OBAMA’S TRUST DEFICIT ON TRADE: House Democrats are balking at fast-track approval of President Obama’s Pacific Rim trade deal.

Trade promotion authority (TPA), also known as fast-track, passed the Senate last month but faces a tougher road in the House.

Sponsored by Sens. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) and Ron Wyden (D-Ore) and Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), the bill would grant Congress an up-or-down vote on Obama’s trade deals, but deny lawmakers the power to amend or filibuster those agreements. The additional power is seen as necessary to Obama finalizing the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) — a 12-nation behemoth that stands as a top priority in his second term. . . .

But the vast majority of House Democrats oppose the president’s trade agenda, naming a long list of concerns — from food safety to the environment, currency manipulation to labor rights and the loss of U.S. jobs.

They’re also accusing the administration of pushing trade agreements benefiting corporations and other well-heeled interests, while leaving working-class Americans out in the cold. . . .

Democratic support will be crucial to the TPA’s success, because GOP leaders are struggling to rally the votes to pass the measure on their own.

Yet Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) on Wednesday acknowledged in an interview on Fox News Radio’s “Kilmeade & Friends” that he doesn’t have the votes to pass fast-track.

As evidence of the trust deficit, all 6 House Democrats running for Senate seats in 2016 have come out against fast-tracking the deal.

I don’t blame them. Fast-tracking a trade deal of this magnitude–with no opportunity for amendments and limited debate–seems like a bad way to run the legislative railroad. There is a need for good and thoughtful trade deals, but I’m not a big fan of truncating the normal legislative process.  

FUNDING FOR IMMIGRATION LAWSUIT DEFENSE BLOCKED: The House on Wednesday voted 222-204 to include an amendment to the Department of Justice appropriations bill that blocks any of the Act’s funds from being used to litigate the defense of President Obama’s unilateral lawmaking executive action on immigration in the 26 state lawsuit, Texas v. United States. Judge Andrew Hanen has issued a preliminary injunction in that lawsuit, preventing some of the actions from going forward, and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit recently refused to stay that injunction, pending the trial on the merits.

The amendment was sponsored by Rep. Steve King (R-IA). Nineteen House Republicans–in mostly Hispanic districts–broke with party ranks to oppose the amendment.

It’s a good example of the House flexing its “power of the purse” muscle for a change, although the question remains whether DOJ will be able to use other funds to continue the litigation. And of course, the Senate has yet to act, and the President has threatened a veto.

MORE EX-IM BANK HANKY PANKY: Timothy Carney at the Washington Examiner reports that the controversial Export-Import Bank funneled $10.3 million in loan guarantees to Solyndra after the company had already manufactured, shipped and installed the solar panels to a solar farm in Belgium.  As Carney observes:

So why would Ex-Im agree to subsidize exports that had already been made, shipped, and installed? This seems odd if Ex-Im was trying to support U.S. jobs at Solyndra. It makes sense if Ex-Im was trying to change the financing of an existing export, so as to shore up Solyndra’s financing. In other words, Ex-Im may not have helped Solyndra make a sale (which is what it is supposed to do), but it may have slowed down Solyndra’s cash-flow trainwreck — a crucial objective for the Obama administration, which had stuck out its neck holding up Solyndra as the poster company for the new subsidized green economy.

“I’ll take crony capitalism for $100, Alex.” For the Obama Administration, Solyndra was too political to fail.

EXECUTIVE AMNESTY WITH BENEFITS: The IRS has confirmed to Congress that individuals granted amnesty by President Obama’s unilateral lawmaking “executive action” will indeed qualify for a refund of back taxes, even if they never filed a tax return:

IRS lawyers have ruled that once illegal immigrants get numbers, they can go back and re-file for up to three previous years’ taxes and claim refunds even for time they were working illegally.

The lawyers said since the EITC is a refundable credit, that’s allowed even when the illegal immigrants worked off-the-books and never paid taxes in the first place.

Terrific–so the President can take executive action that not only transforms individuals whom our law classifies as “deportable” into “not deportable,” he can simultaneously confer upon them multiple benefits, including work permits and now, tax refunds, which will be funded by law-abiding individuals who are present in the country legally.

The conferral of benefits–now even more significant than previously believed–is a key indicator that President Obama’s executive actions on illegal immigration are not, in fact, mere “prosecutorial discretion,” as he asserts.  Prosecutorial discretion allows the executive branch to prioritize enforcement given the reality of limited resources; it does not grant the executive branch authority to go further and grant benefits to lawbreakers.

WHEN ACCEPTANCE TURNS TO HARM: Psychiatrist Paul McHugh had an intriguing take on “accepting” transgendered individuals a few months back in the WSJ that may be worth re-reading in the wake of the Bruce/Caitlyn Jenner revelation:

[P]olicy makers and the media are doing no favors either to the public or the transgendered by treating their confusions as a right in need of defending rather than as a mental disorder that deserves understanding, treatment and prevention. This intensely felt sense of being transgendered constitutes a mental disorder in two respects. The first is that the idea of sex misalignment is simply mistaken—it does not correspond with physical reality. The second is that it can lead to grim psychological outcomes.

The transgendered suffer a disorder of “assumption” like those in other disorders familiar to psychiatrists. With the transgendered, the disordered assumption is that the individual differs from what seems given in nature—namely one’s maleness or femaleness. Other kinds of disordered assumptions are held by those who suffer from anorexia and bulimia nervosa, where the assumption that departs from physical reality is the belief by the dangerously thin that they are overweight. . . .

When children who reported transgender feelings were tracked without medical or surgical treatment at both Vanderbilt University and London’s Portman Clinic, 70%-80% of them spontaneously lost those feelings. Some 25% did have persisting feelings; what differentiates those individuals remains to be discerned.

We at Johns Hopkins University—which in the 1960s was the first American medical center to venture into “sex-reassignment surgery”—launched a study in the 1970s comparing the outcomes of transgendered people who had the surgery with the outcomes of those who did not. Most of the surgically treated patients described themselves as “satisfied” by the results, but their subsequent psycho-social adjustments were no better than those who didn’t have the surgery. And so at Hopkins we stopped doing sex-reassignment surgery, since producing a “satisfied” but still troubled patient seemed an inadequate reason for surgically amputating normal organs.

It now appears that our long-ago decision was a wise one. A 2011 study at the Karolinska Institute in Sweden produced the most illuminating results yet regarding the transgendered, evidence that should give advocates pause. The long-term study—up to 30 years—followed 324 people who had sex-reassignment surgery. The study revealed that beginning about 10 years after having the surgery, the transgendered began to experience increasing mental difficulties. Most shockingly, their suicide mortality rose almost 20-fold above the comparable nontransgender population. This disturbing result has as yet no explanation but probably reflects the growing sense of isolation reported by the aging transgendered after surgery. The high suicide rate certainly challenges the surgery prescription. . . .

At the heart of the problem is confusion over the nature of the transgendered. “Sex change” is biologically impossible. People who undergo sex-reassignment surgery do not change from men to women or vice versa. Rather, they become feminized men or masculinized women. Claiming that this is civil-rights matter and encouraging surgical intervention is in reality to collaborate with and promote a mental disorder.

It’s an interesting question: If individuals who seek sex reassignment surgery are suffering from a treatable mental disorder–a form of body dysmorphic disorder–that could allow them to recover without invasive surgery, shouldn’t society encourage the less intrusive psychological therapy rather than the more intrusive (and irreversible) surgery? Indeed, if the surgery does not improve–but amplifies–underlying psychological disorders such as depression, would not the surgery constitute an unethical harm? Why is society so eager to lump “transgendered” individuals into the same category with homosexual or bisexual individuals? I know LGBT makes a nice-sounding acronym and all, but is there a principled, medical reason to treat the LGBs differently from the Ts? Where is the psychiatric community on this question? 

SO MUCH FOR “BLACK LIVES MATTER”: The WSJ has an editorial today calling NYC Mayor Bill DeBlasio on the carpet for his response to the “Ferguson effect” spike in violent crimes:

“I think it’s clear that what we have primarily here is a gang and crew problem,” the mayor said last week. “You know, for those of us who were here in the bad old days—when we had 2,000 murders or more a year—a lot of everyday citizens were getting caught in those crossfires.” He added it’s “equally troubling when, you know, individual gang members shoot other gang members, but it’s a different reality.”

Translation: If young, largely minority men are killing each other over gang turf, then the violent crime revival is no big deal. It won’t hit the trendier corners of Brooklyn.

So whatever happened to Mr. de Blasio’s campaign that “black lives matter”?

It’s true that most of the New York shootings, as in Chicago or Baltimore, have been confined to poor neighborhoods. But one of the secrets of New York’s policing success from Rudy Giuliani through Michael Bloomberg is that it sought to reduce crime in the highest-crime neighborhoods. The main beneficiaries are the thousands of city residents—overwhelmingly young, black and male—who are alive today because New York’s policing reforms brought crime to record lows.

To be fair, it’s not like the progressive/liberal activists and politicians said that black lives matter all the time. It only matters for the purpose of mainstream media sensationalism, flaming racial hatred/looting for the cameras, and scoring quick political points. It makes cool-looking t-shirts, signs and an awesome hashtag!

BOWLING ALONE, FOREIGN POLICY EDITION: Edwin Corr and Elliott Abrams have a terrific oped in the WSJ today, “Allies Beware:The U.S. is a Fair Weather Friend:”

It may be dangerous to be an enemy of the United States, but in recent decades it often has been almost as risky to be a friend. There was Ngo Dinh Diem, the first president of South Vietnam, overthrown and assassinated by his army in 1963 after losing American support. Or the thousands of Iraqis and Afghans who assisted American troops a decade ago but are still waiting for the visas for safe haven in the U.S. The uncomfortable truth is that America has too often treated former allies as expendable.

The drama that played out this year around Carlos Eugenio Vides Casanova is a reminder of what can happen when time passes and Americans forget. Gen. Vides was El Salvador’s minister of defense in the government of José Napoleón Duarte in the 1980s. Duarte was an American favorite, with plenty of backing from the Reagan administration and Democrats who understood his commitment to democracy and human rights. . . .

Mr. Vides moved to the U.S. in 1989 because his safety in El Salvador could not be protected. He has since lived in Florida, and his children and grandchildren are all U.S. citizens. . . .

An immigration judge ruled on Aug. 16, 2012, that he should be deported under laws allowing such treatment for human-rights abusers. On March 11, 2015, Mr. Vides’s initial appeal was rejected and he was given 30 days to depart. He decided he would leave the U.S. and return to El Salvador while his attorneys appealed the case.

But allowing him to take a commercial flight home, where his brother stood ready to meet him, was too dignified for the U.S. government. Two weeks later Mr. Vides was pulled over while driving near his home, arrested, shackled hand and foot, and transported to the immigration jail in Jena, La. His car was left at the side of the road. After days of complaints by his attorneys he was finally taken back to El Salvador on April 8 aboard a special Department of Homeland Security flight at taxpayers’ expense.

A person of Vides’s stature can be shackled and forcibly removed from the U.S., yet somehow millions and millions of illegal immigrants cannot, supposedly because it would be a violation of “human rights,” even if those illegal immigrants have committed violent crimes.  Sounds rational to me. With friends like the U.S., who needs enemies?

SO I GUESS I NEED TO BUY SOME WELLIES: The Miami Herald has an editorial, “The End of Florida?,” which echoes the Al Gore/Barack Obama doom and gloom predictions about global warming climate change:

But as bad as hurricanes are, they do not pose existential threats to Florida, or to our future. The recurring peril of windstorms has certainly not stopped the influx of millions of new residents that began in the post-war years and has turned Florida into the third most populous state in the union.

But climate change — specifically, sea-level rise caused by global warming — poses a challenge of another order of magnitude. A hurricane hits our shores like a big bang. It’s here and then gone, leaving disaster in its wake. We clean up, we move on.

Sea-level rise is something else: an insidious attack, slowly gnawing away at our beaches, our coastline, our coastal cities. It doesn’t go away.

And it’s here already. Look at the flooded streets in Miami Beach. Or, further up the coast, the 450-year-old city of St. Augustine, whose streets already flood about 10 times a year, and homes built on sand dunes teetering over open space as the Atlantic encroaches on the foundations. All of Florida’s coastal cities face similar threats. Over on the Gulf side, the Tampa/St. Pete area is deemed particularly vulnerable to rising seas because roads and bridges weren’t designed to handle higher tides. . . .

These are not wild guesses or alarmist warnings. They’re predictions, based on accepted science. . . . We don’t think the end of Florida is inevitable, or even likely. But the end of Florida as we know it is certainly possible, and growing more likely every year as the state’s once limitless future erodes along with the vanishing beaches and shrinking shoreline.

Um, the flooding of streets in Miami recently was caused by heavy, slow-moving thunderstorms, not global warming climate change. And St. Augustine has always flooded because 90% of the city is located in an historic floodplain and the development of barrier islands has reduced the ability of the land to absorb the brunt of storms entering from the Atlantic side.  It has nothing to do with global warming climate change.

I live in Key Largo– one of the most “vulnerable” little islands in the Florida Keys. I have lived here for many years, and I can tell you that I haven’t noticed even the slightest change in sea levels. The tide comes in; the tide goes out. Sometimes the tide rises higher and our street floods near our boat basin. Other days it doesn’t. It ebbs and flows, as tides do. Rainy season comes and goes. When it rains a lot, we have some minor flooding. When it doesn’t, we don’t. Yes, the climate changes–every single day, minute by minute. But this isn’t a reason to fundamentally transform the energy sector, taxation policy or the global economy.

These scaremongering tactics are just that. And it’s far from “accepted science” that global warming climate change is an “existential threat” to Florida, or anywhere else.

UM, NO–I MEAN, JUST NO:  Obama told David Axelrod,”I am the closest thing to a Jew that has ever sat in this office.” Can we get some serious psychotherapy for this guy? I’m pretty sure Obamacare would cover it, right?

AT LEAST THEY HAVE A BRAIN, WHICH IS MORE THAN I CAN SAY FOR HER: New York Magazine’s Annie Lowrey tells MSNBC’s Alex Wagner that she wants GOP presidential candidates to “unleash their lizard brains” during the debates. Her full comment is even worse:

“Even in terms of getting a better bread and circus type ludicrous production, which as a journalist is all that I care about, I just want chaos, anarchy, racist comments, sexist comments, I want, I want the worst of these people, I want them to, like, unleash their lizard brains.”

Yeah, that seems like reasonable, objective journalistic analysis. I’m sure Ms. Lowrey wants Hillary Clinton and the other Democratic presidential candidates to also make racist, sexist comments that unleash their lizard brains, too.

AL SENATE VOTES TO END MARRIAGE LICENSES: The Alabama Senate has voted 22-3 to scrap the State’s issuance of all marriage licenses. The bill, SB 377, would transform marriage into a contract, rather than a license, and would not require a marriage ceremony to be valid.

The purpose? Presumably, by taking the State out of the business of issuing marriage “licenses,” marriage would just become another private contractual undertaking, and any Supreme Court ruling that, under the Due Process or Equal Protection Clauses, States must issue marriage “licenses” to same-sex couples would not bind the State of Alabama, which would no longer be in the marriage license business, as a technical, formal matter.

But this seems a bit silly, since SB 377 says, “Effective July 1, 2015, the only requirement to be married in this state shall be for parties who are otherwise legally authorized to be married to enter into a contract of marriage as provided herein.”  It then lists the required form of the contract. But the key question is who is “legally authorized to be married”?  Presumably, the State of Alabama would continue to specify this (and has, pursuant to a state constitutional amendment limiting marriage to one man, one woman). And also presumably, the Alabama Senate did not intend to authorize contractual marriage among multiple persons (polygamy) or among closely related individuals (incest).

Whatever the purpose, the measure now moves to the Alabama house for consideration.  Stay tuned.

I PITY THE FOOL: Naomi Shaeffer Riley is en fuego at the New York Post, penning an oped on Laura Kipnis’s sad, slow awakening to the progressive culture of which she is/was a part:

The charges against Kipnis were dropped over the weekend, but not before she submitted to what she referred to as her “Title IX Inquisition.”

A law firm hired by Northwestern to investigate at first even refused to reveal the nature of the accusations against her. Lawyers told her they wanted to ask her questions but she wasn’t entitled to have her own lawyer present.

Nor could she record the session, during which she was interrogated about her writing, her teaching and even tweets she’d sent.

It’s hard to work up too much sympathy for Kipnis, though. One wonders where she’s been for the past two decades when kangaroo courts were set up at institutions of higher education all over the country.

Has she been rushing to defend all the men convicted by campus courts of sexual assault with no lawyers present?

Kipnis learned (much to her surprise) that, as she wrote, “any Title IX charge that’s filed has to be investigated, which effectively empowers anyone on campus to individually decide, and expand, what Title IX covers. Anyone with a grudge, a political agenda, or a desire for attention can quite easily leverage the system.”

No kidding. And Title IX is only the tip of the iceberg. Anyone with a political agenda and an ax to grind can get professors reprimanded, students kicked off campus and commencement speakers disinvited.

Did self-described feminist Kipnis rush to the defense of Ayaan Hirsi Ali or Condoleezza Rice when they were told they couldn’t come to Brandeis and Rutgers? (In an essay for Slate, Kipnis referred to Condi as President George W. Bush’s “Stepford Wife.”)

Has she been defending Christina Hoff Sommers when the students at Georgetown and Oberlin tried to prevent her from giving a visiting lecture and then demanding “safe spaces” to be protected from her harsh words?

Of course she didn’t.

Do I feel sorry for Kipnis? Yes, I pity the fool, for not opening her eyes and seeing what little fascist enclaves universities have become thanks to progressive intolerance and lack of ideological “diversity.”  Other than that, as a court of equity would say, Kipnis has “dirty hands,” and her involvement in the progressive cabal diminishes her entitlement to relief.

DEMOCRATS’ #WARONWOMEN: S.E. Cupp has an incisive oped about the Democrats’ objections to a GOP effort to increase over-the-counter (OTC) access to birth control:

If you’re one of the 10 million women in America who uses the pill, the prospect is nothing short of life-changing. Going to the doctor to refill the pill every month or even a couple times a year is annoying and time-consuming. And, according to many doctors, it’s unnecessary. The pill is safe to take without a prescription. . . .

But if Republican Sens. Cory Gardner of Colorado and Kelly Ayotte of New Hampshire, along with four other GOP senators, were expecting flowers from Planned Parenthood and others for their bill, the Allowing Greater Access to Safe and Effective Contraception Act, they should brace for disappointment. Suddenly, the idea doesn’t sound so great, and the former supporters aren’t mincing words.

Planned Parenthood president Cecile Richards said the bill is a “sham and an insult to women.”

Karen Middleton of NARAL Pro-Choice Colorado even got personal, saying, “Cory Gardner can’t be trusted when it comes to Colorado women and their health care.”

Beneath the fear-mongering lies the more likely reason for the change of heart on the left. The bill was simply introduced by the wrong party.

If Democrats cede this issue to Republicans, they lose a major chit in their “war on women” narrative. For years, pro-choice groups have been peddling the charge that Republicans are against access to birth control. But it’s utterly (and provably) false.

Indeed. Republican presidential candidates should push this issue hard.

TENURE’S DEMISE BEGINS?: A Wisconsin state legislative committee approved a measure that would, if ultimately enacted, cut $250 million from the University of Wisconsin over two years, and eliminate state laws guaranteeing tenure.  The $250 million cut can be absorbed with little effect by eliminating the unnecessary layers of bureaucracy. As for the tenure reforms:

The elimination of tenure protections was first suggested by [Gov. Scott] Walker back in February, but was considered a longshot proposal. The Joint Finance Committee, however, is tremendously influential, and its decision to send the rollback to the floor of the legislature is seen as making passage much more likely.

By itself, the measure wouldn’t end tenure, but it would remove the current protections it has under state law and allow universities to set their own policies on the matter. In response, current UW system president Ray Cross said the school’s board of regents will act to enshrine tenure as university policy in a meeting later this week.

More details:

In addition to removing tenure from state law, the budget committee called to make it easier for tenured faculty to be fired or laid off. One provision eliminates current law requiring that tenured faculty only be removed for just cause and only after due notice and hearing. Another provision gives Regents authority to lay off any employee, including tenured faculty, if budget circumstances call for it. Seniority protections would go away, although seniority would be one factor considered in who loses jobs.

Darling stated that Wisconsin is the only state that has job protections for tenured faculty written into statutes, which Radomski said was a point of pride for many faculty and a reason faculty find System campuses a desirable place despite comparatively low salaries. The GOP motion calls for the Board of Regents to determine whether to have tenure and what it would entail.

UW faculty are fighting mad. I have mixed feelings about this, and it’s not because I have tenure (which I do).  Undoubtedly, tenure inherently creates some “dead wood”–faculty that slack off and lose interest in their jobs once they know they have a presumptive job for life.  And it would be nice to have a higher education system that reflects a real world ethos of rewarding excellence and punishing lethargy–among faculty, staff and administrators.

On the other hand, the original justification for tenure in higher education (and notice that this emphatically does not apply to lower education, where elementary, middle school and high school teachers do not undertake scholarship as part of their job) is that the job does generally require and involve scholarship, and sometimes that scholarship is politically controversial. Tenure was designed to ensure that scholars could feel free to express their views, without fear of retribution based on viewpoint discrimination. And frankly, it’s conservative professors who need this protection the most, as they are inherently swimming in a sea of progressive colleagues/deans/administrators/sharks who would be tempted to “punish” conservative scholarly viewpoints and activities. These concerns potentially could be allayed with robust statutory protections against viewpoint discrimination, but this would encourage expensive litigation whenever a faculty member is fired. Whether these costs would outweigh the benefits isn’t as clear as it may seem initially.

In any event, the Wisconsin legislature’s proposal represents a thoughtful beginning to an important discussion about what tenure means, and when it is needed (if ever).

BUT WE WERE SUPPOSED TO SAVE $2,500 PER YEAR!: Brace yourself for Obamacare sticker shock.

Health insurers are proposing to raise Obamacare rates more than in the past — some by more than 70 percent — now that they are finally equipped with all the information they need to price those plans.

Plans wanting to raise rates by at least 10 percent next year posted the proposed increase online Monday, as required by the 2010 healthcare law. Insurers are allowed to raise rates each year, but they must publish significant increases ahead of time.

Insurers have sold plans in the law’s new insurance marketplaces for two years in a row. But the difference in 2016 is that for the first time, they have a full year of claims data from enrollees that tells them how high or low to set the price tag. . . .

While plans and rates vary by state, a look at rate increases published Monday on healthcare.gov shows many hovering around 10 to 30 percent in many states.

But there’s also a sprinkling of even bigger hikes. Blue Cross wants to raise its most expensive “platinum” plan in Alabama by 71 percent next year. Aetna wants to charge 59 percent more for one of its small group plans in Virginia. Time Insurance Co. is proposing a 64 percent hike for an individual plan in Georgia.

Gosh, what happened to that $2500 per year savings we were promised? Same thing that happened to the “if you like your plan/doctor, you can keep it/him.”  I think we need trigger warnings for all Obamacare-related news items, since it inevitably causes painful flashbacks of these promises.  It’s like intellectual rape over and over again. 

CLUELESS: Obama claims he has restored the U.S. to the most respected nation on earth:

“People don’t remember, but when I came into office, the Untied States in world opinion ranked below China and just barley above Russia, and today once again, the Untied States is the most respected country on earth. Part of that I think is because of the work we did to reengage the world and say we want to work with you as partners with mutual interests and mutual respect. It was on that basis we were able to end two wars while still focusing on the very real threat of terrorism and try to work with our partners in Iraq and Afghanistan. It’s the reason why we are moving in the direction to normalize relations with Cuba and the nuclear deal that we are trying to negotiate with Iran.”

What is he smoking? As John Hayward points out in his new Breitbart oped:

A “recovery” that just gave us a negative 0.7 percent contraction, a health care plan that hasn’t lived up to a single one of its promises – and is bidding to blow health insurance costs into orbit next year – and foreign policy that wiped out America’s influence in virtually every corner of the world, especially the Middle East, where the gains in Iraq were thrown away, and the group Obama misjudged as the “junior varsity league” of terrorism is sacking cities? What’s not to love? Hey, America is more popular in Cuba and Iran now, right? . . .

How will history judge Obama? Who cares? It’s how the present is judging him that should scare us out of wits. It’s also hard to avoid noticing that his prospective Democrat successors aren’t exactly treating him as a model President whose policies they intend to emulate.

Exactly. It’s the present danger presented by President Obama’s incompetence/indifference/indolence that matters–and we still have 18 long months to go.

LACKING SELF AWARENESS:  Obama tells Asian leaders, “One of my core principles is that I will never engage in a politics in which I’m trying to divide people or make them less than me because they look different or have a different religion,” Obama said. “That’s a core principle, that’s not something I would violate.”

How principled of him. But then again, notice he limits his principle to dividing or devaluing people because they look “different” or have a “different” religion. So inferentially, individuals in the majority (whites and Christians) can/should be divided or devalued?

ADHD LINKED TO COMMON PESTICIDE: A new study published in the journal Environmental Health has identified an association between a common pesticide, pyrethroid, and ADHD in boys.

Boys with detectable urinary 3-PBA, a biomarker of exposure to pyrethroids, were three times as likely to have ADHD compared with those without detectable 3-PBA. Hyperactivity and impulsivity increased by 50 percent for every 10-fold increase in 3-PBA levels in boys. Biomarkers were not associated with increased odds of ADHD diagnosis or symptoms in girls.

Pyrethroids are an insecticide used in mosquito control, flea/tick pet treatments and bug bomb foggers.

ABERCROMBIE LOSES RELIGIOUS DISCRIMINATION SUIT: The Supreme Court ruled today in favor of a Muslim young woman who was denied a job at an Abercrombie store because she wore a hijab, thus violating the store’s “look policy” for salespersons, which prohibited the wearing of any caps or other head coverings.  The policy violated the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which prohibits discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex or national origin.

Justice Scalia, writing for a 7-Justice majority (Justice Alito concurred separately in the judgment but didn’t join the majority), concluded:

Instead, the intentional discrimination provision prohibits certain motives, regardless of the state of the actor’s knowledge. Motive and knowledge are separate concepts. An employer who has actual knowledge of the need for an accommodation does not violate Title VII by refusing to hire an applicant if avoiding that accommodation is not his motive. Conversely, an employer who acts with the motive of avoiding accommodation may violate Title VII even if he has no more than an unsubstantiated suspicion that accommodation would be needed.

Thus, the rule for disparate-treatment claims based on a failure to accommodate a religious practice is straightforward: An employer may not make an applicant’s religious practice, confirmed or otherwise, a factor in employment decisions. For example, suppose that an employer thinks (though he does not know for certain) that a job applicant may be an orthodox Jew who will observe the Sabbath, and thus be unable to work on Saturdays. If the applicant actually requires an accommodation of that religious practice, and the employer’s desire to avoid the prospective accommodation is a motivating factor in his decision, the employer violates Title VII.

Abercrombie urges this Court to adopt the Tenth Circuit’s rule “allocat[ing] the burden of raising a religious conflict.” This would require the employer to have actual knowledge of a conflict between an applicant’s religious practice and a work rule. The problem with this approach is the one that inheres in most incorrect interpretations of statutes: It asks us to add words to the law to produce what is thought to be a desirable result. That is Congress’s province. We construe Title VII’s silence as exactly that: silence. Its disparate treatment provision prohibits actions taken with the motive of avoiding the need for accommodating a religious practice.

Justice Clarence Thomas was the sole dissenter, concluding:

I would hold that Abercrombie’s conduct did not constitute “intentional discrimination.” Abercrombie refused to create an exception to its neutral Look Policy for Samantha Elauf ’s religious practice of wearing a headscarf.  In doing so, it did not treat religious practices less favorably than similar secular practices, but instead remained neutral with regard to religious practices. To be sure, the effects of Abercrombie’s neutral Look Policy, absent an accommodation, fall more harshly on those who wear headscarves as an aspect of their faith. But that is a classic case of an alleged disparate impact. It is not what we have previously understood to be a case of disparate treatment because Elauf received the same treatment from Abercrombie as any other applicant who appeared unable to comply with the company’s Look Policy. Because I cannot classify Abercrombie’s conduct as “intentional discrimination,” I would affirm.

I think Justice Thomas has the better argument here, as Abercrombie’s policy did not appear to be motivated by intentional discrimination against Muslims or any other religion.  Such neutral policies should be presumptively not discriminatory absent strong evidence to the contrary.  But the Court has been very protective of religious exercise in recent cases (both constitutional and statutory), and this decision’s rationale can be extended to provide more robust protection for all religions, not just Muslims. Employers, however, will likely be more constrained in their ability to impose dress restrictions (hair; facial hair; clothing) that disproportionately impact certain religions, as it will be argued that their dress policy “motivates” an adverse employment action, because they don’t want to “accommodate” a person who doesn’t satisfy their policy.

A GOOD SIGN FOR THE HOUSE LAWSUIT:  Judge digs deeper into House GOP’s lawsuit against Obama. The appropriations count of the complaint is very strong. If the House cannot protect itself against executive encroachments on its power of the purse, no one can, and this aspect of separation of powers is rendered merely precatory. The good news is that Judge Rosemary Collyer (a smart cookie) seems to understand what is at stake in this lawsuit.

USELESS PIECE OF . . . . : French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius says a nuclear deal with Iran will be “useless” unless fully verifiable, including allowing access to Iranian military sites, which Iran has stated it will not allow.

A CANCER IS SPREADING: ISIS claims responsibility for suicide bombing in Saudi Arabia. ISIS’s targeting of Saudi Arabia means awful things for the U.S.:

What these attacks say is that Riyadh doesn’t have the comforting control over its land that Americans like to believe it does. And if the royal family doesn’t have its territory as buttoned down as Washington assumed, what other weaknesses has it been masking? What other vulnerabilities now are on view? . . .

The real reason is that it casts into doubt all of the mythology America has created around its favorite autocratic kingdom. The royal family operates a government that is truly authoritarian. It abuses the rights of its citizens. It discriminates against women. It does frightfully little to protect its minority communities. Beheadings. Disappearances. But, damn, it sure is quiet over there. And man, that’s gotta mean those guys are as tough as we need them to be, that they are the mighty Sunni power that’s going to help us do one thing in particular—keep Iran in check.

It’s about to get very noisy. And Iran won’t be kept in check; it is emboldened.

THE WORLD SMELLS WEAKNESS: A confluence of events this week emphasizes that the world–especially its worst characters–smells the pungent aroma of American weakness thanks to President Obama’s purposeful, “leading from behind” philosophy of non-leadership:

Iran is brazenly trying a Washington Post reporter, Jason Rezaian for espionage, ignoring State Department entreaties to release him. It also has ongoing ties to North Korea, which is providing nuclear weaponry expertise, even as Iran claims to be negotiating the the Obama Administration to halt development of its nuclear weapon program.

Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is forced to pitch his country’s concerns about the Iran nuclear deal directly to Congress, and our President won’t even meet with him.

President Obama will meet with Arab Gulf leaders, however, in an attempt to pitch them on his Iranian deal. But the leaders of Saudi Arabia and Bahrain snub the President and don’t attend. Saudi Arabia sends its own troops in to fight ISIS in Syria.

China is building up strategically located islands in the South China Sea–including construction of a military airstrip–destabilizing the area and warning the U.S. not to fly or sail near them.  After Secretary of Defense Ash Carter responded tepidly, a Chinese Colonel said Mr. Carter “wasn’t as tough as I expected.”

To counter Putin’s overt aggression in Crimea, Lithuania and Poland tell Congress they want U.S. military bases to protect them.

Secretary of Defense Ash Carter admitted that the US-trained Iraqi military forces have “no will to fight” ISIL–the official excuse for why Ramadi and other major cities in the region are falling.  But then again, the Administration doesn’t exhibit a will to fight ISIL either.

The Obama Administration’s support of the Muslim Brotherhood and ISIS-supporting Syrian rebels have been disasters.

The question is: What will 18 more months of an Obama Administration mean for U.S. national security?

RICO: A NEW FRONT ON THE WAR ON FREE SPEECH:  As preposterous as it sounds, Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) has an oped in the Washington Post arguing that the federal racketeering law, RICO, should be used to prosecute those who deny global warming climate change:

Fossil fuel companies and their allies are funding a massive and sophisticated campaign to mislead the American people about the environmental harm caused by carbon pollution.

Their activities are often compared to those of Big Tobacco denying the health dangers of smoking. Big Tobacco’s denial scheme was ultimately found by a federal judge to have amounted to a racketeering enterprise. . . .

The parallels between what the tobacco industry did and what the fossil fuel industry is doing now are striking.

In the case of fossil fuels, just as with tobacco, the industry joined together in a common enterprise and coordinated strategy. In 1998, the Clinton administration was building support for international climate action under the Kyoto Protocol. The fossil fuel industry, its trade associations and the conservative policy institutes that often do the industry’s dirty work met at the Washington office of the American Petroleum Institute. A memo from that meeting that was leaked to the New York Times documented their plans for a multimillion-dollar public relations campaign to undermine climate science and to raise “questions among those (e.g. Congress) who chart the future U.S. course on global climate change.” . . .

To be clear: I don’t know whether the fossil fuel industry and its allies engaged in the same kind of racketeering activity as the tobacco industry. We don’t have enough information to make that conclusion. Perhaps it’s all smoke and no fire. But there’s an awful lot of smoke.

Senator Whitehouse seems to be utterly ignorant of the fact that the “science” supporting global warming climate change is far from settled, unlike the situation of the tobacco litigation, which involved, in the judge’s words, evidence that the tobacco industry “suppressed research, [] destroyed documents, [] manipulated the use of nicotine so as to increase and perpetuate addiction, [and] distorted the truth about low-tar and light cigarettes so as to discourage smokers from quitting.”

First, this man should be voted out of office as soon as human possible.  His ignorance is dangerous. Second, the state bar should require him to undergo at least 100 hours of mandatory continuing legal education on the subject of constitutional law, with emphasis on the First Amendment. Newsflash: joining together to discuss common interests and even–gasp!–funding research, white papers and lobbying efforts to advance one’s perspectives on an issue isn’t illegal; its free speech.

HIS HAIR IS, BUT NOT HIS ARTICLE:  Bernie Sanders tries to explain his bizarre fictional sex story, “Man and Woman,” as “Something like Fifty Shades of Grey.”