RUTHFULLY YOURS

There is only one guaranteed way to get fired from the Department of Veterans’ Affairs. Falsifying records won’t do it. Prescribing obsolete drugs won’t do it. Cutting all manner of corners on health and safety is, at worst, going to get you a reprimand. No, the only sure-fire way to get canned at the VA is to report any of these matters to authorities who might do something about it.

That, at least, is what the U.S. Office of Special Counsel recently reported to the president of the United States. The Special Counsel’s office is the agency to which government whistleblowers go to report wrongdoing.

“Our concern is really about the pattern that we’re seeing, where whistleblowers who disclose wrongdoing are facing trumped-up punishment, but the employees who put veterans’ health at risk are going unpunished,” Special Counsel Carolyn Lerner recently told National Public Radio.

Now, obviously, this shouldn’t happen. Everyone, except perhaps the managers at the VA, probably agrees with that. So by all means, let’s have some reforms and further protections for whistleblowers.

But that’s not a real solution. The real fix is to get rid of the VA entirely.

The biggest liability Hillary Clinton faces in getting the Democratic nomination may be that too many of her fellow Democrats don’t believe she is a good liar.

A new Fox News poll this week found that by 58 to 32 percent, Americans don’t think Hillary is telling the truth about her e-mail scandal. Surprisingly, 31 percent of Democrats and almost two-thirds of independents share that view. Perhaps most ominous for her is that 47 percent of Democrats (and 62 percent of all voters) “are worried that scandals would be a problem for a Clinton administration were she elected.”

Clinton loyalists are convinced that polls showing that majorities of voters find Hillary dishonest and untrustworthy will be irrelevant when it actually comes time to vote. One top Clintion adviser told Ron Fournier of the National Journal last spring: “Trust doesn’t matter.” Other aides point out that the day Bill Clinton won reelection in 1996 with 49 percent of the vote, a majority of Americans didn’t think he was honest or trustworthy — and that was before the Lewinsky scandal.

Democrats are starting to admit that the new scandals involving e-mails and the Clinton Foundation’s conflicts of interest are taking a worrying toll. Democratic Senator Chris Coons of Delaware admitted to the PBS affiliate in his state this week that there has been “a real loss of support by of some of the folks who I had expected would be just diehard, enthusiastic Clinton fans, in part because it’s a reminder of the Clinton era, when there seemed to always be some scandal going on about something.” Coons also criticized Hillary’s attempts at explaining the scandals: “Her answers to it have been less open and artful than I’d expected they would be.”

Twelve years ago, it was said that the western armies in Iraq would be welcomed as liberators. (They were – for a while.) Today in Germany, another conquering army are being welcomed as liberators – liberators from the residual moral stain of what remains of ethnic nationalism and cultural identity. Watching European news broadcasts right now is like an insane demotic inversion of the Emperor’s new clothes. “To a fool these thousands of fit young Muslim men appear well dressed and well fed. But a wise man such as Your Majesty can easily see that they are desperate starving refugees in rags.” And so as the trains pull in to German railway stations to disgorge men who meet no known definition of “refugees” they are greeted on the platform by volunteers offering food and second-hand clothes. The cameras do their best to alight on a telegenic moppet or a covered woman, but, even when they do, you notice that they’re surrounded by a sea of confident vigorous males – who, according to the UN, make up 75 per cent of the “refugees”.

From Australia but very applicable in the US….rsk
They won’t say it, so I must: our political class blundered when it lowered the voting age to 18. Eager, optimistic and brimming with idealism today’s post-adolescents may be, but they also lack perspective and insight. Take that as my diagnosis of an arrogant ignorance only time can remedy.
It isn’t difficult for Malcolm Turnbull to bat away suggestions that he is betraying his position on gay marriage by supporting a plebiscite. After all, as he says, what could be more democratic than a plebiscite? What indeed?

The implicit proposition is that if 50% of voters-plus-one support gay marriage, Amen! Game, set and match. But, in this case, should a simple bare majority be sufficient to upend a longstanding institutional arrangement; and, separately, a majority of whom?

The outward show of democracy is government by majority will. Fifty per cent of votes plus one holds sway. For the most part, decisions are not directly made by the voting population but by their elected representatives. The 50%-plus-one still prevails, one level up as it were, from the underlying popular will. For deciding most issues, it is hard to think of a better system. But, for deciding some issues of far-reaching consequence, like, say, in passing, the portentous mass immigration of people with incompatible cultural values, it is not nearly demanding enough.

What does ‘far-reaching’ mean? A reasonable guide is that it should apply to a change which cannot feasibly be undone by the current or future generations and which goes to the heart of national culture, conventions, traditions or institutions. Constitutional amendments often fall under this category of change. And, appropriately and accordingly, usually more than a simple bare majority is required to make amendments.

In Australia, a majority of the population nationally, plus a majority in a majority of states, have to agree before a change to the Constitution is made. Special provisions governing constitutional change are par for the course in other countries. However, constitutional provisions are seldom all-encompassing.

http://mosaicmagazine.com/picks/2015/09/what-albert-speer-knew-about-the-holocaust/

The German architect Albert Speer was a favorite of Adolf Hitler, who put him in charge of the Third Reich’s building projects and later made him minister of armaments. Speer was spared the death penalty at Nuremburg, consistently denied he had any knowledge of the extermination of the Jews, and earned himself a reputation as the ex-Nazi with a conscience. A recent biography by Martin Kitchen sets the record straight, as Daniel Johnson writes.

http://www.standpointmag.co.uk/node/6216/full

Albert Speer was as fortunate in death as he was in birth. In 1981, on a visit to London — the city that, four decades earlier, he had tried to obliterate with the world’s first missile bombardment — he had dinner with the historian Norman Stone at Brown’s Hotel, chatting and carousing until 2 am. Next morning Stone interviewed him for the BBC. Stone found Speer “haunted by his past”. Perhaps he was; but the septuagenarian boasted that he had an assignation with a younger woman — an affair that finally disillusioned his loyal wife, Gretel — and seemed to be enjoying an Indian summer. Before Speer could take his lover to lunch, however, he had a stroke, dying later at St Mary’s Hospital in Paddington.

The obituaries were respectful, of course: Speer had always enjoyed a good press. But did he deserve it? Or was his reputation for integrity a shameless fabrication? Journalists, academics and clergymen were complicit in Speer’s construction of an image — the senior Nazi who was innocent of the Holocaust but who admitted his guilt anyway — that was convenient for millions of his countrymen, because it enabled them to be economical with the truth about what exactly they too had known or done. Speer: Hitler’s Architect (Yale, £20), a new biography by Martin Kitchen, paints an unsparing portrait of this “hollow man”.

BRUSSELS—While the European Union overrode the bitter objections of four members this week to establish a plan to relocate 120,000 migrants around the continent, most asylum seekers are deciding for themselves where they want to go—and more quickly than officials can respond.

The plan to resettle 120,000 asylum seekers now in Italy, Greece and other front-line countries and an earlier plan to resettle another 40,000 migrants affect just a fraction of the more than half a million people who have sought refuge in Europe this year.

The plans are meant in part to ease pressure on Germany, the refugees’ destination of choice. The relocation is expected to take place over two years, and is tied to bolstering efforts to register migrants in Italy and Greece as they arrive on those countries’ shores.

But most of the people landing there are moving on swiftly, even the relatively few whom local authorities do manage to register, some officials say.

http://jamieglazov.com/2015/09/24/the-unknown-my-islamic-court-date-and-no-way-out/

The Glazov Gang is proud and excited to run the third episode of its new feature: The Unknown. The producer of the Gang, Anni Cyrus, has now entered the stage.

Below is the new edition, My Islamic Court Date and No Way Out, in which Anni shares her horrific ordeal of trying to escape an abusive forced marriage in the Islamic Republic.

Today, the ills of the Middle East are often blamed on colonialism, imperialism or ‘Satans’ great or small. Nonsense, argues the author.

By 1947 the British, who had ruled mandatory Palestine since 1917, lost the will to remain. Their exhaustion was the catalyst for the 1947-48 war and the establishment of Israel. As Sir Alan Cunningham, the British High Commissioner, told the head of Jewish settlement, David Ben-Gurion, who would go on to become Israel’s first prime minister: “The British people are bloody fed up with the whole mess.”

After two costly wars, the disappointments of the misnamed Arab Spring, and the ever-worsening situation in Iraq, Syria, Libya and Yemen, Americans can be forgiven for flirting with a similar sentiment today. No doubt some of the support for the feckless Iran deal stems from fatigue at the prospect of confronting another enemy in a region that seems to confound us.

In “The Tail Wags the Dog,” Efraim Karsh cautions against a total mental and literal withdrawal from the Middle East. Yet the author, a longtime professor at King’s College London now teaching in Israel, does propose a certain strategic humility: “Just as no foreign surgeon could have saved the ‘Sick Man of Europe’ (as the Ottoman Empire was famously known) unless he helped himself, so no ‘only remaining superpower’ can fix the Middle East’s endemic malaise,” he writes.

In his fast-paced history of British, American and Russian involvement in the Middle East since World War I, Mr. Karsh argues that foreign powers have had a much more limited impact on regional politics than is sometimes assumed. Success stories like the emergence of Turkey as a secular modern state in the 1920s was not due to British and French foresight but to the near-genius statecraft of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk. The Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty of 1979 was the result of local factors seized upon by local players rather than American diplomacy.

If Hillary Clinton loses this election, it won’t be because of Bernie Sanders. It won’t be because of Marco Rubio or Jeb Bush or Carly Fiorina. It will be because of a 1966 statute.

The Clintons are street fighters, and over their scandal-plagued years they have mastered outwitting the press, Congress, the Justice Department, even special prosecutors. But the reason Mrs. Clinton isn’t winning her latest scandal is because she faces a new opponent—one she can’t beat: the Freedom of Information Act.

Of all the Clinton email revelations this week, none compared with a filing by the State Department in federal Judge Emmet Sullivan’s court in Washington on Monday. The filing was a response to a FOIA lawsuit brought in March by conservative organization Citizens United. The group demanded documents from Mrs. Clinton’s tenure as secretary of state related to the Clinton Foundation and to the 2012 terrorist attack on the U.S. diplomatic outpost in Benghazi, Libya. What the State Department revealed was a testament to the power of FOIA.

Congressional investigators can subpoena documents, but even if after long delays they get them, the investigators must trust that the agency handed over everything. The agency usually doesn’t. Under FOIA, by contrast, the agency is required by law to provide plaintiffs with a complete inventory and broad description of every document it has that pertains to the request—but is withholding. This is known as a Vaughn index. The State Department on Monday handed over its Vaughn index to Citizens United and, boy, are these email descriptions revealing.

Vladimir Putin’s Syria strategy is working better than perhaps even he had hoped. The Russian arms flowing into the Latakia military base in western Syria are already propping up his ally Bashar Assad’s teetering government. Now they’re ending the Russian President’s diplomatic isolation, as President Obama agreed Thursday to meet with him next week during the U.N. General Assembly in New York.

“Given the situations in Ukraine and Syria, despite our profound differences with Moscow, the President believes that it would be irresponsible not to test whether we can make progress through high-level engagement with the Russians,” a senior administration official said on Thursday. Translation: Russia is blowing up Mr. Obama’s Syria and Iraq strategy, and he’d better see what the Kremlin strongman wants.