RUTHFULLY YOURS

After a slow start, the influx of Syrians to the U.S. has accelerated in recent months, and annual arrivals are likely to reach 10,000 by the end of September, the amount that was promised by the Obama administration.

Last year, the U.S. pledged to resettle 85,000 refugees from all over the world in the fiscal year that began on Oct. 1, including at least 10,000 Syrian refugees.

By March 31, halfway through the fiscal year, only 1,285 Syrians had arrived, according to official data. By June 30, the Syrian number had jumped to 5,211. Overall refugee admissions had reached 49,791.

Among Syrians admitted this year, 20% are adult men, 20% are adult women and 60% are children. The vast majority of the men are in a family unit, said a State Department spokesman.

The deployment of additional staff and resources in Jordan, Turkey, Lebanon and Iraq has enabled both the Departments of State and Homeland Security to review more applications and complete more security checks in recent months, he said.

For instance, between February and April, Homeland Security officers in Amman, Jordan, interviewed about 12,000 individuals referred by the U.N. High Commission for Refugees.
ENLARGE

The U.S. resettled 1,682 Syrians in fiscal year 2015 and only 105 in 2014. So far this fiscal year, Michigan, California and Illinois have been the top three recipients of Syrian refugees.

Due to security checks, it takes about two years for a refugee to be admitted to the U.S. Typically, the vetting includes several interviews of family members, together and apart, background checks, fingerprinting and iris scans, among other things. CONTINUE AT SITE

Rumors are swirling about a Trump and Clinton pick for a running mate. It’s no small matter. An active Vice-President can influence policy, be an effective spokesman for legislation, and if necessary take over the administration and finish an interrupted term. A vice president is also poised to run for election and complete the agenda of a successful predecessor.

The Vice President is first in the line of succession to a President who is removed, resigns, becomes incapacitated or dies. The Vice President as designated by our Constitution, is also the President of the Senate and can break tie votes. That can be crucial in a closely divided Congress.

In the past, electors in the Electoral College, were permitted two votes and the candidate who came in second became the Vice President almost automatically but since 1940 the candidate chooses the potential Vice-President.

The only modern Presidential candidate who did not pick a Veep and had Congress do it for him was Adlai Stevenson, a pompous poseur who lost to Dwight Eisenhower whose Vice President was Richard Nixon.

The qualifications for Vice President are exactly like those for President ….an individual must:

Be a natural born U.S. citizen
Be at least 35 years old
Have resided in the U.S. at least 14 years

Too bad. That leaves Ileana Ros- Lehtinen the doughty Representative from Florida (District 18) out. She is a she, is savvy, great on defense and foreign policy and Hispanic. But, she was born in Cuba.

Although the President is limited to only two terms, a Vice-President has no limit of terms. Thus, Joe Biden could be Vice-President for life as long as a Democrat is President. And Al Gore could have done so too.

In fact, Al Gore could have become President if Bill Clinton had been removed from office after the impeachment. He would have had almost two full years to cool America.What a chilling thought.

The office of Vice President has evolved greatly. At one time it was seen as ceremonial and virtually a sinecure. However, the influence and prestige of the office grew markedly in the last century. Perhaps because a seemingly unprepared and unprepossessing figure like Harry Truman became a worthy successor to Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

President Roosevelt who was ill for much of his time in office actually had two Vice Presidents before Harry Truman. John Nance Gardner, a governor of Texas was the Veep in the first two terms (1933-41). Gardner did not think much of the office. He is quoted as saying “the office is not a bucket of warm piss.”

Henry A. Wallace, a Republican progressive served during Roosevelt’s third term (1941-1945). Wallace was an apostle for the “New Deal” and an apologist for Russia. Fortunately President Roosevelt dumped him in 1944 and selected Harry Truman. Imagine America if Wallace had become President. He certainly would have attempted a radical transformation and one can only guess at how the war in the Pacific would have ended.

In 1947 when Wallace tried to run for President a writer described his effort as “”the closest the Soviet Union ever came to actually choosing a president of the United States.”

Harry S Truman of Missouri was elected Vice President for Roosevelt’s fourth term, but served only a few months (Jan-May 1945) before becoming president. The office of the Vice President became vacant when Harry Truman succeeded to the presidency in 1945 and remained so until 1948 when Alben Barkley of Kentucky, was elected.

The more we think about Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s recent public outbursts, the more we wonder if the 83-year-old Justice can still perform her duties on the Supreme Court. Her fellow Justices need to stage an intervention and suggest that she make way for someone who knows how a judge is supposed to behave.

We say this more in sadness than anger; Justice Ginsburg would never have talked this way 20 years ago and there’s no joy in seeing a reputation implode. She’d also probably be replaced by another, much younger progressive. But as she indulges her inner Bernie Sanders in public, she is hurting the reputation of the Court and setting a terrible example for other judges.

It’s important to understand how far out of bounds Justice Ginsburg was in her comments to the New York Times. She barged into the presidential race by saying “I can’t imagine what the country would be with Donald Trump as our president,” joking that her late husband would say they should move to New Zealand if he won. The Justice kept it up in an interview on Monday with CNN, calling Mr. Trump “a faker” and wondering “how has he gotten away with not turning over his tax returns?”

Such overt partisanship from a judge should disqualify her from hearing any case related to the presidential election—such as voter ID laws. It would also raise doubts about her fairness in judging executive-branch actions if Mr. Trump becomes President.

Justice Ginsburg further violated judicial norms by lecturing the Senate for not confirming President Obama’s Supreme Court nominee, Merrick Garland. “That’s their job,” she said. “There’s nothing in the Constitution that says the president stops being president in his last year.” CONTINUE AT SITE

“We are not as divided as we seem, President Barack Obama told a Dallas memorial for five police officers killed by a black sniper enraged at the alleged mistreatment of African-Americans by white police.

But a different Barack Obama hosted rapper Kendrick Lamar at a White House barbecue last July 4. Details of Lamar’s performance are not available, but it is unlikely that he repeated this line (from a recent Saturday Night Live appearance): “I put a bullet in the back of the back of the head of the police….It’s a war outside, bomb in the street, gun in the hood, mob of police,” Lamar’s rap continued.

Of course, the president does not endorse the killing of policemen. But a White House invitation to a rapper who brags about such things is a macabre gauge of America’s national mood. Another frequent White House guest is rapper Jay-Z, a former drug dealer who, like Kendrick Lamar, chants about street violence. Homicidal impulses are so common prevalent among black Americans that they have been naturalized into mainstream culture.

There is endless hand-wringing about the source of the fragility of African-American life in America, but one of the causes surely is the notion that homicidal rage is an acceptable response to social problems. A generation ago, it was still possible for a leading black clergyman, Rev. Calvin Butts of Harlem’s Abyssinian Baptist Church, to denounce rappers from the pulpit and dump a truckload of rap CD’s in front of the offices of the Sony Corp. in Manhattan. Rev. Butts has been ridiculed in the interim by the likes of Jay-Z and would not attempt this again.

Many African-Americans believe that they are at war and fighting for their lives. Broadly speaking, they are correct. Something is killing off Black America. It isn’t the police, however. Between 2009 and 2012, though, forty black men were killed by other black men for every black man killed by police, according to Prof. Robert Johnson of the University of Toledo. Policemen killed 491 people in 2015, of whom 132 were black. But American police are more likely to shoot white suspects than black suspects, according to a just-released study conducted by an African-American economist at Harvard University.

There are any number of racist policemen, and there are rare instances of police shootings which amount to deliberate murder, but their impact is small compared to the scale of the problem.

The problem, as Heather MacDonald of the Manhattan Institute reported, is that “blacks were charged with 62% of all robberies, 57% of murders and 45% of assaults in the 75 largest US counties in 2009, though they made up roughly 15% of the population there.”

This is an autogenocide, or genosuicide, in slow motion. Increasing numbers of black Americans are drawn into patterns of life that lead to more failure and more rage. And it will get worse until African-American leaders tell their constituents to stop blaming white policemen and take responsibility for their own lives.

Only 32% of black adults are married, compared to 51% of adults of all other races. Part of the reason is a shortage of appropriate spouses: only 49% of college-educated black females marry a man of comparable education, compared to 84% of college-educated white women, according to a Brookings study. That, in turn, is the sad result of low college graduation rates among black men: the most recent data show that only 34% of black male college students at public universities and 39% at private universities complete a four-year degree program after six years of trying, compared to 60% for white male students, according to the Journal of Blacks in Higher Education.

The confluence of developments in medical knowledge and military technology enabled doctors to learn a great deal about surgery during the American Civil War. Since, at the war’s outset, very few physicians had any experience treating gunshot wounds, P.J. Horwitz—a Jew from Baltimore and the Union navy’s surgeon general—authored a brief manual on the subject.

At the Start of the Civil War, Few Union Army Surgeons Had Ever Treated a Gunshot Wound By Rebecca Onion

In this three-page, handwritten document, Baltimorean P.J. Horwitz, who served as surgeon general of the Navy for the Union during the Civil War, tries to get his fellow medical officers up to speed on the presentation and treatment of gunshot wounds.

The document is included in an online exhibition,”Passages Through the Fire: Jews and the Civil War,” put together by the Shapell Manuscript Foundation. In introducing Horwitz’s treatise, the anonymous curator notes: “At the outset of the war, the Union medical corps consisted of 83 surgeons and assistant surgeons, few if any of whom had ever treated a gunshot wound.”

The basic information in Horwitz’s treatise, written in January 1862, reflects physicians’ need for rudimentary advice, at this early stage of the war. “One of the first things to be done is to stop the hemorrhage, if there be any, and then carefully examine the wound to see that no foreign body is lodged there in, and then after bathing the flesh in cold water, apply to the wound a piece of lint on which may be spread a little cerate [an ointment],” Horwitz writes.

While the medical corps may have started the war laughably unready for the types and volume of wounds it would see, it would make many improvements in the next four years. “Each side was woefully unprepared, in all aspects, for the extent of the war,” argues Robert F. Reilly, M.D., in an assessment of the performance of physicians and surgeons during the conflict. “Despite this, many medical advances and discoveries occurred as a result of the work of dedicated physicians on both sides”—advances including the safer use of anesthetics, the organization of large hospitals, and the performance of rudimentary neurosurgery.

A transcript follows the document images.

Whoopi Goldberg said on the view that black women wearing blond hair weaves amounts to “cultural appropriation.”

“I think there’s a lot of appropriation going back and forth, the weave . . . the weave doesn’t look like this,” Goldberg said, grabbing her own hair, and then adding “the weave kind of looks like this,” while pointing to the hair of her blonde co host.

“If you are going to talk about appropriating and what’s cool and what’s not, then we are all in deep doo-doo because we are doing it to each other constantly. Everybody is appropriating. Japanese are appropriating. Black folks are appropriating. Spanish people appropriate. We are appropriating each other. It’s not just a black thing.”

In an article for Jet Magazine, Zainib Karim stated that although “to the naked eye, Goldberg’s words might hold some truth,” “what she is speaking of is not cultural appropriation; it’s assimilation.”

“Assimilation is the sister-wife that sprung from white supremacist standards of beauty, living, and social practices,” he writes.

Appropriation is, as another View co host, Sunny Hostin, put it: When “a dominant group in society exploits the culture of a less privileged group without understanding that group’s experience.”

Basically, Goldberg didn’t understand that just because someone uses something from another culture, it doesn’t necessarily mean that that person is engaging in “cultural appropriation.”

But is this misunderstanding really that surprising?

After all, it does seem that, particularly in social justice circles and on college campuses, any use of something from another culture – regardless of the circumstances or intent — is fair game for being called out as “cultural appropriation.” Everything from yoga to toe rings to sumo-wrestling fat suits have earned this label, and perhaps it’s time that more people take a look at actual impacts and definitions before knee-jerk shaming others.