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The Red Line

100,000 Casualties, Obliteration, Famine – For What?

With casualties in Gaza exceeding 100,000, the obliteration of the territory and the reduction of Gazans to such a state of desperation that over 100 died trying to access a rare aid convoy, the parade of horrors has been so continuous that there has been virtually no time to consider the fundamental justification of Israel’s invasion. It is assumed to be self-defense, but it is not.

March 7, 2024

It is widely acknowledged that the Netanyahu regime and the Israeli defense establishment were grossly negligent in failing to defend Israel on October 7th, when effective defense would have required so little. Few have applied the same logic with a future view. With all the military might that the U.S. supplies – fighter jets, tanks, howitzers, bombs – Israel is only exposed to Hamas fighters with their homemade weapons if it lapses into another instance of such gross negligence.

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Another SEBAC Contract & Deeper in Debt

The U.S. and the State of Connecticut are sinking deeper into debt. The skyrocketing national debt receives widespread media attention, Connecticut’s almost none. Uncle Sam’s growing debt is highlighted and explained by huge budget deficits, while Connecticut’s increasing liabilities are hidden behind budget surpluses.

February 23, 2024

Yet, Connecticut’s growing debt is also ignored, because it is caused mainly by overgenerous and underfunded state employee compensation. No one, certainly not union-friendly Democrats, wants to offend public sector unions by exposing this reality.

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Connecticut is $3.8 Billion Deeper in Debt… How Did We Get There?

Governor Lamont claims to be engineering the Connecticut Comeback. Not so fast. Immediately before he first took office in 2018, the state’s long-term debt was $83.4 billion. The latest state financial statements show $87.2 billion. The state is $3.8 billion deeper in debt.

February 15, 2024

Lamont claims to have improved the health of the drastically underfunded state employee pension fund (SERS) with $5.0 billion of special deposits to the fund. In 2018, SERS unfunded liability was $21.2 billion; last June 30th, it was $20.1 billion, indicating a meager improvement of $1.1 billion.

What happened?

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Harvard’s Gay Resigned For Good Reasons But Antisemitism Charges Miss the Mark

Harvard President Claudine Gay resigned this month, for good reasons. Foremost was her inability to muster a straightforward answer when asked in Congress whether Harvard should condemn calls for the genocide of the Jewish people.

January 6, 2024

There are other good reasons and one glaring exception. First the reasons. Over her career, she indulged, if not encouraged, the left-wing cancel culture at Harvard. On her watch, the college’s free-speech ranking dropped to last place among 248 colleges surveyed. Her resume of scholarly research is short and, apparently, riddled with instances of plagiarism.

Now the exception. She has been attacked most vociferously – and wrongly – for indulging alleged antisemitism on campus. Of this charge, she was not guilty; she was simply incompetent in her inability to defend the free speech rights of pro-Palestinian students and distinguish them from antisemitism.

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Furor Over Antisemitism is Trampling Free Speech

Wealthy Jewish financiers and national politicians have attacked university presidents for not restricting supposedly antisemitic speech on campus. Yet, previously, the attackers have condemned college leaders for restrictions on campus free speech.

December 26, 2023

Bill Ackman wants Harvard’s Claudine Gay fired. Marc Rowan has succeeded in ousting UPenn President Elizabeth Magill. U.S. Representative Elise Stefanik has gloated “one down [Magill], two [Gay and MIT President Kornbluth] to go.”

In an ironic example, Ackman’s extreme actions - demanding Gay’s ouster and doxing and trying to blacklist pro-Palestinian students - have served to resurrect a key element of free speech and academic freedom at Harvard, namely that the institution should not cave to the demands of outsiders, no matter how wealthy or powerful.

Yet, the overriding irony of Ackman’s actions is that they constitute the same effort to restrict on-campus speech that many alumni have criticized in recent years. Doxing and blacklisting are surely efforts to punish and silence speech.

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Fearful Symmetry, Futile Strategy; The Only Solution Is Peace

Palestinians cry “From the river to the sea,” while Israelis seize and settle the land from the sea to the river. The Times of Israel reports that an Israeli cabinet minister and his father, a rabbi, suggest the option of nuking Gaza and eradicating Palestinians, unavoidably evoking the Final Solution and the Holocaust.

November 30, 2023


The massacre at Kibbutz Be’eri, where 130 Israelis were slaughtered by Hamas on October 7th, recalls the documented 1948 massacre at Deir Yassin, where Jewish guerrillas executed over 100 Palestinian men, women and children.

Hamas and Hezbollah seem tragic descendants of last century’s Jewish guerillas, the Urgun and Lehi.

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Palestinians enjoying peace and tranquility in their own homeland from the river to the Green Line is the best way to defang the terrorist movements. How many families living in genuine peace will offer their children to be suicide bombers? To be terrorists? To live in tunnels in Gaza or caves in Southern Lebanon? Peace is the greatest threat to terrorists. It is time to carry out the threat.

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CT Revenue: Easy Days Are Over

On Monday, Connecticut’s budget forecasters released their first updated revenue forecast since last May, at which time they removed a whopping $2 billion of expected revenue from volatile individual income tax categories over a four-year stretch. The new forecast predicts further declines in these categories, wiping away another $750 million over the remaining three of the original four years.

While declining revenue is never good news, these drastic reductions represent a welcome return to budgetary prudence from the wildly over-optimistic revenue forecasts of fiscal 2023 and from Governor Lamont’s re-election campaign happy talk last year claiming to have ended the era of permanent fiscal crisis in the state.

The crisis is not over.

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A New Peace Proposal: A Protectorate on the West Bank Governed by a Coalition of Major Powers

After Hamas's heinous attack on Israel, President Biden - wisely - has been talking about peace in the Mideast, even as hostilities rage in Gaza, the West Bank and at the Israel-Lebanese border. Without a peace settlement, these hostilities are open-ended, as they have been for decades. Yet, Biden has resurrected the old idea of a Palestinian state under the Palestinian Authority. That plan is a dead letter. Instead, we should try an entirely new approach, a permanent international protectorate on the West Bank.

October 25, 2023

The protectorate would be established and governed by a multinational coalition which would take control of the West Bank and demilitarize it completely, replacing Israeli Defense Forces with international peacekeeping troops.

The Palestinian state is a casualty of two realities. First, Israel could never accept a fully sovereign Palestinian state on the West Bank high above Israel which is but six miles wide at its narrowest point. That would be an unacceptable existential risk for the Jewish state.

Nor would the Palestinians accept the emasculated version of a state contemplated in failed negotiations to date, a small demilitarized entity with IDF troops stationed on all its borders. That would be little different from the current status quo. Peace negotiations over the years have bogged down in fatally complex detail in attempts to square the circle of these irreconcilable positions.

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New York’s Fraud Law: Guilt, In Absence of Intent, Malice, Materiality, Damages or Actual Fraud

Let me say first that I am not a lawyer. Nor am I a supporter of Donald Trump for the GOP presidential nomination. Yet, I am troubled by the New York Executive Law § 63(12) (the “Law”) under which Donald Trump and his associates have been found to have committed fraud, his business licenses cancelled and various of his business units ordered dissolved within 10 days – all before a trial in which New York State seeks a whopping $250 million from The Donald.

This Law strikes me as dangerous, certainly to anyone doing business in New York State. As the order by New York Supreme Court Justice Arthur Engoron (“the Order”) acknowledges, no victim of Trump’s activities “lodged a complaint” or “otherwise claimed damages.” Usually, a murder conviction requires that the victim’s body be found. In the Trump case, the body is alive and kicking.

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There’s Nothing Slow-Motion About Uncle Sam’s Financial Train Wreck

Casey Jones might as well be at the throttle. Certainly, there’s nothing slow-motion about Uncle Sam’s financial train wreck. The crisis is broadly consequential. In the eleven months through August, net interest on the national debt has hit $630 billion, with $69 billion paid last month. It will end the full year at double the $351 billion paid just two years ago in fiscal 2021.

The increase is stunning, but predictable. So too is next year’s increase. With the Federal Reserve keeping rates “higher for longer,” net interest will hit almost $850 billion next year and top $1 trillion in fiscal 2025, if the current interest rate environment persists.

The environment may not persist, since debt throughout the economy is repricing at interest rates that are multiples higher than those prevailing in the easy-money decade of the 2010s. Businesses and consumers may buckle under the burden. That would bring recession and lower rates, despite current economic commentary to the contrary that sees, instead, a “soft landing” ahead.

The skyrocketing rise in interest costs has some of the fascination of a runaway freight train, transfixing observers. Yet, we should ignore the spectacle to focus instead upon the damage being wrought

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