RUTHFULLY YOURS

A loophole touted as a way for employers to wiggle out of the Affordable Care Act’s insurance mandate has been closed. What happened?
Officials got wind that some employers planned to bypass the mandate by giving their workers bonuses, asking them to decline company-sponsored insurance and sending them to the Obamacare marketplaces to buy subsidized policies. Nudging sick workers, in particular, onto the exchanges could save employers’ health plans money and shift the cost onto publicly subsidized plans. The Labor Department published new guidelines in November to explicitly forbid that practice.

Why did employers think they could get out of a federal mandate?
“Brokers were running around selling this idea that employers could give everybody a raise and say, ‘Go, get the tax credit, knock yourselves out,’ and they wouldn’t pay a penalty. Go figure—the IRS got wise to that,” says Keith McMurdy, a partner in the employee benefit division at Fox Rothschild, a law firm in New York City.

Hasn’t there been confusion around the employer mandate in general?
That probably hasn’t helped. Under the Affordable Care Act, so-called large employers—those with more than 50 employees—were supposed to offer insurance or pay penalties starting this year. But the Obama administration pushed that deadline back repeatedly after the bungled rollout of health insurance exchanges in late 2013. In fact, those delays are being challenged in the Republicans’ recent lawsuit against the administration.

Here’s a little-told success story: Israeli Arabs, women in particular, have made huge strides over the past decade at the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, better known as Israel’s answer to MIT. Among both men and women, Arabs’ share of the Technion student body is now equal to their share of the overall population, an impressive achievement considering that more than half of Israeli Arab children live below the nation’s official poverty line.

I spoke today with Yosef Jabareen, an Arab professor of urban planning who spearheads the Technion’s effort to recruit and graduate Arab students. He shared a recently updated report he’s done and explained what he called “a dramatic change” in outcomes for Arab students. “For me, as an Arab professor, it’s fantastic,” said Jabareen. He earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees at the Technion, completed his education in the U.S. with a master’s from Harvard and a Ph.D. from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (America’s answer to the Technion), then returned to his alma mater and five years ago was named assistant to the senior vice president for minorities.In 2001, as this slide shows, Arabs accounted for only 11 percent of undergraduates at the Technion. The percentage rose steadily to 18 percent last year and jumped three percentage points more to 21 percent this year, which is the same as Arabs’ share of the population of Israel (not counting the West Bank or Gaza, of course). Jabareen says that in 1990 Arabs’ share of the student body was only 5 percent to 7 percent. So it’s at least tripled in a quarter-century.

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/documents-reveal-obama-hhs-paid-182129786-for-four-months-housing-of-illegal-alien-children?f=puball

– Judicial Watch announced today that on September 9, 2014, it received documents from the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) revealing that the Obama administration paid Baptist Children and Family Services (BCFS) $182,129,786 to provide “basic shelter care” to 2,400 “unaccompanied alien children” (UAC) for four months in 2014. The BCFS budget included charges for $104,215,608 for UACs at Fort Sill, Oklahoma, and an additional $77,914,178 for UACs at Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio, Texas.

The start date of BCFS’s contract was October 1, 2013, but it was signed on June 27, 2014. The project’s end date of September 30, 2016, suggests that the Obama administration anticipates that the “surge” will continue until near the end of his presidency.

According to the documents obtained by Judicial Watch, the cost to the American taxpayer was $86,846.34 per illegal alien child at Ft. Sill, for a total to $104,215,608 for 1,200 UACs from June 12 to October 18. The bill also included $2,648,800 in compensation for 30 members of the BCFS “Incident Management Team” (IMT), for a total to $88,293 per IMT member for the four-month period.

The $77,914,178 to care for 1,200 children at Lackland AFB amounted to a cost to the taxpayer of $64,928 per illegal alien child from May 18 to September 18. The Lackland bill included $20,000 for a “cable television screen/projector set up” and 20 shower stalls at $1,000 each.

Judicial Watch obtained the documents in response to an August 1, 2014, Freedom of Information Act request seeking BCFS applications for funding, correspondence between the HHS Administration for Children and Families (ACF) and BCFS, and correspondence within ACF relating to BCFS. The records obtained by Judicial Watch from the HHS Administration for Children and Families include the “Budget Information and Project Narrative portions of the BCFS applications funded in calendar 2014” for both the Ft. Sill and the Lackland AFB facilities.

Just like the House of Commons a bit earlier, on December 2 the French National Assembly voted for a seemingly significant but in reality inconsequential resolution calling for the recognition of the state of Palestine.

Indeed, the resolution won by a large margin: 339 to 151. But there is very little substance about it, either in constitutional or political terms. It may even accelerate a pro-Israel reaction both in France and in the European Union at large.

The constitutional angle is clear enough. As Laurent Fabius, the French foreign minister, observed a few days before the vote, “the policy of France,” including its foreign policy and the recognition of foreign States, “is determined and conducted by the Government” under the Fifth Republic Constitution of 1958, article 20. Moreover, according to a constitutional custom tracing back to General Charles de Gaulle, the Fifth Republic’s first president from 1959 to 1969, it is the president’s exclusive prerogative to make decisions in matters of defense and international relations.

The French executive — President François Hollande as well as Prime Minister Manuel Valls and diplomacy chief Fabius — has definitely made up its mind about the Israeli-Palestinian dispute. It sticks to the Israeli-Palestinian peace process as defined by the 1993 Oslo accords and subsequent agreements. Accordingly, it opposes the recognition of the state of Palestine under the present circumstances, since such a move would wreck the Oslo accords for good. However, in order to revive and accelerate the peace process, France is prepared to hold a peace conference in Paris with Israel, the Palestinians, and the powers or international organizations that may have been involved at one point or another (the United States, Russia, the EU, the UN, etc).

Given that context, a French National Assembly resolution calling for the recognition of the state of Palestine carries no more weight than a United Nations General Assembly resolution. It has no binding power whatsoever.

The political angle is a bit more complex. Still, it leads to the similar conclusion that the resolution is a non-starter. It has been essentially supported by the current Left majority in the National Assembly (a coalition of socialists, quasi-socialists, neocommunists, and Greens, who hold 343 seats out of 577). The conservative opposition (225 seats) opposed it or abstained. However, the legitimacy of the Left-dominated National Assembly is eroding at a smart pace. According to a CSA/Le Figaro poll that was coincidentally released on the very day the assembly voted on Palestine, new elections, if held now, would be an unprecedented triumph for Nicolas Sarkozy’s conservative party and its centrist allies.

Americans remember December 7 as Pearl Harbor Day, but most Americans have never even heard of the “Little Pearl Harbor,” which occurred in Bari Harbor, Italy, on December 2, 1943. More than 100 Luftwaffe bombers mounted a surprise attack on Allied ships moored in the harbor. Their bombs sank or rendered inoperable 28 of these ships. Nearly a thousand Allied troops were killed or wounded. along with hundreds of civilians.

Unbeknownst to those in the port, one of the ships carried liquid death in its belly. The American freighter John Harvey was secretly carrying mustard agent, in violation of international agreements that banned its use. President Franklin Roosevelt had covertly ordered the shipment of 100 tons of mustard agent to Italy for retaliation in the event that the Germans used chemical warfare against the Allied troops. The incident was covered up and remained a secret for decades.

When the German bombs hit the John Harvey, the ship’s hold immediately exploded with devastating violence, killing all those who knew about the mustard. Deadly liquid and gas flew high into the air and then slowly settled back down into the harbor, coating everything and everyone in the vicinity. Casualties would mount over the coming days and weeks as the agent slowly and painfully claimed the lives of many who had survived the initial attack.

Among those who survived in the harbor that day were some of America’s first SEALs, the men of the OSS Maritime Unit. Their ranks included Jack Taylor, a former dentist from Hollywood, and Sterling Hayden, one of Hollywood’s leading men. Their stories are captured for the first time in a new book titled First SEALs: The Untold Story of the Forging of America’s Most Elite Unit.

Hayden recalled the drama: “We were trapped on the end of a dock, and eighty partisans from Yugoslavia went right on with what they were doing in spite of the commotion, loading ammunition, blankets, and high-octane gas into a pair of wooden schooners. The leader of the Yugoslavs, a man named Stipanovitch, fired at the low-flying German planes with a machine pistol. ‘Bloody fucking buggers!’ he yelled over and over again in a deep voice that boomed through a broad mustache.”

Fortunately for the OSS, the Luftwaffe bombers targeted the Allies’ more impressive warships and failed to sink the Maritime Unit’s ragtag fleet, which included a former fishing vessel known as the Yankee. As the OSS men cleaned up Bari and attempted to save civilians and seamen alike from the damage caused by the bombs and the lethal mustard gas, they also prepared the Yankee for one of the most daring and dangerous rescue missions of World War II.

A couple of weeks earlier, a C-53 Skytrooper transport plane carrying 26 American nurses and medics had crashed behind enemy lines in German-controlled Albania. That war-torn country was occupied by the Germans, but it also held a variety of armed insurgent groups and militias who were fighting the Germans. In a high-profile operation authorized by President Roosevelt himself, the first SEALs would attempt to rescue the American medical personnel.

Civil-rights investigations in Ferguson and Staten Island? No, what denizens of St. Louis and New York City ought to be worried about right now is . . . the crime wave overtaking Seattle.

If you don’t understand why, then you probably thought Obamacare was about covering the uninsured. Like its health-care “reform” campaign, the Obama Left’s civil-rights crusade is about control — central control of state law enforcement by Washington.

The deaths of Michael Brown in Missouri and Eric Garner in New York are each tragic in their own way. But in neither is there a federal civil-rights case to be had. To think otherwise, you have to be getting your advice from Al Sharpton — the huckster confidant of President Obama and Attorney General Holder.

The law of civil rights requires the government to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the defendant, usually driven by racial prejudice, willfully acted — violently in these cases — with the evil purpose to deprive a person of specific federal rights. Let’s put aside the utter absence of proof that race had any bearing on what happened in Staten Island, for example, where police supervised by an African-American officer came to the scene because of complaints about Garner by local business owners. It is virtually impossible to prove a civil-rights violation when there is no denying that police were engaged in a good-faith arrest and were put in the position of using force because a suspect resisted.

In Ferguson, Michael Brown did not merely resist arrest. Having just robbed a store, he was the aggressor in a confrontation with a police officer, who was made to fear for his life. And in Staten Island, there may be a real question about whether one police officer used excessive force under the circumstances; but there is no question that some quantum of force was appropriate in arresting a physically imposing suspect who insisted he would not be taken into custody and waved his arms to prevent the cops from cuffing him.

Dear Reader,

When I wrote the “news”letter below, the news had not broken yet that Rolling Stone — and really the Washington Post — had confirmed what I believed all along: This story was bogus. My only regret is that I didn’t write the column a week earlier like I wanted. My immediate reaction to the story was “this is bull****.” But I didn’t want to write that without at least making some phone calls. Anyway, congrats to Richard Bradley and Robert Soave for beating me to the punch. And congratulations to Phi Kappa Psi; usually it takes a little longer to be vindicated, when it happens at all. I very much hope you sue Rolling Stone the way the Mongol Hordes attacked their enemies.

You see, I’m not a huge fan of fraternities, but I have the quaint view that when a major national publication falsely accuses an institution of being an organized criminal organization that specializes in ritual gang rape, they should be held accountable. It isn’t like Rolling Stone criticized a statistical hockey stick — if you know what I’m saying — they reported (and defended their reporting) to the whole world that this fraternity is an institutional rape gang.

Anyway, I was going to revise this G-File to reflect the news. But frankly I think it holds up just fine as it is, so long as you keep in mind that I wrote before my very deeply held suspicion was confirmed. Meanwhile, my immediate response to the news is here. I’ll save further thoughts for later.

***Dear Reader (Unless you find the “Dear” part offensive. Feel free to insert “Yo”),

Let’s skip the introductory jocularity and jump right into it. I promise there will be inappropriate jocularity at the end.

So I am having a hard time getting my head around something. All week people have been calling me a “rape apologist” and “pro-rape.” I’m being constantly informed that I don’t understand “rape culture.” These often hysterical accusations tend to come from people who seem to understand rape culture the same way some people understand the geopolitics of Westeros or Middle Earth: They’ve studied it, they know every detail about it, they just seem to have forgotten it doesn’t exist.

Now, hold on. I certainly believe rape happens. And I definitely believe we have cultural problems that lead to date rape and other drunken barbarisms and sober atrocities. But the term “rape culture” suggests that there is a large and obvious belief system that condones and enables rape as an end in itself in America. This simply strikes me as an elaborate political lie intended to strengthen the hand of activists. There’s definitely lots that is wrong with our culture, particularly youth culture and specifically campus culture. Sybaritic, crapulent, hedonistic, decadent, bacchanalian: choose your adjectives.

Rolling Stone magazine has now acknowledged “discrepancies” in an article it published last month about an alleged premeditated gang rape at a University of Virginia fraternity. Reporter Sabrina Rubin Erdely made sensational allegations based solely on the testimony of the alleged victim. Ms. Erdely also made no attempt to get a comment from the alleged assailants, a failing that bloggers and columnists first pointed out.

All publications make mistakes, including us, but this one is worth some meditation for what it says about our larger media and political culture. All the more so given the amount of laudatory national attention the story received, and the trauma it caused at UVA.

Part of the reason may be a natural human reluctance to investigate the credibility of an alleged rape victim. But that should not have stopped Ms. Erdely from doing some basic due diligence. The rape allegedly took place at a loud “date function” at the Phi Kappa Psi fraternity house on September 28, 2012. On Thursday the fraternity released a statement that it “did not have a date function or a social event during the weekend of September 28th, 2012.”

The larger problem, however, is that Ms. Erderly was, by her own admission, looking for a story to fit a pre-existing narrative—in this case, the supposed epidemic of sexual assault at elite universities, along with the presumed indifference of those schools to the problem. As the Washington Post noted in an admiring profile of Ms. Erdely, she interviewed students at several elite universities before alighting on UVA, “a public school, Southern and genteel.”

In other words, Ms. Erdely did not construct a story based on facts, but went looking for facts to fit her theory. She appears to have been looking for a story to fit the current popular liberal belief that sexual assault is pervasive and pervasively covered-up.

Now that the story has begun to fall apart, it’s worth considering the damage. Though it may never get as far as the bogus 2006 rape charges against the students of the Duke lacrosse team, members of the UVA chapter of Phi Kappa Psi will have to live with undeservedly tainted personal reputations, especially since the charges may never be decisively refuted. UVA has also taken an unfair blow to its reputation. Nor can the story do any good for the broader interest of preventing future campus sexual assaults.

Professor Tribe Takes Obama to School

In his Harvard days, Barack Obama studied under law professor Laurence Tribe. Perhaps the future President spent too much time at the law review and missed the part about limited powers. We say that because Professor Tribe delivered a constitutional rebuke this week to the Obama Administration that is remarkable coming from a titan of the liberal professoriate.

Mr. Tribe joined with the world’s largest private coal company, Peabody Energy , to criticize the “executive overreach” of the Environmental Protection Agency’s proposed rule to regulate carbon emissions from existing power plants. In joint comments filed with the EPA, the professor accuses the agency of abusing statutory law, violating the Constitution’s Article I, Article II, the separation of powers, the Tenth and Fifth Amendments, and in general displaying contempt for the law.

The Clean Air Act doesn’t give the Administration the authority the EPA claims to impose its climate crackdown on existing power plants by effectively eradicating coal power. The EPA instead uses—in Mr. Tribe’s words—“a hitherto obscure provision” of the Clean Air Act, known as Section 111, to justify its actions. Such legal scavenging is a characteristic of this Administration, and rarely has it been so thoroughly dismantled.

“The Proposed rule rests on a fatally flawed interpretation of Section 111. According to EPA . . . Congress effectively created two different versions of Section 111, and the agency should be allowed to pick and choose which version it wishes to enforce,” writes Mr. Tribe. “According to EPA, since 1990 the U.S. Code has reflected the wrong version of Section 111, and EPA has discovered a mistake [made by Congress]. According to EPA, both the D.C. Circuit and the U.S. Supreme Court have previously misinterpreted Section 111. According to EPA, the two different versions of Section 111 have created ‘ambiguity’ triggering deference to the agency’s [interpretation]. Every part of this narrative is flawed.”

We quote Mr. Tribe at length because the Administration likes to dismiss concerns about its extralegal exertions as partisan or political. But Mr. Tribe shows that there are genuine issues about the law and democratic process at stake.

He writes that even if EPA’s theory of two versions of Section 111 were correct, the agency’s “claim that it is entitled to pick and choose which version it prefers represents an attempt to seize lawmaking power that belongs to Congress. Under Article I, Article II, and the separation of powers, EPA lacks the ability to make law.” Mr. Tribe adds, icily, that a “presidential speech” is insufficient to claim such authority.

Despite two decades of elections and growth, democracy has stalled, militaries are resurgent, and autocrats are in control.

On the same November morning when Boko Haram seized yet another village in Nigeria’s north, police in riot gear surrounded the country’s House of Representatives in the capital city of Abuja. But they weren’t guarding the country’s parliament against an assault by the notorious Islamist insurgency; they were there to block a politician from casting his vote.

Nigeria’s Speaker of the House, Aminu Tambuwal, had recently defected to the opposition—a risky move in a government dominated by one party. A court had ruled that he could keep his speaker’s chair, but police at the barricades outside said that he couldn’t. They stopped his car at the gate.

Nigerian lawmakers were scheduled to vote on whether to renew a bill that allows soldiers to detain suspects without cause in areas threatened by Boko Haram’s gunmen. Mr. Tambuwal expected to lead the legislative bloc opposed to this grant of sweeping state powers. Instead, the police fired tear gas and effectively shut down the Nigerian parliament.

Nigeria’s political drama is just one example of a disquieting trend across the continent. Two decades of elections and economic progress in Africa haven’t erased the vast power that militaries have long wielded in many countries, large and small. In much of Africa, in fact, the armed forces have gained influence in recent years as battling Islamist terrorists has become a priority.

“There are signs of the predatory nature of military rule” returning to Africa, said Larry Diamond, director of Stanford University’s Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law. “This is a calamity for a number of these countries.”

To friends of democratic development, Africa’s 54 countries pose perhaps the world’s most important test of whether representative institutions can flourish amid low living standards and rapidly changing economies. Leaders from the U.S., Europe and Latin America have visited the continent to promote open, politically accountable government. They know that China, Africa’s biggest trading partner, is offering a rival model in the form of market-powered autocracy.

For now, the advance of democracy in Africa appears to have stalled. In 1990, just three of Africa’s 48 countries were electoral democracies, according to Freedom House, a Washington-based pro-democracy advocacy group. By 1994, that number had leapt to 18. Two decades later, only 19 qualify.