RUTHFULLY YOURS

Everything has changed, save the commentariat’s way of thinking. That’s why, when the Brexit vote confounded the chattering classes and Pauline Hanson rose again, the reaction was one of outraged bafflement. Trump will soon increase that dyspepsia by an order of magnitude.
Last Wednesday, President Obama said “the world has never been less violent…than it is today.” He didn’t explain his precise measure but asked us to “think about” the fact that “it has been decades since a war between major powers.” I am underwhelmed by this presidential insight. In fact, it is a disturbing line of argument. Let me extend it to show how disturbing it is.

The oppression and beheadings of Christians and Yazidis in Syria by ISIS is a mere blip when put against the Holocaust. The execution of five police officers in Dallas and three in Baton Rouge is not so violent when put against the 72 officers who lost their lives on 9/11. Obviously one could go on. For example, presumably, nothing could possibly happen again in Japan to equal Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Ipso facto, get real about the Tohoku earthquake and tsunami of 2011.

War, murder, enslavement and mayhem in the Middle East and North Africa; one barbaric Islamic terrorist atrocity after another throughout the world, including in the United States; millions of Muslim refugees swamping Europe — none of it compares with a world war. On that scale, Obama is right. It is when being right is breathtakingly vacuous.

The current president of the United States lives in his own relativistic world. Cops kill blacks; it’s a racially-driven epidemic; even though the data shows there is no racial bias at work.[i] Islamic violence, on the other hand, must be left unnamed and minimized by being put on a cock-eyed historical scale. The man has shown yet again why he is monumentally unfit to be president; and, just think, he might be followed by “what difference does it make” Hillary Clinton. And some people are concerned about Donald Trump. There has never been an easier act to follow than Obama.

I found it interesting to compare the initial take of Fox News and CNN to Trump’s speech at the Republican Convention. “Inspirational and uplifting” versus “dark”. “Dark”, by the way, was reiterated by Clinton. I understand other US news outlets also used the description “dark”, for example, NBC. Did Clinton simply copy the media’s language or was it more collegial?

With the Democratic Party set to officially anoint Hillary Clinton as their presidential candidate during the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia this week, and with accusations of Republican candidate Donald Trump’s supposed close associations with Russia, it is worth noting that Clinton has her Russia issues as well.

In March 2009 (the early days of Clinton’s tenure as secretary of State), in Clinton’s first meeting with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, she presented him with a “reset” button said to be emblematic of the Obama administration’s new openness to Russia after the Bush administration.

Sadly, for Clinton, the word printed on the “reset” button was “peregruzka” [“overcharged”] rather than “perezagruzka” [“reset”].

That is not the only occasion that Clinton has got “lost in translation” with Russia.

Just yesterday the Clinton campaign blamed Russia for the hack on damaging internal DNC emails released by WikiLeaks this past Friday that revealed a cozy relationship between the DNC and Clinton during the Democratic primaries.

So it is a bit embarrassing that two years ago today, Clinton bragged in an interview with NPR that the Russia “reset” worked:

And yet even the pro-Hillary shills at the Washington Post have admitted that Clinton’s Russia “reset failed.

On the eve of the Democratic National Convention, thousands of Bernie supporters marched in the streets of Philly, chanting, beating drums, and holding anti-Hillary signs. The protesters chanted “Hey-hey, ho-ho, HRC has got to go” and “Lock her up.” They held signs that read “Hillary for Prison” or called for her indictment.

Via the Wall Street Journal:

Erica Albanese, who traveled from Oregon, wore a “Hillary for Prison” shirt as she wandered around the park after the four mile march.

She said that Mrs. Clinton was guilty of “perjury” adding: “She lied about her documents and her emails.”

Dylan Melnik, 24, from Boston carried a sign in the march that said “Hillary 4 Prison 2016.”

“He basically inferred under any other circumstances she might be indicted, but because she’s Hillary, she won’t be indicted,” Mr. Melnik said about Mr. Comey’s press conference.

Those same sentiments were on display last week at the Republican National Convention, where delegates also chanted “Lock her up!” and vendors hawked buttons, t-shirts and bumper stickers that said “Hillary for Prison” and “Vote no to Monica’s ex-boyfriend’s wife in 2016,” among other things. Democrats were scandalized.

“When I see this, you know, ‘Crooked Hillary,’ or I see the ‘Lock her up,’ it’s just ridiculous. It is ridiculous,” Clinton’s running mate Tim Kaine said in a preview of an interview on 60 Minutes.

MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow also expressed her disapproval of the notion that Hillary Clinton should go to jail. Last week, she denounced offensive signs that said “Hillary Clinton for prison,” and complained that “we’ve seen calls from the stage that she ought to be in stripes, that she ought to be locked up.”

She even offered a “trigger warning” to viewers before showing them a clip of the anti-Hillary buttons vendors were selling, because the pins might have made them “uncomfortable.” The buttons included the admittedly crass “Clinton KFC Special: 2 fat thighs, 2 small breasts, left wing.”

“You may not want to look at this stuff,” Maddow warned viewers.

It’s too bad Maddow wasn’t on the air Sunday morning, because terrible things were being chanted about Hillary Clinton on MSNBC at that time and no one was there to warn viewers that it might make them uncomfortable.

Breitbart has reported that Clinton’s VP pick Tim Kaine is among the top anti-Israel Senators. He is the top recipient of PAC funds from George Soros’ anti-Israel group, J-street. He distinguished himself as one of 8 senators to walk out on Benjamin Netanyahu’s historic speech to a joint session of Congress warning against the so-called Iran deal.

Kaine’s record on the Islamic threat here in America is far, far worse than that.

In exchange for campaign contributions, he appointed a radical jihadi to the Virginia Immigration Commission. Esam Omeish runs a group described by federal prosecutors in a 2008 court filing “as the overt arm of the Muslim Brotherhood in America.” Omeish is the VP of a radical mosque which had the Al-Qaeda operative Anwar Al-Awlaki as its imam and two of the 9/11 hijackers and Nidal Hasan, the perpetrator of the Fort Hood shooting, in the congregation. Omeish is still a board member, even as he serves on the Virginia Immigration Commission.

Omeish was also chairman of the board of a New Jersey mosque with terrorist ties, including an imam that the Department of Homeland Security wants to deport for having links to Hamas. As if that weren’t enough, Omeish pledged in a video to help Palestinians who understand “the jihad way is the way to liberate your land.”

When a state delegate wrote a letter to then-Governor Kaine warning him that the MAS has “questionable origins,” a Kaine spokesperson said the charge was bigotry.

Kaine also has close ties with Jamal Barzinji, who the Global Muslim Brotherhood Watch describes as a “founding father of the U.S. Muslim Brotherhood.”

He first came on to the FBI’s radar in 1987-1988 when an informant inside the Brotherhood identified Barzinji and his associated groups as being part of a network of Brotherhood fronts to “institute the Islamic Revolution in the United States.”

The source said Barzinji and his colleagues were “organizing political support which involves influencing both public opinion in the United States as well as the United States Government” using “political action front groups with no traceable ties.”

(snip) Barzinji was nearly prosecuted but the Obama Justice Department dropped plans for indictment.

Barzinji played a major role in nearly every Brotherhood front in the U.S. and was vice president of the International Institute of Islamic Thought (IIIT), which came under terrorism investigation also.

What is truly chilling about Kaine’s association with known terrorists, is that the indictment of Al-Arian, says that the jihadist strategy was to “seek to obtain support from influential individuals, in the United States under the guise of promoting and protecting Arab rights.”

The quotes about Brotherhood operative Barzinji’s aspirations to use civil rights advocacy as a means to influence politicians are especially relevant when you consider that video from the event honoring Barzinji shows Kaine saying that it was his fourth time at the annual dinner and thanked his “friends” that organized it for helping him in his campaign for lieutenant-governor and governor and asked them to help his Senate campaign.

Like Hillary, Tim Kaine’s affection for jihadists is a quid pro quo: he gives them cover and appointments to positions of power, they give him money.

(snip) The Barzinji-tied New Dominion PAC donated $43,050 to Kaine’s gubernatorial campaign …

The PAC has very strong ties to the Democratic Party in Virginia, with … almost $257,000 in donations. This likely explains why Barzinji’s grandson served in Governor McAuliffe’s administration and then became the Obama Administration’s liaison to the Muslim-American community.

The Middle East Forum’s Islamist Money in Politics database shows another $4,300 donated to Kaine’s Senate campaign in 2011-2012 by officials from U.S. Muslim Brotherhood entities …. Another $3,500 came from … Barzinji’s IIIT organization.

In the brave new world of higher education, one finds that a Senior Diversity & Inclusion Specialist is needed for Princeton University in New Jersey.

Thus,

Princeton University’s Office of Human Resources (HR) seeks to fill a newly created position, the Diversity and Inclusion (D&I) Specialist (Specialist) who will foster relationships and work collaboratively with a wide array of campus partners to advance the recommendations of the Trustee Ad Hoc Committee on Diversity and current departmental and institutional goals.

http://www.careerbuilder.com/job/J3G4HZ6MZNW7TG4GYQT

Consequently, “this is an exceptional opportunity to work with employees and contribute to Princeton University’s current diversity, inclusion, and equity campus initiatives.”

Thus the job of the Specialist will be “as a facilitator who demonstrates empathy when working with individuals and groups and excels at reading their audience, thinking on one’s feet, and creatively adapting to meet the needs of a diverse audience.”

Did anyone from Princeton proofread? The word “facilitator” is a singular noun and simply cannot use “their” which is a plural pronoun.

But is that because when “thinking on one’s feet,” it is unclear if one is upside down or right side up?

In order to achieve the stated goals, “[t]he Specialist must be adept at working strategically and proactively in a dynamic, team-oriented work environment; excelling at communication skills with the ability to express ideas clearly and concisely; managing difficult conversations between individuals in both meeting and educational contexts with strong political acumen and aptitude; working both collaboratively and independently, depending on the need; taking initiative, and problem solving with good judgment about when to seek direction; managing multiple projects and competing priorities simultaneously while balancing the need for quality and precision with meeting deadlines.”

Is the previous paragraph the quintessential example of concise writing?

And, clearly, the “Essential Qualifications” include:
-Demonstrated knowledge of D & I topics, such as: identity (i.e., race, ethnicity, nationality, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, class, disability, faith, and age), intersectionality, privilege and power, unconscious bias, microagressions, improving climate, and intergroup and intragroup dynamics and dialogue.

Of course, climate has everything to do with expressing empathy to one’s fellow students. Golly, did I express a micro aggression by using the term “fellow?”

In 2008 we had John McCain, who was too honorable to criticize Barack Hussein Obama. In 2012 we had Mitt Romney who again was too honorable to attack our first black President. Now we have Ted
Cruz who is too honorable to honor his pledge of party unity, too honorable to protect our Supreme Court from Hillary’s potential nominees, and too honorable to help us win. We have all the Libertarians, so honorable they have a shot at throwing the election to Hillary.

We have a whole list of conservative pundits and websites, who could swallow the GOP betraying all their 2012 pledges, doubling our national debt and increasing entitlements, without a word about bolting the party, but Trump’s crude, honest talk is too much for their honor to bear?

We have Paul Ryan who is so honorable he has to rush to the microphones and join the media lynch mob criticizing Trump as racist, while the Dems’ race-baiting over 8 years has gotten a pass. Ryan’s priority is to protect his own, oh so honorable brand, as a compassionate conservative, superior to the voters as well as Trump.

There is nothing honorable about choosing to lose.

There is nothing honorable about betraying your voters, who picked Trump because all those honorable leaders have been lying to us for years. They pretend to support enforcing our immigration laws when they have no intention of doing so. They pretend to be serious about the jihadi threat, while letting millions of sharia-supporting Muslims into our country. They pretend to be fixing things in the Middle East, while giving the Gulf sheikdoms free rein to turn American mosques into jihadi propaganda centers. They pretend to be serious about jobs, while refusing to confront the Chinese on currency manipulation. They pretend to love America, but not enough to protect it from the PC onslaught on our constitutional rights.

Bill Clinton took Democrats to the political middle. He met with Republicans to pass welfare-to-work laws and put more police on the streets. Barack Obama steered the party leftward with “change we can believe in.” He promised to end long-running wars, deliver an economic recovery, offer medical coverage to the uninsured and unify an increasingly diverse nation.

Hillary Clinton will claim the Democratic nomination this week in Philadelphia, but the party is no longer defined by its standard-bearer. The energy rests instead with a rising generation of Democrats excited to use activist government to protect them in anxious economic times.

Older Democrats and minority voters provided a “firewall” that allowed Mrs. Clinton to defeat her rival in the primaries, Sen. Bernie Sanders. Democrats who call themselves “somewhat liberal” went for Hillary by 13 percentage points, according to exit poll data analyzed by Public Opinion Strategies. “Moderates” backed her by 23 percentage points. But among the quarter of Democrats who see themselves as “very liberal,” she ran even with the socialist.

Bernie Sanders and his activist supporters have moved Mrs. Clinton and the party’s platform to the left. The result is that the Democrats have taken on an identity that comes from a new base: voters under 40 who have no problem with Mr. Sanders’s socialist vision. A 2015 study by the Pew Research Center found that 51% of millennials “identify as Democrats or lean Democratic,” compared with only 35% for Republicans. Two-fifths of millennials are people of color and immigrants.

This is not your father’s—or even your older sister’s—Democratic Party. It is far more left-leaning than under Bill Clinton or President Obama.

Almost 60% of Democratic voters agree that “socialism has a positive” impact on society, according to a February poll by OnMessage Inc. and the American Action Network. In Iowa 43% of Democrats said in January that they would use the word “socialist” to describe themselves, a survey by the Des Moines Register and Bloomberg Politics found.

Forty-seven percent of Democrats told Gallup last year that they are both “socially liberal and economically moderate/liberal”—the highest level in the poll’s history. In 2001 only 30% of Democrats described themselves that way. Between 2000 and 2015 the percentage of “Democratic and Democratic-leaning registered voters” who consider themselves liberal has gone up to 42% from 27%, according to a Pew study in February.

Mrs. Clinton has been running to the front of this liberal parade. This month she wrapped her arms around one of Mr. Sanders’s biggest causes by backing tuition-free college at in-state public universities for families making under $125,000 a year.

She broke with Mr. Obama by calling for repeal of the so-called Cadillac tax on health-insurance plans, a priority for labor unions. She gave a sop to the teachers unions by backtracking on her decades-old support for charter schools. It is clear that in this new liberal order of Democratic politics, the unions will be the enforcers. CONTINUE AT SITE

Dr. Dreisbach is the director of the Desert Hematology Oncology Medical Group at the Eisenhower Medical Center in Rancho Mirage, Calif.

I am an oncologist/hematologist who has been practicing in California, primarily at Eisenhower Medical Center in Rancho Mirage, for 39 years. It has been my privilege to have treated and cared for more than 16,000 patients with cancer or blood diseases and to have provided pain relief and comfort for the dying.

I am also one of six concerned physicians who, along with the American Academy of Medical Ethics, have sued in a California Superior Court to try to block as unconstitutional the state’s Physician Assisted Suicide law, which went into effect on June 9. More recently, a group of doctors and health-care professionals in Vermont joined a lawsuit filed July 19 to try to block the way that state’s 2013 assisted suicide law is being interpreted and misapplied.

Signed by Gov. Jerry Brown and voted against by every elected Republican member of the state legislature, California’s radical measure is part of an organized, nationwide, social-engineering campaign, heavily funded by big donors such as the leftist George Soros.

Our state’s physician-assisted suicide law instantly removes penal-code protections from a vulnerable segment of the population deemed “terminally ill.” The law allows anyone labeled as terminally ill to request assisted suicide—but it also accepts heirs and the owners of caregiving facilities to formally witness such requests, even though the probate code does not even accept “interested” parties as witnesses to a will.

The law does not require an attending physician to refer the patient for psychological assessment. It thus does not allow for screening for possible coercion, or for underlying mental conditions that could be behind the suicide request—unless the patient has signs of mental problems, which may not be visible to a suicide-specialist doctor they may not even know. In these and other ways, the law devastates elder-abuse law and mental-health legal protections, and it deprives those labeled as terminally ill of equal-protection rights that all other Americans enjoy.

All of us in the practice of cancer care have seen patients, diagnosed with so-called terminal illness, who have experienced a marvelous remission of disease. Very little is absolute—except death itself.

On the day that physician-assisted suicide was legalized, my hospital and the other local hospitals announced that they were opting out and would not facilitate the killing of any patients. Some local hospices informed me that they would continue to give palliative care, instead of helping patients kill themselves.

My witty friend Arthur P. calls the ticket Unable and Kaine….rsk

The Democrats are out selling Tim Kaine as a solid citizen, experienced politician, and a great choice for vice president on the Hillary Clinton ticket — someone who could step in quickly as president if needed. The traditional pro-Israel community, led by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, are undoubtedly preparing to signal their comfort with him as a Clinton running mate, much as they did with the supposedly pro-Israel Barack Obama, twice. Kaine has voted in favor of foreign aid; he has traveled to Israel; he voted in favor of funding some weapons systems for Israel; he has raised a lot of money from liberal Jews (running for governor, senator, and head of the Democratic National Committee). Therefore, he must be a great supporter of the U.S.-Israel relationship. So great in fact, that he was happy to take money from the J Street political action committee and accept its endorsement when he ran for Senate. AIPAC, J Street, Kaine, all one big happy family in the pro-Israel club.

Of course, on the Iran nuclear deal, the single most important foreign policy decision since the vote on the Iraq war in 2002, Kaine was not only wrong, but extraordinarily disrespectful to Israel’s prime minister. He chose to boycott Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s speech before a joint session of Congress on the issue in early 2015, saying that he thought Netanyahu’s aim was mainly to help himself with his own domestic politics in the Israeli elections, held two weeks later.

“There is no reason to schedule this speech [on March 3] before Israeli voters go to the polls on March 17 and choose their own leadership,” Kaine said in a statement, after describing how he’d worked to delay the event. “I am disappointed that, as of now, the speech has not been postponed. For this reason, I will not attend the speech.”

Let us assume for a moment that Netanyahu had two goals in mind for his speech — to make the case for healthy skepticism and opposition within Congress toward the Iran nuclear deal, which was near completion at the time, and help himself politically. This must have come as a shock to Kaine. Imagine a leader concerned both about the security of his country and his own political future. Good thing such considerations never entered the mind of any American president. Certainly Obama must never have allowed domestic political considerations to influence his policymaking or the timing of his decisions. The attempt to bury the Benghazi attack on September 11, 2012, presenting it as an event caused by some anti-Muslim message by some obscure American filmmaker was quickly adopted by all the administration spinners — from Susan Rice to then-Secretary of State Clinton. This spin was necessary for Obama to continue running for re-election on the campaign theme he had developed — the fact that he killed Osama bin Laden and saved General Motors. Blaming the filmmaker was of course complete and total nonsense.

Debbie Wasserman Schultz will step down as chairwoman of the Democratic National Committee at the conclusion of this week’s convention, the Florida congresswoman said Sunday in a statement.

The announcement follows the growing controversy over the release of party emails that at times depicted staffers favoring Hillary Clinton over Bernie Sanders during the primary campaign.

Citing the importance of electing Clinton and her commitment to fulfilling her responsibilities to her Florida House district, Wasserman Schultz said in her statement that “going forward, the best way for me to accomplish those goals is to step down as Party Chair at the end of this convention.”

However, despite reports of an increasingly limited role at the convention, she added: “As Party Chair, this week I will open and close the Convention and I will address our delegates about the stakes involved in this election not only for Democrats, but for all Americans.”

However, former party spokeswoman Maria Cardona predicted on CNN that Wasserman Schultz’s statement is a beginning point for negotiations that could further minimize the Florida congresswoman’s role this week. Democrats want to avoid a chaotic scene at the convention, and some predict the chairwoman could be loudly booed by Sanders supporters, who were already marching through the streets of Philadelphia.Rep. Marcia Fudge, D-Ohio, will preside over the four-day convention, and Democratic National Committee communications director Luis Miranda announced that party vice chair Donna Brazile will serve as interim head of the DNC through the election.

Sanders, who has called for Wasserman Schultz’s resignation, applauded her decision to step down.

“Debbie Wasserman Schultz has made the right decision for the future of the Democratic Party,” the Vermont senator said in a statement. “While she deserves thanks for her years of service, the party now needs new leadership that will open the doors of the party and welcome in working people and young people.”