RUTHFULLY YOURS

Our dysfunctional federal government’s bungling is killing people.

Example: Every year, more than half a million patients undergoing a common medical procedure risk getting a superbug infection because their doctor is using a contaminated instrument. A doctor inserts a thin, tubular scope down your throat and into your digestive system to treat cancer and other problems. You assume the tube is clean. Think again.

The scope’s defective design allows bacteria to grow even after it’s rigorously cleaned between patients. The Food and Drug Administration, whose job is to ensure the safety of medical devices, has known about this problem since 2012 but dawdled while patients died. Three months ago, Olympus, the manufacturer of most of these specialized scopes (duodenoscopes), began recalling them.

Yet numerous hospitals are still using them, and patients are still getting infected and dying – eight more infections and two more deaths according to last month’s FDA data.

Even at prestigious institutions such as UCLA Medical Center, New York-Presbyterian, Hartford Hospital in Connecticut, Massachusetts General in Boston and Thomas Jefferson University Hospital in Philadelphia, patients have been infected with superbugs from contaminated duodenoscopes.

When hospitals fail to warn patients about the risk, it makes a mockery of the idea that patients are giving “informed consent” before the procedure, says medical-safety expert Lawrence Muscarella.

Worse, the FDA and another federal agency, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, go along with the hush-up about which hospitals are having a problem. These agencies are supposed to work for us – the public – but clearly they’re siding with the hospitals. The FDA is stonewalling about where the two most recent deaths occurred.

In the wake of the terror attacks in Belgium, news reports once again focused on how so-called “No Go Zones” in Europe create neighborhoods where communities develop that, although are geographically located within major cities, insulate themselves from their surroundings, fostering the mindset that cooperating with law enforcement is dangerous and even traitorous.

The residents eye law enforcement officers with great suspicion if not outright animosity. The situation is exacerbated because while they fear law enforcement, they may well also fear their neighbors who may take revenge against them for cooperating with law enforcement.

These neighborhoods become “cultural islands” that eschew the cultures and values of the cities and countries in which they grow — a virtual malignancy that ultimately comes to threaten its host city and country because within this cocoon radical Islamists are shielded from law enforcement, find shelter and support and an ample supply of potential terror recruits.

These communities are inhabited by many Muslim refugees who cannot be effectively screened.

This makes assimilation by the residents of these isolated communities unlikely if not impossible and creates breeding grounds for crime and, in this era and under these circumstances- breeding grounds for terrorism.

While there are no actual “No Go Zones” in the United States, there are neighborhoods scattered around the United States, where the concentration of ethnic immigrant minorities is so great that police find themselves unable to make the sort of inroads that they should be able to make in order to effectively police these communities. Adding to the high density of these aliens in these communities is the issue of foreign languages often being the prevalent language in such “ghettos.” This gives new meaning to the term “Language Barrier.”

Another attempt by the Obama administration to run out the clock on a scandal.

For more than three years, the Treasury Department has been looking into fraud committed by solar companies who received taxpayer loans from the Obama administration. But they have yet to release their findings, and Congress wants to know what the hell is going on.

Daily Caller:

Republicans senators sent a letter Monday to Treasury Inspectors General Eric Thorson and J. Russell George, asking the officials for updates regarding the agency’s investigation into solar companies that inflated the market value of their products to get more taxpayer cash.

“As you are aware, the Department recently indicated that applicants included ineligible costs or otherwise overstated the value of their solar energy investments by claiming approximately $1.3 billion in unwarranted cash grants,” Republican senators, led by Jeff Flake of Arizona and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, wrote in a letter to Treasury officials obtained by The Daily Caller News Foundation.

The Treasury Department said it would publish its findings by June 2015, but that never happened. Republicans are once again hammering the agency for not releasing the results of a probe into whether taxpayers were fleeced for billions of dollars.

Republicans noted the amount of potential solar energy fraud was “more than two-and-a-half times the amount of the Solyndra default.”

Republicans wrote to the department in November asking for the status of their investigation into solar companies, and lawmakers are again asking for Treasury officials to handover the “final results of your investigations.”

“Based on the information available, we remain concerned that the 1603 cash grant program and the administration of the investment tax credits lack sufficient transparency, oversight and enforcement to protect taxpayers,” Murkowski and her colleagues wrote to the Treasury in November.

Despite warnings that Muslim terrorists remain a grave threat to the United States, President Obama gave two dangerous veteran jihadists at Guantanamo Bay get-out-of-jail-free cards earlier this month.

Emptying out Guantanamo is a longtime goal of Obama. Shuttering the terrorist detention facility located on U.S.-held territory in Cuba has been a goal of President Obama, going back at least to the campaign trail in 2008. He wants to close the prison camp and unleash the worst of the worst among Islamic terrorists, allowing them to wreak havoc and kill more Americans. Violent Muslim militants are merely misunderstood people from a foreign culture, in Obama’s view, and setting them free is just the right thing to do as he sees it.

Obama doesn’t give a farthing’s cuss about the prospect of these hardened terrorists returning to the glories of jihad-fighting after leaving Gitmo. Terrorists, freedom fighters — why quibble? They’re all more or less the same to the president.

The first newly freed detainee, Salem Abdul Salem Ghereby (also known as Rafdat Muhammad Faqi Aljj Saqqaf, Falen Gherebi, and Salim Gherebi), a 55-year-old Libyan national, was transferred to Senegal on April 3.

Senegal, a French-speaking country on Africa’s western coast, also accepted Ghereby’s comrade-in-jihad, Omar Khalifa Mohammed Abu Bakr (also known as Omar Khalif Mohammed Abu Baker Mahjoub, Omar Mohammed Khalifh, and Omar Mohamad Khalifah), another Libyan national who is thought to be 43 or 44 years old.

Why Senegal? Perhaps because about 95 percent of Senegal’s up to 14 million inhabitants are Muslims.

Although Senegal “has shown no signs of jihadist terrorism” and its government has cracked down on terrorist financing and money laundering in the region, it is bordered by Islamist violence-plagued Mali and Mauritania. According to the American Foreign Policy Council, there are concerns that Senegal “presents a potential ‘backdoor’ for radical, jihadist Islam, which already exhibits a major presence in rapidly-changing North Africa.”

According to a 2008 Department of Defense report, Ghereby was a member of the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG) also known as Al-Jama’a al-Islamiyyah al-Muqatilah bi-Libya, which is reportedly tied to al-Qaeda.

IRS Commissioner John Koskinen struggled to explain on Tuesday why the IRS has been allowing illegal immigrants to illegally use Social Security numbers that don’t belong to them. Sen. Dan Coats, R-Ind. asked Koskinen to shed light on the practice during a Senate Finance Committee session focused on cybersecurity issues on Tuesday.

Via the Washington Examiner:

“What we learned is that … the IRS continues to process tax returns with false W-2 information and issue refunds as if they were routine tax returns, and say that’s not really our job,” Coats said. “We also learned the IRS ignores notifications from the Social Security Administration that a name does not match a Social Security number, and you use your own system to determine whether a number is valid.”

Koskinen replied, “What happens in these situations is someone is using a Social Security number to get a job, but they’re filing their tax return with their [taxpayer identification number].” What that means, he said, is that “they are undocumented aliens … . They’re paying taxes. It’s in everybody’s interest to have them pay the taxes they owe.”

As long as the information is being used only to fraudulently obtain jobs, Koskinen said, rather than to claim false tax returns, the agency has an interest in helping them. “The question is whether the Social Security number they’re using to get the job has been stolen. It’s not the normal identity theft situation,” he said.

About 464,000 illegally obtained Social Security numbers were targeted by hackers in a February cyber breach of the agency, while information on 330,000 taxpayers was stolen in an unrelated breach last year.

Someone should have asked Koskinen why the IRS has kept this policy secret from taxpayers, and why IRS employees are instructed not to tell taxpayers when undocumented aliens use their social security numbers to earn income. Investigative journalist Bob Segall made those shocking discoveries last October in an exclusive report for Indiana’s WTHR Eyewitness News. He also discovered that the IRS actually encourages illegal immigrants to file taxes with mismatched Social Security numbers that don’t legally belong to them.

The IRS website instructs tax preparers that undocumented workers can and should include on their tax returns any income they’ve earned using a Social Security number — even though the IRS admits non-resident aliens are not legally eligible to receive a Social Security number in the first place!

So what does the IRS do with that information? What action does the agency take when it learns someone else used your Social Security number to get work and earn a paycheck?

“We’re not allowed to say anything. Not a word,” explained an IRS whistleblower.

“You were told to ignore it?” I asked, making sure I heard correctly.

“Yes. Identity theft is a crime. It affects real people in a lot of ways. But we are not supposed to do anything. Just let it go,” she said. “I talk to these people every day who don’t understand exactly what happened to them, and it’s heartbreaking.”

Segall spoke with two IRS whistleblowers who said they were coming forward out of love for their country.

A series of biblical and Zionist-themed paintings by Salvador Dalí has gone on private display in the heart of New York City in an effort to showcase through art the historical connection of the Jewish people to the land of Israel, the collection’s owner told The Algemeiner.

Art dealer Hillel Philip, who owns one of 250 sets of prints of Dalí’s little-known “Aliyah, the Rebirth of Israel” series, told The Algemeiner, “You have all of Jewish history, all the dreams of the Jews for 2,000 years, in these paintings.”

The paintings were commissioned by Shorewood Publishers in 1967 for the 20th anniversary of the state of Israel. The set is comprised of 25 mixed-media paintings highlighting important religious, historic and political moments in Jewish history. The series received a special endorsement from Israel’s first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion.

“The distinguished artist Salvador Dalí has succeeded through the power of his great artistry in embodying in a number of prints the marvel of aliyah, which in a short time fashioned a renewed people, a renewed country and a renewed — as well as renewing — state,” Ben-Gurion wrote in a letter on display with the collection. Shorewood exhibited the original series in a New York museum, but each piece was eventually sold to private collectors. Their locations remain unknown to this day.

Philip told The Algemeiner that a large number of the roughly 300 people — including top art collectors, Jewish leaders and political officials — who came to view “Dalí’s Israel: From Past to Present” expressed their marvel over the artist’s connection to Judaism. “Many people have said to me, ‘I didn’t know Dalí was Jewish.’ I would tell them that no, he wasn’t Jewish and everyone would respond, ‘But I’ve never heard of Dalí doing something like this.’ Everyone just loved it. They are blown away that he did such a thing,” Philip said.

In March, the Islamic Society of Wichita rescinded an invitation to Monzer Taleb, a longtime sympathizer of Hamas, the Palestinian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood and a formally designated terrorist organization under American law. Taleb was to speak at a fundraiser, but the Islamic Society canceled his appearance when community members protested and Representative Mike Pompeo (R., Kan.) publicly raised questions about the matter. The Wichita Eagle covered the controversy. In my opinion, the paper’s reporting stressed the allegations of “Islamophobia” posited by Islamist sympathizers in reaction to the protests. The paper also focused on what it described as “a trend by anti-government militias of targeting Muslims.” The impropriety of a prominent Islamic organization’s decision to give a platform to an apologist for a terrorist organization seemed of, at best, secondary importance. Consequently, last Thursday (April 7), I submitted a proposed op-ed to the Wichita Eagle. This weekend, a member of the paper’s editorial board informed me that the paper believed it had adequately covered the matter and therefore had decided to decline my op-ed. I have reproduced it, below.

As a federal prosecutor in 1993, when I led the investigation and trial of a jihadist cell that had bombed the World Trade Center and plotted an even more ambitious attack on New York City landmarks, the first Muslims I encountered were not terrorists. They were anti-terrorists: patriots who embraced America and Western liberty. They helped us infiltrate the cell, thwart the jihadist plots (including the planned attacks in Manhattan), and convict the terrorists.

There was a valuable lesson in this. Radical Islam poses a serious threat to America and the West, very much including a threat against American Muslims, our fellow citizens who reject radical Islam’s authoritarianism and savagery. While terrorists and their atrocities grab the headlines, much of the real battle takes place in Muslim communities. A key to winning that battle and protecting our security involves distinguishing our radical Islamic enemies from our patriotic Muslim allies.

The Muslim Brotherhood and its Palestinian branch, Hamas, which is a terrorist organization and has been formally recognized as such under American law for some 20 years, are on the wrong side of that divide. Representative Mike Pompeo did the people of Kansas — both non-Muslim and Muslim Americans — a great service by calling out the Islamic Society of Wichita (ISW) on its indefensible invitation to Monzer Taleb, a Hamas sympathizer, to speak at a fundraising event.

PayPal and Apple are incensed that the State of North Carolina restricts public toilet usage to those possessing the actual anatomy corresponding to respective restroom designations. With an estimated .3% of the population classified as “transgender,” according to UCLA LGBT demographer, Gary Gates, you would think that PayPal and Apple would be shooting themselves in the foot by putting political correctness before the protection of women and children from sexual predators. However, in solidarity with the LGBT movement, Facebook and Google, among other businesses and the usual “civil rights” groups, have closed ranks to declare the North Carolina law “out of line with their core values.” Have we really come to the point where mandating male usage of the ladies’ room is a core value?

PayPal CEO, Daniel Schulman, earning his social justice warrior stripes, withdrew plans to open a North Carolina facility that would have brought 400 new jobs to the Charlotte area after learning that the state legislature enacted a law – the Public Facilities Privacy and Security Act or HB2 – prohibiting people from using restrooms of the opposite sex. (Yes, that’s “sex,” not “gender.”) PayPal contends that the law “perpetuates discrimination” and “violates the values and principles” of their mission and culture. And you thought PayPal was just in the business of operating an online payment system!

Ironically, in 2011, PayPal had no qualms about opening a global operations center in Malaysia, where homosexual activity is illegal and punished with harsh prison sentences and whippings. Not to be outdone on the hypocrisy score, openly gay Apple CEO, Tim Cook, has taken North Carolina to task for being “anti-gay” but somehow manages to have the moral wherewithal to operate stores in Saudi Arabia, where homosexuals are routinely executed in public.

Contrary to the standard Millennial educational fare of the “diversity of opinion-deprived” campus as well as the twilight zone of Common Core in which “Heather has two mommies” and “Melea has two Dads,” there is a difference (viva la difference!) between “sex” and “gender.”

Bill Clinton injected a disruptive element into the Democratic presidential campaign yesterday: truth. The question now is: How will his wife recover from this alien intrusion?

The former president was stumping for Hillary Clinton in Philadelphia when protesters targeted the 1994 Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act that he had signed into law. The bill lengthened federal sentences for repeat felony offenders and provided federal funding for more state prison construction, among other provisions. Signs bobbing in the audience read: CLINTON CRIME BILL DESTROYED OUR COMMUNITIES and HILLARY IS A MURDERER. A heckler shouted out that Bill Clinton should be charged with crimes against humanity.

At first, Clinton responded by touting the Democratic feel-good elements of the 1994 bill: a ban on assault weapons, funding for after-school programs in inner cities, and money for more cops “so that the police could look like the people they police.” It was then-Senator Joe Biden, Clinton said, who persuaded him to support the tougher sentencing measures in order to get the bill through a Republican Congress. But then, in the first of his inconvenient infusions of truth, Clinton added that it wasn’t just Republican lawmakers who wanted a tougher response to crime—it was also “African-American communities.” They urged him to sign the bill, he said, because their “kids were shot in the street by gangs.” Thirteen-year-olds were planning their funerals, according to Clinton. The result of the bill’s passage? “A 25-year low in crime, a 33-year low in the murder rate—and listen to this,” he said, “because of that and the background-check law, a 46-year low in the deaths of people from gun violence. And who do you think those lives were, that mattered? Whose lives were saved, that mattered?”

The hecklers weren’t placated. As chants continued to disrupt his speech, Clinton broke out in obvious exasperation: “I don’t know how you would characterize the gang leaders who got 13-year-old kids hopped up on crack and sent them out on the street to murder other African-American children,” Clinton said heatedly. “Maybe you thought they were good citizens, [Hillary] didn’t. You are defending the people who killed the people whose lives you say matter! Tell the truth. You are defending the people who caused young people to go out and take guns.”

Clinton also defended the historic 1996 welfare reform bill, currently the subject of a rearguard left-wing assault. If it increased poverty as its critics charge, he asked, “Why then did we have the largest drop in African-American poverty in history?”

Clinton’s equation of today’s virulent anti-cop protests with the enabling of criminals is about as visceral and daring a response to the Black Lives Matter movement as one could imagine. It also happens to be accurate. Data-driven, accountable policing and lengthened sentences for violent criminals have saved thousands of black lives since 1994. And now, as cops back off from proactive policing under the relentless charge that they’re racist for enforcing the law in minority neighborhoods, black lives—including children’s lives—are once again being lost at elevated rates, prompting no outcry or protests from Black Lives Matter. Clinton understands at a gut level the need for vigilant, strong law enforcement. He also knows that the people most hurt by crime are blacks.