RUTHFULLY YOURS

As a long-time resident of Connecticut, I have been patient and respectful while my representatives in Congress have railed against “gun violence” and called for new and sweeping restrictions on gun ownership. The Newtown, Connecticut, incident was tragic and, politics aside, recognition of the tragedy was appropriate and necessary.

But now they have gone too far. Senator Chris Murphy has been focused on expanding gun control to the exclusion of everything else. He led a filibuster in the Senate to highlight his position — fair enough. But after the gun-control proposals were voted down, Murphy accused Republicans of “sell[ing] weapons to ISIS.” Connecticut’s other senator, Richard Blumenthal, has been a less visible but equally engaged activist for increased gun restrictions. Congressman Jim Himes and other Connecticut representatives walked out of a moment of silence for Orlando in the House of Representatives, saying that silence mocks the victims.

To these legislators, the Orlando incident was little more than an opportunity to revive the memory of Newtown and once again advance their gun control agenda.

These people need to understand some basic truths:

1. Citizens have a natural right to own a gun. This is an unalienable right — by virtue of our right to life, liberty, and property — to defend family, self, and possessions.

2. The right to “keep and bear arms” is not granted to citizens by virtue of the Second Amendment. It is not bestowed upon us by government or by our elected representatives. Rather, it is a fundamental citizen right, and therefore one that government is morally obliged to protect for all citizens.

3. The Second Amendment exists to protect citizens from precisely the gun-rights abuses we are seeing from government today. It exists to prevent our representatives from interfering with our fundamental human right to keep (own) and bear (carry) arms, and all else that gun ownership entails (such as access to ammunition and indemnification of gun manufacturers).

4. When I need to defend my family and possessions, the police will surely be far away. Our town police force is capable and competent, the department is certified to high standards, but the town is sprawling, the force is modest, and response times are long. My representatives in government will be even farther away in the event of trouble.

Another day, another judicial rebuke to President Obama’s contempt for the rule of law. On Wednesday a federal judge struck down an oil and gas drilling rule imposed with no statutory authority.

In 2015 the Bureau of Land Management published new regulations about well construction and water management for hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, that takes place on federal and Indian lands. The BLM asserted “broad authority” to control oil and gas operations on the basis of laws that were passed in 1920, 1930, 1938, 1976 and 1982 and were allegedly ambiguous. Thus the agency said it deserved the benefit of the interpretive doubt that the courts call Chevron deference.

Abusing Chevron is an Obama specialty. But BLM’s overreach was notably egregious because Congress passed an energy law in 2005 that stripped the executive branch of fracking jurisdiction and gave that power to the states.

The BLM argued that Congress’s choice didn’t matter because the bureau wasn’t mentioned by name in the 2005 law. That claim inspired Judge Scott Skavdahl of Wyoming—an Obama appointee—to conduct a remedial seminar in the Constitution’s separation of powers.

Under the BLM argument, Judge Skavdahl writes, “there would be no limit to the scope or extent of congressionally delegated authority BLM has. . . . Having explicitly removed the only source of specific federal agency authority over fracking, it defies common sense for the BLM to argue that Congress intended to allow it to regulate the same activity under a general statute that says nothing about hydraulic fracturing.”

The Obama administration’s relentless campaign against for-profit colleges is succeeding: More than 180 have closed in the past two years. The Education Department projects that 1,400 vocational programs educating 840,000 students won’t survive its gainful-employment rule, which ties federal student aid to debt and earnings.

But the administration isn’t content with shutting down for-profits: Now regulators and prosecutors are even going after a businessman who waved the white flag and converted his vocational schools into nonprofits. With this administration, it’s a sin if you ever tried to make a buck.

In 2012 Carl Barney merged the CollegeAmerica, Stevens-Henager College, Independence University and California College San Diego with the nonprofit Center for Excellence in Higher Education (CEHE), which promotes reforms in college philanthropy. The 75-year-old British immigrant, who had been the for-profit colleges’ sole proprietor, tells me that he wanted to reduce his day-to-day responsibilities and channel more resources into education rather than paying taxes. “I didn’t want to be as involved,” he says. “I wanted to put more money back into the colleges.” He became the chairman of the new group of nonprofit colleges.

As the merger was being completed in 2012, Colorado Attorney General John Suthers, a Republican, began an investigation. In November 2014, the AG sued CEHE. According to the complaint, the colleges duped students into enrolling with deceptive ads such as one promising to help them “make more money and have a real career.”

Federal agents have arrested roughly 300 suspects in what officials call their largest crackdown on Medicare fraud, with charges ranging from taking illegal payments for marketing medications to false physical-therapy claims.

Attorney General Loretta Lynch announced the crackdown Wednesday, citing cases around the country where prosecutors say they found a wide variety of health-care fraud that totaled about $900 million in losses.

In California, officials have charged a man with receiving illegal payments for marketing compound medications, the costs of which were paid by Tricare, a program for members of the military, veterans and their families.

Previously, authorities have said compound-prescription sales involving Tricare were generating hundreds of millions of dollars in fraudulent transactions. The medications are specially mixed by pharmacists, often to treat pain, and often sell for thousands of dollars per prescription.

Other suspects charged in the crackdown include the managers of physical-therapy clinics in New York City that allegedly laundered money, paid kickbacks and billed Medicare and Medicaid for unnecessary treatments for patients.

In the aftermath of the Orlando terrorist attack, many Washington politicians tried to shift the conversation to the Second Amendment and called for an assault weapons bans. But former U.S. Senator Tom Coburn, our Honorary Chairman, had another idea. In this interview on CNBC, Coburn said we should improve our system of background checks, but said it was IRS officials and non-military federal personnel who should be subject to an assault weapons ban, not the general public.

This week, our organization at OpenTheBooks.com released our findings in an editorial at The Wall Street Journal that quantified the growing federal arsenal. The number of non-military federal officers with arrest and firearm authority (200,000+) now exceeds the number of U.S. Marines (182,000). Spending on guns, ammo and military-style equipment at 67 federal agencies – including 53 regulatory, administrative agencies amounted to $1.48 billion between 2006-2014.

The IRS gun-locker is an example of this growing federal firepower. Nearly $11 million was spent on guns, ammo, and military-style equipment for 2,316 ‘special agents’ during this period. The IRS stockpile includes pump-action and semi-automatic shotguns with buckshot and slugs; and semi-automatic AR-15 rifles (S&W M&P 15) and military-style H&K 416 rifles. Source: OpenTheBooks Oversight Report – The Militarization of America

The recent growth of the federal arsenal begs the questions: Just who are the feds planning to battle?

In 1996, the Bureau of Justice Statistics officially counted 74,500 federal officers who had arrest and firearm authority. By 2008, the Bureau quantified over 120,000 such officers. Newly updated counts were supposed to publish by this July but the Bureau now admits that over 80-percent of federal agencies ignored or stonewalled responses to their latest survey. What are they trying to hide?

Some Iranian-Americans argued that NIAC’s policies did not seem to be aimed at improving the lives of Iranian-Americans, but were political and partisan policies more likely aimed at making more money, getting more fame, media publicity and self-promotion, satisfying those who provide funding to them, or going towards where the money is.

“I think Trita Parsi does not belong to the Green Movement. I feel his lobbying has secretly been more for the Islamic Republic.” — Mohsen Makhmalbaf to the Washington Times.

“It appears that this may be lobbying on behalf of Iranian government interests. Were I running the counterintelligence program at the bureau now, I would have cause to look into this further.” — Kenneth Piernick, FBI special agent in counterintelligence and counterterrorism.

I have often been asked why someone with my credentials joined the National Iranian American Council (NIAC) — a political institution, not “nonpartisan” as it sometimes suggests — and advanced the interests of Iran’s ruling clerics, who now lead the world in human rights violations, with a regime that ranks number one in executions per capita.

They also ask why one would work with an organization that is run by a director who is not even Iranian-American; not an American citizen, but holds Iranian and Swedish passports?

Before coming to the United States, I did not know about NIAC and no one I knew in Iran was aware of it either.

Although I wanted to contribute socially in helping Iranian-American communities in the U.S., I also did not want to join a partisan political organization that pretended to help the communities but instead was partisan and sought money, fame, and media attention.

At first, NIAC seemed fine: its mission statement says, “The National Iranian American Council is a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization dedicated to strengthening the voice of Iranian Americans and promoting greater understanding between the American and Iranian people.”

But soon after joining, I discovered several issues.

First, after joining NIAC in a voluntary and unpaid capacity, I felt as if I were back in the Islamic Republic of Iran. I began receiving calls and emails from NIAC indicating that some media outlets were introducing me as “ambassador” for NIAC. Well, one does not always get to choose what title the TV media outlets or magazine use to introduce one. Further, in many instances, journalists would Google my name and find it listed as ambassador for NIAC on its website.

I was still wondering why NIAC would be opposed to the idea that media introduces me as their ambassador. Later on, I encountered an article which said:

“NIAC’s inner contradictions never cease to surprise me, but then I guess that is the nature of Politics. Trita Parsi who staunchly opposed Western intervention in Libya virtually blaming it on Sarkozy’s warmongering and conforted [sic] in his views by the ever clueless moralist Hamid Dabashi accusing the hidden agenda’s of Western ‘Imperialism’ with his Broken record rants on European ‘Neo Colonialism’ while people were being mercilessly slaughtered by Libya’s Caligula has now added to it’s [sic] new list of Ambassador’s [sic] for 2012 an Iranian academic of Syrian heritage. But One who for a change seems to speak some sense in regard to a country he seems to understand far more deeply than NIAC understands Iran…”

It seemed most likely their opposition to me being introduced as their ambassador had to do with my personal views, which differed from those of NIAC. I criticized Iran’s political establishments, strongly condemned human right violations, criticized the Syrian regime for the bloodshed, and Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) for assisting the Syrian regime.

It soon felt as if my freedom of expression were being taken away. I started to worry that a journalist somewhere might quote an interview or text and use the title “Ambassador to the National Iranian American Council,” if he might have found my name on its website. I would then have to track down the journalist, find his or her contacts, and plead with him or her to remove the title. I was also worried that I might say something on television or write something that NIAC might not like. These fears of expressing myself freely were similar to those that I grew up with having lived and worked in Iran and Syria.

I was also wondering why, if NIAC had issues with my personal views, it kept me for some months more. Perhaps, I wondered, it might have had to do with what I had mentioned to them earlier: that I knew some philanthropists who might donate money to the institution.

The Obama administration, bowing to the wishes of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) and other Muslim Brotherhood affiliated groups in the United States, has handcuffed our intelligence and law enforcement agencies from doing their job to protect the American people.

Barack Obama promised the Muslim world in his June 2009 speech in Cairo that he would use his presidency to “to fight against negative stereotypes of Islam wherever they appear.” True to his word, his administration conducted what amounted to a censorship campaign within the government of anything deemed critical of Islam. For example, an anti-terrorism conference scheduled for August 10-12, 2011 hosted by the CIA’s Threat Management Unit was cancelled after Islamic groups protested the content of several presentations and the speakers.

Beginning in the fall of 2011, the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Civil Rights and Civil Liberties undertook a campaign to purge any critical references to Islamic ideology and beliefs from intelligence and law enforcement training materials.

“Don’t use programs that venture too deep into the weeds of religious doctrine and history,” the Homeland Security unit warned in a set of guidelines it issued to other federal agencies. Don’t listen to “self-professed ‘Muslim reformers’,” the unit’s guidelines advised. The guidelines also called for rejecting the inclusion in the training materials of the fact, documented by a Muslim Brotherhood memo outlining its own strategic plan for America, that Islamists were intent on using our own democratic institutions and laws to subvert our system from within.

Here is what the Muslim Brotherhood memo said about its own strategic objective:

“The Ikhwan [Muslim Brotherhood] must understand that their work in America is a kind of grand jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within and ‘sabotaging’ its miserable house by their hands and the hands of the believers…”

Of all the constitutional freedoms granted to us in the Bill of Rights, none is more sacred than the right to free speech. That is why it stands apart from all other amendments at the top as the First Amendment. The Framers, having experienced the suppression of free speech firsthand, were cognizant of the tyranny ruling monarchs and assorted despots could impose by suppressing speech and sought to make clear that this was a sacred right that with few exceptions was not to be infringed upon.

But in recent years, we’ve witnessed an unrelenting assault on free speech with a concerted effort by the regressive Left to curtail thought and restrict the free exchange of ideas. Last week, I wrote about campus terrorism and how conservatives and others who maintain views that are inconsistent with the leftist narrative have been subjected to campaigns of harassment and abuse by campus hooligans.

Often university officials are apathetic, turning a blind eye to these transgressions, while in other universities the administration is complicit by instructing campus police to stand down, allowing the agitators free reign to shut down speaking engagements through use of bullying tactics. In at least two instances, university presidents were forced to issue rather craven apologies to an alliance of leftists and Islamists for having the temerity to defend the right to free speech.

This disturbing trend of muzzling free speech has now substantially broadened to include criminalizing speech that issues challenges to the so-called science of climate change. Some seventeen left-leaning state attorneys general have launched investigative and intrusive probes against Exxon Mobil and conservative groups because of their involvement in debunking alarmist claims of imminent doom issued by hysterical climate change proponents.

The ringleaders of this anti-free speech witch hunt include Eric Schneiderman (D-New York) and Claude Walker (I-Virgin Islands). At a recent speech at the Bloomberg’s Big Law Business Summit, Schneiderman was dismissive of his critics, accusing them of “First Amendment opportunism.” The more he spoke the more he sounded like Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Turkey’s thuggish dictator who utilized the vast resources of the state to silence anyone who disagreed with him.

On June 16, 2016 John Brennan, the Director of the Central Intelligence Agency, testified before a hearing conducted by the Senate Intelligence Committee on the various threats and challenges that confront our nation, including the growth of the Chinese military and its expanding sphere of influence and the threats posed to the United States, our allies and other countries around the world by ISIS. C-SPAN posted a video of the hearing.

The title of the report posted by Fox News in covering that hearing pulled no punches and left nothing to the imagination: “CIA Director Warns of ISIS Using Refugee Streams to Move Operatives .”

Here is the way that Brennan articulated his concerns on this issue in his prepared testimony:

Since at least 2014, ISIL has been working to build an apparatus to direct and inspire attacks against its foreign enemies, resulting in hundreds of casualties. The most prominent examples are the attacks in Paris and Brussels, which we assess were directed by ISIL’s leadership.

We judge that ISIL is training and attempting to deploy operatives for further attacks. ISIL has a large cadre of Western fighters who could potentially serve as operatives for attacks in the West. And the group is probably exploring a variety of means for infiltrating operatives into the West, including refugee flows, smuggling routes, and legitimate methods of travel.

Meanwhile, even as Brennan voiced his concerns about the multitude of ways that terrorists were on the move around the world and seeking to attack the United States and its allies in the West, the administration continues to admit ever more refugees into the United States who cannot be effectively vetted.

The hearing that focused on the concerns of the CIA Director was not, however, the only hearing conducted last week in Washington that provided disturbing information about how our immigration system is likely to be exploited by terrorists.

On June 14, 2016 the Washington Times article “Illegal immigrants who overstay visas hardly ever caught, feds admit” reported on a hearing conducted by the House Committee on Homeland Security on the topic, “Overstaying Their Welcome: National Security Risks Posed by Visa Overstays.”

The seventeen attorneys general who have been pursuing “climate deniers” for prosecution have been put on notice: turnabout is fair play. If Democrats can use the force of law to silence climate change narratives they deem to be fraudulent, so can Republicans. This is not a road anyone should want to go down, but fascistic Democrats have left Republicans with no choice. A group of Republican AGs along with Republicans on the House science panel have decided to push back.

On June 15, the Republican AGs of Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas, Louisiana, Michigan, Nebraska, Nevada, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Texas, Utah and Wisconsin sent a letter to the Democrat AGs pointing out that if statements minimizing the risks of climate change are prosecutable as “fraud,” then so are statements exaggerating the dangers of climate change.

Via the Washington Times:

The “cuts both ways” argument was among those raised by 13 Republican attorneys general in a letter urging their Democratic counterparts to stop using their law enforcement power against fossil fuel companies and others that challenge the climate change catastrophe narrative.

Consider carefully the legal precedent and threat to free speech, said the state prosecutors in their letter this week, headed by Alabama Attorney General Luther Strange.

“If it is possible to minimize the risks of climate change, then the same goes for exaggeration,” said the letter. “If minimization is fraud, exaggeration is fraud.”

The letter comes as Exxon Mobil fights off subpoenas by two prosecutors — Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey and Virgin Islands Attorney General Claude E. Walker — for decades’ worth of climate-related documents and communications with academics, universities and free-market think tanks.

New York Attorney General Eric T. Schneiderman and California Attorney General Kamala Harris have also reportedly launched probes.

The 17 attorneys general — 16 Democrats and one independent — announced at a March 29 press conference that they had formed a coalition, AGs United for Clean Power.

“We think this effort by our colleagues to police the global warming debate through the power of the subpoena is a grave mistake,” said the letter.

The name of the coalition itself shows that the attorneys general “have taken the unusual step of aligning themselves with the competition of their investigative targets,” namely the solar and wind energy.

“If the focus is fraud, such alignment by law enforcement sends the dangerous signal that companies in certain segments of the energy market need not worry about their misrepresentations,” said the GOP letter.

Schneiderman spokesman Eric Soufer insisted in a statement that “the law is clear: the First Amendment does not give any corporation the right to commit fraud.”