RUTHFULLY YOURS

Yellow-cab rides could soon be driving New Yorkers completely crazy if the City Council passes a new bill that would eliminate written English tests for aspiring hacks.

The proposal would allow drivers to get their hack licenses with just a cursory oral exam and without offering any proof they can read or write the language, including traffic signs.

Councilman Ydanis Rodriguez (D-Manhattan), chair of the council Transportation Committee, introduced the bill amid an exodus of yellow-cab drivers to app-based car services like Uber and Lyft.

He insisted cab riders wouldn’t notice a difference.

“Effective communication between rider and driver is key for any ride and this is not in jeopardy with this bill,” Rodriguez said.

Cab riders were skeptical on Friday Nicholas Grimaldi, a development specialist from Chelsea, said hacks need to be more than just barely conversational in English.

http://jamieglazov.com/2016/01/16/daniel-greenfield-moment-islams-american-identity-crisis/

This special edition of The Glazov Gang presents The Daniel Greenfield Moment with Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center who writes the blog The Point at Frontpagemag.com.

Daniel discussed Islam’s American Identity Crisis, explaining the pathological process of confusing your way to theocracy.

Don’t miss it!

Yes, it’s now gotten to the point where the Muslim student president of the self-described “pro-Israel” J Street U is given the forum of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency to tell Jews to be better pro-Israel advocates by fighting Israel’s “Occupation.”

J Street U gave this University of Maryland student a megaphone which she’s using to attack Israel, and now she’s being given a “Jewish” media outlet to amplify her anti-Israel, pro-Palestinian Arab message.

Amna Farooqi, the J Street U president, seized upon another editorial from another leader of a Jewish organization brought to you by the JTA, David Bernstein of the Jewish Council on Public Affairs.

Bernstein, in turn, was warning Jewish Americans that in order to defeat the BDS (Boycott of, Divestment from and Sanctions against Israel) Movement, Jews should start developing partnerships with various social justice groups “on the mainstream left.”

Bernstein wrote that the BDS movement is teaming up with other “social justice” organizations to together fight against Israel, and so he urged pro-Israel folks to ape this coalition building and thereby fight this “intersectionality” of “other oppressed groups” making alliances with anti-Israel groups.

Farooqi added the next step, which is that the best thing pro-Israel groups can do to defeat this intersectionality dilemma would be to join up with other groups opposing…what, other anti-Israel groups? Nope. Maybe pro-Israel groups should join together with organizations fighting against ISIS? Nope. How about suggesting pro-Israel groups create a coalition with organizations fighting for human rights for persecuted Christians in the Middle East? Nope.

Farooqi suggests the coalition pro-Israel groups should join are those progressives who are attacking Israel for engaging in the “Occupation” of Palestinian Arab land. No joke.

BOSTON, Jan 15 (Reuters) – Several Boston-area schools were evacuated following a series of telephone bomb threats, police and media said on Friday.
No injuries or explosions were reported.
Boston police were called to Boston College High School after school officials received a recorded threat and students were put on lockdown, according to a Boston Police Department spokeswoman.

St. Agnes School, a Roman Catholic elementary school in the Boston suburb of Arlington was also evacuated following a bomb threat, Arlington police said.

Two middle schools in Weymouth, a suburb south of Boston, were also evacuated following bomb threats, the Boston Globe reported, citing school officials.

Dalia Mogahed, formerly Barack Obama’s adviser on Muslim affairs, appeared on Trevor Noah’s sinking-like-a-stone Daily Show last week, to explain to a worshipful Noah and an adoring audience that the hijab represented nothing more or less than the “privatization of women’s sexuality” – and who on earth but the most benighted lout could possibly be against that? The burning outrage of Mogahed’s words was probably missed by most Daily Show viewers. It should not be missed by FrontPage readers.

“The privatization of women’s sexuality.” A well-constructed and extraordinarily clever phrase, to be sure. With it, Mogahed suggests that the only people who could possibly object to women wearing hijabs are those who want to objectify women as sexual commodities. In this, we glimpse the subtle manipulation by which Islamic supremacists such as Mogahed have co-opted and silenced feminists whom one might otherwise have expected to have stood up against the Sharia oppression of women. How can one stand with the objectifiers, the pornographers, the users, the haters, against those who simply want to “privatize” their sexuality?

The audience loved this. Noah ate it up. But there are a few audiences before whom Mogahed’s extremely clever act might not play quite as well as it did before the Daily Show. Aqsa Parvez’s Muslim father choked her to death with her hijab after she refused to wear it. Aqsa might have a few choice words for Dalia Mogahed about “privatization” of her sexuality. And then there was Amina Muse Ali, who was a Christian woman in Somalia whom Muslims murdered because she wasn’t wearing a hijab. Forty women were murdered in Iraq in 2007 for not wearing the hijab. They might wish that their sexuality had been a trifle less “privatized” – at least enough for them to be able to continue to breathe air.

Flint, Mich., has been poisoning its residents.

The city, in an attempt to save money, planned to stop buying water from Detroit and sign up with a regional water system; in the interim, it was getting its municipal water from the Flint River, which is as much a garbage dump as it is a body of water. Residents complained that the water smells of chemicals, that it isn’t the right color, etc. Children’s lead levels are dangerously high, and an outbreak of Legionnaires’ disease may also be linked to city water. The city knew about this, and did approximately nothing in response until the problem was well advanced.

A word that is curiously scarce in coverage of this disaster: Democrat.

Flint, like big brother Detroit down the way, has a long history of political dominance by the Democratic party. Its current mayor is a Democrat; so was her predecessor; the mayor before him, Don Williamson, was a career criminal (he did time for various scams some years back) and a Democrat who resigned under threat of recall; his immediate predecessor, Democrat James W. Rutherford, is a longtime politico and was elected to finish out the term of Woodrow Stanley, who was recalled because of the financial state in which he left the city.

Stanley was in effect replaced by — Democrat — Darnell Earley, former director of the Democratic legislative caucus’s research-and-policy team, who became the city’s emergency manager. Earley is the Democrat the other Democrats blame for changing the city’s water supply, and the Michigan Democratic party has demanded his termination.

The Obama administration knew about this, too, and had known for a long time, since February of last year at least — but it chose to keep quiet on the matter.

Can a drug company be held liable for following the directions of federal regulators on warning labels? Johnson & Johnson did exactly that, only to be slapped with a $63 million jury verdict in Massachusetts for inadequate warnings. The Supreme Court is being asked to hear J&J’s appeal in a case with major implications for uniform national business regulation.

In 2003 Richard Reckis treated his seven-year-old daughter Samantha with over-the-counter Children’s Motrin for a fever. Samantha developed a rare and advanced case of Stevens-Johnson syndrome called toxic epidermal necrolysis which caused skin blistering, as well as lung, liver and vision damage. Her parents sued Johnson & Johnson in state court for failing to alert buyers to the potential side effects, and the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court affirmed the jury verdict.

The legal problem is that the federal Food and Drug Administration had rejected the specific labelling enhancement that lawyers for the Reckis family say should have been applied. In 2005 what’s known as a Citizen Petition to the FDA suggested that Motrin should include language on “serious skin reactions” and “potentially life-threatening diseases” and specify the names of some of the conditions.

The FDA agreed on the need for improved warnings about skin reactions, but it said it would not be helpful to include a mention of “life-threatening” conditions or the names of the conditions, which most people were unfamiliar with. Instead, the agency said, “a description of symptoms” was more appropriate for the over-the-counter medication. J&J would have been defying federal regulatory guidelines if it had included the warning that the Reckis lawsuit claims should have been on the bottle.

The legal doctrine at issue is federal pre-emption, and in 2009 the U.S. Supreme Court ruled (Wyeth v. Levine) that some state court lawsuits against drug companies over warning labels are pre-empted by federal law if the FDA has made its opinion on labelling clear. While some cases might require guessing about FDA directions, in this case the FDA was asked to consider a specific warning and rejected it.

Dr. Coburn is a physician and former Republican senator from Oklahoma. He serves as an adviser to Project FDA at the Manhattan Institute.

In his State of the Union address on Tuesday, President Obama called for America to become “the country that cures cancer once and for all.” As a three-time cancer survivor (metastatic colon, metastatic melanoma and metastatic prostate), I can tell you that this “moonshot,” as Vice President Joe Biden first called it, is a bold goal—but one within our grasp.

Last week’s report from the American Cancer Society shows that cancer mortality is down more than 20% over the past 20 years. Many patients are living longer thanks to better treatments and earlier detection. Science is tipping the odds of survival in favor of patients.
Ironically, we’re handicapping ourselves in the war on cancer, in part because of a web of privacy regulations like the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act. HIPAA makes it difficult for researchers to tap into large caches of clinical and genomic data shared across multiple institutions or firms, and then share their findings more broadly.

The law allows some research uses, but only if the uses (and informed patient consent) are specified in advance. As one analyst put it, “because obtaining [consent] from huge numbers of people or [institutional review board] waivers ranges from the impracticable to the impossible, important research has gone undone and important findings unshared.”

Harnessing that information—“big data”—would allow us to personalize prevention and treatment based on the genetic characteristics of a patient’s tumor, family history and personal preferences, while minimizing unwanted side effects. But today cancers are often fought “off the grid.” Patients whose cancers resist standard treatment, or whose tumors reappear years later, are medical puzzles. Their doctors cobble together treatments through intuition, experience and case studies scattered in the medical literature.

The clinical trials that pharmaceutical companies rely on for FDA approval and drug labeling capture too little of the information patients and physicians need. The trials only enroll 3% of cancer patients and can take years and tens of millions of dollars to finish. Many trials never enroll enough patients to get off the ground.

Janet Levy,Los Angeles writes

“More Pakistanis and Afghans (including 4 know Islamic State operatives) on the terror watch carrying American passports entered the United States in October than in the prior 12 month period. These potential jihadists are being transported on remote farm roads instead of interstates and being stashed in Acala, Texas, a ghost town outside of El Paso within easy access of a state highway.Judicial Watch (JW) reports the existence of an ISIS camp within a few miles from El Paso and another camp within proximity of Deming and Columbus, New Mexico.Reportedly, Texas Congressman (Beto O’Rourke) contacted local FBI, Homeland Security Investigations and Border Patrol officers in an effort to identify and possibly intimidate sources that may have been used by JW to break the story of the nearby ISIS camps.There is growing cooperation at our southern border between organized crime and terrorist groups, including Hezbollah, to finance terrorism, launder money and smuggle people and drugs into the U.S.See the report below from New York Analysis of Policy and Government. ”

More Pakistanis and Afghans, including those of military age, carrying U.S. passports, and on the terror watch list illegally entered the United States in the first month of this fiscal year (October) than in all of FY2015 (September 2014 to October 2015), According to a San Diego Reader report.

Rep. Duncan Hunter (R-California) in a recent letter to Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson, stated:
“It is routinely said that there is no ‘specific and credible information about an attack on the homeland.’ Despite this assertion, the Southern land border remains vulnerable to intrusion and exists as a point of vulnerability. And evidently there are criminal organizations and individuals with the networks and the knowhow to facilitate illegal entry into the United States without regard for one’s intentions or status on a terror watch list. The detention of two Pakistani nationals underscores the fact that any serious effort to secure our homeland must include effective border security and immigration enforcement.”
According to the San Diego Reader, “Muhammad Azeem and Muktar Ahmad, both in their 20s, surrendered to U.S. Border Patrol agents in September, according to Immigration and Customs Enforcement. One was listed on the Terrorist Screening Database for ‘associations with a known or suspected terrorist. The other was a positive match for derogatory information in an alternative database,’ according to Hunter’s letter. Azeem and Ahmad are among dozens of men – described by Border Patrol agents as “military age and carrying U.S. cash” who began entering the U.S. through a Tijuana-based human-smuggling pipeline in September.”

http://bigpeace.com/hfontova/2011/05/12/rapper-who-hails-stalinist-mass-murderer-invited-to-white-house/
For inviting the rapper-“poet” named “Common,” to the White House, our First Lady is currently taking some heat. Common’s lyric, it appears, are a trifle “racy,” plus in his “poetry,” he hails Black-Panther/Cop-killer Joanne “Assata Shakur” Chesimard.

Hip-hop artist Kendrick Lamar, whose latest album boasts a controversial cover and explicit lyrics, met with President Obama in the Oval Office on Monday.

The two reportedly discussed a variety of issues. The White House has not commented on the content of the meeting but Lamar said in a “Pay It Forward” PSA that they talked about topics related to the inner cities and the importance of youth -mentoring programs.

The PSA was created in support of the National Mentoring Partnership, which supports affiliate mentorship programs, and featured photos of Grammy-winner Lamar with Obama. The president declared January National Mentoring Month.

Obama has said the rapper’s “How Much a Dollar Cost” was his favorite song of 2015.

That was off Lamar’s “To Pimp A Butterfly” album, which shows a group of African-American men in front of the White House holding champagne bottles and hundred-dollar bills on top of the dead body of a white judge.

During an interview last year, Lamar commented on the meaning of the cover.

“You look at these individuals and you look at them as bad people or a menace to society, but they’re actually good people, just a product of their environment,” he said. “Only God can judge these individuals right here. Not no one with a gavel handing out football numbers of years and not giving these kids a chance at life. Every n**** is a star.”