RUTHFULLY YOURS

Friday’s jobs report from the Labor Department brought the latest reminder that the U.S. economy isn’t creating opportunities like it used to. A separate report released this week goes a long way toward explaining why.

On Wednesday Wayne Crews of the Competitive Enterprise Institute rolled out his annual report card on federal regulation, “Ten Thousand Commandments.” Beltway rules are now imposing $1.9 trillion of annual costs on the U.S. economy. That’s the same level as last year, but when combined with on-the-books federal spending, which is $3.9 trillion, the feds are taking a record-setting bite out of private commerce and wealth.

The regulatory burden is staggering for the economy and for all who live and work within it. The annual tab for complying with directives from Washington is now larger than the entire economy of Russia. The cost of federal red tape amounts to nearly $15,000 per U.S. household each year.

And the bureaucratic onslaught will continue, even as we enter the final months of the last year of President Obama’s second term. Mr. Crews reports that regulators spanning 60 federal departments, agencies and commissions have nearly 3,300 regulations still in the pipeline and waiting to be imposed on an unsuspecting public.

Is it any wonder that the government reported modest job growth in April and a shrinking labor force? Or that the U.S. economy wheezed its way to 0.5% growth in the first quarter?

Mr. Crews’s data also show that the regulatory burden falls particularly hard on small firms, which suffer higher compliance costs per employee than larger competitors. This may explain why readings of small-business hiring look even worse than for the economy as a whole.

The Obama Administration was the first in American history to generate more than 80,000 pages of new and proposed rules in the Federal Register in a single year. CONTINUE AT SITE

Obama’s plan to accelerate vetting of Syrian “refugees” for U.S. entry.

President Obama is willing to gamble with the lives of American citizens. He is intent on emptying Guantanamo of as many of the detainees as possible, even as some of the released jihadists have returned to the battlefield to fight against our soldiers. Now the Obama administration is reportedly planning to accelerate the screening process for Syrians claiming refugee status, so that they can be rapidly resettled in communities across the United States.

The Washington Free Beacon has reported that, according to its sources, “The Obama administration has committed to bring at least 10,000 Syrian refugees onto American soil in fiscal year 2016 by accelerating security screening procedures from 18-24 months to around three months.”

The current resettlement vetting process for self-proclaimed refugees begins with an initial screening by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). The applications of some who make it through this preliminary UN screen are referred to United States authorities for further consideration and possible resettlement. UNCHR’s role in the front end of the vetting process should be reason enough for alarm.

The United Nations has called for more open borders to accommodate the millions of “refugees” and other migrants whom have left the Middle East and North Africa. To this end, UNCHR is said to be looking for alternative avenues to admit Syrian refugees that are faster than the current refugee “resettlement” vetting process. UN High Commissioner for Refugees Filippo Grandi suggested a number of such alternatives last March, at a high-level meeting held in Geneva to discuss “global responsibility sharing through pathways for admission of Syrian refugees.”

Among the alternative “pathways” listed by the UNCHR High Commissioner for Refugees were “labour mobility schemes, student visa and scholarships, as well as visa for medical reasons.” He added, “Resettlement needs vastly outstrip the places that have been made available so far… But humanitarian and student visa, job permits and family reunification would represent safe avenues of admission for many other refugees as well.”

Mickey Fearn, the National Park Service Deputy Director for Communications and Community Assistance, made headlines when he claimed that black people don’t visit national parks because they associate them with slaves being lynched by their masters.

Yellowstone, the first national park, was created in 1872 in Wyoming. Slavery was over by then and no one had ever been lynching slaves around Old Faithful anyway. But false claims of racism die very hard.

Now Alcee Hastings, an impeached judge, and a coalition of minority groups is demanding increased “inclusiveness” at national parks. High on their list is the claim that, “African-Americans have felt unwelcome and even fearful in federal parklands during our nation’s history because of the horrors of lynching.” What do national parks have to do with lynchings? Many national parks have trees. People were hung from trees. It’s racial guilt by arboreal association. Trees are racist down to their roots.

The origin of the bizarre racist lynching theory of national parks appears to be Carolyn Finney. Finney was an actress noted for, apparently, little more than an appearance in The Nutt House. Then she became a cause célèbre for race activists when she was denied tenure by Berkeley’s Department of Environmental Science, Policy, and Management because her work didn’t meet academic standards.

Her supporters blamed racism, rather than her academic shortcomings, and protested vocally.

These days she’s a diversity advisor to the U.S. National Parks Advisory Board. What wasn’t good enough for UC Berkeley is good enough for national parks. She is also the author of Black Faces, White Spaces. In it she claims that “oppression and violence against black people in forests and other green spaces can translate into contemporary understandings that constrain African-American environmental understandings.”

Finney cites the work of Joy DeGruy Leary who invented a Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome that she claims black people suffer from. Affected by PTSS, black people experience “fear and mistrust of forests and other green spaces.” According to Finney, the tree is a racist symbol to black people.

“Black people also wanted to go out in the woods and eat apples from the trees,” Finney explains.” But black people were lynched on the trees. The tree became a big symbol.” Black people are triggered by trees and suffer Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome flashbacks. You can’t expect them to go to on a hike.

What shall we do about the racist trees? Finney is front and center at the new “inclusion” initiative, “You’re sitting here making up a rule and assuming that everybody is going to feel comfortable to come to the woods and go on a hike,” she whined. “Maybe they’re not interested in doing that, that’s not how they like to come to the woods.”

A few weeks ago, the bloviator-in-chief moved his lips in another deathless lumbada of badda — another nugget of Obamaesque [un]truthiness.

His words: “An attack on islam is an attack on all faiths.” Outside a Baltimore mosque, he added, “When any religious group is targeted, we all have a responsibility to speak up.”

That goes double for you, too, Mr. President. And you have the means, and the daily morning update briefings, to be hyperaware of the true extent of threats against “religious groups.” And those under threat are far and away not Muslims.

But equal faiths is simply not so, Mr. O.

Few religions chattelize all women, sanction the taking of all and any female child or adult as fit booty after unprovoked aggressions aimed at wresting land and money and valuables from innocent civilians doing no one any harm. No Protestant sect advises the mutilation of female genitalia, the forced donning of impenetrable, crippling body bags to ensure that men cannot gaze on a workaday female going about her daily rounds. Judaism has no brief with forced conversions under pain of death or the payment of vast sums of Jizzya to ‘apologize’ for not converting. Judaism frowns on conversions altogether, as those wishing to convert for a variety of reasons soon learn.

The Hindu does not rampage ceaselessly over lands they ‘once inhabited’ — as in Andalusia, the Muslim coinage for Spain, 700 years ago. Baha’I have no brief with enforcing a specialized hell on earth called “sharia” that essentially nullifies the Constitution or any national democratic document that asserts primacy over a nation’s laws and people.

In an extensive, groundbreaking study of hundreds of stateside mosques undertaken in the ‘90s by leading anti-terror national security expert Steven Emerson, executive director of the Investigative Project on Terrorism, the vast majority of U.S. mosques feature violent and unmitigated anti-infidel literature, problematic clerics advocating unholy screeds and actions, and in the past and to this day harbor often-scabrous terrorists in training or worse.

During the first days in May, I attended a three-day conference held in the Roosevelt Hotel in NYC, sponsored by CitizenGo!, that dedicated a full day to hourly panels and discussion of ISIS and related Islamist groups’ torture, beheading, ravaging of property, abduction of women, selling captured Christian, Yazidi, and minority women into actual slavery, and of course, personal witness of their men being beheaded, shot or otherwise tortured to death.

Conference days on which there were no Christian survivor panels showed unwatchable full-length documentaries and trailers gotten through hidden cameras inside ISIS tents as they jubilantly discussed trading slaves and practicing sexual abuse on Yazidi women and children. These films show the ravages of Shia, Sunni, or Syrian Alewite massacres of mostly Christians, or other Muslims. Witness after witness spoke of being raped, even tiny girls. Men who had escaped, including priests and prelates of various Christian denominations, called on the world, and in particular President Obama, to come to their aid. Though there are some four thousand Jews in Iran, ostensibly a “protected minority” useful for the Shia regime of the mullahcracy, there are no longer any Jewish populations of any numbers in any Middle Eastern — that is, Muslim — state.

“If you really want to protect Americans from ISIS, you secure the southern border. It’s that simple.” — Rep. Duncan Hunter.

The Department of Homeland Security denied Hunter’s claims, called them “categorically false” and added that “no credible intelligence to suggest terrorist organizations are actively plotting to cross the southwest border.” Days later, however, it was confirmed that “4 ISIS Terrorists” were arrested crossing the border into Texas.

Under Obama’s presidency alone, 2.5 million illegals have crossed the border. And those are just the ones we know about. How many of these are ISIS operatives, sympathizers or facilitators?

Securing the U.S.-Mexico border — with an electronic fence, which has worked so effectively in Israel — is more urgent than we think.

Of all the reasons a majority of Americans support the plan of businessman and U.S. presidential candidate Donald Trump to “build a wall” along the U.S.-Mexico border, perhaps the most critical is to avoid letting terrorists into the country. Drugs enter, the victims of traffickers enter, but the most imminent danger comes from operatives of the Islamic State (ISIS) and like-minded groups that are trying to use this porous border as a way to smuggle weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) into the United States and launch terror attacks that could make 9/11 seem like a morning in May.

Just last week, “One of the American men accused in Minnesota of trying to join the Islamic State group wanted to open up routes from Syria to the U.S. through Mexico… Guled Ali Omar told the ISIS members about the route so that it could be used to send members to America to carry out terrorist attacks, prosecutors alleged in a document.”

While I am an admirer of his work, Ross Douthat’s New York Times post-mortem on the candidacy of Ted Cruz is a caricature of “True Conservatism,” the demise of which he undertakes to explain.

Devoid of any context except reaction to the futilities of George W. Bush’s “compassionate conservatism,” Ross builds his straw man:

Thus True Conservatism’s determination to avoid both anything that savored of big government and anything that smacked of compromise. Where Bush had been softhearted, True Conservatism would be sternly Ayn Randian; where Bush had been free-spending, True Conservatism would be austere; where Bush had taken working-class Americans off the tax rolls, True Conservatism would put them back on — for their own good. And above all, where Bush had sometimes reached for the center, True Conservatism would stand on principle, fight hard, and win.

This is warped because it fails to tell even half the story.

President Bush’s conservative heresies had not merely “reached for the center” or, as Ross elsewhere puts it, “led the Republican Party into a ditch.” They had paved the way for President Obama and the radical Left to lead the country into a bottomless pit. The national debt that Bush and the Republican Congress would double to $10 trillion, Obama would double again, to $20 trillion. The unsustainable entitlements that Bush added to, Obama would double-down on — including with Obamacare, which (unlike Bush’s well-meaning prescription entitlement) is about government control, not government compassion. The Bush bailouts became Obama mega-bailouts cum stimulus. The push for “comprehensive immigration reform” became the systematic non-enforcement of the immigration laws, the breakdown of border security, and a Justice Department crackdown on states that tried to affirm the rule of law. The conflation of national security with Muslim outreach, oxymoronic sharia-democracy building, and the pie-in-the-sky notion that Iran could be a helpful force for regional stability became willful blindness on steroids, Muslim Brotherhood promotion, and an Iran deal that combines nuclear proliferation with the provision of material support to the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism.

In the interim, Republicans pleading to be returned to power repeatedly promised to use all constitutional means at their disposal, particularly the power of the purse, to thwart Obama’s steamrolling agenda. Typical was Mitch McConnell, GOP leader in the Senate, who thundered that Obama “needs to be challenged” and vowed “to do that through the funding process.” Here is McConnell, for example, in the run-up to the 2014 midterms:

In the spending bill, we will be pushing back against this bureaucracy by doing what’s called placing riders in the bill. No money can be spent to do this or to do that. We’re going to go after them on health care, on financial services, on the Environmental Protection Agency, across the board. All across the federal government, we’re going to go after it.

Yet, as soon as conservative voters put them in control, Republicans promptly dropped the combative rhetoric and forfeited the power of the purse. With Obama applauding, they funded the administration’s priorities while leaving themselves no leverage to fight the excesses that were sure to come and are sure to continue through the next eight months.

‘Jump the shark” is an American pop-culture expression that derives from a 1977 Happy Days sitcom episode; it describes a moment of decline. At a certain point, a TV show becomes so predictable, empty of ideas, and gimmicky that in desperation its writers will try anything — like the character “The Fonz” jumping over a shark on water skis — just to keep on the air.

Contemporary protestors have reached that moment, when demonstrations exist for demonstrations’ sake, without any consistent or coherent agenda of dissent.

At a recent forum on political correctness at the University of Massachusetts, three invited guest speakers were shouted down by protestors in the audience. A video of one shouter went viral. In the manner of a two-year-old, she threw a loud temper tantrum, interrupting the speakers, screaming obscenities, and repeatedly yelling, “Keep your hate speech off this campus!”

How does one stop “hate speech” by bellowing out four-letter obscenities to disrupt free expression at a university? The childish protestor then proved that she had jumped the shark when she finished by screaming, “Stop treating us like children!”

At an earlier protest at Yale, one particularly emotional student jumped the shark by cursing at a faculty member whose crime was advising students not to overreact to the childish Halloween costumes that other students would be wearing.

Protestors have a right to object to Donald Trump’s various crudities, as long as they do so peacefully and respect the right of free speech. But recently, disrupters at a Trump rally in California likewise jumped the shark when some waved the flag of Mexico or bore placards with slogans such as “Make America Mexico Again.” If the protest was directed against Trump’s pledges to deport undocumented immigrants to Mexico, then it made little sense to celebrate the country to which protestors did not wish immigrants to return, or to suggest that immigrants’ new home should become identical to the old home that they had chosen to leave.

At the University of Missouri last year, protestors demanded concessions from the university. In a public area, assistant communications professor Melissa Click called for “some muscle” to manhandle a student journalist who was trying to photograph a public demonstration. Click might as well have put on water skis and jumped a plastic shark. A right-wing cartoonist could not have dreamed up a sillier scenario, with a faculty member from a university’s communications department trying to have a student reporter physically blocked from covering a news story in a free-speech zone.

From our “not such a good idea” department comes a new plan from the Obama administration to resettle refugees even faster by cutting the time expended to screen the newcomers for ties to terrorism.

What could go wrong?

Washington Free Beacon:

The Obama administration has committed to bring at least 10,000 Syrian refugees onto American soil in fiscal year 2016 by accelerating security screening procedures from 18-24 months to around three months, according to sources who spoke to the Washington Free Beacon.

Obama administration officials told the Free Beacon that they remain committed to the plan, despite warnings from the FBI and other law enforcement officials who say the federal government is not equipped to properly vet these individuals within that timeframe.

The administration is committed to moving forward this year with a plan to resettle 10,000 Syrian refugees and 85,000 refugees overall, officials said.

Lawmakers are pressing the State Department and White House to reconsider the plan, arguing that critical security concerns should be addressed before it is implemented.

“We know the 18- to 24-month vetting process for Syrian refugees has severe vulnerabilities after FBI Director James Comey warned about the federal government’s inability to thoroughly screen Syrian refugee applicants for terrorism risk and after the Department of Homeland Security’s investigative arm warned about ISIS’s capability to print fake Syrian passports for terrorist infiltration,” Sen. Mark Kirk (R., Ill.) told the Free Beacon.

The administration has not specified what mechanisms it has put in place to facilitate the screening of a larger number of refugees on a three-month timeline, according to Kirk.

“Given that the administration has not explained to the American people whether and how it fixed these and other known vulnerabilities to terrorist infiltration, it is highly irresponsible for the administration to reduce the 18- to 24-month vetting process for Syrian refugees down to three months to meet its artificial and ideologically-driven goal of bringing 10,000 Syrian refugees onto U.S. soil by September,” said Kirk, who recently introduced legislation to impose enhanced screening measures to prevent terrorists from taking advantage of the U.S. refugee program.

Willfully ignoring the effects of 15 years of combat, President Obama, Congress and Pentagon leaders are causing the readiness of our combat aircraft to sink to so low a level that it clearly endangers national security. It’s a matter of shrunken budgets and awful planning.

Readiness — the ability of a force to accomplish its assigned combat mission — is measured somewhat differently among the services. But when it comes to aircraft the criteria are immutable. They’re objective measures that are based on metallurgical science and the laws of physics.

Our military went into combat a month after the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks when we attacked al Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan. In the nearly 15 years since, our air forces have flown almost constantly, attacking the terrorist forces in Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya. The burden on them has worn out too many aircraft to the degree that they can no longer be flown in combat.

As reported by Fox News, only a small minority of Marine Corps aircraft — about 30 percent of the Marines’ F/A-18s — are ready to fly and only 42 of their 147 heavy-lift CH-53E helicopters are airworthy. They — like the F/A-18s — are just plain worn out.

Retired U.S. Navy Rear Adm. Mike Groothousen flew A-7 attack aircraft and F-18 strike fighters. He was captain (in combat) of the nuclear carrier USS Harry S. Truman and had four other aviation and surface commands in his career.

The last time I was in Los Angeles, there were guards at every synagogue. In New York, there are police officers in front of every synagogue. But the media won’t talk about Muslim anti-Semitism. Instead it’ll pretend that we face a grave Islamophobia threat. Two days from now this story will be buried beneath a deluge of “Muslims fear backlash” stories. And Jews will have to pray in synagogues under assault.

And so we turn to James Gonzalo Medina aka James Muhammad, who converted to Islam, threatened a church and then plotted to bomb a synagogue for Islam.

Medina has a number of prior arrests, including one in August 2012 when he was accused of sending violent threats via text message to a Coral Springs family.

One text read: “By next week, Ima bomb ya [curse word] … Bring him! I will buy a gun [off] the street and rampage [family member’s] church. Murder she wrote,” according to the 2012 affidavit.

And at some point, Muhammad/Medina prioritized killing Jews.

One of Medina’s associates informed the FBI source that Medina was planning to martyr himself in a firearms attack on the Aventura synagogue, using AK-47 assault rifles — then, the affidavit said, the conversation turned to claiming responsibility for it. Medina said he liked the source’s idea of using the name of a notorious terrorist group — ISIS or al-Qaida-linked Shabaab — to assume responsibility.

Medina, who told the source he had converted to Islam four years ago, said the planned synagogue attack would inspire other Muslims. Medina would later express his “current hatred for the Jewish people,” the affidavit said.