RUTHFULLY YOURS

For the first time in 21 years a law making it illegal to cut young girls’ genitalia will be challenged, claiming freedom of religion as a defense, the Detroit Free Press reports.

Three people have been charged with cutting the genitals of two 7-year-old girls from Minnesota in February. The defendants, Dr. Fakhruddin Attar, his wife Farida Attar and Dr. Jumana Nagarwala are members of the Indian-Muslim sect Dawoodi Bohra, located in Farmington Hills, Michigan, outside of Detroit.

One of the defense lawyers for the case, Mary Chartier, told the Detroit Free Press that besides freedom of religion, the defense will also argue that technically the doctors didn’t cut any genitalia, it was just a “scraping.”

“We know there is female genital mutilation. No one is saying it doesn’t exist. But what we’re saying is this procedure does not qualify as FGM. And even if it did, it would be exempt because it would violate their First Amendment rights. They believe that if they do not engage in this then they are not actively practicing their religion,” Chartier said.

But according to court records, the young girls said the procedures were very painful and were told to keep it a secret.

“She knew that this was illegal but did it anyway. As a medical doctor, she is aware that female genital mutilation has no medical purpose,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Sara Woodward told the Detroit Free Press about the doctor who performed the procedure.

FGM became illegal in 1997 under the Federal Prohibition of Female Genital Mutilation Act, according to Catholic News Agency.

Writers love words. Journalists love words. We spend our professional lives typing them out, shifting them around, cutting and pasting and refining. The reason we do so is that we feel we have something to say, and we keep trying to find a clearer, stronger, and more precise way of expressing exactly what we want to express.

This was one reason journalists loved Obama. Like a very small number of political leaders throughout human history, from Marcus Aurelius to Abraham Lincoln to Winston Churchill, he was, or seemed to be, a man of words. Certainly he wanted to be seen that way.

Indeed, everything about the way he gave speeches — the posture, the gestures, the tone — made him seem very much like someone who wished to be thought of as a philosopher king, right out of Plato via Central Casting. He loved playing the role of president as professor, loved the mellifluous sound of his own voice, loved standing in regal fashion at a lectern and proffering what he expected to be received by his audiences as pearls of wisdom.

And whether it was wisdom or not, journalists loved it. Because — oh, the words, those glorious words! The sentences, the passages, the transitions! At one point during the 2008 campaign, somebody in some newspaper or magazine actually diagrammed a sentence by Obama, not from one of his magnificently polished speeches but from some impromptu response to a question at a press conference.

The point, of course, was to show what a wonderfully complex and coherent thinker he was, and how skilled he was at expressing his thoughts in unscripted, elegant, and grammatically correct statements. Obama’s sentence was contrasted with an off-the-cuff statement by George W. Bush, which, needless to say, was much more simply put together — indeed, barely coherent, and certainly far from literate.

The conclusion was obvious: Obama was a man for whom the wording and construction and delivery of a speech, or even an answer to a reporter’s query, was a matter of supreme importance. The man always came off as thoughtful, sophisticated, supremely articulate.

Throughout his 2008 campaign and then throughout his presidency, journalists’ respect for him as a highly serious man of highly serious words remained unshaken. Whatever his policies, and whatever the success or failure thereof, one fact about him could not be challenged: he was a man who took very seriously the act of putting ideas into words, and of polishing those words (or ensuring that his speechwriters polished them) to a golden, perfect sheen. And for this reason – in many cases, perhaps, more than any other – journalists revered him.
Trump vs. Obama: A Study in Contrasts

Then came Trump.

When it comes to all of these matters, Trump was Obama’s exact opposite. He never pretended to be a philosopher king – far from it. On the contrary, he made a flagrant point of the fact that he enjoys speaking off the cuff, in simple, punchy, repetitious, and often vulgar language. And to the shock and dismay of America’s journalists, millions of voters didn’t care. Indeed, a lot of them liked it. For many of us who write for a living, who labor over language, and who regard words with an almost religious awe, it can be unpleasant to be reminded that most people don’t care about such things. CONTINUE AT SITE

The year was 1993. Bill Clinton had recently been elected president. A gallon of gas cost $1.16, and the Chicago Bulls won the first of three consecutive National Basketball Association championships. Over in Lansing, Mich., a teaching assistant’s dreams were about to come true as well.

This public employee, Steve Cook, was making a relatively low hourly wage at Lansing Public School District. But he had an opportunity to enter the private economy, where his new employer would pay him a lot more. Even better, he would be allowed to continue accruing taxpayer-funded pension benefits.

Why? This was no ordinary private employer. Mr. Cook was going to work for the Michigan Education Association, the state’s largest teachers union. His new employer worked out a deal with the school district that made Mr. Cook an “educator on loan,” a scheme that allows public employees to be paid by a government entity while being “loaned out” to another organization. Under the arrangement, the district technically pays Mr. Cook’s salary and the union reimburses the district. This allows him to accrue a much higher pension, by basing it on a far higher salary and many more years of service.

Richard Halik, the district’s superintendent at the time, agreed to the request. “You want a positive relationship with the MEA,” Mr. Halik said in a 2016 interview, explaining why he agreed to the deal that he expected to last only one year. “You pick the hill you die on. . . . We were going to be cooperative.”

Nearly 25 years later the scheme is still going. And this is not unique. Michigan’s largest teachers union has these types of agreements with its past three presidents, most of their current executives and even some low-level union employees. Dozens of people working full time for the private union are technically getting paid by a public school district.

It’s not hard to see why union employees go for such a setup. The lucky ones get to boost their taxpayer-funded pensions by pretending that they are still public employees. Since they are technically being paid by school districts—even though they work exclusively for a private union—union officials accrue benefits and stay eligible for Michigan’s school-employee pension system. That system is $29 billion underfunded, thanks in part to arrangements like this.

Mr. Cook became president of the MEA in 2011. He is set to retire later this year. His current salary is more than $200,000. While his pay was determined by the union, his paychecks still came from the Lansing school district. Had Mr. Cook stayed on as a teacher’s assistant in 1993, his annual pension benefit in retirement would be around $10,000, according to estimates by the Mackinac Center for Public Policy (which uncovered the scheme). Instead, Mr. Cook is in line to receive an annual pension of at least $105,000 for the rest of his life, at taxpayer expense.

The school district says it didn’t intend for this to happen. But three words in Mr. Cook’s “educator on loan” contract prohibit the district from terminating the arrangement. The contract, according to language contained in it, “shall be renewed.” Since there is no end date specified, the union claims the arrangement renews in perpetuity—and it has.

Union officials in Michigan and throughout the country benefit from these and other schemes. “Release time” arrangements enable public employees such as teachers to work full time for their unions, while still receiving their full school salaries and benefits. In Michigan, at least 70 school districts spend millions offering this benefit to union officials.

Last year, the Arizona Supreme Court upheld one such arrangement after the Goldwater Institute challenged it under the state’s constitutional “gift clause” provision. In California everyone from janitors to schoolteachers to college professors takes union release time, paid for by taxpayers, and the California Legislature actually expanded the practice in 2013.

The Office of Personnel Management tracks release time for federal employees. Its most recent report in 2014 showed that union employees logged 3.4 million hours of release time, at a cost of more than $162 million. In the Veterans Affairs Department alone, employees took more than a million hours of leave time.

Using taxpayer money to pay for union activities and private pensions should outrage anyone interested in efficient and effective public services. Taxpayers are on the hook twice—once to pay for the released worker and again to pay for a replacement employee. There’s no legitimate reason why governments should provide these types of extra benefits to unions and their officials. States and the federal government should end these schemes. CONTINUE AT SITE

White House aides are leaking that President Trump is considering a staff shakeup to stop them from leaking, and the casualty on Monday was communications director Mike Dubke. Mr. Trump certainly needs to fix his White House mess, but staff changes won’t matter unless the President accepts that he is the root of the dysfunction.

Mr. Dubke’s departure was rumored for weeks, though he’d been on the job for only three months. He wasn’t the problem, and his replacement won’t be the solution. It’s impossible to run a communications operation, or a policy shop, if the top man prefers chaotic, make-it-up-as-you-go management.

Take two recent examples. In late April Mr. Trump decided after consulting with a couple of advisers that he wanted to unilaterally withdraw from Nafta. No staff preparation. No warning to Mexico or Canada.

As word spread that the announcement was imminent, other aides and business leaders swung into action to prevent it, including pleas to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to call the President. Mr. Trump stood down, but the result was wasted political energy and economic uncertainty.

Then there was the fire drill over Mr. Trump’s tax plan. The White House National Economic Council had been working to develop a plan to send to Congress, but suddenly the President announced publicly that he wanted it rolled out in days. The result was a one-pager that moved in the right policy direction but was easily attacked for its lack of details. Mr. Trump may have wanted to galvanize his team, but the drill wasted time and did little to build a Republican consensus in Congress.

This is apparently how Mr. Trump likes to govern, and he has built a White House tower of Babel in that image. Reince Priebus, his chief of staff, has too little power and must read constantly that his job is in jeopardy. Steve Bannon is supposed to be the keeper of the populist flame, but his coterie of allies leak relentlessly against economics aide Gary Cohn and national security adviser H.R. McMaster.

John F. Kennedy would have turned 100 on Monday, and his life’s work on foreign policy provides compelling insights into how we might approach our own challenges in an increasingly unstable world.

From his election to the House in 1946, through his Senate tenure in the 1950s, to his 1,000-ish days as president, JFK sought to know more about the world, recognized the special U.S. role in it, focused attention on the challenges that a free and democratic America faced from authoritarian adversaries, pursued a coherent set of policies to confront them and, most importantly, learned from his mistakes.

Kennedy, who was born on May 29, 1917, read voraciously about history from his childhood, traveled widely across Europe and Asia, worked in America’s embassy in London while his father was the U.S. ambassador in the late 1930s, and penned diaries with his thoughts about different systems of government that he observed up close and what they meant for America’s prospects around the world.

He never doubted that freedom was far better than its authoritarian alternatives, whether it be the fascism of the 1930s or the Soviet-led communism that represented America’s biggest global challenge in the post-war years.

With Washington and Moscow battling for the allegiance of nonaligned Third World nations, Kennedy proudly promoted freedom over communism – never more than when he told a massive crowd in the besieged city of West Berlin in 1963, “There are many people in the world who really don’t understand, or say they don’t, what is the great issue between the free world and the communist world. Let them come to Berlin.”

Speaking near the Berlin Wall, which the Soviets built in 1961 to stop the flow of East Germans fleeing to the West, he declared, “Freedom has many difficulties and democracy is not perfect, but we have never had to put a wall up to keep our people in, to prevent them from leaving us.”

More than most, JFK recognized that “freedom is not free.” From at least his college days, as reflected in his Harvard senior thesis that he turned into the best-selling book “Why England Slept,” he believed that the United States faced the test of whether its democratic system was tough enough to prevail over authoritarian systems that could largely ignore public opinion and organize all of their resources for warfare.