RUTHFULLY YOURS

If we are to believe the latest news reports, congressional Republicans are out to murder Americans, ripping life-saving medication from their hands and forcibly dragging them from health-care clinics by the thousand. Setting aside the fairly obvious fact that the GOP reform bill will not, in fact, kill millions, one wonders why the Left’s semblance of measured rhetoric on health care has vanished so quickly.

The recent histrionics from Democratic politicians, pundits, and even many journalists stand in stark contrast to the tone of public conversation about health-care reform before Donald Trump’s election. As recently as last fall, commentators on both the left and the right seemed to agree that the Affordable Care Act needed further work.

To be sure, Democrats at every level of government remained adamant that the few shortcomings of Obamacare were a necessary part of the equalizing process to provide health insurance for low-income Americans and minorities. But at the same time, most on the left named those shortcomings (however reluctantly) and acknowledged the need for improvement.

Even the Democrats’ own presidential nominee said as much. During the 2016 campaign, Hillary Clinton admitted that “premiums have gotten too high” and vowed to “fix” Obamacare. And while Clinton’s idea of “fixing” Obamacare would have looked much different from, say, Ted Cruz’s, she didn’t embrace the far-left-wing solution of single-payer health care, either.

A Huffington Post article from early 2016 divulged some of President Obama’s own proposed health-care reforms, noting, “Even the guy who signed it knows the Affordable Care Act has problems.” And last fall, several Democratic senators stretched magnanimous hands across the aisle, urging their Republican colleagues to work with them for the sake of improving the Obamacare markets.

“There are things we can do and need to do to address restoring competition in these exchanges, and my hope is when we’re through the elections and past the elections, we’ll do those,” said senator Tom Carper (D., Del.) last September.

“You know, I think the Affordable Care Act from the very beginning has been a roller coaster,” Democratic senator Chris Murphy (Conn.) said around the same time. Senator Bob Casey Jr. (D., Pa.) agreed: “I think it’s important to be vigilant, because like any complex area of policy, it’s going to require some changes.”

But after Trump’s surprise victory in November, the tenor of health-care-reform dialogue underwent a rapid transformation. Today’s Left — including these previously fair-minded Democratic senators — seems to have completely forgotten their earlier admissions that Obamacare needs some work.

Instead, pundits and politicians alike have settled on a tone akin to total panic. The American Health Care Act that passed the House this spring, and the recently proposed draft bill written by GOP leadership in the Senate, are surely not the type of reforms that Democrats had in mind. But neither of those bills by any means represents a full repeal-and-replace effort, and both at least attempt to address the skyrocketing costs and plummeting options that have plagued the Obamacare exchanges.

In the months since Donald Trump became America’s 45th president, the unemployment rate among black people has hit the lowest number since 2000.

In February, the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) reported the black unemployment rate at 8.1, but the number dropped to 8.0 in March, 7.9 in April, and 7.5 in May.

During most of Barack Obama’s presidency, black unemployment was in double digits, hitting a high mark of 16.8 in March 2010. Between July 2008 (during the financial crisis) and February 2015, the rate remained above 10 percent.

Black unemployment has not been this low since December 2000, when 7.4 percent of African-Americans looking for work were unable to find it.

This good news should be taken with a grain of salt, however, because the workforce participation rate remained low in May, at 62.7 percent. It is possible that many people stopped looking for work, just as others found good jobs.

Some might argue that Obama could be credited for this drop in unemployment. But under that logic, Bill Clinton is responsible for the increase in black unemployment in the first year of George W. Bush’s presidency.

Even so, this decline in the black unemployment rate is good news for the new president during his first year in office.

This comes on the heels of a Los Angeles Times report that President Trump has been a unique champion of historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs).

“For [President] Obama, people expected him to come in and fix everything — especially for black people,” Walter Kimbrough, president of Dillard University in New Orleans, told the L.A. Times. “But he never campaigned strongly for HBCUs.”

But Trump came into office with no expectations, and has pleasantly surprised black leaders like Kimbrough. “He’s coming in saying he’s going to be the president for HBCUs,” the university president noted.

As former FBI Director James Comey’s best friend, Robert Mueller, stocks his Seinfeld investigation-about-nothing with every Democratic lawyer and Hillary and/or Obama donor he can find, we are treated to the delicious irony of collusion with Russia being confirmed — and the colluder-in-chief being Ex-president Barack Hussein Obama.

Even Obama’s Democrat supporters are now acknowledging he knew about Russia’s hacking of the DNC and Podesta emails. They are acknowledging that he did nothing but are not acknowledging the reason why – that he thought Hillary Clinton was going to succeed him and he wanted to do nothing to offend the Russians to whom he had once famously promised more “flexibility.”As Fox News Politics reported:

President Trump criticized his predecessor for allegedly doing “nothing” about reports that Russia interfered in last year’s presidential campaign, in a recent interview.“I just heard today for the first time that (former President) Obama knew about Russia a long time before the election, and he did nothing about it,” Trump said in the interview set to air Sunday on “Fox & Friends Weekend.” “The CIA gave him information on Russia a long time before the election. … If he had the information, why didn’t he do something about it?”

Even Rep. Adam Schiff, ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee, acknowledged that President Obama’s refusal to embarrass his Russian friends by doing nothing was a mistake:

President Obama’s decision to not act sooner on Russian election interference last year was “a very serious mistake,” says California Rep. Adam Schiff.

“I think the administration needed to call out Russia earlier, and needed to act to deter and punish Russia earlier and I think that was a very serious mistake,” Schiff said in an interview on CNN’s “State of the Union” on Sunday.

Schiff, the top ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, said that Obama was hesitant to confront Russia over its active measures campaign for fear of being seen as helping Hillary Clinton and of fueling Donald Trump’s allegations that the election was being “rigged” against him.

That is the excuse made by those caught with their hands in the cookie jar. What happened to our democracy being at stake, the sanctity of our electoral process being violated? It was okay to jeopardize our national security through inaction as long as it was thought it might embarrass Hillary? But when Trump won, suddenly it became an issue for which he was responsible?

As noted, Obama’s collusion with the Russians began years earlier when he conspired to gut U.S. missile defense efforts in Europe. As Investor’s Business Daily noted over a year ago, President Obama had other plans and his betrayal of our allies was exquisitely ironic:

Yet within hours of Medvedev’s election as president in 2008, the Russian announced that Moscow would deploy SS-26 missiles in his country’s enclave of Kaliningrad situated between our NATO allies Poland and Lithuania.

He wanted the U.S. to abandon plans to deploy missile interceptors in Poland and warning radars in the Czech Republic designed to counter a future threat from Iran.

It was a Chicago weekend filled with gay pride events, with friends and families cheering on the marchers. But a dark cloud loomed over one event. When some lesbians showed up at the “Dyke March” with banners that included a Star of David, they were booted out.

The Jewish symbol “made us feel unsafe,” the organizers said.

As the blues-rock singer Delbert McClinton once wrote, “If you can’t lie no better than that, you might as well tell the truth.”

Noxious in its own right, this incident highlights several problems that are now pervasive on the left and increasingly pollute the public sphere. They deserve exposure and censure.

There’s no mistaking the Star of David’s meaning. It’s the universal symbol for Judaism, one seen at every synagogue—and on every “Coexist” bumper sticker. It is the centerpiece of Israel’s flag, marking it as the Jewish state. It was pinned as the mark of Cain on Jews in ghettos and concentration camps.

When the organizers of Chicago’s “Dyke March” prohibited its display, they were saying, “Jews are not welcome here if they display any symbol of their faith or cultural history.”

The irony, of course, is that gays themselves were treated this way for years. They were told to keep their heads down and never say who they really are, much less display their orientation openly, proudly. They are still treated this way in many countries, the very ones embraced by the Dyke March organizers. It’s a bizarre contortion of “progressive ideology,” one they could test by marching through Ramallah or Gaza City.

The organizers were open about why they prohibited the Jewish symbol. They loathe Israel and love Palestinian opposition to it. Of course, you could hold those views and still let others march. But that wasn’t “progressive” enough for them.

Incidents like this are not confined to a few wackos. They occur regularly at leftist protests and on college campuses. For the first time since the 1950s, anti-Semitism is voiced openly, well beyond fringe groups and “restricted” country clubs.

This resurgence of anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism has been growing in Europe for more than a decade. On the right, it’s a return to age-old hatreds in an age of globalization and dislocation. On the left, it’s a fashionable way to show solidarity with Muslim immigrants—without actually dealing with the serious (and increasingly lethal) problems of integrating them into modern European life.

Like so many bad ideas, this New Anti-Semitism jumped the pond, landing first in universities and spreading from there. On campus, the vanguard has been Muslim activists from the Middle East and North Africa, especially Palestinians, with little regard for free speech if it conflicts with their political aims. They show up to protest at virtually all pro-Israel events (okay), and routinely disrupt them (not okay).

They have many fellow travelers, as the Dyke March shows. What they share is contempt for the First Amendment. They think views that diverge from theirs should be suppressed. Of course, they alone are allowed to make those decisions.

The Dyke March incident reveals several other disturbing trends, as well. It shows how easily the disparagement of Israel, which is nearly universal on the left, spills over into denigration of all Jews.

Ah, you say, but aren’t many Jews active on the left? Yes, but too few have fought back against their comrades’ scorn of their religion or the Jewish state. Some don’t care because they are thoroughly secular. Judaism may have been their parents’ or grandparents’ religion, but it is not theirs. Others are aggressively anti-Israel. Their presence as Jews (which they highlight) gives political cover to others’ hatred. How could we be anti-Semitic if we welcome these Jews?

Dr. Price, an orthopedic surgeon and former Republican Rep. from Georgia District 6 is secretary of health and human services.

America faces an urgent crisis in its health-care system. Costs are skyrocketing and choices are disappearing on the individual and small-group markets. Many people now confront the real challenge of having no choice in their health coverage.

One of them is Doug Lake, an Iowa radiologist who came to the White House last week to share his story. His daughter, who suffers from a rare cardiac condition, is covered by an insurer that plans to pull out of ObamaCare’s exchange in their state next year. Only one insurer remains in their county, and that company has requested a 43% increase in premiums.

The situation is even worse elsewhere. As of this week, 49 counties across the country do not have a single insurer offering plans on the exchanges next year.

This year more than 1,000 counties had only one insurer in the ObamaCare market, meaning millions of Americans had no meaningful choice. Meanwhile, the insurers that did stay in the market increased premiums for their midlevel plans by an average of 25%. Premiums on the individual market are up about $3,000 since ObamaCare was implemented. Think about what else that money could buy!

It is too early to know how much premiums will rise next year, but reports so far indicate that double-digit increases again will be the norm.

These are not simply numbers on a page: They represent real people with real stories, facing real health-care and financial crises.

Dudley Bostic, a pharmacy owner in Tennessee, can no longer afford to provide health insurance for her employees because of ObamaCare’s mandates. Candace Fowler, a Missouri homemaker who was recently diagnosed with a serious neurological condition, lives in a county where there are slated to be no insurers selling ObamaCare plans next year. Tommie McClain, a student in Clinton, Mo., who suffers from chronic migraines, faces the possibility of zero choices in his county, too.

The good news is that Congress has the chance to help Doug, Dudley, Candace, Tommie and the millions of other Americans suffering under this law by undoing the damage done by ObamaCare and fulfilling the promises President Trump has made.

The bill recently introduced in the Senate would get rid of the individual mandate, which in 2015 alone caused 6.5 million Americans to pay $3 billion in penalties to the IRS because they did not want or could not afford a government-dictated health plan. It would directly repeal some of ObamaCare’s most costly regulations while giving states flexibility to waive others if they develop innovative ways to provide coverage and bring down costs.

The Senate’s plan also would repeal hundreds of billions of dollars in onerous taxes. It would put Medicaid on a sustainable spending path and give states a real chance to reform the program to make it work for the people who rely on it.

In the Sunday Washington Post’s 7,000-word account of what President Obama knew about Russian election meddling and what he did about it, one absence is notable. Nowhere in the Post’s lengthy tick-tock is Mr. Obama presented with evidence of, or described as worried about, Trump collusion with Russia.

Moscow intervened in the election eight ways from Sunday, but it’s clearer than ever that what’s occupied Americans for the past six months are baseless accusations about the Trump campaign.

Among the evidence on Mr. Obama’s desk was proof that Vladimir Putin was personally directing the Russian espionage effort. For a variety of sensible reasons, though, the White House and U.S. intelligence also concluded that Russia’s meddling was “unlikely to materially affect the outcome of the election.”

President Obama made at least one inevitably political calculation: Hillary Clinton was going to win, so he would keep relatively mum on Russian interference to avoid provoking “escalation from Putin” or “potentially contaminating the expected Clinton triumph,” in the Post’s words.

Strangely missing from the Post account, however, is one Russian intervention, revealed by the paper’s own earlier reporting, that may really have, in farcical fashion, elected Donald Trump.

This was FBI Director James Comey’s ill-fated decision to clear Hillary Clinton publicly on intelligence-mishandling charges. His choice, it now appears, was partly shaped by a false intelligence document referring to a nonexistent Democratic email purporting to confirm that then-Attorney General Loretta Lynch had vowed to quash any Hillary charges.

On April 23, the New York Times first alluded to the document’s existence in an 8,000-word story about Mr. Comey’s intervention.

On May 24, the Post provided a detailed description of the document and revealed that many in the FBI considered it “bad intelligence,” possibly a Russian plant.

On May 26, CNN adumbrated that Mr. Comey “knew that a critical piece of information relating to the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s email was fake—created by Russian intelligence—but he feared that if it became public it would undermine the probe and the Justice Department itself.”

“In at least one classified session [before Congress],” CNN added, “Comey cited that intelligence as the primary reason he took the unusual step of publicly announcing the end of the Clinton email probe. . . . Comey did not even mention the other reason he gave in public testimony for acting independently of the Justice Department—that Lynch was compromised because Bill Clinton boarded her plane and spoke to her during the investigation.”

Why has this apparently well-documented, and eminently documentable, episode fallen down the memory hole, in favor of a theory for which there is no evidence, of collusion by the outsider Mr. Trump?

The alternative history is incalculable, but consider: If Mr. Comey had followed established practice, the Hillary investigation would have been closed without an announcement, or the conflicted Ms. Lynch or an underling would have cleared Mrs. Clinton. How would this have played with voters and the media? Would the investigation’s reopening in the race’s final days, with discovery of the Weiner laptop, have taken place? Would the reopening have become public knowledge? CONTINUE AT SITE

In one of the last decisions of its term, the U.S. Supreme Court dealt a clear rebuke to politicized lower courts. The justices’ unanimous ruling in Trump v. International Refugee Assistance Project upholds both the integrity of the judiciary and the Supreme Court’s own authority.

The case came to the justices from two federal appellate courts. They had upheld trial judges’ orders halting enforcement of President Trump’s “travel ban” executive order, which temporarily limits entry to the U.S. by nationals from six countries. The court will hear the appeal on the merits in October. On Tuesday it held unanimously that the executive order can be immediately enforced, with narrow exceptions, until they address the merits of these cases in the fall.

The challenges to the order claimed it violated the First Amendment’s protection of religious freedom and exceeded the president’s authority under immigration law. Both the substance and tone of these decisions created an unmistakable impression that a portion of the judiciary has joined the anti-Trump “resistance.” Not only did the lower-court judges defy clear and binding Supreme Court precedent, they based much of their legal analysis, incredibly, on Candidate Trump’s campaign rhetoric.

The high court didn’t rule entirely in the administration’s favor. By a 6-3 vote, with Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito and Neil Gorsuch dissenting, it held that the individuals who originally challenged the order could continue to do so, as could a carefully defined class of “similarly situated” persons with “close familial” relationships to individuals in the United States, along with institutions that can show a “formal, documented, and formed in the ordinary course” relationship to a U.S. entity.

That, the court specifically cautioned, is not an invitation for evasion by immigration advocates: “For example, a nonprofit group devoted to immigration issues may not contact foreign nationals from the designated countries, add them to client lists, and then secure their entry by claiming injury from their exclusion.”

That exception, Justice Thomas noted for the dissenters, was a “compromise”—most likely the product of Chief Justice John Roberts’s effort to achieve a unanimous decision. Given the circumstances, this was a good outcome. It lends the imprimatur of the full court to the rebuke of the lower courts, and avoids the kind of partisan split that prevailed in both the Fourth and Ninth Circuit Courts of Appeals. All nine justices are also now on record supporting the proposition that the vast majority of foreign nationals cannot claim a constitutional right to enter the United States.

When the court reviews the merits of the case in the fall, however, such considerations will be out of place. While courts can adjudicate cases involving immigration and other foreign affairs issues, judicial engagement in this space is fundamentally different than in domestic affairs. In an area of decision-making that involves both institutional knowledge of international affairs and continuous access to classified information, great deference is in order from the courts. If the courts wade into this area, they would undermine both national security and respect for the judiciary. The perception that judging is swayed by political or ideological considerations would be particularly calamitous in this area. Better a 5-4 decision articulating this view clearly than a unanimous but equivocal one.

The odds of a clear outcome are good. As Justice Thomas pointed out, his colleagues’ “implicit conclusion” is that the administration is likely to prevail on the merits. The high court’s own precedent in this area is clear. Nonresident aliens have no constitutional right to enter the U.S. When denying entry, the president need only provide a “facially legitimate and bona fide” justification. As the court held in Kleindienst v. Mandel (1972), once that justification is established, there is no further inquiry or balancing for the courts to make. CONTINUE AT SITE

This weekend, at a lesbian march in Chicago, three women carrying Jewish pride flags — rainbow flags embossed with a Star of David — were kicked out of the celebration on the grounds that their flags were a “trigger.” An organizer of the Dyke March told the Windy City Times that the fabric “made people feel unsafe” and that she and the other members of the Dyke March collective didn’t want anything “that can inadvertently or advertently express Zionism” at the event.

Laurel Grauer, one of the women who was ejected, said she’d been carrying that Jewish pride flag in the march, held on the Saturday before the city’s official Pride Parade, for more than a decade. It “celebrates my queer, Jewish identity,” she explained. This year, however, she lost track of the number of people who harassed her for carrying it.

I’m sorry for the women, like Ms. Grauer, who found themselves under genuine threat for carrying a colorful cloth falsely accused of being pernicious.

But I am also grateful.

Has there ever been a crisper expression of the consequences of “intersectionality” than a ban on Jewish lesbians from a Dyke March

Intersectionality is the big idea of today’s progressive left. In theory, it’s the benign notion that every form of social oppression is linked to every other social oppression. This observation — coined in 1989 by Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw — sounds like just another way of rephrasing a slogan from a poster I had in college: My liberation is bound up with yours. That is, the fight for women’s rights is tied up with the fight for gay rights and civil rights and so forth. Who would dissent from the seductive notion of a global sisterhood?

Well, in practice, intersectionality functions as kind of caste system, in which people are judged according to how much their particular caste has suffered throughout history. Victimhood, in the intersectional way of seeing the world, is akin to sainthood; power and privilege are profane.

By that hierarchy, you might imagine that the Jewish people — enduring yet another wave of anti-Semitism here and abroad — should be registered as victims. Not quite.

Why? Largely because of Israel, the Jewish state, which today’s progressives see only as a vehicle for oppression of the Palestinians — no matter that Israel has repeatedly sought to meet Palestinian claims with peaceful compromise, and no matter that progressives hold no other country to the same standard. China may brutalize Buddhists in Tibet and Muslims in Xinjiang, while denying basic rights to the rest of its 1.3 billion citizens, but “woke” activists pushing intersectionality keep mum on all that.

One of the women who was asked to leave the Dyke March, Eleanor Shoshany Anderson, couldn’t understand why she was kicked out of an event that billed itself as intersectional. “The Dyke March is supposed to be intersectional,” she said. “I don’t know why my identity is excluded from that. I felt that, as a Jew, I am not welcome here.”

She isn’t. Because though intersectionality cloaks itself in the garb of humanism, it takes a Manichaean view of life in which there can only be oppressors and oppressed. To be a Jewish dyke, let alone one who deigns to support Israel, is a categorical impossibility, oppressor and oppressed in the same person.

That’s why the march organizers and their sympathizers are now trying to smear Ms. Grauer as some sort of right-wing provocateur. Their evidence: She works at an organization called A Wider Bridge, which connects the L.G.B.T.Q. Jewish community in America with the L.G.B.T.Q. community in Israel. The organizers are also making the spurious claim that the Jewish star is necessarily a symbol of Zionist oppression — a breathtaking claim to anyone who has ever seen a picture of a Jew forced to wear a yellow one under the Nazis.

No, the truth is that it was no more and no less than anti-Semitism. Just read Ms. Shoshany Anderson’s account of her experience, which she posted on Facebook after being kicked out of the march.

“I wanted to be in public as a gay Jew of Persian and German heritage. Nothing more, nothing less. So I made a shirt that said ‘Proud Jewish Dyke’ and hoisted a big Jewish Pride flag — a rainbow flag with a Star of David in the center, the centuries-old symbol of the Jewish people,” she wrote. “During the picnic in the park, organizers in their official t-shirts began whispering and pointing at me and soon, a delegation came over, announcing they’d been sent by the organizers. They told me my choices were to roll up my Jewish Pride flag or leave. The Star of David makes it look too much like the Israeli flag, they said, and it triggers people and makes them feel unsafe. This was their complaint.”

She tried to explain that the star is the “ubiquitous symbol of Judaism,” and that she simply wanted “to be Jewish in public.” Then, she “tried using their language,” explaining “this is my intersection. I’m supposed to be able to celebrate it here.”

It didn’t work. Ms. Shoshany Anderson left sobbing. “I was thrown out of Dyke March for being Jewish,” she said. Just so.

For progressive American Jews, intersectionality forces a choice: Which side of your identity do you keep, and which side do you discard and revile? Do you side with the oppressed or with the oppressor?

That kind of choice would have been familiar to previous generations of left-wing Jews, particularly those in Europe, who felt the tug between their ethnic heritage and their “internationalist” ideological sympathies. But this is the United States. Here, progressives are supposed to be comfortable with the idea of hyphenated identities and overlapping ethnic, sexual and political affinities. Since when did a politics that celebrates choice — and choices — devolve into a requirement of being forced to choose?

Jews on the left, particularly in recent years, have attempted to square this growing discomfort by becoming more anti-Israel. But if history has taught the Jews anything it’s that this kind of contortion never ends well.

It may be wrong to read too much into an ugly incident at a single march, but Jews should take what happened in Chicago as a lesson that they might not be as welcome among progressives as they might imagine. That’s a warning for which to be grateful, even as it is a reminder that anti-Semitism remains as much a problem on the far-left as it is on the alt-right.

Bari Weiss (@bariweiss) is a staff editor in The Times opinion section.

It’s not anti-Semitism. It’s anti-Zionism. It just happens to be completely and totally indistinguishable from anti-Semitism.

One marcher, Laurel Grauer, said she was harassed by other Dyke March attendees before being told she needed to leave with her flag.

“It was a flag from my congregation which celebrates my queer, Jewish identity which I have done for over a decade marching in the Dyke March with the same flag,” she told Windy City Times.

“They were telling me to leave because my flag was a trigger to people that they found offensive,” she added. “Prior to this [march] I had never been harassed or asked to leave and I had always carried the flag with me.”

The organizers of the march told the Times the event was a pro-Palestinian and anti-Zionist one and that the flags made people feel unsafe.

One Dyke March collective member, asked by Windy City Times for a response, said the women were told to leave because the flags “made people feel unsafe,” that the march was “anti-Zionist” and “pro-Palestinian.”

“They were telling me to leave because my flag was a trigger to people that they found offensive,” Grauer said. “Prior to this [march] I had never been harassed or asked to leave and I had always carried the flag with me.”

Another of those individuals asked to leave was an Iranian Jew Eleanor Shoshany-Anderson.

“I was here as a proud Jew in all of my identities,” Shoshany-Anderson asserted. “The Dyke March is supposed to be intersectional. I don’t know why my identity is excluded from that. I fell that, as a Jew, I am not welcome here.”

Jews are not welcome in the left. Unless they make war on other Jews. And even then, they eventually get gulaged.