RUTHFULLY YOURS

Barack Obama continues to fundamentally transform and tilt our nation to favor one of his favorite groups – Muslims — at the expense of everyone else.

Early in his presidency, Barack Obama’s plans to control the Census Bureau unleashed a firestorm of criticism. The White House in a radical move ordered the Census Bureau to work directly with Barack Obama aides. Since the 2010 census would play a key role in drawing House districts and electoral votes at least until 2020 there was criticism that Obama’s moves, supported by other Democrats, would be used for partisan purposes to empower Democrats.

But there may have been ulterior motives, as there so often are when it comes to Democrat machinations. The Wall Street Journal reports that moves are afoot to create a new way to empower Muslims who live in America:

The U.S. Census Bureau has opened the door to counting people of Middle Eastern descent for the first time, setting off an intense debate about who fits in the category and whether they will also divulge their ethnicity to the government.

The hysterical, politically correct outburst following Donald Trump’s idea of barring Muslims from abroad produced much emotion and wacky claims, including the protest that barring someone based on his religion is unconstitutional according to the 1st Amendment.

The ignorance here is shocking. The rights, privileges and obligations of a U.S. citizen are simply inapplicable to non-citizen foreigners.

But this is hardly the first time the 1st Amendment has been misunderstood. It may be, in fact, the most misunderstood, starting with its first words: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof…”

In our time, these words have been used to bar school prayer, prevent football coaches from presiding over collective team prayer, disallow references to God in high school graduation speeches, buttress the demand that “Merry Christmas” be deleted from American speech in exchange for “Happy Holidays,” etc. Today’s standard, politically correct interpretation is that the purpose of the 1st Amendment was to make of the new United States an irreligious republic when that was nowhere near its original intent.

The massacre in San Bernardino, Calif., came a few days after a law went into effect banning access by intelligence agencies to key digital communications. It is time for the U.S. to get ahead of terrorism by finally allowing its intelligence agents to use digital tools before the next attack.

Soon after the San Bernardino massacre, law-enforcement agents discovered digital records left behind by Syed Farook and his wife Tashfeen Malik. If intelligence agencies had been allowed access to the information in real time, the terrorist attack might have been prevented.

Politics forces the National Security Agency to operate with blinders. The Obama administration blocked the agency from its post-9/11 practice of collecting metadata—tracking digital data on an anonymous basis, and then seeking a court order if Americans are involved—for emails and other digital communications. The law that went into effect just before the San Bernardino killings ended direct NSA access to historic phone records.

Iranian hackers infiltrated the control system of a small dam less than 20 miles from New York City two years ago, sparking concerns that reached to the White House, according to former and current U.S. officials and experts familiar with the previously undisclosed incident.

The breach came amid attacks by hackers linked to Iran’s government against the websites of U.S. banks, and just a few years after American spies had damaged an Iranian nuclear facility with a sophisticated computer worm called Stuxnet. In October 2012, then-Defense Secretary Leon Panetta called out Iran’s hacking, prompting fears of cyberwar.

The still-classified dam intrusion illustrates a top concern for U.S. officials as they enter an age of digital state-on-state conflict. America’s power grid, factories, pipelines, bridges and dams—all prime targets for digital armies—are sitting largely unprotected on the Internet. And, unlike in a traditional war, it is sometimes difficult to know whether or where an opponent has struck. In the case of the dam hack, federal investigators initially thought the target might have been a much larger dam in Oregon.