LIZ SHELD’S MORNING BRIEF: MAGA Hat Controversy and Much, Much More. “It’s not hard to understand why the media is hated and viewed as untrustworthy. There is an unprecedented amount of media labor directed at assaulting the president regarding any trivial issue. President Trump’s recent trip to visit Iraq really triggered the crazy to come out. Maybe it was because the media enjoyed wagging their finger at the president because he hadn’t visited the troops? Whoops.”

ASHE SCHOW: Mizzou Official Claims Tall Men Asking Out Short Women Could Constitute Sexual Misconduct.

When a Mizzou official was questioned regarding a case where a black male Ph.D. candidate at the school asked out a white female fitness trainer, she bizarrely suggested that the fact that the male student was larger than the female student gave him “power over her” and violated school policy.

The Daily Wire previously reported on the case in July. The male student, who the Daily Wire will refer to as John Doe, asked out the female fitness instructor, who will be identified as Jane Roe. She said she was busy but discussed with him possibly going out later that month. Two days later, she told him to “stop making romantic advances toward her,” according to John’s lawsuit against Mizzou. Despite not wanting to date him, Jane asked John to keep taking her dance classes.

John did this, and later asked Jane to recommend some YouTube videos to help him improve his dancing. She suggested private lessons but told him she didn’t teach privately. She then, according to John’s lawsuit, avoided him for the next week.

On Oct. 14, 2016, John wrote Jane a three-page letter “apologizing for being awkward around her, expressing sincere feelings for her, and asking [her] what if anything she wanted from Plaintiff,” his lawsuit said.

More groveling, apparently.

LOOKING TO MAKE A YEAR-END CHARITABLE DONATION? I recommend the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, which has been fighting higher-ed totalitarianism for many years.

DEMOCRATS DON’T REALLY MIND THAT, THOUGH: FBI: Record number of illegal immigrants tried to buy guns this year. Because that’s not who they want disarmed.

WHEN NARRATIVES FAIL:

But yes, it’s worth pointing out that regardless of the pundits’ output, America isn’t in trouble, leftists are just angry because they’re out of power.

VENEZUELA: Nine military personnel sentenced for plotting to overthrow president.

Nine members of the Venezuelan armed forces were sentenced to up to eight years in prison for plotting to overthrow President Nicolas Maduro in 2014, the Supreme Court said on Wednesday.

General Oswaldo Hernandez and retired Colonel Jose Delgado were among those sentenced to a minimum of five years, the court said in a statement.

Venezuela’s top court rejected a final appeal from the nine defendants who had already seen previous motions dismissed by both a lower court and a court-martial.
They were accused of “preparing in 2014 an insurrectional and destabilizing movement, called operation Jericho, against the government.”

The opposition has accused the supreme court of “serving” Maduro’s interests.
All nine defendants were arrested between March and May 2014.

I wonder if any of them will survive past the length of their sentences.

WHEN YOU DECIDE TO REMOVE THE BOUNDARIES BETWEEN NATIONS, YOU DECIDE TO ALLOW COLLUSION IN ALL ITS MANY FORMS:

But here’s a hypothesis: The bogus “Russia collusion” narrative is actually being spread by . . . Chinese disinformation efforts, to distract people from what China’s up to.

HMM: Trump Didn’t Kill the Global Trade System. He Split It in Two. “Allies find relations modestly tweaked, despite the president’s rhetoric, while relations with China are entering a deep freeze.”

There are two big questions hanging over this realignment. The first is deciding how far the U.S. is prepared to decouple from China. The U.S. has given China until March 1 to avoid higher tariffs by addressing complaints it discriminates against foreign companies and steals their technology. Mr. Trump is counting on a deal that avoids a trade war. But many in his administration and Congress don’t trust China to make the necessary concessions and would likely advocate a sharper break.

The second question is whether the U.S. can persuade allies to join a united front to contain China. Other countries don’t relish the choice. Their economic ties to China are far greater than they ever were to the Soviet Union during the Cold War.

Nor are the ideological choices as clear cut. China isn’t waging an ideological struggle against the West as the Soviet Union did.

Greg Ip is sadly mistaken on that last point. Just because Beijing has toned down the Communist rhetoric doesn’t make them any less ambitious than the Soviets were — and flush with a lot more cash, too.

THIS PAYMENT NEEDS A ZERO OR TWO ADDED: School Pays Male Student $47,000 After It Punished Him Based On Nothing More Than An Accusation.

GET WOKE, GO BROKE? I Used to Write for Sports Illustrated. Now I Deliver Packages for Amazon.

ANTITRUST: Silicon Valley May Rue the Day it Called for Government Intervention Against Microsoft. “Facebook, Google, Apple, and others are now facing the sort of regulatory and antitrust animus once leveled at Bill Gates’ company.”

All good things have got to end, and Clark documents how Washington started to take an interest in West Coast tech. Ironically, it was Silicon Valley who came a-calling first, “in the 1990s with the antitrust case against Microsoft, and again more recently in the battle with internet service providers over net neutrality.” In each case, he notes, the alarm was sounded by other tech sector people and now, “they entangled the federal government in their industry in ways that are coming back to haunt them.”

Clark writes that “net neutrality” rules were aimed at telecom firms (especially cable companies providing internet access) and promulgated and pushed by online bandwidth hogs including Netflix, Google, eBay, and Amazon. It was all good to start regulating the internet as long as it was the pipes being regulated and not what flowed through them (indeed, the rallying cry of net neutrality was that all data should be treated equally!). But that’s not the way it played out. The Open Internet Order of 2015 has been rescinded (that’s a good thing, incidentally) and now Washington is far more concerned with what’s being transmitted rather than what ISP is transmitting it or at what speed it’s being sent

However noble or well-meaning Net Neutrality supporters were at the start, it soon got coopted as a rent-seeking measure by the above-mentioned “bandwidth hogs.” And now that Washington’s nose is under the tent, good luck ever getting it out.

EVERYONE SHOULD BE UPSET AT THE IDEA OF THE SPLC HATE MOB CONSPIRING WITH TECH TITANS TO PUNISH PEOPLE FOR EXERCISING THEIR CONSTITUTIONAL RIGHTS: Tech Companies’ Concerted Suppression of Disfavored Views Represents a Threat to Our Freedom.

CIVIL RIGHTS UPDATE: Gun-owner rights bill becomes Ohio law after legislature overrode Kasich veto. Kasich is so pathetic.

PAULA BOLYARD: Ohio Heartbeat Bill Goes Down in Flames after GOPs Side with Kasich, Planned Parenthood, and Democrats. “A despicable betrayal.”

WHO COULD HAVE SEEN THIS COMING, BESIDES EVERYONE WITH A BRAIN? It Sure Looks Like This Obamacare Program Has Led to More People Dying: Under the health law, Medicare started penalizing hospitals for too many readmissions. Now mortality rates are up.

To determine whether a government program is successful, it’s often necessary to look not only at how well it does what it’s supposed to do, but what it’s doing that it isn’t supposed to. For example, killing people.

Take the hospital readmissions program built into Obamacare. The program derived from a simple observation that hospitals were treating lots of people who would then return for more treatment within the month. Unnecessary readmissions cost Medicare an estimated $17.5 billion a year. If hospitals were treating people effectively, the thinking went, those people shouldn’t need to return so soon.

So the health law instituted a Medicare payment penalty for hospitals with too many readmissions for pneumonia, heart failure, and heart attack. Since 2012, Medicare has assessed about $2 billion in penalties on hospitals with too-high readmissions rates.

Hospital groups have argued that these payments are punitive and unfair, particularly to so-called safety net hospitals that serve the poorest, sickest patients. These patients tend to have higher readmissions rates, and the hospitals that treat them were more likely to be hit with payment reductions. (Earlier this year, the Trump administration changed the penalty structure for safety net hospitals.)

But the program has often been labeled a success because it accomplished its primary goal. Readmissions dropped between 2.3 and 3.6 percentage points for the conditions targeted. Readmissions associated with other maladies dropped by 1.4 percent. The authors of one 2016 study suggested that the lower readmission rates “point to how Medicare can improve the care that patients receive through innovative payment models.” It offered proof, and hope, that with the right incentives, Medicare could save money and provide better care.

A new study appears to dash that hope, at least as far as readmissions are concerned.

The study, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) and conducted by by researchers associated with Beth Israel Deaconess Medical and Harvard Medical School, looked at hospitalizations between 2005 and 2015. It found that “30-day post-discharge mortality”—the number of people who died within a month of leaving the hospital—increased for heart failure patients after the readmissions penalty program was implemented.

But remember, if you opposed ObamaCare, it was because you wanted people to die. All the best thought leaders said so.

WELL, I THINK SHE SHOULD LEARN GERMAN:  Possibly the Weirdest Easter Egg Scripture Linkages. Ever.  (She posts this kind of fascinating trivia on my blog comments and I find it interesting.)

X-RAY VISION: On this day in 1895, Wilhelm Röntgen (1845-1923), a mechanical engineer and physicist, published “On a New Kind of Rays.” His Röntgen rays (X-rays) allowed doctors to see things that previously were hidden, changing the way medical conditions are detected and diagnosed forever.

For weeks prior to the publication, he had been working feverishly in his lab. The first “X-ray” of a human body part was of his wife Anna’s hand. When she saw the macabre image, she is said to have shuddered, “I have seen my death!” (No worries.  She lived another 24 years before dying in 1919 at the age of 80.)

Experimenting with X-rays became fashionable in the years immediately after Röntgen’s discovery. It took a while before it became clear X-rays could be lethal. One of Thomas Edison’s assistants, Clarence Dally, was an early casualty. In the long run, of course, X-rays have extended far more lives than they have shortened.

Röntgen received the Nobel Prize in Physics for his discovery.

GOOD:  Gun Owners Of America Formally File Lawsuit Against Bump Stock Ban

FASCINATING:  Treasure Trove of Dinosaur Footprints Found.

NO. IT’S ABOUT MAKING KIDS SAFER: Arming Teachers Isn’t About Making You ‘Feel’ Safer.

DUH:  With identical tweets, Schumer and Pelosi reveal themselves as mouthpieces for the same propaganda puppet master.