RUTHFULLY YOURS

The Wall Street Journal reports that Donald Trump’s recent public criticism of U.S. intelligence agencies presages an effort to reorganize the nation’s sundry spy bureaucracies. Trump’s press secretary, Sean Spicer, denies that the president has any such plan in mind.

If he doesn’t, he damn well should.

The plan described in the Journal is not unlike the one described in National Review on December 9 by Fred Fleitz of the Center for Security Policy, which would scale back the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), a post-9/11 innovation intended to create a central authority to ensure cooperation and coordination within the herd of cats that is the intelligence community. Fleitz and others have argued that ODNI is just another ladle full of federal alphabet soup — CIA, DIA, NIC, etc. — doing very little more than adding a layer of bureaucracy.

Conservatives have a blind spot for spies, cops, and soldiers. The psychology here is pretty straightforward: A great many conservatives (myself included) who are habitually and instinctively skeptical of grand federal plans were insufficiently beady-eyed when it came to President George W. Bush’s big plans for Iraq, and some of that (again, speaking for myself first and foremost, but not, I think, for myself alone) is purely reactionary. When I see a bunch of dopey white kids with dreadlocks from Haverford College, the Workers World Party, and Chaka Fattah on one side of a barricade, I instinctively want to be on the other side. (This is especially true at the moment for Fattah, the longtime Philadelphia Democrat and Hugo Chávez fanboy who is headed to the penitentiary for corruption.) This is, to be sure, an imperfect heuristic.

There is a question of agents and a separate question of agencies. Many of us, especially conservatives, are inclined to respect and admire those whose profession consists in performing necessary violence: police on the beat in New York City, soldiers patrolling Mosul, and intelligence operatives who, if they are doing their jobs, will never hear the words “Thank you for your service.” But bureaucracies have lives and characters of their own, irrespective of the sort of men they employ. The public schools are made up mostly of good people, but they don’t work very well. One imagines that most IRS agents are scrupulous and dedicated. (The DMV people just hate us.) Out of the field of operations and into the cubicles and corner offices, the NYPD, the FBI, the Department of Defense, and the Central Intelligence Agency are bureaucracies like any others, and suffer from familiar bureaucratic ailments.

Nearly 200,000 people have signed up to participate in the Women’s March on Washington to protest the inauguration of Donald Trump. The protest, called “The Gathering for Justice,” includes an array of liberal causes, but at the center is the demand for equal rights for women.

The application for the protest states that the purpose is “to come together in solidarity to express to the new administration and congress that women’s rights are human rights and our power cannot be ignored.”

The group’s mission and vision statement says the march is a response to the “rhetoric of the past election cycle,” which they say “has insulted, demonized, and threatened many of us—immigrants of all statuses, Muslims and those of diverse religious faiths, people who identify as LGBTQIA, Native people, Black and Brown people, people with disabilities, survivors of sexual assault—and our communities are hurting and scared.”

Organizers of the event, which are made up of typical liberal community organizers, from pro-abortion activists, to CodePink, to former associates of Al Sharpton, say it’s about more than a protest—it’s a movement and they want it to continue for years to come.

“We plan to make a bold and clear statement to this country on the national and local level that we will not be silent,” said Tamika Mallory, a gun-control activist and one of the main organizers of the march. “And we will not let anyone roll back the rights we have fought and struggled to get.”

But is this march really about the rights of marginalized groups and women, in particular? Exactly what are they protesting? What has happened that is threatening their “human rights”? They can talk about Trump’s rhetoric during the campaign, but does that translate at all into policy? In fact, are any of his policies, when you really examine them, racist, bigoted, sexist, or homophobic in any way? No, they’re not.

There was a time in the past when women actually marched for real rights. From the Suffrage movement to the Equal Rights Amendment marches in the 1970s, women had legitimate complaints and addressed actual issues that concerned them.

But not in 2016. Their rights are not being threatened by the Republican Party’s agenda or Trump. In fact, Trump is more pro-woman, particularly in business with proposals for maternity leave, than most other Republicans. One could argue that he is pro-life, which means he could turn back Roe v. Wade through a Supreme Court nomination, but killing the baby in your womb is not a human right. It’s actually the exact opposite. Getting free birth control is not a human right. Even getting free medical care, paid by the state, is not a human right. Becoming a citizen is not a human right either. Neither is a man using a woman’s bathroom. CONTINUE ON SITE

President Obama has another ironic award for his trophy shelf, to accompany his Nobel Peace Prize and all those participation trophies he got at Punahou for his basketball skills. His appointee and subordinate Ash Carter yesterday pinned a military medal – the Department of Defense Medal for Distinguished Public Service – on his boss, as Warner Todd Huston reported for Breitbart.

Defense Secy Carter presents Pres Obama with Dept of Defense Medal for Distinguished Public Service. pic.twitter.com/a5DihpPRnA
— Mark Knoller (@markknoller) January 4, 2017

The ceremony took place at Joint Base Myers-Henderson, before a crowd that had an awful lot of empty seats, almost as if the military service members who attended were there on orders.

I am sorry, but this stinks of a tin-pot dictatorship.

According to our leftist betters, a sickening graphic video showing a white man being brutally tortured in Chicago by four black attackers as they shout, “F— Donald Trump! F— white people!” isn’t evidence of racism or a hate crime.

In the left’s alternate universe, Pepe the Donald Trump-loving cartoon frog is racist. Kidnapping, torturing, and scalping an innocent white man because he is white is not racist. Black-hating mass murderer Dylann Storm Roof speaks for all white people, but the newly arrested black perpetrators in Chicago, Jordan Hill, Tesfaye Cooper, Tanishia Covington, and Brittany Covington, are all rogue actors.

No minorities are responsible for their actions. It’s society’s fault. It’s capitalism’s fault. It’s the fault of white privilege.

To be clear, I am referring to the #BlackLivesMatter kidnapping broadcast live on Facebook (since censored by the fake news commissars at Facebook and at YouTube) that shows a captive, reportedly mentally disabled young white male being physically abused by four young black assailants. Fortunately, Live Leak posted the full video, which runs 27 minutes and 39 seconds.

Black Lives Matter movement hero DeRay Mckesson rushed to Twitter Thursday morning to make excuses for his comrades-in-arms. “It goes without saying that the actions being branded by the far-right as the ‘BLM Kidnapping’ have nothing to do [with] the movement.”

He’s lying.

This is exactly what Black Lives Matter stands for. Its supporters lionize those who murder cops and white people. At their marches, they carry signs reading, “End White Supremacy.” America, they claim, is systemically racist. In other words, white people are racist and evil.

Donald Trump may or may not be planning to reorganize the 17 separate U.S. intelligence agencies, and the mere suggestion seems to be a breach of Beltway etiquette. But the intelligence services shouldn’t be immune from a bureaucratic shakeup, especially at the White House, and we have some suggestions.

The Journal reported this week that the Trump team believes the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (DNI) has become “bloated and politicized,” though incoming White House press secretary Sean Spicer called the story “100% false.” The transition also said that Mr. Trump will nominate Dan Coats, a former Indiana Senator and political grownup, as DNI, perhaps to calm the uproar.

Mr. Trump’s opponents are portraying the reorganization as his payback to the intelligence community for concluding that Russia hacked Democrats to throw him the election, and Mr. Trump’s tweets don’t help. “The ‘Intelligence’ briefing on so-called ‘Russian hacking’ was delayed until Friday, perhaps more time needed to build a case. Very strange!” the President-elect tweeted this week, though he later called himself “a big fan!” of U.S. spooks.

This brawling is a shame because the truth is that the DNI has become the stagnant, permanent bureaucracy that critics predicted when the office was proposed in the panicked runup to the 2004 election. The 9/11 Commission identified multiple failures to coordinate activities and share information across the CIA, FBI, National Security Agency and so forth, and the commissioners lobbied for the new DNI as a maestro in the war on terror.

We argued at the time that this “furniture reshuffle” would simply “create a new layer of bureaucracy to police the old layers,” and we hoped we’d be wrong. Better intelligence integration and management is a useful goal, but Congress whipped the DNI bill though with little strategic deliberation. CONTINUE AT SITE

Americans who want better treatments for their diseases should be pleased that the lame-duck Congress passed the 21st Century Cures Act, which will promote medical innovation. They should be wary, however, of the $4 billion budget boost that the law gives to the National Institutes of Health.

The assumption seems to be that the root of all medical innovation is university research, primarily funded by federal grants. This is mistaken. The private economy, not the government, actually discovers and develops most of the insights and products that advance health. The history of medical progress supports this conclusion.

Few findings in medical science significantly improved health until the late 19th and early 20th centuries. During that period came breakthroughs such as anesthesia and antisepsis, along with vaccines and antibiotics to combat infectious diseases. The discovery of vitamins and hormones made it possible to treat patients with deficiencies in either category.

In America, innovation came from physicians in universities and research institutes that were supported by philanthropy. Private industry provided chemicals used in the studies and then manufactured therapies on a mass scale.

Things changed after World War II, when Vannevar Bush, who had led the U.S. Office of Scientific Research and Development during the war, persuaded Congress to increase federal subsidies for science. The National Institutes of Health became the major backer of medical research. That changed the incentives. Universities that had previously lacked research operations suddenly developed them, and others expanded existing programs. Over time these institutions grew into what I call the government-academic biomedical complex.

Since then, improvements in health have accumulated. Life expectancy has increased. Deaths from heart attack and stroke have radically decreased, and cancer mortality has declined. New drugs and devices have ameliorated the pain and immobility of diseases like arthritis. Yet the question remains: Is the government responsible for these improvements? The answer is largely no. Washington-centric research, rather, might slow progress.

Many physicians have never lacked motivation to develop treatments for diseases. But the government-academic biomedical complex has recruited predominantly nonphysician scientists who value elegant solutions to medical puzzles—generally preferring to impress their influential peers rather than solve practical problems. Vannevar Bush believed that basic research, unrelated to specific ends, was the best approach to scientific progress. How something works became more important than whether it works. Aspirin, for example, came into use even though researchers weren’t sure exactly what made it effective. That approach would never work today. Instead of the messy work of studying sick patients, scientists now prefer experimenting with inbred mice and cultured cells. Their results accrue faster and are scientifically cleaner, but they arguably are less germane to health.

President Obama does few favors for Republicans, but he did them a parting one this week when he sojourned to Capitol Hill, where he exhorted Democrats to defend ObamaCare. The vision of the president calling on his party’s members to—yet again—lay down their political lives for his “signature” law was a reminder of how this disaster began. Only if Republicans remember that history do they have a chance of succeeding where Mr. Obama failed.

The media are already labeling the Republican strategy of “repeal and replace” a mess, obsessing over the GOP’s lack of a fully formed “replace” plan. The suggestion is that disorder and disunity reign. This is the same media that all of seven weeks ago was assuring the GOP it needn’t even bother drawing up a bill, since President Hillary Clinton would veto any changes to ObamaCare.

True enough, eight years ago congressional Republicans were clueless about health-care policy. But a great deal has changed in that time—in ideas, education and the quality of the GOP caucus. Witness Rep. (and Dr.) Tom Price, the nominee to be the next secretary of health and human services, who offered in Congress his own detailed replacement plan.

Republicans already agree on the general contours of a free-market proposal—one based on tax credits, entitlement reform, freer insurance markets, portable policies and fewer mandates. The internal debates are over scope and details, not approach.

The bigger point is that what might undo Republicans isn’t policy so much as politics. This is where they’d do well to reflect on all that President Obama did wrong. Long before ObamaCare cratered on the merits, it had failed in the court of public opinion—because of both the manner and the means by which it became law. The first test for Republican lawmakers and the Trump administration is whether they prove foolish enough to repeat those obvious mistakes.

Senior Democrats crafted ObamaCare in lobbyist-filled backrooms, forgoing hearings, markups, even input from their own colleagues—much less Republicans. It was an exercise in secrecy and control. Those now calling on the GOP to present a fait accompli “replace” plan, and to ram it through alongside repeal, are advocating essentially the same high-handed approach.

So yes, it’s imperative that Republicans move to implement a replace plan this year, while they still retain maximum political capital. But they should build in time for hearings, debates, modifications. A coalition must be built. The public needs to know that, this time, the job is being done right.

In 2009 Democrats were so convinced of their health-care righteousness, and in such a hurry, that they never bothered to sell their plan to the public. Many of them probably didn’t even know what they were meant to sell, since they hadn’t read the 2,700-page bill and, per Nancy Pelosi, were waiting to pass it to find out what was in it. CONTINUE AT SITE

This first week of the 115th Congress has been the coming out party for new Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, and he isn’t disappointing his fellow Democrats. The New Yorker made clear in a speech on the Senate floor that he intends to do everything he can to use his 48-seat minority as a bulwark against Donald Trump’s agenda.

Mr. Schumer offered up the possibility of compromise on “issues like infrastructure, trade and closing the carried interest loophole,” though the public-works spending must be “significant, direct spending,” not tax credits. You almost have to admire his Stakhanovite dedication to the tiny carried interest tax provision, though we’re willing to bet Mr. Schumer will find other reasons to oppose a serious tax reform that eliminates it.

But that was it for the olive branches, saying that on most Republican priorities “we will resist.” He laced into Mr. Trump’s appointees as “stacked with billionaires, corporate executives, titans of Wall Street, and those deeply embedded in Washington’s corridors of power.” He did not mention that two of those “titans” hail from Goldman Sachs, source of many donations to Senate Democrats.

The Minority Leader saved his most partisan remarks for MSNBC, aptly enough, where he all but promised to block any Trump nominee to the Supreme Court. “We are not going to settle on a Supreme Court nominee. If they don’t appoint someone who’s really good, we’re gonna oppose him tooth and nail,” he said. When the MSNBC host asked if Mr. Schumer would do his best to keep the current vacancy on the High Court open, he responded “absolutely.”

Give him credit for candor. Democrats are sore that Senate Republicans refused to consider President Obama’s nominee, Merrick Garland, after Antonin Scalia died in February. And they’re eager for payback. CONTINUE AT SITE

President Obama and Vice President-elect Mike Pence both paid a visit to Capitol Hill Wednesday, in the first formal engagement over the future of the Affordable Care Act. Republicans finally have the power to repeal, but the question is whether they have the grit to replace ObamaCare.

Mr. Pence told Republicans that repeal and replace is the Trump Administration’s “first order of business,” while Mr. Obama ordered Democrats not to “rescue” the GOP by helping to pass a “TrumpCare replacement.” Going by his business background Donald Trump won’t mind putting his name on a health-care plan, or anything else, but Republicans need to appreciate the reality that they will soon own ObamaCare. Until they pass a coherent and market-oriented substitute, as a political matter ObamaCare is TrumpCare, like it or not.
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This isn’t a great political position, given the law’s large and ongoing failures on almost every measure: premium trends, enrollment, limited doctor and hospital networks, insurer participation. Affordability, choice and competition are due for another tumble next year under the status quo.

Mr. Trump seems to appreciate the political danger, tweeting Wednesday that “Republicans must be careful in that the Dems own the failed ObamaCare disaster, with its poor coverage and massive premium increases,” adding “Don’t let the [Democratic Senator Chuck] Schumer clowns out of this web.”

But Mr. Trump isn’t some candidate bystander any more. What was the point of Mr. Pence’s visit to Congress if not to encourage Republicans to proceed with their plans for a quick repeal? Does the President-elect have any better ideas on legislative strategy, or is he merely going to toss around the sayings of Chairman Donald from Trump Tower?

Some Republicans think they can repeal ObamaCare and blame Mr. Obama for the fallout, but they are kidding themselves. Republicans were elected on a promise to repeal and replace, and the statute of limitations on blaming Mr. Obama will soon expire. Voters tend to punish politicians who can but don’t solve problems, even if they didn’t cause them.