RUTHFULLY YOURS

The VA inspector general has issued a scathing report accusing a Colorado VA clinic of manufacturing wait time data and delaying treatment for hundreds of veterans.

Washington Times:

Employees at a Colorado Springs VA clinic incorrectly reported wait times for veterans, making it appear that they got their appointments sooner than they actually did, while at least 288 veterans had to wait longer than the government’s 30-day target for an appointment, a federal watchdog said Thursday.

The VA inspector general found that 64 percent of veterans faced excessive wait times at the PFC Floyd K. Lindstrom Outpatient Clinic.

Excessive wait times ranged from 31 days to 200 days.

Staffers are also required to put veterans facing long wait times for appointments on the Veterans Choice List, which allows patients to receive outside care. However, investigators found that, for 288 veterans with excessive wait times, staffers either did not add them to the list in a timely manner or did not add them to the list at all.

One hundred veterans were denied care because they were not added to the list.

It was not made clear in the report whether staffers deliberately falsified records to make wait times appear shorter.

Amid the chaos of the 2009 holiday travel season, jihadists planned to slaughter 290 innocent travelers on a Christmas Day flight from the Netherlands to Detroit, Michigan. Twenty-three-year old Nigerian Muslim Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab intended to detonate Northwest Airlines Flight 253, but the explosives in his underwear malfunctioned and brave passengers subdued him until he could be arrested. The graphic and traumatic defeat they planned for the United States failed, that time.

Following the attempted attack, President Obama threw the intelligence community under the bus for its failure to “connect the dots.” He said, “this was not a failure to collect intelligence, it was a failure to integrate and understand the intelligence that we already had.”
Most Americans were unaware of the enormous damage to morale at the Department of Homeland Security, where I worked, his condemnation caused. His words infuriated many of us because we knew his administration had been engaged in a bureaucratic effort to destroy the raw material—the actual intelligence we had collected for years, and erase those dots. The dots constitute the intelligence needed to keep Americans safe, and the Obama administration was ordering they be wiped away.

President Obama has forbidden immigration authorities to enforce the law at the border, bringing back the Bush-era “catch and release” policy that allows illegals to go their merry way after they’ve been caught entering the country illegally.

It led one border agent to remark, “We might as well abolish our immigration laws altogether.”

Washington Times:

The Obama administration has revived the maligned illegal immigrant “catch-and-release” policy of the Bush years, ordering Border Patrol agents not to bother arresting and deporting many new illegal immigrants, the head of the agents’ labor union revealed Thursday.

Brandon Judd, president of the National Border Patrol Council, told Congress that Homeland Security was embarrassed by the number of illegal immigrants not showing up for their deportation hearings, but instead of cracking down on the immigrants, the department ordered agents not to arrest them in the first place — meaning they no longer need to show up for court.

Mr. Judd said the releases are part of President Obama’s “priorities” program, which orders agents to worry chiefly about criminals, national security risks and illegal immigrants who came into the U.S. after Jan. 1, 2014. Mr. Judd said illegal immigrants without serious criminal convictions have learned that by claiming they came before 2014 — without even needing to show proof — they can be released immediately rather than being arrested.

President Barack Obama’s Wednesday speech at the Islamic Society mosque in Baltimore, a venue tainted by a long history of preaching radicalism, summarizes his thinking about Islam and national security. That address has troubling implications and deserves detailed scrutiny.
OBAMA: “[I]f we’re serious about freedom of religion—and I’m speaking now to my fellow Christians who remain the majority in this country—we have to understand an attack on one faith is an attack on all our faiths . . . We have to reject a politics that seeks to manipulate prejudice or bias, and targets people because of religion.”

FACTS: The implication is that Islam (with over 3,000 active mosques) is under attack in America, and that Obama’s “fellow Christians” are the culprits who need to listen. Since 9/11 89 Americans have been killed in 48 separate attacks of deadly Islamic terror in the U.S. while one Muslim was killed in an apparent “revenge” attack during the same period. Only Muslims routinely target members of other faiths on American soil. The number of Muslims involved in terrorism in the U.S. rose dramatically in 2015: it more than doubled over 2014. Two-thirds of them were born in America. The resulting public perceptions are not based on prejudice or bias, but on reason and empirical evidence.

If you’re a white male looking for a job, your search just got harder.

Claiming women aren’t getting paid enough, President Obama wants to make it easier to accuse employers of gender discrimination and hit them with class-action lawsuits. A new regulation proposed on Friday will require all employers with 100 or more workers to report how much their workforce is paid, broken down by race and gender.

The rule, slated to go into effect in September 2017, will cause headaches for employers and anyone – man or woman – who works hard and expects to get ahead based on merit. The winners are federal bean counters, class-action lawyers and the Democratic Party, which is playing up the gender “wage gap” as usual during this election year.

Never mind that the gap is largely fiction. Or that Uncle Sam’s social engineers are foisting their cookie-cutter vision of a politically correct workplace on employers, denying them the freedom to hire and promote based on merit.

Race and gender discrimination is already against the law. As it should be. But seniority, education and merit often explain salary differences.

When Barack Obama visited the Muslim Brotherhood-linked Islamic Society of Baltimore on Wednesday, he said: “The first thing I want to say is two words that Muslim Americans don’t hear often enough: Thank you.”

While Obama has been President, Muslims have murdered non-Muslims, avowedly in the cause of Islam, at Fort Hood, Boston, Chattanooga, and San Bernardino, and attempted to do so in many, many other places. Imagine if armed Baptists screaming “Jesus is Lord” had committed murder, and explained that they were doing so in order to advance Christianity, in four American cities, and had attempted to do so in many others. Imagine that those killers were supporters of a global Christian movement that had repeatedly called for attacks on U.S. civilians and declared its determination to destroy the United States.

Imagine how incongruous it would be in that case for the President of the United States to visit a church and say: “The first thing I want to say is two words that Christian Americans don’t hear often enough: Thank you.” And imagine how unlikely it would be that Barack Obama would ever have done that.

But his visit to the Islamic Society of Baltimore was the apotheosis of the Muslim victimhood myth, as he signaled yet again to the world (and worldwide jihadis) that in the U.S., Muslims are victims, victims of unwarranted concern over jihad terror, and thus that concern is likely to lessen even more, as Obama dismantles still more of our counter-terror apparatus.

— Ben Sasse is the junior Republican U.S. senator from Nebraska and former president of Midland University. Jim DeMint, president of the Heritage Foundation, was formerly a Republican U.S. senator from South Carolina.

The land of the mostly free and the home of the brave.”

That sounds wrong, and it is. But “mostly free” is how the U.S. economy rates in the recently released 2016 Index of Economic Freedom. This is bad news for Americans in general, and especially unfortunate for our poorest, most vulnerable citizens.

A joint research product of the Heritage Foundation and the Wall Street Journal, the Index measures the economic freedom of nations based on ten criteria, including the rule of law, size of government, regulatory efficiency, and market openness. These factors affect how easily Americans from Nebraska to New York can climb ladders of opportunity, start businesses, and make a better life for their families. These are the things that really matter.

Nations such as Switzerland and Australia continue to rank among the ten freest economies in the world, while North Korea and Cuba remain on the bottom rungs — their citizens the victims of crippling economic repression.

The good news is that the average score for the 189 nations analyzed rose again this year. In other words, economic freedom overall advanced globally for the fourth year running. The bad news: Economic freedom declined here in the United States.

Our 2016 score is only 75.4 out of a possible 100 — well below the 80 points required to earn a “mostly free” rating. Indeed, the new score ties our previous worst — set in 1998. Put another way, all U.S. advances in economic freedom logged in the last 18 years have now been wiped out. As Americans, we shouldn’t have to settle for anything short of excellence — that’s not who we are.

America is exceptional because we are free. We are unique in history because we haven’t stood in line to ask a king, a court, or a bureaucracy for our freedoms. We have invented and invested, collaborated, and created great products, businesses, and services without government micromanagement.

rack Obama suffers from serious case of the real Islamophobia — fear of telling the truth about Islam. Even though a “progressive,” he says nary a word about the rampant misogyny and homophobia in Islam or about Sharia law whose medieval strictures are preferred by 51% of American Muslims. Nor does he seem to care that so few of these same American Muslims actively oppose radical Islam. The president prefers the Hamas-linked CAIR to courageous reformers like Dr. Zuhdi Jasser. But that’s no surprise. For Obama, radical Islam doesn’t even exist.

Instead, he claims American citizens are mistreating their Muslim brothers and sisters when anyone with a web browser can see that simply isn’t true and is yet another Obama lie. In fact, anti-Muslim acts in the USA are few and far less than those against Jews. According to the FBI, in 2014, 57% of hate crimes targeted Jews, only 16% Muslims. Moreover, hate crimes themselves are extremely infrequent in this country, only 1140 (again from 2014) in a nation with a population well over 320 million. Compare hate crimes to burglaries — 2,159,878, according to the FBI, in 2010 — and it becomes obvious how minuscule the threat is, particularly to Muslims. It’s almost non-existent.

Yet Obama continues to hector us about our anti-Muslim bias. Actually what he is demonstrating is an unconscious contempt for Muslims, treating them like children who need to be coddled. And as most parents know, coddling children is a sure way to ratify, even encourage, bad behavior.

Obama’s choice for his first mosque visit did just that. From Investor’s Business Daily:

President Obama is conferring legitimacy on a Baltimore mosque the FBI just a few years ago was monitoring as a breeding ground for terrorists, after arresting a member for plotting to blow up a federal building.