RUTHFULLY YOURS

President Donald Trump has himself to blame for the appointment of Robert Mueller. But that doesn’t mean Mr. Trump or the republic deserves the damage Mr. Mueller seems willing to do to the body politic. Just like former FBI Director James Comey and too many other Washington officials, the special counsel’s office appears to be leaking everything except evidence of collusion.

If Mr. Mueller somehow manages to demonstrate that the 2016 Trump campaign really did cooperate with Russia to rig the election then of course it will all be worth it. But news of his expanding investigation suggests that Mr. Mueller doesn’t think he can—and has instead focused on simply searching for anything detrimental to Mr. Trump.

It’s possible Mr. Mueller is running a tight ship and that various accounts of his expanding investigation are either false or based on sources who are actually not that familiar with his investigation. But let’s assume for the moment that, for example, Bloomberg’s story, “Mueller Expands Probe to Trump Business Transactions,” is accurate. The news service reports:

The 2013 Miss Universe pageant is of interest because a prominent Moscow developer, Aras Agalarov, paid $20 million to bring the beauty spectacle there. About a third of that sum went to Trump in the form of a licensing fee, according to Forbes magazine. At the event, Trump met Herman Gref, chief executive of Russia’s biggest bank, Sberbank PJSC. Agalarov’s son, Emin, helped broker a meeting last year between Donald Trump Jr. and a Russian lawyer who was said to have damaging information about Hillary Clinton and her campaign.

Another significant financial transaction involved a Palm Beach, Florida, estate Trump purchased in 2004 for $41 million, after its previous owner lost it in bankruptcy. In March of 2008, after the real-estate bubble had begun losing air, Russian fertilizer magnate Dmitry Rybolovlev bought the property for $95 million.

As part of their investigation, Mueller’s team has issued subpoenas to banks and filed requests for bank records to foreign lenders under mutual legal-assistance treaties, according to two of the people familiar with the matter.

Why would a counterintelligence investigation focused on potential foreign influence on last year’s election be examining the details of a 2008 real estate transaction? One reasonable conclusion is that Mr. Mueller’s team has quickly decided that they don’t have a lot of hot leads from 2016. Also, if Mr. Mueller and his associates actually did discover proof that Team Trump colluded with the Russians to rig the 2016 election, would any further evidence be required?

Focusing on some of the particulars, it seems that if one wanted a well-known beauty pageant to be staged in the exotic locale of Moscow and to feature one’s Russian pop-star son as it was broadcast on a large American television network, one probably would expect to write a fairly large check.

As for the real-estate transaction, there may be important facts that haven’t been made public, but selling to a Russian oligarch didn’t make Mr. Trump unique in his industry. In fact, it might have been more odd if Donald Trump had been an American developer of luxury real estate who did not do business with Russians.

A Journal story in 2008 noted that the Trump sale to Mr. Rybolovlev was part of a larger trend:

As many of America’s wealthy are roiled by the credit crisis and general financial gloom, a growing number of rich Russians are house-shopping — and buying — in costly U.S. enclaves…

Several years ago, the weakening dollar began to draw more overseas buyers but Russians were scarce. Now, Russia’s economy is booming amid soaring energy prices. Moscow real estate is among the world’s costliest, making property elsewhere a relative bargain.

In New York City, foreign buyers now make up about 15% of the market, with Russians the largest contingent, says Hall Willkie, president of real-estate firm Brown Harris Stevens. “A few years ago we didn’t see any Russians,” Mr. Willkie says. “But now, especially at the high end of the market they are buying big apartments…so they are a significant factor.”

What should happen now? In June, National Review’s incomparable Andrew McCarthy offered some good advice for the Deputy Attorney General:

Rosenstein should issue a directive superseding his original appointment of Mueller in order to more tightly and appropriately define Mueller’s jurisdiction. The new directive should describe, in writing, the potential crimes that have been uncovered in the Russia investigation.

Daniel Webster spent a total of 27 years in the Senate and the House and served as Secretary of State for three Presidents. So, he knew whereof he spoke when he once warned: “Now is the time when men work quietly in the fields and women weep softly in the kitchen; the legislature is in session.” Today, his words sound dated and, perhaps, sexist, but his meaning resonates. Congress can be dangerous to our health. Webster understood power – its benefits, its temptations, its iniquity. To the good, it is a means to improve society; to the impressionable, it is an aphrodisiac; to opportunists, a venue for harm.

It is true that our representatives no longer represent us as they once did. Demographics prove the point. In 1800, there were 32 Senators and 106 House members, representing a population of 5.3 million people, or one for every 38,400 people. By 1900, the population of the U.S. was just over 76 million. We were represented by 90 Senators and 357 members of Congress, or one representative per 170,000 residents. Today, with a population of 321 million, 100 Senators and 435 House members, each member represents, on average, over 600,000 residents. Our representatives are less representative. However, the adaption of social media and changes in communication and travel should mean they are not isolated, that they should be able to better understand and be more responsive to the needs of the people. Somehow, that doesn’t seem true. They live, it appears, as secluded as the gods once did on Mt. Olympus.

The arguments used to support term limits tend to congregate around the idea that our representatives are out of touch; that party affiliation is more important than the wants and needs of constituents; that cronyism has become endemic and costs of campaigns, along with the time required to raise funds, take their toll. Term limits would encourage more active participation, and representatives would be freer to use judgement rather than heeding the demands of lobbyists. Term limits would promote fresh ideas and empower more quickly new arrivals to the Senate or the House. There are times when Congress absolves itself of laws it imposes on constituents. Ruth Bader Ginsburg made that point: “One might plausibly contend that Congress violates the spirit, if not the letter, of the constitutional doctrine of separation of powers when it exonerates itself from the imposition of laws it obligates people outside the legislature to obey.”

After an election, approval for Congress typically rises. People assume that the new Congress will enact laws championed by the victors during the campaign. But, inevitably they disappoint. The 2016 election was no exception. Congressional approval rose to 39% in January, but has subsequently slipped to 20%, according to Gallup, about where it was before the election. Bickering and rancor returned. Egos prevent accommodation. Whichever party is in control follows the advice of former Louisiana Governor Huey Long: “I used to get things done by saying please. Now I dynamite them out of my path.”

The Humanitarian Hoax is a deliberate and deceitful tactic of presenting a destructive policy as altruistic. The humanitarian huckster presents himself as a compassionate advocate when in fact he is the disguised enemy.

Obama, the humanitarian huckster-in-chief, weakened the United States military for eight years presenting his crippling policies as altruistic when in fact they were designed for destruction. His legacy, the Leftist Democratic Party with its “resistance” movement, is the party of the Humanitarian Hoax attempting to destroy American democracy and replace it with socialism.

Barack Obama perpetrated the Humanitarian Hoax on the military

In a stunning reversal of military protocols and procedures Barack Obama perpetrated the Humanitarian Hoax on the military. Scheduled to take effect July 1, 2017 Obama’s “Tier Three Transgender Training” materials were presented as compassionate and deeply respectful of the minuscule population of transgender soldiers. In fact these protocols and procedures were designed to weaken the military by making the feelings of a few soldiers more important than combat-readiness, and by placing the needs of individuals over the well-being of their units. Obama’s policies were not misguided they were deliberate.

Defense Secretary James Mattis has ordered the military branches to study the impact of President Barack Obama’s decision last year to allow open transgender troops to remain on duty rather than being automatically discharged.

Left to Mr. Mattis is a decision on whether to induct transgender people into the military. Facing a July 1 deadline, Mr. Mattis delayed a decision until at least January.

The mission of the military is unequivocally national defense – the protection of America and her people. The military is one of the only appropriate collectives in a democracy. It is a unique culture with unique rules where collective units, not individuals, are prioritized and where the mission supersedes the men/women who serve. Police departments are another form of appropriate collective in a democracy whose similar mission is national defense at a local and state level. Obama and his leftist Democratic Party are deliberately trying to weaken and undermine American police departments as well.

Obama’s long-term plan for socialism and its cradle-to-grave government control

Obama’s long-term plan for socialism and its cradle-to-grave government control is a political power grab that steals individual right and replaces them with national government rights. Like any predator the Democratic Party focuses its prey on the short game and disguises its long term objective. Sexual predators do not lure children with vegetables – they offer candy. Political predators do not lure their voters with hard work – they offer them free college, free healthcare, free food, free housing, free everything – and then the windows close, the doors lock, and the prey is captured and exploited.

Socialism is political candy for Americans who have been indoctrinated to believe that it will provide social justice and income equality. There are no individual rights in socialism – all rights belong to the national government. There are no property rights in socialism – all property belongs to the national government. The only social justice or income equality provided by socialism is that everyone is equally poor and equally exploited.

A forty-year-old Australian woman named Justine Damond called 911 in Minneapolis Saturday night to report what she thought might be a rape; when police arrived, she approached the police car, and a Minneapolis police officer named Mohamed Noor shot her dead. Since then, Noor has refused to be interviewed by investigators, but has spoken to friends about what happened and why. The more Noor and those who know him have spoken, the more it becomes clear: Justine Damond was a casualty of “Islamophobia.”

Mohamed Noor is a Somali Muslim. He was the first Somali Muslim on the Minneapolis police force. In 2016, Minneapolis Mayor Betsy Hodges expressed her excitement about that fact: “I want to take a moment to recognize Officer Mohamed Noor, the newest Somali officer in the Minneapolis Police Department. Officer Noor has been assigned to the 5th Precinct, where his arrival has been highly celebrated, particularly by the Somali community in and around Karmel Mall.”

Hodges wasn’t excited because Mohamed Noor had the skills necessary to become a fine police officer. She was only excited because he represented a religious and ethnic that she was anxious to court. And it is increasingly clear, as we learn about Mohamed Noor’s nervousness and jumpiness and lack of respect for women, and from his own account of events that he relayed to friends (that he was “startled” and reacted by opening fire), that Mohamed Noor was not cut out to be a policeman. He did not have the temperament for it, and if he hadn’t killed Justine Damond, he would likely have done something similar at some point.

So why was he on the force at all? Because he was the first Somali Muslim on the Minneapolis police force. He was a symbol of our glorious multicultural mosaic. He was a rebuke to “Islamophobes” and proof that what they say is false. Minneapolis authorities placed a great deal of faith in Mohamed Noor. He was for them the triumph of diversity, the victory of their worldview. But he has let them down.

Mohamed Noor is not a jihad terrorist. This was not a jihad attack. He is just a trigger-happy, panicky, reckless individual who held his job not because he was fit for it, but because of what he symbolized. And in the wake of his failure, Minneapolis multiculturalists aren’t about to reconsider their religion. On the contrary, they are doubling down. Minneapolis Mayor Betsy Hodges has immediately recognized — as authorities do everywhere after jihad attacks — that the real victims are not those who were killed or wounded, but the Muslim community. She should have issued a statement saying that she recognized that Mohamed Noor was not hired because he was competent, but because he was a Somali Muslim, and that she sees now that Leftist social engineering on the police force costs lives. She should have promised that from now on, police officers will be hired based on their fitness for the job, not their religion or ethnicity.

Special Counsel Robert S. Mueller III is yet again expanding the scope of his off-the-rails investigation into the Left’s wacky Russian electoral collusion conspiracy theory by examining financial transactions even vaguely related to Russia involving President Trump’s businesses and those of his associates, Bloomberg News reports.

Honest observers recognize that with the election of Donald Trump, the longtime Russophiles of the morally flexible Left flipped on their traditional friends in Moscow faster than you can say Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact or Operation Barbarossa. Ignoring its own history of rampant seditious collaboration with Russia, the Left has now managed to convince many that any past or present connection a Republican has or had to Russia, however trivial, is somehow now retroactively evidence of treason against the United States.

There is still no evidence that Trump covered up a crime, or even that there was an underlying crime to be concealed but that hasn’t stopped the Left’s witch-hunt from growing and the goalposts from being shifted.

Remember that it was just a month ago as the bizarre collusion allegations got stuck in the mud that Mueller expanded his investigation to include allegations that Trump tried to obstruct justice by firing FBI Director James B. Comey on May 9. The claim is that Trump did this to end Comey’s investigation into National Security Advisor Mike Flynn’s ties to Russia. Of course, as Harvard Law professor emeritus Alan Dershowitz has pointed out repeatedly, the president has authority under the Constitution to fire the FBI director for any reason or no reason at all. Comey himself has freely acknowledged he served at the pleasure of the president.

That said, “FBI investigators and others are looking at Russian purchases of apartments in Trump buildings, Trump’s involvement in a controversial SoHo development in New York with Russian associates, the 2013 Miss Universe pageant in Moscow and Trump’s sale of a Florida mansion to a Russian oligarch in 2008,” Bloomberg reported an anonymous source saying.

The report continues, elaborating that:

Mueller’s team is looking at the Trump SoHo hotel condominium development, which was a licensing deal with Bayrock Capital LLC. In 2010, the former finance director of Bayrock filed a lawsuit claiming the firm structured transactions in fraudulent ways to evade taxes. Bayrock was a key source of capital for Trump projects, including Trump SoHo.

The 2013 Miss Universe pageant is of interest because a prominent Moscow developer, Aras Agalarov, paid $20 million to bring the beauty spectacle there. About a third of that sum went to Trump in the form of a licensing fee, according to Forbes magazine. At the event, Trump met Herman Gref, chief executive of Russia’s biggest bank, Sberbank PJSC. Agalarov’s son, Emin, helped broker a meeting last year between Donald Trump Jr. and a Russian lawyer [i.e. Natalia Veselnitskaya] who was said to have damaging information about Hillary Clinton and her campaign.

Another significant financial transaction involved a Palm Beach, Florida, estate Trump purchased in 2004 for $41 million, after its previous owner lost it in bankruptcy. In March of 2008, after the real-estate bubble had begun losing air, Russian fertilizer magnate Dmitry Rybolovlev bought the property for $95 million.

As part of their investigation, Mueller’s team has issued subpoenas to banks and filed requests for bank records to foreign lenders under mutual legal-assistance treaties, according to two of the people familiar with the matter.

In addition, a federal money-laundering probe of Trump’s former campaign chairman Paul Manafort has reportedly been subsumed into the larger investigation headed by Mueller. Mueller’s office is also reportedly looking at Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross’s tenure as vice chairman of the Bank of Cyprus and at presidential advisor and son-in-law Jared Kushner’s efforts to obtain financing for his family’s real estate investments.

Newt Gingrich said yesterday that Mueller “has so many conflicts of interest it’s almost an absurdity,” but all of this seems above-board to Bloomberg.

“The Justice Department’s May 17 order to Mueller,” the media outlet reports, “instructs him to investigate ‘any links and/or coordination between the Russian government and individuals associated with the campaign’ as well as ‘any matters that arose or may arise directly from the investigation,’ suggesting a relatively broad mandate.”

Trump lawyer John Dowd disagrees. He said examining the president’s business dealings should be out-of-bounds for Mueller.

Speech policing in the United States, often called “political correctness,” has inspired much resentment and concern along with advocacy. Right now only its advocates have an action plan—which is to institutionalize PC on university campuses through the appointment of administrators responsible for developing and enforcing policies to control expression. Those who object to political correctness are less organized and largely lack a coherent idea of it as a unified phenomenon. But they apparently stumbled into one successful response to it in the presidential victory of Donald Trump. Although Trump has no policy proposals that touch upon political correctness per se, his willingness to occasionally violate its sensibilities, and to openly denounce some of its advocates in the media, certainly won him many votes among proud Deplorables. https://amgreatness.com/2017/07/20/indoctrinationism-ideology-speech-policing/

What’s In a Name?
Some commentators have even suggested that PC was the single most important factor separating Trump from his Republican rivals, and that it needs to be seen as a central issue in contemporary American politics. David Gelernter made such an argument in early 2016 and suggested that the real gravity of “political correctness” and its significance to voters have been obscured and minimized by the term itself. I think he’s right. “PC,” like “man-caused disaster,” is a gift to the enemy it is supposed to name.

Since most people don’t know or care about the historical origin of the term “political correctness,” the best way to grasp what it conveys in today’s discourse is to examine its constituent semantic elements. “Correctness” refers to a judgment that some form of expression is subject to approval or not; “political” refers to the standard according to which this judgment is rendered. “Political correctness” therefore implies that politics and speech are separate realms, and that speech is subordinate to politics. Restrictions on speech seem less serious than jobs, health care, racism, and other intrinsically political matters.

Additionally, since politics in the United States involves a plurality of parties, and freedom of expression is protected by the First Amendment, a “political” judgment about speech will strike many intuitively as merely an annoyance, subject to automatic contestation by rival parties, and without means of enforcement. This does not sound like a threat to the norms of our republican government, or even a consequential infringement on anybody’s rights as a citizen.

An “Ism” Breeding in Our Baseboards
Nevertheless, many people now realize that minimizing the problem called “political correctness” is wrong. We need to remove the distraction of a term that makes a serious problem seem trivial or even humorous. Speech policing would be better, but it lacks a critical feature.

For the speech policing we now confront is actually the centerpiece of a nascent ideology. While in the past leftist regimes used speech policing as an instrument to support agendas like solidarity with oppressed classes, the putatively oppressed classes are now instruments that the left uses as pretexts to expand speech policing. This ideology of speech policing I propose to call Indoctrinationism.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell at this point has busted pretty much every move in his effort to rally 50 votes for an Obama Care replacement. He’s listened. He’s negotiated. He’s encouraged. He’s cajoled. Lather. Rinse. Repeat.

Months later, still lacking a majority, the time has come for the Kentucky Republican to execute the final, clarifying move. It’s time for Mr. McConnell to make this all about his self-interested members.

Up to now, this exercise has been about trying to improve health care and the federal fisc. The House bill isn’t perfect—no bill ever is—but it amounts to the biggest entitlement reform in history. It repeals crushing taxes. It dramatically cuts spending. And it begins the process of stabilizing the individual health-care market and expanding consumer freedom.

None of this is good enough for a handful of senators, so now it’s time to make this exercise all about them. Mr. McConnell should make clear that the overwhelming majority of the Republican Party stands ready to make good on its repeal-and-replace campaign promise—and that it would have done so already were it not for a cynical or egotistic few. It’s time for some very public accountability.

That rests in Mr. McConnell giving his caucus a drop-dead date to broker a compromise, after which he will proceed to bring up the House bill. And any Republican who votes against moving forward, “a motion to proceed,” will forever be known as the Republican who saved ObamaCare. The Republican who voted to throw billions more taxpayer dollars at failing entitlement programs and collapsing insurance markets. The Republican who abandoned struggling American families. The Republican who voted against a tax cut and spending reductions. The Republican who made Chuck Schumer’s year.

And that’s only a short list of the real-world accountability. That vote might also provide home-state voters a new, eye-opening means to account for the character of their senators. Few things drive conservative voters battier than phony politicians, those who say one thing and do another to avoid hard choices.

Nearly every Senate Republican is on record having voted to repeal ObamaCare—back when they knew that President Obama’s veto made the vote consequence-free. And to be crystal clear, any senator who now votes against simply proceeding to debate is doing so for just one reason: To again avoid consequences, to again avoid accountability. CONTINUE AT SITE

Those who would never stoop to paint their own houses gladly expend far more energy sweating at the gym. During the decline in physical-labor jobs over the last 50 years, an entire compensating industry has grown up around physical fitness. As modern work becomes less physical, requiring hours at a desk or some sort of immobile standing, the fitness center has replaced the drudgery of the field, the mine, and the forest as a means to exercise the body each day. A forbidding array of exercise bikes and StairMasters not only works the body; it also reinforces the modern, scientifically backed conviction that physical fitness promotes general wellness, mental acuity, and perhaps longevity. A new slang has entered the Western vocabulary, from “abs,” “glutes,” and “cardio” to “ripped” and “toned” to describe the ideal results of daily exercise: a look of chiseled fitness. The ideal is much different from the appearance of the pipe fitter and welder of the past, whose protruding bellies and girth were not necessarily incongruous with physical strength and stamina incurred from daily physical labor.

Yet the modern idea of “working out” by no means denotes that someone is laboring at a physical task, except for wisely keeping fit. Our idea of exercising, then, is not quite the Odyssean notion of being equally adept in craftiness and brawn—the ability to build a raft or lead men into battle—or versatile in outfoxing sexy sirens and ramming poles through the heads of dull-witted huge monsters. We are more like Alcibiades, whose high life and gifts for political craft and oratory were balanced by his studied Olympic training and sponsorship of chariotry.

One reason for our disdain for labor today is that the more physical work recedes in the twenty-first century, the more life superficially appears to get better, even for the vestigial muscular classes. Cheap cell phones, video games, the Internet, social media, and labor-saving appliances all make life easier and suggest that even more and better benefits are on the horizon. Formerly backbreaking industries, from the growing of almonds to the building of cars, are increasingly mechanized, using fewer but more skilled operators; in the future, this work might be all but robotized, without much human agency at all.

Anyone who has spot-welded or harvested almonds with a mallet and canvas has no regrets in seeing the disappearance of such rote drudgery, from the view of both the laborer and the consumer, who benefits from the cheaper prices brought on by labor-saving devices. But as we continue on this trajectory, initiated in the Industrial Revolution, from less demanding physical work to rare physical work, is something lost? Something only poorly approximated by greater leisure time, non-muscular jobs, and contrived physical exercise?

Until the early nineteenth century, hard work—agricultural work, for most of the population—was bifurcated: working as a slave, serf, or hired hand for someone else was the unfortunate lot of the accursed. In popular lore, hired or coerced labor led nowhere but to premature old age, illness, accident, poverty, and an early death. So the once-popular Edwin Markham, in his iconic “The Man with the Hoe,” laments the exploited toiler: “Through this dread shape the suffering ages look; Time’s tragedy is in the aching stoop; Through this dread shape humanity betrayed.” Physical work was not just hard and dirty; it was also done for someone else. In contrast with physical work for wages (what the aristocratic Greeks deprecated as banausia), voices of the agrarian tradition—from the seventh-century BC Greek poet Hesiod to the romantic paeans of the farmer voiced by aristocratic landowners such as Thomas Jefferson and later by the Southern agrarians—praised the yeoman and the homesteader. Ostensibly, the owner-operator calibrated his own drudgery by his own self-interest and profits; and in theory, at least, he controlled the conditions of his own physical exploitation.

Politicians still give lip service to the “entrepreneur” who gets up at 5 AM to open his bakery and goes home long after his employees have quit at 6 PM (akin to what Hesiod praised as “work with work upon work”). But Donald Trump was the first politician in recent memory to refer to working people with the first-person plural possessive pronoun of endearment—“our miners” and “our farmers,” as if physical work was still critical and honored. Otherwise, most of popular culture promotes the idea of a bachelor’s degree as the first stepping-stone of the cognitive elite on the path toward professional and graduate schools, certification and degree branding, interning, and ending up largely physically inactive but inordinately well compensated and intellectually and psychologically fulfilled. So inured are we to the ideal of a cursus honorum that we don’t even need to mention that it is an obvious means to escape a supposedly limited life of laying tile or overhauling transmissions.

Yet talk long enough to the most accomplished academics, lawyers, and CEOs—who also tend to be the most conscientious about biking, jogging, and weightlifting (obesity is mostly an epidemic of the poor and lower middle classes)—and more often than not, they will brag about a long-ago college summer job waiting tables or an internship repairing hiking trails. They might praise the granite-counter installer who redid their kitchen, or offer an anecdote about the time they helped the tree-trimmer haul limbs from the backyard out to the trailer at the curb. There seems a human instinct to want to do physical work. We moderns want to be able to say that we have some residual firsthand familiarity with drudgery—or at least share our admiration for muscular labor when one sees the positive results of physical craftsmanship, or even the smallest physical alteration of the natural environment.

Anyone who has spot-welded has no regrets in seeing the disappearance of such rote drudgery.

The proliferation of hard-work reality-television programming reflects this apparent need, if only vicariously. Indeed, the more we have become immobile, urbanized, and distanced from hard work, the more we tune in to watch reality television’s assorted truckers, loggers, farmers, fishermen, drillers, and rail engineers. Usually, these supposed “losers” are filmed in rough physical landscapes of Alaska, Wyoming, Colorado, or out at sea, where they sweat, grunt, smoke, and swear as they toil to bring us our seafood, wood floors, arugula, and high-performance gasoline. The subtext of these shows is that the human dinosaurs who do such work are as tough and wild as the environment in which they labor.

In a society that supposedly despises menial jobs, the television ratings for such programs suggest that lots of Americans enjoy watching people of action who work with their hands, even if (or perhaps because) they are sometimes overweight, unkempt, and coarse. Mike Rowe became a media celebrity for his Discovery Channel reality series Dirty Jobs, in which he not only tried but also enjoyed said jobs—to the delight of viewers.

The Public Broadcasting Service’s signature series This Old House and its later spin-off shows on cable television made physical work seem especially hip. Yuppies and upwardly mobile young urban couples during off-hours put on old clothes, strapped on leather tool belts, and took up sledgehammers to knock down walls and break up concrete to remodel older homes into their own dream-gentrified Victorians. Apparently, they had a blast getting dirty and using their muscles while slowly turning decaying structures into renovated palaces. Again, the subtext of This Old House was that doing a lot of physical labor in remodeling something decrepit into something beautiful was rewarding—and preferable to contracting the hard labor out to experts.

What is it about physical work, in its supposed eleventh hour within a rapidly changing Western culture, that still intrigues us?

Physical work remains the foundation for twenty-first-century sophistication and complexity. Investors may know the oil trade better than oil drillers, but buying and selling based on intimate knowledge of Indonesian politics or the nature of the American automobile market are still predicated on someone’s knowing how to feed down steel casing to follow the drill bit. If there is no one to pump oil, there is nothing to sell. Selling plums to Japan is not the same as pruning a plum tree. Both aspects of the oil and plum industries are critical to their success, but the commercial tasks are cerebral and secondary, the physical ones elemental and primary.

This story was co-published with NPR’s Shots blog.

The box of prescription drugs had been forgotten in a back closet of a retail pharmacy for so long that some of the pills predated the 1969 moon landing. Most were 30 to 40 years past their expiration dates — possibly toxic, probably worthless.

But to Lee Cantrell, who helps run the California Poison Control System, the cache was an opportunity to answer an enduring question about the actual shelf life of drugs: Could these drugs from the bell-bottom era still be potent?

Cantrell called Roy Gerona, a University of California, San Francisco, researcher who specializes in analyzing chemicals. Gerona had grown up in the Philippines and had seen people recover from sickness by taking expired drugs with no apparent ill effects.

“This was very cool,” Gerona says. “Who gets the chance of analyzing drugs that have been in storage for more than 30 years?”

The age of the drugs might have been bizarre, but the question the researchers wanted to answer wasn’t. Pharmacies across the country — in major medical centers and in neighborhood strip malls — routinely toss out tons of scarce and potentially valuable prescription drugs when they hit their expiration dates.

Gerona and Cantrell, a pharmacist and toxicologist, knew that the term “expiration date” was a misnomer. The dates on drug labels are simply the point up to which the Food and Drug Administration and pharmaceutical companies guarantee their effectiveness, typically at two or three years. But the dates don’t necessarily mean they’re ineffective immediately after they “expire” — just that there’s no incentive for drugmakers to study whether they could still be usable.

ProPublica has been researching why the U.S. health care system is the most expensive in the world. One answer, broadly, is waste — some of it buried in practices that the medical establishment and the rest of us take for granted. We’ve documented how hospitals often discard pricey new supplies, how nursing homes trash valuable medications after patients pass away or move out, and how drug companies create expensive combinations of cheap drugs. Experts estimate such squandering eats up about $765 billion a year — as much as a quarter of all the country’s health care spending.

Experts say the United States might be squandering a quarter of the money spent on health care. That’s an estimated $765 billion a year. Do you believe you’ve encountered this waste? Tell us.

What if the system is destroying drugs that are technically “expired” but could still be safely used?

In his lab, Gerona ran tests on the decades-old drugs, including some now defunct brands such as the diet pills Obocell (once pitched to doctors with a portly figurine called “Mr. Obocell”) and Bamadex. Overall, the bottles contained 14 different compounds, including antihistamines, pain relievers and stimulants. All the drugs tested were in their original sealed containers.

The findings surprised both researchers: A dozen of the 14 compounds were still as potent as they were when they were manufactured, some at almost 100 percent of their labeled concentrations.

“Lo and behold,” Cantrell says, “The active ingredients are pretty darn stable.”

Cantrell and Gerona knew their findings had big implications. Perhaps no area of health care has provoked as much anger in recent years as prescription drugs. The news media is rife with stories of medications priced out of reach or of shortages of crucial drugs, sometimes because producing them is no longer profitable.

Tossing such drugs when they expire is doubly hard. One pharmacist at Newton-Wellesley Hospital outside Boston says the 240-bed facility is able to return some expired drugs for credit, but had to destroy about $200,000 worth last year. A commentary in the journal Mayo Clinic Proceedings cited similar losses at the nearby Tufts Medical Center. Play that out at hospitals across the country and the tab is significant: about $800 million per year. And that doesn’t include the costs of expired drugs at long-term care pharmacies, retail pharmacies and in consumer medicine cabinets.

After Cantrell and Gerona published their findings in Archives of Internal Medicine in 2012, some readers accused them of being irresponsible and advising patients that it was OK to take expired drugs. Cantrell says they weren’t recommending the use of expired medication, just reviewing the arbitrary way the dates are set.

“Refining our prescription drug dating process could save billions,” he says.

JIM TALENT Senator, MO Republican (2002–2007)
A number of writers in these pages have been critical of the meeting between Donald Trump Jr., Rob Goldstone, and a Russian lawyer. They include a lot of people I respect highly. Here are a few: Charles Krauthammer, David French, and the editors of National Review.

The visceral reaction of these writers was that there was something terribly abnormal or unethical about Trump Jr. being eager to meet with Goldstone and his Russian contact.

I didn’t react the same way. My first impulse was to think that, if I had been Trump, I too would have wanted to get useful information from the Russian, or at least to see what information she had. I wouldn’t have “loved” the idea, as Trump Jr said he did, but I would have wanted to listen to what the contact had to say.

After reading the NR articles, I thought perhaps I was missing something. So I called one of my former campaign staffers and asked him what he would have done in Trump Jr.’s place.

He said that “it would have been campaign malpractice not to explore the opportunity.” He added: “The first thing I would have done was to call the lawyers to see how I could proceed.”

That pretty much sums up my opinion. If I were running in a close race against an opponent who had been credibly accused of using her foundation to do favors for foreign entities, and a contact from one of those entities had approached my campaign with an offer of information, I would have wanted my campaign to follow up, albeit with caution. (More on the cautious part later.)

I would have been suspicious, of course, of the motives of the representative and the foreign entity. Maybe somebody was playing my campaign — setting us up. On the other hand, I would have also thought that it was precisely people connected with the foreign entity who might have the kind of information that would expose illegality by my opponent.

In other words, my reaction was that the meeting proves nothing other than that the Trump campaign was exploring a lead it thought credible, as it would have explored any other credible lead, whatever the source, and as most campaigns would have done in similar circumstances.

I ran for office eleven times, and in four highly competitive races: one for Congress, one for governor, and two for the Senate. Naturally, I wanted very much to win, in part because nobody likes to lose, but also because I really felt that I could accomplish worthwhile things in office.

To be sure, in any given election, many voters think that all of the candidates are pretty worthless, but understandably enough, the candidates themselves rarely see it that way. President Trump wasn’t the first politician, and won’t be the last, who believed that he could make America great again if only he could get elected.

In addition, when you become the nominee of your party, you have a responsibility to do everything you can to succeed. The agenda of your movement is at stake, your party is counting on you, and your supporters are working hard to elect you. Of course, every campaign should operate within ethical as well as legal constraints, but a candidate doesn’t have the luxury of eschewing an opportunity for political advantage because it carries some risk or is in some way distasteful.

I think most politicians of both parties would feel that way. And most candidates wouldn’t care too much about whether a foreign entity was rooting for them to win. How, really would you know what a foreign government is thinking? And what difference would it make to your campaign if you did know?

It’s a pretty good bet that Vladimir Putin preferred Barack Obama to Mitt Romney in 2012, given this episode, and this one.

So what should Obama have done? Blow the race to frustrate the Russians?

One of the things the press likes to do is to raise the visibility of something that has been part of the political culture for a long time, when by focusing on it they think they can embarrass a politician they don’t like. The press manifestly dislikes President Trump, and it has now discovered how terrible it is that foreign governments get involved in our elections — as if that never happened before, and as if the media hadn’t pretty much ignored it when it did.

I am not accusing Charles, David, or NR’s editors of engaging in such a double standard. But a double standard definitely is at play in much of the coverage of the Goldstone-Trump Jr. meeting.

Now for the caution part. Politics is a highly regulated affair, and so is dealing with foreign entities and people who purport to represent them.

The Trump campaign should have had experienced lawyers and senior national-security advisers, and those people should have been consulted when the request for a meeting was made. They could have helped lower the risks attendant to such a meeting. In fact, I would have had a lawyer and an intelligence professional attend the meeting, to assess the motives of the parties, the value of any information, the possibility of foreign intrigue, and whether the information should be shared with the authorities.