RUTHFULLY YOURS

On November 5, the White House released the text of the 5,544 page Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) that President Obama had just finished negotiating under the FastTrack authority that Congress gave him. That trade pact can no longer be amended. The up-or-down votes in the House and Senate will take place as early as January 2016.

So what’s in the TPP? Here’s a quick summary:

A legislative body superior to Congress
A vehicle to pass Obama’s climate change treaty
Increased legal immigration
Reduced patent protection for U.S. pharmaceuticals
Quotas on U.S. agricultural exports
Increased currency manipulation
Reduced U.S. power

That’s the summary. Here are the details.

“That’s what happens when a federal agency serves as its own detective, prosecutor, judge, jury and executioner. As Mr. Wright observed, the FTC’s record is “a strong sign of an unhealthy and biased institutional process.” And he puts it perhaps most powerfully: “Even bank robbery prosecutions have less predictable outcomes than administrative adjudication at the FTC.” Winning against the federal government should never require losing so much.”

Sometimes winning is still losing. That is certainly true for companies that find themselves caught in the cross hairs of the federal government. Since 2013, my organization has defended one such company, the cancer-screening LabMD, against meritless allegations from the Federal Trade Commission. Last Friday, the FTC’s chief administrative-law judge dismissed the agency’s complaint. But it was too late. The reputational damage and expense of a six-year federal investigation forced LabMD to close last year.

While the Atlanta-based company was in business, its work required securely storing personal-health data and medical records in compliance with Health and Human Services Department regulations under the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, often known as HIPAA.

So it was alarming when, in May 2008, LabMD was contacted by Tiversa, a company that describes itself as a “world leader in P2P cyberintelligence,” alleging that it had found on the Internet a LabMD insurance-agent file containing the names, dates of birth and Social Security numbers of about 9,000 patients. Oddly, Tiversa wouldn’t disclose where or how it discovered the file. But the company demanded a fee of $40,000 to mitigate the situation.

Last week, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, who is soon to depart, gave a swan-song address in Boston. Recounting a tenure spent treating the U.S. Department of Education like a national school board, he took special pains to celebrate four federal adventures: the Obama administration’s Race to the Top program, its dubious new $6 billion School Improvement Grant program, his attempts to micro-manage teacher evaluation in the states via waivers from the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act, and his efforts to push states to adopt the Common Core standards.

This afternoon, House and Senate negotiators will sit down to finalize the conference bill that would replace No Child Left Behind. To understand how profoundly the bill shrinks the federal role, one need only ask what it means for the overreaching, progressives-at-play education legacy of Obama and Duncan. Race to the Top? Gone. School Improvement Grants? Gone. Federal bureaucrats no longer have the ability to dictate to states on teacher policy. And, when it comes to the Common Core, federal officials are henceforth barred from “encouraging” or “incentivizing” states to adopt certain standards.

Indeed, one can read the bill as a massive, bipartisan repudiation of the Obama administration’s Washington-centric education excesses. More fundamentally, the bill is an important victory for principled, limited government even as it addresses practical concerns about over-testing and ill-conceived federal mandates.

Among politicians and their clingers-on, journalists, nothing takes hold like a bad historical analogy. Thus as politicians — 29 governors chief among them — call for a halt to our Syrian-refugee-resettlement program on the grounds that it might be exploited as a conduit for terrorists, pundits are invoking the plight of Jewish refugees fleeing Adolf Hitler’s Germany in an effort to soften American hearts. The Washington Post’s Dana Milbank wrote Monday, “This growing cry to turn away people fleeing for their lives brings to mind the SS St. Louis, the ship of Jewish refugees turned away from Florida in 1939,” while his colleague Ishaan Tharoor contended: “Today’s 3-year-old Syrian orphan, it seems, is 1939’s German Jewish child.” Meanwhile, a Daily Kos headline shouts: “Replace ‘Syrian’ with ‘Jewish’ and we’re back to 1939.”

This is prima facie nonsense, which should be obvious from the terms being compared: Jews, an ethnic group, with Syrians, a national one. An honest, apples-to-apples comparison would line up German Jews and Syrian Muslims — the relevant ethnic group within the relevant political entity. But do this, and the failure of the analogy becomes clear.

The Red Guards were the terrorist vanguard, mainly teenagers and people in their 20s, who helped Mao Tse-Tung execute the Cultural Revolution. Their first skirmishes were waged against the administrations of Tsinghua University and Peking University, which they accused of being blind to what we may as well go ahead and call “privilege,” though the language of the time was probably closer to “elitism” and “bourgeois” tendencies. They were fond of public-criticism sessions and reeducation programs, and the movement they helped launch would eventually persecute tens of millions of people and murder a million and a half. Among those were 23,000 members of minority groups, beaten to death after being judged insufficiently committed to the prevalent ideas of social justice based on their ethnic background.

The idiot children running amok on our college campuses right now aren’t exactly the Red Guards — they’re far too weak and wishy-washy for that. Call them the Pink Guards.

Two points here.

1. Obama Inc. is predictably refusing to slow down or stop Syrian migrant dumping in US states. Including those states which have said no to it.

2. Obama Inc. is refusing to even work with Democratic governors who are pro-resettlement, like Jerry Brown in California, to provide local law enforcement with information about risks.

In a call with senior Obama administration officials Tuesday evening, several governors demanded they be given access to information about Syrian refugees about to be resettled by the federal government in their states. Top White House officials refused…

On the call several Republican governors and two Democrats — New Hampshire’s Maggie Hassan and California’s Jerry Brown — repeatedly pressed administration officials to share more information about Syrian refugees entering the United States. The governors wanted notifications whenever refugees were resettled in their states, as well as access to classified information collected when the refugees were vetted…

That’s the surprising thing. Obama won’t even throw Jerry Brown a bone.

After making America poorer, weaker, less free, more race-obsessed and balkanized throughout his tumultuous presidency, Barack Obama is gearing up to use his two tax-exempt nonprofits to continue attacking what remains of the republic’s civil society after he leaves office in 14 months.

Obama’s presidency “has been pockmarked by rioting, looting and protests,” as he “encouraged the nonstop civil unrest exhausting the nation,” writes the Hoover Institution’s Paul Sperry. Obama and his “army of social justice bullies” are going to make things worse before he leaves office on Jan. 20, 2017.

Our indefatigable Community Organizer-in-Chief is planning to use Organizing for Action (OfA) and the Barack Obama Foundation to continue punishing America for its imaginary sins and to promote manufactured controversies long after he leaves the White House.

Chicago-based OfA has trained “more than 10,000 leftist organizers, who, in turn, are training more than 2 million youths in [Saul] Alinsky street tactics,” according to Sperry. This “army of social justice bullies” will carry on Obama’s campaign to fundamentally transform America.

A new video released by ISIS on Wednesday praises the recent terror attacks in Paris and threatens a new attack in New York City’s Time Square.

The video was released by the Furat Media Center, ISIS’s media arm, and features several men speaking in Arabic and French. They congratulate ISIS over the Paris attacks and promise that they will prevail.

Before scenes from Times Square are shown, an ISIS jihadist declares that “the attacks in Paris were just the beginning.”

Via Fox News:

The video then cuts to a militant donning a bomb vest mixed with footage of flashing billboards and yellow taxi cabs.
The video ends with a message on screen that reads “and what is to come will be worse and more bitter.”

We all know people of towering arrogance and we all know people of staggering incompetence, but Barack Obama is quite possibly the perfect package. No one on the scene today combines these two qualities in quite the same way as Mr. Obama.

On the incompetence side, and sticking just with the president’s policies and record in the greater Middle East, there is Mr. Obama’s mishandling of the rise of the Islamic State, which just last year he referred to as the “jayvee team” and just last week declared was “contained.” Recall his threat to Syrian President Assad that if Assad used chemical weapons on his own people it would constitute crossing a “red line” (Assad did and Obama did nothing), and his stop-start-stop support for opposition forces in Syria.

Then there is the president’s decision to pull out all American troops from Iraq, which had disastrous consequences; his failures in Afghanistan (including announcing a withdrawal date even as he was announcing a surge in troops); his bungled relations with Egypt; his failure to support the Green Revolution in Iran in 2009 and his nuclear deal with Iran in 2015, which Charles Krauthammer called “the worst agreement in U.S. diplomatic history.” Add to that Mr. Obama declaring his policies in Libya, Yemen and Somalia to be models of success before things collapses in all three countries, his alienation and mistreatment of Israel, and his botched handling of relations with our Arab allies – not to mention policies that have allowed Russia a presence in the Middle East unlike any its had since Anwar Sadat expelled the Soviet Union from Egypt in the early 1970s – and you have a catastrophic foreign policy record. It was only in the summer of last year that the Wall Street Journal reported, “The breadth of global instability now unfolding hasn’t been seen since the late 1970s” – and things are more disordered, chaotic and violent now then it was then. Things are so bad that the president has even lost CNN’s Christiane Amanpour.

Now most of us, with this almost unblemished record of ineptness, might feel some embarrassment. We might show a touch of self-reflection. And we would at least resist the temptation to lecture others. But not Mr. Obama. In his press conference in Turkey earlier this week, the president was prickly, petulant, condescending and small-minded. Consider just these two paragraphs

US authorities have charged at least 66 men and women with ISIS-related terror plots on American soil – including a handful of refugees, Daily Mail Online can reveal. The terror group has set its sights on Washington, D.C. as it vows to further infiltrate the West and ramp up its blood-soaked offensive.

President Obama insists that ‘slamming the door’ on Syrian refugees fleeing ISIS would be a betrayal of American values.But 34 governors are refusing to take in any more, in case jihadi fighters slip into their states and repeat the carnage of Paris.

Analysis by Daily Mail Online reveals that a handful of foiled plots have already involved immigrants accused of harboring sympathy for ISIS. The threat also comes from within, with American teenagers and Islamic converts among those seduced by the group’s torrent of chilling online propaganda.

They include a U.S. Air Force veteran accused of waging war on the country he once served and a National Guard soldier who allegedly plotted to gun down his own colleagues. Others are seemingly ordinary American citizens, including a young nurse, a pizza parlor boss and schoolgirls tricked into becoming shrouded ISIS brides.

Some have conspired to travel or send friends abroad to link up with fundamentalist fighters while others have planned for jihad closer to home – with Capitol Hill among the targets for a foiled bombing raid.

The incidents detailed here are among dozens of alleged disrupted by police and federal agents since ISIS began to rise from the flames of the Syrian civil war. The earliest arrest was 18 months ago.

They include: