RUTHFULLY YOURS

Every member of a delegation of Iraqi minority groups has been granted visas to visit Washington for official meetings — except one. An Iraqi nun, who is a representative of the Nineveh Christians who have been forced to flee Iraq or be slaughtered by ISIS, has been barred from entering the United States by the Obama administration.

*Sister Diana Momeka was hoping to have a chance to tell Americans about the devastation Christians have suffered at the hands of ISIS, but the only Christian member of a delegation that includes Turkmen Shia and Yazidis is not welcome.

The State Department’s reasoning, according to National Review’s Nina Shea, is completely specious.

She told me in a phone conversation that, to her face, consular officer Christopher Patch told her she was denied because she is an “IDP” or Internally Displaced Person. “That really hurt,” she said. Essentially, the State Department was calling her a deceiver. The State Department officials made the determination that the Catholic nun could be falsely asserting that she intends to visit Washington when secretly she could be intending to stay. That would constitute illegal immigration, and that, of course, is strictly forbidden.

(Ms. Shea was being sarcastic there — in case you missed it.)

Last week, two Muslim members of Congress, Keith Ellison (D-MN) and Andre Carson (D-IN), sent a letter to the State Department requesting that they deny a visa to Dutch politician Geert Wilders. Wilders was coming to Washington, D.C. for a Capitol Hill event sponsored by Reps. Louie Gohmert (R-TX) and Steve King (R-IA).

Unsuccessful in their attempts to have Wilders banned, Ellison, Carson and their associates from the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) tried to disrupt a press conference on free speech with Wilders, Gohmert, and King in front of the U.S. Capitol yesterday. Ellison promoted their actions on Twitter:

Given America’s experience with hundreds of urban riots and the ensuing calls for “domestic Marshall Plans” to heal the wounds, recent events in Baltimore are, as Yogi Berra, once said, déjà vu all over again. The president himself kicked off this rerun with his condemnation of community neglect, disinvestment, joblessness, the need for better funded early education and additional job training, plus updating the city’s infrastructure (also here). That hundreds of billions have already been squandered on similar Great Society-like nostrums to no avail is irrelevant — we have to do something and even if these programs fail, and they will.

Let me shed some light on the awaiting disappointments in Baltimore and why failure may be inescapable. In blunt terms, the quandary is one of uplifting a poor, often violent and occasionally lawless black underclass. This is partially cultural: modern schools with well-qualified teachers, multiple job training programs, and all the rest assigned to this uplift task are pointless unless program recipients willingly avail themselves of the provided opportunities. For education to succeed, for example, you must show up, learn the lesson and not disrupt others. It’s the old “you can take a horse to water but….” problem.

Some readers are so literal and blinkered that they took a “dark” view of my “Obama and His Texas Dreams” column, even though I clearly marked it “satire.” The sad thing is that much of what I wrote in the original piece is no longer “prophetic” but are actualities. The Dallas Cowboys cheerleaders haven’t been bundled off to brothels….not yet. But Texan children are in many instances being indoctrinated in “Hispanic” culture. In California, a white wearing an American flag T-Shirt to school will get him expelled or suspended on charges of “hate speech” or “racism” against Hispanic or Mexican students. In some cases, Mexican students insist that the Mexican flag be flown over the American on school grounds.

Muslim students in American colleges and universities unabashedly voice their support for ISIS, Hamas, Hezbollah, and other Islamic terrorist organizations.

Following in the footsteps and traditions of all recent U.S. presidents, Barack Hussein Obama, our embattled #44, is busily planning his legacy archives, to be domiciled in a place of his Obama Foundation’s choosing.

Off-the-griddle scuttlebutt is that the site chosen is in fact Chicago, home of the man before he ascended to Messianic (in-)fallibility. Chicago, City of Broad Shoulders, a darling poetic inspiration of Carl Sandburg, second city in population after NYC (and hence the source of the comedic troupe and nightspot that has lent so many fantastic comics and hard-pitch terrific actors to SNL: Second City) — and now, the most corrupt burg in the country. Home of dozens of weekend murders. Home of the deplorably wretched mayor Rahm (“dead fish”) Emanuel, the least achieved of the otherwise stellar three Emanuel boys.

It saddens one. But what speculation fleeted through the whorls and crevices of the brain before this selection was apparently pinned down for Illinoisers to visit, once they’ve hit the superior Observatory, green Chicago River on St. Pat’s Day, legendary art museums and Millionaire’s Mile?

Mr Brooks is Vice President and Client Executive, Department of Homeland Security, Xerox
Today’s rapid technological changes and advances can be mind-boggling. It seems that yesterday’s futuristic technology is today’s cutting-edge reality. Did you ever think we’d be able to print more than just text on paper, but an actual object like prosthetics for medicine or wearable sensors?

I recently contributed an article, “ Some Catalyzing Technologies on the Government Horizon,” to The Hill that discussed the transformation of technology like 3-D printing along with data science, digital transformation, the Internet of Things and cybersecurity and its impact on government.

In a very interesting column the author states: “It turns out that, in the prehistory of our species, almost all of us were invaders and usurpers and miscegenators. This scientific revelation is interesting in its own right, but it may have the added benefit of encouraging people today to worry a bit less about cultural change, racial mixing and immigration.”….Oh Puleez!!! rsk
Armed with old bones and new DNA sequencing technology, scientists are getting a much better understanding of the prehistory of the human species.

Imagine what it must have been like to look through the first telescopes or the first microscopes, or to see the bottom of the sea as clearly as if the water were gin. This is how students of human prehistory are starting to feel, thanks to a new ability to study ancient DNA extracted from bodies and bones in archaeological sites.

Low-cost, high-throughput DNA sequencing—a technique in which millions of DNA base-pairs are automatically read in parallel—appeared on the scene less than a decade ago. It has already transformed our ability to see just how the genes of human beings, their domestic animals and their diseases have changed over thousands or tens of thousands of years.

The president wants to zero out a program that is saving poor kids from bad schools—the kind of reform that could work in Baltimore too.

The scenes of Baltimore set ablaze this week have many Americans thinking: What can be done to rescue families trapped in an inner-city culture of violence, despair and joblessness?

There are no easy answers, but down the road from Baltimore in Washington, D.C., an education program is giving children in poor neighborhoods a big lift up. The D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program, which George W. Bush signed into law in 2004, has so far funded private-school tuition for nearly 5,000 students, 95% of whom are African-American. They attend religious schools, music and arts schools, even elite college-prep schools. Last month at the Heritage Foundation in Washington, I met with about 20 parents and children who participate in the program. I also visited several of these families in their homes—which are located in some of the most beaten-down neighborhoods in the city, places that in many ways resemble the trouble spots in Baltimore.

Ruthie Blum is the web editor of Voice of Israel talk radio (voiceofisrael.com).

In 1983, four years after then-Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin and then-Egyptian President Anwar Sadat signed a peace treaty, I became acquainted with a couple who lived in my Jerusalem apartment complex.

The husband was a teacher in the local elementary school; the wife worked for the Israel Electric Corporation.

Within minutes of our first encounter, it became apparent that they did not share my worldview. This was not a novel experience. On the contrary, I had come to expect secular Israelis, especially those with university degrees, to be somewhere on the Left.

Still, the couple in question turned out to be different from the others with whom I argued regularly about politics and economics, until more urgent issues, such as whether our babies had slept through the night, reminded us why we were friends in the first place.

Unlike the trendy Labor party liberals all over the neighborhood, who were buying up run-down Arab houses and renovating them with a vengeance (made possible through much hard-earned cash from their parents), this couple were bona fide, card-carrying communists. And their disdain for anyone less ideologically “pure” bordered on hatred.

Iran controls the strategic waterway through which 40 percent of seaborne oil and a quarter of seaborne gas transits to global markets.

The Maersk Tigris is flagged to the Marshall Islands. The South Pacific archipelago gained its independence from the US in 1986 after signing a treaty conceding its right to self-defense in exchange for US protection. According to the treaty, the US has “full authority and responsibility for security and defense of the Marshall Islands.”

Given the US’s formal, binding obligation to the Marshall Islands, the Iranian seizure of the ship was in effect an act of war against America.

In comments to Bloomberg hours after the ship was seized, Junior Aini, chargé d’affairs at the Marshall Islands Embassy in Washington, indicated that his government’s only recourse is to rely on the US to free its ship.