RUTHFULLY YOURS

While the New York Public Theatre revels in its nightly assassination of Donald Trump, another Shakespearean drama is reaching its denouement

The New York Public Theatre’s Shakespeare in the Park production of Julius Caesar has once again thrust the works of William Shakespeare into the headlines. The current iteration features a Donald Trump look-a-like in the title role of a modern-day Julius Caesar who is brutally assassinated in the opening scene of Act III. The overt political message is not subtle. Other than being a head of state there is little or no similarity between Shakespeare’s depiction of the last days of Julius Caesar and the life and career of Donald Trump. However, there is another player on the national scene whose career does appear to perhaps mirror a number of Shakespearean characters who rose and ultimately fell as a result of their overriding ambition. That person is James Comey.

Shakespeare was influenced by the writings of Niccolo Machiavelli, whose seminal work, The Prince (1532), laid out his ideas on how the prince of a country could achieve power and, more importantly, retain it, utilizing devious and at times evil means if necessary. These underlying principles would apply not just to princes but to political schemers out to solidify their own positions within a ruling hierarchy.

While not directly comparing James Comey with any of English literature’s most notorious villains, there appears to be some very striking similarities insofar as a single-minded pursuit of power and influence.

Early in his career James Comey was never shy in prosecuting high profile cases in order to burnish his reputation. His determination to achieve a conviction, however specious, and at any cost would have made Javert of Les Miserables proud. Mollie Hemingway at the The Federalist has an excellent analysis of some of these cases.

Among them is that of Frank Quattrone a well-known and successful investment banker. In 2003, Comey, as the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, was unable to find sufficient evidence to press criminal bank fraud charges; instead he pursued supposed obstruction of justice based on one specious email. During the investigation and indictment process Comey made false statements about Quattrone and the intent of the email. While winning a conviction at trial, the verdict was soon overturned on appeal.

In 2003, in another case that made national headlines and thrust Comey further into the spotlight, he pursued insider trading charges against Martha Stewart. That charge could not be proven. Undaunted Comey then claimed that Stewart’s public protestations of innocence were designed solely to prop up the stock price of her own company. Further he claimed that she obstructed justice by making false statements to a federal official. As Alan Reynolds of the Cato institute stated, “Stewart was prosecuted for having misled people by denying having committed a crime with which she was not charged.” Even the New York Times described the entire process as “petty and vindictive.” Perhaps so, but it served Comey well.

On January 2004, Comey was promoted to United States Deputy Attorney General, the second highest position in the U. S. Justice Department. Once in Washington D.C. Comey wasted no time in solidifying his power.

Insurers must submit applications by next Wednesday to sell plans through HealthCare.gov, and these will give us some of the first indicators of how high Obama Care costs will skyrocket in 2018. ObamaCare supporters can’t wait to blame the coming premium increases on the “uncertainty” caused by President Trump. But insurers faced the same uncertainty last year under President Obama.

Consider a recent press release from California Insurance Commissioner Dave Jones. He announced that “in light of the market instability created by President Trump’s continued undermining of the Affordable Care Act,” he would authorize insurers to file two sets of proposed rates for 2018—“Trump rates” and “ACA rates.” Among other sources of uncertainty, Mr. Jones’s office cited the possibility that the Trump administration will end cost-sharing reduction payments.

Those subsidies reimburse insurers for discounted deductibles and copayments given to certain low-income individuals. Congress has never enacted an appropriation for the payments, but the Obama administration began disbursing the funds in 2014 anyway.

Thus the uncertainty: The House filed a lawsuit in November 2014, alleging that the unauthorized payments were unconstitutional. Judge Rosemary Collyer ruled in the House’s favor and ordered a stop to the payments. As the Obama administration appealed the ruling, the cost-sharing reduction payments continued.

The House lawsuit and the potential for a new administration that could cut off the payments unilaterally should have been red flags for regulators when insurers were preparing their rate filings for 2017. I noted this in a blog post for the Journal last May.

To maintain a stable marketplace regardless of the uncertainty, regulators should have demanded that insurers price in a contingency margin for their 2017 rates. It appears that Mr. Jones’s office did not even consider doing so. I recently submitted a Freedom of Information Act request to his office requesting documents related to the 2017 rate-filing process, and “whether uncertainty surrounding the cost-sharing reduction payments was considered by the Commissioner’s office in determining rates for the current plan year.” Mr. Jones’s office replied that no such documents exist.

What does that mean? At best, not one of the California Insurance Commission’s nearly 1,400 employees thought to ask whether a federal court ruling stopping an estimated $7 billion to $10 billion in annual payments to insurers throughout the country would affect the state’s health-insurance market. At worst, Mr. Jones—a Democrat running for attorney general next year—deliberately ignored the issue to avoid exacerbating already-high premium increases that could have damaged Hillary Clinton’s fall campaign and consumers further down the road.

The California Insurance Commission is not alone in its “recent discovery” of uncertainty as a driver of premium increases. In April the left-liberal Center for American Progress published a paper claiming to quantify the “Trump uncertainty rate hike.” The center noted that the “mere possibility” of and end to cost-sharing payments would require insurers to raise premiums by hundreds of dollars a year. CONTINUE AT SITE

WASHINGTON—Rep. Steve Scalise underwent surgery again and remained in critical condition Thursday evening, a day after the House’s third-ranking congressman was shot during a baseball practice.

Mr. Scalise was at MedStar Washington Hospital Center after suffering a gunshot wound to the hip that led to extensive internal damage as the bullet crossed his pelvis. The hospital had said Wednesday night that the lawmaker had had two procedures and blood transfusion.

House Majority Whip Steve Scalise (R., La.) Photo: Ron Sachs/CNP/Zuma Press

The hospital said Thursday evening that Mr. Scalise’s surgery was related to his internal injuries and a broken bone in his leg, that he remained in critical condition but had improved in the last 24 hours, and that he would require additional operations and be in the hospital “for some time.”

“It’s been much more difficult than people even thought,” President Donald Trump said in comments at a White House event Thursday. “He’s going to be OK, we hope.”
The Capitol largely returned to business Thursday, with the House holding votes it had suspended a day earlier and GOP senators returning their focus to health-care negotiations. But lawmakers from both parties spoke about how unsettled they felt after Wednesday’s shooting on both the House and Senate floor and the need to ratchet down the partisan rancor.

Sometimes politics changes so rapidly that few seem to notice. Remember the “energy independence” preoccupation of not so long ago? The U.S. is now emerging as the world’s energy superpower and U.S. oil and gas exports are rebalancing global markets. More remarkable still, this dominance was achieved by private U.S. investment, innovation and trade—not Washington central planning.

Thanks largely to the domestic hydraulic fracturing revolution, the U.S. has been the world’s top natural gas producer since 2009, passing Russia, and the top producer of oil and petroleum hydrocarbons since 2014, passing Saudi Arabia. By now this is well known.

Less appreciated is the role that energy exports are now playing in sustaining U.S. production despite lower prices. Since Congress lifted the 40-year ban on U.S. crude oil exports in 2015, exports are rising in some weeks to more than one million barrels of oil per day. That’s double the pace of 2016 when government permission was required, according to a recent Journal analysis of U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) data.
The U.S. still imports about 25% of petroleum consumption on net, mostly from Canada and Mexico, but lifting the ban has resulted in a more efficient global supply chain. Most domestic refineries are configured to process heavy crudes, but fracking tends to produce light sweet crudes. Exporting the light and importing cheaper heavy oil results in lower prices for gasoline and other petro-products, and the larger world market has allowed U.S. drillers to revive production after prices fell from close to $90 a barrel in 2014.

Then there is the surge in liquefied natural gas (LNG) exports. Since the first LNG shipment from the lower 48 left a Louisiana port in 2016, the EIA expects exports will climb by about 200% over the next five years.

What is responsible for this progress? Well, producers are responding to a modest recovery in commodity prices after the price bust amid rising demand, and break-even costs for production continue to fall as technology and cost-management improve. But better policy decisions have also been crucial.

On March 30, 2017, by his own account, then-FBI director James Comey told President Donald Trump that Trump himself was not under investigation — the third time he had given him that assurance. In fact, Comey told Trump that he had just assured members of Congress that Trump was not a suspect under investigation.

Think about that.

This was fully six weeks after the then-director’s Oval Office meeting with the president, during which Comey alleges that Trump told him, “I hope you can see your way clear to letting this go, to letting Flynn go.” Flynn, of course, is Michael Flynn, the close Trump campaign adviser and original Trump national-security adviser, whom Trump, with pained reluctance, had fired just the day before.

Interesting thing about that. Most of the time, when public officials obstruct an investigation, there is a certain obsessiveness about it. Because, in the usual situation, the official has been paid off, or the official is worried that the subject of the investigation will inculpate the official if the investigation is allowed to continue. There is great pressure on the official to get the case shut down.

But not Trump, he of the notoriously short attention span.

Trump was feeling remorse over Flynn. What he told Comey, in substance, was that Flynn had been through enough. A combat veteran who had served the country with distinction for over 30 years, and who had not done anything wrong by speaking with the Russian ambassador as part of the Trump transition, Flynn had just been cashiered in humiliating fashion. The one who had done the cashiering was Trump, and he was still upset about it.

That, obviously, is why he lobbied Comey on Flynn’s behalf. And as I have pointed out before, it was an exercise in weighing the merits of further investigation and prosecution that FBI agents and federal prosecutors do hundreds of times a day, throughout the country. That matters because, as their superior and as the constitutional official whose power these subordinates exercise, Trump has as much authority to do this weighing as did Comey — who worked for Trump, not the other way around.

The United States is currently the world’s oldest democracy.

But America is no more immune from collapse than were some of history’s most stable and impressive consensual governments. Fifth-century Athens, Republican Rome, Renaissance Florence and Venice, and many of the elected governments of early 20th-century Western European states eventually destroyed themselves, went bankrupt, or were overrun by invaders.

The United States is dividing as rarely before. Half the country, mostly liberal America, is concentrated in 146 of the nation’s more than 3,000 counties — in an area that collectively represents less than 10 percent of the U.S. land mass. The other half, the conservative Red states of the interior of America, is geographically, culturally, economically, politically, and socially at odds with Blue-state America, which resides mostly on the two coasts.

The two Americas watch different news. They read very different books, listen to different music, and watch different television shows. Increasingly, they now live lives according to two widely different traditions.

Barack Obama was elected president after compiling the most left-wing voting record in the U.S. Senate. His antidote, Donald Trump, was elected largely on the premise that traditional Republicans were hardly conservative.

Red America and Blue America are spiraling into divisions approaching those of 1860, or of the nihilistic hippie/straight divide of 1968.

Currently, some 27 percent of all Californians were not born in the United States. More than 40 million foreign-born immigrants currently live in the U.S. — the highest number in the nation’s history.

Yet widely unchecked immigration comes at a time when the country has lost confidence in its prior successful adherence to melting-pot assimilation and integration. The ultimate result is a fragmenting of society into tribal cliques that vie for power, careers, and influence on the basis of ethnic solidarity rather than shared Americanness.

History is not very kind to multicultural chaos — as opposed to a multiracial society united by a single national culture. The fates of Rwanda, Iraq, and the former Yugoslavia should remind us of our present disastrous trajectory.

Either the United States will return to a shared single language and allegiance to a common and singular culture, or it will eventually descend into clannish violence.

Does the unique American idea of federalism still work, with state rights and laws subordinate to federal law? We fought a Civil War that cost more than 600,000 lives in part to uphold the idea that individual states could not override the federal government.

“……when it comes to craven cowardice we shouldn’t leave out poltroons like James Comey, who couldn’t leak his own memorandum to the press without drawing in a close friend to do the dirty work…..”

Here in New England, there comes a moment, generally in March, when you can tell that Winter has turned the corner. The nights are still frigid. The ground is still strewn with filthy snow, cold but angry mounds, pitted black with icy gravel. And there might be more snow on the way. But there is something in the slant of the afternoon sunlight, something in the scent and texture of the air, that tells you that Spring is nigh.

I have a kindred feeling about the progress of the anti-Trump hysteria that has been plaguing the country since the early hours of November 9, 2016. The hysteria, I admit, has gone on far longer, and has been far more virulent, than I anticipated. I thought the insanity would dissipate quickly after January 20, when Donald Trump was inaugurated. Instead, it has accelerated, abetted by a scurrilous and irresponsible media and grandstanding Democratic politicians encouraged by their deep-state enablers.

The hysteria reached a crescendo over the last week. There was Kathy Griffin and her ghoulish ISIS-by-proxy photo shoot depicting her holding a blood-soaked likeness of Donald Trump’s severed head. There is the ongoing production in New York of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, replete with a Donald Trump lookalike in the title role and lots and lots of stage blood spilled when we come to the Ides of March. There was James Comey’s truly bizarre testimony before Congress last week. Then there was the disgusting treatment of Attorney General Jeff Sessions by his former colleagues in the Senate: the names of Martin Heinrich and Mark Warner will occupy a place of special obloquy in the annals of disgraceful and nakedly partisan vilification. These anti-Trump players, each in his own way, helped to create the toxic environment into which James Hodgkinson, an anti-GOP zealot and Bernie Sanders supporter, strode Wednesday morning when he showed up at a congressional baseball practice session in Alexandria, Virginia. “Democrats or Republicans?” he was overheard to ask. Told that the field was occupied by Republicans, he took out a high-powered rifle and began shooting, seriously injuring several, including Steve Scalise, the House majority whip, before being felled himself by the Capitol Police.

What’s the take-away of all this? That we’re on the verge of a Civil War? There are some who say so. Certainly, as I have noted elsewhere, what all those who style themselves part of the “resistance” to Donald Trump are actually resisting is the result of a free and open democratic election. Trump met the qualifications to run for president of the United States: he was old enough and was a native-born American. And then he won the race by racking up more electoral votes than his opponent, despite being outspent nearly two to one.

I fully expect there will be additional arctic blasts from the media-engineered campaign against Trump. Doubtless many of the blasts will come from James Comey’s very good personal friend (“brothers in arms”) Robert Mueller, recently appointed special counsel to investigate allegations of Russian involvement in the 2016 election. It’s conceivable that Mueller will be forced to recuse himself, but in the meantime, he is busy packing his investigative staff with Obama and Clinton loyalists.

As has been pointed out by many observers, the charge against Trump has subtly modulated away from “collusion with the Russians.” Unfortunately for The Narrative, there was no collusion with the Russians, at least not with Trump or his surrogates (perhaps Mr. Mueller will develop a healthy curiosity about the connection between the Clinton Foundation and Russian’s acquisition of 20 % of our uranium assets. Perhaps). The new tort is “obstruction of justice,” but—again, unfortunately for The Narrative—there is no evidence of obstruction. So I expect that the volume on the radio, though the station is playing only static, will be turned way up. (Maybe I mean that because it is playing only static, the volume will be turned up.)

Where does that leave us? There is a small pen of chihuahuas yapping wildly that Trump should be impeached because, because, because—the doggies will get back to us later with a reason. (The real reason is simply that they don’t like Mr. Trump.) Were that to happen, it would precipitate the gravest crisis since South seceded.

But I don’t expect it to happen. Why? Because Trump is succeeding like gangbusters nearly everywhere: judicial appointments are one thing all his supporters point to, but there is also his roll-back of the regulatory burden, his plan to cut taxes and to ditch and replace Obamacare (it’s happening), his enforcement of the immigration laws, his revitalization of the military, and on and on. The man has had a startling string of successes, though the media won’t tell you that. CONTINUE AT SITE

President Donald Trump’s firing of former FBI Director James Comey is now a subject of the federal probe being headed by special counsel Robert Mueller, which has expanded to include whether the president obstructed justice, a person familiar with the matter said.

Mr. Mueller is examining whether the president fired Mr. Comey as part of a broader effort to alter the direction of the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s probe into Russia’s alleged meddling in the 2016 presidential election and whether associates of Mr. Trump colluded with Moscow, the person said.

Mark Corallo, a spokesman for Mr. Trump’s personal lawyer, Marc Kasowitz, denounced the revelation in a statement.

“The FBI leak of information regarding the president is outrageous, inexcusable and illegal,” Mr. Corallo said.

Peter Carr, a spokesman for Mr. Mueller, declined to comment. The special counsel’s pursuit of an obstruction of justice probe was first reported Wednesday by the Washington Post.

Mr. Mueller’s team is planning to interview Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats and National Security Agency Director Mike Rogers as part of its examination of whether Mr. Trump sought to obstruct justice, the person said.

The special counsel also plans to interview Rick Ledgett, who recently retired as the deputy director of the NSA, the person added. CONTINUE AT SITE

Senate Republicans continue to negotiate the details of their health-care reform, and one measure of progress is that their opponents are more manic and disingenuous. Progressives who used to deride the GOP for incompetence are now panicked that they may really succeed, and thus the faux tantrums.

The distortion du jour is that the GOP is operating “in secret.” This week Minority Leader Chuck Schumer accused Republicans of working “behind closed doors, writing a bill they won’t let the public read. . . . Today, no Member of Congress can read the bill because we don’t know what it is.”

Despite Mr. Schumer’s bewilderment, he still knew enough to assert that the Senate bill will “greatly hurt the American people.” Well, which is it? And if Republicans are trying to suppress a public debate about repealing and replacing Obama Care, then they haven’t prevailed, either now or across the presidential campaign. Health care has been central to U.S. political debate for nearly a decade as Democrats created a new entitlement with little public support.

Compared to that effort, the Senate this time has been a model of deliberative democracy. On Dec. 19, 2009, a Saturday, then Majority Leader Harry Reid tossed the 2,100-page bill the Senate had spent that fall debating and offered a new bill drafted in an invitation-only back room. Democrats didn’t even pretend to care what was in it while passing it in the dead of night on Dec. 24, amid a snowstorm, in the first Christmas Eve vote since 1895.

Liberals excused this legislative sausage-making as the price of making history, which was an insult to sausages. MIT economist and ObamaCare architect Jonathan Gruber told an academic audience in 2014 that “lack of transparency is a huge political advantage. And basically, you know, call it the stupidity of the American voter or whatever, but basically that was really, really critical to getting the thing to pass.”

Mr. Gruber has since re-emerged to complain of the current debate that “I’m just worried about the speed they’re moving at for what that implies, because it implies no effort to actually get this right.” The professor had apologized for what he called his “inexcusable” remarks in 2014 but he’s betting he can con Americans again.

The irony is that the GOP negotiations are so time-consuming because Senators are trying to improve the product as they build a consensus that can get 50 votes. They’re trying to answer the House bill’s critics on the left and right, not that they’ll get any credit.

James T. Hodgkinson, who on Wednesday shot Republican Rep. Steve Scalise and four others, posted this on his Facebook page March 22: “Trump is a Traitor. Trump Has Destroyed Our Democracy. It’s Time to Destroy Trump & Co.”

Sitting in the dying light of World War I, the poet T.S. Eliot wrote, “I had not thought death had undone so many.” What’s our excuse? Displays of political or social excess seem to be everywhere. Whatever once fastened the doors of people’s minds to something secure and stable has become unhinged.

Some thought the apotheosis of political derangement had been reached when celebrity Kathy Griffin posted a video of herself holding the bloody, severed head of Donald Trump.

But that wasn’t the end of it. We may assume that as Ms. Griffin was creating her video, the artists at New York’s Public Theater were rehearsing their production of “ Julius Caesar, ” the one in which Central Park audiences watch Caesar as a blond-haired Donald Trump, who is pulled down from a podium by men in suits and assassinated with plunging knives.

The news site Axios runs stories regularly about journalists who have been suspended or fired because of their unhinged postings on Twitter . After Donald Trump used a tweet to revive his long-running feud with the mayor of London amid the June 3 killings, CNN personality Reza Aslan tweeted that Mr. Trump was a “piece of s—.”

Some take comfort that these displays did not go unpunished. CNN wrist-slapped Ms. Griffin by dropping her as co-host of its New Year’s Eve show with Anderson Cooper. Delta Air Lines , American Express and Bank of America withdrew their sponsorship of “Julius Caesar,” though New York City’s Democratic Comptroller Scott Stringer said their pullout “sends the wrong message.”

Advertisers must wake up every morning wondering what political meteorite will hit them next. J.P. Morgan Chase pulled its ads this week from NBC News rather than be associated with Megyn Kelly’s prime-time interview with Alex Jones to discuss “controversies and conspiracies,” such as his notion that the Sandy Hook murders were a hoax. Ms. Kelly justified the interview in part on Twitter because Donald Trump appeared on Mr. Jones’s show and “our job is 2 shine a light.” CONTINUE AT SITE