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Ruth King

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Transplants far outnumber official donors. Prisoners of conscience evidently account for the difference. By Benedict Rogers

By on February 6th, 2019

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-nightmare-of-human-organ-harvesting-in-china-11549411056

China stands accused of a gruesome trade in human organs. It’s difficult to prove, because the victims’ bodies are disposed of and the only witnesses are the doctors, police and prison guards involved. Even so, the evidence supports a damning verdict.

The charge is that many prisoners of conscience—Falun Gong members, Uighur Muslims, Tibetan Buddhists and “underground” Christians—have been subjected to medical testing and had their organs forcibly removed. Those organs have fed an enormous trade in organ transplants.

Patients in China—including foreigners—are promised matching organs within days. Former Canadian politician and prosecutor David Kilgour, lawyer David Matas, American journalist Ethan Gutmann and a team of researchers have confirmed this by posing to Chinese hospitals as patients. Dr. Huang Jiefu, China’s former vice minister for health and chairman of its organ-transplant committee, ordered two spare livers as backups for a 2005 medical operation. They were delivered the next morning. In most advanced Western countries, patients wait months or even years for transplants.

In 2016 Messrs. Kilgour, Matas and Gutmann published a report, “Bloody Harvest/the Slaughter: An Update,” building on research that dates back to 2006. In this latest version, the authors estimated that between 60,000 and 100,000 organs are transplanted each year in Chinese hospitals.

Where are the organs coming from? China claims it has the “largest voluntary organ donation system in Asia” and stopped using prisoners in 2015. But the country has no tradition of voluntary organ donation. CONTINUE AT SITE

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UK: Landmark First Conviction for Female Genital Mutilation by Soeren Kern

By on February 6th, 2019

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/13688/britain-fgm-conviction

Editor’s Note: February 6 is International Day of Zero Tolerance for Female Genital Mutilation, a United Nations-sponsored annual awareness day aimed at eradicating the practice.

“Female genital mutilation is a sickening, depraved form of child abuse and we will do all we can to ensure all perpetrators are brought to justice.” — British Home Secretary Sajid Javid.

“It is the physical damage and emotional damage as well. It can be very, very damaging. The person who should be protecting them in the first place has usually arranged and facilitated it. How can you rebuild that link to the person that should be protecting you?” — Inspector Allen Davis, the Metropolitan Police Service lead officer for FGM.

“The grooming gang cases are again one of the only near parallels. As a number of official inquiries have revealed, in Rochdale, Rotherham, Oxfordshire and a growing list of other places, there must have been hundreds if not thousands of people who were not perpetrators in the cases but who knew something was going on. People who worked in social services, local police, hotel owners and others… but decided to turn a blind eye… But it had also become a local custom… There is something to be grateful for in the Old Bailey prosecution this week, certainly. But underneath it are deep questions which cannot go unaddressed.” — Douglas Murray, The Spectator.

In a landmark ruling, a mother-of-three has become the first person in Britain to be found guilty of female genital mutilation (FGM), a practice that has been outlawed in the country for more than three decades.

Under British law, anyone found guilty of performing FGM can be imprisoned for up to 14 years. It has been illegal in Britain since 1985 under the Prohibition of Female Circumcision Act, later amended in the Female Genital Mutilation Act 2003.

The UK’s Serious Crime Act defines FGM as involving “procedures that include the partial or total removal of the external female genital organs for non-medical reasons.”

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Mission Impossible: World Bank David Malpass is an excellent choice for a miserable job.

By on February 5th, 2019

https://www.wsj.com/articles/mission-impossible-world-bank-11549411445

Condolences to our longtime contributor David Malpass, the Treasury Under Secretary who is President Trump’s choice to be the next president of the World Bank. He can expect bitter resistance from the bank’s bureaucracy and its clients to even mild reforms.

Mr. Malpass is well-qualified to run the institution that is supposed to help developing nations with grants and loans. He has spent much of his career working on development economics, starting as the Treasury official responsible for the World Bank in the Reagan Administration. He worked with Latin American countries at the State Department and most recently on Argentine currency and Chinese trade matters in the Trump Administration.

He is an evangelist for pro-growth policies including low taxes, spending control, stable money for the poor as much as for the rich, and the rule of law. This is controversial in some corners of the World Bank, where they measure success not by growth but by how much money gets shoveled out the door.

Readers may recall how the bureaucracy and European governments ran Paul Wolfowitz out of the bank in 2007 after he tried to use bank lending to fight corruption. The path of least resistance for a World Bank president is to do very little, attend conferences, and enjoy a salary free of paying U.S. income taxes.

Mr. Malpass did some good in his current position when he negotiated a $13 billion capital replenishment for the World Bank in 2017. The U.S. share was $1.2 billion. The terms include an annual cap on bank lending of $25 billion, which should force the organization to prioritize lending and keep it from demanding more cash anytime soon.

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Riveting Stories Of Black American History From The Backwoods Of Alabama By Christine Weerts

By on February 5th, 2019

http://thefederalist.com/2019/02/05/riveting-stories-black-american-history-backwoods-alabama/
You might not have heard of these less celebrated Black History Month heroes, but their lives of faith and service are worthy of recognition.

It’s Black History Month and time for the annual student essays and programs on Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Harriet Tubman, and Jessie Owens. Who better a hero, for example, than a runaway slave who freed others and later was nurse, scout, and spy for the Union Army, like Tubman? Yet there are so many other stories to tell, so why not look at some other heroes worthy of recognition?

With a little digging––a treat for this Yankee transplant––I found some African-Americans who believed in a dream bigger than the narrowness of life in the Jim Crow South, and worked hard, despite the trying times they lived in, to create better lives for fellow African-Americans. I’d like to introduce you to three of my new heroes, who grew up in the backwoods of rural Alabama and became teachers, healers, and builders worthy of a Black History Month essay.

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BOOKS Comments turned off

How Bureaucracy Wars Against Americans’ Control Of Their Own Government By Ben Weingarten

By on February 5th, 2019

http://thefederalist.com/2019/02/05/bureaucracy-wars-americans-control-government/
Expansion of federal agencies’ power over the last century has culminated in the rise of the Deep State, which is seeking to undermine presidential power.

Of all the domestic challenges America faces in government, the administrative state stands preeminent, not only in its size and scope, but in the threat it poses to liberty as such a formidable, fundamentally tyrannical institution. James Madison might as well have been describing the administrative state in Federalist 47, when he wrote: “The accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands, whether of one, a few, or many, and whether hereditary, self-appointed, or elective, may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny.”

A new book, “Unmasking the Administrative State: The Crisis of American Politics in the Twenty-First Century,” by professors John Marini and Ken Masugi, explores the sprawling federal bureaucracy’s philosophical origins, chronicles its evolution, and provides a compelling argument that the Trump administration is attempting to curtail it. (Disclosure: The authors consulted with me for this book project and I received payment for my work.)

Marini and Masugi have played an outsized but underappreciated role in American political thought, focusing on the theory and practice of the mammoth, ever-ballooning, arguably unconstitutional––and certainly anti-constitutional––bureaucratic morass of which “Unmasking the Administrative State” serves an essential part.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The Kavanaughing of Neomi Rao By Jeremy Carl

By on February 5th, 2019

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/02/the-kavanaughing-of-neomi-rao/

Rao is an outstanding nominee who, like many other conservatives, is not being attacked for her faults, but for her virtues.

If you were to design a perfect judge for the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals in a laboratory, that judge would look like Neomi Rao. The D.C. Circuit, the nation’s second most important court, is the leading court in which administrative-law decisions are made and one that has exclusive jurisdiction over many federal regulatory agencies. As it happens, Rao currently serves as an extraordinarily effective head of the U.S. Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA), from which she spearheads the Trump administration’s approach to regulatory policy.

Rao came to OIRA with deep expertise in regulatory policy, having founded the Center for the Study for the Administrative State at George Mason. A graduate of Yale and the University of Chicago Law School, she clerked for Justice Thomas and the highly respected appeals-court judge J. Harvie Wilkinson.

Rao can view legal issues not just from the perspective of her current perch, but also as a former counsel to Senator Orrin Hatch (R., Utah) on the Senate Judiciary committee and as a counselor to former president George W. Bush. Furthermore, she has valuable experience in private practice both domestically and internationally.

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POLITICS Comments turned off

One Cheer for Tulsi By Michael Brendan Dougherty

By on February 5th, 2019

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/02/tulsi-gabbard-peace-campaign/

Perpetual war requires perpetual peace candidates

What’s so funny about peace, love, and understanding? Elvis Costello’s bitter song by that name was on my mind while I listened to Tulsi Gabbard’s maiden campaign speech for the presidential nomination of the Democratic party over the weekend. The social-democratic space on the left side of the Democratic field has been filling up with Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren. And so it seemed prudent for Gabbard to distinguish herself as the peace candidate, the one woman of the anti-imperialist left. She promised to “end the regime-change wars that have taken far too many lives and undermined our security by strengthening terrorist groups like Al-Qaeda.” My first thought: good luck to her.

Close listeners of NR’s Editors podcast will note a developing running joke where Rich Lowry teases me for support of Gabbard. And in fact, I find I do have some reasons to cheer her candidacy.

First, she’s at least interesting. The rest of the Democrats will be accusing each other of deviationism over trivialities. Gabbard’s been accused of being a toady of Bashar al-Assad and a Hindu-nationalist fifth columnist. She also grew up in a socially conservative household and, as a very young woman, she participated in her activist father’s campaigns against the legal recognition of same-sex partnerships as marriage. You can imagine how that’s going over among Democrats. But she’s also young and attractive. She’s a veteran of the Iraq war, and still serves in the Hawaii Army National Guard. And unlike Barack Obama, who basically appropriated his wife’s South-Side Chicago identity, Gabbard fully embraces her Hawaiian roots. If one made a word cloud of her first campaign speech, “Aloha” would outrank “love,” “sacrifice,” and even “neocon.”

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IMMIGRATION Comments turned off

Mexico deploys militarized police to block 2,000 migrants from entering Texas by Anna Giaritelli

By on February 5th, 2019

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/mexico-deploys-militarized-police-to-block-2-000-migrants-from-entering-texas?utm_source=

Hundreds of militarized Mexican police officers were standing guard Tuesday at the border between Piedras Negras, Coahuila, and Eagle Pass, Texas, to prevent nearly 2,000 Central American migrants from illegally crossing into the U.S.

Buses dropped off the migrants in Piedras Negras, a city of around 250,000 residents, late Monday. By Tuesday morning, federal police in full military gear were lined up in two long parallel rows outside of the facility to keep them from leaving the country, according to tweets from Mexican officials.

The Rio Grande separates both countries in that area, and due to the landscape, portions of the border do not have a physical barrier, making it easier for people to try to enter the U.S.

Starting Tuesday, the state’s governor, Miguel Riquelme, plans to begin deporting migrants who illegally entered Mexico on their way to America.

Coahuila officials will ask those staying at the temporary shelter to show humanitarian visas they would have received if they tried to travel through the country legally from Guatemala. Those who do not have the documents will be removed as soon as Tuesday.

Meanwhile, American, Mexican, and Central American officials are in talks about how to handle this new caravan, one of a handful in the past year. Officials from U.S. Customs and Border Protection, U.S. Border Patrol, the Guatemalan consulate in South Texas, the Mexican consulate in South Texas, Mexican government, Coahuila state government, and others met again Monday to talk about how to care for and process the group.

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Senate: Confirm Neomi Rao for D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals Roger Klein

By on February 5th, 2019

https://www.realclearpolicy.com/articles/2019/02/05/senate_confirm_neomi_rao_for_dc_circuit_court_of_appeals_111028.html

Among the many victories President Trump has given conservatives, his success in reforming the federal judiciary through judicial appointments will be among the most meaningful and lasting elements of his legacy. One of the President’s top judicial picks, former law professor Neomi Rao, is now awaiting confirmation to replace Justice Brett Kavanaugh on the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals. She should be quickly confirmed.

Ms. Rao was born in Detroit, a child of Indian immigrants. She completed her undergraduate education at Yale, graduating cum laude. After a brief stint as a reporter with the Weekly Standard, Ms. Rao attended University of Chicago Law School, where she was an Editor of the Law Review and graduated in 1999 with high honors and as a member of the Order of the Coif, a legal honor society.

Following law school, Ms. Rao was awarded prestigious clerkships at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit with prominent Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson, III and at the United States Supreme Court with Justice Clarence Thomas. She later served as Counsel to the Senate Judiciary Committee and from 2005 to 2006 as Associate Counsel and Special Assistant to President George W. Bush.

In 2006 Ms. Rao joined the faculty at the George Mason University Law School, where she distinguished herself as a legal scholar with a focus on administrative law. She founded and was the first director of the C. Boyden Gray Center for the Study of the Administrative State and was a driving force behind George Mason’s 2016 decision to name its law school after the late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia.

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FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

Trump Administration Threads the Needle in Venezuela By Charles Lipson

By on February 5th, 2019

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2019/02/05/trump_administration_threads_the_needle_in_venezuela_139363.html

The Trump administration has clear goals in Venezuela and is determined to achieve them with limited means. Those goals are straightforward:

–Out with the fraudulently elected regime of Nicolás Maduro, its Chávez-style socialism, and its strong ties to Cuba, Russia, Iran, and China;

–In with the duly elected moderate Juan Guaidó.

To do that without sending U.S. troops means squeezing Maduro with harsh economic pressure, recognizing Guaidó as the legitimate leader, and naming an experienced point man, Elliott Abrams. It also entails, and this would be a departure for President Trump, building a supportive coalition of Latin American nations and major economic powers.

The coalition helps in two ways. First, it blunts Maduro’s knee-jerk claim that any effort to replace him is simply Yankee imperialism. His claim sounds ludicrous when there are massive protests inside Venezuela itself and after nearly every country in South America (Bolivia and Uruguay are the exceptions) recognized Guaidó as the country’s legitimate leader.

Within the region, Maduro’s support comes mainly from Cuba, an ideological fellow traveler with few resources to help. Outside the region, his support comes from Russia, Iran, and China, the triumvirate that now challenges the U.S. around the globe. They would hate to lose their foothold in Latin America.

Of the two coalitions, America’s is obviously much larger and richer, much more capable of exerting economic leverage. Sanctions are key. The heaviest blow was Washington’s decision to place Venezuela’s oil revenues in escrow. With a stroke of the pen, the U.S. Department of the Treasury cut off Maduro’s primary source of foreign exchange, his only way to pay the army. When he desperately tried to move his country’s gold reserves out of Britain, the Bank of England refused. The European Union is likely to impose additional sanctions this week.

These restrictions won’t add much more pain for Venezuela’s ordinary citizens, who already face grim conditions. The economy is in free fall, food is scarce, and inflation tops 1 million percent, according to Reuters. When currency becomes worthless, as Venezuela’s has, the economy is reduced to barter. What will the sanctions do, then? They will make it very hard—nearly impossible—for Maduro to buy food and essential supplies for his soldiers. If they defect, the regime dies.

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