RUTHFULLY YOURS

If you want a monument to the failure of American schools, just look around a Bernie Sanders rally. It will be full of millennials, the 83 million people born between the early 1980s and 2000s. Most of them have been educated in schools that abandoned basic skills and knowledge, and put in their place curricula designed to “improve” human nature in order to conform to progressive utopian ideals. So instead of informed citizens, we have today’s “tolerant,” “sensitive,” and “diverse” narcissists whose heads are uniformly filled with intolerant leftwing dogma and unexamined political orthodoxy.

Exhibit one is the enthusiasm for socialism on the part of many millennials. This affection for a failed ideology in turn explains their attraction to an antique hippie and self-proclaimed socialist whose only jobs his whole life have been on the public payroll in a state with fewer people than Fresno County. So no surprise that in New Hampshire 83% of the under-30 vote went for Sanders, in Iowa 84%, and in Nevada 82%. That electoral approval, of course, is predicated on massive ignorance of socialism’s historical reality. In a 2010 New York Times/CBS poll, only 16% of millennials knew that socialism means some degree of government ownership of the economy. But it’s not just millennials: 43% of Democrats––and 56% of Democratic primary voters–– also view socialism favorably. That’s why Hillary Clinton is furiously tacking left in the primaries.

Nor do millennials know that Bernie’s advice to “look to countries like Denmark, like Sweden and Norway and learn from what they have accomplished for their working people,” ignores the fact that those countries have long been reforming their welfare states and liberalizing their economies, backing away from the failed dirigiste policies that excite the Berniacs. Denmark does have a generous welfare state, but high taxes on the middle class and a regressive Value Added Tax fund these benefits. This inconvenient truth contradicts Bernie’s claim that all his promised goodies can be paid for by punitively taxing “billionaires,” whose combined total wealth couldn’t pay for one year of the federal budget, let alone the trillions of dollars in unfunded social welfare liabilities.

But the flip side of this love of socialism is a strange hatred of capitalism, another consequence of the degeneration of our schools, which teach very little about the history and true nature of capitalism. So all that students know are what popular culture, movie actors, and progressives teach them with caricatures of capitalism as silly as Scrooge McDuck diving into piles of currency or pin-striped Mr. Moneybags lounging at Park Place.

Barack Obama announced Tuesday that he was finally fulfilling one of his foremost campaign promises and closing the Guantanamo Bay detention center. Usually the closing of a prison camp for enemy combatants signals the end of the war, and since Obama has never acknowledged that the U.S.’s defense against the global jihad is a war at all, it is fitting that he should end his presidency by closing the camp that so notoriously demonstrated otherwise. And besides, the jihadi leadership ranks need replenishing.

Certainly Obama has replenished them a great deal already. With as many as thirty percent of prisoners freed from Gitmo returning to the jihad, one would think that the Obama administration would pause and consider their plan very carefully before releasing more or transferring them to far less secure prisons inside the United States. That is, administration officials would pause and consider if they had any genuine concern for national security, but it is increasingly clear that they do not. After all, in January, al-Qaeda bomb expert Tariq Mahmoud Ahmed al-Sawah was released from Guantanamo.

What could possibly go wrong? What benefit could jihad terrorists possibly get from a bomb expert? And just last week, Fox News reported: “When Ibrahim al Qosi was released from Guantanamo Bay in 2012, a lawyer for the former Usama bin Laden aide said he looked forward to living a life of peace in his native Sudan. Three years later, Qosi has emerged as a prominent voice of Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, appearing in a number of AQAP propaganda videos — including a 50-minute lecture calling for the takeover of Saudi Arabia.”

And on the same day that Obama announced his plan to close Gitmo, a former Gitmo inmate was arrested in Spain for recruiting for the Islamic State. The arrest epitomized just how much Obama’s plan is rooted in Leftist fantasy that would prefer to ignore the global jihad, rather than in reality.

Here’s another example of Obama’s failed immigration policy threatening the public. Statistics from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) show that almost 90,000 illegal aliens considered a threat are not deported and eventually are released.

Washington Examiner:

Internal ICE figures show that in fiscal 2015, the agency encountered 152,393 illegal immigrants labeled a criminal threat, mostly in jails, but charged 64,116. About another 88,000 were not processed for deportation, according to the Center for Immigration Studies’ Jessica Vaughan.

The numbers are even worse for those who ICE asks local police and sheriffs to detain but never collect.

Under Obama’s recently announced Priority Enforcement Program, officials work with local police to arrest and deport criminal immigrants. In reality, that amounts to a phone call from ICE requesting local authorities hold the suspect for 48 hours after they’re set to be freed.

But several sheriffs from around the country say that just 35-40 percent of those held are ever seized by ICE, even after they’ve been released.

Richard W. Stanek, sheriff of Hennepin County in Minneapolis, said he had 75 illegals ICE wanted, but the agency only picked up about 35 percent. “And these are people that they want,” he told theWashington Examiner.

Susan Benton, sheriff of Florida’s Highlands County, said “mine would be much much lower.” Worse, she added, many are seized and sent to a federal facility in Miami and immediately released and return to her county.

It’s become a huge issue for local police. Benton said she wants to help ICE and hold illegal immigrants longer, but can’t legally. Often the result is more crime from the suspect and questions about why her department’s jail frees them.

A big reason why ICE doesn’t deport these criminal aliens is that the immigration courts are swamped:

Kang has been in America long enough to raise two sons and run a family-owned doughnut shop in Irving. After years of worrying, he thinks he’s about to find out his fate. Things look promising.

But Sims sets a merit hearing for Dec. 6, 2017.

“The great political irony is that Mr. Obama is the main cause of his own Guantanamo failure. If he hadn’t let Islamic State rise in Syria and Iraq, if he hadn’t let Libya become another terror incubator, and if he hadn’t let al Qaeda make a comeback via multiple local franchises, the American people might feel more relaxed about closing the terror prison. As the tide of war keeps rising, Americans know they need it.”

The day after he was first sworn in, President Obama issued an executive order declaring that he would shut down the terrorist detention camp at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba “no later than 1 year from the date of this order.” That was January 2009 in one of his first acts as President. Congress has since used its power of the purse to frustrate the President’s effort. So on Tuesday he said he’s going to try again in one of his last acts as President.

It’s not going to happen—at least not if Mr. Obama follows the law. Polls show the American people oppose closing Gitmo by about two to one, politicians in both parties oppose closing it, and the past seven years have taught that the camp plays an important role in keeping America safe.

One reason is because Americans have figured out that the alternative is bringing these terrorists to the mainland. It’s easy to call for Gitmo’s closure in the abstract. It’s harder to explain to voters why Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and other killers may soon move into a prison near you.

No doubt this explains why the Pentagon plan submitted to Congress on Tuesday is so vague on details—especially the names of the “appropriate site[s] in the continental United States” where the detainees would be sent. One likely destination would be the supermax prison in Florence, Colorado, which explains why Democratic Senator Michael Bennet rejects Mr. Obama’s plan.

The great political irony is that Mr. Obama is the main cause of his own Guantanamo failure. If he hadn’t let Islamic State rise in Syria and Iraq, if he hadn’t let Libya become another terror incubator, and if he hadn’t let al Qaeda make a comeback via multiple local franchises, the American people might feel more relaxed about closing the terror prison. As the tide of war keeps rising, Americans know they need it. READ MORE AT SITE

Financial markets are humbling. After spending forty-eight years working in the industry, one would think I would have learned some, if not many, of the answers. Not so. In my late teens, I met the president of a regional brokerage firm based in Boston. He told me that he had been in the business for several years and claimed he knew less each year. That is familiar territory. Financial markets are akin to discoveries about space. Just as boundaries to the latter keep expanding, complexities to the former become more ubiquitous. Just when we think we know the answer, something else gets added to the mix.

One ingredient this year is the campaign for President and the possible nominees. A recent Barron’s article spoke to the “Bernie and Donald factors.” They included a chart which contrasted the spike in their respective polls, beginning late last year, with a collapse in the S&P 500. Coincidence? I don’t know. Isolationism is troublesome to markets. While neither man campaigns as an isolationist, they both advocate policies that lead that way. Mr. Trump talks of imposing tariffs on goods imported from China. Senator Sanders recently stated: “Unfettered free trade has been a disaster for working Americans.” While the odds that either man will win the Presidency may not be high, it is impossible to avoid the fact that the popularity of both reflect the thinking of millions of Americans. Voters should not ignore the positive contributions that free trade and globalization have brought to man’s well being. To the extent the policies of Mr. Trump and Senator Sanders have economic consequences, they will be reflected in financial markets.

America’s intelligence agencies have a serious and difficult mission: protecting our national security from a world of diverse and changing threats. These include nuclear, military, terrorist, and economic threats from nation-states and non-state actors. China is a rapidly growing intelligence, military, and cyber threat. Russia has exploited a power vacuum in the Middle East caused by President Obama’s failure to exercise leadership in the region. ISIS, which did not exist in 2009, is now a global threat and could be planning new terrorist attacks with chemical weapons and dirty bombs.

Protecting our nation from such threats requires extremely competent and capable individuals to conduct intelligence operations and write analysis in challenging security and legal environments. This means the intelligence profession needs officers who will speak truth to power, obey the law, and resist pressure to politicize analysis.

CIA Director John Brennan apparently believes otherwise and that advancing President Obama’s political and social agendas should be an important part of the CIA’s mission. This may be why Brennan recently announced his “Diversity and Inclusion Strategy (2016–2019)” to make the CIA more diverse and politically correct. Brennan says in the introduction to this strategy:

Diversity at CIA is defined as the wide range of life experiences and backgrounds needed to ensure multiple perspectives that enable us to safeguard US national security. It encompasses the collection of individual attributes that together help Agencies pursue organizational objectives efficiently and effectively. These include but are not limited to characteristics such as national origin, language, race, color, disability, ethnicity, gender, age, religion, sexual orientation, gender identity, socio-economic status, veteran’s status and family structures.

Brennan has mandated “diversity and inclusion performance objectives for all CIA managers and supervisors and ultimately [for] the entire workforce,” so that CIA personnel must weigh diversity and gender figures in making key assignments and senior-level promotions. Brennan’s plan also includes agency-wide “unconscious bias” training.