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Baltimore Anti-Cop Consent Decree Imposed Judge Bredar slaps down Sessions’ pleas — as the Ferguson effect grabs hold. April 11, 2017 Matthew Vadum

An Obama-appointed judge is moving forward with a federal takeover of the Baltimore, Md. police department that critics say will boost crime there by handcuffing police officers in the increasingly violent city.

The pleas of U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions fell on deaf ears as U.S. District Judge James K. Bredar, appointed by President Obama in 2010, denied a request from Sessions to hold off on enforcing the consent decree drafted by cop-haters for at least 30 days so the new Trump administration could assess the underlying settlement.

“The time for negotiating the agreement is over,” Bredar wrote this past Friday, April 7. “The only question now is whether the Court needs more time to consider the proposed decree. It does not.”

Sessions said he’s in favor of reform but has “grave concerns that some provisions of this decree will reduce the lawful powers of the police department and result in a less safe city.”

The consent decree in U.S. v. Police Department of Baltimore City was signed by both sides on Jan. 12, 2017 as President Obama was packing his bags at the White House. (The consent decree may be read here. Bredar’s order requiring immediate enforcement of the decree, may be read here.)

Sessions said the provisions of the consent decree were “negotiated during a rushed process by the previous administration,” and at a time when “Baltimore is facing a violent crime crisis.”

Cops across America are shirking their duties because they are quite justifiably afraid of being called racist. This is called the “Ferguson effect,” because it took hold after an August 2014 police shooting of a black suspect in the St. Louis, Mo., suburbs led to huge race riots and catapulted the violent, racist Black Lives Matter movement to national and international prominence.

Sessions said:

Baltimore has seen a 22 percent increase in violent crime in just the last year. While arrests in the city fell 45 percent based on some of these ill-advised reforms, homicides rose 78 percent and shootings more than doubled. Just in 2017, we’ve seen homicides are up another 42 percent compared to this time last year. In short, the citizens of Baltimore are plagued by a rash of violent crime that shows no signs of letting up.

Within the consent decree “there are clear departures from many proven principles of good policing that we fear will result in more crime.”

Swamp Diving: The EPA’s Secret Human Experiment Regime By John Dunn and Steve Milloy

The authors have written numerous essays since 2010 for American Thinker on California’s Environmental Protection Agency (Cal EPA)’s and the U.S. EPA’s scientific misconduct related to air pollution human effects science, and more recently on the discovery that the U.S. EPA was sponsoring and paying for illegal and unethical experiments exposing human subjects, even children, to small particle air pollution at high levels. Small particles originate from natural and man-made sources, such as dust, smoke, and engine and industrial emissions. The U.S. EPA claims that small particles are toxic and lethal and cause cancer.

The EPA position on small particle air pollution

The issue of small particle air pollution human effects was discussed in a House of Representatives hearing in September 2011 by the U.S. EPA administrator, Lisa Jackson. In a colloquy with Representative Ed Markey (D-Mass.), Ms. Jackson stated, “Particulate matter causes premature death. It’s directly causal to dying sooner than you should.”

Markey asked, “How would you compare [the benefits of reducing airborne PM2.5] to the fight against cancer?”

Ms. Jackson replied, “Yeah, I was briefed not long ago. If we could reduce particulate matter to healthy levels, it would have the same impact as finding a cure for cancer in our country.”

Markey: “Can you say that sentence one more time?”

Jackson: “Yes sir. If – um – we could reduce particulate matter to levels that are healthy, we could have identical impacts to finding a cure for cancer.” (Author note: Cancer kills a half-million Americans a year – 25 percent of all deaths in the U.S. annually).

The claim stated above by Ms. Jackson is the basis for the EPA’s war on coal, fossil fuels, and internal combustion engines. All other criteria air pollutants are minimal concerns for the EPA. Surely small particles are a very toxic and lethal thing, as bad as cancer. Right?

EPA is discovered doing human experiments

The same month as Ms. Jackson’s testimony, Milloy discovered a report in Environmental Health Perspectives, a journal published online and in hard copy by the National Institutes of Health, that reported an experiment on a 57-year-old lady subjected to small particle air pollution much higher than the EPA says is safe, in a chamber at the University of North Carolina School of Medicine EPA laboratory for human research. A stunned Milloy showed the journal report to Dunn. So little had come of the decade of human experiments before that Milloy and Dunn had not known of the EPA human exposure experiments project that was at least illegal and unethical, possibly a crime against humanity. Humans are not guinea pigs.

The Nuremberg Code; the Helsinki Accords; the Belmont Report; and U.S. common law, statutes, and regulations, to include state laws and the Federal Code “Common Rule” and EPA rule 1000.17, all prohibit human experimentation that might cause harm to the subjects. Human risk can be considered only for the researchers themselves in circumstances where the research is essential and vital. The civil or criminal offense of human experimentation that risks harm to the subjects would be either exposure to harm or the fear of harm by infliction of mental distress if subjects found out that the public position of the EPA is that small particles are toxic and lethal and cause cancer. Which lie to believe? That is the twist – you can’t make these things up.

In 2011 and 2012, Milloy and Dunn wrote letters to the EPA, the NIH journal editor who published the article, the EPA inspector general, and the federal Office for Scientific Integrity. They wrote to all the physicians in Congress, all the deans of the ten domestic medical schools doing human experiments, and state medical boards in North Carolina and Michigan, all attempting to stop the human experiments.

The authors have written about the EPA project of research that exposed human beings of all ages, even children, to that same small particle air pollution to see if they could cause some harm. EPA sponsorship of these studies at ten domestic and six foreign medical schools was admitted under oath by an EPA official, Wayne Cascio, M.D., and it is unethical and illegal. Senior EPA research scientist Robert Devlin, Ph.D. admitted in a sworn affidavit that the EPA epidemiology was unreliable, the reason for human experiments.

EPA hires the National Academy of Science

The EPA, in response to a congressional inquiry and negative inspector general report, engaged and paid the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) contract subdivision, the National Research Council (NRC), to provide a whitewash investigation. The NAS National Research Council Investigative Committee was convened in secret without notice and without contacting Milloy and Dunn, the complaining parties, or the congressional committee that had demanded an inspector general report that had gone badly for the EPA.

The Silencing of Heather Mac Donald Lofty college statements on free speech are worthless without enforcement. By William McGurn

No one who knows her could ever describe Heather Mac Donald as a victim.

Still, last Thursday night the Manhattan Institute scholar became the latest target of the latter-day Red Guards bringing chaos to so many American campuses. Ms. Mac Donald had been invited to talk about her book “The War on Cops” at Claremont McKenna College’s Marian Miner Cook Athenaeum. Among her arguments is that if you truly believe black lives matter, maybe you should recognize “there is no government agency more dedicated to the proposition” than the police who protect the law-abiding minority residents of high-crime neighborhoods.

You can imagine how well that goes over. At City Journal, Ms. Mac Donald offers a first-person account of that ugly evening. The day before, she says, event organizers told her they were considering changing the venue to a building with fewer glass windows to break. Such are the considerations these days on the modern American campus.

That evening Ms. Mac Donald ended up live-streaming her talk to a mostly empty auditorium as protesters outside banged on the windows and shouted. As a result, she could take only two questions before authorities deemed it prudent to hustle her out for her own security. As if out of central casting, the vice president for academic affairs and president of the college each issued mealy-mouthed statements supporting her.

With one hopeful difference.

In his note defending the university’s decision not to make arrests or force the hall open, CMC President Hiram Chodosh did say that students who blocked people from entering the Athenaeum “will be held accountable.” On Monday, a university spokeswoman, Joann Young, confirmed in an email that students found responsible face a range of sanctions including “temporary or permanent separation from the college.”

If true these are welcome words. For the main reason our colleges and universities are increasingly plagued by these illiberal disturbances is that there are seldom hard consequences for those who commit them.

At Yale, for example, when lecturer Erika Christakis sent an email declaring that students should make their own decisions about Halloween costumes—even when the costumes might be “a little bit obnoxious,” she wrote—it set off a storm of protest. Her husband, Nicholas Christakis, a master of one of Yale’s colleges, was surrounded by screaming students. CONTINUE AT SITE

The Case Against Legalizing Unknown Millions of Illegal Aliens A supposed “solution” that would be catastrophic for America. April 10, 2017 Michael Cutler

At least as far back as the administration of Jimmy Carter, the immigration debate has been waged by globalists who have, over time, succeeded in hijacking the language and terminology applied to immigration.

Consider that Jimmy Carter: Orignator of the Orwellian Term “Undocumented Immigrant,” understood that by removing the term “alien” from discussions about immigration he could, over time, subvert the debate by confounding the public’s understanding about the entire immigration issue.

Carter insisted that INS employees immediately stop using the term “Illegal Alien” to describe aliens who were illegally present in the United States but refer to them as being “undocumented aliens.”

Today many politicians and journalists claim that illegal aliens who run America’s borders, thereby evading the inspections process conducted at ports of entry, have entered the United States “undocumented.”

In actuality, aliens who evade the inspections process enter the United States without inspection. This creates a huge threat to national security and public safety, after all, Entry Without Inspection = Entry Without Vetting.

Additionally, aliens who enter the United States through ports of entry but then go on to violate the terms of their admission, depending on the category of visa they used to enter the United States, certainly are not making “undocumented” entries.

However, to the globalists and immigration anarchists, these facts are merely speed bumps that need to be overcome so that they can craft their false narrative.

One of America’s most cherished symbols is the Statue of Liberty that is equated with America’s rich and diverse immigrant heritage. Over time his strategy of altering the terminology succeeded in convincing huge numbers of Americans that anyone who would interfere with the flow of “immigrants” into the United States was acting against America’s culture and traditions.

The media was quick to jump on the bandwagon and identified to immigration anarchists who oppose secure borders and effective immigration law enforcement as being “Pro-Immigrant” while branding advocates for effective immigration law enforcement as “Anti-Immigrant.”

Of course if honest and accurate nomenclature was used the two sides should be referred as as “Immigration Anarchists” vs “Pro “Immigration Law Enforcement.”

However the agenda is to eradicate America’s borders which, to the globalists, are impediment to their wealth and political power.

How to Craft an Effective, Politically Viable Repeal-and-Replace Bill It’s easier than you think. By Aaron Hedlund

The collapse of the American Health Care Act in the House did nothing to change one fundamental reality: Republicans simply don’t have the luxury of failing when it comes to repealing and replacing Obamacare. No other campaign promise has galvanized conservative voters more over the past seven years; failure to keep it will irreparably sever trust and demoralize the grassroots as the 2018 midterms approach.

Given the united Democratic opposition, inside-the-bubble D.C. thinking has made the tug-of-war between Republican moderates and the Freedom Caucus into an impossible zero-sum game. But a viable path for free-market health-care reform still exists — if Republicans in Congress can coalesce around some key ideas, such as pursuing smart insurance deregulation that puts families back in charge, creating a targeted and robust free-market safety net, and unleashing productivity and innovation by unshackling the health-care-delivery system.

Separating Insurance from Redistribution

True insurance spreads the risk of unknown future events and sets premiums individually based on projected claims. Imagine two groups of people, Group A and Group B. Those in Group A have a 5 percent chance of experiencing a severe health episode that generates $100,000 in claims and a 95 percent chance of zero health expenses. Ignoring profit margins — which, despite the wild hyperbole, are quite small — Group A’s annual premiums should equal 5 percent of $100,000, or $5,000. The lucky 95 percent pays the $5,000 premium despite generating no actual expenses. The unlucky 5 percent faces $100,000 in claims, but insurance kicks in to cover the bill. Those in Group B, meanwhile, face a 10 percent chance of experiencing a severe health episode. In a properly functioning insurance market, their annual premiums would be twice as high as Group A’s — $10,000 — because they present twice the risk to insurers.

Unfortunately, the market created by Obamacare does not function properly because the law enacts community-rating restrictions to subsidize the higher-risk Group B at Group A’s expense. In practical terms, Obamacare forces Group A to overpay for insurance so that Group B underpays, subjecting both groups to an individual mandate as a way of preventing Group A from walking away. Essentially, the law taxes the young and healthy to subsidize the old and sick under the pretext of “consumer protection.” This de facto insurance-premium tax is worse than even a typical tax because it destabilizes insurance markets by causing a cascade of rising premiums and fleeing customers, which then forces market consolidation as many insurers follow suit and depart.

The best way to fix this problem, restoring affordability and stability to the health-care sector, is to unleash market competition by stripping away Obamacare’s insurance mandates. But while deregulating insurance markets is likely to win the support of the Freedom Caucus, moderates may worry — not without reason — that removing these “protections” will make insurance unaffordable for people with preexisting conditions, even as it dramatically lowers premiums for the vast majority of Americans. Which means that deregulation of the market can’t be the only feature of any repeal-and-replace proposal.

Yale Medical School…..Teaching doctors to give hormones to ‘transgendered’ pre-teens By Ed Straker!!!!!

Medicine continues to advance! That may explain why Yale Medical School is teaching doctors in training to give hormones and puberty blockers to kids who claim they are “transgendered”.

Hannah is a 14-year-old girl, clad in leggings and an oversize T-shirt, with long brown hair that she curls around a finger. She was also born a boy.

Hannah is using a puberty-blocking implant and getting ready to embark on the path of developing a female body by starting estrogen. Ten years ago most doctors would have called this malpractice. New data has now made it the protocol for thousands of American children.

Being transgender doesn’t affect Hannah much. She is a straight-A student and auditioning for her school’s production of “Annie.” She’s both embarrassed and excited to talk about the two boys who asked her out this year.

“I turned to him and said, ‘You know I’m transgender, right?’” she tells me. “He said that he knows I’m transgender and that he also knows I’m pretty and sweet.”

Wait… so the boy is gay? Or is the boy really a girl? I need subtitles for this relationship!

Taking her red cheeks as a sign to change the subject, we switch back to medicine. I feel around her bicep, where a hard rod just beneath her skin releases a drug that turns off the brain cells that would otherwise kick off puberty.

Does this being done to a child disturb anyone else but me?

The implant has been in place for two years, preventing the process that would have deepened her voice and given her an Adam’s apple. She has been happy with the blocker, but is ready to move on.

At 10, after a yearlong psychological evaluation, she underwent a nonmedical “social transition.” This meant changing her name from Jonah to Hannah, wearing girls’ clothes and using female pronouns. She went from the frustrated boy wearing a yarmulke to the bubbly child wearing a dress and joining the girls’ bunk at summer camp.

I wonder how the girls at her summer’s camp felt seeing a “girl” with a penis in their showers?

A Trump Nomination Shows He’s Serious About Deregulation The president picks a law professor to lead the most important office you’ve never heard of. By Susan Dudley

President Trump on Friday reinforced how serious he is about reforming the regulatory state by nominating Neomi Rao to head the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs. The OIRA administrator, or “regulatory czar,” is the ultimate policy wonk. Ms. Rao, a respected legal scholar with experience in all three branches of government, is ideally suited to the job.

OIRA, which operates within the president’s Office of Management and Budget, may be the most important office you’ve never heard of. Its staff of fewer than 50 career professionals reviews the regulatory, information-collection and statistical activities of federal agencies. That may not sound exciting, but regulation is one of the most direct and powerful ways by which a president can advance his policies.

President Obama used regulation to get around Congress in pursuit of initiatives on climate change, immigration, worker pay and more. President Trump has promised to reverse those regulations and directed agencies to eliminate two old rules for every new one they issue.

OIRA allows the president to manage the regulatory authority that Congress has delegated to the executive branch. By some estimates regulations cost Americans more than $2 trillion a year, and every president since Reagan has recognized that letting agencies make policy without White House oversight would be like giving them a blank check on their budgets.

The next OIRA administrator will enforce Mr. Trump’s executive order that agencies eliminate costly regulations while identifying those that still provide significant net benefits. That will require principled and pragmatic leadership, and Ms. Rao has the experience, intellect and character for the job. She is an associate professor at George Mason University’s Antonin Scalia Law School, where she founded and directs the Center for the Study of the Administrative State. She directs a committee on regulatory policy for the American Bar Association. In addition to a sharp legal mind, Ms. Rao brings an openness to different perspectives and an ability to manage the competing demands of regulatory policy.

I served as OIRA administrator for the last two years of the George W. Bush administration and, like many others who held the position, consider it one of the best jobs in government. If confirmed, Ms. Rao will be involved in a dizzying range of issues and work with senior appointees across the government to implement important policies that affect people’s daily lives. CONTINUE AT SITE

Reviving Repeal and Replace The GOP is running out of time as insurance markets deteriorate.

Republicans left Washington on Friday without a health-care deal, despite renewed negotiations after last month’s fiasco and a burst of White House diplomacy. Perhaps the two-week recess will be a cooling-off period and we hope the House’s factions can agree on a deal. If they can’t, then at least we’ll learn who’s responsible for defeat.

After the Freedom Caucus killed the original health bill in March, the talks resumed, not least for practical and political imperatives. President Trump and Republicans campaigned on repeal and replace, and the President at least wants to keep his word. The ObamaCare exchanges are also fragile and precarious, and consumers harmed by rising premiums and declining choices are likely to blame the party in power.

But the divide between conservatives and centrists hasn’t narrowed. Last week, in part to create the appearance of progress, the House added an amendment on “invisible risk sharing” that would help bring down premiums by absorbing high-cost patients. The compromise was worked out by the Freedom Caucus’s David Schweikert of Arizona and Tom MacArthur of New Jersey, who is more moderate.
These talks are constructive, though the larger question is whether most of the Freedom Caucus members want a bill they can back or are merely trying to shift the blame for failure. They say they’ll support a bill that repeals, or creates a state waiver to avoid, the ObamaCare mandates that prohibit insurers from denying coverage or charging more to patients based on pre-existing conditions. The Freedom Caucus is right that these mandates drive up the cost of insurance, but the moderates understandably don’t want to have a debate about how much to soak the sickest patients.

One reason is that this fight is largely pointless. True, the House bill doesn’t repeal the “community rating” that limits how much premiums can vary among consumers, but it does relax it enough to be effective repeal. Under ObamaCare, the costliest plan can be no more than three times as expensive as the cheapest, known as a 3 to 1 rating band. The House bill moves to a 5 to 1 band, which is above the true cost of care.

The Millstones of the Gods Grind Late, but They Grind Fine :Victor Davis Hanson

The latest disclosures that former Obama national-security adviser Susan Rice may have requested that intelligence agencies reveal or “unmask” those from the Trump team who were surveilled in purportedly normal intelligence gathering — and that such requests may have extended over an apparently considerable period of time — remind us that at some point there is always an accounting.

Rice’s past serial and shameless untruths about the tragic deaths at Benghazi (a 2012 Obama re-election “al-Qaeda on the run” narrative, with a supposedly spontaneous riot over a YouTube video as the cause of the attack) were contextualized by the media and eventually vaporized.

Her sad “honor and distinction” narrative about the Bowe Bergdahl betrayal of his comrades — the infamous purported “prisoner of war” “captured on the battlefield” fabrication — was intended to mask what was otherwise a dishonest and terrible hostage swap for someone who had endangered the lives of his fellow soldiers.

Recently, she has denied all knowledge of what House Intelligence chairman Devin Nunes had been fighting to uncover, and has even tweeted periodically to criticize the purported ethical lapses and unprofessionalism of the Trump administration.

All that is a lot for even the gods to grind. If, as likely, she had access to, or requested, such raw data, and sent it, with names illegally unmasked, to primary players of the Obama administration (e.g., Clapper, Brennan, Rhodes, etc.), that fact would blow up some heretofore denials of any knowledge of such skullduggery and perhaps become the greatest presidential scandal of the last half century.

The Rice revelation might also put into the proper landscape the following:

a) the astounding self-confessionals of Hillary adviser Evelyn Farkas about her frantic efforts to convince Obama operatives to increase intelligence gathering and to leak the information to the press (what gave a former mid-level Department of Defense employee the presumption that she could influence the intelligence operations of the U.S. government?)

, b) the unprecedented eleventh-hour Obama effort to broaden access to classified data to spread and leak such unmasked individuals

, c) the political and media landmines that Representative Nunes (facing “kill the messenger” efforts to kill the message) had to navigate around and the character assassination to which he has been subjected

Josh Zumbrun: Trump Taps Kevin Hassett For Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers Mr. Hassett emerged as a candidate for the job several months ago, but the White House announced its intent to nominate him Friday.

President Donald Trump said he would nominate Kevin Hassett, an expert in tax policy and one of the most prominent economists at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, to serve as the chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers.

The council’s chairman is generally considered the chief economist of the White House. The White House announced its intent to nominate Mr. Hassett in a statement Friday afternoon.

Mr. Hassett emerged as a candidate for the job several months ago, but his nomination wasn’t confirmed until Friday. The fate of Mr. Trump’s Council of Economic Advisers had been uncertain. How much Mr. Trump cared about advice from academic economists also came into question when he announced that his cabinet would no longer include the council’s chairman, as former President Barack Obama’s had.
An economic advisory council announced during his presidential campaign had included only one Ph.D. economist, Peter Navarro, who has already been appointed to head a trade council for Mr. Trump.

Mr. Hassett, however, has a traditional pedigree for an elite academic economist. He received his doctorate in economics from the University of Pennsylvania, where he wrote a dissertation on applied econometrics–the difficult statistical work that underlies much economic research. He has published on a wide range of topics, with a particular focus on the benefits of tax cuts and the effects of economic uncertainty on business investment.

“He’s not just a standard-issue really good economist, he’s someone who knows how policy works,” said Glenn Hubbard, who chaired the CEA under President George W. Bush and has published research with Mr. Hassett. CONTINUE AT SITE