RUTHFULLY YOURS

Don’t be fooled by last week’s headlines about more money and greater accountability at the Veterans Affairs Department. It’s the usual malarkey coming out of Washington. The prognosis for veterans who need health care remains poor, with vets likely to get the run-around and face delays again in 2016.

On Friday, Congress passed an omnibus spending bill for the coming year that allocates a whopping $163 billion to the Veterans Administration – even more than the department requested. But as long as the VA is riddled with corruption and saddled with job-protection rules that favor employees instead of vets, that’s throwing good money after bad.

As for the latest highly touted whistleblower-protection law signed by President Obama last Friday, there were whistleblower protections already on the books. What’s lacking is the will to enforce them. Adding more pages of laws won’t fix that.

The last whistleblower-protection law, passed in 2002, mandated training for VA employees in how to treat informants. VA facilities are wallpapered with posters announcing whistleblower safeguards. There’s an entire federal agency – the Office of Special Counsel – to protect them. Despite all this, VA executives penalize whistleblowers and get away with it.

There is a war on police.

It’s the post-Ferguson truth that every cop knows, but there is one man who has emerged as a passionate and articulate spokesman for law enforcement and is willing to call it a “war on police.”

“War had been declared on the American police officer led by some high profile people, one of them coming out of the White House, and one coming out of the United States Department of Justice,” he said. “And it’s open season right now.”

For decades, Sheriff David A. Clarke, Jr. put his life and his energies into protecting and serving the people of Milwaukee County. Though always a man of strong opinions, it was when the White House cheered a war on police and pushed through pro-crime policies, freeing drug dealers while locking up police officers that he emerged as a national figure of unquestionable moral authority.

When Attorney General Eric Holder met Sheriff Clarke he sneered, “What’s up with the hat?” Political opponents have mocked Sheriff Clarke as a “big cowboy.” And indeed, the Sheriff of Milwaukee County wears a cowboy hat and he can be seen riding a horse. He also preaches “cowboy values” like speaking frankly and telling people that they have to be ready to stand up to criminals.

In the wake of video disclosures earlier this year that Planned Parenthood employees appeared to be engaging in the sale of body parts obtained through abortions, Utah governor Gary Herbert ordered state agencies to end the practice of funneling federal grants to Planned Parenthood’s Utah affiliate. This required the state to end or not renew four contracts with Planned Parenthood — contracts involving sex education and testing for sexually transmitted diseases. Other states made similar decisions.

But Planned Parenthood of Utah immediately sued, asking for a temporary injunction. Their argument was that the decision to end the contracts was motivated by the governor’s opposition to abortion and had the effect of infringing the Utah affiliate’s constitutional rights to associate with other affiliates and to promote abortion.

As far-fetched as the argument for a constitutional obligation to fund Planned Parenthood and to maintain contracts with them would seem, the group had an initial legal victory at the end of September. A federal district court issued a terse opinion relying heavily on the idea that accusations stemming from the conduct disclosed in the videos had not been proven. The court assumed that the governor’s motivation for ending the state’s contracts with Planned Parenthood must have been motivated by unconstitutional reasons, and the judge ordered Herbert “to state in writing a legitimate basis” for defunding, declining to renew, or not issuing a contract to the organization.

The Roman philosopher and statesman Cicero insisted that gratitude was “the parent of all the other virtues.”

Cicero did not define gratitude as Mafia-like loyalty or mutual back-scratching. He was not referring to a pop socialism where all supposedly owe their successes to the government.

Instead, gratitude is proof of humility and offers perspective. It is an appreciation for others, often now dead, who have helped to make us what we are. Without it, we are narcissists and self-absorbed amnesiacs.

Unfortunately, our modern “me” generation has forgotten gratitude and replaced it with the art of victimization. Contemporary Americans prefer blaming others — parents, ancestors, their country, the world in general — for their own unhappiness while patting themselves on the back for anything that goes well.

Nowhere is the death of gratitude more acute than at our elite universities.

Today’s students hunt for micro-aggressions, slights that register only on their hypersensitive Richter scales of victimization. They pout over mean Halloween costumes, inauthentic ethnic food, or politically incorrect literature assignments. They are angry even at mute statues and century-old names chiseled on the arches of their ivy-covered halls.

We rarely hear students thank their parents, their universities, or the government for forking over an average of more than $30,000 per year to excuse them from the American rat race. An expensive education has become more a birthright than a gift from others.

Open borders, by any means necessary:

Nearly 100 Mexicans have sought to return to the U.S. by Wednesday’s deadline under the settlement of a class-action lawsuit that accused federal immigration officials in Southern California of failing to advise people of their rights.

The American Civil Liberties Union sued the Department of Homeland Security in 2013 over the use of a procedure to expel people from the country known as a voluntary return. Under the procedure, people surrender rights to appear before an immigration judge and can’t legally return to the U.S. for up to 10 years. The lawsuit claimed authorities threatened people into accepting the terms.

The government didn’t acknowledge wrongdoing but agreed to changes in California that include a revised form that spells out the consequences and options of a voluntary return, new training and procedures and an information hotline for detainees seeking legal aid. The government also agreed to let some Mexicans return to the U.S. to resume efforts to stay legally.

Of course it did. Because, in the progressives’ view of the Constitution they despise, constitutional protections apply to everybody in the world — except, of course, real Americans.

http://www.wsj.com/articles/notable-quotable-mark-twain-1450913993

A letter from Mark Twain, Dec. 23, 1890, to the editor of the New York World newspaper:

It is my heart-warm and world-embracing Christmas hope and aspiration that all of us—the high, the low, the rich, the poor, the admired, the despised, the loved, the hated, the civilized, the savage—may eventually be gathered together in a heaven of everlasting rest and peace and bliss—except the inventor of the telephone.

It seems like a new development, but of course it has been under way for some time: a wave of extreme assimilationism, much in the form of anti-Israel agitation, in non-Orthodox American synagogues. I am writing from Brownstone Brooklyn where this neo-Hellenism seems particularly rampant.

First, there is the extreme form, (still) relatively rare: “brit shalom.”

Here is a frequently-heard witticism at a brit (or bris), a circumcision ceremony: iz shver tsu zeyn a yid, it’s hard to be a Jew. But now there are people who have found a way around the problem: let’s not do it, the circumcision, let’s just say we did. This “non-cutting naming ceremony for Jewish boys” is disingenuously called Brit Shalom, provided by the “Jews Against Circumcision.“ We are told that there are 216 “celebrants” who will (for a fee) perform the service, among them 132 rabbis, or at least people who say they are.

As it happens, two of these “celebrants” — David Mivasair of Vancouver and Brat Rosen of Chicago — enjoy considerable public attention because of their leadership positions in the radical anti-Israel group Jewish Voice for Peace. Both men hold ordination from the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College, home of the bulk of anti-Israel rabbis. But despite each man’s vigorous protestation, there is doubt about the extent to which either can be called Jewish at all. While Mivasair had his nominally Jewish congregation in Vancouver, he also, at the same time, held the title of Chaplain at the United Church of Canada. Rosen, while Rabbi of Tzedek Chicago, is also, simultaneously, the Midwest Regional Director of the Quakers’ American Friends Service Committee,

An explicit embrace of non-Jewish religion, though rare among self-described Jews, is not confined to men like Mivasair and Rosen who affiliate with Christian groups. The late Zalman Schachter-Shalomi, one of the fathers of the Jewish Renewal movement, was also a practitioner of both Buddhism and Sufism. At the time of his death he held the (modestly named) World Wisdom Chair at the (Buddhist) Naropa Institute of Colorado, and, if that weren’t enough, he was also described as a Sufi shaikh, whatever that means.

www.HumanRightsVoices.org.

Over at the United Nations, they are laying the groundwork for the 2016 American presidential election — on behalf of the Democratic party. The perceived golden ticket? Playing the victim card. Wild and repeated accusations are being hurled against the GOP of systematic racism, xenophobia, and, in particular, “Islamophobia.”

On December 18, 2015, the U.N. hosted two panels under the title “The Changing Dynamics of Islamophobia and Its Implications on Peaceful and Inclusive Societies.”

The predominant theme was victimhood. There were frequent mentions of 9/11, but not of the 2,977 who died, or their families. The alleged victims of 9/11 of interest to the U.N. gathering were the entirety of American Muslims. MuslimGirl.net editor Amani Al-Khatahtbeh told the U.N. audience: “I was in fourth grade when 9/11 happened. So I had to endure the height of Islamophobia during my formative years.” Wajahat Ali of Al Jazeera America said that 9/11 was “a baptism by fire. . . . As a result of that pain and trauma of 9/11, for my generation there is always a pre- and post-9/11.”

Each instance of radical Islamist terror was flipped the same way. Co-host Ufuk Gokcen, the U.N. representative of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation, had a long list of incidents bracketed by events in America: “9/11 terrorist attacks . . . and San Bernardino terrorist attacks. The level that Islamophobia has reached, and its mainstreaming into media and political discourse, is terrifying us.”

As we approach the final year of Barack Obama’s presidency, there isn’t much that the president can do to change people’s opinion of him, for better or worse. His legacy, barring some extraordinary occurrence — including an extraterrestrial one, as the holiday advertising blitz for the new Independence Day movie reminds us — is baked into history.

Setting aside legislation and executive action (on which more imminently), we note that one of President Obama’s chief accomplishments has been to return the Constitution to a central place in our public discourse.

Unfortunately, the president fomented this upswing in civic interest not by talking up federalism or the separation of powers but by blatantly violating the strictures of our founding document. With his pen and his phone, and hearkening to Woodrow Wilson’s progressive view of government, he’s been taking out his frustrations with the checks and balances that inhibit his ability to “fundamentally transform” the country.