RUTHFULLY YOURS

A “factsheet” issued by the New York City Commission on Human Rights makes some astonishing claims about biology and gender identity.

They claim that it’s a “myth” that biological men are not “real women.”

The commission published a “myths vs. facts” document on gender identity and expression after receiving a flurry of criticism over its transgender guidance that forces businesses to accommodate 31 different gender identities.

One of the “myths” listed is that “Transgender women are not ‘real’ women, and transgender men are not ‘real’ men.”

Next to that myth, the commission asserts the correct “fact”: “Gender identity is not based on one’s sex assigned at birth.” The implication is that one’s self-determined “gender identity” — rather than one’s biological makeup — is what makes a woman a woman.

Underneath the “myth” and “fact,” the commission offers an explanation of the issue.

“If someone’s gender identity is female, then that person is a woman – regardless of what her birth sex was – and she should be treated as a woman,” the document states. “Similarly, if someone’s gender identity is male, then that person is a man, and he should be treated as a man.”

The document also states that it’s a “myth” that, “The New York City Human Rights Law allows men to enter the women’s bathroom and vice versa.” The “fact” the commission offers to disprove that “myth” is “If an individual identifies as a man, he is not permitted to use the women’s room.”

The document explains this by stating: “The NYCHRL allows individuals to use the bathroom that is consistent with their gender identity.”

An economy that has struggled for growth for seven years showed fresh signs of trouble Friday with a sobering jobs report. Nonfarm payrolls climbed by a mere 38,000 in May—the fewest since September 2010. The Bureau of Labor Statistics also reported that a record 94,708,000 Americans were not in the labor force last month, as the labor-force participation rate fell to 62.6%, from 63% two months earlier.

When thinking about what has stymied the U.S. economy, I sometimes recall a biology lesson about the role that cell death plays in explaining embryonic development and normal growth of adult tissue. In economics, as far back as Joseph Schumpeter, or even Karl Marx, we have known that the flow of business deaths and births affects the dynamism and growth of a country’s economy. Business deaths unlock resources that can be allocated to more productive use and business formation can boost innovation and economic and social mobility.

For much of the nation’s history, this process of what Schumpeter called “creative destruction” has spread prosperity throughout the U.S. and the world. Over the past 30 years, however, with the exception of the mid-1980s and the 2002-05 period, this dynamism has been waning. There has been a steady decline in business formation while the rate of business deaths has been more or less constant. Business deaths outnumber births for the first time since measurement of these indicators began.

Equally troubling, the latest analysis of Census Bureau data by the Economic Innovation Group points to the increasing concentration of new business formation in a smaller number of U.S. counties. The findings show that 20 counties account for half of new businesses and that most counties had fewer business establishments in 2014 than in 2010. Even accounting for so-called dynamic counties, the total number of firms in the U.S. remains lower than it was in 2004.

As the Economic Innovation Group shows, the 1990 recovery registered a net increase of over 420,000 business establishments, or a 6.7% increase. The numbers for the 2000 recovery were 400,000 and 5.6%. Since 2010, the number of new business establishments has grown by only 166,000 or 2.3%.

One explanation for this subpar new business formation is the overall pallid U.S. recovery. Today’s new-normal 2%-growth economy doesn’t inspire vigor or confidence. Likewise the collapse, until very recently, of real-estate values, and the imposition of tougher standards on personal credit cards, have constrained traditional sources of credit for startups. Banks have tightened lending criteria and many regional and community banks have disappeared. CONTINUE AT SITE

Federal officials are predicting doom because a Pennsylvania woman became infected with a germ that can’t be stopped by most antibiotics. “The medicine cabinet is empty for some patients,” warned Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Thomas Frieden last week.

You’d think the CDC was finally ready to get serious about drug-resistant infections. Think again. The CDC watched “superbugs” spread across the nation, and dawdled. Centers for Denial and Confusion is more like it.

The Pennsylvania woman’s infection is resistant to a last-resort antibiotic called colistin. This is the first case, as far as we know, of an infection resistant to colistin in the U.S. , but thousands of patients die every year from infections resistant to more commonly used antibiotics.

As antibiotics lose their punch, medical care becomes riskier, especially in hospitals. Patients who need chemotherapy or surgery rely on antibiotics. Without them, even a routine procedure – bypass surgery, or C-section – could turn deadly.

The medical community has struggled with drug-resistance for half a century. There’s no avoiding it. Bacteria naturally evolve to resist weapons we use to fight them.

CRE – carbapenem-resistant infections – have plagued New York-area hospitals for fifteen years. CRE bloodstream infections have a 50% death rate. In 2011, a New York patient transferred to the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Md., carried the germ with her, starting an outbreak that killed several patients, including a 16-year-old boy. Yet the CDC waited until 2013 to sound the alarm about this “nightmare bacteria.” And has done little since.

Three aggressive steps are needed to protect patients, but the CDC has gotten serious about only one: curbing over-use of antibiotics. The agency is MIA on the need for rigorous cleaning and screening incoming patients for superbugs.

In remarks aimed at Donald Trump, Secretary of State John Kerry said “seeking to rattle people is not objective, number one, most of the time” in foreign policy.

Last week, President Obama said fellow world leaders are “rattled by [Trump] — and for good reason — because a lot of the proposals that he’s made display either ignorance of world affairs, or a cavalier attitude, or an interest in getting tweets and headlines instead of actually thinking through what it is that is required to keep America safe and secure and prosperous, and what’s required to keep the world on an even keel.”

Trump responded at a press conference in North Dakota: “When you rattle someone, that’s good. If they’re rattled in a friendly way, that’s a good thing … not a bad thing.”

On MSNBC Wednesday night, Kerry stressed that he’s “not permitted to get in the middle of the election and I don’t want to.”

“But I can’t help but say that as I meet with my counterparts all around the world and as I engage with other countries, they are very concerned about the quality of what’s happened to America, and it’s a clarity of leadership, if you will,” Kerry said. “And I think the bombast and the dividing language is very hard for some people to digest even as we are working to undo sectarian divisions and old religious overtones to different conflicts. We need our voice to be above reproach and I think, right now, people are really wondering about where we’re heading.”

On Trump saying that rattling other countries is a good thing, Kerry replied that “we’re not doing a Trump hotel business deal.”

“These are dealings between nations based on precedent, based on understandings, based on the trust from one administration to another. This is an ongoing relationship. And when you’re dealing with nuclear weapons and you’re dealing with war and you’re dealing with the life and death choices that the president of the United States have to make everyday, seeking to rattle people is not objective, number one, most of the time,” he said.

Kerry stressed that any president who would rip up the Paris climate accord “would be reckless, counter productive, self-destructive.”

Virginia’s Gov. Terry McAuliffe recently signed an executive order restoring, with the stroke of a pen, the right to vote for all 206,000 Virginia felons who have completed their terms of incarceration and supervised probation. This includes more than 40,000 felons convicted of violent crimes. The order also restores the rights to serve on a jury and to seek and hold public office, and it makes each of them eligible to ask a court to restore their right to own and carry firearms.

The sweeping order has no precedent in Virginia history, and last week Virginia’s Republican House Speaker William J. Howell and Senate Majority Leader Thomas K. Norment Jr. and four other state voters filed a challenge to its constitutionality. Their petition asks the Virginia Supreme Court to invalidate the governor’s order before votes are cast in November, lest the validity of the general election be cast into doubt. Recognizing the urgency of the situation, the state’s high court issued an order on June 1 calling a special session of the court to hear argument in the case on July 19.

The executive order defies the text of the Virginia Constitution. Article II flatly prohibits all felons from voting, but it grants the governor a narrow power to restore voting rights to deserving felons on an individual, case-by-case basis. Nothing in the constitution gives the governor power to restore political rights en masse to virtually all felons, no matter how heinous or numerous their crimes.

Gov. McAuliffe, a Democrat, has acknowledged that for 240 years none of the state’s 71 other governors exercised wholesale clemency power. In 2010 another Democratic governor, Tim Kaine, expressly declined to issue a blanket restoration order like Gov. McAuliffe’s, concluding that such an order would “rewrite” the law rather than follow it. Three years later, a bipartisan committee convened and headed by Virginia’s then-attorney general, Ken Cuccinelli, advised Republican Gov. Bob McDonnell that a blanket order restoring voting rights would be unconstitutional.

Cyrus Skeen, Edward Cline’s fictional detective, has survived countless brushes with death and danger across eighteen novels, the latest of which, Exegesis, is coming out just now. Its author, a 70-year-old Air Force veteran, has lived a life that in some ways has been as difficult as that of his fictional protagonist.

But while Cyrus Skeen brushes off threats with witty quips and a keen intellect, his creator’s keen intellect and wit have come up against the harsher reality of ISIS terror and the willingness of some in our country to appease that terrorism by turning on its victims.

The Islamic State has been publishing lists of thousands of names of those it claims will be its targets. One such list included 3,600 New Yorkers. Another contained the names of 43 government employees and yet another listed 70 members of the military. But many of those on the hit lists were ordinary people, like Julie, a dogwalker living in Brooklyn. They received calls from FBI agents and then they went back to living the routine of their ordinary lives.

For the most part.

Edward Cline will not go back to his ordinary life. After he was visited by the FBI, his landlord, Lawson Enterprises, chose to kick a 70-year-old Air Force veteran threatened by ISIS into the street.

According to Cline, Lawson Enterprises informed him that he posed a “risk” to the safety of the other tenants. It is not ISIS that poses the risk, but its target and its victim, who must be put out on the street. Cline has no means of moving and nowhere to move to. After initially being ordered to leave by July 1st, he was offered a “courtesy” extension to July 19th, which was later rescinded, leaving the elderly writer with few options and less time. Cline described the experience as taking “years” off his life.

On Tuesday, May 31, 2016 Fox & Friends conducted an interview with the former president of Telemundo Nely Galan and posted a video of that segment with the title, “What can Donald Trump do to win back Hispanic voters? – Former president of Telemundo Nely Galan weighs in on the race for the White House, talks new book ‘Self Made’.”

I have decided to address Nely Galan’s five minute segment on Fox & Friends and the statements she made because, although she is not a particularly significant person, the theme of the claims she made have also been made by far too many other people and have been broadcast frequently on news programs for years without being properly challenged.

Furthermore, while it took Donald Trump to move immigration to center stage for this presidential election, immigration has been the most significant issue confronting our nation and our citizens for decades because of how it impacts virtually every challenge and threat we face from national security, public safety and public health to the economy, unemployment, healthcare, education and the environment.

Today we will examine the position that Ms Galan took on the issue of immigration and how this issue, she claims, adversely impacts the candidacy of Donald Trump.

To begin with, let’s consider what transpired during the segment.

Galan said that immigrants make up half of all entrepreneurs in the United States and dismissed the statement by Brian Kilmeade that Donald Trump’s problem is illegal immigrants not legal immigrants. She responded by saying that this is like saying, “I like this minority but not that minority.”

Pete Hegseth, one of the co-hosts of the program, then asked if it was not a fair and important distinction to differentiate between legal immigrants and illegal immigrants. Galan said it was not fair and adamantly rejected the use of the term illegal alien saying, “We don’t like that word- illegal immigrant,” she never defined who “we” was and insisted that aliens who enter the United States without being lawfully admitted are simply “undocumented.”

America and its citizens are under attack from outside forces – from terror and criminal organizations seeking to enter the country, wreak havoc and ply their violent and criminal “trades” – and from forces within the United States.

Examples of forces from within are globalists, including organizations such as the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and, in fact, all who advocate for open borders and other dangerous and wrong-headed goals, including massive legalization programs for unknown millions of illegal aliens.

In the wake of the terror attacks of September 11, 2001, I have testified before numerous Congressional hearings and appeared on various television and radio news programs and college campuses to discuss and debate issues relating to the nexus between immigration and national security. Included in what I share is how immigration system failures have enabled criminals to enter the U.S., along with massive – indeed, unprecedented – numbers of foreign workers to displace hardworking American workers.

Within the past several years, however, many television networks no longer provide the opportunities for open and honest discussions about immigration. Increasing numbers of television networks have developed and grown their multilingual subsidiary programming that has proven to provide huge revenue streams. Broadcast networks are focused on profits which are determined by the size of the audience that their programming reaches. Network executives are eager to do whatever they need to do to grow their audience – even if their audience is comprised of illegal aliens.

Last week’s shattering report by the State Department’s inspector general drew the conclusion that several of us at National Review have been urging for over a year: Hillary Clinton’s systematic conduct of government business over a homebrew e-mail system resulted in serious violations of federal law.

Mrs. Clinton’s withheld tens of thousands of government records (the e-mails) for nearly two years after she departed the State Department. She failed to return all government-related e-mails upon demand. She destroyed (or at least attempted to destroy) tens of thousands of e-mails without consultation with the State Department. And she did it all malevolently: for the manifest purpose of shielding her communications from the statutory file-keeping and disclosure requirements.

The inspector general euphemistically couches these violations as transgressions against “policies” and “procedures.” Yet his report also acknowledges that these policies and procedures were expressly made pursuant to, and are expressly designed to enforce compliance with, federal law. The State Department still strains to avoid stating the obvious: Mrs. Clinton is a law-breaker.

In an excellent column following release of the inspector general’s report, National Review’s John Fund envisioned the increasingly plausible implosion of Clinton’s candidacy — i.e., a scenario in which Democrats dump her owing to her metastasizing legal woes, coupled with her extraordinarily high negatives (general disapproval, untrustworthiness, unlikability, etc.). The latter are set in stone after a quarter-century’s antics.

Relatedly, on Twitter, I floated the possibility that Democrats could resort to the “Torricelli Solution.”

In October 2002, seeking reelection while beset by an indefensible corruption investigation, Senator Robert Torricelli was badly trailing his Republican rival, Doug Forrester, as the race came down to the wire — no small thing in the blue Garden State. At the eleventh hour (actually, more like after the twelfth hour), Democrats persuaded “the Torch” to step aside. Into his place they slid 78-year-old Frank Lautenberg, a reliably partisan former senator.

When it returns in June, house leadership has indicated it may take up a mental-health bill originally proposed by Representative Tim Murphy (R., Penn.), the Helping Families in Mental Health Crisis Act (H.R. 2646) as rewritten by Representative Fred Upton (R., Michigan). The well-intentioned Upton rewrite keeps some important provisions of the original bill, but it ignores the core finding of Murphy’s multi-year investigation of the mental-health system. Murphy found that we do not need to spend more money to cut the practice of incarcerating 365,000 seriously mentally ill, or to help the 140,000 seriously mentally ill who today go homeless. What’s required is for Congress to focus already-existing funding streams on treating adults known to have serious mental illness instead of using them to improve mental wellness in all others. It is the most seriously ill — not the worried well — who are most likely to become homeless or incarcerated or violent.

While some think more money is the only answer, the federal government already spends $130 billion annually on mental-health services, yet homelessness, arrest, incarceration, and violence related to untreated serious mental illness are all rising. That’s because the two agencies government charged with setting mental health policy — the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Administration (SAMHSA) and the Center for Mental Health Services (CMHS)­­ — moved away from a science-based system that spent mental-health dollars on delivering treatment to adults who were the most seriously mentally ill and who most needed treatment. Tragically, the system today largely ignores science and the seriously ill. Instead it works to improve the “sense of wellness” in the highest functioning. Under this new rubric, anything that makes you feel sad is now a mental illness.

National Review, the Wall Street Journal, and leading experts such as Dr. Sally Satel at the American Enterprise Institute, Dr. E. Fuller Torrey of the Treatment Advocacy Center, as well as my own organization Mental Illness Policy Org have extensively documented how SAMHSA and CMHS drive federal dollars away from the core mission of helping the most seriously ill. SAMHSA promotes prevention in spite of the fact that there is no known way to prevent serious mental illnesses such as schizophrenia and depression. “Preventing mental illness” is a great sound bite but lousy science. They use funds to address “trauma.” But everyone loses a parent and many people experience a trauma at some point. That is not a mental illness. It is part of life. Because SAMHSA and CMHS have no doctors at the top — or even on staff — they certify ineffective programs as being evidence-based. Virtually the only people who support SAMHSA or CMHS are those who receive SAMHSA and CMHS funds. That is not who Upton should listen to.