RUTHFULLY YOURS

I have listened over and over to exactly what Spicer said and I agree 100% with Rick Moran on this one……rsk

I’m not quite feeling the furious reaction to White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer’s comment about Hitler and poison gas. To be sure, much of the over-the-top criticism is politically motivated. But this is one of those instances where people have to dig pretty deep in that manure pile to find the pony.

Spicer made the following observation which is absolutely true.

Politico:

“We didn’t use chemical weapons in World War II,” Spicer told reporters, as he criticized the Russian government for its support of Assad. “Someone who is despicable as Hitler who didn’t even sink to using chemical weapons. You have to, if you’re Russia, ask yourself, is this a country that you, and a regime that you want to align yourself with?”

Correct Fact #1: We did not use chemical weapons in World War II.

Correct Fact #2: Hitler did not use chemical weapons during World War II.

That should have been the end of the story. But the ignoramuses in the press and Twitter immediately sprang into action.

In fact, Hitler’s Nazi Germany did use chemical weapons, most notably through the Holocaust, the genocidal program intended to murder Europe’s entire Jewish population. Many of the Jews who died in the Holocaust were killed in gas chambers using Zyklon B and other poisons.

Sarin gas, the weapon believed to have been used by Assad’s regime, was first created and weaponized by Nazi scientists in 1938.

Earth to Politco: Zyklon B was not a chemical weapon. It was a fumigator/ pesticide and was never weaponized. It was sold in the form of pellets or crystals that, when exposed to the air, turned into a gas. It was a horrific product used for evil purposes. But to say it was a “chemical weapon” which was the point that Spicer was making, is ludicrous.

The Nazis also created special trucks where they would stuff dozens of Jews into the back of the closed vehicle and route carbon monoxide into the closed space. Carbon monoxide is a gas. Should we call it a weapon too?

And the Nazis may have, indeed, created sarin gas and weaponized it. But Spicer didn’t say the Nazis didn’t make chemical weapons. He said they never used them. Why did Politico even allow that idiotic point to be published?

Spicer tried to clarify:

“In no way was I trying to lessen the horrendous nature of the Holocaust,” Spicer said in the statement. “I was trying to draw a distinction of the tactic of using airplanes to drop chemical weapons on population centers. Any attack on innocent people is reprehensible and inexcusable.”

Everyone understood what he was originally talking about except those trying to score political points.

The press secretary’s statement was quickly derided and fact-checked, including by MSNBC, which followed the press briefing with a chyron summarizing what Spicer had said and adding parenthetically that “Hitler gassed millions.” Chelsea Clinton, the daughter of 2016 Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, wrote on Twitter that she hopes Spicer “takes time to visit @HolocaustMuseum. It’s a few blocks away.”

Sen. Ben Cardin, Democrat of Maryland, tweeted that Spicer needed a “refresher history course on Hitler stat.” “#Icantbelievehereallysaidthat,” Cardin added.

Susan Rice is the real version of Woody Allen’s cinematic character Zelig, who in the movie of the same name popped up almost anywhere as an expert on anything.

As U.N. ambassador from 2009 to 2013, and later as National Security Adviser from 2013 to 2017, Rice seemed to have turned up everywhere there was an Obama-administration implosion. She was always eager to offer a supposedly expert assessment — one that also always proved wrong or untrue or both.

Rice, along with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Samantha Power, had a major role in the disastrous Libyan bombing decision and its wasteland aftermath.

As U.N. ambassador, she helped the U.N. draft resolutions establishing no-fly-zones and humanitarian aid to curb the violence against Arab Spring protestors. But such U.N. policies were immediately contorted into an active military role when the U.S. and allies supplied direct air support to anti-Qaddafi ground forces. The allied bombing to overthrow Qaddafi gave some credence to Russian complaints that Rice had deceived them about the true intent of the resolutions, which were really used by the Obama administration to facilitate French, British, and American efforts to achieve regime change in Libya.

The later Benghazi disaster and the subsequent false narrative of a video-inspired spontaneous riot — aimed at advancing the “al-Qaeda on the run” talking point central to Obama’s reelection campaign —were her most infamous moments of deceit. That fake-news effort eventually led to the unjustifiable imprisonment of the scapegoat (and otherwise shady character) Nakoula Basseley Nakoula on suddenly trumped-up enforcement of his parole violation. Rice’s well-publicized untruth, while helpful to Obama’s reelection effort, was not benign: It obscured the disturbing circumstances in which four brave Americans died.

Yet, to be fair, it is difficult to know whether Rice was a seasoned architect of that duplicity. Given her reputation as a useful naïf and loyal fall person, perhaps she was easily manipulated into going on five Sunday shows to mislead and distort. Her subordinate Ben Rhodes needed a vessel to assure the nation that the Benghazi attacks were not due to administration policy failures, and Rice was deemed the ideal vehicle to spread that myth.

And the fable of the supposedly honorable Bowe Bergdahl (currently facing Pentagon charges of desertion)?

Rice was there, too. To prop up an unhinged trade of five terrorists at Guantanamo for an AWOL soldier, Rice falsely claimed that Bergdahl had “served with honor and distinction.” Then she trumped that with a quite unnecessary fillip: “Sergeant Bergdahl wasn’t simply a hostage; he was an American prisoner of war captured on the battlefield.” Left unsaid was that a number of American soldiers were killed as a result of efforts to find his walkabout whereabouts.

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.”

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.