RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://www.wsj.com/articles/the-civil-illiberties-union-targets-a-yeshiva-1460069202

Rabbi Aharon Kotler arrived in the U.S. on April 10, 1941, having escaped Lithuania as the Nazis approached. Even as the Holocaust proceeded to destroy Jewish life in Europe, Rabbi Kotler declared that he would rebuild it in America.

He convinced 13 students to join him in Lakewood, N.J., where in 1943 he founded Beth Medrash Govoha. Today, BMG enrolls more than 6,800. Another mark of its success is that the school now has become caught up in a lawsuit brought by the American Civil Liberties Union.

In 2013 the state of New Jersey decided to give grants to colleges and universities to promote business and job opportunities. BMG was awarded $10.6 million to help build a new library and improve other of its facilities.

But the ACLU filed a lawsuit against New Jersey, objecting that the grant violates the state constitution. It is also offended that BMG is an all-male school, even though that is perfectly legal. After years of procedural wrangling, the lawsuit will be heard in a New Jersey appellate court on Monday—75 years, almost to the day, since Rabbi Kotler debarked in San Francisco and set about to transform Jewish life in America.

If that isn’t a sufficient good omen, there is also Harvard Law School Prof. Noah Feldman’s prediction, in a Bloomberg article shortly after the lawsuit was filed, that the ACLU’s challenge “is on shaky constitutional grounds and will probably fail.”

Let’s start with a stated purpose of the grants, which were intended to help spur economic development. BMG’s primary achievement is as an academic institution, but along the way it has transformed its hometown. Thousands of its alumni have purchased homes, raised families and created businesses in Lakewood and across New Jersey.

A 2015 report commissioned by the school shows that its alumni have created more than 3,000 businesses and employ about 11,000 people in Lakewood alone. The report credits the BMG community with paying more than $100 million in annual property and other local taxes. All of which is to say that the yeshiva fits the profile to be eligible for the grant. CONTINUE AT SITE

Hillary Clinton is good at imagining partisan plots, and to listen to her team, no less than several inspectors general, the intelligence community, and the entire Republican ecosphere are colluding to turn her home-brew email system into a fake scandal. To this conspiracy, she must now add the federal judiciary.

In recent weeks, not one, but two, esteemed federal judges have granted an outside group—Judicial Watch—the right to conduct discovery into the origins and handling of her private email system. It’s a reminder that Mrs. Clinton’s biggest problem this election isn’t Bernie Sanders or Donald Trump. Her problem is a 1966 statute known as the Freedom of Information Act, and the judges who enforce it.

The judges have taken unprecedented steps to resolve this case. It is exceedingly rare—almost unheard of—for a judge to allow discovery in a FOIA proceeding. This is a testament to how grave Mrs. Clinton’s email problem is. In the usual course of things, an outside group demands documents, a judge requires a federal department to hand them over, and the public learns something.

In this case—as we all know—the problem is that the State Department doesn’t have the documents. Or rather, it can’t confirm that it has them all, because State left it to Mrs. Clinton and her aides to possess them, and then to unilaterally decide what to hand over. To Judge Royce Lamberth, this is cut and dry “evidence of government wrong-doing and bad faith,” and the law demands a full accounting of how this situation came to be, what records exist, and where they are now.

Speaking of the judge’s words, they too are a testament to Mrs. Clinton’s mess. Judge Lamberth was unplugged in his order, calling the former secretary of state’s email set up “extraordinary,” and slamming “constantly shifting admissions by the government and former government officials” about the setup. Judge Emmet Sullivan, the first to allow discovery, referred in his own hearing to Mrs. Clinton’s “totally atypical system” and noted that it “boggles the mind that the State Department allowed this circumstance to arise in the first place. It’s just very, very, very troubling.”CONTINUE AT SITE

The attorneys general of New York and California are on the warpath. They’re fed up with dissent over the science and politics of global warming, and they’re ready to investigate the liars. California’s Kamala Harris and New York’s Eric Schneiderman have Exxon in their sights, and they’re trying to pry open the books to see whether the corporation properly warned shareholders “about the risk to its business from climate change.” Not to be outdone, Attorney General Loretta Lynch revealed that the federal Department of Justice has “discussed” the possibility of civil suits against the fossil-fuel industry. The smell of litigation is in the air.

Some people are worried about little things like the “First Amendment,” “academic freedom,” and “scientific integrity.” Not me. I hate unscientific nonsense. So if Harris and Schneiderman are up for suing people who’ve made piles of cash peddling exaggerations and distortions, let’s roll out some test cases. I’ve got three ideas:

United States v. Al Gore. Ten years ago, the former vice president of the United States launched an extraordinarily lucrative career by selling climate doomsday. While promoting his Oscar-winning documentary, An Inconvenient Truth, he made a shockingly false statement. He said that unless the world took “drastic measures” to reduce greenhouse gases, it would reach a “point of no return” in ten years.

Ten years have passed. Is there a scientific consensus that the world has reached a “point of no return?” No? Gore’s documentary grossed almost $50 million worldwide. I’d suggest that number as a starting point for damages. But of course you’ll need to subpoena all his business records and communications. We wouldn’t want him hiding his ill-gotten gains, and goodness knows that public schools could use some cash.

New York v. ABC/Walt Disney Company: If you thought the case against Gore was compelling, I present to you this complete absurdity from ABC: