RUTHFULLY YOURS

‘You’re all suckers.”That has to be what Barack Obama is thinking as the country falls for his head-fake.Let’s recap.

George W. Bush’s surge reduced the Islamic State’s precursor, al-Qaeda in Iraq, to a paltry 700 members, according to CIA director John Brennan. Its membership has grown by something close to 4,000 percent. As it metastasized, Obama yawned, calling it the “JV team.” When Syrian president Bashar al-Assad violated Obama’s “red line,” Obama yawned again, and the refugee crisis was born.

By August 2014, Obama was grudgingly conceding he needed a new counterterrorism strategy. One tactic he ruled out: building up pro-American Syrian forces. He told New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman that was an unworkable “fantasy.”

Then, within weeks, the Islamic State beheaded American journalist James Foley. On vacation in Martha’s Vineyard, Obama denounced the murder. Within eight minutes of that statement, he was on the golf course. He later conceded that was a mistake.

President Obama reiterated his determination to close the prison at Guantanamo Bay despite the attorney general’s affirmation to Congress that the administration would be breaking the law by moving detainees to U.S. soil.

In testimony before the House Judiciary Committee on Tuesday, Attorney General Loretta Lynch acknowledged that “as the administration has stated, the closure of Guantanamo Bay is something that is part of the administration’s policy and the Department Of Justice supports that as well.”

“At this point in time I believe the current state of the law is that individuals are not transferred from Guantanamo to U.S. shores,” Lynch said. “…And certainly it’s the position of the Department of Justice that we would follow the law of the land in regard to that issue.”

“I believe that it is the view of the department that we would certainly observe the laws as passed by Congress and signed by the president. Only very rarely would we take the step of finding that an unconstitutional provision was something that we could not manage.”

White House senior advisor Valerie Jarrett said criminal justice reform that reduces the prison population would make America safer.

Jarrett also said President Obama is focused on tackling the issue along with Congress and is not a “lame duck.” Obama has directed federal agencies to “ban the box,” which prohibits them from asking about an applicant’s criminal history. Jarrett said Obama wants Congress to do the same for federal contractors as well, which requires congressional action.

In addition, the Justice Department has decided to release about 6,000 inmates from federal prison who were convicted of drug-related offenses.

Jarrett was asked if reforming the criminal justice system could cause crime to rise.

“We are seeing crime go up in some cities. We’re also seeing it leveled in others and going down in the third category,” Jarrett said during the “Race and Justice in America” Summit held by The Atlantic.

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.