RUTHFULLY YOURS

A recent poll [2] found that 51 percent of Democrats supported criminalizing hate speech. It also found that the same number of self-described liberals supported its criminalization.

Liberal self-identification has hit its highest mark [3] in decades while the ranks of the moderates have declined. And while the idea that the liberal and the moderate are opposites may be a troubling one to those who still think of liberalism in classical terms, the modern liberal is really a leftist in denial.

When William Voegeli writes in the Claremont Review [4] about the crisis of political correctness, it is about a clash between liberals and leftists that no longer really exists. The liberal backs the same censorship agenda as the leftists that Voegeli discusses.

And under his control, the Democratic Party has signed on the dirty dotted line.

The dark truth about disease and Obama’s border lawlessness.

By now most Americans are familiar with the Obama administration’s ongoing effort to force-feed amnesty for illegals to a largely recalcitrant American public. The most egregious part of this effort occurred during last year’s border “surge” when the administration not only embraced the admittance of tens of thousands of Unaccompanied Alien Children (UACs) into our nation, but the purposeful and secret dispersal [2] of them into all 50 states, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands. What Americans don’t know is that the Obama administration ignored [3] Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) guidelines [4] that apply to legal immigrants and prevent the unvaccinated, or those with a “communicable disease of public health significance,” from entering the country. As a result, it is quite possible the outbreak of unknown diseases or those mostly eradicated in the U.S. for quite some time is no coincidence. The administration’s stance on the issue? A combination of silence, denial [5], or blame-shifting [6] to the anti-vaxxer crowd.

We begin with last year’s outbreak [7] of Enterovirus D68 (EV-D68), a disease that paralyzed and killed American children. That in and of itself should have elicited a media firestorm, along with demands for establishing the origins of the outbreak beyond a reasonable doubt. Yet coverage was scant. Reporter Sharryl Attkisson revealed [8] the disease was first identified in California in 1962, but that outbreaks had been relatively rare. She further noted the CDC “hasn’t suggested reasons for the current uptick or its origin.” Sundance at theconservativetreehouse.com [9] attempted [10] to correlate the outbreaks of the disease with the location of UAC shelters. And while part of his investigation was stymied by the reality that the administration kept many of those shelter locations secret, “there are significant numbers of them in both cities in which the current outbreak was first identified,” he explained.

On June 17, 2015 the Subcommittee on National Security and the Subcommittee on Health Care, Benefits and Administrative Rules conducted a joint hearing concerning “A Review of the President’s Executive Actions on Immigration [2].”

Inspector General (IG) John Roth testified at this hearing along with Sarah R. Saldaña, the Director of ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) and León Rodríguez, the Director of USCIS (United States Citizenship and Immigration Services). For those not familiar with the federal government, the Office of the Inspector General (OIG) is comparable to “Internal Affairs” where police departments are concerned.

Before we begin to consider the Inspector General’s testimony and what it tells us about the administration’s use of what is claimed to be “prosecutorial discretion,” I want to begin by calling attention to what I hope is obvious to everyone: The Congressional Subcommittee on National Security was one of the two subcommittees that called this hearing, thereby reenforcing the nexus between immigration and national security — a nexus that was identified by the 9/11 Commission.

Nevertheless, precious few members of Congress, or journalists for that matter, are willing to publicly address this nexus. Talk about the proverbial “elephant in the room.”

In the 21st century, barbarism has gained ground at the expense of civilization. Democracy has been in sharp decline [2]. Terrorism increased by 35 percent [3] in 2014. ISIS’s latest video is the most horrific yet [4].

If civilization can still prevail, it first has to be able to distinguish between civilization and barbarism. Civilization has had a notoriously hard time doing that. It signed a peace agreement with Herr Hitler and declared “peace in our time.” It may be on the verge of signing an agreement with Iran that leaves its nuclear program intact and ensures it will get—for starters—$150 billion worth of sanctions relief.

The inability to morally distinguish between Israel and its barbaric enemies is, of course, a key part of the malaise. The UN Human Rights Council’s report on last summer’s war in Gaza, released this week, is a further symptom of a disease that appears incurable.

Two years into his reign, Pope Francis has emerged as an extreme socialist obsessed with the usual phony leftist problems such as manmade global warming, American institutional racism, and income inequality.Muslims are indiscriminately slaughtering Christians around the world while Christianity itself seems on the verge of being eclipsed globally by Islam, but these things barely register with this pope.

This pseudo-intellectual pope keeps on spouting the same misanthropic Marxist platitudes as he hitches his papacy to global warming, the new international totalitarian cause. Sounding like Mao Zedong, Francis said a “bold cultural revolution” was needed to save the planet.

“Israel defeated conventional warfare time and again, in 1948, 1956, 1967, 1973. It overcame the strategic terrorist onslaught of the Second Intifada. What’s urgently needed now is a strategy to defeat this third phase of our enemies’ efforts to destroy this country — which they pursue by waging war from within a civilian populace, and demonizing Israel when it fights back. However much we moan about the intransigent hostility, the relentless conflicts, the misrepresentation and the injustice, the cold fact is that our enemies are celebrating. And Mary McGowan Davis is one more ghastly reason for that.”

Op-ed: The skewed UNHRC report on last summer’s war will further embolden Hamas. Still, mere moaning about it, and moaning about our enemies’ evil schemes, is no substitute for a strategy

Guest-hosting The Rush Limbaugh Show last week, I mentioned an outrageous and very direct assault on free speech by the Government of the United States. As I said on the air, federal prosecutors are demanding Reason, the libertarian mag, cough up any identifying information on readers who posted comments in relation to the Silk Road case.

That was the trial in which the Silk Road drugs impresario, Ross Ulbricht, wound up being sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole. This would not happen, obviously, in Sweden or New Zealand or anywhere else, but even by the standards of American courtrooms it was unusual: Judge Katherine Forrest gave Ulbricht a tougher sentence than the prosecution had asked for. Commenters at Reason, who aren’t big on the “war” on drugs, were unimpressed by Judge Forrest:

Whenever and wherever tragedy strikes, politicians follow. This one has been no different. Before the smoke cleared, the Reverend Al Sharpton announced he was on his way to Charleston. The President couldn’t help himself: When asked about the tragedy he expressed consoling words for the victims and their families, but then added that what Charleston, Newtown and Aurora had in common was the ease with which the perpetrators acquired their weapons. The Press, predictably, began barraging Republican candidates on their views regarding gun control, racism and whether the Confederate flag should fly over state-owned property in South Carolina’s capital.

You almost certainly know how the expectations game is played in electoral politics, because there are only three rules:

1) If you think you’re going to win, set expectations low. Your victory then appears even bigger than “expected.”

2) If you think you’re going to lose, set expectations even lower. Your loss won’t look so bad as “expected.”

3) If you know you’re going to lose, lower expectations for your opponent by dismissing the entire event as meaningless. Their win will mean less than “expected.”

At this early stage in the game — six months before the Iowa Caucus or the New Hampshire Primary, Team Clinton is already working Rule #2 in those early states. Democratic strategist (and self-described “Clinton supporter”) Maria Cardona went on ABC’s This Week to talk to Jonathan Karl about the threat posed to Hillary by Vermont Democratic-Socialist-Independent-Democrat Bernie Sanders:

As most everyone has heard by now, the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) data systems were hacked sometime during the last 18 months, and a whole lot of people’s personal information was copied out. The estimates on how many “a whole lot” is have changed, and frankly I don’t trust any government numbers, but OPM now says that it was “as many as” 14 million people.

When I say “personal information,” by the way, I’m not just talking about Social Security numbers and names.

Some of the data exposed was from the background investigations of people with security clearances, collected with Standard Form 86 [1]. This form is nearly 150 pages long, and it collects everything — where you’ve lived, where you’ve worked, who you know. For high-level clearances, it is then supplemented with a background investigation that looks at your credit, your potential police record, and interviews with people whom you identified on the form, and other people who show up by being connected to those people.