RUTHFULLY YOURS

Should the Senate Republican health care reform legislation pass, it will usher in another house of horrors just like Obama’s patently not affordable health care law.

In 2008, Drs. Mark Albanese, George Mejicano, and Larry Gruppen, concerned about “a looming shortage of physicians” wrote about the “four horsemen of the medical education apocalypse” which include

teaching patient shortages, teacher shortages, conflicting systems, and financial problems. Rapidly expanding class sizes and new medical schools are coming online as medical student access to teaching patients is becoming increasingly difficult because of the decreasing length and increasing intensity of hospital stays, concerns about patient safety, patients who are stressed for time, teaching physician shortages and needs for increasing productivity from those who remain [.] Further, medical education is facing reductions in funding from all sources, just as it is mounting its first major expansion in 40 years. The authors contend that medical education is on the verge of crisis and that little outside assistance is forthcoming.

Indeed, the GOP bill will bring us even closer to another crisis.

Should the Senate GOP “repeal” bill pass, it will result in as Matthew Vadum illustrates “tinkering around the edges of the Obamacare system but leav[ing] the fundamentals of the failing program in place.”

With only four courageous conservatives who have come out “against the language in the new draft bill” the American people must, yet again, rise up and demand a true repeal and replace bill. Sens. Mike Lee of Utah, Ted Cruz of Texas, Rand Paul of Kentucky, and Ron Johnson of Wisconsin are the only ones holding back the onslaught of what will eventually be a single-payer system in this country.

If Jonathan Gruber said that the Senate document is “no longer an Obamacare repeal bill [and] that’s good” that should be more than sufficient evidence that this bill is not going to help Americans. Gruber, dubbed the “Obamacare architect was caught on tape admitting that Obamacare doesn’t provide subsidies for federally-run insurance exchanges [.]” In another video “Gruber said that ‘the stupidity of the American voter’ made it important for him and Democrats to hide Obamacare’s true costs from the public. ‘That was really, really critical for the thing to pass,’ said Gruber. ‘But I’d rather have this law than not.’ In other words, the ends — imposing Obamacare upon the public — justified the means.”

Most Americans now understand that “Obamacare really is a huge redistribution of wealth from the young and healthy to the old and unhealthy” and Daniel Horowitz at Conservative Review explains that “everything [in the Senate bill] is working within the confines of the most extreme socialist baseline from the Obama era.” Horowitz gets to the nub of the problem when he writes that to “avoid the endless semantics, lies, and perfidious distortions from GOP leadership on how they are ‘repealing’ Obamacare, let’s briefly describe the law.”

Angela Lee Duckworth has just returned from her 25th class reunion at Harvard. “People’s lives really do turn out differently,” she observes during an interview in a stylish boardroom. “And it certainly can’t be explained by how intelligent you remember them being when they were sitting next to you in organic chemistry class. Some of it is luck, some of it opportunity.” And some of it is “grit,” as Ms. Duckworth has told the world in articles, lectures and a 2016 bestselling book, “Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance.”

It’s no hyperbole to talk about the 47-year-old University of Pennsylvania professor in international terms. More than eight million people have watched her 2013 TED talk on grit. That same year she won the renowned MacArthur “Genius” grant. U.S. and foreign government officials, CEOs and ordinary helicopter parents, teachers of every stripe, world-class coaches and award-winning researchers line up outside her office to pick her brain about how to make their employees, students, children or competitive swimmers grittier.
She also runs a nonprofit, the Character Lab, with a staff of 12. Our interview took place immediately after the organization’s board meeting—hence the snazzy conference room. After 90 minutes of anecdotes, research citations and quotes—Aristotle, Nietzsche and, unexpectedly, US Weekly—my disarmingly laid-back but highly practiced interlocutor shows no signs of flagging.

So what is this thing called grit, and why should we believe it is a key to success? “I define grit as the tendency to pursue long-term goals with passion and persistence,” she explains, echoing her book’s subtitle. A close cousin of what personality psychologists call conscientiousness, grit deserves its own entry in the social-science lexicon, Ms. Duckworth insists: “Conscientiousness also includes self-control, orderliness, punctuality, responsibility.”

Ms. Duckworth has her own 10-question test called the Grit Scale. She asked West Point cadets to take the test; those who scored higher were likelier to make it through the notoriously grueling “Beast Barracks” training. She also tested salespeople at a time-share company, Chicago public-school students and National Spelling Bee competitors, among others. High grit scores had the same predictive power for all of them. Persistence driven by passionate interest, she concluded after testing the various likely alternatives, predicts achievement in ways that neither conscientiousness nor IQ nor talent does.

Ms. Duckworth came to her topic through a straightforward observation. “I left management consulting to teach at a school on the Lower East Side before it got hip,” she tells me. She then left New York and went on to a more affluent school in San Francisco. In the classroom, she noticed for the first time what she saw again at her Harvard reunion: The kids who seemed to have the greatest natural skill in, say, math, were often not the ones who aced the tests. Instead, the most dogged excelled. She wondered what makes resolute individuals tick—if that lightning could be bottled for the benefit of the less tenacious. CONTINUE AT SITE

The Obama administration is under fresh scrutiny for its response to Russian meddling in the election after new details emerged this week about how the White House weighed its actions against the 2016 political environment.

Then-President Obama was too cautious in the months leading up to the election, frustrated Democratic lawmakers and strategists say.

“It was inadequate. I think they could have done a better job informing the American people of the extent of the attack,” said Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-Calif.), a member of the House Intelligence Committee who co-chairs the Democratic Steering and Policy Committee.

And even after the election was over, they say, the penalties Obama levied were too mild to appropriately punish what by all accounts was an unprecedented attack on a U.S. election.

Rep. Jim Himes (D-Conn.), another House Intelligence member, called the penalties “barely a slap on the wrist.” Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), who supports tougher sanctions Russia, said in a statement Friday that the administration “abjectly failed to deter Russian aggression” and “failed to impose any meaningful costs on Russia.”

Some Republicans argue the Obama administration only started to take the Russia threat seriously after President Trump had won the election.

Trump has called the influence operation a “hoax” and dismissed the various inquiries into Russian interference in the election — which include looking for possible collusion between his campaign and Moscow — as a “witch hunt.”

“By the way, if Russia was working so hard on the 2016 Election, it all took place during the Obama Admin. Why didn’t they stop them?” Trump tweeted Thursday.

The Senate Judiciary Committee has opened a probe into former Attorney General Loretta Lynch’s efforts to shape the FBI’s investigation into 2016 Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton, the committee’s chairman announced Friday.

In a letter to Ms. Lynch, the committee asks her to detail the depths of her involvement in the FBI’s investigation, including whether she ever assured Clinton confidantes that the probe wouldn’t “push too deeply into the matter.”

Fired FBI Director James B. Comey has said publicly that Ms. Lynch tried to shape the way he talked about the investigation into Mrs. Clinton’s emails, and he also hinted at other behavior “which I cannot talk about yet” that made him worried about Ms. Lynch’s ability to make impartial decisions.

Mr. Comey said that was one reason why he took it upon himself to buck Justice Department tradition and reveal his findings about Mrs. Clinton last year.

The probe into Ms. Lynch comes as the Judiciary Committee is already looking at President Trump’s firing of Mr. Comey.

Sen. Charles E. Grassley, chairman of the committee, said the investigation is bipartisan. The letter to Ms. Lynch is signed by ranking Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein and also by Sens. Lindsey Graham and Sheldon Whitehouse, the chairman and ranking member of the key investigative subcommittee.

Further to my observations on Deep State dinner theatre, the “Russia investigation” show goes on, undeterred by the lack of any evidence of actual crime: The more obvious the absence of any crime to investigate, the bigger the investigation gets. As I’ve said before, in Hitchcockian terms, this is a thriller without a MacGuffin: instead, it’s one big MacNuffin – unless you count the “collusion” between government bureaucracies and the Hillary campaign in surveilling their political opposition before the election, or FBI honcho Jim Leaky leaking material to The New York Times to get his buddy Bob Mueller appointed as “Special Counsel”.

That last one worked – notwithstanding calls for a Special Counsel to investigate the Special Counsel over his ties to the FBI Director who wanted the Special Counsel. This is a very Washington creature-feature: the Blob feasts on nothing. So at the Deep State dinner theatre Mr Mueller is now casting an army of extras. With the usual money-no-object lavishness of the world’s premier five-star swamp, the Special Counsel has appointed, to date, 14 lawyers to his “investigation”, “with more still to come”. In a fascinating column, my old colleague Andrew McCarthy puts this prosecutorial football squad in perspective:

Andy was the lead counsel in the prosecution of the Blind Sheikh for the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center. It led to a nine-month trial of twelve defendants. The Government somehow managed to pull that off with three prosecutors plus an appellate lawyer.

A couple of years before that, Andy was on the “Pizza Connection” Mafia case – a 17-month trial of 22 defendants. In that one, he was the junior member among five government lawyers, and many of his peers thought the size of the prosecution team was “excessive”.

But McCarthy’s column contains an even more sobering context for Bob and his Fantastic Fourteen:

Does it seem strange to anyone else that, by comparison, the president of the United States has managed to get—count ’em—three appointees confirmed to Justice Department positions in five months?

So in one month Mueller has managed to put five times as many people on the DoJ payroll as Trump has since January.

As has been noticed, no matter how many lawyers Mueller hires, he only seems to know bigtime Hillary donors. If he wraps the investigation up in time, the Special Counsel can change his title to Special Bundler for the Clinton 2020 campaign. But, even if they weren’t so ostentatiously partisan, the whole money-no-object profligacy sums up dysfunctional Washington at its most repulsive.