RUTHFULLY YOURS

Health and Human Services Secretary Sylvia Burwell announced recently that she expects 10 million people to be enrolled in health-care coverage through ObamaCare’s exchanges by the end of next year. What she didn’t mention was that in March of last year the Congressional Budget Office predicted that 21 million people would be enrolled in 2016—more than double the new estimate.

The administration says the difference can be explained away: For instance, fewer companies dropped coverage than expected, thus fewer employees are migrating from employer-sponsored plans to the exchanges. “We haven’t seen much of a shift at all,” Richard Frank, a health and human services assistant secretary, told USA Today.

But the question isn’t where Americans are getting health insurance. It is whether ObamaCare will provide more Americans with affordable insurance for decades to come.

Supporters credit ObamaCare with helping nine million uninsured Americans find coverage in 2014. But a new paper from the Heritage Foundation, however, suggests that nearly all of the increase came from adding nearly nine million people to the Medicaid rolls.

The Justice Department has permitted Denny Hastert to plead guilty to a felony money-laundering violation. Under the plea agreement, the 73-year-old former House speaker may face no more than six months’ imprisonment and, quite likely, no jail time at all.

This has some legal experts grumbling. One, according to Politico’s Josh Gerstein, insists Hastert got a “sweet deal.” The critique is worth exploring. In a recent weekend column, I visited “sentencing reform,” Washington’s latest fetish. Hastert’s case is a good example of how badly the bipartisan project misses the mark: failing to address the real problem, which is over-criminalization, not over-incarceration; and encouraging judges to avoid imprisoning offenders by fictional “fact” pleading.

An FBI investigation uncovered that Hastert paid nearly $1 million in “hush money” to conceal “misconduct” that occurred decades ago. The nature of the misconduct is not specified in the indictment and has not been publicly confirmed, so ordinarily I would not describe it. In this case, however, the misconduct is key to understanding why a prominent figure has been induced to plead guilty to a serious charge, and why the “slap on the wrist” Hastert is getting has some people grousing. We thus take note of Mr. Gerstein’s explanation that “sources have alleged the behavior involved sexual contact with a male student while Hastert was a coach and high school teacher several decades ago.”

In a tight spot and need some cash? The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) is here to help. All you need to do is convert to Islam then refuse to do your job on religious grounds, and significant financial rewards await you.

Last Thursday [1], the EEOC won $240,000 for two Muslim truck drivers who had been fired for refusing to transport beer. The lucky winners, Somali Muslims Mahad Abass Mohamed and Abdkiarim Hassan Bulshale, had been fired by trucking company Star Transport. Their refusal was based on Islamic law.

One hadith describes Aisha, Muhammad’s beloved child bride, recounting:

When the last verses of Surat-al-Baqara [chapter two of the Qur’an] were revealed, the Prophet went out (of his house to the Mosque) and said, “The trade of alcohol has become illegal.” (Bukhari 3.34.429)

Due to this passage, Muslims not only cannot drink alcohol, but they cannot traffic in it, including driving it from one place to another. However, this rule is not hard and fast: Muslims who sell alcohol in convenience stores or do the job Mahad Abass Mohamed and Abdkiarim Hassan Bulshale were told to do can justify it by pointing to the Islamic principles of taysir, meaning “facilitation” or making things easier, and darura, the permission to do something that is normally illegal out of some necessity.

When I founded Rhea Lana’s, a children’s clothing consignment company, 18 years ago, I knew that going into business would bring challenges. What I didn’t guess was that the biggest one would be the government.

For the last 34 months, I have found myself stuck between the Labor Department, which says my business model is illegal, and the federal courts, which refuse to clear the air.

I first set up shop in 1997, although it wasn’t much of a business back then. A stay-at-home mom in Conway, Ark., I realized that, like me, many mothers in the neighborhood couldn’t afford cute children’s clothes. Seeing an opportunity to help their families and mine, I began organizing consignment sales in my family’s living room. Before long these little sales grew beyond our wildest dreams. Thanks to my husband’s engineering know-how, we computerized, went online and began to offer real-time tracking of consignor sales. We converted to a franchise model in 2008 and now have 80 locations across 24 states.

In August 2012, two rapes by unknown assailants were reported at Harvard University, sending the school into crisis. Police cruisers idled around the campus; uniformed and plainclothes officers came out in force. Students were advised not to walk alone. A member of the undergraduate council called for the closing of Harvard Yard. “I thought Cambridge wasn’t a dangerous area,” a freshman told the student newspaper. “It was Harvard—it was supposed to be safe, academic.” (In fact, Harvard still was safe. The campus authorities ultimately deemed at least one of the rape allegations baseless, judging by the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reports. Since Harvard never disclosed the outcome of either of its investigations, its findings regarding the other supposed incident remain secret.)

In September 2015, Harvard president Drew Gilpin Faust announced that Harvard students experience sexual assault with “alarming frequency.” Faust was responding to the results of a sexual assault survey conducted at Harvard and 26 other colleges earlier in the year. According to the survey, spearheaded by the Association of American Universities (AAU), 16 percent of Harvard female seniors had experienced nonconsensual sexual penetration during their time at the college and nearly 40 percent had experienced nonconsensual sexual contact. The “severity of the problem” required “an even more intent focus on the problem of sexual assault,” Faust said. Harvard professor and former provost Steve Hyman decried the “terribly damaging” problem that “profoundly violates the values and undermines the educational goals of this University.”

October 6 Conference Call with DHS, DOJ & FBI

Several federal agencies appear to have ongoing contacts with an organization that has been connected to international terrorism.

On October 6, 2015, according to Department of Homeland Security spokesman S.Y. Lee, DHS convened a conference call with “senior officials from the FBI, Department of Justice (DOJ) Civil Rights Division, DOJ Community Relations Service, DHS Office of Infrastructure Protection and Federal Emergency Management Agency.” Also on the call were what Lee characterized insipidly as “faith-based, community-based, and civil rights and civil liberties advocacy stakeholders,” and what the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) characterized as “American Muslim community leaders.”

CAIR’s press release on the subject coyly does not say whether CAIR was one of the “American Muslim community leaders” participating in the meeting.