RUTHFULLY YOURS

On October 24, 2015, the Obama administration condemned “over-testing” in schools. It called for a cap on testing, limiting it to two percent of a child’s class time. It called on Congress to enact this cap and on teachers to “step back and make tests less onerous and more purposeful.” This accompanied the release of a study by the Council of the Great City Schools.

In a smooth move, the Obama administration called on Congress to fix a problem that had been foisted on the people without the consent of Congress—namely the national Common Core standards, even as the widely hated name was scrupulously avoided. The Obama administration also told teachers to fix tests that they had not devised and were forced to administer.

In an even smoother move, the New York Times summed up the blame this way:

The administration’s move seemed a reckoning on a two-decade push that began during the Bush administration and intensified under President Obama. Programs with aspirational names — No Child Left Behind, Race to the Top — were responding to swelling agreement among Democrats and Republicans that higher expectations and accountability could lift the performance of American students. . . . .”

NYPD Officer Randolph Holder was shot and killed last week. But the bullet that murdered him had been fired years ago. And it was the Democrats of the New York State government that took the shot.

The trigger had been pulled in 2009 when New York lawmakers passed drug crime “reforms” that targeted mandatory minimum sentences, a particular obsession of the pro-crime lobby, and allowed drug offenders to bypass jail.

Governor Paterson, who had used cocaine and whose close associate was a former drug dealer whose scandal would play a role in the governor’s downfall, claimed that sentencing reform would “Give judges the discretion to divert non-violent drug addicted individuals to treatment alternatives that are far more successful than prison.”

Senate Majority Leader Malcolm Smith, New York’s first black Temporary President of the Senate, who would later be busted by the FBI on corruption charges, promised that the reforms would “Reverse years of ineffective criminal laws.”

The House Oversight & Government Reform Committee led by Chairman Jason Chaffetz introduced on Tuesday a resolution to impeach IRS Commissioner John Koskinen, accusing him of making “false statements” under oath, failing to comply with a lawful subpoena, and overseeing the destruction of documents that were being sought under a congressional subpoena.

The move comes less than a week after the Justice Department issued a report finding no criminal behavior in the IRS’s decision to target conservative groups for improper scrutiny. The DOJ investigation was led by a career Justice Department lawyer in the Civil Rights Division who happened to be a “maxed-out” Obama campaign donor.

Via Fox News:

“Commissioner Koskinen violated the public trust,” Chaffetz said in a statement Tuesday. “He failed to comply with a congressionally issued subpoena, documents were destroyed on his watch, and the public was consistently misled.

“Impeachment is the appropriate tool to restore public confidence in the IRS and to protect the institutional interests of Congress.”

“Nam homo proponit, sed Deus disponit,” wrote the medieval cleric Thomas a Kempis. “For man proposes, but God disposes.”

The observation that human intent, however well conceived and deftly pursued, is commonly frustrated, does not require the invoking of God. One can, for example, comprehend the frustrating agent as fate, fortune or simply the exigencies of worldly existence.

But the founders of our republic considered the particular circumstance of people’s aspirations and intent being frustrated by the heavy hand of government, and in addressing this phenomenon they clearly attached importance to invoking God.

In the Declaration of Independence, they assert, of course, “that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” They further assert that the proper role of government, indeed the raison d’etre of government, is to secure these God-given rights.

Seventy years ago, on Oct. 27, 1945, New York City was the site of the most spectacular homefront display of American military might the nation had ever seen. Navy Day was in effect a monumental victory lap, coming seven weeks after the signing of the Japanese surrender in Tokyo Bay aboard the USS Missouri.

Now the “Big Mo” and other stars and supporting players from the Pacific Fleet had come home. Along a six-mile stretch of the Hudson River, 47 warships gathered—battleships, aircraft carriers, cruisers, destroyers, submarines and submarine chasers.

President Truman was there. So was I. About 3.5 million people crowded along Manhattan’s West Side, with another 1.5 million viewing from New Jersey, according to press reports. Joining the USS Missouri, with its 16-inch turret guns bristling from its 56,000-ton frame, were the USS New York (an older battle wagon) and the USS Enterprise, the only aircraft carrier that had been active from Pearl Harbor to V-J Day.

At midafternoon, President Truman boarded a destroyer for a two-hour review of the assembled firepower. Twenty-one-gun salutes boomed from many of the vessels. Overhead, 1,200 Hellcat and Corsair fighters, Avenger torpedo planes and Helldiver bombers circled in 12-mile ovals. For half-hour spells on two successive nights the ships turned on their 24-inch and 36-inch searchlights, sending brilliant blue-white beams, with millions in candle power, flashing across the sky and illuminating the city’s skyscrapers. No fireworks display could compare.

Everywhere you look, someone is accusing governments of abusing the rights of people crossing their borders. The United Nations just accused the Czech Republic of human-rights abuses for holding migrants in “degrading” conditions.

Last month, the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights issued a report in which it demanded that illegal-immigrant families be released from detention centers. Conditions in the centers, the commission suggested, were worse than the abuse and persecution they had fled in their home countries. It demanded that Congress stop funding detention centers.

If we know anything about the human-rights community, it’s that it often combines lofty idealism with dubious anecdotes and shifty statistics that undermine its genuine concerns. Take the U.S. commission’s report: On close examination, it is a dubious farrago of abuse claims used to lobby for a preferred pro-immigrant and pro-union outcome.

The report was supposed to examine conditions at detention facilities for immigrants, but its members didn’t get around to visiting any facilities until the report was nearly finished. They apparently thought they didn’t need to; instead, they relied largely on rumor and innuendo. Indeed, in its initial proposal to study detention facilities — adopted by the commission long before it undertook any research — the commission had already concluded that “egregious human rights and constitutional violations” were occurring.

Paris just one month after All Hallows’ Eve and All Saints’ Day.

The climate treaty under negotiation is like a vampire from a bad old horror film. Every time you think it’s dead, it rises from the grave. This vampire is not sucking blood, but money and resources from taxpayers and needy people around the world. It’s time to put a stake through its heart and cut off the head of this climate-treaty monstrosity once and for all.

Congressional Republicans are working to do just that. Politico reports that Neil Chatterjee, a top aide to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, has been making the rounds at foreign embassies alerting the countries’ diplomats that Republicans intend to fight President Barack Obama’s climate agenda until the end of his term and beyond.

Obama’s war on Inspectors General started with the firing and subsequent efforts to smear Gerald Walpin…please read:

The White House Fires a Watchdog The curious case of the inspector general and a Presidential ally.

http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB124511811033017539?alg=y

In the sadistic era of fraudulent Hope and Change, inspectors general inside the federal government have been kicked, neutered, and starved of the authority and information they need to do their jobs.

It’s transparently clear: President Obama loathes and fears independent watchdogs.

Accountability is an empty talking point without whistleblower protection and investigative autonomy. That is why Capitol Hill must do everything in its power to stop the White House war on the public’s ombudsmen. Federal inspectors general across dozens of agencies are begging lawmakers to grant them access to public records, as guaranteed by the 1978 Inspector General Act.

The call for help comes as Obama-administration obstructionists and cover-up operatives impede and downplay several key investigations into government corruption and malfeasance.

Last year, 47 of the nation’s 73 federal IGs signed an open letter decrying the Obama administration’s stonewalling of their investigations. The White House, they reported, had placed “serious limitations on access to records that have recently impeded the work” of IGs at the Peace Corps, the EPA, and the Department of Justice, and jeopardized their “ability to conduct our work thoroughly, independently, and in a timely manner.”