RUTHFULLY YOURS

A federal audit has discovered that up to 10,000 California National Guard enlistees received improper bonuses at the time of their recruitment and now the government wants the vets to pay the bonsues back.

The bonuses were meant to spur recruitment a decade ago when Guard enlistments were lagging. But the money was only supposed to go to recruits who signed up for “high demand” positions. Thousands received the bonuses anyway.

CBS Los Angeles:

“The way to fix it if the law needs to be changed,” says McVey, “that’s what elected officials are for. They should fix the problem not lay it off on what in fact are turning into the victims.”

The money was given to the soldiers upfront, similar to an athlete getting a signing bonus.

According to the LA Time, the bonus money was supposed to be limited to soldiers who were taken on high-demand assignments.

A federal investigation uncovered thousands of bonuses and studentloan payments that were given to California Guard soldiers who didn’t qualify under the high-demand assignment criteria.

Fajardo also spoke to retired US Army Chief Warrant Officer Warren Finch who also served in the Guard.

A decade ago, the California National Guard offered thousands of soldiers large bonuses to reenlist and go to war. After investigations discovered fraud and mismanagement involving those payments, the Pentagon is demanding the money back, making veterans pay for the government’s mistakes.

Nearly 10,000 soldiers — many of whom served in multiple combat tours — have been ordered to repay large enlistment bonuses (of $15,000 or more), the Los Angeles Times reported. Worse, if the veterans refuse, the Pentagon uses interest charges, wage garnishments, and tax liens to recoup the money.

“I feel totally betrayed,” Susan Haley, a 26-year veteran and former Army master sergeant who deployed to Afghanistan in 2008, told the Los Angeles Times.

Haley comes from a family of heroes: her husband also served, and her eldest son lost a leg in Afghanistan while serving as a medic. Haley said she sends the Pentagon $650 every month, a quarter of her family’s income, just to pay the $20,500 in bonuses which was given to her improperly, in exchange for her six-year reenlistment. Haley said she fears her family may have to sell their house to repay the bonuses.

“They’ll get their money, but I want those years back,” she declared.

“It’s egregious that veterans who sacrificed their lives for this country are being asked to retroactively pay the price for sloppy government miscalculations,” Mark Lucas, executive director at Concerned Veterans for America (CVA) and a 13-year veteran of the Iowa Army National Guard, told PJ Media. “The California Guard is showing no remorse as it yanks the rug out from under the very heroes it once asked to serve.”

Lucas said that he was not surprised at the bureaucratic mix-up, but that does not make it any better. “This is par for the course from a bureaucratic Pentagon that wastes billions of dollars each year on failed projects and mismanaged funds,” he said. “American veterans and taxpayers alike deserve better from the agency entrusted with over half of our national federal budget each year.”

The enlistment bonuses came at the height of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, as the Pentagon aimed to bulk up forces. Investigations from that time period determined that a lack of oversight allowed widespread fraud and mismanagement by California Guard officials under pressure to meet their enlistment goals. In other words, the government told officials they needed to hire a certain number of soldiers, and they fudged the numbers in order to bribe more veterans to reenlist.

During that time, the Pentagon started offering the most generous incentives in history to retain soldiers. It also began paying the money up front, like signing bonuses in the private sector.

In 2010, a federal investigation found that thousands of bonuses and student loan payments were given to California Guard soldiers who did not qualify for them, or whose applications had paperwork errors, according to the Times.

FBI Director James Comey has again defied the official White House line on policing and the Black Lives Matter movement. The “narrative that policing is biased and violent and unfair” is resulting in “more dead young black men,” Mr. Comey warned in an Oct. 16 address to the International Association of Chiefs of Police in San Diego. That narrative, he added, also “threatens the future of policing.”

Mr. Comey has spoken out before. In October 2015, after he observed that rising violent crime was likely the result of officers backing off proactive policing, President Obama obliquely accused the FBI director of “cherry-pick[ing] data” and “feed[ing] political agendas.”

But as much as Mr. Obama has tried to dismiss the violent crime increase that began after the 2014 fatal police shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., the data are clear.

Last year’s 12% increase in homicides reported to the FBI is the largest one-year homicide increase in nearly half a century. The primary victims have been black. An additional 900 black males were killed last year compared with the previous year, resulting in a homicide victimization rate that is now nine times greater for black males than for white males, according to a Guardian study. The brutality of these killings can be shocking. Over the weekend of Sept. 16, a 15-year-old boy in Chicago was burned alive in a dumpster.

More police are being killed this year too. Gun murders of police officers are up 47% nationally through Oct. 21, compared with the same period the previous year. In Chicago gun assaults on officers are up 100%. In New York City attacks on officers are up 23%. In the last two weeks, four California officers have been deliberately murdered.

Gangbanger John Felix prepared for his lethal attack on two Palm Springs officers on Oct. 8 by setting a trap and ambushing them as they stood outside his door. Two days earlier, parolee Trenton Trevon Lovell shot Los Angeles Sheriff’s Sgt. Steve Owen in the face as he investigated a burglary call. Lovell then stood over Sgt. Owen and fired four additional rounds into his body. A planned assassination of two officers on coffee break in Vallejo, Calif., on Oct. 17 failed only when the assault rifle used in the attack jammed. In Indianapolis on Oct. 13, police headquarters were sprayed with bullets by a car that then fled, echoing a similar attack on Oct. 4 against the same police station.

American citizens are in for a double whammy of speech restrictions, and even of censorship. The Federal Election Commission (FEC), and the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) want to ratchet up the pressures on freedom of speech.

Two independent news blogs have bravely reported developments in this realm when they stand a chance of being “lawfully” obliterated by the government: The Daily Signal, and Accuracy in Media.

On the one hand, the FEC is a government agency that should not even exist. But it was pushed and encouraged by Theodore Roosevelt, a Progressive, and so the initial legislation was introduced and passed by Congress, on the premise that regulating Big Business was the natural thing to do (re the Sherman Anti-Trust Act of 1890 of 1890, and other Federal regulations)

As early as 1905, Theodore Roosevelt asserted the need for campaign finance reform and called for legislation to ban corporate contributions for political purposes. In response, the United States Congress enacted the Tillman Act of 1907, named for its sponsor Senator Benjamin Tillman, banning corporate contributions. Further regulation followed in the Federal Corrupt Practices Act enacted in 1910, and subsequent amendments in 1910 and 1925, the Hatch Act, the Smith-Connally Act of 1943, and the Taft-Hartley Act in 1947. These Acts sought to regulate corporate and union spending in campaigns for federal office, and mandated public disclosure of campaign donors.

But the urge to regulate corporate contributions during political campaigns can be dated to the immediate post-Civil War period.

Although attempts to regulate campaign finance by legislation date back to 1867, the modern era of “campaign finance reform” in the United States begins with the passage of the Federal Election Campaign Act (FECA) of 1971 and, more importantly, 1974 amendments to that Act. The 1971 FECA required candidates to disclose sources of campaign contributions and campaign expenditures. The 1974 Amendments essentially rewrote the Act from top to bottom. The 1974 Amendments placed statutory limits on contributions by individuals for the first time, and created the Federal Election Commission (FEC) as an independent enforcement agency. It provided for broad new disclosure requirements, and limited the amounts that candidates could spend on their campaigns, or that citizens could spend separate from candidate campaigns to promote their political views.

Fred Lucas in The Daily Signal article of October 20th writes:

Books, movies, satellite radio shows, and streaming video about real-life politics aren’t protected by the First Amendment’s guarantee of a free press, some government officials argue.

The Federal Election Commission hasn’t proposed banning books or movies, but in a 3-3 vote last month along party lines, the six-member panel left the regulatory option on the table.

Thanks to e-pal Louis L……

My life has been getting harder and, at times, lonelier, but I want to thank those of you who are brave enough to still associate with me regardless of what I have become. The following is a recap of my current identity by many friends and family members.

I was born white, which makes me not only a racist, but a “privileged” racist.

I am a fiscal and moral conservative, which makes me a fascist.

I am heterosexual, which makes me a homophobe.

I am non-union, which makes me a traitor to the working class and an ally of big business.

I am Jewish, which makes me an infidel.

I’m a patriot who believes in the Constitution and owning a gun, which makes me a radical right wing nut job.

I am older than 66 and retired, which makes me a useless old person.

I read, observe, and reason, so I doubt and vet much that the media, current administration, presidential candidates, and assorted inbox entries tell me, which makes me paranoid and delusional.

I am proud of my heritages and my inclusive American culture, which make me a xenophobe.

I value my safety and that of my family; therefore I appreciate the police and the legal system, which makes me an illiberal obstructionist.

I believe in hard work, fair play, and fair compensation according to each individual’s merits, which makes me a cold-hearted, slimy capitalist.

I acquired with immense gratitude a good education using student loans, Pell Grants, and a merit grant which makes me an underachieving outcast.

I believe in the defense and protection of my homeland with defined borders, which makes me a regressive, anti-social, militaristic hawk.

I believe people who look like women should use “women’s” bathrooms & lockers and men who look like men use “men” ones, which makes me morally and ethically depraved, backward, and worse than Islamic terrorists.

I must be irredeemably deplorable, which makes me a Trump supporter.

Summary: The terrorist-linked Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) claims to be America’s largest civil rights organization for Muslims. But its agenda has more to do with the Islamization of America than with protecting Muslims from civil rights abuses.

Capital Research Center last examined the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) and its aggressive, jihad terrorism-whitewashing Islamists in the August 2005Organization Trends. CAIR statements and actions in recent years show that this organization, which sprang out of the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas, has in no way changed its radical spots—a fact that ought to call into question its continuing respectability in media and politics.

The basics

Information about CAIR’s revenue sources is surprisingly difficult to come by. IRS filings reveal donations to CAIR by Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors ($30,000 since 2008), Silicon Valley Community Foundation ($90,000 since 2008), and Tides Foundation ($5,000 since 2002). CAIR is actually registered as CAIR Foundation Inc., a public charity recognized under section 501(c)(3) of the tax code. That entity reported a budget of $2,632,410 in 2014 and gross receipts of $2,355,032. It also claims to have had 28 employees in 2014 and 40 volunteers. Many of CAIR’s state and local chapters are separately incorporated as nonprofits.

CAIR was founded in 1994 by Nihad Awad, Omar Ahmad, and Rafeeq Jaber. The three men were linked to the Islamic Association for Palestine (IAP), which was established by senior Hamas operative Mousa Abu Marzook and created to serve as Hamas’ public relations and recruitment arm in the United States. CAIR opened an office in Washington, D.C., by using a $5,000 grant from the Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development (HLF), a charity that the Bush administration closed down in 2001 for collecting money “to support the Hamas terror organization.”

CAIR’s ties to terrorists are recognized on Capitol Hill. Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) has said, “CAIR is unusual in its extreme rhetoric and its associations with groups that are suspect.” Before leaving Congress in 2013, Rep. Sue Myrick (R-N.C.) said, “Groups like CAIR have a proven record of senior officials being indicted and either imprisoned or deported from the United States.”

Ghassan Elashi, a co-founder of Texas CAIR, was convicted in 2005 of terrorism-related offenses and sentenced to almost seven years imprisonment. CAIR civil rights director Randall Todd Royer was given 20 years for federal weapons and explosives convictions in 2004. Bassem Khafagi, a community affairs director at CAIR, was convicted in 2003 on bank and visa fraud charges and shipped back to Egypt. Rabih Haddad, a fundraiser for CAIR’s chapter in Ann Arbor, Mich., was detained in 2001 for overstaying his visa. Authorities found a firearm and considerable ammunition in his home. He served 19 months in prison and was then deported to Lebanon in 2003. CAIR board member Abdurahman Alamoudi was sentenced to 23 years imprisonment for directing at least $1 million to al-Qaeda. (See Foundation Watch, December 2015.)

“Contending that American Muslims are the victims of wholesale repression, CAIR has provided sensitivity training to police departments across the United States, instructing law officers in the art of dealing with Muslims respectfully,” according to DiscoverTheNetworks. The estate of 9/11 victim John O’Neill Sr., a senior FBI counter-terrorism agent, filed a lawsuit claiming that CAIR’s goal “is to create as much self-doubt, hesitation, fear of name-calling, and litigation within police department and intelligence agencies as possible so as to render such authorities ineffective in pursuing international and domestic terrorist entities.”

“By its Second Amendment, Americans have ensured that they will never be short of the means to defend their freedom from tyrants, foreign invaders, terrorists or criminals.Fanciful, you think, no threat to democracy could possibly arise on our quiet, law-abiding shores. Quite possibly so — and let us hope it is. Then again, a Jewish shopkeeper in 1930 Berlin probably shared the same opinion.”

Much of last week was dominated by charge and counter-charge concerning deals allegedly struck to legalise a seven-shot shotgun, the weapon’s opponents seeing it as a tool of mayhem and terror. Be that as it may, a gun serves the purpose of the person who holds it, good or bad.
Many surprises await the traveller in the US of A. However, no matter how much one expects to be dazzled amazed or stunned, no catalyst for instant culture shock can compete with the variety of guns and ammo offered for sale. Openly, even in some supermarkets. I still have a supermarket flyer, kept as a souvenir, which advertises a selection of rifles and pistols with the appropriate ammo for all.

It took me almost a week to stop looking for concealed guns everywhere, wondering who might be packing an equalizer. My fearful imagination battled thoughts that I might at any moment be caught up in the homicidal rampage of a mad gunman. Eventually I started to relax. And think. And talk to the armed citizens our foreign correspondents unvaryingly depict in their dispatches as symptoms of US society’s collective insanity. Casting aside preconceptions was a good start because, gradually, I came to understand that Americans view their right to bear arms in a somewhat different context than we Australians think they do. However, there are also some intriguing similarities, which, to me, signify a certain degree of an emotional affinity and conceptual confluence on the subject of gun control.

But first, just for some context, let me recall a bus trip I took with my wife in 1981 from Melbourne to Uluru (then still known as Ayers Rock). Ah, memories of a nose caked with red dust and those jarring, corrugated roads come flooding back! Likewise the spectacle of my fellow, full-to-burst passengers jiggling like a mob of St.Vitus Dance patients as they waited in line at the coyly named “comfort stops” along the way. One overnight stop was Coober Pedy, an unruly opal town where life has gone underground to escape the withering heat. We went to a supermarket, mostly because it was the only air-conditioned sanctuary that wasn’t a pub or a church. It was in that supermarket where an astonishing spectacle stopped me in my tracks.

Neatly stacked on easy-to-reach shelves, row upon row of red gelignite sticks and spools of fuse by the metre. It was a revelation — high explosives for sale just down the aisle from the lettuce and cheese. More than that, explosives in an Australian supermarket were treated as a fact of life. Nobody was shocked, surprised or outraged. Me neither, when I thought about it.

Now, let’s get back to Americans’ alleged “fascination” with guns, which isn’t the right word at all. Like Coober Pedy miners and their off-the-shelf high explosives, the Americans with whom I spoke accepted guns as a fact of life. Underpinning this was the conviction that the Second Amendment’s guarantee of the right to bear arms isn’t something bizarre, outlandish or provocative. Rather — and this is what Australians find hard to grasp — many felt it was a civic responsibility. When I heard that, I asked what kind of responsibility? To kill anyone you do not like? The response was hearty, indulgent laughter. Gently, I was advised to read the Second Amendment, which I did. Pasted it below, please do read it.

second amend

I had always sided with those who advocated a complete ban on weapons. I also accepted as an axiom that the gun ownership means crime, injury and the deaths of innocents. Every time a mass shooting occurred, whether here or abroad, I was distressed, thinking I or someone I love could have been at the wrong place at the wrong time. The closest I have come to being a victim was at the time of the Hoddle Street massacre. I was on my way to work, close to the stretch of busy Melbourne inner-city road that Julian Knight had selected as his killing ground. I heard the news and was shocked. But amidst my thoughts and concern for Knight’s victims, in the back of my mind were the words of the Second Amendment.

I thought, ‘Hang on, the Second Amendment says nothing of the right to shoot innocents or to rob banks — nothing of the sort.’ All it says is that Mr. and Mrs. American Citizen have the right to form militias and bear arms to protect both their democracy and freedom. The Second Amendment also implies that the maintenance of collective and individual freedom is the right and responsibility of the citizenry, and it likewise countenances the possibility that recourse to arms might be required to achieve as much. Those who misuse the right enshrined in the Second Amendment are criminals and the law takes care of them — or rather, should take care of them. This simple chain of reasoning changed the way I thought and felt about guns in private citizens’ hands. Who knows, had their victims had guns and thus were able to defend themselves, Julian Knight and Martin Bryant might not have slaughtered so many. Who knows how many victims of law-breakers and killers might still be alive.