RUTHFULLY YOURS

Money buys everything, including the allegiance of Senator Robert (“Bob”) Casey (D-PA) to militant Islam.

Mr. Casey, a member of the National Security Working Group and the former Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Subcommittee overseeing the Middle East, has received windfalls of cash from individuals and corporations affiliated with Fethullah Gulen.

Gulen, dubbed “the most dangerous Islamist on planet earth,” has amassed a fortune estimated to exceed $50 billion to bring about a New Islamic World Order. Much of the money, according to informed sources, comes from the heroin trade.

“The Guide to Gulen’s Activities in the United States” reveals this sampling of contributions to Mr. Casey from known Gulenists:

Omer Alici of Ceren Delivery in Bethlehem – $4,000.00

Ugar Akyildiz of Bethlehem – $1,000.00

Metin Bor of the West Penn Cultural Center in Pittsburgh – $1,300.00

Suleyman Eris of the Lehigh Dialogue Center in Bethlehem – $2,350.

This is a stunning admission from an arch liberal at the NYTimes…..rsk

WE progressives believe in diversity, and we want women, blacks, Latinos, gays and Muslims at the table — er, so long as they aren’t conservatives.

Universities are the bedrock of progressive values, but the one kind of diversity that universities disregard is ideological and religious. We’re fine with people who don’t look like us, as long as they think like us.

O.K., that’s a little harsh. But consider George Yancey, a sociologist who is black and evangelical.

“Outside of academia I faced more problems as a black,” he told me. “But inside academia I face more problems as a Christian, and it is not even close.”

I’ve been thinking about this because on Facebook recently I wondered aloud whether universities stigmatize conservatives and undermine intellectual diversity. The scornful reaction from my fellow liberals proved the point.

“Much of the ‘conservative’ worldview consists of ideas that are known empirically to be false,” said Carmi.

“The truth has a liberal slant,” wrote Michelle.

“Why stop there?” asked Steven. “How about we make faculties more diverse by hiring idiots?”

To me, the conversation illuminated primarily liberal arrogance — the implication that conservatives don’t have anything significant to add to the discussion. My Facebook followers have incredible compassion for war victims in South Sudan, for kids who have been trafficked, even for abused chickens, but no obvious empathy for conservative scholars facing discrimination.

The stakes involve not just fairness to conservatives or evangelical Christians, not just whether progressives will be true to their own values, not just the benefits that come from diversity (and diversity of thought is arguably among the most important kinds), but also the quality of education itself. When perspectives are unrepresented in discussions, when some kinds of thinkers aren’t at the table, classrooms become echo chambers rather than sounding boards — and we all lose.

Four studies found that the proportion of professors in the humanities who are Republicans ranges between 6 and 11 percent, and in the social sciences between 7 and 9 percent.

Conservatives can be spotted in the sciences and in economics, but they are virtually an endangered species in fields like anthropology, sociology, history and literature. One study found that only 2 percent of English professors are Republicans (although a large share are independents).

Abraham M. Nussbaum When Doctors Stop ‘Seeing’ Patients

Dr. Nussbaum, the chief education officer at Denver Health, is the author of “The Finest Traditions of My Calling” (Yale University Press, 2016).
Physicians aptly speak of “seeing” patients. After all, medical training is a series of vision lessons. Students look closely at a nameless cadaver and disassemble it until it resembles the pictures in an anatomy text. They watch lectures in which interrelated organ systems are displayed as simple machines.

Often, however, doctors’ vision narrows too far. We begin to see the body as a collection of parts and lose sight of the person before us. Early in my medical training, this way of seeing began intruding on the rest of my life. During movies I imagined the best surgical approach for the actress. I saw friends’ physical imperfections as signs of syndromes.

So I took a leave of absence from med school to study history, literature and theology. The humanities taught me that the questions I was wrestling with are foundational to the history of medicine. In Platonic medicine, a physician sought to diagnose disease as a concrete fact. Hippocrates, who lived around 400 B.C., reoriented doctors toward seeking to understand the beneficial and deleterious forces in a patient’s life and then helping rebalance them in favor of health.

For the past two centuries, physicians have been counseled to pursue something akin to Platonic medicine, to act like scientists. Remarkable technologies—antibiotics, anesthesia, antisepsis—resulted. But physicians also shifted away from the Hippocratic pursuit of understanding patients. Today’s clinics are often alienating, as when a physician spends a checkup gazing into a computer screen. Half of doctors report feeling burned out, and a majority would advise against a medical career. CONCINUE AT SITE

Progressives want to politicize everything, even chicken sandwiches. Witness New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio’s campaign to get his fellow citizens to boycott the Chick-fil-A restaurants that are opening around the Big Apple.

The fast-food chain opened its first New York restaurant last year, and the line at lunch time at the restaurant near our office stretches around the block. This is no small feat in midtown Manhattan, where you can’t walk 20 yards without hitting a deli, a food truck or some other fast-food joint.

This meeting of popular supply and demand is too much for Mr. de Blasio, who last week urged New Yorkers not to eat the spicy chicken fare because the chain’s owners are known for opposing same-sex marriage.

“Chick-fil-A is anti-LGBT,” said the mayor, who fancies himself a spokesman for all progressive causes. “I’m certainly not going to patronize them and I wouldn’t urge any other New Yorker to patronize them. But they do have a legal right.” Good to know he isn’t trying to ban the business, though give him time.

A Chick-fil-A spokesman responded that, “The Chick-fil-A culture and service tradition in our restaurants is to treat every person with honor, dignity and respect—regardless of their beliefs, race, creed, sexual orientation or gender.” There are also laws that ban discrimination. CONTINUE AT SITE

Understandable. We wouldn’t want to stigmatize murderers, drug dealers, rapists and robbers. Their victims might disagree, but they’re just Crimeaphobic.

Assistant Attorney General Karol Mason, who has headed the Office of Justice Programs since 2013, announces in a guest post that her agency will no longer use words such as “felon” or “convict” to refer to released prisoners.

“Many of the formerly incarcerated men, women, and young people I talk with say that no punishment is harsher than being permanently branded a “felon” or “offender,” Mason writes. “This new policy statement replaces unnecessarily disparaging labels with terms like “person who committed a crime” and “individual who was incarcerated,”

Should go over as well as “man caused disasters” for terrorism. But the side benefits of living inside a Groucho Marx movie set in an Orwellian dystopia is that we get plenty of laughs.

“The labels we affix to those who have served time can drain their sense of self-worth”.

I suppose we could discuss the self-worth of their victims, but that would not be politically correct.

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.”