RUTHFULLY YOURS

“From the Berlin Wall, to Vietnamese and Cuban boat people, to the DMZ, the prisoners of communism run in only one direction: toward liberty and self-government, toward the bounty of the marketplace and the possibilities of representative democracy.”

On November 13, a 24-year-old North Korean soldier, known only by his surname Oh, commandeered a jeep and sped toward the De-Militarized Zone that for 64 years has separated his communist homeland from the democratic capitalist south.

As he approached the border, the young man abandoned the vehicle and scrambled on foot toward the line of control. North Korean soldiers began firing on him. He was hit five or six times before collapsing onto South Korean ground. Transported to a hospital in Suwon, near Seoul, doctors performed emergency surgery. They discovered and extracted parasitic worms from his small intestine. Diagnosed with tuberculosis and hepatitis B, he is nonetheless expected to recover.

Oh risked everything to live in freedom. He has joined the ranks of other defectors, refugees, and exiles that fled oppression for the chance of a life free of tyrannical control. From the Berlin Wall, to Vietnamese and Cuban boat people, to the DMZ, the prisoners of communism run in only one direction: toward liberty and self-government, toward the bounty of the marketplace and the possibilities of representative democracy.

Many did not—many do not—make it. They die imprisoned, like the Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo, or do not survive the crossing, like Peter Fletcher, murdered by the Border Troops of the German Democratic Republic at the age of 18.

And there are millions more still who, having been born and raised in democratic capitalist societies, do not fully recognize or appreciate the novelty and blessing of their lives. The story of Oh is not only a reminder that the call of freedom persists. It is a rebuke to those who ignore freedom’s song.

For it has become fashionable, on both left and right, to downplay or ignore or deprecate the idea of freedom, to blame individualism, self-determination, and choice for inequality, pollution, corruption, immorality, decline, and other tragic aspects of the human condition. The fact that all of these pathologies flourish in autocratic, socialist, and communist societies as well as in our own seemingly escapes the notice of the intellectual critics of freedom.

Even so, we are told that free will is a delusion, that we are better off being “nudged” by our cognitive and moral superiors, that freedom and democracy are like rubber bands that snap back when stretched to the limit. “We are drowning in freedom,” says one editor. Tell that to Oh.

Left-wing currency manipulator George Soros’s push to radically reshape the judiciary and elect extremist district attorneys across the country to weaken law enforcement and protect lawless sanctuary cities is bearing fruit.

Soros has been pouring money into local elections because he supports local efforts to resist U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and wants to cripple police in order to advance the neo-Marxist abstraction known as social justice that simplistically breaks the world down into race, class, and sex or gender. Radicals claim that American laws and institutions are inherently corrupt and that these systems protect, for example, wealthy, white, native-born, non-disabled males at the expense of everyone else.

Soros wants prosecutors to empty prisons and coddle the prisoners who remain, scale back drug prosecutions, lower bail, and eliminate alleged racial disparities in sentencing, among other things.

Getting people who share Soros’s worldview into public office at every level is key to promoting his ugly vision of how America, which he calls “the main obstacle to a stable and just world order,” should look.

Soros’s backing helped elect radical leftist Lawrence (Larry) Krasner (D) as Philadelphia DA this month. Krasner, who quipped that his track record as a civil rights lawyer made him “completely unelectable,” somehow managed to best seven other candidates in the primary election.

“Krasner, who has represented Occupy Philadelphia and Black Lives Matter, and has sued the police department more than 75 times, had a major fundraising advantage that was provided almost exclusively by Soros,” the indispensable Joe Schoffstall reported at the Washington Free Beacon.

On the campaign trail, Krasner promised never to seek the death penalty in any criminal case and to keep Philadelphia a lawless sanctuary city. A segment of his platform titled “Resist the Trump Administration” spelled out his plan to “protect immigrants,” “reject the drug war,” and “stand up to police misconduct.”

“As District Attorney, he will work to maintain Philadelphia as a ‘sanctuary city’ and protect the Fourth Amendment rights of all residents, cooperating with federal authorities only to the degree required by law,” according to his campaign website.

“Because legal proceedings can affect the status of immigrants and therefore relations between communities and law enforcement, Larry will take those effects into account when making prosecutorial decisions and setting prosecutorial policy. He will oppose renewal of ICE’s access to the PARS database, a city police database used by ICE to identify ‘deportable’ immigrants.”

In April, Soros gave $1.45 million to the Philadelphia Justice and Public Safety PAC, which was created to support Krasner and listed its address as the Democrat law firm Perkins Coie in the nation’s capital. Soros threw another $214,000 the super PAC’s way in May, bringing his pro-Krasner donations to $1.7 million, “an unusual[ly] high [amount] for the average district attorney race.” It was also the first time a PAC had ever backed a candidate for Philly DA.

Unsealed bank records appear to reinforce the claim that Democrat Hillary Clinton’s campaign bought and paid for the sensational “piss-gate” dossier that used anonymous sources to smear President Trump by falsely linking him to Russia.

The dossier is the salacious, 35-page report commissioned by Democrat-aligned opposition research firm Fusion GPS. The statements in the partisan hit job were compiled by former British spy Christopher Steele and published by BuzzFeed. One claim was that Donald Trump hired prostitutes to urinate on a bed.

The dossier was just one of many particularly outrageous dirty tricks Clinton’s campaign to undercut her opponent’s campaign during the 2016 election cycle. Clinton also personally authorized the illicit efforts of socialist felon Bob Creamer and organizer Scott Foval who fomented violence at Trump campaign rallies, as James O’Keefe’s Project Veritas group revealed in undercover videos.

President Trump and his defenders have repeatedly suggested Democrats, Russia, or the FBI – or all three – may have helped fund the infamous document dump.

What’s new here are bank records from two Democrat-aligned law firms listing 112 transactions involving Fusion GPS. Clinton campaign and DNC lawyer Marc Elias reportedly hired Fusion GPS in April 2016 to conduct opposition research against Trump.

The documents were made public after Washington, D.C.-based federal Judge Richard Leon, who is presiding over a lawsuit related to Fusion’s records, ordered them unsealed. Fusion fought the unsealing request.

As the Daily Caller reports:

Perkins Coie, the law firm that represented the Clinton campaign and DNC, paid Fusion a total of $1,024,408 between May 24, 2016 and Dec. 28, 2016, the records show.

The largest payment was made just before the election. Perkins Coie made a $365,275 payment to Fusion GPS on Oct. 28, 2016, according to the records.

ObamaCare has caused hard-to-quantify economic damage, but some of the law’s regulations may be lethal—literally. Consider a Medicare hospital payment initiative, which a new study in the Journal of the American Medical Association Cardiology suggests may have contributed to an increase in deaths.

Readers are likely familiar with ObamaCare’s mandate and subsidies to impel individuals to obtain health insurance. But the law also included monetary incentives and penalties aimed at inducing changes in health-care delivery and spending reductions. The government rolled out these payment models nationally without careful study, and they are having unintended side effects.

A case in point is the Hospital Readmissions Reduction Program, which penalizes hospitals with above-average readmissions for Medicare patients. Readmissions are expensive, and the goal of the penalties is to encourage providers to take measures that reduce repeat hospitalizations—for instance, providing patients with clearer discharge instructions and coordinating with primary-care physicians.

Hospitals are graded on a curve and dunned if their 30-day readmission rate exceeds the national average. Hospitals can thus be penalized even if they reduce readmissions. The penalties, which are assessed as a share of hospitals’ Medicare payments, have been applied to an increasing number of medical conditions including knee and hip replacements.

Liberals have touted data showing that readmissions have fallen since the penalties took effect in 2013, but the JAMA researchers examined whether quality of care has improved as a result. Their observational study examined 115,245 fee-for-service Medicare beneficiaries hospitalized with heart failure across the U.S. in the four years prior to and first two years following implementation of the program.

Researchers found that the 30-day readmission rate (adjusted for patient risk) declined to 18.4% from 20% after the penalties were introduced. Yet the 30-day mortality rate increased to 8.6% from 7.2%—about 5,400 additional deaths per year. Over a one-year period the readmission rate fell by 0.9 percentage points while the mortality rate rose by five. In other words, while fewer patients were being readmitted, many more were dying.

The researchers hypothesize that the penalties might “incentivize hospitals to ‘game’ the system, using strategies such as delaying admissions beyond day 30, increasing observation stays, or shifting inpatient-type care to emergency departments.” These tricks may end up hurting patients.

Hospitals with above-average readmissions are also more likely to care for low-income patients and deal with complicated medical cases. They are usually financially strapped due to low Medicaid reimbursements, and the ObamaCare penalties may make it even harder to deliver quality care.

ObamaCare effectively enrolled Medicare patients and hospitals without their consent in a mandatory policy experiment—you’ll be better off, trust us—but then neglected to evaluate the adverse effects. A drug trial with the same results would have been shut down long ago.

The JAMA researchers conclude that, “like drugs and devices, public health policies should be tested in a rigorous fashion—most preferably in randomized trials—before their widespread adoption.” Sounds like good advice, but not the sort that ObamaCare architects and masters of the economic-planning universe like Peter Orszag and Jonathan Gruber are inclined to take.

The Trump Administration is seeking to redesign some of ObamaCare’s payment programs, including making policy experiments voluntary for providers. This has caused a fury among those on the left who believe that government coercion is the cure for all health-care maladies. Testing incentives on a small scale could prevent untold economic harm and deaths.

They are:Betty McCollum (MN) Mark Pocan (WI), Earl Blumenauer (OR), André Carson (IN), John Conyers, Jr. (MI), Danny K. Davis (IL), Peter A. DeFazio (OR), Raul Grijalva, Luis V. Gutiérrez (AZ), and Chellie Pingree (Maine)
Now ten members of the “progressive caucus” of the Democratic Party are trying to give these terrorist leaders another reason for using even younger terrorists to kill even more innocent civilians.

The bill fails to acknowledge that some of the most barbaric terrorist attacks against Jewish Israelis have been committed by Palestinian teens who have been recruited by terrorist leaders.

Israel has a right — according to international law — to protect its citizens from constant terror attacks, even those committed by young Palestinians. Indeed, it has an obligation to do so.

Palestinian terrorist leaders often use teenagers to commit acts of terror because they know that the Israeli legal system treats child terrorists more leniently than adult terrorists. Now ten members of the “progressive caucus” of the Democratic Party are trying to give these terrorist leaders another reason for using even younger terrorists to kill even more innocent civilians.

On November 14, Representative Betty McCollum introduced legislation c co-sponsored by nine other “progressive” members of Congress — calling on the State Department to “prevent United States tax dollars from supporting the Israeli military’s ongoing detention and mistreatment of Palestinian children.” In a statement about the proposed legislation McCollum said:

“This legislation highlights Israel’s system of military detention of Palestinian children and ensures that no American assistance to Israel supports human rights violations…Peace can only be achieved by respecting human rights, especially the rights of children. Congress must not turn a blind eye the unjust and ongoing mistreatment of Palestinian children living under Israeli occupation.”

It is well established that recruiting and using young Palestinians to wage terror on Israeli civilians is part of the modus operandi of Palestinian terrorist leaders. For decades, members of the radical Palestinian political and religious leadership have been stirring up young people to wage war against the Jews and their nation state. This was seen in the gruesome Intifada that began in 2000, in which Palestinian teenagers committed dozens of attacks against Jewish Israelis on buses, in cafes and at nightclubs. More recently—in what has become known as the ‘lone-wolf’ intifada — children as young as 13 have stabbed Israelis with scissors, screwdrivers and knives with the aim of inflicting maximum harm.

‘And thus the whirligig of time brings in his revenges.” Who could suppress at least a smirk of pleasure at the news of Senator Al Franken’s being caught up in the sexual-harassment scandals that have been breaking ever since Harvey Weinstein crashed the world? The fact that Franken’s molestation was caught on camera — that there is a picture that can accompany every single news story and Twitter meme for years to come — makes it even better. All that is now needed for instant Internet gratification is to take that photo of Franken mugging as he grabs the breasts of his sleeping co-star and stick it alongside a screen-grab of any of his earlier denunciations of poor sexual etiquette.

Because Franken is a high-handed moralizer of the Left, some Republicans and conservatives are happy to run with this, condemning Franken for it and another incident in which he attempted to kiss his co-star. There are even calls for an Ethics Committee investigation into the Minnesota senator.

Yet conservatives, like everyone else, should pause before playing this game. As with other cases in which enemies of the Right have been floored by this flood — a journalist from Vice and much of Hollywood spring to mind — we should be careful about embedding the new etiquette that such campaigns push us toward.

Of course the Left have been at it for years. We all know of people who think that rape is not rape if it is committed by a leftist, whereas even mild flirting is rape when it is committed by a conservative. We all know people who didn’t want to condemn Bill Clinton’s relationship with an intern who are now willing to talk eagerly about a “serial abuser” in the Oval Office. All of us can list plenty of examples of this. And we all know why they do it, too: because they want to win, and they are willing to seize any opportunity to get closer to that goal.

But conservatives should be careful about joining this. Every time the definition of rape, abuse, or molestation is brought down another notch and this new low-water mark is agreed on across the political spectrum, the prospect for a different type of harm increases. If we agree for short-term political pleasure that Franken is guilty of serious sexual molestation for an unfunny photograph taken years ago and for a sloppy and unwanted pass at a woman, then two things are certain to happen.

The first is that the difference between bad manners and rape will become blurred yet further. We live in an era when already a knee-touch can cause resignations. Are we sure that unwanted advances must now always be deemed a resigning matter? It was the late British Conservative MP Alan Clark who once, when taken to task for making allegedly unwanted approaches toward women, replied, “How do I know they’re unwanted until I make them?” Of course Senator Franken is a married man, and plenty of us may agree to look down on a married man who does such a thing. But are we absolutely certain that we want to make it into something that requires an ethics investigation and total career destruction?

After Hurricane Harvey hit, Islamist activist Linda Sarsour put out a call for donations. But instead of the money going to hurricane victims, it was actually being directed to the Texas Organizing Project Education Fund. TOP is a spinoff of ACORN, a disgraced organization shut down in the wake of scandals involving embezzlement and internal cover-ups, and was backed by Hungarian anti-Semitic billionaire George Soros who continues to invest his ill-gotten wealth into a war against the Jewish State.

Soros has blamed Jews for anti-Semitism and described his period as a Nazi collaborator as the “most exciting time of my life.” He claims to have grown up in a “Jewish, anti-Semitic home” and called his mother a “typical Jewish anti-Semite” who hated his first wife because she was “too Jewish”. He has written an article insisting that, “America and Israel must open the door to Hamas.”

As controversy mounts over Sarsour’s appearance on a panel denying the existence of leftist and Islamist anti-Semitism, especially among activists waging a campaign of hate against Israel, her defenders are recycling a letter by “Jewish leaders” defending the anti-Semitic Islamist activist.

The “Jewish Leaders Statement Against Attacks on Linda Sarsour” contains rather few Jewish leaders. Behind “Jews for Linda”, the group linked to the letter, is Rafael Shimunov. Shimunov is the National Creative Director of the Working Families Party. The WFP is yet another spinoff of ACORN.

And Shimunov is also a member of the hate group If Not Now which targets Jewish charities.

Three of the signatories to the Sarsour letter are with the Working Families Party. They include the WFP’s biggest bigwigs, Dan Cantor, its National Director, Joe Dinkin, its National Communications Director, and Bill Lipton, its New York State Director. Cantor is a former ACORN activist and Lipton is a former ACORN employee who studied under Eric Foner, an apologist for Communism and Iran.

Both of the New York City Council members who signed on to the Sarsour letter, Brad Lander and Stephen Levin, are WFP endorsed. Lander had formerly worked for the Pratt Center which was funded by Soros. Even while serving in the City Council, Lander leads Toward a 21st Century City for All. The group thanks Soros’ Open Society for its funding on almost every single page.

Steyn noted how a recent mainstream media headline read “I Believe Juanita,” referring to Juanita Broaddrick, a former nursing home administrator who says then-Arkansas Attorney General Bill Clinton (D) raped her.

He said he wrote the same post in February 1999…

“Why shouldn’t Al Franken grope a woman? It’s because the media told us it doesn’t matter being a pig because character doesn’t matter,” he said of the sentiment during the Lewinsky scandal.

“They’ve got respected PBS anchors walking around naked, and I don’t mean Big Bird,” Steyn said of Charlie Rose, who has been accused of misconduct by as many as eight women.

The New York Times a few days ago ran a column called “I Believe Juanita”. I believed Juanita, too – way back when, eighteen-and-a-half years ago, when it counted and when the Times was covering the story only as an illustration of “shadowy, subterranean” media “mechanics”. At any rate, here’s my Juanita Broaddrick column from February 1999:

He raped her. Old news. Get over it.

He raped her. Or rather (for we must observe the niceties) she alleges he raped her. That’s what Juanita Broaddrick told The Wall Street Journal last Friday. That’s what The Washington Post reported Saturday —on page one. That’s what The New York Times somewhat tardily got around to letting its readers in on yesterday — although the fastidious Times boys forebore to let the word “rape” sully their account, preferring the term “assault” and noting only that “he forced her down to the bed and had intercourse with her,” which would be rape if Mike ‘Tyson did it but with Bill Clinton qualifies merely as a marginally non-consensual relationship.

He raped her. Okay, he assaulted her. He bit her lip and rammed his penis into her vagina. And what happened? Nothing. No one on the Sunday talk shows raised the issue. It wasn’t on the TV news, it wasn’t on the radio news. Instead of running with “Is Our President A Rapist?”, Time and Newsweek put the alleged rapist’s wife on the cover in regal pose and cooed over the unstoppable momentum for her mooted Senate campaign.

He raped her. That’s what she told Lisa Myers of NBC News back in January, just as the impeachment trial was getting underway. But the network got cold feet — unlike the president, who always keeps his socks on. “The good news is you’re credible,” Miss Myers informed her interviewee. “The bad news is you’re very credible” — a problem peculiar to American journalism. Last night, with Mr. Clinton acquitted and Senator-elect Rodham cruising to victory in the New York primary, NBC decided it was finally safe to air Miss Myers’ report on Dateline. So what will happen now? Nothing. He raped her. Old news. Get over it. Move on. The country’s reached “closure.”

No, it hasn’t. It’s reached “Denial.” Denial is a small town in Arkansas, midway between Hope and Hot Springs, where all the men are abusers but all the women feel it would be unseemly to bring it up. A zillion Clinton women ago, I remarked that the United States was beginning to resemble one of those Sam Shephard plays set in a crumbling farmhouse where everyone in the family knows there’s a dead baby buried in the backyard but they all agree not to mention it, even though its rotting corpse silently and remorselessly contaminates everything. Back in those days, when it seemed the president was simply groping the odd breast hither and yon, my comparison was intended as metaphor. But the metaphor is getting dangerously close to prosaic reality. First, Americans learned to accept that their president was an adulterer; next, a pants-dropper; now, a rapist. It’s all too easy to imagine, say, a year from now a decomposed corpse being dug up on the outskirts of Little Rock, the spawn of some unfortunate gubernatorial liaison circa 1987. In a typically artful invention, Mr. Clinton told Mrs. Broaddrick, as he zipped up his pants, not to worry, he was sterile, the result of mumps. The conception of his daughter shortly after this 1978 encounter represents what the lawyers would call “conflicting testimony.”

In blockbuster posts Monday, investigative reporters John Solomon at The Hill and Sara Carter at Hannity.com reported on the extensive evidence of Russia’s plot to corner the American uranium market with the help of the Obama administration.

The evidence, gathered by FBI informant William Campbell who was working undercover for six years, includes corruption inside a U.S. nuclear transport company and Obama administration approvals that let Moscow buy and sell atomic fuels.

The more than 5,000 pages of documents from the counterintelligence investigation, reviewed by the reporters, are just the tip of the iceberg, Solomon told Sean Hannity on Fox News Monday night.

But the memos are already conflicting with statements made by Justice Department officials, who in recent days threw cold water on Campbell’s assertions, saying they wouldn’t shed much light on the U.S. government’s 2010 decision to approve Russia’s purchase of the Uranium One mining company.

Solomon held up an email that he said the FBI has had for six years.

“It shows that Uranium One was part of a Russia strategy to control — not just benefit from the global market, control the global market. That would put the United States at a disadvantage. That’s the sort of evidence that this FBI informant has right now,” Solomon said.

Last week the DOJ said the FBI informant’s info had “there’s no connection to Uranium One. These are emails that say Uranium One that are in the FBI files,” Solomon said, holding up the documents. “They said there that was no connection between the Uranium One case and the criminal case. We now know that the criminal case got its first evidence in 2009, a whole year before the Uranium One deal was approved by the Obama administration,” he continued.

“There are a lot of things that people have been saying that these documents simply don’t agree with,” Solomon told Hannity.

Hannity said that “a very high-ranking congressman” recently sent him a note stating the “the knowledge of key administration officials will be the next thing proven by both of you [Solomon and Carter] and the links to the Clinton Foundation.” CONTINUE AT SITE