RUTHFULLY YOURS

Donald Trump’s decision to fire James Comey has set off a firestorm, mostly along party lines, but not entirely. Some Republicans have expressed concern, too, and more will wring their hands in the next few days if the Democrats’ narrative takes hold. http://www.zipdialog.com/05/10/2017/a-quick-guide-to-the-political-firestorm-over-comeys-firing-what-matters-and-why-what-democrats-and-republicans-will-argue

How long the fire lasts and how much it consumes depends, crucially, on information that will emerge out over the coming days, as media organizations pump their sources and Comey defends himself.

Here are the basic messages you will hear from Democrats and Republicans, starting immediately.

The Democrats’ message is remarkably disciplined. They are speaking with one voice, Chuck Schumer’s.

They will repeat two key words: Nixon and Watergate.

Their meaning is clear: Comey was fired to cover up Trump’s crimes.

Here is their message:

Trump, not some underlying, is the person who fired Comey.
Advice from the Justice Department is just a cover, they will say.
Key question here: Was the firing top-down or bottom-up? Did Comey’s new boss at DOJ initiate this or was it really an order from the White House.
The new boss is Rod Rosenstein, an esteemed, career prosecutor, considered politically neutral. He received a lot of Democratic backing when he was approved recently. Here’s an excellent, brief description of his professional background, which is sterling. (US News)
But Politico is reporting that Trump was fuming over the Russia investigation.
Trump fired Comey because the FBI was getting to close to uncovering malfeasance by the Trump campaign and transition.
This is focused on Russian collaboration with Trump and usually implied rather than asserted directly. Why?
First, the intelligence agencies agree that Russia actively meddled in the US campaign, sought to harm Hillary Clinton, and favored Trump.
We know that some Trump advisers had connections of various sorts to Russian entities. The most important is Michael Flynn, who was briefly the National Security Adviser. There are reports that he and his associates are now under investigation by a grand jury. Some questions have also swirled around Paul Manafort, head of Trump’s campaign in the summer, and Carter Page, a lower-level figure.
Key question: Do the connections between the Trump team and Russia rise to the level of collaboration? If so, that would be a huge scandal and lead to calls for impeachment. If such evidence were found and were convincing, many would consider it a “high crime and misdemeanor.”
So far, no evidence of such collaboration has been found. Senior figures of the intelligence community, associated with the Obama Administration, have specifically said that they have looked and that there is no such evidence.
Because Trump “interfered” with the FBI, which was investigating the Russia issue, we cannot leave this investigation to the Congress or Department of Justice.
Key claim: We are now seeing a Watergate-style coverup by the Trump Administration since they cannot fairly investigate themselves and we cannot count on the FBI, the DOJ, etc.

President Trump abruptly fired embattled FBI Director James B. Comey Jr. late yesterday afternoon for exceeding his authority during the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s email abuses.

The long-overdue termination of Comey, who inappropriately injected himself and the FBI into political matters, came three-and-a-half years into his 10-year term. It was based on the recommendation of the Department of Justice and was effective immediately.

Comey’s firing is a reaffirmation of the importance of the rule of law. He was more powerful than an FBI director ever should be. As commentator Brit Hume observed, “For better or worse, no FBI director since J. Edgar Hoover had taken so large a role in the political life of this country as James Comey.”

Lawmakers on both sides of the aisle were intimidated and scared by Comey, Tucker Carlson editorialized on his Fox News Channel show.

Just how powerful was James Comey? Let’s it put this way: He was feared in a way that no appointed bureaucrat should ever be feared in a free society. Time and again elected lawmakers on both sides came on this show and expressed worry and concern about his behavior, but they did so only during commercial breaks with the cameras off. Why? Because they were terrified at the prospect of criticizing him in public. They certainly don’t have that fear of the sitting president of the United States and that tells you everything you need to know about Jim Comey.

After taking this necessary step towards draining the Washington swamp, Trump was upbeat, saying the FBI “is one of our nation’s most cherished and respected institutions and today will mark a new beginning for our crown jewel of law enforcement.”

Here is the text of the president’s letter informing Comey of his firing:

Dear Director Comey,

I have received the attached letters from the Attorney General and Deputy Attorney General of the United States recommending your dismissal as Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. I have accepted their recommendation and you are hereby terminated and removed from office, effective immediately.

While I greatly appreciate you informing me, on three separate occasions, that I am not under investigation, I nevertheless concur with the judgement of the Department of Justice that you are not able to effectively lead the Bureau.

It is essential that we find new leadership for the FBI that restores public trust and confidence in its vital law enforcement mission.

I wish you the best of luck in your future endeavors.

The passage in Trump’s letter about being informed he was not under FBI investigation seems out of place. While not relevant to the subject of the letter, perhaps it was inserted to color media coverage of the news. It may constitute an “I told you so” in the eyes of Trump but it is odd and Trump’s critics will no doubt seize upon it.

President Trump fired James Comey late Tuesday, and better now than never. These columns opposed Mr. Comey’s nomination by Barack Obama, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation Director has committed more than enough mistakes in the last year to be dismissed for cause.

Mr. Trump sacked Mr. Comey on the advice of Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, a former U.S. Attorney with a straight-up-the-middle reputation who was only recently confirmed by the Senate. In a memo to Attorney General Jeff Sessions, Mr. Rosenstein cited Mr. Comey’s multiple breaches of Justice Department protocol in his criminal investigation of Hillary Clinton’s mishandling of classified material.

The FBI isn’t supposed even to confirm or deny ongoing investigations, but in July 2016 Mr. Comey publicly exonerated Mrs. Clinton in the probe of her private email server on his own legal judgment and political afflatus. That should have been the AG’s responsibility, and Loretta Lynch had never recused herself.

“It is not the function of the Director to make such an announcement,” Mr. Rosenstein wrote. “The Director now defends his decision by asserting that he believed Attorney General Loretta Lynch had a conflict. But the FBI Director is never empowered to supplant federal prosecutors and assume command of the Justice Department.”

Mr. Rosenstein added that at his July 5 press appearance Mr. Comey “laid out his version of the facts for the news media as if it were a closing argument, but without a trial. It is a textbook example of what federal prosecutors and agents are taught not to do.”

Then, 11 days before the election, Mr. Comey told Congress he had reopened the inquiry. His public appearances since have become a self-exoneration tour to defend his job and political standing, not least to Democrats who blame a “Comey effect” for Mrs. Clinton’s defeat. Last week Mr. Comey dropped more innuendo about the Trump campaign’s alleged ties to Russia in testimony to Congress, while also exaggerating the new evidence that led his agents to reopen the Clinton file.

For all of these reasons and more, we advised Mr. Trump to sack Mr. Comey immediately upon taking office. The President will now pay a larger political price for waiting, as critics question the timing of his action amid the FBI’s probe of his campaign’s alleged Russia ties. Democrats are already portraying Mr. Comey as a liberal martyr, though last October they accused him of partisan betrayal.

Gender Dysphoria as it is called is all the rage in schools across America….with some troubling incidents and result. This Australian pediatrician explains and warns about this issue.
Childhood Gender Dysphoria and the Law

Judges seem untroubled by the contradiction inherent in a diagnosis that has become rather fashionable of late, ‘gender dysphoria’. On the one hand the condition is described as a psychiatric illness, yet the purported remedies of hormones and surgery are entirely physical.

Childhood gender dysphoria may be defined as distress due to conflict between the physical manifestations of gender in the body and their perception in the mind of a child or adolescent. The body reveals one sex, the mind feels the other.

This conflict between matter and mind can be as destructive as any other confusional state and deserves our compassion. Disturbingly, special clinics in capital cities in Australia are now reporting hundreds of new cases seeking attention each year. This contrasts, dramatically, with a straw poll I have undertaken of twenty-eight paediatricians with a cumulative experience of 931 years. This poll revealed only ten cases: eight associated with mental illness, two with sexual abuse. Protestations by a child that it belonged to the opposite sex used to be a warning sign of sexual abuse.

Given the increasing prevalence, the perturbation to family life as well as the mind of the child, and the possibility of prolonged therapy, the importance of gender dysphoria now rivals that of anorexia nervosa with its incongruity between bodily reality and mental perception (the body is thin but is imagined to be fat).

Fundamental differences exist, however, between the medical and societal managements of anorexia and gender dysphoria. In anorexia, management seeks to reduce the mindset, not substantiate it. No medical authority would augment weight loss with diet pills and a gastric band. No media would portray anorexia as heroic. No legislature would forbid therapies that did not affirm the delusion. No court would praise the courage of the child in refusing food, and no court would consider being relieved of a protective role. But, with regard to gender dysphoria, these are the kinds of things that are happening.

This article will consider three matters: First, the treatment regime for childhood gender dysphoria; second, Family Court of Australia decisions regarding childhood gender dysphoria; third, research that indicates medical treatment for gender dysphoria may result in permanent changes in the brain.

Jim Comey has been a good friend to me over the years. I have disagreed strenuously with a number of decisions he made in connection with the Hillary Clinton investigation — with his rationales and with the fact that he was presuming to exercise authority that was not his to exercise. The independence of law enforcement is critical, but at times he seemed to redefine “independent” as beholden to only those institutional guidelines he subjectively judged worthy of following. Still, I personally know him to be a good man. I know that he loves the country and the FBI, and that every decision he made — regardless of whether it was right or wrong — was made in what he sincerely believed was the best interests of both.

Last week, he testified that he was made “mildly nauseous” by the thought that his decisions had an impact on the outcome of the election. I know what he means: It describes how I’ve felt in criticizing someone I’ve been fond of since we started out as young prosecutors three decades ago — except I’d have omitted the “mildly.” The only solace I take in it is that I know Jim did what he understood his job required — and he knows he is not the only one who goes about things that way.

The memorandum issued by Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein to explain Comey’s dismissal Tuesday is well crafted and will make it very difficult for Democrats to attack President Trump’s decision. Rosenstein bases the decision not merely on Comey’s much discussed missteps in the Clinton e-mails investigation — viz., usurping the authority of the attorney general to close the case without prosecution; failing to avail himself of the normal procedures for raising concerns about Attorney General Lynch’s conflict of interest. He goes on specifically to rebuke Comey’s “gratuitous” release of “derogatory information about the subject of a declined criminal prosecution.” That “subject,” of course, would be Mrs. Clinton.

This (as I noted in a recent column) is exactly the line of attack Democrats have adopted since Clinton lost the election: Conveniently forget how ecstatic they were over Comey’s confident public assessment that the case was not worth charging, and remember only his scathing public description of the evidence — even though both were improper. Significantly, Rosenstein avoids any suggestion that Comey was wrong in concluding Clinton should not be indicted; nor does he in any way imply that Comey’s errors made it impossible to bring a wrongdoer to justice. That is, Rosenstein leaves unstated the partisan Republican critique of Comey. Instead, Clinton is portrayed as a victim. This will appeal to Democrats — especially since it will keep alive the fiction that Comey, rather than Clinton herself, is responsible for the Democrats’ stunning electoral defeat.

Rosenstein leaves unstated the partisan Republican critique of Comey.

Moreover, Rosenstein makes a point of quoting condemnations of Comey by Democrats prominent in law enforcement: former Obama attorney general Eric Holder and Clinton deputy attorney general Jamie Gorelick. Recall that Comey endorsed Holder for AG. This was an important seal of approval at a time when critics (like yours truly) were arguing that Holder’s key participation in the Marc Rich pardon scandal was disqualifying: Comey had not only been a respected deputy attorney general in a Republican administration; he had for a time inherited the Marc Rich investigation as a prosecutor in New York, when Rich was among the FBI’s most wanted fugitives. Yet, Holder has blasted Comey for breaking with “fundamental principles” of the Justice Department, and thus undermining “public trust in both the Justice Department and the FBI” (in a way, I suppose, that Holder’s own citation for contempt of Congress did not).

If ever there were an example of why a congressional committee is a terrible vehicle for investigating misconduct with alleged criminal or national-security implications, it was Monday’s Senate Judiciary subcommittee hearing. The session, a probe into Russian interference in the 2016 election, featured the much-anticipated testimony of Democratic diva Sally Yates, the former acting Attorney General fired for insubordination by President Trump in the early days of his administration. You’ll be shocked, I’m sure, to learn that the proceedings were heavy on politically charged innuendo and light on substance.

If you were looking for hard evidence of Trump collusion in a Russian influence operation, there was none to be found. And if you were hoping for insight into the only known crime to have been committed in this escapade — namely, the leaking of classified information to the media — the hearing chaired by Senator Lindsey Graham (R., S.C.) was a disappointment.

What we mainly heard was that the Obama administration really does not like Michael Flynn. Not exactly the late-breaking news.

President Obama fired Flynn after making him head of the Defense Intelligence Agency. Flynn was a naysayer on Obama’s foreign policy, particularly with respect to the Middle East — especially Iran and radical Islam. Flynn also made enemies throughout the so-called “community” of U.S. intelligence agencies because he called out our spooks on politicizing their analyses to paper over Obama’s policy failures. How surprising that many of these officials have no use for him either.

Thus, the schadenfreude runneth over in the Obama camp, which is clearly enjoying the general’s fall from grace. And one can hardly blame them for bursting into “I told you so” mode over lapses in judgment by President Trump’s original (and short-lived) national-security adviser — e.g., taking money in his post-military security-consulting career from enterprises tied to the murderous Putin regime and the government of Turkey’s Islamist thug, Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

Flynn defenders will get only so far observing that the autocratic Erdogan was beloved of the Obama and Bush administrations, too, and that the haul from Flynn’s Russian speaking gigs was a bare fraction of the cool $500,000 Bill Clinton got from a Kremlin-tied investment bank shortly before his wife, then-secretary of state Hillary Clinton, signed off on a government ruling that gave Russia control of one-fifth of U.S. uranium supplies. I myself have pointed out that Flynn (with co-author Michael Ledeen) wrote a bestselling book, The Field of Fight: How We Can Win the Global War against Radical Islam and Its Allies, in which he describes the Putin regime as a determined enemy bent on America’s destruction, and radical Islam as the ideology that animates the terrorist threat against our country. Given the general’s awareness of these facts, if he couldn’t perceive the unseemliness of profiting off the Russian and Turkish despots, then Democrats surely can’t be faulted for questioning his fitness, or Trump’s judgment in retaining him. Such critiques can hardly be dismissed as baseless, even if they are hypocritical, motivated by politics rather than security concerns, and grossly incomplete in the portrait they paint of Flynn’s distinguished military career.

Three years after the 2014 Veterans Health Administration scandal erupted in headlines, outrage, investigations, and the resignation of then-secretary of veterans’ affairs Eric Shinseki, veterans still must contend with an agency that provides less than stellar service.

A government report issued in February found that the VA’s shift to using more private-sector care for veterans has its own problems. They include cumbersome authorization and scheduling procedures, inadequate provider networks, and the potential for veterans having to pay their own treatment costs. Plus wait times for care, the heart of the 2014 scandal, are still long: an average of 45 days for 53% of veterans.

Problematic health care, as well as the descent into homelessness for a growing number of our nation’s veterans, belies our posture of national pride in our troops. We label them heroes, and then we fail to properly provide for them.

The problems of inadequate health care began to surface in 2012 and 2013, when two doctors at the Phoenix VA Health Care System voiced concerns. The whistleblowers said they had witnessed substandard care, that VA officials had falsified health service wait times, and that 40 veterans died while waiting for health care. These claims were later verified by the Veterans Administration, and investigations began nationwide.

A 2014 General Accounting Office audit of 731 VA medical centers and outpatient clinics reported that roughly 100,000 veterans nationwide were experiencing long wait times for health care. Another VA report detailed specific techniques used to falsify wait times.

Still other allegations of mismanagement surfaced in 2014, when a congressional committee revealed that more than $380,000 in bonuses were awarded to directors and top executives of 38 VA facilities where falsification of records and delays in care were being examined. The money was part of $2.7 million in extra pay given in 2013 to top-ranking VA officials.

Further, a 2015 VA report found that the VA had such sloppy record keeping that 307,000 veterans out of 867,000 pending cases on the VA’s list of electronic records were actually deceased. VA officials could not conclude if the veterans had received care, were still waiting for care, or had even applied for care. Nonetheless, some concluded that those veterans had died while waiting for medical help.