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May 2017

CUNY Mainstreams Jew-Hatred — Again A terrorist-supporter’s planned commencement address. Ari Lieberman

The convoluted legal saga of Rasmea Odeh is thankfully nearing its end. On April 25, the convicted murderer and fraudster pled guilty in federal court to committing immigration fraud and violating 18 U.S.C §1425(a) which criminalizes knowingly procuring naturalization contrary to law. She will be stripped of her U.S. citizenship and is expected to be deported – likely to Jordan – after a sentencing hearing scheduled for August 17. Unfortunately, we will have to endure her presence in the U.S. for another 3 ½ months.

Courtroom witnesses said that Odeh teared up during her allocution. But the tears she shed were not for the two young university students – Leon Kaner, 21, and Edward Jaffe, 22 – she murdered on February 21, 1969 when she and her PFLP cohorts detonated a bomb at a Jerusalem supermarket. No, her tears were the tears of a cowardly, unrepentant terrorist who was sorry that she got caught committing immigration fraud.

By any standard, Rasmea Odeh is toxic. She is a convicted murderer and terrorist whose felony record now spans two continents. She is also a rabid anti-Semite. Her bombs targeted Jews for no other reason than the fact that they were Jews. Her instruments of death were insidiously timed to go off on Friday when Jewish shoppers were known to purchase last minute grocery provisions for the Sabbath. So sinister was this woman that she timed the second bomb to go off just as first responders – doctors and ambulance personnel – were tending to the wounded. Thankfully, the second bomb was discovered and neutralized in the nick of time, minutes before causing further injuries or damage.

But Odeh still has her supporters. The PFLP (A group listed as a terrorist organization by the U.S. State Department) has named terror cells after her. More recently, the anti-Semitic hate group, Jewish Voice for Peace, featured Odeh as a guest speaker at their annual hate fest. Another invited guest speaker was the notorious Linda Sarsour, a woman who once absurdly touted Saudi Arabia (a country that often punishes rape victims and denies women the right to drive) as a model for upholding women’s rights. Sarsour, who has a long history of offensive social media posts, including support for terrorism, once tweeted that she wished she could give her political opponents an “ass whippin” and wanted to “take their vaginas.” She maintains racist views that are consistent with the State Department’s definition of anti-Semitism and openly calls for the end of Israel.

PENTAGON: TERRORISTS THREATENING TO CONTROL 40% OF AFGHANISTAN PAUL SPERRY

So why is Congress OK’ing 2,500 more US visas for Afghan immigrants?

A just-released Pentagon report suggests Afghanistan is spiraling toward civil war with the number of terrorist attacks, casualties and displacements of Afghans hitting record highs, thanks in no small part to former President Obama’s precipitous withdrawal of US combat troops starting in 2014.

As the Afghan government risks losing roughly 40 percent of the country to terrorists and insurgents, Congress proposes issuing 2,500 more visas to Afghan nationals to allow them to immigrate to America, a move that raises security concerns. The Pentagon says ISIS has established beachheads in several Afghan districts, along with al-Qaeda and the Taliban, and these and other terrorist groups could use the visa program to infiltrate the US.

The new report from the Defense Department’s special inspector general for Afghan reconstruction paints a picture of chaos and instability throughout the country. Among the shocking findings:

* The number of terrorist attacks and other security incidents throughout 2016 and continuing into the first quarter of 2017 reached their highest level on record.

* Casualties suffered by Afghan security forces “in the fight against the Taliban and other insurgents continue to be shockingly high,” with 807 killed and 1,328 wounded in just the first six weeks of this year.

* Conflict-related civilian casualties in Afghanistan rose to 11,418 in 2016 – the highest on record.

* A whopping 660,639 people in Afghanistan fled their homes due to conflict in 2016 – a 40 percent jump over 2015 and the highest number of displacements on record.

* The Afghan government now controls barely 60 percent of the country’s 407 districts, while the Taliban and other insurgents control or threaten to control the rest.

“Preventing insurgents from increasing their control or influence of districts continues to be a challenge” for the Afghan government, the report warned, noting that Kabul’s control of the country has dropped from 72 percent in November 2015 to just under 60 percent today.

Hillary’s Defeat Tour Will Never End It’s the fault of the FBI, cell phones, Colin Powell and misogyny. Daniel Greenfield

It’s May. The flowers are blooming. Young couples stroll through the park holding hands. And Hillary Clinton continues to tour the country explaining that she would have won if only it hadn’t been for the vast FBI-Russian-Misogynist conspiracy that shamelessly robbed her of an inevitable victory.

It’s not a campaign. It’s an anti-campaign. In our political tradition, losers go away. But the Clintons are the cockroaches of American politics. Getting nuked 306 to 232 won’t get rid of them. Instead they crawl out of the rubble, greedy antennas twitching, to cash in on their latest disaster.

Wearing one of Elton John’s used leather pantsuits, her latest act of fashion revenge on the nation that had spurned her, Hillary showed up at 583 Park Avenue in the sixth month leg of her Defeat Tour.

“If you drive around in some of the places that beat the heck out of me, you cannot get cell coverage for miles,” she told a horrified Manhattan audience that included Meryl Streep and Donna Karan who can no more imagine going out without cell phone coverage than without their personal assistants.

And people without cell phone coverage, unlike Los Angeles and New York, which accounted for her “popular vote” that Hillary always brings up, don’t matter. Except around election time when even people without cell phone coverage, personal assistants and Netflix accounts are still allowed to vote.

If it’s anyone’s fault that Hillary lost, it’s the “States” part of the United States.

Is it fair that 3 million progressive Hillary voters in New York City and Los Angeles County should be outvoted by a bunch of hicks in flyover country who can’t even get 4G on their iPhone 7S?

As another defeated candidate once said, “This anonymous clan of slack-jawed troglodytes has cost me the election, and yet if I were to have them killed, I would be the one to go to jail. That’s democracy for you.” That’s the position that the #Resistance, whose newest member is Hillary herself, embodies.

But as always, she was there to take responsibility. Absolute responsibility. Nothing relative about it.

“I take absolute personal responsibility,” Hillary declared. Then she blamed the FBI-Russian conspiracy. Not to mention misogyny. And lack of cell phone coverage.

Absolute personal responsibility, indeed. At this sad stage in Hillary’s career, students of the English language are forced to ponder whether she’s a liar or just doesn’t understand what words mean.

Racing Before Hitler My memories of athletic life as a Jewish teenager in Germany during the tumultuous 1930s. by Walter Laqueur *****

Walter Laqueur (Born in May 1921) is the author of, among other books, Weimar, A History of Terrorism, Fascism: Past, Present, Future, and The Dream that Failed: Reflections on the Soviet Union. His newest book,Putinism: Russia and Its Future with the West, was released in 2015 by Thomas Dunne/St. Martin’s.https://mosaicmagazine.com/observation/2017/05/racing-before-hitler/

It’s not so common for people in their forties or fifties to start rereading the books they read at thirteen or fourteen. But it’s quite common for them to revisit and regale friends with their early sports achievements and those of others that they may have witnessed first-hand. “Those were the days, my friend. . . .”

The habit is pronounced not only in circles that sophisticated intellectuals look down on but among such allegedly superior types themselves. Nor is it confined to those fortunate enough to have enjoyed a “normal” youth. It was no less prevalent among the generation of Jews who, like me, grew up in Germany or elsewhere in Central Europe during the tumultuous 1920s and 30s—and certainly among my own colleagues, friends, and close contemporaries.

Much later, and throughout the decades beginning in the 1960s when I was living in London, I always looked forward to the pleasure of a visit from Abraham Ascher, the distinguished historian of Russia at the City University of New York. Like me, Abe was a native of Breslau and almost exactly my age, so I knew for certain that he had stopped first not at the British Museum but in Highbury, mecca to Arsenal Football Club fans. Of similar disposition was the Berlin-born historian Peter Gay of Yale, though I forget the name of his favorite British team. In the annals of British Zionism, Chaim Weizmann, destined to become Israel’s first president, may have had no great feeling for soccer, but his biographer Jehuda Reinharz, a former president of Brandeis University, has a deep knowledge of its history and its significance for other Jews in, especially, Central Europe, and above all of the exploits of the renowned Westphalian club known as Schalke 04.

At a luncheon before he became U.S. secretary of state, Henry Kissinger’s curiosity was sharply piqued when he discovered that I not only had a certain command of history and politics but also knew which sports club went by the nickname “1860 Munich” and could even talk intelligently about the exploits of Heinrich Stuhlfauth, the legendary goalie of Kissinger’s own hometown team, Spielvereinigung Fuerth. I also remember having a long debate at Dulles Airport with the world-class French political thinker Raymond Aron, a tennis fanatic and brother to a player once considered among France’s leading champions—and this at a time (the 1920s-30s) when France was a tennis superpower, boasting the likes of René Lacoste, Jean Borotra, and the other two members of France’s “Four Musketeers.” On the Parisian amateur front in those same days, a young Estonian-born devotee of tennis named Michael Josselson, later to become a consummate intellectual entrepreneur, had a regular partner in the composer and writer Nicolas Nabokov (cousin to Vladimir); in postwar Berlin, the two would give birth to the Congress for Cultural Freedom.

The great sports issuepreoccupying me and many of my teenage generation was the case of Gretel Bergmann. This young Jewish lady from Laupheim in southwest Germany, who had equaled the previous German record in high-jumping, was at first invited by the Nazi regime to represent Germany in the 1936 Olympic Games. But at the last moment the invitation was withdrawn.

Some brief background. In 1912, a decision had been made in favor of Berlin as a site for the Olympic Games. Then World War I intervened, and the decision was put on indefinite hold. It was only owing to the initiative and personal contacts of Theodore Lewald, the German representative of the Olympic Committee, that the original decision was reinstated and the games could take place, infamously, under Nazi auspices in 1936. And even then there were complications as some Nazi fanatics discovered that Lewald had a Jewish grandmother and demanded his removal. When his many personal friends in the U.S. made it clear that “no Lewald, no Olympic games in Germany,” the complainers were forced to capitulate. (As for the grandmother in question, Fanny Lewald, she is very much a story unto herself, which I have rehearsed in an earlier essay in Mosaic.)

Faux Outrage and Melodrama over Comey’s Pre-Election Letter If Director Comey had not conducted his July 5 press conference clearing Hillary Clinton, there would have been no cause to issue the October 28 letter to Congress. By Andrew C. McCarthy

Even absent Hillary Clinton’s latest bleat about how he cost her the election, FBI director James Comey’s testimony on Wednesday at a routine oversight hearing of the Senate Judiciary Committee was certain to be anything but routine. And sure enough, Comey mounted a vigorous defense of his letter of October 28, 2016 — eleven days before Election Day — in which he informed Congress that the Clinton e-mails investigation had been reopened.

Director Comey did nevertheless allow that he was made “mildly nauseous” by the suggestion that his letter affected the vote’s outcome.

Several features of the hearing were especially worth noting. I have dealt with one of them in a separate column — viz., the director’s continuing defense of his assessment that there was insufficient criminal-intent evidence to warrant charging Mrs. Clinton. Now, let’s turn to another: the Democrats’ effort to skew or erase entirely the context of Comey’s October 28 letter.

It would be foolish to deny that the letter may have had some impact on voters. The effect was likely very small: By the time of the letter (as our Jim Geraghty has related), 35 million Americans had already voted; most voters had already made up their minds about the e-mail scandal after many months of coverage and commentary; Comey’s notification did not announce charges or accuse Clinton of additional wrongdoing; and the ultimate determination that the new evidence did not change the FBI’s decision against bringing charges was also announced before Election Day. Still, to say President Trump’s margin of victory was “razor thin” is an understatement. So close was the contest that it is hard to discount anything as a factor possibly material to the outcome.

That said, Democrats would now have you believe that history began on October 28. In reality, the critical context of that day’s letter to Congress was the Comey press conference four months earlier — on July 5 — followed by the director’s extensive congressional testimony in the days that followed. It makes no sense for Democrats to complain about the letter and its departure from protocol but ignore the press conference’s far more extensive departures. To the (debatable) extent that there was a need to notify Congress in late October that the investigation had been reopened, it was precisely because the director, in early July, had made a highly unusual, highly public pronouncement that the investigation was complete and the case too weak to charge.

You may recall the unrestrained Democratic glee over that particular breach of protocol.

Of course, smarter Democrats perceive this incongruity. Thus, rather than ignore the Comey press conference, they bowdlerize it, choosing to remember only the first three-quarters of Comey’s bravura performance. That, you’ll recall, is the part in which the director rebuked Clinton for her inappropriate conduct, her “extreme carelessness” in handling highly classified information, the cavalier culture that prevailed during Clinton’s State Department tenure regarding the need to safeguard intelligence, and so on.

What Democrats choose to forget, and hope you will too, is the closing section of Comey’s remarks. That was when he seized the power of the Justice Department to render legal conclusions about both the prosecutorial merits of the case and the interpretation of the relevant criminal statute. In this conclusion, not only did Comey claim that Clinton’s conduct did not warrant an indictment, he gratuitously added the declaration that no “reasonable prosecutor” could disagree with his assessment.

This was a specious claim, but it commanded a respectful hearing, having come from an official who was not just the nation’s top investigator but had been a highly accomplished, top-ranking prosecutor in his own right. And remember (even if Dems prefer that you forget), Comey’s “lack of criminal intent” theory swept aside not only the classified-information felonies but also Clinton’s willful destruction of tens of thousands of government records — more felonies. By the time the press conference ended — poof! — it was as if someone had taken BleachBit to the thought of filing such charges.

Now that Clinton has lost and Democrats need a scapegoat, they have suddenly developed amnesia over this decisive aspect of the Comey press conference. But it saved Clinton’s candidacy. Now that we know what a lousy campaign she ran from July to November, Democrats understandably don’t regard this as any great favor. Back in July, however, when they were so sure that only Comey — and certainly not Donald Trump — could derail the next Clinton administration, Democrats could not have been more effusive in proclaiming the director’s unwavering integrity and legal acumen.

Now that Clinton has lost and Democrats need a scapegoat.

Comey Sticks to His Claim That Hillary Lacked Criminal Intent Though the evidence that she knew what she was doing when she mishandled classified information is clear. By Andrew C. McCarthy

In his testimony today before the Senate Judiciary Committee (on which I’ll have more to say in an upcoming column), FBI director James Comey has stuck by his claim that declining to bring charges against Hillary Clinton for mishandling classified information was the right call because proof of intent was lacking. This is unsurprising. The director has repeated this analysis many times. It hasn’t gotten better with age, but given his insistence that “no reasonable prosecutor” could possibly disagree with him, I’m not holding my breath waiting for him to reverse himself.

In my column over the weekend, discussing a lengthy New York Times report about the Clinton e-mails investigation, I briefly rehashed why Comey is wrong about this:

This is a convoluted part of the story, stemming from the Justice Department’s effective rewriting of the applicable statute to avoid charging Clinton. As the Times tells it, the Justice Department and the FBI knew that to charge Clinton with a crime, it would not be enough to prove she had been “sloppy or careless”; instead, “they needed evidence showing that she knowingly received classified information or set up her server for that purpose.”

As I have contended before, this claim is specious on multiple levels. Subsection (f) of the pertinent statute (the Espionage Act, codified at Section 793 of Title 18, U.S. Code) makes it a felony to mishandle classified information “through gross negligence” — i.e., proving Clinton was sloppy or careless (or “extremely careless,” to use Comey’s own description) could have been sufficient. But beyond that, Clinton willfully set up a private network for the systematic handling of her State Department-related communications, in violation of federal record-keeping requirements of which she was well aware, and under circumstances in which she (a former senator who served for years on the intelligence Armed Services committee) was a sophisticated longtime consumer of classified information. She was keenly aware that her responsibilities as secretary of state would heavily involve classified information — whether it was “marked” classified or “born classified” because of the subject matter.

It is irrelevant whether Clinton’s purpose was to transmit or store classified information on the private, non-secure server; prosecutors are not required to prove motive. The question is whether she knew classified information would end up on the server, and her set-up made that inevitable.

That is, Clinton could have been prosecuted either for willfully mishandling classified information or for doing so through gross negligence.

As I elaborate in the column, the Times did not address the controlling statute in its 8,000-word article. Instead, the story was that Clinton could not be charged because of the purported Petraeus precedent. We are to believe that the evidence of former CIA director David Petreaus’s criminal intent was far stronger than Clinton’s, yet he was not charged with the felony mishandling of classified information (he was permitted to plead guilty to a misdemeanor); ergo, it would have been an abuse of prosecutorial discretion to charge Clinton with the felony.

I addressed this in the column as well:

This line of reasoning is fatuous — and it’s another instance of the Justice Department adopting Clinton campaign cant. Petreaus shared his classified diaries with a single person, a paramour who actually had a security clearance (albeit not one high enough to view what she was shown). Clinton’s offense was more extensive in duration and seriousness.

Assuming the accuracy of the Times’s account, Comey is quite right that Petraeus should have been indicted on much more serious charges (as I have contended). But the Justice Department’s dereliction in Petraeus’s case was hardly a justification for giving Clinton a pass on a more egregious offense that, unlike Petraeus’s, (a) almost certainly caused the compromise of government secrets to foreign intelligence services and (b) resulted in the destruction of tens of thousands of government records — a separate felony. Clinton’s misconduct should have been prosecuted under the governing law, not excused based on the sweetheart plea deal Petraeus got.

Tillerson Points to Shift in U.S. Foreign Policy Priorities U.S. Secretary of State says nation will emphasize national security, economic interests over human rights in its tiesBy Felicia Schwartz

WASHINGTON—Secretary of State Rex Tillerson said the U.S. will pursue national security and economic interests before turning to human rights concerns in its relationships with other countries, signalling a shift in Washington’s global outlook.

Mr. Tillerson’s remarks, to U.S. diplomats and employees at the State Department on Wednesday, amounted to the clearest expression yet of President Donald Trump’s “America First” foreign policy doctrine, in which the U.S. won’t condition its approach to other countries based on “how they treat people,” he said.

“We really have to understand, in each country or each region of the world that we’re dealing with, what are our national security interests, what are our economic prosperity interests, and then, as we can advocate and advance our values, we should,” he said.

In separating U.S. policies from values such as human rights, democracy, press freedom and the treatment of minorities, Mr. Tillerson appeared to outline a departure from priorities pursued during both the Bush and Obama administrations.

Since taking office, Mr. Trump has sought to strengthen ties with leaders who have drawn criticism for their human rights records. He hosted Egypt’s President Abdel Fattah Al Sisi last month at the White House for his first state visit since he took power in 2014 and has invited the Philippines’ President Rodrigo Duterte to Washington.

Human rights groups and some lawmakers have raised concerns about what they’ve described as a U.S. turn away from an emphasis on human rights and basic freedoms. On Wednesday, Amnesty International USA director Margaret Huang said the Trump administration is “literally trying to erase human rights before our own eyes.”

But Mr. Tillerson said emphasizing rights can impede other imperatives. CONTINUE AT SITE

French Presidential Candidates Emmanuel Macron, Marine Le Pen Face Off in Debate Macron is tested under pressure as Le Pen seeks to narrow poll gap By William Horobin

PARIS—A live head-to-head debate Wednesday between French presidential candidates Emmanuel Macron and Marine Le Pen rapidly descended into a tit-for-tat battle in which both struggled to land a knockout punch.

Seeking to close a 20-percentage-point gap in the polls before Sunday’s vote, Ms. Le Pen quickly went on the offensive in the live prime-time event with a blistering attack on Mr. Macron, centering on his past as an investment banker and a minister in the government of incumbent President François Hollande.

Over the course of the two-and-a-half-hour marathon, however, Ms. Le Pen’s barrage failed to deliver a destabilizing blow to the front-runner. Mr. Macron stood his ground, wearing his opponent down by highlighting what he said were technical holes in her sweeping plans to pull France out of the euro.

“Mr. Macron is the candidate of wild globalization,” Ms. Le Pen said.

Mr. Macron shot back that Ms. Le Pen was preaching isolationism.

“Confronted with this mind-set of defeat, I represent the mind-set of conquest,” Mr. Macron said.

A snap poll of 1,314 viewers by Elabe for BFMTV showed that 63% found Mr. Macron the most convincing and 34% Ms. Le Pen.

For Mr. Macron, who is running for elected office for the first time, the debate was a test of whether he can hold his footing under pressure from a battle-hardened National Front candidate who is tapping into deep resentment of globalization and the European Union.

The debate was watched closely by investors, who sold French assets when Ms. Le Pen polled high ahead of the April 23 first-round vote. If Ms. Le Pen can turn the table on Mr. Macron during the debate, it could cast renewed doubt over the outcome of an election that is crucial for the future of the EU.

Ms. Le Pen proposes pulling France from the euro and a radical overhaul of the EU to repatriate powers in Paris and implement protectionist trade policies. On Wednesday, Ms. Le Pen sought to paint Mr. Macron as a crony of the EU establishment who lacks the gravitas to stand up to Germany. She also characterized him as weak on terrorism. CONTINUE AT SITE

Trump Meets Abbas, Says of Peace: ‘We Will Get It Done’ In meeting with the Palestinian leader, the president says the U.S. would serve as a mediator By Carol E. Lee and Rory Jones in Tel Aviv See note

OH PULEEZ! BACK TO THE SWAMP OF FAILED POLICIES WHICH ONLY ENCOURAGE AND RATCHET UP ARAB DEMANDS FOR THE SLOWER BUT SURER ERADICATION OF ISRAEL……RSK

President Donald Trump raised expectations for a peace agreement between Israelis and Palestinians as he met with Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas on Wednesday, saying he would do whatever is necessary to broker a deal and pledging, “We will get it done.”

Mr. Trump was dismissive of the notion that a foreign-policy knot that has vexed his predecessors for decades is the “toughest deal to make.” He said he hoped to invite Mr. Abbas back to the White House to mark progress in an effort that Mr. Trump’s administration has been working on only for a few months.

“Let’s see if we can find the solution,” Mr. Trump said. “It’s something that I think is, frankly, maybe not as difficult as people have thought over the years.”

Mr. Abbas, president of the Palestinian Authority, which rules the West Bank, said he looked forward to working with Mr. Trump to achieve a “historic deal to bring about peace.” But his remarks also underscored challenges faced by the effort. Palestinians, he said, are “the only remaining people in the world that still live under occupation,” a term Israeli officials dislike.

Mr. Trump’s confidence drew skepticism, as former Israeli-Palestinian mediators believe the two sides are as far apart as they have ever been.

“I’m an optimist by nature. But goodness gracious!” Daniel Shapiro, former U.S. ambassador to Israel in the Obama administration, tweeted from his official account in response to Mr. Trump’s comments.

Fundamental differences between Israelis and Palestinians have prevented a peace deal from being reached for decades. “In my mind, as someone that has worked on this for the last 30 years, I don’t think we have ever been at a lower point,” Dennis Ross, former peace negotiator for multiple U.S. administrations, said Monday. “The level of disbelief between the two sides has never been greater.”

White House press secretary Sean Spicer argued that the difference between previous attempts to reach a peace deal and the one undertaken by the Trump administration is “the man.” He said Mr. Trump’s style of building relationships with world leaders gives the process more of a chance for success.

Under Mr. Trump, the U.S. has smoothed over ties with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that had become strained during former President Barack Obama’s time in office.

Mr. Trump also is considering moving the U.S. embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, a move that would be welcomed by Israelis as effectively recognizing the city as their capital.​Palestinians have said the status of Jerusalem should be determined in negotiations.

However, Mr. Trump also has made clear that it is up to the Israelis and Palestinians to reach a peace deal, and was harshly critical of Mr. Obama for trying to pressure the Israelis into policy concessions.

With Liberty and Pizza for All HHS issues a pepperoni calorie count reprieve.

Some good news for readers who enjoy personal freedom and eating pizza: The Trump Administration this week delayed calorie rules that carried criminal penalties for errant pepperonis. Now Congress should rework the idea in legislation.

The Food and Drug Administration announced on Monday that the agency would delay a May 5 enforcement date for a rule that requires restaurants with more than 20 locations to post calorie counts on menu boards, ostensibly to encourage healthy choices and prevent a patchwork of state labeling schemes. The mandate was included in the Affordable Care Act in 2010.

But the resulting regulation has been thrice delayed because it required pizza chains to display per slice ranges for an estimated 34 million topping combinations. Imagine a sign that reads “200-800 calories per slice of one-topping medium pizza” with lists of individual accoutrements that span from 0-400 calories, with each one varying based on whether you add other toppings. Do you feel edified about your food choices?

The displays would be ripped up and replaced for every limited-time special. Franchisees—that is, local business owners, not Mr. Moneybags—would sign affidavits that “reasonable” efforts were made to ensure the accuracy of the placards. That’s an invitation for trial lawyers to drag every last pizza to a lab for verification. The penalties for noncompliance include a year in jail, and who knew that a job at Papa John’s could lead to a life of crime.

A bill in the House would eliminate the fines and hard time, as well as allow pizza places to display information online, where customers can already find it. Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price, who deserves credit for the stroke of common sense, voted for an earlier version of the legislation. Congress should move on it before next year’s new enforcement date arrives, though the FDA could also revise the rule.

The FDA’s final guidance is riddled with amusing introspections on what constitutes a “combination meal” or how to label pumpkin lattes, but the less funny reality is that the pizza industry has spent years and millions of dollars fighting this insane rule-making. The Trump Administration is right to put those resources back in the productive economy.