RUTHFULLY YOURS

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.

Was it only eight years ago that a newly elected president assured an adoring hometown crowd that crime and injustice would wilt before his enlightened moral authority? As the chalked outlines on too many sidewalks attest, it was another false promise
Every May I head to Chicago for a week (a long story, over a drink perhaps…). Great city. Lovely setting beside Lake Michigan. Wonderful architecture. Sensational shopping. Fantastic museums. Pleasant parks along the lakeshore. Easy to get around, but who would want to, who would dare to, anymore?

This year the murder rate in Chicago is up almost 80% on last year. Yes, 80%. No misprint. And that’s compounding on a rise of 20% from the year before — a trend heading towards a total that may well exceed 800 by the time this year is done. Sure, Chicago has seen years with more murders: 970 in 1974 and 943 in 1992. But this time there’s a remarkable difference to the crime statistics: the clear-up rate for murders has plummeted. Some 70% of murders were solved back in the early 1990s. But last year it was just over 30%. Put it another way: Two out of three Chicago murderers now get away with it. Scot free. Permanently.

All this is happening on Barack Obama’s home turf, just around the corner from where he used to live in the South Side’s Hyde Park, in the second term of his supposedly “transformative” presidency. And in the city where Barack’s buddy and former right-hand man, Rahm Emanuel, is current mayor.

These killings are not mass murders perpetrated by isolated, unhinged loners. This is gang violence writ large, with retribution after retribution after retribution. It is tearing apart the mainly black suburban communities that make up the South and the West of Chicago. But more recently shootings have spread into other areas of Chicago.

Chicago’s police, fearing they will get shot (or videoed shooting someone who later turns out to be unarmed — are intervening less and less, it seems. Instead, they come by later to stretch out the tape, mark out the corpses, pick up the cartridges, photograph stray bullet-holes, and hope that a witness dares to come forward. If Crime Scene Investigation is your buzz, then the Windy City is a sure bet for a long, steady career.

The American people have become familiar with ObamaCare’s failings: higher premiums, fewer choices and a more powerful federal health bureaucracy. Yet another important piece of health-care legislation, signed into law last year, has gone almost unnoticed.

The Medicare Access and CHIP Reauthorization Act, known simply as Macra, was enacted to replace the outdated and dysfunctional system for paying doctors under Medicare. The old system, based on the universally despised sustainable-growth rate formula, perennially threatened to impose unsustainable cuts in physicians’ fees. Macra passed Congress with bipartisan support and President Obama quickly signed it. Unfortunately, the law empowers the federal bureaucracy at the expense of the doctor-patient relationship, putting the quality of American health care at risk.

In an effort to secure broad support, Congress wrote into the law general guidance but left important details of implementation to the executive branch. What happened next was predictable: In April the administration presented a 962-page regulatory behemoth. This new set of rules uses the power of Medicare to put the federal government in charge of almost every aspect of physician care in the U.S.

Macra adopts the same theory of cost control embedded in ObamaCare. It assumes that the federal government has the knowledge and wherewithal to engineer better health care through “delivery system reforms,” forgetting the utter failure of the bureaucracy’s previous effort. ObamaCare and now Macra use Medicare’s payment regulations to force hospitals and physicians to change how they care for their patients. The administration’s regulations will force doctors to comply with scores of new reporting requirements and intrusions into their practices. Physicians who refuse to bend will see their Medicare fees cut.

Macra and the new regulations force physicians to pick between a “merit-based incentive payment system” or an “alternative-payment model.” Doctors who choose the former will get paid fee-for-service, but they will receive meager annual increases of only 0.25% starting in 2019. Some doctors could earn “bonus payments” but only if the federal bureaucracy approves of their performance. CONTINUE AT SITE

A political battle is brewing on Capitol Hill with an unlikely source: a weed killer.

Congress is demanding to know why the Environmental Protection Agency posted and then pulled a long-awaited report on the carcinogenicity of glyphosate, the world’s most widely used herbicide. The weed killer is also the latest bogeyman for anti-GMO activists.

Two congressional committees — the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology and the House Agriculture Committee — have asked EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy to explain why her agency took the assessment offline and is continuing to delay its release.

On April 29, the EPA posted a report concluding that glyphosate (the active ingredient in Roundup herbicide and other products) is “not likely to be carcinogenic.” The committee found no relationship between glyphosate exposure and a number of cancers, including leukemia, multiple myeloma, and Hodgkin lymphoma. The 86-page assessment was signed by the EPA’s cancer review committee back in October 2015 and marked “final.”

But the EPA took it down on May 2, claiming the documents were “inadvertently” posted and only a preliminary report. “EPA has not completed our cancer review. We will look at the work of other governments. . . . our assessment will be peer reviewed and completed by end of 2016,” said an EPA spokeswoman.

That move caught the attention of House Science Committee chairman Lamar Smith (R., Texas), who fired off a letter two days later to McCarthy, questioning the agency’s “apparent mishandling” of the report and demanding all documents and communications about the report dating back to January 1, 2015. The House Agriculture Committee followed up with its own letter (signed by both the chairman and the ranking member) asking McCarthy why the agency has “continually delayed its review of glyphosate.” Both committees expect answers within the coming weeks.

In spite of all the posturing on Memorial Day, this scandal continues unabated…..rsk

WASHINGTON — A Senate investigation of poor health care at a Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Tomah, Wis., found systemic failures in a VA inspector general’s review of the facility that raise questions about the internal watchdog’s ability to ensure adequate health care for veterans nationwide.

The probe by the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee found the inspector general’s office, which is charged with independently investigating VA complaints, discounted key evidence and witness testimony, needlessly narrowed its inquiry and has no standard for determining wrongdoing.

One of the biggest failures identified by Senate investigators was the inspector general’s decision not to release its investigation report, which concluded two providers at the facility had been prescribing alarming levels of narcotics. The facility’s chief of staff at the time was David Houlihan, a physician veterans had nick-named “candy man” because he doled out so many pills.

Releasing the report would have forced VA officials to publicly address the issue and ensured follow up by the inspector general to make sure the VA took action. Instead, the inspector general’s office briefed local VA officials and closed the case.

A 35-year-old Marine Corps veteran, Jason Simcakoski, died five months later from “mixed drug toxicity” at Tomah days after Houlihan signed off on adding another opiate to the 14 drugs he was already prescribed.

The 350-page Senate committee report obtained by USA TODAY also chronicles instances where other agencies could have done more to fix problems at the Tomah VA Medical Center, including the local police, the FBI, DEA, and the VA itself, but it singles out the inspector general.