RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://amgreatness.com/2018/11/25/the-costs-of-presidential

Predictably, Donald Trump was attacked both by the establishment and the media as “crude,” “unpresidential,” and “gratuitous” for a recent series of blunt and graphic statements on a variety of current policies. Oddly, the implied charge this time around was not that Trump makes up stuff, but that he said things that were factual but should not be spoken.

Trump’s tweets and ex tempore editorials may have been indiscreet and politically unwise, but they were also mostly accurate assessments. That paradox revisits the perennial question that is the hallmark of the Trump presidency of what exactly is presidential crudity and what are the liabilities of presidential candor?

Concerning the catastrophic California Camp Fire (150,000 acres) and the Woolsey conflagration (100,000 acres), which in turn followed prior devastating California fires in spring and summer of 2018 (perhaps charring 1 million acres in all), Trump tweeted: “There is no reason for these massive, deadly and costly forest fires in California except that forest management is so poor. Billions of dollars are given each year, with so many lives lost, all because of gross mismanagement of the forests. Remedy now, or no more Fed payments!”

Certainly, while flames were devouring homes and lives, it was unwise and crass to talk of withholding federal disaster assistance funding in the future—a realization apparently soon known to Trump himself. In short order, he began signaling his admiration for the rare courage of California response teams and visited the fires promising full federal cooperation with state officials.

No matter. A chorus of critics claimed that Trump was ignoring the human tragedy to score points, whether about reviving the logging industry to salvage dead trees or punishing blue California. Perhaps, but he did not quite serially milk the catastrophe in the manner of California Governor Jerry Brown, who repeatedly warned that the disaster was a result of global warming rather than his own disastrous green agendas that have led to such destruction: “Managing all the forests in everywhere we can does not stop climate change. And tragedies that we’re now witnessing, and will continue to witness in the coming years.”

Both statements—Trump’s and Brown’s—may well have sounded crass in the midst of such lethal disasters, but there were a few differences. The likeliest immediate cause of the 2018 serial fires was the Brown administration’s continual failure on state lands to allow removal of millions of dead trees, lost in mountain and foothill forests during the four-year California drought, and to petition the federal government to do the same in national forests.

Instead, Brown throughout years of increasingly deadly forest fires has stayed wedded to the unyielding green orthodoxy that decaying trees were nearly sacrosanct and essential to the forest ecosystem (true perhaps in the long run, but absolutely a catastrophic short-term policy in a state of 40 million). Moreover, despite Brown’s diagnosis that that the fires rage because of a new normal era of hot and dry weather, 2016 had seen one of the wettest and snowiest years in California history, while 2017 had been a near normal year of temperature and precipitation. The point then was that Trump’s ill-timed admonishment was truthful, while Brown’s own politicking was either irrelevant, misleading—or abjectly dangerous for millions. And yet Trump’s candor was precisely the sort of bluntness that turns off suburban voters.

https://reason.com/archives/2018/11/02/zombie-statistics

Linda Goudsmit responds to this very powerful column: “Zombie statistics are used in the marketing campaigns that sell leftist policies to unsuspecting Americans including global warming, gun control, open borders, population shifting, and the “safety” of opioids to doctors. Corrupt and falsified data in “scientific” studies used to support political science is a threat to freedom everywhere. Zombie statistics are used because society still naively believes in the credibility and integrity of the studies. They have not understood the malevolence and purposefulness of zombie statistics.” (http://goudsmit.pundicity.com/21767/the-problem-with-capitalism)

“You’re about to be untricked,” boasted the opening line of a groundbreaking 1981 Reason investigation about high-profile chemical leaks in upstate New York. In the early ’80s, Love Canal had already become synonymous with corporate willingness to destroy the environment and human health in the name of profit. But careful reporting revealed the anti-corporate narrative was wrong; the primary malefactor wasn’t the greedy businessmen at Hooker Chemical but the Niagara Falls Board of Education, which developed a plot of land despite many warnings from Hooker about the presence of dangerous chemicals. Unfortunately, Reason’s story did little to change the anti-market tenor of the environmental reforms that followed.

That’s because when a narrative is powerful and useful to highly motivated activists, it can be fiendishly difficult to roll it back. Zombie statistics, in particular, are tough to defeat. These undead tidbits can sustain incredible blows and yet continue to crawl forward, like the plodding, inexorable zombies in George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead—a film that debuted in 1968, the same year as Reason. These raggedy facts terrorize the debates over important issues for years after they have been definitively debunked.

At a time when #MeToo and Title IX are dominating the headlines, for instance, it can seem like sexual assault is everywhere. But one of the central statistics responsible for that perception rests on an astonishingly weak foundation. You’ve probably heard this shocking figure: One in five women has been sexually assaulted while in college.

One of the sources of support for that number is a 2002 study by David Lisak, who concluded that what had previously been referred to as “date rape” was actually the result of repeated infractions by serial campus predators. Lisak urged administrators to view every accusation “as an opportunity to identify a serial rapist,” a way of thinking that in turn validates harsh treatment for accused students and justifies funding a massive bureaucracy for adjudication. The Obama White House cited Lisak in memoranda, anti-rape activists promoted his work in movies and books, and university administrators invited him to give lectures and sit on panels.

But as Davidson College administrator Linda M. LeFauve explained in our pages three years ago, Lisak’s study was based on survey data cobbled together from his students’ dissertations and masters’ theses. The central data set drew from interviews with just 76 nontraditional, nonresidential students whose offenses “may or may not have happened on or near a college campus, may or may not have been perpetrated on other students, and may have happened at any time in the survey respondents’ adult lives.” Despite all these problems, the figure is still widely used and widely believed.

https://amgreatness.com/2018/11/23/republicans-and-trump

Pause for a moment and imagine you are so gullible that you believe one of the biggest political stunts of all time—that your mind is so incurious and facile that you’ve fallen for a crackpot conspiracy theory force-fed to you by fabulists in the media for two solid years. Still bitter about the defeat of your presidential candidate, you hallucinate about why your side lost, and convince yourself that the current occupant of the Oval Office is there as a result of some illegitimate or nefarious scheme.

That isn’t an imaginary scenario. Sadly—or laughably, take your pick—it’s a state of mind shared by tens of millions of your countrymen.

According to a recent poll, nearly 70 percent of Democrats actually admitted out loud they think the Russians helped sway the 2016 presidential election in favor of Donald Trump.

When asked if it was true that “Russians tampered with vote tallies to in order to get Donald Trump elected,” 67 percent of Democrats replied that yes, it was true. Eighty-five percent of Democrats think Russia hacked the emails of Democrats to help Trump; nearly 90 percent of Democrats think Russia “created and spread fake news stories to help Donald Trump win the election.”

Whoa.

The active imaginations of those on the Left are guided by one overriding delusion: That the Trump presidential campaign conspired with the Kremlin to influence the outcome of the 2016 presidential election. No villain is too improbable, no CNN-sourced story is too far fetched for this crowd to believe. “Without evidence!” they wail at Trump as they cling to an evidence-free Trump-Russia chimera that pollutes their thoughts and consumes their time.

https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2018/11/19/donald-trump-criminal-justice-reform-recidivism-jared-kushner-column/2047239002/
The costs of criminal activity are unacceptably high, but the reforms supported by the president promise to reduce costs and cut down on recidivism.

Crime imposes substantial fiscal and social costs on the United States. In 2016, more than 1.4 percent of our Nation’s GDP was spent funding the State and Federal criminal justice system. Victims and society at large also bear significant costs through pain, suffering, reduced quality of life, property losses, increased medical costs, and loss of life. The most recent estimates from 2014 indicate that altogether these damages constitute an additional 1.5 percent of GDP, yielding a total burden of 2.9 percent of GDP, or roughly $500 billion.

These costs can be attributed, in part, to crimes committed by prisoners after already serving once in prison, through recidivism after being released from state and federal facilities. If recent trends hold, almost half of federal inmates who were conditionally released will be re-arrested within 5 years of release and more than 75 percent of state offenders who were released on community supervision will be re-arrested within 5 years of release.
The president is reducing spending, crime

To break this cycle, President Donald J. Trump is working to effect bipartisan and evidence-based prison reforms to reduce recidivism. He issued an executive order in March that is bringing together more than a dozen Federal agencies to identify ways to reduce recidivism, enhance the reentry process, and improve public safety.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/americans-turned-to-trump-to-roll-back-the-progressive-tide-1542672973

At lunch the other day, a friend and strong anti-Trumper wondered aloud what brought all those thousands of people out to Donald Trump’s rallies. “After all,” he said “they’re pretty much the same show.” Mr. Trump on stage, in his usual bragging mode, attacking the press, settling scores with people he feels have betrayed him, while the audience in their red hats applaud uproariously, yelling approval for 90 or so minutes. “What’s the attraction? I don’t get it.”

Not a bad question, really. As I thought it over, it occurred to me that what genuinely excites Mr. Trump’s crowds and draws them to him is their shared antiliberalism. By liberalism I do not mean liberalism of the kind that was at the center of our fathers’ Democratic Party—which supported labor unions, civil liberties, racial integration, involvement in international affairs. I refer to the liberalism now metamorphisized into progressivism, at the heart of the thinking of such Democrats as Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, Cory Booker, Kamala Harris, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and others.

This is the progressivism that edges into socialism, that is said to attract the young, that promises a newer, kinder America—the progressivism that exalts identity politics and has no argument with political correctness. As one looks upon the people who attend Mr. Trump’s rallies, one sees the faces not of Hillary Clinton’s “deplorables” but of the proletariat out of which Karl Marx’s dictatorship was supposed to derive. Yet these people, despite the progressives’ promises to them of free Medicare, free college tuition, and the rest, want nothing to do with Sens. Warren, Sanders, Booker & Co. Quite the reverse: They loathe them.

The man who attends a Trump rally turns on his television set and that night’s news leads off with a Black Lives Matter protest in his city. If that city is Chicago, he might recall that this year some 2,619 people have been shot, 475 shot and killed, the preponderance of these being black people shot by black youth gangs. If it is another city, there is a distinct possibility, as fairly often in the past, that the protest will lead to looting of nearby shops. Al Sharpton, nattily turned out, is likely to have flown in for the festivities to remind everyone about the world’s injustice.

Our man changes channels and is greeted by a story of a long and happy lesbian marriage. He reads in the papers that people are fired from jobs for remarks that, under the reign of political correctness, are interpreted as racist, sexist, you name it; that students feel unsafe at Yale; that a year’s tuition, room and board at Dartmouth is $74,000. Doubtless before long he will read a story about an 11-year-old who is suing his parents for not allowing him to transgender himself.

Oh God, he thinks, make America great again, make America straight again, make America anything but what it is becoming. What elected Donald Trump, and what sustains him, is not his rather dubious charisma, his ideas, his obvious jolt to the country’s earlier slow economic growth, and no, not even the wretched campaign run by Hillary Clinton. Mr. Trump was chosen as a rebuke to the progressivism that has made life in America seem chaotic, if not a touch mad, and that now threatens to take over the Democratic Party. CONTINUE AT SITE

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/womens-march-founder-calls-on-sarsour-other-leaders-to-step-down-for-indulging-anti-semitism/

Theresa Shook, founder of the Women’s March, called on leaders of the liberal political-protest movement to step down on Monday amid widespread backlash against their refusal to condemn anti-Semitic and homophobic allies.

“As Founder of the Women’s March, my original vision and intent was to show the capacity of human beings to stand in solidarity and love against the hateful rhetoric that had become a part of the political landscape in the U.S. and around the world,” Shook wrote in a Monday Facebook post.

“Bob Bland, Tamika Mallory, Linda Sarsour and Carmen Perez of Women’s March, Inc. have steered the Movement away from its true course,” she continued. “I have waited, hoping they would right the ship. But they have not. In opposition to our Unity Principles, they have allowed anti-Semitism, anti-LBGTQIA sentiment and hateful, racist rhetoric to become a part of the platform by their refusal to separate themselves from groups that espouse these racist, hateful beliefs. I call for the current Co-Chairs to step down and to let others lead who can restore faith in the Movement and its original intent.”

Mallory and Sarsour have been routinely criticized by public figures from across the political spectrum for praising Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan, who routinely espouses anti-Semitic and homophobic views to his large following. The co-chairs have also come under fire for partnering with and endorsing anti-Semitic pro-Palestinian groups.

https://www.city-journal.org/price-controls-on-pharmaceuticals

The American pharmaceutical industry is the most innovative in the world and saves more lives than any other institution. So, of course, it is also the national villain.

In this autumn’s election, once again, voters say that one of the top issues—the top issue, in some polls—is lowering the price of prescription drugs. Politicians of both parties ritually denounce Big Pharma for profiteering. In his first press conference as president, Donald Trump accused drug companies of “getting away with murder,” and Bernie Sanders has called the industry’s greed a “public-health hazard to the American people.” A central plank in the “Better Deal” that Democrats are promising in the midterm elections is for the federal government to “negotiate” drug prices, and some progressives don’t even make that semantical pretense. They call for outright price controls, if not the “deprivatization” of the industry, on the grounds that Big Pharma is too powerful to be constrained by market forces.

At one level, this is just political opportunism. Big Pharma is easy to resent because its products are so essential, and it’s easy to attack because it’s actually not so big. Of every dollar that Americans spend on health, only a dime goes for prescription drugs. The lion’s share of health spending goes to hospitals and people in the health-care professions, whose relatively high fees and salaries are largely responsible for Americans bearing the world’s highest health-care costs. But how many politicians want to go after doctors and nurses? What Democrat would dare arouse the ire of the health-care unions? Much easier to scapegoat the greedy drug companies.

The critics do get one thing right: the pharmaceutical industry is no paragon of free-market capitalism. Companies spend much of their time appeasing regulators instead of satisfying customers. The bureaucratic delays and complexities discourage innovation and competition, allowing some firms to profit by gaming the rules rather than developing new drugs. The system is so opaque and convoluted that both parties agree that it needs to be reformed.

For Democrats, the answer is a system modeled on Canada and European countries with nationalized health systems that use their monopoly power to dictate which drugs are available at what price. On average, Americans spend more money on prescription drugs than people do in those other countries, a favorite talking point for Democrats advocating price controls and “Medicare for All.” As a candidate, Trump endorsed the big-government approach to controlling prices, and, as president, he has personally bullied pharmaceutical executives into rolling back some prices. But so far, thanks to some smart appointments, his administration is pursuing more sensible reforms. Instead of joining the march toward nationalized health care, it is focused on reviving market competition.

These reforms are moving forward at a remarkably brisk pace (for Washington), but there’s always the danger that Trump’s populist instincts and a resurgent Democratic Party could prevail. Politicians of both parties know how popular Democratic ideas on drugs are—and how unpopular Big Pharma is. Public-opinion polls by the Kaiser Family Foundation show that most Republicans as well as Democrats support tighter regulation of prescription-drug prices. Three-quarters of Americans favor outright price controls on some drugs, and more than 90 percent want the federal government to “negotiate” lower prices across the board.