RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/13593/womens-march-antisemitism

Consider the front page story in the New York Times Sunday Review, which singled out the Palestinian issue as “one of the great moral challenges of our time” — ignoring Syria, Ukraine, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Chechnya, Tibet, Cyprus and many far greater moral challenges, which are largely ignored by the hard left.

Recall that Hitler was not elected by anti-Semites or because of his anti-Semitism. He was elected as the result of his economic and other policies by people who gave him a pass for his anti-Semitism because they approved of his other policies.

People who support Louis Farrakhan because of the alleged good he does for the Black community and despite his overt anti-Semitism are complicit in bigotry, and those who march under the banner of such bigots are only one degree removed from such complicity.

Those women and men who marched in the Women’s March under the leadership of Linda Sarsour and Tamika Mallory colluded with anti-Semitism. These two leaders of the Women’s March worship the most influential anti-Semite in the United States today, Louis Farrakhan. They claim to disagree with his crass anti-Jewish (and anti-gay and anti-feminist) preaching — although there is reason to doubt this, as it relates to Jews — but they admire him for his impact on elements of the Black community. They must understand that this impact includes influencing hundreds of thousands of Blacks to consider Jews to be “termites” and destroyers of the world. But they do not care. They regard him as great — Mallory has called him “the GOAT” (“Greatest of All Time”).

Marching with these supporters of an anti-Semite is the equivalent of marching under the banner of David Duke, who inspires white supremacists with the same sort of bigotry with which Farrakhan preaches Black supremacy. Hitler inspired pride in Aryans, Mussolini made the trains run on time, and Stalin spread the wealth. But would the women who marched with Farrakhan’s admirers have marched with these bigots?

http://swtotd.blogspot.com/

This essay is about Donald Trump, but it could have been about Martin Luther King whose birthday we celebrate today. Democracies must always be challenged, else they atrophy. The Reverend Doctor King did so in the 1950s and 1960s to great effect. Mr. Trump did so in his campaign and has continued to do so thus far in his Presidency, but to an effect yet unknown.

In Hans Christian Anderson’s tale, “The Emperor’s New Clothes,” a small boy calls attention to the fact that the Emperor is naked – that the clothes sold him by an unscrupulous merchant who appealed to his vanity were, in fact, nothing. None of the people who watched the Emperor as he paraded by said anything, as they didn’t want to admit they were too ignorant to see his fine suit of clothes. It took a small boy to call out the truth, that the Emperor was indeed naked. Today, it is Donald J. Trump who has called our attention to the corruption, stagnation and cronyism of political systems populated with elites who think they live beyond the boundaries of criticism. For doing so, he has been vilified.

But disruption is natural to life. It is everywhere, and for that we should be thankful. Joseph Schumpeter popularized the concept of creative destruction – that progress requires destroying old technologies. It has always been so. Cars replaced horse-drawn carriages. The telegraph ended the Pony Express. Trains made obsolete the Erie Canal. Machine guns and tanks changed the way war was conducted on land, as submarines did on the seas. Wireless phones are eliminating the need for land-line phones. Amazon has changed the way we shop, and Netflix the way we are entertained. 401ks have replaced defined benefit retirement plans. Charter schools, facing pressure from unions and the politicians who rely on them, have competed against and made better traditional public schools. Norman Borlaug, in using plant pathology and genetics, dramatically increased crop supplies around the world. Without disruption, we would be poorer.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/01/mark-kot-anti-obamacare-doctor/

Good for Dr. Kot, but there is nothing new here. At New York City’s Weill Cornell Hospital, finding a private doctor that takes Medicare is impossible, even among those who accept other insurance…..And their waiting rooms are full because enough people are willing to pay for a doctor…..I am among them and my internist looks at me and not a computer…..rsk

Meet the man trying out a new way to deliver health care.

Dr. Mark Kot, an urgent-care specialist and the owner of Southampton Urgent Medical Care in Southampton, N.Y., is the anti-Obamacare doctor. He does not participate in most insurance plans and is not in any Affordable Care Act network. He feels sorry for the patients with this restricted insurance, and when they come to his door with a bad cough or a painful foot and ask to be seen, he does his best to provide them great care for a limited cost. The insurance card they got through Obamacare remains in their pocket, useless.

Kot is not a “concierge” doctor. He does not charge a membership fee, and he does not charge for follow-up visits, where he determines whether the initial treatment was effective.

Kot works with four nurses and staff, performs and interprets his own x-rays, and administers intravenous medications when needed. There is little waiting time, and the visits are efficient — geared to the complexity of care provided. He generally sees over 40 patients per day and performs rapid flu tests; treats ankle sprains, bronchitis, pneumonia, and sinus infections; and during the summer and fall sees several cases of suspected Lyme disease each day. Kot purchases antibiotics from a supplier so he can give his patients samples. He charges a base inclusive fee ($220 per initial visit); office procedures and tests may have additional charges, and some patients with good out-of-network coverage get reimbursed by their insurance. But reimbursement isn’t Kot’s focus, because he provides an affordable product and is paid up front.

Whereas Kot provides instant access to care, Obamacare erects barriers to it, such as high deductibles and narrow networks. Doctors fight for reimbursements and patients encounter bureaucratic obstacles to tests and treatments. While it is true that Obamacare has reduced the number of uninsured in the U.S. from 44 million in 2013 to less than 28 million in 2017, at the same time it has done a poor job of ensuring access to quality doctors.

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/march-for-life-art-contrasts-with-vulgar-signs-at-womens-march-in-30-photos/

This weekend, Americans traveled from across the country to Washington, D.C., to participate in the March for Life and the Women’s March by walking with their poster art. While the pro-life marchers’ art focused on women and unborn life, the posters of Women’s March attendees, including small children, displayed anti-Trump messages along with vulgar imagery and words.

The Women’s March began Saturday morning at Freedom Plaza. The protest, which features a slew of liberal talking points, began in 2017 in response to the election of the president. While the first march boasted hundreds of thousands in Washington, D.C., the 2019 march appeared much smaller.

https://amgreatness.com/2019/01/19

Bismarck said that politics is the art of the possible. It looks like House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), Senator Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), and other Democrats regard politics as the art of intransigence.

In his brief remarks Saturday on border security, Donald Trump outlined a plan that made multiple concessions to Democratic desiderata in exchange for $5.7 billion to fund 230 miles of the wall along the southern U.S. border. Indeed, the president’s plan deliberately took cues from some Durbin’s own legislation on the subject.

Didn’t matter. Pelosi said the president’s plan was “a non-starter.”

Before rehearsing the specifics of the plan, let’s note two things. First, as the president himself noted, his plan is meant as the first step in addressing a national crisis. The crisis has two parts. One is humanitarian. The hordes pooling at the U.S.-Mexico border attempting to gain unlawful entry to the country are taking huge risks. According to the president, one-third of the women making the journey North are subject to sexual assault; some observers put the figure even higher; some mothers, Trump said, provided their girls with contraceptives in preparation for the journey. Many of the children, most often brought along by adults, are also frequently subject to abuse. Some of those banging on our southern gates are hapless people just seeking a better life; but many are hardened criminals or aspiring terrorists.

The second part of the crisis concerns national security. The southern border is a huge conduit for dangerous drugs and dangerous thugs. Moreover, the sheer number of Hispanics seeking entry to the United States has already affected the demographic profile and character of large parts of the Southwest. This is a subject that was eloquently anatomized by Victor Davis Hanson in Mexifornia: A State of Becoming. That was several years ago and the situation has only gotten worse in the intervening years.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/01/buzzfeed-report-michael-cohen-mueller-investigation-secrecy/

It is long past time that the public was told exactly what the president is alleged to have done.

BuzzFeed published an explosive allegation that the president of the United States ordered his former lawyer, Michael Cohen, to lie to congressional committees investigating Russia’s interference in the 2016 election. Specifically, in a news story sourced to two anonymous law-enforcement officials said to be “involved in an investigation of the matter,” the site reported that Special Counsel Robert Mueller had learned, though multiple witnesses and documents, of President Trump’s alleged instruction to Cohen; subsequently, upon being confronted by prosecutors, Cohen had supposedly admitted that Trump gave the order.

As a rule, Mueller does not comment on press reports about his probe. Yet, in a highly unusual move Friday night, the prosecutor refuted the story by reporters Jason Leopold and Anthony Cormier. Through a spokesman, Mueller asserted:

BuzzFeed’s description of specific statements to the special counsel’s office, and characterization of documents and testimony obtained by this office, regarding Michael Cohen’s congressional testimony are not accurate.

Clearly, Mueller did the right thing. The reporting had triggered a frenzy of commentary by Trump critics that impeachment was imminent, and even many chagrined Trump supporters conceded that, if the report was true, the presidency was in grave peril. Had Mueller stood idly by, the administration, and thus the governance of the nation, would have been engulfed in a ruinous storm of suspicion. It is not the special counsel’s job to correct bad reporting, but it would have been irresponsible to stay mum in these circumstances if the story was false.

Nevertheless, this incident highlights how investigative secrecy has wrongly been given pride of place. In the Mueller probe, the desire of prosecutors to go about their business in stealth — to attempt to build a case on undisclosed crimes based on unknown evidence; to prevent witnesses from gaming their testimony and evidence from being tampered with — has been prioritized over the president’s ability to govern the country.

https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/alan-dershowitz-buzzfeed-report-and-mueller-rebuke-a-vivid-example-of-get-trump-medias-mindset

As soon as I read the explosive BuzzFeed News report alleging there was evidence that President Trump had directed his former attorney Michael Cohen to lie to Congress, I was very suspicious.

Even before the Office of Special Counsel Robert Mueller issued a statement Friday night saying that the BuzzFeed account was “not accurate,” I wrote an op-ed for the New York Daily News raising questions about whether there was actually credible evidence that Trump suborned perjury or obstructed justice by telling Cohen to lie to lawmakers.

It seemed obvious that there were no smoking gun emails containing any such direction from the president. Nor would there be eyewitnesses to any such alleged conversation.

Unlike the obstruction of justice case that led to articles of impeachment being drafted against President Nixon and his resignation – where tape recordings proved criminal conduct by Nixon – the accusations against President Trump would have to rely on the credibility of Cohen, who has a long history of lying and little if any credibility.

In fact, Cohen was sentenced in federal court in December to three years in prison after pleading guilty to lying to Congress, campaign finance violations and financial crimes.

President Trump’s spokeswoman and his lawyers strongly disputed the BuzzFeed report, which was published Thursday, even before the statement from Mueller’s spokesman knocking down the story.

“Two words sum it up better than anything anybody else can say, and that is ‘categorically false,’” White House press secretary Sarah Sanders said Friday.

https://amgreatness.com/2019/01/19/schiff-for-brains

It’s a good thing President Trump canceled the Democrats’ overseas excursion this weekend because Representative Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) has some work to do here at home. For starters, he needs to take a red pen to his memo that defended the deceptive tactics used by the FBI to obtain a FISA warrant on Trump campaign aide Carter Page days before the 2016 presidential election.

The new chairman of the House Intelligence Committee authored a memo dated January 28, 2018, ironically titled, “Correcting the Record—The Russia Investigation.” But it is Schiff who needs to correct his own record in light of new and damaging information that contradicts several claims he made in that document.

The California congressman might also want to apologize to his predecessor, Devin Nunes (R-Calif.), who Schiff has spent the better part of a year trying to smear and discredit—even suggesting Nunes should be removed as chair of the committee—for releasing his memo that exposed how the FBI manipulated and misled the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court in order to spy on the Trump campaign.

Thanks to reporting by The Hill’s John Solomon and others, we now know that the Justice Department and the FBI were in possession of parts of the dossier far earlier than Schiff suggested in his memo and that the dossier’s author, Christopher Steele, also was in contact with top officials months before Schiff claimed he was. Further, these same officials were warned about Steele’s motivations as well as the connection between the wife of a key Justice Department lawyer, who also was employed by the same opposition research firm that had retained Steele.

The new details also bolster Nunes’s contention that a footnote in the FISA application did not fully and accurately inform the court about the political origins of the dossier, even though the department’s hierarchy was well aware of its partisan provenance at the time.

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/special-counsel-labels-buzzfeed-report-inaccurate/

A spokesman for special counsel Robert Mueller took the unusual step Friday of publicly correcting an inaccurate BuzzFeed News report that accused President Trump of suborning perjury.

“BuzzFeed’s description of specific statements to the Special Counsel’s Office, and characterization of documents and testimony obtained by this office, regarding Michael Cohen’s Congressional testimony are not accurate,” special counsel spokesman Peter Carr said in a statement to BuzzFeed.

The statement was issued in response to a bombshell report, which cited two law enforcement officials and alleged Trump directed his personal attorney, Michael Cohen, to lie to Congress about when exactly plans to construct a Trump Tower in Moscow concluded.

Cohen pleaded guilty in November to lying to Congress after admitting that his discussions with Russian officials regarding the construction of a Moscow Trump Tower continued until June 2016 and did not conclude in January of that year, as he previously testified before lawmakers. Cohen also admittedly lied to Congress about the extent of then-candidate Trump’s involvement in those discussions, many of which involved senior Kremlin officials.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/01/trump-cannot-be-pressured-out-of-white-house/

Why would Trump ever quit?

The walls supposedly are always closing in on Donald Trump. The end is always beginning.

He’s going to quit. He’s going to be impeached and removed. He’s going to decide not to run again. Somehow or other, he’s going to relieve everyone of the responsibility of ever thinking of him again, and especially of the responsibility of defeating him in an election.

This is the perpetual backdrop to media commentary about Trump. It rocketed around the Internet a couple of months ago when Jeffrey Toobin of The New Yorker said Trump might not serve out his term. Fake Washington Post editions recently distributed in Washington were about Trump quitting. Such scenarios are a constant topic in private conversations.

The allure of all this is obvious. It is the promise of deliverance. After tormenting his enemies for so long, Trump’s going to make it easy for them. He’s just going to go away.

It is true that the odds of Trump somehow not serving out his term are, given his erratic personality and the wild card of the Mueller investigation, higher than those for a normal president serving in normal times. But they are still slim.

Perhaps Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s report will send a torpedo into Trump’s bow. It seems more likely that a report will contain damaging and embarrassing revelations that, whatever the initial shock, will be quickly absorbed by the political system and especially Trump’s supporters.

The velocity of the news cycle, driven in part by the sheer volume and pace of Trump controversies, works in his favor.