RUTHFULLY YOURS

Hell hath no fury like a swamp creature scorned, and that ferocity was trained almost exclusively these past weeks on California House Republicans. The attack was a case study in standing up to entrenched special tax interests, and a lesson to other Republicans in the virtues of having the backbone to go on offense.

The House GOP passed its tax-reform bill on Thursday, and special medals of valor go to the 11 of 14 California Republicans who voted in support. The lobbyist brigade had joined with Democrats to target the Golden State delegation, seeing it as their best shot at peeling off enough Republicans to kill the bill. The assault was brutal, dishonest and all-out.

The National Association of Realtors, incensed that the nation’s millionaires might face limits on their mortgage-interest deduction, staged a “fly-in” to Washington, sending dozens of real-estate agents to harass Californians. The California Association of Realtors took out full-page ads in state and national newspapers, accusing Republicans of “punishing” state homeowners. National and California-based housing and building associations staged press conferences, online ad campaigns, petition drives—targeting everyone from Palmdale’s Steve Knight to the Central Valley’s David Valadao.

Gov. Jerry Brown unleashed on state Republicans, calling them “sheep” for supporting an end to most state and local tax, or SALT, deductions, and sending them letters deploring the tax hit on residents of high-tax California. Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi accused them of “looting” the state. Her Senate counterpart, New York’s Chuck Schumer, warned of “political fallout” that would be “catastrophic.” Liberal groups, super PACs and the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee unfurled a digital and TV ad blitz, charging the GOP with “eliminating middle-class tax deductions” to help the wealthy.

This is the reward for attempting to simplify the tax code—the forces of distortion scurry to protect their privileges. Democrats had hoped Republican infighting would tank tax reform. But as the GOP kept marching, the left and special interests instead turned to picking off blue-state Republicans with scare campaigns about mortgage interest and SALT. Most of the New York and New Jersey GOP contingencies quickly caved, which left the Californians to field all the incoming fire. Had they defected in the same manner as their Northeastern colleagues, the bill would have failed.

Their resistance instead shows the virtues of aggressively arguing the tax-reform case. Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy and House Ways and Means member Devin Nunes are Californians themselves, and they worked to keep the delegation armed against the disinformation. The press, for instance, continued to parrot Realtor-fed numbers about super-high house values, even though much of the state outside pricey San Francisco and Los Angeles would not be hit. In Central Valley districts like Mr. Nunes’s, approximately 98% of homes aren’t worth enough to be subject to the $500,000 proposed principal limit on the mortgage-interest deduction. Members made a point of repeating this. Some also reminded middle-class constituents that the left often notes the mortgage deduction mostly benefits wealthier Americans. CONTINUE AT SITE

Yesterday, a male prisoner serving a three-to-four-year sentence for drug offenses sued the Massachusetts Correctional Institution, demanding, among other things, that the state transfer him to a female correctional facility because he suffers from gender dysphoria.

In his lawsuit, filed by GLBTQ Legal Advocates & Defenders under the pseudonym Jane Doe, Doe alleged violations of his federal and state constitutional rights to equal protection and due process, as well as his rights under the Americans with Disabilities Act. All of Doe’s legal theories are dubious, but none so much as his disability claim under the ADA.

Passed in 1990, the ADA prohibits discrimination on the basis of a disability, and also requires employers and public entities — including prisons — to provide reasonable accommodations to disabled individuals. But in passing the ADA, Congress explicitly provided that “the term ‘disability’ shall not include (1) transvestism, transsexualism, pedophilia, exhibitionism, voyeurism, gender identity disorders not resulting from physical impairments, or other sexual behavior disorders.” And Doe’s complaint specifically says that his “doctor ultimately diagnosed Jane Doe with Gender Identity Disorder, or transsexualism.”

Given the clear statutory language, a court should quickly toss out Doe’s ADA claim. But that is not what happened the last time a man suffering from gender dysphoria brought a disability-discrimination claim under the ADA. Rather, when Kate Lynn Blatt sued his employer in 2014 under the ADA, the case lingered until May 2017, when federal district-court judge Joseph F. Leeson Jr. refused to dismiss the lawsuit, and instead held:

It is fairly possible to interpret the term gender identity disorders narrowly to refer to simply the condition of identifying with a different gender, not to exclude from ADA coverage disabling conditions that persons who identify with a different gender may have — such as Blatt’s gender dysphoria, which substantially limits her major life activities of interacting with others, reproducing, and social and occupational functioning.

The court’s reasoning is illogical: As Ed Whelan asked at the time, “We’re supposed to believe that it is ‘fairly possible’ to read gender identity disorders to mean only gender identity (‘identifying with a different gender’) and not to extend to disorders?” Because the parties in the Blatt case settled shortly after Judge Leeson refused to toss out the plaintiff’s case, a higher court will not have the opportunity to correct the district court’s flawed analysis.

European Islamist scion Tariq Ramadan was banned from the U.S. by the Bush administration in February 2004 for his financial support of a charity that funded terrorist groups. In January 2010, then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton overturned that ban. Clinton personally approved a visa for the controversial grandson of the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood.

Now, Tariq Ramadan is facing multiple accusations of rape and sexual assault of minors.

Hillary Clinton’s visa for Tariq Ramadan was seen as part of the new Obama administration policy of embracing more hardcore Islamists.

The New York Times reported in 2010:

Six years after using the Patriot Act to revoke the visa of a prominent Muslim academic, the United States State Department reversed itself and said Wednesday that it would no longer bar the scholar from entering the United States.

The decision came in the form of an order signed by Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton. It paves the way for the scholar, Prof. Tariq Ramadan, to apply for a new visa free of the authorities’ former accusation that he had contributed money to a charity connected to terrorism.

Here’s a copy of the signed Clinton order clearing the way for Tariq Ramadan’s visa to the U.S.:

Since last month, Ramadan has been the target of multiple rape claims.

The National reports:

Mr Ramadan, who is professor of contemporary Islamic studies at Oxford University, has been accused of rape and sexual assault by three women in the past 10 days.

One of them, French writer Henda Ayari, says Mr Ramadan raped her in a Paris hotel room in 2012. Ms Ayari, 41, who lodged a rape complaint against the 55-year-old Swiss national on October 20, claimed that for Mr Ramadan, “either you wear a veil or you get raped”.

“He choked me so hard that I thought I was going to die,” she told Le Parisien on Monday.

Mr Ramadan is also accused of raping another woman in a hotel room in 2009. The unnamed 42-year-old, who is reported to have disability in her legs, said on Friday that the professor had subjected her to a terrifying and violent sexual assault.

A third complainant, identified as Yasmina, told Le Parisien in an interview on Saturday that Mr Ramadan sexually harassed her in 2014 and blackmailed her for sexual favours.

Mr Ramadan has denied the accusations and has filed counter-charges for libel. CONTINUE AT SITE

WASHINGTON — Both GOP and Democratic Senate leaders said they want the Senate Ethics Committee to investigate Sen. Al Franken (D-Minn.) over a radio reporter saying he kissed and groped her without consent in December 2006.

In a testimonial posted today on the website of L.A.’s 790 KABC, Leeann Tweeden said she was on her ninth USO tour with comedian Franken as the headliner.

“Franken had written some skits for the show and brought props and costumes to go along with them. Like many USO shows before and since, the skits were full of sexual innuendo geared toward a young, male audience,” Tweeden said. “As a TV host and sports broadcaster, as well as a model familiar to the audience from the covers of FHM, Maxim and Playboy, I was only expecting to emcee and introduce the acts, but Franken said he had written a part for me that he thought would be funny, and I agreed to play along.”

“When I saw the script, Franken had written a moment when his character comes at me for a ‘kiss’. I suspected what he was after, but I figured I could turn my head at the last minute, or put my hand over his mouth, to get more laughs from the crowd,” she continued. “On the day of the show Franken and I were alone backstage going over our lines one last time. He said to me, ‘We need to rehearse the kiss.’ I laughed and ignored him. Then he said it again. I said something like, ‘Relax Al, this isn’t SNL…we don’t need to rehearse the kiss.’ He continued to insist, and I was beginning to get uncomfortable.”

Tweeden said he insisted on rehearsing the kiss, she finally agreed, and “he came at me, put his hand on the back of my head, mashed his lips against mine and aggressively stuck his tongue in my mouth.”

“I immediately pushed him away with both of my hands against his chest and told him if he ever did that to me again I wouldn’t be so nice about it the next time,” she said. “I walked away. All I could think about was getting to a bathroom as fast as possible to rinse the taste of him out of my mouth. I felt disgusted and violated.” When they performed the skit for the USO show, she turned her head at the kiss part, she added.

“I avoided him as much as possible and made sure I was never alone with him again for the rest of the tour. Franken repaid me with petty insults, including drawing devil horns on at least one of the headshots I was autographing for the troops.”

She then found a photo from the trip in which she had fallen asleep on a C-17 flying out of Afghanistan and Franken was grabbing her breasts. CONTINUE AT SITE

Former President Barack Obama and his advisers claimed that their 2010 health insurance law would create incentives to provide better and more efficient patient care. A new study suggests that one of their bright ideas has since gone disastrously wrong.

This week the Journal reports:

The Affordable Care Act required Medicare to penalize hospitals with high numbers of heart failure patients who returned for treatment shortly after discharge. New research shows that penalty was associated with fewer readmissions, but also higher rates of death among that patient group.

The researchers said the study results, being published in JAMA Cardiology, can’t show cause and effect, but “support the possibility that the [penalty] has had the unintended consequence of increased mortality in patients hospitalized with heart failure.”

The policy went into effect in October 2012 and the new study examines hospital readmission and mortality rates both before and after the penalties were in force. It’s just one study, generated by the experiences of 115,245 Medicare patients hospitalized for heart failure at 416 hospitals between 2006 and 2014. But the results are disturbing:

One in five heart failure patients returned to the hospital within 30 days before the ACA passed. That dropped to 18.4% after the penalties. Mortality rates increased from 7.2% before the ACA to 8.6% after the penalties, or about 5,400 additional deaths a year for Medicare beneficiaries not in managed care plans.

While doctors and researchers consider whether this particular Affordable Care Act policy is killing thousands of patients, the larger question is whether ObamaCare overall is making us less healthy. The implementation of the law has coincided with bad news on U.S. mortality and life expectancy.

Last month the Society of Actuaries reported:

The age-adjusted mortality rate for 2015 was 733.1 (per 100,000), an increase of 1.2% over the 2014 rate of 724.6. This was the first year-over-year increase in the age-adjusted U.S. mortality rates since 2005, and only the seventh year-over-year increase since 1980. In fact, the only other time since 1980 that an annual age-adjusted mortality rate increased by more than 1.0% was in 1993, when the rate increased 2.3% over the 1992 rate.

Back in the early ‘90s, the U.S. was battling the AIDS crisis. Now, we face a number of health challenges, which many believe are related to diminished economic prospects and other long-term trends. Also, preliminary data for 2016 look better than the 2015 numbers, though not as good as 2014, according to the actuaries.

It may be a little early to pronounce that ObamaCare has made us sicker and is—at the margin—killing us. But given all the cost and disruption, Americans can reasonably be disappointed if it’s not making us healthier. Also, given the abundant evidence that wealthier people are healthier and the disincentives to work embedded in ObamaCare, it’s hard to be optimistic about our future health if the law remains unreformed. CONTINUE AT SITE

In the winter of ’56, Khrushchev told the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union that Stalin may not have been a very nice guy. In the fall of ’17, the media began to concede that maybe Bill Clinton did abuse a whole bunch of women. And maybe those women weren’t really part of a vast right-wing conspiracy to make a bloated piggish progressive hero seem like he might not be a very nice guy.

Why are Democrats turning on the Clintons? Same reason Khrushchev turned on Stalin. They’re purging the Clintons for the same reasons that they defended them. They’re calling out Bill Clinton for his sexual assaults for the same reasons that they covered them up. It’s about power and money.

The Democrats smeared Bill Clinton’s accusers then. Now they’ll exploit them to throw the Clintons out.

The #MeToo campaign provided an opening. But if you really want to understand why the left is disavowing Bill Clinton, ignore the hashtags and look at the bigger picture.

Earlier this month, the rollout of Donna Brazile’s book raked Hillary Clinton and her campaign over the coals. The former interim DNC boss made the case that the Clinton campaign had rigged the primaries.

Brazile’s outrage at the rigging is laughable. Not only was she caught passing a debate question to Hillary, but the only reason she was allowed to replace Debbie Wasserman Schultz is that she was a Clintonista who had served as a Clinton adviser and was promoted to head Gore’s campaign.

After Hillary’s collapse, Brazile was left out in the cold. Like Schultz, she was one of Hillary’s fall girls. And unlike Schultz, she didn’t have a cozy congressional district to call her own. Her CNN contract was torn up after the debate question leak. (Though if you think CNN was actually surprised that a Clinton ally leaked it to the Clintons, you’re also shocked that there’s gambling going on at Rick’s Cafe Americain. CNN had disavow Donna who then had to disavow Hillary. Now the Dems are disavowing the Clintons.)

Brazile’s book tour was Act 1 in purging the Clintons from the Dem establishment. Talking about Bill Clinton’s sexual harassment and abuses is Act 2. And the odds are very good that there’s an Act 3.

Why get rid of the Clintons? Let’s look at what the First Grifters have been doing to the Dems.

In May, Hillary rolled out Onward Together. The new SuperPAC was supposed to fundraise for lefty groups. But the groups don’t actually appear to be getting the cash.

Understandable. The flat broke Clintons always have lots of bills to pay and private jets to book. And good chardonnay doesn’t come cheap. A 1787 vintage Chateau d’Yquem runs to $100K a bottle.

Fusion GPS co-founder Glenn Simpson refused to answer key questions during his seven-hour closed-door appearance Tuesday before the House Intelligence Committee, Fox News reported Wednesday. But he did acknowledge that he personally discussed allegations in the Steele dossier with members of the media, even though he did not speak to the sources behind the allegations himself to verify whether they were true.

Moreover, he reportedly said that he leaked details from the dirty dossier to reporters right before the 2016 election because he was “upset” that then-FBI director James Comey had reopened the Clinton email case.

Simpson told investigators he never spoke to the underlying sources of the document, never traveled to Russia and did not verify the dossier beyond comparing the claims to “open source” media reporting.

The source said Simpson also told investigators he was “upset” when then FBI Director James Comey re-opened the Hillary Clinton email investigation in late October 2016, and Simpson wanted to push back.

Simpson’s attorneys negotiated the details of his appearance before the committee last week, agreeing to voluntarily testify rather than be subpoenaed.

“Throughout this entire year, the White House and its allies on the Hill and elsewhere have attempted at every turn to smear Fusion GPS because of its connection to the Steele dossier,” Simpson’s attorney Joshua Levy said Tuesday.

Levy admitted that Steele and Simpson had briefed reporters on the dossier last year, but insisted that neither Simpson nor Fusion GPS paid members of the media to publish stories of any kind.

Banker turned human rights activist Bill Browder has accused Fusion of hiring journalists to plant stories in the media.

Fusion, meanwhile, continued to fight the Intel Committee’s request for their bank records in court on Wednesday.

According to The Daily Caller, Steele has revealed in court papers in London that “he was directed by Fusion to brief reporters at The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN, Yahoo! News and The New Yorker in September 2016.”

Steele also gave an interview via Skype to Mother Jones reporter David Corn, who published an article about Steele’s allegations on Oct. 31, 2016.

Levy maintains that the dossier is legitimate.

“What they did do is they contracted with Christopher Steele…. This experienced British intelligence official came back with a report that now in hindsight looks quite accurate,” Levy said.

Fox News is standing by its report that Simpson met with Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya before and after the June 2016 Trump Tower meeting with Donald Trump Jr. and other campaign officials. CONTINUE AT SITE

American politics has become an endless fox hunt. The hounds’ heads jerked up this week on news that Attorney General Jeff Sessions, responding to a request from House Judiciary Committee Chairman Bob Goodlatte, had asked the Justice Department’s career lawyers to look into the possibility of appointing a second special prosecutor, to investigate Hillary Clinton.

Set aside for a moment what the precise meaning of “investigate” might be. The day doesn’t pass anymore without a demand, from the Oval Office or the ozone, that someone should “look into” some political malefaction. Theoretically, we could have public officials being led to the executioner’s block weekly in Washington.

Indeed, the movement to name a second special prosecutor flows from the fact that the Washington press corps in January decided en masse to “look into” the notion that the Trump campaign had colluded with Russia to defeat Mrs. Clinton, a thought dropped into the water by the departing Obama administration.

What followed was a river of stories purporting Trump-Russian collusion. Months later, it remains true that the federal code recognizes no crime called “collusion.” Eventually the river of collusion stories joined with Oval Office mania over them to produce special prosecutor Robert Mueller. CONTINUE AT SITE

The Southern Poverty Law Center has established itself as the nation’s most vocal and prominent hate-group watchdog in the nation.

The organization was founded in 1971 by Morris Dees Jr. in Montgomery, Alabama. Before co-founding the SPLC, Dees was a law partner and serial entrepreneur with Millard Fuller. Still in their twenties, they became millionaires. Fuller then went his own way, dedicating his life to helping the poor, ultimately founding Habit for Humanity in 1976.

Morris Dees went another direction. He and another law partner, Joseph J. Levin Jr., created the Southern Poverty Law Center to counter racial discrimination in the South and finish off the Ku Klux Klan. And the SPLC had some remarkable successes in its first several decades, implementing a legal strategy of using civil lawsuits to secure court judgments against targeted organizations and then having the courts seize assets to cripple them or force their closure.

A marketing wizard, Dees has grown the SPLC into an organization with a staff of 250 in four states. It has a shiny and sleek headquarters building in Montgomery and a net worth in 2015 of $350 million, of which a considerable portion is held in offshore accounts. The media often parrots its point of view uncritically, as it labels more than 1,000 organizations across the nation as hate groups. Using sophisticated marketing methods, it is the recipient of tens of millions of dollars annually from individual and corporate donors, most of whom believe they are helping to counter “hate groups.”

But tragically, Dees and the SPLC are now fueled by the same passionate animus that fueled the Klan and white supremacists. The alleged “hate groups” that the SPLC targets now are often Christian organizations which follow the same doctrines and beliefs that the church has followed for the past two millennia. Critics of Islamic extremism are labelled as anti-Muslim extremists. Politicians who support traditional marriage such as Ben Carson are called out as “extremists.” Several examples of the pain and damage that the SPLC has inspired are illustrative.

Earlier this year, James Hodgkinson, who liked the SPLC on his Facebook page, shot House of Representatives Whip Steve Scalise and four other Republicans while they were at a baseball practice early one morning in Washington. Another fan of the SPLC, Floyd Lee Corkins II, shot a security guard at the offices of Family Research Council in Washington in 2012. Family Research Council, one of the nation’s most respected conservative think tanks, was labelled a “hate group” by the SPLC because it supported traditional Christian morality in regard to sexuality and marriage.

Another illustration comes from Middlebury College, the elite Vermont school where tuition runs $61,000 a year. In March, a student mob prevented American Enterprise Institute Fellow Charles Murray from speaking. Later the mob attacked the Middlebury political science professor accompanying him, Allison Stanger, causing her to be taken to the emergency room of a nearby hospital with a neck injury and a concussion after being thrown to the ground. Mr. Murray is a highly distinguished political scientist, sociologist, and author. The SPLC on its website had labeled him a “white nationalist” — a false and even absurd claim as Mr. Murray has multi-racial children. Gullible students, armed with the hatred spewed out by SPLC, showed the depth of the ideological civil war in the United States, as the left-wing fascists at Middlebury shut down free speech in a manner reminiscent of the book burners in Nazi Germany.

Republicans, whether in the White House or on Capitol Hill, do not seem to appreciate how much they may be undermining what they say they want — a serious investigation of the Clinton Foundation and such related matters as the Uranium One transaction, the interplay between the foundation and the operation of the State Department during Secretary Clinton’s tenure, and the question of whether that interplay explains the use of the improper private email system and the destruction of tens of thousands of emails.

The president has been railing about his own Justice Department’s apparent inaction (after signaling, post-election, that he did not want to see the Clintons further investigated and prosecuted). A group of House Republicans has taken up this cause and is pushing for the appointment of a special counsel. In essence, it is a tit-for-tat maneuver: There is a special-counsel probing Trump ties to Russia, they reason, so why not a special-counsel to probe Clinton ties to Russia?

This suggests a basic misunderstanding about what triggers a special-counsel investigation: There must be potential offenses that warrant investigation as to which the Justice Department has a conflict of interest that would make its conducting the investigation inappropriate.

Preliminarily, we should note that there is no such thing as an independent counsel. In our constitutional system, prosecution is an executive power, so even special counsels ultimately report to the Justice Department’s leadership. That being the case, we should never have a special counsel unless one is absolutely necessary. It is pernicious to have a prosecutor who is assigned to make a case on a single target (or set of targets). These prosecutors are insulated from the pressures of an ordinary prosecutor’s office, where cases have to compete for resources and only the meritorious ones are pursued. Thus, the sorry history of the special counsel (and its predecessors — the “special prosecutor” and “independent counsel”) is empire-building, investigations that go on for years, and cases involving trivial charges often far removed from the suspected offense that was the original rationale for appointing the special counsel.