RUTHFULLY YOURS

Among all the recent WikiLeaks email dumps, perhaps the most important one of all has been overlooked by the mainstream media.

In it, Neera Tanden, Hillary Clinton’s longtime political guru, warned campaign manager John Podesta not to raise the question of primary opponent Bernie Sanders’ health because it would draw unwanted attention to the hidden truth about Hillary’s health.

“Hard to think of anything more counter-productive than demanding Bernie’s medical records,” Mr. Tanden emailed Mr. Podesta, according to an email obtained by WikiLeaks from Mr. Podesta’s personal inbox.
Until the publication of my new book, “Guilty As Sin,” the truth about Hillary’s health has been her campaign’s closest guarded secret.

Her physician, Dr. Lisa Bardack, has said that Hillary is fit as a fiddle, but according to my sources in the White House, that is not what President Obama and his senior adviser, Valerie Jarrett, believe.

Mr. Obama and Ms. Jarrett have been so worried about Hillary’s health that they recently offered to arrange a secret medical checkup for her at the Walter Reed National Military Medical Center.

Hillary declined their offer because she feared a leak to the media would prove fatal to her presidential campaign. Instead, she has been secretly visiting the New York-Presbyterian Hospital, where she arrives through a private entrance out of public sight and where she can rely on her doctors not to speak to the media.

Sources close to Hillary tell me that her doctors have discovered she suffers from arrhythmia (an abnormal heart beat) and a leaking heart valve. They have recommended that she consider having valve replacement surgery, but Hillary has refused because she does not want to risk the negative political fallout from stories about such a serious operation.

In addition to the arrhythmia and leaking heart valve, Hillary suffers from chronic low blood pressure, insufficient blood flow, a tendency to form life-threatening blood clots, and troubling side effects from her medications.

Her doctors have prescribed Coumadin, a blood thinner, and a beta blocker to treat her condition. However, these medications make her drowsy and tired, lower her blood pressure, and have led to frequent bouts of light-headedness and fainting spells.

Hillary has suffered at least five fainting spells that the public is aware of, including the most recent one at the 15th anniversary memorial service of 9/11.

In addition, there have been many other incidents of fainting that have been hidden from the public.

For example, after her 11-hour testimony before the Trey Gowdy Benghazi committee, Hillary swooned as she walked to her waiting Secret Service SUV and had to be carried into the back seat by her aides.

Among Hillary’s friends, it is common knowledge that she suffers from tension headaches, sits with her feet elevated, nods off to sleep while studying her speeches, gets dizzy and has frequently stumbled and fallen at her home in Chappaqua. She asks her closest aide, Huma Abedin, to rub her shoulders and bring her cold compresses for her neck and forehead.

“Huma always kneels down, whispers to her, rubs her shoulders, and comforts her,” said one of Hillary’s closest friends. “Huma seems genuinely alarmed at her condition, and looks agonized as well.

“Hillary also has a masseuse on call to work on her legs, which give her almost constant pain,” this friend continued. “It reminds me of what I read about Jack Kennedy’s constant back problems and how they were always hidden from the public.

“Hillary’s campaign people are well aware of her problem and are doing everything possible to make her schedule as easy as possible, but it’s hard to run for president and not work hard and spend a lot of time on your feet and constantly get photographed.

Healthcare cybersecurity is in a state of transformation. As medical care becomes more networked and interconnected via computers and devices, the digital landscape of health administrators, hospitals, and patients, has become increasingly vulnerable.

The cybersecurity healthcare landscape has many facets. These include the information security networks of medical facilities and hospitals, medical equipment and devices, and protection of the privacy of patients. Technologies, processes and people are the cornerstones of the healthcare cybersecurity transformation.

The 2016 Sixth Annual Benchmark Study on Privacy & Security of Healthcare Data presented by Ponemon Institute, May 2016, revealed that a large number of healthcare organizations have experienced multiple data breaches resulting from evolving cyber threats. Hackers have already exploited medical facilities and hospitals – and the problem is escalating.

Earlier this year, Hollywood Presbyterian Medical Center was victimized by ransomware. For ten days the computer systems were unavailable because of the hackers and Hollywood Presbyterian ended up paying the hackers in cryptocurrencies to recover control of their systems. Another US hospital, Boston Children’s Hospital was the target of a series of breaches including distributed denial of service attacks. Medical institutions in Europe and Canada have also been subjected to intrusions.

The reality is that hospitals are a logical hacker target for several reasons. They are susceptible to phishing attacks and insider threats because of the large data flows throughout various systems. They are many points of vulnerability for malware/ransomware extortion because their systems are networked with multiple stations and devices. In addition, most workers in medical facilities are not trained in basic cybersecurity hygiene.

For hackers, healthcare facilities are viewed as achievable targets where they can reap quick monetary gains. Hackers can steal medical records that are commodities with a resale value on the Dark Web. And, the likelihood is pretty strong that hospital administrators will pay ransoms to gain back operational control over facilities to reduce liabilities and putting patients at risk. Hospitals and healthcare facilities also want to protect their reputations and prevent cybersecurity incidents from going public.

The end of liberalism is not an original thought, but it is a possibility. In 1969 (revised in 1979), Theodore J. Lowi, professor of government at Cornell, published The End of Liberalism: The Second Republic of the United States. He argued that government had become too big and that interest groups had caused Congress to cede responsibilities to unelected (and, in some cases, unaccountable) agencies. These agencies, including the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), control more than a trillion dollars in annual expenditures – almost 25% of all federal spending. Ironically for Democrats, special interest groups have created another problem – they compete with unionized government, and the demands public-sector retirees exact from American taxpayers.

Today, global progressives see the end of liberalism in the rise of nativism, xenophobia and populism – manifested in decisions such as Brexit, the Republican nomination of Trump and the Colombia-FARC Accord. It is seen in the failure of the Arab Spring and the resurgence of Putin’s Russia and Xi’s China. Conservatives bemoan the unraveling of liberal values, which date to the age of enlightenment – the acceptance of anti-Western ideologies, cultural and moral relativism, and political correctness. The latter denies language from being used as it was intended – to accurately describe people, their actions and events.

I do not pretend to know if “liberalism” is at an end. What I believe is that big, activist government is being hoisted with its own petard. Promises have been made that will prove impossible to keep. Activist government was conceived in the belief that equality of outcomes supersedes that of opportunity. In the United States, “big” government was born during the New Deal, reached maturity in LBJ’s Great Society, and has come into senescence with ObamaCare and the CFPB; it is seen in the Administration’s videos: “Life of Julia” and “Pajama Boy.” The factors progressives cite allow them to ignore what seems an inevitability – that promises politicians made to those who elected them will not be possible to keep.

Donald Trump needs a unified Republican party in the homestretch if he is to have any chance left of catching Hillary Clinton — along with winning higher percentages of the college-educated and women than currently support him. But even before the latest revelations from an eleven-year-old Access Hollywood tape, in which Trump crudely talked about women, he had long ago in the primaries gratuitously insulted his more moderate rivals and their supporters. He bragged about his lone-wolf candidacy and claimed that his polls were — and would be — always tremendous — contrary to his present deprecation of them. Is it all that surprising that some in his party and some independents, who felt offended, swear that they will not stoop to vote for him when in extremis he now needs them? Or that party stalwarts protest that they no longer wish to be associated with a malodorous albatross hung around their neck?

That question of payback gains importance if the race in the last weeks once again narrows. Trump had by mid September recaptured many of the constituencies that once put John McCain and Mitt Romney within striking distance of Barack Obama. And because Trump has apparently brought back to the Republican cause millions of the old Reagan Democrats, various tea-partiers, and the working classes, and since Hillary Clinton is a far weaker candidate than was Barack Obama, in theory he should have had a better shot to win the popular vote than has any Republican candidate since incumbent president George W. Bush in 2004.

What has always been missing to end the long public career of Hillary Clinton is a four- or five-percentage-point boost from a mélange of the so-called Never Trump Republicans, as well as women and suburban, college-educated independents. Winning back some of these critics could translate into a one- or two-point lead over Clinton in critical swing states.

Those who are soured on Trump certainly can cite lots of understandable reasons for their distaste — well beyond his sometimes grating reality-television personality. In over-dramatic fashion, some Against Trumpers invoke William F. Buckley Jr.’s ostracism of John Birchers from conservative circles as a model for dealing with perceived Trump vulgarity. He is damned as an opportunistic chameleon, not a true conservative. Trump’s personal and professional life has been lurid — as, again, we were reminded by the media-inspired release of a hot-mic tape of past Trump crude sexual braggadocio. The long campaigning has confirmed Trump as often uncouth — insensitive to women and minorities. He has never held office. His ignorance of politics often embarrasses those in foreign- and domestic-policy circles. Trump’s temperament is mercurial, especially in its ego-driven obsessions with slights to his business ethics and acumen. He wins back supporters by temporary bouts of steadiness as his polls surge, only to alienate them again with crazy nocturnal tweets and off-topic rants — as his popularity then again dips. He seems to battle as much with GOP stalwarts as Clintonites, often, to be fair, in retaliation rather than in preemptory fashion.

The Republican Party headquarters in Hillsborough, North Carolina, was firebombed overnight, resulting in major smoke and fire damage. Somebody threw a bottle of flammable liquid through a front window of the Orange County Republican headquarters , setting supplies and furniture ablaze, Hillsborough police said. The side of an adjacent building was also spray painted with a swastika and the words “Nazi Republicans get out of town or else.”

Damage estimates were not immediately available but Dallas Woodhouse, executive director of the state GOP, said, “The office itself is a total loss.” He called the bombing “political terrorism” and said “the only thing important to us is that nobody was killed, and they very well could have been.”

Violence has broken out at a large number of Trump rallies this year — the vast majority of which involved anti-Trump protesters assaulting Trump supporters.

N.C. Gov. Pat McCrory Sunday called the weekend firebombing of the GOP headquarters “an attack on our democracy.”

Via the Charlotte Observer:

“The firebombing of a local political headquarters in Orange County is clearly an attack on our democracy,” McCrory said in a statement. “Violence has no place in our society – but especially in our elections … I will use every resource as governor to assist local authorities in this investigation.”

Hillsborough Mayor Tom Stevens said, “This highly disturbing act goes far beyond vandalizing property; it willfully threatens our community’s safety … and its hateful message undermines decency, respect and integrity in civic participation.”