RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://spectator.org/the-radicalizing-of-eric-ciaramella/

While the lawyers representing Eric Ciaramella, the alleged “whistleblower” in the Trump impeachment fiasco, describe him as having spent his entire career in “apolitical civil servant positions,” the truth is that Eric Ciaramella has been involved in radical political behavior throughout his life — including his years at Yale.

In fact, long before he was digging up dirt with the DNC’s Alexandra Chalupa about President Trump’s mythical collusion with Russia, Ciaramella was involved in leading a protest over what he believed was the poor treatment of Bassam Frangieh, a radical professor of Arabic studies at Yale. On April 15, 2005, then first-year Yale student Ciaramella dressed in all white to lead a contingent of 10 similarly dressed first-year Yale Arabic students to the offices of the provost and the president of the university to demand that the university provide an incentive to encourage Frangieh to stay at Yale. The students were unhappy because Frangieh had decided earlier in the school year to accept a tenure-track position at the University of Delaware.

Ciaramella helped to organize a campus-wide letter-writing campaign on behalf of Frangieh, which “identified flaws in the administration’s policies regarding language instructors at Yale.” According to the Yale Daily News, Bassam Frangieh was looking for an opportunity to teach more of the classes that he would like to teach. One of the protesters said, “His specialty is Arabic language and literature, and he wanted to teach some classes on style and poetry.” A week after the protest, Yale’s administration announced that they had “upped the ante with an offer competitive enough to keep one of its star language instructors from leaving” Yale.

It is likely that Bassam Frangieh wanted to use literature to be able to shape Yale’s undergraduates’ views on what he called the “heroic Arabic poet-martyrs” battling against the unjust occupation in Palestine. In 2000, Frangieh published a chapter romanticizing terrorism in a book entitled Tradition, Modernity, and Postmodernity in Arabic Literature. Ciaramella’s favorite Yale Arabic professor praised the heroism of Abd al Rahim Mahmud, the “first Arab poet-martyr.” Mahmud, who is often used to inspire terrorism and suicide bombings among Arab youth, was described by Frangieh as “carrying his soul in the palm of his hand” as he “threw himself into the cavern of death.” Romanticizing his terrorism, Frangieh recalls Mahmud’s “premature death at age 35, fighting a battle in an attempt to keep Palestine free from foreign occupation, [which] brought dignity to the hearts of his people. Through his death he eliminated the gap between words and action … he shall remain a symbol of heroism and pride for his people.”

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2019/11/schiff-denies-republican-requests-testimony-key-joseph-klein/

Alexander Hamilton warned in Federalist No. 65, dealing with impeachments in the House of Representatives and trials in the Senate, that during the impeachment phase there may often be “animosities, partialities, influence, and interest on one side or on the other; and in such cases there will always be the greatest danger that the decision will be regulated more by the comparative strength of parties, than by the real demonstrations of innocence or guilt.” He hoped the Senate would be able to determine guilt or innocence and serve impartially “between an INDIVIDUAL accused, and the REPRESENTATIVES OF THE PEOPLE, HIS ACCUSERS.” House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff, pressing hard for the House to formally become President Trump’s “accusers” and hand over articles of impeachment to the Senate for trial, is displaying the worst traits that Alexander Hamilton described.

The latest example is Schiff’s refusal to let the American people hear from the whistleblower, whose complaint containing a secondhand account of President Trump’s July 25, 2019 phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky gave rise to the impeachment inquiry against President Trump in the first place. The whistleblower’s testimony is “redundant and unnecessary,” Schiff said in a letter to Intelligence Committee Ranking Member Devin Nunes rejecting House Republicans’ request for the whistleblower to testify during the public phase of the impeachment inquiry hearings. Schiff claimed that the impeachment inquiry already “has gathered an ever-growing body of evidence — from witnesses and documents, including the president’s own words in his July 25 call record — that not only confirms but far exceeds the initial information in the whistleblower’s complaint.”

As usual, Schiff is lying to rationalize the extreme one-sided way he is conducting his sham hearings. Originally, Schiff himself had said the whistleblower would appear before Congress “very soon,” but changed his mind after reports surfaced of the whistleblower’s contacts with members of Schiff’s staff before filing the complaint. The whistleblower’s testimony as to the identity of his or her sources is highly relevant to ensuring a fair proceeding and making a complete record for the Senate to consider as the trier of fact. So are the whistleblower’s biases and motives for coming forward and filing a complaint after having first contacted members of Schiff’s staff. Who did the whistleblower talk to, what did they say to the whistleblower that became the basis for the whistleblower’s complaint, and where did the whistleblower’s sources tell the whistleblower they got their information about the July 25th call?

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/11/will-health-care-federalism-ever-have-a-chance/

A Democrat proposes a mirror image of conservative health-care thinking.

R epresentative Ro Khanna (D-CALIFORNIA DISTRICT 17) just introduced a bill whose premise conveys a sense of déjà vu. It would allow states to take the health-care money they already receive from numerous federal programs and use it to provide health care in the way they think best, rather than the way Washington prescribes.

It’s funny, because Khanna is a Democrat who openly admits he has no chance of passing his bill under a Republican president, and the last time we encountered this notion, it was in a Republican bill with zero Democratic support. Both sides want to give freedom to the states, but they can’t seem to agree on how.

Khanna’s bill is a pretty clean illustration of “federalism for me, but not for thee.” The bill offers states access to an amazing amount of federal funding, including the money that currently flows into their borders via Obamacare, Medicaid, and even Medicare. The government would waive a lot of regulations for these states, too.

But in order to get that leeway, states would have to pursue a very specific, very lefty goal: a single-payer program that provides comprehensive coverage to 95 percent of the population within five years and the rest of the population soon after that. The bill’s drafters seem blissfully unaware that red states might want more freedom to experiment, too — and that there might be Republican votes to be had granting them some.

For all their many flaws, Republicans weren’t so selfish when they floated their own most recent attempt at federalism, the Graham-Cassidy proposal that went down in flames about two years ago. A major feature of this plan was that it replaced Obamacare’s funding with block grants to states that they could use to meet their own health-care needs — even if that meant single-payer.