RUTHFULLY YOURS

Dr. Price, a fierce ObamaCare opponent, has his own plan to replace it ….
According to the Washington Post, President-elect Donald Trump has chosen Georgia Rep. Tom Price, a former orthopedic surgeon and staunch ObamaCare opponent to serve as the secretary of health and human services in his administration.

An insider from within the transition team told the Post that the public announcement of Trump’s selection of Price, could come as early as Tuesday.

As HHS secretary, Price would become the Trump administration’s point person on dismantling and replacing the Affordable Care Act, one of Trump’s major campaign promises.

Price, 62, who represents a suburban Atlanta district, has played a leading role in the Republican opposition to the law known as Obamacare and has helped draft several comprehensive bills to replace it.

During the campaign, Trump railed against the Affordable Care Act and vowed to repeal and replace it. But after meeting with Obama in the Oval Office shortly following the election, he was convinced to perhaps keep some of the more popular elements of the law intact and amend the law rather than repeal it.

Trump has said he would favor keeping the provision preventing insurers from refusing coverage for preexisting conditions as well as the one permitting children to stay on their parents’ health plans until age 26.

Price is a six-term congressman who chairs the House Budget Committee and is said to be close to House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.).

In 2011, then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton promised the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) to use “some old fashioned techniques of peer pressure and shaming” against those whose exercise of free speech “we abhor.”

At the time, she had in mind specifically perpetrators of what the OIC, the Muslim Brotherhood, other Islamic supremacists and their enablers on the Left call “defamation of Islam.” But the same playbook – in the tradition of Mrs. Clinton’s mentor, Saul Alinsky – is now being followed with a vengeance against what is abhorred by the cabal best described as the Red-Green Axis.

Much in evidence among such “old-fashioned techniques” now being employed is what’s known as “the Big Lie.” It entails the endless repetition of outrageous falsehoods to defame, and ultimately silence, one’s political opponents.

Three good men Donald Trump has selected for key strategic and national security positions are currently getting the Big Lie treatment: his White House Counsel Steve Bannon, Attorney General-designate Senator Jeff Sessions, and incoming National Security Advisor Lieutenant General Michael Flynn. They are being relentlessly vilified as “racists,” “bigots” and “haters.”

I feel these able public servants’ pain. Indeed, I know what it’s like to be subjected to the Big Lie. For years, the Islamists and their allies on the hard Left – notably, the discredited (for example, here and here) Southern Poverty Law Center – have used character assassination and vitriol against me (for example, here, here and here) to protect what they otherwise cannot defend: the totalitarian program its adherents call Sharia. The false assertion last week that I had been asked to serve on the Trump transition team sent these rogues into fresh paroxysms of hateful denunciation, repeated like a mantra by their media echo chamber (for example, here, here, here and here).

I am hardly alone in being diagnosed by such charlatans with the made-up condition of “Islamophobia.” Indeed, I am proud to be included in the company of men and women being pilloried for what Islamic supremacists and their enablers would have us believe is “defamation of Islam.” In fact, it is simply informed, astute and courageous truth-telling about the global jihad movement and threat it poses. Steve Bannon, Jeff Sessions and Mike Flynn are under assault for doing the same in this and other contexts.

It seems that critics are particularly unhinged by the clarity of these three men and the president they will serve about the fact that Islamic supremacism is not simply a menace overseas. The Red-Green types are determined to prevent Donald Trump from operationalizing the plan of action he described in a major address on the topic on August 15, 2016. Among its highlights are the following:

Our new approach, which must be shared by both parties in America, by our allies overseas, and by our friends in the Middle East, must be to halt the spread of Radical Islam. All actions should be oriented around this goal….Just as we won the Cold War, in part, by exposing the evils of communism and the virtues of free markets, so too must we take on the ideology of Radical Islam….

Just for the record: Rep. Tom Price is a staunch supporter of Israel and ranked a minus 4 from the Arab American institute. As Tevye said ” it doesn’t make much difference but it’s nice to know.” rsk
WASHINGTON—President-elect Donald Trump has chosen House Budget Committee Chairman Tom Price (R., Ga.) as his nominee for secretary of the Health and Human Services Department, according to a transition team adviser, putting the six-term congressman in charge of the sprawling agency that will likely dismantle Democrats’ 2010 health-care overhaul.

Mr. Price, a 62-year-old former orthopedic surgeon, is one of several GOP physicians who sought to carve out a leading role in shaping the party’s health policy and, in particular, the party’s alternative vision to Democrats’ Affordable Care Act. Much of his criticism of the law has centered on the authority it gives to the federal government, and to the agency that he may now head.
“We think it’s important that Washington not be in charge of health care,” he said in an interview this summer. “The problem that I have with Obamacare is that its premise is that Washington knows best.”

He has championed his own legislation, the Empowering Patients First Act, since 2009, taking a position on a number of hot-button issues for conservative health policy thinkers. In its latest iteration, the proposal includes refundable, age-adjusted tax credits for people to buy insurance if they don’t have access to coverage through an employer or government program. People in a government program, such as Medicare, Medicaid or Tricare, would also be allowed to opt out of it and get tax credits toward the cost of private coverage instead.

Mr. Price had previously included tax deductions in his plans, a tool typically favored by harder-line conservative health policy thinkers, but said he had “moved towards credits because we felt it was cleaner.”

COLUMBUS, Ohio—At least 11 people were injured Monday at Ohio State University after a student allegedly jumped a curb in a motor vehicle, then slashed pedestrians with a butcher knife before he was shot and killed.

Officials identified the suspect as Abdul Razak Ali Artan, who was listed in the student directory as a logistics-management major at the business school. Officials didn’t provide a motive for the attack and couldn’t confirm his exact age.

Those injured in the attack were taken to Columbus-area hospitals to be treated for stab wounds and motor-vehicle injuries, as well as other injuries still being assessed. At least two victims have come out of surgery, said officials at Ohio State’s Wexner Medical Center, where six of the victims were sent. Most of those injured were students, officials said.

“We all live with the fear that things like this could happen to us,” Ohio State President Michael Drake said at a news conference outside the hospital Monday afternoon. “We live in an unstable world.”

Officials said the suspect intentionally drove a vehicle over a curb to hit a number of pedestrians before jumping out of the car with a knife. A campus police officer arrived within a minute and shot and killed the suspect when he failed to comply with the officer’s commands, the officials said.

“The first responders did a remarkable job,” Ohio Governor John Kasich said at a press conference Monday afternoon. “It shows how much practice, how much training, how much expertise and how much coordination existed with campus police, Columbus police” and other agencies, he said.

The car struck seven or eight pedestrians at approximately 9:52 a.m. ET, according to Ohio State Director of Public Safety Monica Moll, and an officer had engaged with the suspect within a minute. The school’s alert system sent out its first message at 9:55 a.m. ET.

Police have recovered the knife used in the attack and were processing the scene.

This character evidently lacks shame as well as veracity.

A stable human being, having earned national notoriety by admitting that he participated in a conspiracy to deceive the voters on an important public policy issue, would not expect them to believe anything else he had to say on the subject. This would be particularly true if he had also said that the deception was predicated on the stupidity of those voters. Jonathan Gruber committed both offences, of course, but he evidently isn’t “stable” in the way psychiatrists use the term. He not only expects to be taken seriously on the same issue, he’s still trying to deceive the public.

Gruber, in case you have forgotten, is the MIT economics professor who frequently referred to himself as the “father of Obamacare” during the long health reform debate that culminated in the passage of the ironically titled “Affordable Care Act.” He became an unperson two years ago when a video emerged in which he delivered himself of the following words of wisdom concerning the law: “Lack of transparency is a huge political advantage.… And basically, call it the stupidity of the American voter or whatever, but basically that was really, really critical for the thing to pass.”

Now, he’s attempting to make a comeback by defending the “reform” law from repeal. In an opinion piece published yesterday in the NewYork Daily News, Gruber demonstrated that he still thinks we’re a bunch of brain dead morons. He begins by telling the long-suffering readers of that publication that the law has been a success. In support of this preposterous claim, he offers the same talking points we have been getting from the Obama administration. He glibly repeats, for example, the following whopper: “Twenty million Americans have gained insurance coverage.”

This figure was long ago abandoned by all but the most dishonest Obamacare pimps. It first originated in a widely panned report published in the New England Journal of Medicine. When this work of bad fiction first appeared, Reason’s Peter Suderman debunked it in a column titled, “No, 20 Million Haven’t ‘Gained Coverage’ Under Obamacare,” where he pointed out that the report indiscriminately included anyone who bought insurance: “It’s a count of people obtaining coverage, whether or not they had it before, not people who were previously uninsured.”

Another lie Gruber repeats in yesterday’s piece is this long-ago-debunked tale: “Since the ACA’s passage, health-care costs have grown at their slowest rate in measured U.S. history; the innovative cost controls put in place by the law are one important reason why.” He knows perfectly well that this slowdown in health care inflation has nothing to do with Obamacare. As this report from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid shows, the slowdown began seven years before the “Affordable Care Act” passed. Gruber hopes his readers are too dumb to know that.

Gruber also claims that the most hated of Obamacare’s provisions, the individual mandate, can’t be repealed because it is needed to “bring the healthy into the insurance pool.” He doesn’t tell us where he has been hiding out since his fall from grace two years ago. But, unless he has been locked up and denied access to newspapers, the internet, television, twitter, etc., he will have noticed that the individual mandate just isn’t working. He knows that, of course. A more plausible explanation is that Dr. Gruber still thinks his readers are just too “stupid” to know the truth.

He is posing as the only person in the galaxy who doesn’t know that the mandate has failed to “bring the healthy into the insurance pool.” As Modern Healthcare reports, “Only 28% of exchange members in 2014 were in the coveted 18-34 age range, and that percentage stayed level for 2016. It’s below the 40% level many actuaries say is needed.” In other words, the individual mandate that Dr. Gruber and Obamacare’s other architects insisted upon over the objections of the electorate has not prevented the adverse selection problem it was ostensibly meant to forestall.

Given how central concerns over illegal immigration were to Donald Trump’s campaign, it was inevitable that his triumph would spark a strident debate. The rival sides, however, are like ships passing in the night.

Trump emissaries assert that the president-elect will step up border enforcement and prioritize the deportation of criminal aliens – i.e., those who’ve committed serious and/or repetitious state and federal crimes, not just immigration-law violations. Trump detractors, including Democratic mayors of major cities, respond with indignant vows to protect “undocumented” members of their communities who are living peaceful, essentially law-abiding lives.

If you’re thinking the Democratic response is not, well, responsive, you’re onto the game. The immigrants they make a grand show of protecting are exactly the people not being targeted by the Trump camp’s deportation plans. If Democrats oppose Trump on his own terms, they risk being revealed as champions of criminals preying on Americans. So the Left is going demagogue – turning a “right versus wrong” issue into “us versus them.”

To be fair, they have not been alone in this. Throughout the campaign, especially during the GOP primaries, Trump beat his chest about mass deportations and the sea-to-sea wall for which Mexico would supposedly pay. As we’ve observed, much of this was absurd, as was Trump’s suggestion of a touchback amnesty approach: The government would expend untold billions to send millions of illegal aliens back home … only to invite most of them back in with legal status.

As the campaign unfolded and victory seemed increasingly plausible, Trump’s rhetoric grew tamer. As president-elect, it appears he has ended up in a more realistic place.

There is a reason the competing rhetoric – mass deportations versus sanctuary cities – has been so extreme. It’s been so long since our government has enforced the immigration laws, we have forgotten what rational enforcement looks like. In the interim, after two decades of prosecuting terrorism in the federal courts, we’ve lost the distinction between law-enforcement issues and national-security challenges.

Immigration is a law-enforcement issue. Yes, it has some national-security implications, just as other crimes that contribute to terrorist plots do. In the main, though, it is an ordinary crime problem. Our goal is never to extirpate crime problems – not in the way that government agents must prevent and exhibit zero tolerance for terrorism, a national security challenge. Crime problems are managed, not eradicated.

It is not possible to prosecute every immigration offense, just as we have no expectation that the police will arrest every drug dealer or petty thief. No one would want to live in the kind of authoritarian state we would become if we took such an approach to crime. Plus, we do not have the resources it would take even if we were open to it.Like any other crime problem, illegal immigration should be addressed in a manner commensurate with its seriousness. The objective should be to prosecute and/or deport as many of the worst offenders as possible, given the available resources – meaning the amount of investigators, prosecutor-time, court-time, detention space, and deportation administration it is reasonable to devote to immigration enforcement in light of other crime problems that also demand attention. The goal is a degree of enforcement sufficient to remove significant offenders and discourage potential offenders. CONTINUE AT SITE

President, London Center for Policy Research

The recent American election raised a host of hypotheses about how to make America great again, to quote President Elect Trump. What it suggests is what made America great in the first place. Clearly America is based on a Constitution and Bill of Rights that give and constrain simultaneously in a symphony of Judeo Christian beliefs. The free market opened avenues of wealth and opportunity. Most significantly, the nation was blessed with great leaders from Washington to Reagan.

Unfortunately, much of the past is gone and unlikely to be reclaimed. The ruling class is fraught with corruption – the Clinton Foundation a classic example. Leaders like Biden and the Kennedys cheated on tests without remorse. Churches have embraced the Playboy life. Law is relative and administrative rulings rigid. How do you discover a new ruling class when the precedents of the past put the succeeding generations on the pathway to power?

Moreover, how does one govern a nation when half the population is regarded as deplorable and irredeemable and half is comprised of crybabies? Clearly the nation needs leaders of the kind we were blessed to have in the past. There is, of course, the danger of romanticizing a past that didn’t exist. Andrew Jackson might have committed homicide before being elected president. General Omar Bradley called his colleague Douglas Mac Arthur “primitive” for his comments during the Korean War. Richard Nixon was described by his detractors as a “psychopath.” Since George Washington, none of our presidents were universally admired.

Yet there were leaders who transcended the limits of office. George Marshall was more than a Secretary of State and a Secretary of Defense, he was a symbol of American strength and generosity. Wallace Stevens, the poet, worked as an executive for an insurance company, but wrote brilliant poetry in a cocoon of quiet dignity which served as a model of civic conduct. Harry Truman was a flawed personality in many ways including, but not restricted to, his association with the Prendergast machine in Kansas City. He was a conventional New Deal Democrat who hardly stood out as a legislative leader in the Senate. However, when he inherited the presidency, he was obliged to make some of the toughest decisions in the twentieth century. He made them with firmness and confidence. When he retired from office, his wife met him outside the White House, and without fanfare or secret service personnel, they drove off to the family home in Independence Missouri. Not everyone loved Truman, but he was a man who rose above his station.

From my friend Andy Bostom…..

New York Timesman Arthur Krock provided the following unusually candid assessment of FDR/Obama statist rule, circa April, 1938 (“Congress Discovers Its Own Backbone,” Arthur Krock, April 10, 1938 The New York Times).

It is, of course, entirely fitting and proper, wholly in keeping with our form of government, that the President [FDR] should regularly discuss with the leaders of the Legislature the affairs of the nation. But the remarkable thing about these meetings is that they were virtually forced upon Mr. Roosevelt. He did not want them. He prefers the system he followed from March, 1933, until last January [1938]. Under its workings, the President decided what he wanted to do administratively, and did it, letting the leaders of Congress read about it in the newspapers. He also decided what he wanted to do legislatively, had a bill prepared to carry out the ideas, and sent it ready-made to Congress to be signed on the dotted line.

Often his leaders introduced the measure without reading it. The late Senator [Joseph Taylor] Robinson “introduced” a copy of the morning paper during the bank crisis of 1933 because the bill it was supposed to be was not fully drafted. Always the rank and file of Congress knew nothing of a bill’s contents until they read them in the newspapers. Sometimes they did not trouble to do that, voting “aye” on faith.

Clearly, now lame duck POTUS Obama repeated FDR’s machinations in forcing passage of the disastrous, liberty-crushing, Orwellian-dubbed “Affordable Care Act.” Good riddance—one fervently wishes—to yet another failed iteration of totalitarian “good governance.” Andrew Bostom