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It now appears the biggest acts of collusion were those engaged in/created by former FBI Director Comey. We were warned decades ago about "Big Brother" and we forgot/disregarded the lessons.
We also know Obama's education department took away the civil liberties of those randomly accused of sexual abuse on college campuses and we also are learning Charter Schools have been successful.
What all of these postings suggest to me, and should reveal to you, is that your own instincts, what is sensible and logical are as credible today as ever and allowing ourselves to be overly influenced by the power and growth of government, the intrusions on our freedoms by distant and arrogant bureaucrats, the influence of politically correct thinking on the part of do gooders, liberals and progressives and the hypocrisy and arrogance of certain collective minority members has been destructive and divisive.
One of the great characteristics of what it means to be an American is to think for yourself and be responsible for the consequences. Our constitution gives us the freedom to be independent.Morality demands we be responsible. When we have turned away from this luxury that made us a great people and when we allowed the sins of the past to become manipulated and heap unjustified guilt upon our psyche we allow ourselves to be dictated to by those who want to destroy our nation, take away our freedoms and do us immeasurable harm. Under the guise of just demands many dangerous manipulations occur.
I have always rejected being made to feel guilty for the past behaviour and actions of others while at the same time recognizing I have a moral obligation to make things better, to embrace a new way of approaching the aftermath. That said, I have always been reluctant to immediately join the popular response by those who profess their approach is preferable to the dictates of common sense. This is why education is so critical. This is why we must return to teaching our young to reason. This is why we must always be willing to listen to the other viewpoint but not swallow everything we hear. This is why we must not cower in the face of goons.
The false cacophony of fascism, the destruction perpetrated by unrestrained crowds of hooligans and the lies and manipulation by those in the mass media and government comprise some of the greatest threats facing our republic. They must be resisted. We cannot allow them to be met by silence. We must overcome passivity. We must demand public officials stop stonewalling legitimate requests for information and penalize them when they do so. All must be subjected to the rule of law regardless of stature and position. (See 1, 1a, 1b and 1c below.)
Stop and ponder this:
We learned about the questionable doings surrounding "Camelot" and Kennedy's health issues after he was gone. Why? Because it did not serve the interest of the mass media to expose their anointed.
We are now getting a peek into some of the nefariousness of the Obama Administration now that another administration is able to expose their questionable actions. Once again, the mass media have done a disservice to "we the people" because their narrow interests would not have been served by honest and forthright reporting. Why? Because, lamentably, they feel compelled to protect their anointed. And so it would have been had Queen Hilary been anointed. This is partly why the mass media must attack Trump, notwithstanding the fact that he provides them with adequate ammunition.
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My memo list and e mail list is quite large so if I did not send you a personal message to be safe and sensible please accept my apology.
I congratulate the mass media, which has done a remarkable job of informing us about Irma, along with all the administrators and officials of states Irma impacted whose messaging has saved lives and lessened damage.
A particular thanks to all of our friends who reached out and offered their homes as refuge and sent e mails letting us know they were thinking of us etc.
Be safe and lets come together as a nation..
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Dick
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1) Comey’s Secret Power
Here’s a question: What if the FBI had a lot to do with that fake Trump ‘dossier’?
By Kimberley A. Strassel
J. Edgar Hoover’s abuse of power as FBI director led Congress and the Justice Department to put new checks on that most powerful and secretive of offices. By the time Congress finishes investigating James Comey’s role in the 2016 presidential election, those safeguards may be due for an update.
Powerful as Hoover was, even he never simultaneously investigated both major-party candidates for the presidency. Mr. Comey did, and Americans are now getting a glimpse of how much he influenced political events.
Mr. Comey’s actions in the Hillary Clinton email probe are concerning enough. He made himself investigator, judge and jury, breaking the Justice Department’s chain of command. He publicly confirmed the investigation, violating the department’s principles. He announced he would not recommend prosecuting Mrs. Clinton, even as he publicly excoriated her—an extraordinary abuse of his megaphone. Then he rekindled the case only 11 days before the election.
An inquiry by the Senate Judiciary Committee has now shown that Mr. Comey’s investigation was a charade. He wrote a draft statement exonerating Mrs. Clinton in May, long before he bothered to interview her or her staff. This at least finally explains the probe’s lackluster nature: the absence of a grand jury, the failure to follow up on likely perjury, the unorthodox immunity deals made with Clinton aides.
But the big development this week is a new look at how Mr. Comey may have similarly juked the probe into Donald Trump’s purported ties to Russia. The House Intelligence Committee’s investigation took a sharp and notable turn on Tuesday, as news broke that it had subpoenaed the FBI and the Justice Department for information relating to the infamous Trump “dossier.” That dossier, whose allegations appear to have been fabricated, was commissioned by the opposition-research firm Fusion GPS and then developed by a former British spook named Christopher Steele.
But the FBI had its own part in this dossier, and investigators are finally drilling down into how big a role it played, and why. The bureau has furiously resisted answering questions. It ignored the initial requests for documents and has refused to comply with the House committee’s subpoenas, which were first issued Aug. 24. Republicans are frustrated enough that this week they sent orders compelling FBI Director Christopher Wray and Attorney General Jeff Sessions to appear before the committee to explain the obstruction.
One explanation is that the documents might show the FBI played a central role in ginning up the fake dossier on Mr. Trump. To this day, we do not know who hired Fusion GPS to gather the dirt. The New York Times early this year reported, citing an anonymous source, that a wealthy anti-Trumper initially hired Fusion to dig into Mr. Trump’s business dealings, but the contract was later taken over by a Clinton-allied group. That’s when Fusion shifted its focus to Russia and hired Mr. Steele.
The question is when the FBI got in on the act. The Washington Post in February reported that Mr. Steele “was familiar” to the FBI, since he’d worked for the bureau before. The newspaper said Mr. Steele had reached out to a “friend” at the FBI about his Trump work as far back as July 2016. The Post even reported that Mr. Steele “reached an agreement with the FBI a few weeks before the election for the bureau to pay him to continue his work.”
Who was Mr. Steele’s friend at the FBI? Did the bureau influence the direction of the Trump dossier? Did it give Mr. Steele material support from the start? The timing matters because it could answer the vital question of why the FBI wanted the dossier. Here’s one thought: warrants.
The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which oversees spying activities, is usually generous in approving warrants, on the presumption law-enforcement agencies are acting in good faith. When a warrant is rejected, though, law enforcement isn’t pleased.
Perhaps the FBI wanted to conduct surveillance on someone connected to a presidential campaign (Carter Page?) but couldn’t hit what was—and ought to be—a supremely high bar for getting such a potentially explosive warrant. A dossier of nefarious allegations might well prove handy in finally convincing the FISA court to sign off. The FBI might have had a real motive to support Mr. Steele’s effort. It might have even justified the unjustifiable: working with a partisan oppo-research firm and a former spook to engineer a Kremlin-planted dossier that has roiled Mr. Trump’s entire presidency.
Now that’s power.
Mr. Comey’s meddling has never seemed to stem from some hidden partisan impulse, but rather from an overweening self-righteousness. But power can be misused as much in the hands of the sanctimonious as the corrupt. And it’s overdue for congressional investigators to get to the bottom of precisely how much power Mr. Comey was exercising.
1a) The DeVos Guidance Speech
The Education Secretary takes on Obama’s assault on campus due process.
Education Secretary Betsy DeVos on Thursday gave one of the most important and defining speeches to emerge from the Trump Administration. It deserves to be read in full.
Her subject, long anticipated in the academic community, was the Obama Education Department’s 2011 “guidance letter” to all institutions of higher learning on conducting investigations of sexual abuse under the federal education law known as Title IX. As expected, Mrs. DeVos and the head of her civil-rights office, Candice Jackson, intend to replace the current Title IX guidance after a period of public comment. The DeVos speech, however, was about much more than a bureaucratic revision.
Let’s review the origins of the 2011 guidance letter. Its nominal purpose was to address unanswered complaints on campuses by victims of sexual assault—a real problem.
The Obama Education Department’s response was to circumvent Congress and neglect normal executive-branch rule-making procedures mandated in the Administrative Procedure Act, such as soliciting public comment. Instead, it simply jammed the policy through by sending out a “Dear Colleague” letter, including an explicit threat that noncomplying schools could lose federal funding.
Mrs. DeVos’s speech is a meticulous deconstruction of the damage done when progressive activists like those who populated the Obama Administration believe their ends justify whatever legal and administrative obliteration it takes.
“Rather than engage the public on controversial issues, the (Obama) Department’s Office for Civil Rights has issued letters from the desks of unelected and unaccountable political appointees,” Mrs. DeVos said. “Instead of working with schools on behalf of students, the prior administration weaponized the Office for Civil Rights to work against schools and against students.”
With the original Dear Colleague letter, the Obama Administration introduced a new judicial standard, in which students accused of sexual misconduct could be severely punished based on a mere “preponderance of evidence.” Mrs. DeVos noted that these high-stakes cases—with lifetime consequences for both sides—are brought before a “school administrator who will act as judge and jury.”
The result, unsurprisingly, has been a travesty of injustice, incompetence and inconsistency as schools struggled to comply. Many institutions, often small colleges with limited resources, are now engulfed in lawsuits flowing, again unsurprisingly, from these kangaroo courts.
Secretary DeVos opened her speech with the hope that “every person—even those who feel they disagree—will lend an ear to what I outline today.” It is a faint hope.
Even before she gave the speech, 20 Democratic attorneys general, of all people, wrote a letter warning against “a rushed, poorly-considered effort to roll back current policies.” After the speech, teachers union president Lily Eskelsen Garcia of the National Education Association said the DeVos proposal to rethink sexual-assault adjudication “offends our collective conscience.”
Well, hers anyway—this from a union that makes it nearly impossible to dismiss incompetent or even rule-breaking teachers.
Mrs. DeVos in her address goes more than the extra mile to include the valid concerns of victims, the accused, their parents, school administrators and what used to be commonly held notions of decency and justice.
The secretary deserves credit for taking on this legal and administrative nightmare, which she inherited from an Administration that specialized in creating them. She deserves support from the academic community in finding a way back to a solution.
1b)DeVos Pledges to Restore Due Process
The Obama Education Department’s Title IX decree ‘failed too many students,’ she says.
By KC Johnson and Stuart Taylor Jr.
This might seem like an obvious affirmation of fundamental American principles. But such sentiments were almost wholly absent in discussions about campus sexual assault from the Obama White House and Education Department. Instead, as Mrs. DeVos noted, officials “weaponized” the department’s Office for Civil Rights, imposing policies that have “failed too many students.”
In 2011 and 2014, the OCR issued “guidance” letters radically reinterpreting Title IX, a statute prohibiting sex discrimination at institutions receiving federal money. The highest-profile of these directives required schools to adjudicate sexual-misconduct claims under the low “preponderance of the evidence” standard of proof.
But as Boston College’s R. Shep Melnick has noted, that was “just a minor part of the OCR’s procedural requirements.” Worse were “the agency’s rules on cross-examination and appeals; its informal pressure on schools to institute a ‘single-investigator model’ that turns one person appointed by the school’s ‘Title IX Coordinator’ into a detective, judge, and jury; and the intense pressure for schools to show they are ‘getting tough’ on sexual assault.” As Mrs. DeVos observed: “It’s no wonder so many call these proceedings ‘kangaroo courts.’ ”
The OCR’s guidance letters were not even formal regulations, so that the department bypassed the public notice and comment rule-making process required by the Administrative Procedure Act. Mrs. DeVos promised that wouldn’t happen again: “The era of ‘rule by letter’ is over.”
To be sure, withdrawing the Title IX guidance, as the department is now expected to do, would not be enough to create a fairer system on campus. In a just-released study, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education found only two of the nation’s 53 leading institutions (Cornell and the University of California, Berkeley) earned a score of greater than 60% for fair procedures in their Title IX tribunals.
Under Obama administration pressure, schools dramatically increased personnel in their Title IX offices, creating entrenched bureaucracies that will aggressively resist reform. And several states, including California and New York, have enacted laws designed to make it even more difficult for accused students to defend themselves. Thus the system will remain rigged against accused students until the Education Department issues specific, detailed rules to ensure fairness.
Still, discarding the Obama-era guidance would have two immediate salutary effects. First, it would eliminate one of universities’ standard defenses against lawsuits by accused students, which is to claim that they were merely doing Washington’s bidding.
Second, it would allow the department to implement Title IX policy through new, carefully considered regulations after a period of public notice and comment. The FIRE study identifies provisions that would be necessary to achieve a minimum of fairness in campus tribunals—the presumption of innocence, clear notice of alleged violations, sufficient time for the accused student to prepare his defense, impartial fact-finders, access to all relevant and exculpatory evidence, the right to cross-examine the accuser, a meaningful right to legal representation, and a meaningful right to appeal.
As four Harvard law professors— Jeannie Suk Gersen, Janet Halley, Elizabeth Bartholet and Nancy Gertner —argued in a recent article, a fair process requires “neutral decisionmakers who are independent of the school’s [federal regulatory] compliance interest, and independent decisionmakers providing a check on arbitrary and unlawful decisions.” The four had been among more than two dozen Harvard law professors to express concerns about the Obama administration’s—and Harvard’s—handling of Title IX. So too had 16 University of Pennsylvania law professors, as well as the American Council for Trial Lawyers.
Due process is, or should be, neither a liberal nor a conservative issue, and Mrs. DeVos is hardly alone in recognizing the shortcomings of the policy she inherited. But the accusers-rights organizations that dominated Title IX policy during the Obama administration have reacted with outrage. Laura Dunn, executive director and founder of SurvJustice, deemed the mere news of the speech a “winter” for Title IX. Another group, Know Your IX, demanded that Mrs. DeVos “enforce and support Title IX.”
In fact, on Thursday Mrs. DeVos made clear her determination to enforce Title IX fairly—to combat the new normal of discrimination against accused students as well as any residual discrimination against accusers.
Messrs. Johnson and Taylor are co-authors of “The Campus Rape Frenzy: The Attack on Due Process at America’s Universities” (Encounter, 2017).
1c)Why Entitlements Keep Growing, and Growing, and . . .
Once granted, benefits always multiply and are nearly impossible to repeal, John Cogan says. Only three presidents have been able to rein them in.
Donald Trump’s gleeful deal with the Democrats—ratcheting up the debt ceiling, as well as the ire of the Republican establishment—puts John Cogan’s mind on 1972. Starting in February of that year, the Democratic presidential candidates engaged in a bidding war over Social Security to gain their party’s nomination. Sen. George McGovern kicked off the political auction with a call for a 20% increase in monthly payments. Sen. Edmund Muskie followed suit, as did Rep. Wilbur Mills, chairman of the Ways and Means Committee. Former Vice President Hubert Humphrey, never one to be outdone, offered a succulent 25%.
Mr. Cogan has just written a riveting, massive book, “The High Cost of Good Intentions,” on the history of entitlements in the U.S., and he describes how in 1972 the Senate “attached an across-the-board, permanent increase of 20% in Social Security benefits to a must-pass bill” on the debt ceiling. President Nixon grumbled loudly but signed it into law. In October, a month before his re-election, “Nixon reversed course and availed himself of an opportunity to take credit for the increase,” Mr. Cogan says. “When checks went out to some 28 million recipients, they were accompanied by a letter that said that the increase was ‘signed into law by President Richard Nixon.’ ”
The Nixon episode shows, says Mr. Cogan, that entitlements have been the main cause of America’s rising national debt since the early 1970s. Mr. Trump’s pact with the Democrats is part of a pattern: “The debt ceiling has to be raised this year because elected representatives have again failed to take action to control entitlement spending.”
An economics professor at Stanford and a fellow at the university’s Hoover Institution, Mr. Cogan, 70, is one of those old-fangled American men who are always inclined to play down their achievements. The latest of his is the book that draws us together in conversation. To be published later this month by Stanford University Press, it is a 400-page account of how federal entitlement programs evolved across two centuries “and the common forces that have been at work in causing their expansion.”
Mr. Cogan conceived the book about four years ago when, as part of his research into 19th-century spending patterns, he “saw this remarkable phenomenon of the growth in Civil War pensions. By the 1890s, 30 years after it had ended, pensions from the war accounted for 40% of all federal government spending.” About a million people were getting Civil War pensions, he found, compared with 8,000 in 1873, eight years after the war. Mr. Cogan wondered what caused that “extraordinary growth” and whether it was unique.
When he went back to the stacks to look at pensions from the Revolutionary War, he saw “exactly the same pattern.” It dawned on him, he says, that this matched “the evolutionary pattern of modern entitlements, such as Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps.”
As he explains it, entitlement programs typically begin with relatively narrow eligibility requirements. “For the Civil and Revolutionary War pensions,” he says, “original eligibility was limited to soldiers who had been injured in wartime service, or the widows of those killed in battle.” Marching and fighting wasn’t enough; you had to have lost life or limb for your country. But these rules were incrementally relaxed, and by 30 or 40 years after each war, virtually all veterans were covered, “regardless of whether you were disabled or not, and regardless of whether your disability was related to wartime service.”
We’ve seen the same phenomenon in modern entitlements. “When Social Security started, we had about 50% of the workforce covered,” he says. That was 1935. “By the 1950s, coverage was universal. The Social Security disability program was originally limited to those 50 years or older. And you had to be totally disabled—so disabled that you were unable to perform any job in the U.S. economy.” Gradually, Congress eliminated the age requirement. Then lawmakers allowed benefits for temporary disabilities.
“You see the exact same phenomenon in the low-income benefit entitlement programs,” Mr. Cogan says. Medicaid “extends to all individuals who live in poverty, regardless of whether or not they’re receiving cash welfare.” ObamaCare gave federal health-insurance subsidies to households with incomes up to 400% of the poverty line—currently $98,400 for a family of four.
The same forces that were at play in the 19th century are alive and kicking (the economy) today. “It’s step-by-step expansion,” Mr. Cogan says. “Each expansion tends to be permanent. And each expansion then serves as a base upon which Congress considers the next expansions.”
But what fuels this process? Why is it so relentless? Mr. Cogan identifies a form of moral argument as being a key factor. “After an entitlement is created,” he says, “individuals who are just outside the eligibility line start clamoring for assistance on the grounds that they’re no less ‘worthy’ of receiving assistance than the group that is eligible.” In the case of Social Security disability, why should a 49-year-old who was disabled in a car accident receive any less help than a person who’d had an accident at 50?
“The natural human impulse to treat similarly situated individuals equally under the law,” Mr. Cogan argues, inevitably results in “serial, repeated expansions of eligibility.” Congress responded in the 19th and early 20th centuries, when there were large budget surpluses. “But it also responds now, in the 21st century,” when deficits are endemic and the country is $20 trillion in debt.
Can an entitlement expansion, once granted, ever be taken back? Mr. Cogan refuses to say “never,” but says such rescindments “occur under rather extraordinary circumstances.” He offers a remarkable example: “You might ask, ‘Who achieved the largest reduction in any entitlement in the history of the country?’ Well, surprisingly, it was FDR, a person whom we normally associate with launching the modern era of entitlements.”
When Franklin D. Roosevelt took office in 1933, “the budget was in shambles, in deep deficit as a consequence of the Great Depression.” The new president had campaigned on a promise to put Washington’s fiscal house in order, and at the time, veterans’ pensions accounted for 25% of all government spending. “Within seven days in office,” Mr. Cogan says, “FDR asked Congress to repeal the disability entitlements to World War I, Philippine War, and Boxer Rebellion veterans. Congress gave him that authority, and within a year, he’d knocked nearly 400,000 veterans off the pension rolls. By the time we got to World War II, the benefit rolls were a third lower than they were when he took office.”
Who would feature in an Entitlement Reform Hall of Fame? Mr. Cogan’s blue eyes shine contentedly at this question, as he utters the two words he seems to love most: Grover Cleveland. “He was the very first president to take on an entitlement. He objected to the large Civil War program and thought it needed to be reformed.” Cleveland was largely unsuccessful, but was a “remarkably courageous president.” In his time, Congress had started passing private relief bills, giving out individual pensions “on a grand scale. They’d take 100 or 200 of these bills on a Friday afternoon and pass them with a single vote. Incredibly, 55% of all bills introduced in the Senate in its 1885 to 1887 session were such private pension bills.”
The irrepressible Cleveland “started vetoing these private bills right away”—220 of them in his first term—which explains why he still holds the presidential record for most vetoes. Mr. Cogan admires Cleveland particularly because “each of his vetoes contains an explanation of the reason why and the facts of the case. As time went on, he became more exasperated with Congress, and his veto messages more acerbic.” In one veto, involving a widow who’d claimed her husband had died in battle, Cleveland noted that the man had died in 1882 and wrote: “No cause is given for the soldier’s death, but it is not claimed that it resulted from his military service.” A newspaper later reported the soldier had “choked to death on a piece of beef while gorging himself in a drunken spree.”
The FDR of 1933 is also one of Mr. Cogan’s Hall of Famers, as is Ronald Reagan : “There’s no president who has undertaken entitlement reform in as comprehensive a way.” Reagan “fought a very good fight and he slowed the growth of entitlements like no other president ever had.” He achieved significant reductions in 1981 and 1982, and then “battled to preserve those changes through the rest of his two terms. The growth of entitlements during his time in office is the slowest of any modern administration.” Still, this striking accomplishment “ultimately only slowed, and did not reduce, the aggregate financial burden of entitlements.”
Mr. Cogan also gives an honorable mention to Bill Clinton for his welfare-reform plan. Mr. Clinton’s was “a fairly narrow reform compared to the broad swath of entitlements, but history will show that it’s one of the most successful reforms that’s ever been achieved. The reform not only reduced welfare’s burden on taxpayers, it has also benefited the recipients, whom the old unreformed program had been harming.”
I ask Mr. Cogan how America can break the grip of ever-expanding entitlements. He balks at offering a specific policy agenda, insisting, that his book is a work of economic history. But he does identify three necessary political conditions for any entitlement reform. The first is presidential leadership, without which “there has never been a significant reduction in an entitlement.” Veterans benefits in the 1930s would not have been trimmed without the “strong leadership” of FDR. The restraint on growing expenditures in the 1980s wouldn’t have happened “without Reagan’s steadfast commitment to spending control.” And there would have been no welfare reform in 1996 without Mr. Clinton’s push.
Mr. Cogan’s second sine qua non is “a significant agreement among the general public and the elected representatives that there’s a problem.” In Roosevelt’s day, the belief was widespread that the fiscal crisis had to be addressed. Both Reagan and Mr. Clinton enjoyed public support and a workable legislative consensus.
The third condition is the most piquant, especially given the warring nature of American politics today. Any solution to the problem of entitlements, Mr. Cogan says, “has to be bipartisan.” No significant restraint, he believes, can be imposed by one party alone: “It took a bipartisan effort on the part of Congress and presidents to create our entitlements problem. It’ll take bipartisanship to solve the problem.”
Mr. Varadarajan is a research fellow in journalism at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution.
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