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In one of his few good decisions (and desperately in search of a positive legacy item), President Obama announced his plan to normalize relations with Cuba. It is a smart gesture of reconciliation that, coupled with free trade, will make a friend of an enemy 90 miles to our south.

We won this not because of the embargo (they could always get any goods they wanted from the same places we get ours: Mexico, Vietnam, China), but because it highlighted that socialism does not work for the people. However, it worked for the Castros, whose net worth tops $1 billion. Just imagine how much they would have if they were not government workers and share the wealth socialists.

This is a good sign and a clear repudiation of the flawed, corrupt and unsustainable socialist ideology. A stark rejection of socialist ideas has happened twice in two months, if you count our mid-term elections.

Fifty years of centralized, command-and-control government rule of the economy, supposedly free health care, and Soviet-style repression have devastated Cubas economy. Maybe the best thing that can happen here is that Obama will realize his policies are sending America that way. If our kids ever needed a test case of socialism and its devastating effects on a once vibrant nation, they need look no further than Cuba. Point made.

Fidel Castros policies are similar to Obamas: He nationalized healthcare. He put severe regulations on his people (czars, EPA, etc.). He used government to go after his political enemies (IRS and Lois Lerner). He blamed his own failings on others, circumventing their free speech (imprisoning a filmmaker after blaming him for Benghazi) and arresting them. He took over large pieces of the economy (ObamaCare commandeered 1/7th of the U.S. economy). Fidel spied on and intimidated journalists (Fox News James Rosen and others wiretapped). Both have scores of untried prisoners rotting away in Cuban jails (Gitmo). Both vilified capitalists and took their property to give to their cronies (Chrysler bail-out putting unions ahead of secured creditors).

Perhaps out of his personal respect for their work, Obama risks legitimizing the Castro brothers. Instead, Mr. Obama must highlight why Cuba failed: socialism doesnt work. Capitalism, entrepreneurship, minimal government, freedom, property rights, free trade and the rule of law must exist for a society to prosper.

Fidel, the founder of the regime, and his younger brother Raul (which is Spanish for Jeb) can claim victory. But to those paying attention, socialism and its derivative communism have failed the citizens every time they have been tried. It is an easy sale: I will take from the "rich" 49 percent and give to the "less fortunate" 51 percent. What happens is the 49 percent leave or stop working as hard to support the 51 percent. Cronyism takes over and runs the economy into the ground. Obama and Democrats, please take notice.

Normalization began with negotiations to free an American government worker sent to Cuba to install the Internet for the Jewish community there. Obama traded several Cubans held in America for Alan Gross and three middle infielders. The State Department is still waiting for MLB Commissioner Bud Seligs approval of the deal, but it seems all but done. Out of habit, the Yankees signed the 65-year-old Alan Gross to a three year, $20 mil deal.

Trying to bring the Internet to Cuba was brilliant. If anything would sound the call for freedom, it would be the introduction of online shopping and porn. They have porn in Russia, but every video stars Vladimir Putin.

Many in the GOP will oppose normalizing relations with Cuba, as some Hispanic Democrat politicians already have. I respect that, but they are living a grudge from the past. Obama and Senators Rand Paul and Jeff Flake are right; we should try something new.

More here:
HART: Capitalism will free Cuba

Barack Obama has made a geopolitical irrelevancy suddenly relevant to American presidential politics. For decades, Cuba has been instructive as a museum of two stark failures: socialism and the U.S. embargo. Now, Cuba has become useful as a clarifier of different Republican flavors of foreign-policy thinking.

The permanent embargo was imposed in 1962 in the hope of achieving, among other things, regime change. Well.

Fidel Castro, 88, has not been seen in public since January and may be even more mentally diminished than anyone including his 83-year-old brother Raul who still adheres to Marxism. Whatever Fidels condition, however, Cuba has been governed by the Castros during 11 U.S. presidencies, and for more years than the Soviet Union dominated Eastern Europe. Regime change even significant regime modification has not happened in Havana.

Some conservative criticisms of Obamas new Cuba policy which includes normalizing diplomatic and commercial relations, to the extent that presidential action can seem reflexive. They look symptomatic of Cold War Nostalgia and 1930s Envy yearnings for the moral clarity of the struggle with the totalitarians. Cubas regime, although totalitarian, no longer matters in international politics. As bankrupt morally as it is economically, the regime is intellectually preposterous and an enticing model only for people who want to live where there are lots of 1950s Chevrolets.

Eleven million Cubans, however, matter. Obamas new policy is defensible if it will improve their political conditions by insinuating into Cuba economic and cultural forces that will be subversive of tyranny.

Sen. Rand Paul, a potential Republican presidential candidate, evidently considers this hope highly probable. He is correct to support giving it a try. But he may not understand how many times such wishes have fathered the thought that commerce can pacify the world. In 1910, 40 peaceful European years after the Franco-Prussian War, Norman Angells book The Great Illusion became an international best-seller by arguing that war between developed industrial countries would be prohibitively expensive, hence futile, hence unlikely. Soon Europe stumbled into what was, essentially, a 30-year war.

Angells theory was an early version of what foreign-policy analyst James Mann calls the Starbucks fallacy, the theory that when people become accustomed to a plurality of coffee choices, they will successfully demand political pluralism. We are sadder but wiser now that this theory has been wounded, if not slain, by facts, two of which are China and Vietnam. Both combine relatively open economic systems with political systems that remain resolutely closed.

Sen. Marco Rubio, a potential 2016 rival of Pauls, is properly disgusted that Obama, in striking his deal with Cuba, accomplished disgracefully little for the countrys breathtakingly brave democracy advocates. There are two reasons for questioning whether Obama really tried. First, he is generally congruent with, and partly a product of, academic leftism. Hence, he might be tinged with the sentimentalism that has made Cuba a destination for political pilgrims too ideologically blinkered to see the extraordinary sadism of Cubas treatment of its many political prisoners. Second, Obama is so phobic about George W. Bushs miscarried regime change in Iraq, that he cannot embrace, or at least enunciate, a regime change policy toward Cuba. Regime change, however, must be, at bottom, the justification for his new approach.

Cuba Derangement Syndrome (CDS), a recurring fever, accounted for the Bay of Pigs calamity, the most feckless use of U.S. power ever. After this, the Kennedys, President John and Attorney General Robert, continued to encourage harebrained attempts to destabilize Cuba and assassinate its leader.

Today, CDS afflicts those who, like Rubio, charge that U.S. diplomatic relations and economic interactions lead to legitimizing Cubas regime. Americas doctrine about legitimacy has been clear since the Declaration of Independence: Governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed. America has diplomatic and commercial relations with many regimes that are realities even though they flunk our legitimacy test. Twenty-three years after Cuba ceased being a Soviet satellite, there is no compelling, or even coherent, argument for why Cuba, among all the worlds repulsive regimes, should be the object of a U.S. policy whose rationale is to express the obvious U.S. distaste.

See the article here:
The return of Cuba Derangement Syndrome

Ana #39;s Tea Party for Aunt Molly
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By: Autumn Maggs

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Ana's Tea Party for Aunt Molly - Video

Wizards of Waverly Place S01E07 Alex #39;s Choice
Gigi invites Alex and Harper to her annual tea party held at the Hotel Fleur DuFlaDuFlaFluFlafyFla. Alex tries to convince Harper not to go to because she le... selena gomez #selena gomez...

By: Nathan Leonard

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Wizards of Waverly Place S01E07 Alex's Choice - Video

Tea party chair Jack Nelson doesnt trust the Highlands County commissioners, the school board or President Obama, and he often wonders about Governor Scott.

Democratic chair Dave McCarthy doesnt trust the tea party, Mitch McConnell, Big Business or Grover Norquist, whom he says turned people against teachers.

And theres not much of a reason to trust political commercials, said Marcy Everest, a political science professor in South Florida State Colleges department of social and behavioral sciences.

Commercials are false statements repeated over and over, so they take on their own truth, Everest said. The American equivalent of The Big Lie, commercials influence votes, but they dont have any informing quality. You cant sell peanut butter that way, but you can sell politics. There is no requirement to be true.

Trust in others and societal institutions is at its lowest point in three decades, according to a survey of 140,000 Americans published in the Sept. 16 issue of Psychological Science.

Compared to Americans in the 1970s-2000s, Americans in the last few years are less likely to say they can trust each other, said lead researcher Jean Twenge of San Diego State University. With the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer, people trust each other less.

While 46 percent of adults said most people could be trusted in 1972-1974, only 33 percent agreed in 2010-2012; 32 percent of 12th graders agreed in 1976-78, versus 18 percent of 12th graders in 2010-12.

How much distrust is due to politicians like Rick Scott and Barak Obama, who run on platforms of not trusting Tallahassee or not trusting Republicans in Washington?

The politician tells you what he thinks you want to hear, Nelson said. If hes talking to a college crowd, he says one thing, but once he gets in office, thats all thrown away. He listens to the special interests. Gov. Scott was a fairly decent guy. But when we the people rose up against Common Core, he listened to Bill Gates and Jeb Bush. Then he lied and told us he was listening to us.

It wasnt a matter of trust, McCarthy said, when Mitch McConnell said he wanted to make Barack Obama a one-term president.

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Does suspicion of government go back to the Boston Tea Party?