RUTHFULLY YOURS

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

An FBI informant gathered extensive evidence during his six years undercover about a Russian plot to corner the American uranium market, ranging from corruption inside a U.S. nuclear transport company to Obama administration approvals that let Moscow buy and sell more atomic fuels, according to more than 5,000 pages of documents from the counterintelligence investigation.

The memos, reviewed by The Hill, conflict with statements made by Justice Department officials in recent days that informant William Campbell’s prior work won’t shed much light on the U.S. government’s controversial decision in 2010 to approve Russia’s purchase of the Uranium One mining company and its substantial U.S. assets.

Campbell documented for his FBI handlers the first illegal activity by Russians nuclear industry officials in fall 2009, nearly an entire year before the Russian state-owned Rosatom nuclear firm won Obama administration approval for the Uranium One deal, the memos show.

Campbell, who was paid $50,000 a month to consult for the firm, was solicited by Rosatom colleagues to help overcome political opposition to the Uranium One purchase while collecting FBI evidence that the sale was part of a larger effort by Moscow to make the U.S. more dependent on Russian uranium, contemporaneous emails and memos show.

“The attached article is of interest as I believe it highlights the ongoing resolve in Russia to gradually and systematically acquire and control global energy resources,” Rod Fisk, an American contractor working for the Russians, wrote in a June 24, 2010, email to Campbell.

The email forwarded an article on Rosatom’s efforts to buy Uranium One through its ARMZ subsidiary. Fisk also related information from a conversation with the Canadian executives of the mining firm about their discomfort with the impending sale.

“I spoke with a senior Uranium One Executive,” Fisk wrote Campbell, detailing his personal history with some of the company’s figures. “He said that corporate Management was not even told before the announcement [of the sale] was made.

“There are a lot of concerns,” Fisk added, predicting the Canadians would exit the company with buyouts once the Russians took control. Fisk added the premium price the Russians were paying to buy a mining firm that in 2010 controlled about 20 percent of America’s uranium production seemed “strange.”

At the time, Campell was working alongside Fisk as an American consultant to Rosatom’s commercial sales arm, Tenex.

But unbeknownst to his colleagues, Campbell also was serving as an FBI informant gathering evidence that Fisk, Tenex executive Vadim Mikerin and several others were engaged in a racketeering scheme involving millions of dollars in bribes and kickbacks, plus extortion and money laundering.

New York Mayor Bill de Blasio on Monday became the latest liberal luminary to scurry away from Bill Clinton some 20 years too late.

“If it happened today there would have been a very different reaction,” said the mayor in reference to the White House sex scandal involving Mr. Clinton and Monica Lewinsky. “I don’t think you can rework history. I think if it happened today—if any president did that today—they would have to resign.”

The mayor’s comments follow those made last week by Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand of New York, who told the New York Times that she, too, now believes that Mr. Clinton should have resigned after his affair with Ms. Lewinsky was revealed. The senator used the “things have changed” explanation as well, then added that “in light of this conversation, we should have a very different conversation about President Trump, and a very different conversation about allegations against him.”

Put differently, Ms. Gillibrand wants Donald Trump held to a different standard than the one she and her fellow Democrats were willing to hold Bill Clinton to way, way back in the 1990s. Have the liberal politicians and journalists now changing their tune about Mr. Clinton grown a conscience, or do they merely want another pretext for attacking the current White House occupant? The political left had a teachable moment two decades ago and didn’t learn anything from it.

To be fair, some Democratic partisans know rank political opportunism when they see it and aren’t afraid to say so. “Senate voted to keep POTUS WJC,” tweeted Philippe Reines, a senior adviser to Mrs. Clinton when she was secretary of state. “But not enough for you @SenGillibrand? Over 20 yrs you took the Clintons’ endorsements, money, and seat. Hypocrite.” Much the same could be said about Mr. de Blasio, who served in the Clinton administration and managed Mrs. Clinton’s successful Senate run in 2000.