RUTHFULLY YOURS

Lawmakers on both sides of the aisle criticized the Environmental Protection Agency’s proposed budget for cutting clean water funding and eliminating a lung cancer prevention program.

The Obama’s administration’s $8.3 billion EPA FY2017 budget request increases climate change-related funding to $235 million, which includes money for its Clean Power Plan.

Senate Environment and Public Works Committee Chairman James Inhofe (R-Okla.) argued the administration should be putting that money into existing programs instead since the Supreme Court placed a stay on the Clean Power Plan.

“The EPA has testified before this committee that they have done no modeling on whether the rule [Clean Power Plan] would have any impact on global temperature change,” he said during a committee hearing on the EPA budget. “The president is intent on picking winners and losers in the energy economy.”

Sen. Ben Cardin (D-Md.) asked EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy how she justifies cutting water infrastructure funding after incidents like lead poisoning in Flint, Mich., occurred. Cardin said he is “perplexed” by the $413 million reduction.

“There are obviously constraints that we have. One is we have to respect the levels that were established in the bipartisan budget agreement and our choice was how do we use the money that is allocated to us in the best way that we can,” McCarthy told Cardin.

It would be interesting to chronicle the state of the world on the off chance that everything in it would be made right per the demands and expectations of today’s activists, social justice warriors, and champions of Social Progress. This was done in a speech by Louis Farrakhan, head of the Nation of Islam, in a commencement address delivered at the University of Chicago, at which he was presented with an Honorary Doctorate in Racial Harmony.

All climate change deniers and skeptics were executed, as advocated for years the Secret Society of the Global Warming Collect, by professional hangmen and executioners hired from ISIS. The first executions were presided over by Al Gore, former vice-president of the old U.S. European culprits were transported to Raqqah, the capital of the Islamic State Caliphate, and dispatched there with graphic footage broadcast to Europe. The experienced executioners there made short work of the liars and falsifiers and acolytes of false science. North American culprits were transported to Death Valley, California, and ISIS executioners were flown in to perform their service. The guilty had been hunted down and rounded up by the combined forces of the European-Islamic Police, of the Special Multi-Gender Law Enforcement Force, and of the American Federal Bureau of Intolerance (FBI) in coordinated raids and dragnets. Once the deniers were gone, all was made right in the world, and the world breathed easier.
To the resounding cheers and excellently choreographed Maypole dances of environmentalists of every age and color everywhere, the Environmental Protection Agency seized all private property and land in America and imposed rigorous controls on the former owners (now reduced to the status of tenant farmers) governing the use of the new federal possessions. The rules were so all-encompassing and strict that the tenants were unable to produce or grow much of anything, but were blamed for dragging their feet. Trained, armed, and experienced former Bureau of Land Management personnel were empowered to police the land and to punish violators. Thousands of tenant farmers were incarcerated in special FEMA camps, called Spotted Owl Campuses, in Nevada and Illinois and put on short rations. These new felons were also subjected to reeducation courses and new dietary regimes. And all was made right with the world, and a New Earth Day was proclaimed.
President Bernie Sanders presided over the free distribution of just about everything, including college education, food, personal grooming products, and gas rations. His taxing of major and middle income corporations and small businesses at 99% was intended to pay for the program, but when IRS personnel appeared at these venues, in many instances they found nothing but closed doors or vacant premises. The Bureau of Printing and Engraving announced a “temporary” halt in printing all the new money because of shortages of the proper paper and of the necessary chemicals and inks, while the Treasury Department also announced a halt in the mailing of “Freedom Checks” to everyone because of a shortage of paper on which to print the checks. Suppliers of the currency and check paper to the BPE and the Treasury Department were sued. But President Sanders said the setbacks were just a “blip.” He was also quoted as saying, “You can’t make an omelet without breaking heads.” One person was arrested and sentenced by a kangaroo court to twenty years of hard labor for having been overheard to say to a friend in private that President Sanders “not only needed a walker to get to the john but also for his brain.” Still, all was made right in the world and bad-mouthers were taken out of circulation, resulting in a significant drop in aural pollution.
The inauguration of the new federal Multi-Gender Police (the MGP) was feted by former U.S. President Barack Obama during a special ceremony in Seattle. The new law enforcement tool was expected to work closely with the re-tailored FBI. The MGP’s ranks were filled with heterosexuals, homosexuals, lesbians, trans-genders, and people of unclassified orientation. True to Barack Obama’s anti-gun philosophy, the troops were armed with only tasers, electronic batons, modified cattle prods, and katanas. Cleverly designed uniforms, modeled after samurai fighting armor, disguised the gender identity of each policeperson. However, during its first assignment, the MGP retreated from a food riot in Philadelphia, resulting in half the city being burnt down, its spokesperson saying that sending the MGP into combat violated the “safe spaces” of many of its members who weren’t quite ready to impose law and order. It also claimed that many thousands of lives were saved by the MGP’s non-intervention in the looting, destruction, and occasional killing. Still, all was made right in the world, as there was no more police brutality.
English was demoted from being the official lingua franca of the U.S. Callers to various federal agencies, bureaus, and “crony” corporations were asked to “Press 1 for Arabic, Press 2 for Spanish, Press 3 for English.” Advertising and billboards (where they were permitted) had to communicate in Arabic and Spanish first, with tiny English subtitles. And all was made right in the world, and illiteracy was no longer a social stigma.

The 9/11 attacks were not civil torts. They were acts of war. It is important to keep that fact in the front of our minds as we press for long-overdue disclosure of evidence linking the Saudi Arabian government to the mass murder of nearly 3,000 Americans, to say nothing of the even more overdue investigation of Iran’s contributory role — an investigation that should have been in high gear immediately after the planes struck their targets.

Over the years in these pages, we have catalogued the damage done to national security by regarding international terrorism as a mere law-enforcement problem — the 1990s Clinton counterterrorism paradigm that President Obama has gradually reinstated. We haven’t much considered, though, another problem with thinking about violent jihadism as a litigation matter: It leads us to lose perspective about who was attacked, and why.

Much as our hearts ache for the victims whose lives were lost, and for the families whose lives were ripped apart, 9/11 was not principally an attack on the victims and their families. It was an attack on the United States of America. It was a stealth combat operation against the American people, all of us, by foreign enemies who had quite publicly declared war on our nation. Those killed and wounded are more accurately thought of as casualties than as victims.

This is why it is so unfortunate that the drive to get public accountability for the attacks has been intertwined with the effort to get financial compensation for the families by way of civil lawsuits against complicit nations.

Don’t get me wrong: All of us should demand that state sponsors of terrorism be made to pay dearly for their atrocities – although, for reasons I’ll get to in a bit, legislation permitting victims to sue is a counterproductive way to go about this. But for all the incalculable pain and suffering inflicted on our fallen fellow Americans and their families, the laudable desire to see them awarded hefty money damages is, at best, a secondary priority.

Last year, a faction of the feminist Left discovered that it was being oppressed by the absence of a woman on at least one piece of America’s paper currency. After much baying from activists, Treasury Secretary Jack Lew has struck upon a reasonable compromise. Lew announced on Wednesday that the place of Alexander Hamilton, currently experiencing a historical renascence, on the $10 bill is safe. Instead, Harriet Tubman, the great abolitionist, will replace Andrew Jackson on the front of the $20 bill, and the seventh president will be moved to the back.

Tubman is an admirable choice. Not only was she a courageous chaperone along the Underground Railroad, responsible for escorting more than 300 slaves to freedom; she was also a scout and spy for the Union Army, the first woman in American history to lead a military raid (against Combahee Ferry, in South Carolina, where she helped liberate more than 700 slaves), a Republican, a devout Christian, and a staunch defender of the right to bear arms.

Andrew Jackson, for his part, was a giant of American history, and the animating spirit of the Democratic party. But moods change, and in the current public consciousness, Jackson’s considerable flaws have come to outweigh his also considerable merits. If there is a reason to remove Jackson from the currency, perhaps it should simply be that he hated paper money.

Islamic Relief USA (IR-USA) is the largest U.S. Muslim charity and is an affiliate of Islamic Relief Worldwide (IRW), the largest international Islamic charity in the world. Based in Birmingham, England, IRW has a $240 million operating budget, nearly 300 employees, chapters in more than 12 countries and operations in over 30 countries. Islamic Relief says it “aims to provide rapid relief in the event of human and natural disasters and to establish sustainable local development projects allowing communities to better help themselves.”

The organization’s relief efforts in the USA and throughout the world have been linked to terrorism finance which has led some government to outlaw its activities.

IRW reportedly has a long history of working with Hamas-affiliated entities and then claiming ignorance afterward. RadialIslam.org documented IR-USA’s ties to Hamas in an expose about the organization’s CEO – an Islamist who became a USAID advisor to the Obama State Department. According to the Clarion Project, (a non-profit organization dedicated to exposing the dangers of Islamist extremism) Islamic Relief Worldwide (IRW) partners with a Hamas affiliate in Turkey named the Humanitarian Relief Foundation (IHH).

Israel, Germany and the Netherlands have branded IHH as a terrorist entity. The U.S. has not formally done so, but a bipartisan group of 87 members of Congress including Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) have requested its designation as a Foreign Terrorist Organization by the State Department.

The State Department considered it but did not take action, even though a leaked State Department memo from 2009 shows that the U.S. government knows IHH is “providing material assistance to Hamas.”

Clarion Project also reported that no less than four officials of IR-USA have Muslim Brotherhood ties.

No government agency controls the fate of more people than the Food and Drug Administration, which has the power to deny children a treatment that could help them walk. The FDA is reviewing an experimental drug for muscular dystrophy, and the outcome could determine the quality of life for thousands—and whether companies continue to invest in curing rare diseases.

On Monday an FDA advisory committee will consider eteplirsen, a drug by Boston-based Sarepta designed to treat a strain of Duchenne muscular dystrophy, which is a genetic disorder that weakens every muscle in the body. The condition usually affects boys, who by age 12 or so can no longer walk, and over time damages the heart and lungs. The fatality rate is 100%, and most do not live past 25.

Eteplirsen essentially pumps out the protein missing in patients with Duchenne, known as dystrophin, by skipping over faulty genetic code. Sarepta’s clinical trial started in 2011 and treated boys about 9-years-old whose abilities seemed to be deteriorating rapidly. After four years of treatment, 10 out of 12 children can still walk. In a comparable group of 11 boys who weren’t treated, only one could still walk. No side effects or safety concerns were reported.
***One beneficiary is Max Leclaire, who is now 14. His mother, Jenn McNary, became one of the earliest advocates for the drug after noticing her son’s marked improvement. She had another reason: Her son Austin is also affected by Duchenne but wasn’t eligible for the trial, as he already had lost the ability to walk. So for years Austin was denied the care that helped his brother continue to play sports and dress himself.

Ms. McNary and Christine McSherry, who also has a son with Duchenne, have organized some 900 people to show up at Monday’s committee meeting, which forced the FDA to book a bigger venue. Among those offering public comment will be Austin, who began an eteplirsen trial about 18 months ago. He will tell the committee of his brother’s persistence and his own—and of friends who have lost dexterity and have no options without FDA action.

Sarepta has gone back and forth with the FDA since 2013, and this is somehow considered the expedited track: A 2012 law allows the agency flexibility to accelerate approval in first-in-class drugs for lethal diseases, though the FDA seems to be flouting the spirit of this directive. The agency planned to assemble an advisory committee—which offers recommendations that the FDA typically follows—in January. But the meeting was postponed due to a blizzard in Washington, one that apparently snowed in the FDA for four months. CONTINUE AT SITE

“THE SYSTEM IS RIGGED.” That’s the angry outcry from many Americans as we rush headlong toward the November election. Milton Friedman defined a worthy goal for a society seeking equal opportunity: There should be no arbitrary obstacles blocking people from realizing their ambitions. The angry public sees government overreach as precisely that—an arbitrary obstacle that thwarts their ambitions.

This column has advocated a sweeping government upheaval that would rewrite federal rules in order to limit Washington’s power and redirect it toward growth, security and higher middle-class incomes. Every government department needs to be reinvented and, in most cases, downsized through strong cabinet leadership and oversight. Interactions with Congress need to be transformed. Hundreds of “independent agencies” need to be disbanded or reacquainted with the practice of checks and balances.

Washington hates the idea of an upheaval. The current system is entrenched because it works well for those on the inside, the people who control the outcomes while achieving wealth and status for themselves. Many politicians and former government officials make large fortunes, which is reflected in the capital region’s having the highest per capita income in the nation. This is wrong.

MISGUIDED POWER

The reasons for this bonanza are clear and demand an upheaval. Washington will soon be spending $4 trillion per year, heading toward $5 trillion, yet it doesn’t have a working budget process or limits on spending and taxation. Instead, power is arbitrary and nearly absolute, a recipe for corruption, mistakes and inequality.

For example, the combined wisdom of the Pentagon, Congress and the White House has spent $1 trillion on an F-35 fighter jet that doesn’t meet defense needs, while lobbyists pay richly for the access needed to guide the procurement process. On the international front too much power has been vested in multilateral organizations that work against American values and interests. The IMF regularly imposes austerity on poor people, lowering incomes while increasing government power. The UN is divisive and incompetent, whether in dealing with human rights, women’s safety or North Korean missiles terrorizing the Pacific.

The recently disclosed Panama Papers show the extent of government corruption worldwide—often taking place under the noses of U.S.-funded watchdogs. Washington’s political establishment seems unable to cut a single program. In 2015 crony capitalism mysteriously resurrected the Export-Import Bank after it had been shuttered for cause as an unnecessary apparatus of corporate subsidies and government power contributing to inequality.

Ben Sasse is a United States Senator representing Nebraska. Before his election to the Senate in 2014, he served as president of Midland University, where he turned around a failing institution and made it one of the fastest-growing colleges in America. Senator Sasse holds a bachelor’s degree from Harvard, a master’s degree from St. John’s College in Annapolis, and a PhD from Yale. He and Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas are stars of the GOP….RSK http://www.theimaginativeconservative.org/2016/04/the-american-idea-a-crisis.html

“We face great challenges at this moment in history. We face cyber threats. We face a resurgent Russia under Vladimir Putin. We face a jihadi threat. We face the growing threat of nonstate actors, who now can carry out massive attacks and are as able to play on the global stage as state actors. We face the exploding costs of our entitlement programs.

All these challenges are acute, but another dangerous trend is attracting less notice: The crisis of confidence in, and the growing unawareness of, the American idea.

What is the American idea? The American Founding made the bold claim that most peoples and most governments in the history of the world had been wrong about the nature of power and the nature of freedom. Sure, there were moments in history when certain city-states advanced some conception of liberty, but most people in human history said that might makes right: If you have a monopoly on power, you can do what you want. Everyone else in those societies was not a citizen but a dependent subject. If you lived in such a society, you needed the king to give you rights. The passive assumption was prohibition. The passive assumption was that if I want to start a business, I need a charter because it is illegal to run that business unless the king has sanctioned it. Therefore, I go and supplicate before the king in his court, and he decides whether to give me the right to start that business.

Today we would say that is bizarre. The voluntary transaction between two people is the very nature of freedom. The American Founders saw that denying people their freedom is fundamentally wrong because it does not comport with the dignity of people who are created in the image of God. People have been endowed with certain inalienable rights. God gives us those rights; government does not.

Government is merely a tool. It provides a framework for ordered liberty so that free people can live fully flowering lives.

This is why Ronald Reagan said that the American Founders “brought about the only true revolution that has ever taken place in man’s history.” Previous revolutions “simply exchanged one set of rulers for another set of rulers,” Reagan said. But America’s Founders did something different: They developed and fought for “the idea that you and I have within ourselves the God-given right and the ability to determine our own destiny.”

Founding FathersThink about how the framers of the Constitution wrestled with whether to enumerate any rights. What’s the danger in enumerating rights? Your list will never be long enough. The Constitution does not define any rights because the Constitution is the way that we give the government limited authority. All the powers that we do not give to the government are rights that we still retain. Even when the framers came up with the first ten amendments to the Constitution as a Bill of Rights, they could not decide on any one individual right to list first. They had to list five things in the First Amendment: religious liberty, freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of assembly, and the right to redress grievances. Those five freedoms are all listed as first freedoms because there is no way you can get the list complete.