RUTHFULLY YOURS

According to CBS Baltimore, the city is nearing 160 homicides and already before halfway through 2017. Shockingly, six people were murdered in the span of just 24 hours.

Because of the increase in violent crimes, Baltimore officers have been given mandatory 12-hour shifts where they will go door-to-door, canvassing the neighborhoods where most of the violence is taking place.

Baltimore has been troubled since the Black Lives Matter riots over the death of Freddie Gray who died in police custody. Then-Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake was criticized for bowing to the rioters who injured police officers, giving those “who wished to destroy” the space to do so.

Inheriting that mess is Democratic Mayor Catherine Pugh, who said illegal guns are the city’s biggest problem now.

“It should at least be a felony to carry an illegal gun,” Pugh said. “There’s too many illegal guns on streets of our city.”

Pugh is working to ensure criminals with violent backgrounds stay in jail and can’t get their hands on firearms.

Among the nearly 160 dead is 27-year-old Sebastian Dvorak, who was robbed and gunned down while out with his friends. His killer is still on the run.

Then there was the 37-year-old mother of eight children, Charmaine Wilson, who was murdered after a fight between a group of boys over a bike that belonged to one of her sons. Her killer hasn’t been found, either.

Baltimore police spokesman T.J. Smith said, “There is a murderer among us who is an absolutely monstrous human being. This is something that should outrage the entire community, entire city, because there are cowards walking around that took this mother, killed a woman over a dispute.”

Police are asking for tips or video to help in locating these suspects.

The father of Otto Warmbier, an American college student imprisoned in North Korea until this week, speaks about his experience working with the Trump administration to free his son. He delivered a short press conference at his local high school in Wyoming, OH Thursday morning.

FRED WARMBIER: When Otto was first taken, we were advised by the past administration to take a low profile while they worked to obtain his release. We did so without result. Earlier this year, Cindy and I decided the time for strategic patience was over.

We made a few media appearances and traveled to Washington to meet with [Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Korea and Japan] Ambassador Joe Yun at the State Department.

It is my understanding that Ambassador Yun and his team, at the direction of the president aggressively pursued resolution of the situation.

They have our thanks for bringing him home.

Alexandria, Virginia shooter James T. Hodgkinson was certainly angry about the direction of the country, but his vision of America was prosaic and predictable—ripped from the pages of the Huffington Post. Branding himself a member of the “99 percent,” he advocated higher taxes on the rich, according to letters he sent to a local newspaper. He opposed the repeal of the Affordable Care Act, wanted Democrats to filibuster the nomination of Supreme Court nominee Neil Gorsuch, and supported the proposed Presidential Accountability Act, which extends conflict-of-interest laws for federal officials to the president and vice president, who are currently exempt. In other words, his was not the religious fervor of the jihadist seeking a caliphate, nor did he envision the sweeping historical dialectic of Das Kapital. His ideas weren’t even as dramatic as the cultural revolution imagined by the 1960s’ Yippie manifesto. Yet Hodgkinson was apparently willing to kill for higher marginal tax rates, stricter conflict-of-interest laws, and Obamacare. His was a terrorism constructed out of the narcissism of small differences.

Hodgkinson’s act only seems astonishing if you haven’t been paying attention to politics lately. When Donald Trump entered the Oval Office, he faced an opposition that ranged from virtually all Democrats to a generous collection of Republicans and conservatives. Many of us had already leveled a fair amount of criticism at him for his political ideas (or lack of them) and his temperament. Still, the early Trump presidency has been striking for the hyperbolic rhetoric that has accompanied almost any policy associated with his administration, including mundane ideas that he adopted from others after taking office. Republican efforts to replace the ACA—President Obama’s signature piece of domestic legislation, which is failing—with a modest bill that doesn’t go nearly as far as some wish has been branded by politicians and columnists as an “act of cruelty” likely to cost millions of lives. Those assertions have little grounding in the truth. Meanwhile, even the most modest cuts in Trump’s first budget have sparked comparisons with Ebenezer Scrooge. When, for instance, Trump’s budget director proposed eliminating a decades-old “anti-poverty” program that has never been shown to alleviate poverty, dishes out millions to wealthy communities to build amenities, and shrunk to a mere $3 billion annually under President Obama, critics called the move “devastating” and “an utter disaster,” sure to provoke “a crisis” in communities. That was mild stuff compared to what greeted the confirmation of charter school advocate Betsy DeVos as education secretary, including a tweet from a Vanity Fair editor who claimed her “policies will kill children.”

Hodgkinson apparently took much of this to heart. Though he displayed fits of anger and intolerance in the past, what apparently drove him into a murderous rage late in life was his fear that Trump was undermining progressive gains. To him, that amounted to Trump being a “traitor,” someone the resistance needed to “destroy.” His was an extreme version of the absolutism that has gripped the opposition, which must describe every idea associated with the Trump administration and every individual working in it in apocalyptic terms. This ignores the political reality that Trump’s most radical proposals have little chance of succeeding because of Republican opposition, and that his biggest accomplishments are almost certain to be the kinds of ideological course corrections that occur whenever the president of one party is succeeded by one from the other party.

Hodgkinson’s rage over Trump is even more troubling than the jihadist’s fervor or the anarchist’s nihilism because radicals are in pursuit of something far more transformational and unlikely than what Hodgkinson envisions. To many conservatives, including those who opposed Trump, the message in all of this is that the forces of resistance seem to be aimed not at Trump alone but at every idea that doesn’t fit their narrow agenda. No wonder that even centrist Democrats worry that their party is becoming as extreme—and narcissistic—as some Trumpian elements of the GOP.

Special Counsel Robert S. Mueller III is expanding his investigation into the Left’s Russian electoral collusion conspiracy theory by examining whether President Trump tried to obstruct justice in the probe, according to the hyper-partisan leak-stenographers at the Washington Post.

It is all nonsense.

Democrats and Never Trump Republicans are setting up perjury traps just as Democrats did during Watergate and countless other investigations. But Donald Trump is no Richard Nixon. There is no evidence Trump covered up a crime, or even that there was an underlying crime to be covered up. But the longer the investigation goes on, the greater the likelihood that someone will innocently contradict himself in a deposition, giving evidence that doesn’t mesh with what was originally said to an FBI investigator. And voila! Someone who wasn’t a criminal goes to prison without forming any bad intent.

The obstruction allegation stems from statements made by former FBI Director James B. Comey who claims President Trump ordered him to end an investigation into former National Security Advisor Mike Flynn’s ties to Russia. Trump denies it even though he has the authority under the Constitution to fire Comey for any reason or no reason at all. Comey himself admitted he served at the pleasure of the president.

If the news report is accurate, it means that the president is under investigation now even though he apparently wasn’t as of May 9, the day he fired Comey, who has since outed himself as a leaker of information about Trump. The notes he took during discussions with Trump are considered his work product and therefore property of the U.S. government that he has a duty to surrender to investigators. Additionally, Comey have committed a crime when he leaked the notes.

“The FBI leak of information regarding the president is outrageous, inexcusable and illegal,” said Mark Corallo, on behalf of Marc Kasowitz, Trump’s personal attorney.

Now that the likelihood of Trump or any of his associates being found to have colluded with Russia to rig the last election has dropped to approximately zero for want of evidence, this Deep State-sponsored political theater is moving on to the next best thing: obstruction of justice, a perennial crowd pleaser in the snake pit that is Washington.

And the Left now has an added incentive to push the obstruction narrative because they don’t want to talk about how one of their own, unemployed Trump-hating Bernie Sanders supporter James T. Hodgkinson, late of a white cargo van parked on the streets of Alexandria, Va., came close to assassinating House Majority Whip Steve Scalise (R-La.) at a baseball practice on Wednesday morning.

President Trump, who turned 71 Wednesday, called out the Washington establishment for the all-too-convenient narrative shift.

“They made up a phony collusion with the Russians story, found zero proof, so now they go for obstruction of justice on the phony story. Nice[,]” Trump tweeted yesterday at 6:55 a.m.

An hour later he followed up with: “You are witnessing the single greatest WITCH HUNT in American political history – led by some very bad and conflicted people! #MAGA[.]”

This move toward possible obstruction charges by Mueller “marks a major turning point in the nearly year-old FBI investigation, which until recently focused on Russian meddling during the presidential campaign and on whether there was any coordination between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin,” wrote reporters at the Post. “Investigators have also been looking for any evidence of possible financial crimes among Trump associates, officials said.”

The rush to impeach President Trump is on by an opposition party that lacks the votes, evidence or legal basis for such a move. But since when did an illegal left-wing coup need any of those things?

No Dem has been more honest about the real motive for impeachment than Congressman Ted Lieu.

“We should not give him a chance to govern,” Lieu had declared after Trump had been in office for ten days. And he predicted that, “I do believe that if we win back the House of Representatives, impeachment proceedings will be started.”

What was the basis for impeaching President Trump after ten days in office? Lieu made it clear that if the Democrats won, they would try to impeach Trump no matter what.

That’s not how things work in the United States. But the left is running America like a banana republic.

More recently Lieu had mused that, “A recent poll came out saying that 46 percent of Americans want the president impeached, and certainly members of Congress take notice.”

And what better basis could there be for impeachment than popular Dem support for the move?

The latest poll from PPP, the notorious left-wing troll pollsters Lieu was relying on, shows 75% of Democrats support impeaching President Trump. PPP did not provide any justification. Nor was any needed. President Trump had to be forced out of office to reverse the results of the 2016 election.

The legal basis for such proceedings was as irrelevant as any coup in a banana republic.

Congressman Lieu is a member of the House Judiciary Committee. He’s indicated recently that he’s “researching” impeachment. His statement on being appointed to the Committee claimed that Trump had “lost the popular vote” and that he would “fight like hell on the Judiciary Committee” against him.

Since Lieu has made it clear that his pursuit of impeachment is based on partisan opposition, not evidence, any such action would be an unethical abuse of power whose goal is not justice, but a conspiracy to prevent the President of the United States from even having the “chance to govern”.

This could lead to censure and even expulsion; the Congressional alternative to impeachment.

Congressman Brad Sherman has drafted articles of impeachment for President Trump. The claims in Sherman’s draft contradict, in part, Comey’s testimony even as it claims to be based on it. But it still puts the California politician ahead as the first to put forward a written legislative call for impeachment.

But that’s only because most of his rivals can’t write.

Congressman Al Green (not the Rock and Roll Hall of Famer who crooned “Put a Little Love in Your Heart”) called for the impeachment of President Trump on the House floor in the name of “liberty and justice for all” and also “government of the people, by the people, for the people”.

And how better to stand for “government by the people” than with a shameless attempt to overturn the results of a democratic election and for “liberty and justice for all” than to undertake it baselessly?

“No one is above the law,” Al Green declared. Except maybe Green who was accused of sexual assault by a former aide. Green in turn accused her of blackmail. Put a little love in your heart indeed.

This isn’t Green’s first call for impeachment. A previous Green statement, which read like it was written by a high school dropout who had been watching too many legal dramas, (“A bedrock premise upon which respect for, and obedience to, our societal norms is ‘No one is above the law’”) concluded with “Our mantra should be I. T. N. – Impeach Trump Now.” That’s been the mantra ever since Trump won.

Sherman and Green are far behind Congresswoman Maxine Waters who has been calling for the impeachment of every Republican since Ulysses S. Grant. Last month, she complained that the public was “weary” that Trump still hadn’t been impeached. “I believe that this man has done enough for us to determine that we can connect the dots, that we can get the facts that will lead to impeachment.”

If anyone ought to be impeached, it’s Waters who funneled $750,000 to her daughter and used her influence to help arrange for the taxpayer bailout of a bank linked to her husband.

But Waters has made it obvious that it’s not about the law, it’s about undoing the election results.

At the Center for American Progress, Waters rejected waiting until the next election. “We can’t wait that long. We don’t need to wait that long.” Pointing to left-wing polls backing impeachment, she screeched. “What more do we need in the Congress of the United States of America?”

Maybe evidence?

Waters had already admitted that there was no actual evidence, but impeachment should move forward anyway. There isn’t any evidence for impeachment, but there is documented evidence that Waters can’t tell Crimea from Korea. Much as there is evidence that Congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee, who also called for Trump’s impeachment, can’t tell Wikileaks from Wikipedia.

Sheila Jackson Lee insisted that Trump should be impeached if he doesn’t prove Obama’s eavesdropping.

“If you do not have any proof,” she rambled, “then you are clearly on the edge of the question of public trust and those actions can be associated with high crimes and misdemeanors for which articles of impeachment can be drawn.”

The only high crimes belong to Sheila Jackson Lee, who had once declared on CNN, “I represent Enron.” She should have gone to jail along with its top bosses.

Lee had also claimed that the Constitution is 400 years old and that she was a freed slave.

“I’m concerned about what happened when we get that call about North Korea in the middle of the night,” she blathered. “You have in office an individual that is unread and unlearned.”

And this is coming from a woman who had confused North Korea and Vietnam.

Meanwhile Sheila Jackson Lee had been investigated by the House Ethics Committee for a trip to Azerbaijan paid for by the State Oil Company of Azerbaijan. SOCAR has a joint venture with Rosneft. Back then that meant Vladimir Putin. Maybe Sheila Jackson Lee ought to impeach herself.

“I think about impeachment every single day,” Congresswoman Eddie Bernice Johnson said.

And well she should.

Johnson pushed Congressional Black Caucus scholarships that were supposed to go to “deserving students” to her relatives. She even sent letters directing that the money be paid to them, not the colleges, in violation of the foundation rules. And then she went on CNN and lied about it.

The loudest voices in Congress calling for impeachment don’t belong in Congress. That’s typical enough.

I appreciate Rich’s mention of my column on the homepage about why it is vital that legitimate limits, as provided by federal regulation, be imposed on Robert Mueller’s special counsel investigation. I want to elaborate on this a bit more in the context of what Rich’s post addresses: the leak indicating that Mueller’s investigation is already straying significantly from the matter of Trump campaign collusion with Russia – the evidently unsupported narrative that was supposed to be Mueller’s focus.

Rich notes the Washington Post’s report that “officials” say that Mueller’s “investigators have also been looking for any evidence of possible financial crimes among Trump’s associates.” The New York Times’s version of the leak is more enlightening, elucidating how much of a fishing expedition the financial angle seems to be:

A former senior official said Mr. Mueller’s investigation was looking at money laundering by Trump associates. The suspicion is that any cooperation with Russian officials would most likely have been in exchange for some kind of financial payoff, and that there would have been an effort to hide the payments, probably by routing them through offshore banking centers.

Allow me to translate: The investigators have no evidence of Trump campaign coordination with Russia and, if it is possible, they have even less cause to believe there was a bribe (for the coordination that did not happen), and less still to believe the bribe (that there’s no reason to believe happened) was conveyed in a deceptive manner that amounted to a felony money-laundering violation.

Get it? In the absence of an evidentiary predicate for a criminal investigation, a bunch of smart lawyers are theorizing that if there had been some kind of collusion, there might have been a money trail. On that pretext, they have moved on to a new crime they speculate, but have no evidence, may have occurred. This enables them to start poking around people’s banking records, business ledgers, tax returns and the like.

Inevitably, it will be forgotten that there was no evidence of the collusion, of the bribery for the collusion, or of the money laundering for the bribery for the collusion – i.e., no evidence supporting the rationale for the fishing expedition. Instead, Mueller’s team will be on to theorizing financial irregularities that have utterly no connection to Russia, the election, collusion, or anything that the investigation was supposed to be about in the first place.

This is a huge problem with defining Mueller’s jurisdiction in terms of the counterintelligence investigation, as deputy attorney general Rod Rosenstein did, in violation of the governing regulation.

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.