RUTHFULLY YOURS

An outbreak of deadly infectious tuberculosis among refugees President Obama sent to Indiana is a frightening reminder that the administration’s dangerous immigration policies are putting American lives at risk.

In a frenzied rush to bring as many non-English-speaking Third World aliens to the country as possible before his presidency ends in a few months, Obama is allowing Syrian war migrants and refugees to be brought into the country without first undergoing proper medical examinations, a violation of the nation’s most basic public health protocols.

“Tuberculosis is one of the most lethal infectious diseases in history,” said Dr. Jane Orient, executive director of the Association of American Physicians and surgeons. “It is easily transmitted, say on a public bus [and] increasingly, it is becoming highly resistant to all our antibiotics,” she said.

It is clear that Obama doesn’t care about the health and well-being of the American people. That was obvious when he began pushing to create the so-called death panels that Obamacare mandates. But now as a result of the president’s recklessness, fatal diseases are surfacing or making a comeback in the U.S. Among those ailments are pneumonia, paralysis-causing acute flaccid myelitis, dengue fever, swine flu, and enterovirus D68.

Under Obama, immigration policy aims to import new Democratic voters — the less skilled, less educated, less enamored with the norms and values of Western civilization, the better. Lackluster border security, risible efforts at immigration law enforcement, mass amnesties, promises of generous taxpayer-financed welfare benefits, and other goodies, are used by Obama to expand and remake the American electorate.

Prior to the Obama era, tuberculosis was a rare diagnosis and many thought the disease had more or less been eradicated in the United States. Multi-drug-resistant strains of tuberculosis have been reported in populous California, Florida, Texas, and New York, all of which have large concentrations of illegal aliens.

Defense Secretary Ashton Carter expressed openness today to editing military job titles to make “man” more gender-neutral, even as he struggled with a way to make “unmanned” less masculine.

The Marine Corps Times reported last week that the service is reviewing its job titles — rifleman, infantryman, etc. — in the wake of all combat roles being opened to women and a January directive from Navy Secretary Ray Mabus for the Corps and the Navy to ensure those job descriptions are gender-neutral.

Every job title that includes “man” is up for review and potentially on the editing block.

Meeting with reporters today at the Naval Undersea Warfare Center in Newport, R.I., Carter was asked whether he saw “a benefit or a need to do that throughout the military.”

Carter said it was “a very good question.”

“And, you know, of course one wants to signify a reality, which is a very favorable reality for us in defense, of the modern era, which is that we’re making full use of the wonderful talents of half of the population of the country,” he said.

“And it would be a huge mistake not to do so. And that’s why I wanted to see all military operational specialties opened to qualified females. That doesn’t mean that they’ll get in and it doesn’t mean that they’ll choose to do it. But it does mean that I have the opportunity to pick from the entire population of the country. And since it’s an all-volunteer force, I would be — wouldn’t be fulfilling the needs of having the best force if I weren’t fishing in the widest possible pond.”

Carter stressed “that’s the logic behind the position of women in our Department of Defense in today’s world.”

“And signifying that in all appropriate ways is I think exactly that — very appropriate and needed,” he added. CONTINUE AT SITE

Hillary Clinton has said for more than a year that her use of a private email server as Secretary of State violated no federal rules and posed no security risk. Only the gullible believed that, and now everyone has proof of her deceptions in a scathing report from State Department Inspector General Steve Linick.

The report obtained by news outlets Wednesday is ostensibly an audit of the email practices of five secretaries of State. But the majority of the report, and the most withering criticism, focuses on Mrs. Clinton. The IG concludes that the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee broke federal record-keeping rules, never received permission for her off-grid server, ignored security concerns raised by other officials, and employed a staff that flouted the rules with the same disdain she did.

“Secretary Clinton should have preserved any Federal records she created and received on her personal account by printing and filing those records with the related files in the Office of the Secretary,” says the report. “At a minimum, Secretary Clinton should have surrendered all emails dealing with Department business before leaving government service and, because she did not do so, she did not comply with the Department’s policies that were implemented in accordance with the Federal Records Act.”

State still has never received emails from her private account for the first six weeks after she became Secretary, and the IG notes that it found (by other means) business-related emails that Mrs. Clinton did not include among the emails she has turned over.

The report says she has also stonewalled requests to obtain her server. And “through her counsel, Secretary Clinton declined [the IG’s] request for an interview.” Former Secretaries Madeleine Albright, Colin Powell, Condoleezza Rice and current Secretary John Kerry all sat for interviews. CONTINUE AT SITE

If you have not ever done so, I urge you to program into your next trip abroad a visit to an American military cemetery. There are quite a few in Europe, and some in Asia. You can find a list online.

These cemeteries are settings of an awesome serenity and beauty, immaculately kept by the American Battle Monuments Commission. As Americans, we must thank the architects who designed these settings and the workers who over the decades and to this day have kept them in their immaculate condition.

My wife, born in China and reared in Taiwan, and I, born in Germany and a longtime U.S. citizen, first visited the World War II cemeteries when our American-born children were young. We would tell them: Here rest some of the warriors who sacrificed their lives so that your parents and people in many parts of the world would be free from tyranny and could pursue their dreams in freedom. We made it clear to our children that this was not just a grown-up talk—that it was real and part of their proud heritage.

The lesson must have stuck. Last year our eldest child, now a fully grown man, urged me to come along to visit the battlegrounds in Germany, near the Belgian border, where U.S. troops fought so bravely and where so many of them—too many—met their early death.

This time we visited the large American cemetery near the Belgian town of Henri-Chapelle, about 20 miles west of the German city of Aachen. There rest the warriors who fell in the brutal, four-month-long battle of the Hürtgen Forest, followed by the Battle of the Bulge and the eventual push of American forces all the way to the Rhine River.

You can walk along the gravel paths of these cemeteries, and among the thousands of markers—crosses and Stars of David—beneath which the warriors rest. Pick a marker at random and adopt the soldier whose name is chiseled into that marker. Make him your father, or brother, or cousin, or a friend. Imagine him alive, and how you might have hugged him as he shipped out to the distant front. CONTINUE AT SITE

Today, nearly half a million veterans still wait to see a VA doctor.

So, we opened the books on the VA. Here’s just a sample of our findings:

The VA spent $1.7 million on ’employee engagement’ and other satisfaction surveys with Gallup (2010-2014). There is no indication these polls found, flagged or identified the most egregious scandal in VA history.

The VA paid $303 million in salaries to non-essential positions: Painters ($185 million), Interior Designers ($64 million), and Gardeners ($54 million). While veterans were dying, the VA managers were rewarding the efficiency of these positions with bonuses (2012-2015.)

$751.1 million spent on ‘household’ and ‘office’ furniture including furniture rental, draperies, curtains, carpeting, modification, repair and maintenance (2010-2015). Much of from luxury, upscale manufacturers.

While the veterans wait weeks to see a doctor, we found:

The VA lawyered up and added 175 attorneys.

Dramatically increased their spending on public relations (PR).

‘Reformed bonuses’ so millions of dollars continued to flow to many of the same employees who gamed-the-system during the scandal.

and much more…

Read our Forbes column, It’s Not Disney World – The VA Scandal Two Years Later.

This is the season of college Commencement speeches — an art form that has seldom been memorable, but has increasingly become toxic in recent times.

Two themes seem to dominate Commencement speeches. One is shameless self-advertising by people in government, or in related organizations supported by the taxpayers or donors, saying how nobler it is to be in “public service” than working in business or other “selfish” activities.

In other words, the message is that it is morally superior to be in organizations consuming output produced by others than to be in organizations which produce that output. Moreover, being morally one-up is where it’s at.

The second theme of many Commencement speakers, besides flattering themselves that they are in morally superior careers, is to flatter the graduates that they are now equipped to go out into the world as “leaders” who can prescribe how other people should live.

In other words, young people, who in most cases have never had either the sobering responsibility and experience of being self-supporting adults, are to tell other people — who have had that responsibility and that experience for years — how they should live their lives.

In so far as the graduates go into “public service” in government, whether as bureaucrats or as aides to politicians or judges, they are to help order other people around.

It might never occur to many Commencement speakers, or to their audiences, that what the speakers are suggesting is that inexperienced young graduates are to prescribe, or help to dictate, to vast numbers of other people who have the real world experience that the graduates themselves lack.

I’ve been fortunate to have had two professional careers, the first one in the courtroom as a trial lawyer and the second in journalism. I did not need the latter experience, though, to notice the stark difference between these two worlds.

When I prosecuted the “Blind Sheikh” (Omar Abdel Rahman) and the jihadist cell that bombed the World Trade Center and then plotted a simultaneous attack on several New York City landmarks, the organs of government that speak to the public through the media were making like irresponsible journalists. That is, they were eschewing facts and evidence, obsessively peddling a counterfactual narrative, to wit:

There is only one “true” Islam, and it is resolutely peaceful (indeed, being a “religion of peace” is apparently its only identifiable attribute). Therefore, the terrorist acts plotted and committed by a cabal of men who just happened to be Muslim had utterly nothing to do with Islam, notwithstanding the jihadists’ proclamations to the contrary.

By contrast, in the courtroom, criminal allegations cannot be proved absent convincing factual evidence — beyond a reasonable doubt — that unanimously persuades jurors of the suspects’ guilt.

Thus, though we prosecutors were formally part of the government, it was as if we were inhabiting a cocoon insulated from the fictional government narrative. Indeed, the judge repeatedly reminded the jurors of their oath to decide the case solely based on the facts proved and the controlling law, not bias, fear or favor — which was a 1990s way of saying “not narrative.”

The upshot of all this? No matter what “religion of peace” blather was coming out of Main Justice in Washington or the White House press apparatus, in our New York City federal courtroom a short distance from the Twin Towers, we were not only permitted but obliged as government attorneys to prove the truth:

(a) There are mainstream interpretations of Islam that endorse war against non-Muslims to establish Allah’s law (sharia);

(b) these are literalist interpretations that draw directly on Islamic scripture;

(c) the interpretations (Salafism, Wahhabism, Islamic supremacism — collectively, what we hopefully refer to as “radical” Islam) are urged on young Muslims (mostly men) by influential sharia scholars like the Blind Sheikh, whose powerful influence owes solely and only to their mastery of the doctrine;

(d) based on those incitements, these young men are radicalized into jihadism, plotting and committing acts of terrorism.

Those were the facts. Our evidence proved them incontestably. That is the only way we were able to convict jihadists — not only in my prosecution, but in case after terrorism case.

A 22-year-old Bronx, N.Y., resident was arrested Tuesday and accused of sympathizing with Islamic State, part of a continuing effort by the U.S. to catch the terrorist group’s supporters before they travel overseas or commit violence.

Sajmir Alimehmeti was charged by Manhattan federal prosecutors with providing material support to Islamic State and with passport fraud.

He is accused of facilitating the travel of an individual he believed was heading to Syria to fight for Islamic State. He allegedly gave the individual advice, downloaded encrypted apps onto the individual’s phone, helped purchase supplies and accompanied the individual to the airport. That individual turned out to be an undercover law-enforcement agent, one of four used in the case against Mr. Alimehmeti.

A lawyer for Mr. Alimehmeti hasn’t yet been identified.
Since early 2014, more than 80 individuals have been charged by the U.S. on similar allegations related to the terrorist group. They tend to be in their mid-20s.

The use of undercover agents and paid informants to catch Islamic State supporters has sparked criticism from defense lawyers, who say the government is luring young people into committing crimes. Officials say they target dangerous individuals who would have been predisposed to commit a crime and are careful not to entrap a suspect. CONTINUE AT SITE