RUTHFULLY YOURS

PayPal and Apple are incensed that the State of North Carolina restricts public toilet usage to those possessing the actual anatomy corresponding to respective restroom designations. With an estimated .3% of the population classified as “transgender,” according to UCLA LGBT demographer, Gary Gates, you would think that PayPal and Apple would be shooting themselves in the foot by putting political correctness before the protection of women and children from sexual predators. However, in solidarity with the LGBT movement, Facebook and Google, among other businesses and the usual “civil rights” groups, have closed ranks to declare the North Carolina law “out of line with their core values.” Have we really come to the point where mandating male usage of the ladies’ room is a core value?

PayPal CEO, Daniel Schulman, earning his social justice warrior stripes, withdrew plans to open a North Carolina facility that would have brought 400 new jobs to the Charlotte area after learning that the state legislature enacted a law – the Public Facilities Privacy and Security Act or HB2 – prohibiting people from using restrooms of the opposite sex. (Yes, that’s “sex,” not “gender.”) PayPal contends that the law “perpetuates discrimination” and “violates the values and principles” of their mission and culture. And you thought PayPal was just in the business of operating an online payment system!

Ironically, in 2011, PayPal had no qualms about opening a global operations center in Malaysia, where homosexual activity is illegal and punished with harsh prison sentences and whippings. Not to be outdone on the hypocrisy score, openly gay Apple CEO, Tim Cook, has taken North Carolina to task for being “anti-gay” but somehow manages to have the moral wherewithal to operate stores in Saudi Arabia, where homosexuals are routinely executed in public.

Contrary to the standard Millennial educational fare of the “diversity of opinion-deprived” campus as well as the twilight zone of Common Core in which “Heather has two mommies” and “Melea has two Dads,” there is a difference (viva la difference!) between “sex” and “gender.”

Bill Clinton injected a disruptive element into the Democratic presidential campaign yesterday: truth. The question now is: How will his wife recover from this alien intrusion?

The former president was stumping for Hillary Clinton in Philadelphia when protesters targeted the 1994 Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act that he had signed into law. The bill lengthened federal sentences for repeat felony offenders and provided federal funding for more state prison construction, among other provisions. Signs bobbing in the audience read: CLINTON CRIME BILL DESTROYED OUR COMMUNITIES and HILLARY IS A MURDERER. A heckler shouted out that Bill Clinton should be charged with crimes against humanity.

At first, Clinton responded by touting the Democratic feel-good elements of the 1994 bill: a ban on assault weapons, funding for after-school programs in inner cities, and money for more cops “so that the police could look like the people they police.” It was then-Senator Joe Biden, Clinton said, who persuaded him to support the tougher sentencing measures in order to get the bill through a Republican Congress. But then, in the first of his inconvenient infusions of truth, Clinton added that it wasn’t just Republican lawmakers who wanted a tougher response to crime—it was also “African-American communities.” They urged him to sign the bill, he said, because their “kids were shot in the street by gangs.” Thirteen-year-olds were planning their funerals, according to Clinton. The result of the bill’s passage? “A 25-year low in crime, a 33-year low in the murder rate—and listen to this,” he said, “because of that and the background-check law, a 46-year low in the deaths of people from gun violence. And who do you think those lives were, that mattered? Whose lives were saved, that mattered?”

The hecklers weren’t placated. As chants continued to disrupt his speech, Clinton broke out in obvious exasperation: “I don’t know how you would characterize the gang leaders who got 13-year-old kids hopped up on crack and sent them out on the street to murder other African-American children,” Clinton said heatedly. “Maybe you thought they were good citizens, [Hillary] didn’t. You are defending the people who killed the people whose lives you say matter! Tell the truth. You are defending the people who caused young people to go out and take guns.”

Clinton also defended the historic 1996 welfare reform bill, currently the subject of a rearguard left-wing assault. If it increased poverty as its critics charge, he asked, “Why then did we have the largest drop in African-American poverty in history?”

Clinton’s equation of today’s virulent anti-cop protests with the enabling of criminals is about as visceral and daring a response to the Black Lives Matter movement as one could imagine. It also happens to be accurate. Data-driven, accountable policing and lengthened sentences for violent criminals have saved thousands of black lives since 1994. And now, as cops back off from proactive policing under the relentless charge that they’re racist for enforcing the law in minority neighborhoods, black lives—including children’s lives—are once again being lost at elevated rates, prompting no outcry or protests from Black Lives Matter. Clinton understands at a gut level the need for vigilant, strong law enforcement. He also knows that the people most hurt by crime are blacks.

President Obama is hitting the road and the airwaves trying to convince the nation that the Senate has a constitutional duty to consider his nominee, Merrick Garland, for the Supreme Court. On Thursday the president said at the University of Chicago that Republicans’ refusal to consider Mr. Garland threatens a “dangerous” politicization of the courts “that erodes the institutional integrity of the judicial branch.”

Not so fast. History and the wording of the Constitution teach otherwise. The framers expected that judicial nominations would be political matters—and even that the Senate sometimes might deliberately ignore a president’s nominee.

That is exactly what the upper chamber did after Associate Justice John McKinley’s death in July 1852. The political climate then was intensely partisan, as it is today, and a presidential election loomed that November. In August, President Millard Fillmore, a Whig, nominated Edward A. Bradford, a highly regarded Louisiana lawyer and a graduate of Harvard Law School, to fill the vacancy.

But the opposition Democrats controlled the Senate and expected to win the presidency in a few months. The New York Daily Tribune acknowledged that Bradford was “deserving and qualified” but predicted that the nomination would fail. The Senate refused even to consider Bradford despite his outstanding qualifications. As expected, Democrat Franklin Pierce won the presidency and made his own nomination the following spring.

That wasn’t the only time lawmakers snubbed a Supreme Court nominee for political reasons. In the 1840s, President John Tyler also faced a hostile Senate. Four of Tyler’s five Supreme Court nominees were blocked, including one—Reuben Walworth—whose nomination the Senate completely ignored. After the Civil War, President Andrew Johnson, a southern Democrat, couldn’t get the Republican-dominated Senate to consider his nominee, Henry Stanbery.

That is how the framers planned it. The wording of the Constitution and the decisions they made in the summer of 1787 show they wanted the Senate to control the confirmation process, free to consider or ignore a nomination. The Constitution directs that the president “shall nominate,” but he may appoint only with the advice and consent of the Senate. There is no direction that the Senate “shall” provide its advice and consent, no corresponding obligation on legislators to act. CONTINUE AT SITE

When Congress enacted the Veterans Access, Choice and Accountability Act of 2014 in the wake of revelations about bureaucratic dysfunction at the Veterans Affairs Department, the plan was to reduce wait times at VA hospitals, give veterans access to outside health care and allow the VA to quickly terminate problem employees.

How is the VA doing? For starters, government statistics show that hospital wait times are 50% longer than two years ago.

Trying to increase access to outside care also isn’t working. That’s no surprise. The law allows veterans to see outside doctors, but only for 60 days. Then it’s back to the VA queue. Congress is considering a bill that would undo time limits on outside care.

What about the law’s third aim, to address the VA’s chronic lack of accountability in the past? The law allows the firing of top-level VA officials with less notice and fewer appellate rights than government employees enjoy. The fired VA worker must appeal within seven days of the discipline; administrative judges must hear and decide the case within 21 days, or the department’s discipline stands; judges cannot mitigate penalties; and decisions are final. But that plan, too, has backfired. Judges instead appear to be more inclined to side with misbehaving VA officials.

Over the past month alone, judges at the Merit Systems Protection Board, which hears appeals by federal employees, sided with three VA officials who challenged their disciplining. The MSPB reinstated all three. In each case the misconduct was severe.

One case involved the VA’s termination of a senior employee, Linda Weiss, for ignoring numerous complaints about an abusive nurse assistant. The judge agreed that the nurse assistant was abusive and the supervisor’s disregard was serious. But the judge ordered the supervisor’s reinstatement; he would have opted for mitigation, the judge said, but that’s not allowed under the 2014 law. CONTINUE AT SITE

Is this really the argument he wants to make?

The US domestic security chief on Wednesday compared current anti-Muslim sentiment to the anti-communist “Red Scare” of the 1940s and ’50s, suggesting that divisive statements by Republican presidential candidates are to blame.

Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson, who is black, noted that his grandfather was forced to testify in front of the House of Representatives in 1949.

“He had to, in the height of the Red Scare, to deny he was a member of the communist party, and went on to give an impassioned statement about how American negroes are patriotic,” Johnson said at a conference in Washington about countering violent extremism.

Those who don’t know history “are bound to repeat it,” Johnson added.

True.

Although El Niño has increased the snowpack in the Sierra Nevadas, the Golden State’s historic drought isn’t over. Yet the Obama administration has decided to block a privately financed project that could supply water to 400,000 Californians, even though the project has been approved by an alphabet soup of state and local agencies. The result will be to trap vast amounts of a precious resource beneath the Mojave Desert. Is water the new fossil fuel?

This tale of political and regulatory obstructionism begins in 1998, when Cadiz Inc., a Los Angeles-based company, developed plans for a groundwater bank and well-field on 70 square miles of private land overlying the base of the Mojave’s massive Fenner Valley and Orange Blossom Wash watersheds. Over centuries the aquifers there have amassed as much as 34 million acre feet of water, enough to sustain all of California’s households for several years.

However, tens of thousands of acre feet percolate into salty dry lakes and evaporate each year. Cadiz proposed capturing and exporting the groundwater to Southern California residents. The Cadiz Valley Water Conservation, Recovery and Storage Project could also help store occasional excess flows from the Colorado River that would otherwise drain to the Pacific Ocean.

Water experts such as those at the Public Policy Institute of California have recommended using groundwater banks to recharge aquifers during wet years and expand the state’s storage capacity. Relative to dams, storing water underground reduces evaporation and environmental harm.

None of this mattered to various green lobbies and California Sen. Dianne Feinstein, who complained that the water project would deplete mountain springs and harm wildlife. But environmental reviews by hydrogeologists confirm that the nearest spring—located 11 miles away and 1,000 feet above the aquifer—would not be affected. Nor would fauna, which don’t rely on groundwater. After an exhaustive review, the U.S. Interior Department approved the project in 2002, but Sen. Feinstein maintained her opposition. CONTINUE AT SITE

Dannel Malloy: Fighting the Real Eneny By Matthew Hennessey —

Connecticut governor Dannel Malloy is a big fan of the meaningless political gesture. When it comes to virtue signaling, he prefers it to be as divorced from tangible consequences as possible. To the extent that his showboating can be timed to distract attention from Connecticut’s imbalanced budget and crumbling economy, all the better.

Last year, Malloy signed an executive order banning official travel to Indiana, which had just passed a Religious Freedom Restoration Act. He did this in response to the demands of precisely no one in his state. Somehow it never got through to the former Stamford mayor that Connecticut has had a RFRA of its own on the books since 1993. Turns out that Nutmeggers enjoy even sturdier religious-freedom protections than Hoosiers do.

Malloy must have enjoyed the afternoon of attention that the Indiana incident brought, because last month he leapt at another juicy opportunity to grab the mic and advertise his pristine virtue. This time it was North Carolina’s democratically elected legislature that no one in Connecticut was demanding be punished. Tar Heel State lawmakers drew the ire of righteous liberals everywhere when they passed a bill requiring that people use bathrooms and changing facilities according to their biological gender.

You could practically taste Malloy’s joy as he again reached for his executive pen and signed an order banning official travel from Connecticut to North Carolina. “This law is not just wrong,” he said. “It poses a public-safety risk to Connecticut residents traveling through North Carolina.” That’s right — a public-safety risk.

RELATED: Connecticut’s Progressive Nutmegs: Liberals Policies Are Driving a Great State to Economic Suicide

This week — just because why not — Malloy also banned non-essential official travel to Mississippi, because of a law passed there under the principle known as representative democracy. Conveniently, Mississippi is a state that no Connecticut official really needs to visit, and about whose legislature no Connecticut resident gives a flying finger sandwich.

These invitations to empty gesture couldn’t come at a finer time for Governor Malloy. You may think of Connecticut as a wealthy place, and you’re not wrong. It is the state with the highest per capita income in the country. But it’s also a basket case. Here’s a little rundown on just how well Connecticut is faring under Malloy’s leadership.

Connecticut has a $900 million, union-shaped hole in its budget that some Democratic state lawmakers would like to fill by seizing part of Yale University’s massive endowment. Malloy has been slashing services and warning that the milliony deficit will very shortly become a billiony one. The state’s ravenous public-pension system is only half funded. It swallows up $1.5 billion annually in public money, a figure my colleague Steven Malanga projects could double within a decade.