RUTHFULLY YOURS

The Food and Drug Administration can’t possibly fulfill all of the responsibilities it claims to have, and here’s one way the Trump Administration can set better priorities: Direct the agency to end its effort to inform Americans that pizza contains calories.

An FDA rule to take effect May 5 requires chain restaurants to post calorie counts on menus. The regulation also covers movie theaters, grocery stores, breweries and other establishments with more than 20 locations. The rule, required by the Affordable Care Act, has been revised and twice delayed in six years, mostly due to objections from a trade coalition called the American Pizza Community. (Regrettably, it does not issue membership cards.)

The more than 100-page rule, perhaps the longest meditation on fast food ever published, says that pizza purveyors must display per slice calorie ranges. Dominos offers 34 million potential combinations, and the number of pepperonis on a pizza can vary based on whether a customer also tosses on green peppers or something else. FDA suggests displaying verbiage like “pepperoni—200 added calories for a one-topping pizza” for every topping. Better have a calculator when ordering.

The regulation also defines menu to include advertisements or flyers that list a phone number or website for ordering—in other words, marketing material. The restaurant must certify that the store made “reasonable” efforts to ensure that calorie estimates are accurate, though the minds behind this rule don’t sound like reliable arbiters of reasonableness. The penalty for noncompliance is fines, jail or, this being America, class-action lawsuits.

The micromanaging extends to menu font and colors, which must be “the same color or in a color at least as conspicuous” as other types, according to FDA guidance. By the way, none of this will help consumers eat less pizza: Most customers place orders online or over the phone, not from a menu board. Dominos offers an online Cal-O-Meter to help customers know what they’re eating. Restaurants are already required to make this information available in stores and the web for those who wish to know.

Lois Lerner, the former head of the IRS tax exempt division, is asking a federal judge to keep her deposition in a class action lawsuit related to the targeting scandal secret.

Lerner and another IRS manager, Holly Paz, claim they were harassed and received death threats for their role in the scandal and believe that releasing their depositions will lead to further threats.

Washington Times:

The two women submitted secret evidence to the judge that they said backed up the death threat claim. They said the threats they’ve already gotten contained “graphic, profane and disturbing language” that they said has caused them embarrassment.

The groups suing the IRS in the class action lawsuit have objected to the secrecy order, leaving the matter to Judge Barrett to decide.

So Lerner feels “embarrassment”? She is afraid of “threats”? Imagine what went through the minds of ordinary citizens who felt the heavy hand of the IRS tearing apart their lives, asking for the most personal information, and violating the most sacred principles of individual and political freedom.

Suck it up, Lerner, and come clean.

Both Ms. Lerner and Ms. Paz are among the IRS figures who’ve been ordered to be deposed in the class action lawsuit. Ms. Paz already gave one deposition in the case in 2015.

The women want that past deposition and their future testimony to remain hidden from the public and only available to the lawyers involved in the case. They asked that the seal be permanent.

Ms. Lerner has refused to talk in public about her role in the targeting, famously engaging in a showdown with the House Oversight Committee after she appeared, delivered a statement of innocence and then balked at answering any questions.

The House eventually voted to hold her in contempt, but an Obama administration prosecutor — acting just hours before his resignation became effective — announced the Justice Department wouldn’t pursue the case.

The Justice Department also cleared Ms. Lerner in a criminal investigation, saying she was one of the first in the IRS to realize they were acting wrongly, and took steps to clean up the mess.

House Republicans asked Wednesday that the Trump administration reopen the case. They say Ms. Lerner obstructed official investigations and pointed to evidence from emails in which Ms. Lerner mocked conservatives and Republicans as evidence of malice, which the GOP said helped foster the environment that led to tea party groups being targeted by the IRS.

The IRS still faces several legal cases stemming from the targeting.

The class action lawsuit involves 428 groups who were snared by the IRS targeting procedures. That case, which is being heard in a federal court in Ohio, is in the discovery phase, and Ms. Lerner and Ms. Paz are supposed to give testimony.

IRS officials also agreed to turn over the system reports it generated for each of the 428 groups targeted. CONTINUE AT SITE

‘I’m from the government, and I’m here to help.” Ronald Reagan famously described these as “the nine most terrifying words in the English language.” It may be time to propose a two-word corollary.

“Trust us.”

In the end, underneath the geek-speak of encryption, electronic intercepts, forward-looking infrared thermal imaging, satellite surveillance, and sundry collection technologies, that is what the government is really saying when it comes to national security: “Trust us. The intelligence collection we do is important — is essential – to keeping you alive. Oh . . . and don’t ask a lot of questions. You know, can’t discuss that — methods and sources, etc.”

I don’t think that’s going to cut it this time.

Before 2017 is out, we are going to have a brawl over FISA — the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. Specifically, over FISA section 702, on which much of the sprawling American intelligence enterprise is now based. It will lapse if not reauthorized by Congress.

We ought to be headed into that brawl with a sense of how dangerous the world has become: Competitive great-power geopolitics has reemerged, yet international jihadism remains as threatening as ever.

Instead, foremost in our minds will be how readily the government’s awesome intelligence capabilities can be abused. That is the real significance of the controversy over Obama-administration spying on the Trump campaign and transition.

The scandal that CNN is hell-bent on ignoring brings into sharp relief the very abuses the media, echoing civil-liberties activists, have warned against for years: pretextual uses of intelligence-collection powers to spy on political opponents and dissenters. As a national-security conservative with no illusions about government, I’ve acknowledged these concerns. I’ve countered, though, that the powers are, yes, essential to national security. The abuse of power is thus a reason to get rid of the abuser, not the power.

Livonia, Michigan is known as Little Palestine. The Detroit suburb is famous for its anti-Israel meetings. You could go hear Mustafa Barghouthi, Omar Barghouti and Ali Abunimah without taking a long drive.

It’s also known for its shady doctors.

Dr. Murtaza Hussain was busted for letting unlicensed employees diagnose patients and write prescriptions. Dr. Waseem Alam and Dr. Hatem Ataya pleaded guilty in the nation’s largest Medicare fraud case totaling $712 million in false billings centering on Shahid Tahir, Muhammad Tariq and Manavar Javed’s Livonia medical firms. But what was going on at one Livonia clinic was far worse than the theft of millions. Anyone passing by at the right time could hear the screams of little girls.

We think of horrors like female genital mutilation as a terrible thing that happens over “there.” But as the implacable tide of Muslim immigration swept across Europe, “there” became the United Kingdom.

England recorded 5,700 cases of FGM in less than a year. France has jailed 100 people for FGM. An estimated 50,000 women in Germany have undergone FGM with a 30 percent boost due to the rise of Islamic migration in the last several years. In Sweden, it’s 38,000. And now, as American towns and cities are reshaped by Muslim migration, “there” is now right here. The terrible practice is in America.

Sweden was the first Western country to outlaw FGM. But despite the prevalence of FGM in Sweden, there have only been a handful of convictions. The United States banned FGM in 1997. A Federal report in 2012 warned that 513,000 women and girls in the United States were at risk for FGM.

Now after twenty years of the law’s existence, a Muslim doctor has become the first to be charged.

Operating out of a Livonia clinic, Jumana Fakhruddin Nagarwala abused unknown numbers of little girls. The end came when law enforcement traced calls to her from a Minnesota number. Then they followed the trail to a hotel in Farmington Hills; a Michigan city at the center of an Islamic Center controversy.

It was Friday evening; the holy day of the Islamic week when Muslims are told to “leave off business” and “hasten to the remembrance of Allah.” That is what the two women leading two little girls to be mutilated thought that they were doing. Muslims believe that on Friday, angels stand outside the doors of mosques to record who shows up for prayer. But it was the hotel surveillance cameras that watched and recorded as the two little girls arrived, unaware of the horror that was about to happen to them.

The 7-year-old girl had been told that she was going to Detroit for a “special” girls’ trip. Instead her special trip turned into a nightmare. After the Muslim doctor allegedly mutilated her, she warned the child not to talk about what was done to her.

All new Presidencies are works in progress, though the Trump Administration is less fully formed than most. Amid a shaky early start, leaks and personal feuds, power seems to be shifting away from chief White House strategist Steve Bannon and toward President Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner and National Economic Council Director Gary Cohn. This makes sense if it helps Mr. Trump put his White House in order and puts results over melodrama.

The transition from running a boutique family business to an election campaign to the most powerful and complicated government on the planet has a steep learning curve. Mr. Bannon, the former Breitbart website publisher, was an architect of Mr. Trump’s populist insurgency, and he entered the West Wing with the President’s ear.

Yet Mr. Trump told the New York Post’s Michael Goodwin this week that “I like Steve, but you have to remember he was not involved in my campaign until very late.” He followed up with Journal reporters, noting that “I do my own policy, I’m my own strategist” and calling his aide-de-camp “a guy who works for me.” The Time magazine cover story in February billing Mr. Bannon the “shadow president” probably didn’t help his standing with a boss who doesn’t like to be upstaged.

Mr. Bannon was also the author of the Administration’s early miscalculations, including a divisive inaugural address and especially the immigration executive order. The travel ban was overbroad and poorly drafted, got blocked by the courts, energized Democrats and created dozens of media hardship stories.

Mr. Bannon is also getting blame—perhaps more than he deserves—for the ObamaCare repeal-and-replace failure. He couldn’t deliver the ornery conservatives in the House Freedom Caucus, despite issuing a typically blunt ultimatum that they had no choice. But most of the fault lies with the Freedom Caucus’s refusal to compromise that is giving Mr. Trump doubts about the utility of working with conservatives.

Consumers of media may have whiplash from Mr. Bannon’s ebbing influence. Only weeks ago pundits were characterizing Mr. Bannon as the White House’s Rasputin, or Trotsky, but apparently the revolution will be postponed. In recent days sometimes you could almost mistake Mr. Trump for a normal Republican President.

All of this is empowering Messrs. Kushner and Cohn, who are preaching competence and calm. The real-estate heir and former Goldman Sachs No. 2 are expanding their portfolios and Mr. Cohn is running the economic decision-making process.

In the Netflix series House of Cards, President Frank Underwood campaigned for the White House by telling Americans, “You are entitled to nothing.” The fictional president — a Democrat, no less — was forthright with American voters about the unaffordable and unsustainable structure of America’s entitlement programs, and he was rewarded at the polls.

In real-life America, unfortunately, there is no such courageous honesty from the political class. Even many in the Republican party, once the stalwart force fighting against the growth of big government, are now resigned to contemplating a government takeover of the health-care industry in the wake of their failure to repeal and replace Obamacare. Charles Krauthammer, for example, woefully predicts that President Trump will opt for single-payer health care. F. H. Buckley, meanwhile, optimistically calls for Trump to look to the Canadian model of universal coverage.

There’s just one problem: The Canadian model of universal coverage is failing.

Assessing Canada’s Single-Payer System

The Canada Health Act (CHA), introduced in 1984, governs the complicated fiscal agreement between the provinces, who administer health services, and the feds, who manage their health-insurance monopoly and transfer funds to the local governments. Unlike in the United Kingdom, where health care is socialized and hospitals are run by the National Health Service, in Canada health care is technically delivered privately, although given the Kafkaesque regulations and restrictions that govern it, the system is by no means market-based. In fact, Canada’s government-controlled health-care system has become more restrictive than communist China’s.

Debates about health-care policy typically revolve around three key metrics: universality, affordability, and quality.

Canada passes the first test with flying colors: Every resident of the country is insured under the CHA, with covered procedures free at the point of delivery. While medical providers are independent from the federal government, they are compelled to accept CHA insurance —and nothing else — by a prohibition on accepting payments outside the national-insurance scheme so long as they wish to continue accepting federal health-transfer funds. The spigot of money from Ottawa thus ensures a de facto government monopoly in the health-insurance market.

The CHA provides and ensures universal coverage from the top down. In Canada, the government determines what procedures are medically necessary. Bureaucrats, not doctors, decide which procedures and treatments are covered under the CHA — based on data and statistics rather than on the needs of patients. While private insurance does exist — an OECD report found that 75 percent of Canadians have supplementary insurance — it applies only to procedures and services that fall outside the CHA — including dental work, optometric care, and pharmaceutical drugs.

When it comes to affordability, the Canadian system also passes, if just barely. Canadians pay for health insurance through their taxes; most never see a medical bill. But that doesn’t mean the system is affordable. Au contraire, it relies almost entirely on current taxpayers to subsidize the disproportionately large health-care needs of elderly Canadians in their final few years of life. Rather than pre-funding the system to deal with the coming tsunami of aging Baby Boomers, Canada’s provincial governments pay and borrow as they go — and rank among the most indebted sub-sovereign borrowers in the world. According to Don Drummond, an economist appointed by Ontario’s Liberal government to help fix its finances, Canada’s largest province is projected to see health-care costs soar to the point where they will consume 80 percent of the entire provincial budget by 2030, up from 46 percent in 2010.