RUTHFULLY YOURS

LIONEL SHRIVER SAYS
I am concerned that we are throwing knee-touching into the same basket as rape, which does a grievous disservice to mere knee-touchers and rape victims both. I am concerned that we are increasingly wont to confuse genuine abuse of power in the workplace with often distant memories of men who have made failed – ‘unwanted’ – passes. In the complicated dance of courtship, someone has to make a move, and the way one conventionally discovers if one’s attraction is returned is to brave some gentle physical contact and perhaps accept rebuff. Were I still a young woman looking for a partner, I would not wish to live in world where a man had to secure a countersigned contract in triplicate before he kissed me.

I am concerned that we are casting women as irremediably scarred by even minor, casual advances, and as incapable of competently and sensitively handling the commonplace instances in which men are drawn to them sexually and the feeling doesn’t happen to be mutual.

I am concerned that sex itself seems increasingly to be seen as dirty, and as a violation, a form of assault, so that we’re repackaging an old prudery in progressive wrapping paper. I am concerned that we are well on our way to demonising, if not criminalising, all male desire.

Turbocharged by social media, #MeToo may have gone too far. Rather than bringing the sexes together with improved mutual understanding, we are in danger of driving the sexes apart. If I were a man right now, I’d lock the door of my study with the intention of satisfying myself with internet porn for the indefinite future. Real women would not seem worth the risk of destroying my career. Is that what we want?

Lionel is an author, most recently of The Standing Chandelier, and winner of the Orange Prize for Fiction.

WENDY KAMINER

#MeToo is the unthinking woman’s anti-harassment crusade. It commands us to ‘believe the women’ unthinkingly, without considering the seriousness or plausibility of their claims. It calls every accuser a survivor, whether she alleges a sexual assault or a single, unsolicited advance. It ignores essential differences between work-related harassment that undermines women professionally and inconsequential social annoyances, threatening to police interpersonal relations outside the workplace. It celebrates conformity and demonises dissent, as you might expect from a movement based on proclamations of ‘me too’.

Thinking people make distinctions – between a hand on your knee and a grope up your skirt, between a sexual attack by a supervisor and a pat on the butt from a guy in a bar – just as they distinguish pickpockets from home invaders. #MeTooism condemns such distinctions as reflections of rape culture. At best, when we differentiate ‘sexual assault and sexual harassment and unwanted groping, [we] are having the wrong conversation’, Democratic senator Kirsten Gillibrand asserts, while preparing to run for president as the self-appointed avenger of all self-identified female victims.

This dangerous nonsense denigrates women – we are not all traumatised by every fool who cops a feel – and questions our claim to equality.

Wendy is a lawyer, author and a former national board member of the American Civil Liberties Union.

Claire Berlinski says…

The #MeToo movement has exposed allegations of very serious sexual crimes and the degree to which women are simply fed up. This is healthy, up to a point. But we are way past that point.

It has now morphed into a mass hysteria. Men have been accused of transgressions no reasonable person would define as a crime. And this crime comes with a swift and terrifying penalty, but has no clear definition and no statute of limitations. This is juridically and morally absurd. Nulla poena sine lege.

This crime, it seems, may be committed through word, deed, or even facial expression. It rests entirely on discerning what a woman feels, or will feel, even decades later. But discerning this is actually quite difficult. ‘It’s payback time for men’ is not a reasonable definition. We must now together reason this out. Nullum crimen sine lege.

The names keep coming. The heads keep rolling. A charge of creepiness is a death sentence. (De minimis non curat lex.) Once the charge is made, employers race to purge the creep lest they too be stained by his dishonour. ‘We are deeply disappointed by the reports that Mister Absolutely Unacceptable in this day and age failed to live up to our company standards’, begins the ritual. And you know damned well Mister Absolutely Unacceptable will never get his job, or his life, back. Audacter caluminiare, semper aliquid haeret.

This is not good for men. But neither is it good for women. Newton’s third law is not just about physics. There will be a reaction. And women as a professional class will find themselves figuratively screwed – not an obvious improvement in the screwing scheme of things.

Claire is a novelist and journalist. Donate towards her new book: Stitch by Stitch. READ MORE AT SITE

Administrations by law must publish strategic manifestoes.https://amgreatness.com/2017/12/18/a-jacksonian-manifesto/

Indeed, the Goldwater–Nichols Department of Defense Reorganization Act of October 4, 1986 required every subsequent government to issue periodic and formal national strategic strategy blueprints.

Most of these documents dating from the Reagan Administration are blah-blah boilerplate announcements of the obvious. They offer platitudinous promises of a sober internationalist United States leading the world in promoting global institutions while using its preeminent strength to partner with allies to counter perceived rising threats, such as rogue nations or terrorism. And so on.

The Trump Administration has just released its first national security strategy.

But to be frank, it is unlike most all prior manifestoes. The contrast with the 2015 Obama doctrine is stunning—the disconnect emblematic in its unabashed preamble that “This National Security Strategy puts America first.”

What’s Different
The Obama Administration doctrine’s emphases on global institutions and liberal values also marked a clear departure from past norms. It tended to redefine existential dangers not so much as hostile military powers, but rather as global natural threats (e.g., global warming, AIDS, and Ebola) and innate human prejudices (demeaning the Other, and biases against minority and LGBT communities). In the 2015 document, the words “jihad” or “jihadism” never appear (it pops up nearly 30 times in the twice-as-long Trump outline), but “violent extremism” showed up often in the widest sense of “root causes” and “home-grown” varieties.

The theme of the Trump document is American restoration. In Reaganesque fashion, the administration sees itself as similarly overturning an era of strategic stagnation, analogous to the self-doubt, self-imposed sense of decline, and thematic malaise of the Carter era. Instead, the “strategic confidence” and “principled realism” of the Trump Administration will purportedly snap America back out its Obama recessional in the same manner that Ronald Reagan did in the 1980s.

If the United States is not strong, then the world order will weaken: “America first is the duty of our government and the foundation for U.S. leadership in the world. A strong America is in the vital interests of not only the American people, but also those around the world who want to partner with the United States in pursuit of shared interests, values, and aspirations.”

Resistance is ancient. A few brave men and women have always stood against tyranny. The movie “Spartacus” depicted a slave rebellion in ancient Rome. The Protestant Reformation was resistance against Catholicism. Henry David Thoreau gave us civil disobedience. We associate resistance with the French and Polish undergrounds during the Second World War. More recently, George Lucas used resistance as the center of his epic film “Star Wars.” Leia Organa founds a small military force, “The Resistance,” to combat the First Order, which had risen from the ashes of the Galactic Empire.

Resistance is a call for freedom and a means to defend liberty. It was resistance against King John that established the Magna Carta in 1215, which limited the powers of the king. American patriots resisted the imposition of taxes, by tossing tea into Boston harbor in 1773. Woodrow Wilson noted that “the history of liberty is the history of resistance.”

But today’s resistance against Donald Trump has none of that legitimacy or idealism. It’s driven by hatred. It grew out of last year’s election, when Mr. Trump, anti-establishment and an outsider to Washington’s Beltway politics, was elected President. It claims spontaneity, but is led by a group called Indivisible (www.indivisible.org), and comprised of organizations like Black Lives Matter, Women’s March Global and the Center for Community Change. It has been funded by Democracy Alliance, which has steered more than $600 million toward selected liberal groups since its inception in 2005, and by MoveOn.org, the PAC set up by billionaire George Soros. It is supported by those in the media who decry Mr. Trump’s “toxic and menacing presidency,” as L.A. Kaufman, in The Guardian, put it. The “resistance” has the endorsement of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. Organizing for Action, the PAC set up by Mr. Obama in 2008, has been relaunched with its purpose to derail Mr. Trump’s Presidency. Ms. Clinton incorporated Organizing for Action, a PAC to help fund resistance groups, transferring $800,000 from her campaign funds.

Most disconcerting, “resistance” is embedded in federal bureaucracies, like the IRS, the State Department and the Department of Justice. It descends from resistance to conservatives – recall the stone-walling of Lois Lerner at the IRS in 2015? Today, the State Department is boycotting the President’s Jerusalem policy, as can be seen with 15-year-old American, Menachem Zivotofsky who was born in Jerusalem and is trying to get his passport to say he was born in Israel. We saw it in James Comey’s testimony, and in the anti-Trump e-mails between Peter Strzok and his paramour, Lisa Page. It was seen in Sally Yates, a holdover from the Obama Administration, refusing to enforce a legal order on immigration, and in the refusal of Leandra English to hand over control of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau after the President had appointed Mick Mulvaney to be interim head. It can be seen in the Senate’s “slow-walking” of hundreds of administrative appointments, and in the endless investigations into alleged Russian-Trump collusion.

We don’t know how Robert Mueller’s investigation into the Trump administration will play out, but if it’s half as bad the Obama administration’s coddling of terror-supporting Iran, it should be a massive national scandal.

Empowering terrorist groups. Paying ransom that emboldened our enemies to kidnap Americans. Creating an echo chamber that undermined a free press. Releasing spies, terrorists, and criminals who assisted not only our enemy and her terrorist proxies, but Russia as well. In the Iran deal, we have clear-cut case of the United States handing over extensive concessions to a nation that openly aimed to destabilize our interests, attack our allies, and kill our people — for nothing in return. It’s worse than anything we know about “Russian collusion.”

On Sunday night, Politico sent an email previewing an another investigative article alleging that the Obama administration had “derailed an ambitious law enforcement campaign targeting drug trafficking by the Iranian-backed, Bashar al-Assad-allied, Justice Department-designated terrorist organization Hezbollah, even as it was funneling cocaine into the United States.”

This email dramatically underplays the outlet’s reporting. While it looks like the Obama administration neutralized efforts to stop a terrorist group from funding its operations through criminal enterprises in the United States — which should be a major scandal itself — according to Josh Meyer’s source-heavy reporting, it also decided to let a top Hezbollah operative named Ali Fayad, who had not only been indicted in U.S. courts for planning to kill American government employees but whom agents believed reported to Russian President Vladimir Putin as a key supplier of weapons to Syria and Iraq, to skate free.

You can, I’m sure, imagine what the reaction would be if this story had Trump’s administration rather than Obama’s secretly released Putin’s Middle East arms dealer?

“This was a policy decision, it was a systematic decision,” David Asher, an on-the-record source and Defense Department official charged with tracking Hezbollah’s worldwide criminal enterprise, told Politico. “They serially ripped apart this entire effort that was very well supported and resourced, and it was done from the top down.” (Read the whole thing.)

The striking thing about the latest Mueller investigation controversy — a kerfuffle over the special counsel’s acquisition of voluminous files from Trump’s transition organization — is how unnecessary it is.

As the word transition implies, an incoming president’s transition team is not yet in the government the president-elect will soon be running. It is thus in an ambiguous state: a private entity that is being briefed on government operations as it conducts preparations for governing; an entity through which private persons (i.e., non-government officials) are communicating with public officeholders and other private citizens in order to recruit potential administration officials, discuss policy, and understand the responsibilities the new administration will be taking on. There are obvious legal matters to be discussed, and hence the involvement of lawyers and discussions that are potentially privileged. There are strategic deliberations that go into public announcements and the formulation of policy.

It’s complicated.

That is why, if a prosecutor and investigators want to review presidential transition files, they should make the request directly to counsel for the presidential transition. That is the way to sort out any knotty legal issues, with court intervention if necessary, so that they do not become public controversies. But that is not the Mueller way, as we saw with the utterly unnecessary pre-dawn raid on the home of Paul Manafort — busting in with a search warrant and guns drawn, at the very time Manafort was cooperating with congressional committees, and when he was represented by well-respected lawyers through whom Mueller could have requested production of whatever materials he was seeking.

Mueller’s investigation is examining whether Trump campaign officials “colluded” in Russia’s espionage operations to interfere in the election, and whether contacts between Trump associates and Russian operatives amounted to actionable corruption. That being the case, the relevance of at least some transition materials is obvious.

Last Thursday, the Trump administration issued the first iteration of its congressionally mandated Interdepartmental Serious Mental Illness Coordinating Committee (ISMICC) report. Titled “The Way Forward,” the report is intended to be a blueprint for how the federal government can improve care for the most seriously mentally ill. It is a step in the right direction.

The ISMICC, working under the leadership of Dr. Elinore McCance-Katz, the assistant secretary of Mental Health and Substance Use Disorders, comprises ten federal members representing different agencies and 14 members representing the public- and mental-health industries. These officials were tasked with evaluating the nation’s response to the seriously mentally ill and proposing improvements to Congress.

The problem with our mental-health policy is huge. As I documented in Insane Consequences: How the Mental Health Industry Fails the Mentally Ill, despite $147 billion of annual spending in federal funds and another $40 billion or so in state funds, 140,000 seriously mentally ill individuals are homeless while 390,000 remain incarcerated. Thankfully, the ISMICC defined the rates of homelessness, arrest, incarceration, violence and needless hospitalization as the biggest problems facing the seriously mentally ill.

Helping the most seriously ill, those who can’t help themselves, is a legitimate core function of government. Unfortunately, both the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) and the Center for Mental Health Services (CMHS) remain headed by Obama holdovers who refuse to focus on the most seriously ill or address the most-pressing issues like violence, fearing that doing so will cause a “stigma” by highlighting the association between violence and untreated serious mental illness. Instead, these officials focus their agencies on pumping out pop-psychology webinars, publications and grants to improve “mental wellness” among the higher functioning. President Trump and acting HHS secretary Eric Hargan should replace the leaders of SAMHSA and CMHS with doctors like Dr. McCance-Katz who are committed to using taxpayer dollars for the most important issues that affect the seriously ill, not for the sideshows.

Beyond defining the problem, this first report contains initial recommendations made by the public members of the committee. Many are relevant to reducing homelessness, arrest, incarceration and needless hospitalization, but others are not. This is likely the result of the committee having very little time to sort through their ideas: The final report is not due until four years from now. So there is plenty of time to modify the recommendations and prioritize the most-important ones. Hopefully, the committee members will.

As we hoped, the Republican tax legislation improved as it moved through Congress. Harmful ideas such as eliminating the adoption tax credit were abandoned. Some tax relief for the working poor was added. The final bill should increase investment, reduce the distortionary effect of tax breaks, and lighten the especially excessive burden that the federal government puts on parents. While the bill is nobody’s idea of perfection, it is nonetheless a solid accomplishment and we are glad that Congress is moving quickly to pass it.

Our 35 percent corporate tax rate has stayed in place for decades as our major trading partners cut their rates. The new tax rate of 21 percent should help us compete better for capital. Allowing businesses to write off the cost of investments more rapidly is another pro-growth win in the bill.

The legislation rightly pares back two major deductions: the ones for mortgage interest, which will be capped at mortgages of $750,000 rather than the current $1 million, and for state and local taxes, which will be capped at $10,000 rather than being unlimited. In both cases we would have preferred more aggressive action, but the more moderate course chosen has the virtue of reducing the number of people who will face tax increases thanks to the bill. If some high-income households react to this change by leaving high-tax states, perhaps those states will in turn be moved to rethink their policies.

The bill’s major contribution to tax simplification is the expansion of the standard deduction. That expansion will make tax deductions less important: Only a small percentage of taxpayers will find it worthwhile to itemize. The bill also reduces the number of people who will have to calculate their taxes twice, by limiting the reach of the alternative minimum tax.

Thanks largely to the interventions of Senators Marco Rubio and Mike Lee, the legislation expands the child tax credit. We have long favored a large tax credit for children as the most practical way to remedy a disparity in our old-age entitlements: They overtax parents, who pay the same tax rates and get the same benefits as childless adults no matter how much they have contributed to those programs by raising children.

Following Roy Moore’s defeat in the Alabama Senatorial race, the political Nostradami of both parties are furiously predicting either doom or salvation for the other party. Dems think Doug Jones’ win means the South is up for grabs, and flipping the Senate and maybe even the House is possible. Donks predict that with the toxic Moore off the table, Jones’ win will no more flip the Senate than Scott Brown’s win did for the Republicans in 2010. More interesting is what Moore’s rise and fall tells us about our dysfunctional political culture.

Take the weaponization of sexual harassment and assault charges. A movement that started with Harvey Weinstein, a blatant offender who left enough credible evidence to start a criminal investigation, expanded into an orgy of accusations including clumsy flirting, boorish passes, juvenile gags, and other behaviors that in a workplace might constitute sexual harassment, but would not be subject to legal sanction. The level of subjective interpretations involved in many of these charges confuses the issue even further, and can leave determining “sexual assault” in the eye of the beholder. And of course, false charges are easy to manufacture once we are instructed to believe every accuser before any corroborating evidence is available.

An example of how subjective the standards are for making a serious accusation can be seen in the case of one of the three women who recently accused Trump of sexual impropriety. Here’s NBC’s reporting of one woman’s charge:

[The accuser] said when she competed in Trump’s Miss USA pageant in 2006, Trump came backstage unexpectedly when she and other contestants were wearing nothing but robes and he personally inspected the contestants. “I just felt so gross,” she said. “Just looking me over like I was a piece of meat . . . “Nobody dreams of being ogled when you’re a little girl wanting to wear a crown,” she added.

As reported, this charge is preposterous. We’re talking about a beauty pageant, not a spelling bee or the Academic Decathlon. These contestants are chosen for their physical beauty, including their sexual allure. I’ve never seen an obese homely woman in one of these pageants. And wouldn’t the accuser have shown more of her body during the swimsuit competition than Trump would’ve seen when she was wearing a robe? And isn’t being “ogled” the whole point of parading around on stage in a bikini? Given the accuser’s standard, every male judge and audience member was guilty of sexual assault.