RUTHFULLY YOURS

A devastating oversight report from Sen. Tom Coburn (R-OK) reveals that the combination of malpractice and bureaucratic ineptitude infesting the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) is far deadlier than previously acknowledged. “Over the past decade, more than 1,000 veterans may have died as a result of VA malfeasance, and the VA has paid out nearly $1 billion to veterans and their families for its medical malpractice,” the report states.

The death total dwarfs the 23 fatalities for which the VA has taken responsibility. Coburn, a physician and three-time cancer survivor, notes the problems at VA facilities go “far deeper” than the phony scheduling schemes that brought this scandal to the national stage. “The waiting list cover-ups and uneven care are reflective of a much larger culture within the VA, where administrators manipulate both data and employees to give an appearance that all is well,” the report reveals.

According to Coburn, that culture is one in which veterans “are not always a priority.” Much of that is attributable to the reality that even as the VA suffers from a shortage of healthcare providers, VA nurses are paid to perform union duties and doctors are allowed to leave work early rather than care for patients. The report further explains that good employees who try to bring attention to the Department’s shortcomings “are punished, bullied, put on ‘bad boy’ lists, and transferred to other locations.”

The report also blows away the VA’s fallback excuse, namely that it suffers from a lack of funding. Coburn notes that spending has increased rapidly in recents years, an assertion backed up by federal budget figures. Inflation-adjusted federal spending shows that the VA budget has increased 92.2 percent over the last decade, skyrocketing from $73.3 billion in FY2003 to $140.9 billion last year, measured in constant 2014 dollars. According to Military.com the VA spends more in inflation-adjusted dollars than it did following WWII and the Vietnam war, when millions of troops were returning home from the battlefield.

Coburn reveals that as much as $20 billion of that spending over the last dozen years has been on “junkets, generous salaries, bonuses, and office renovations for its employees,” even as the Department ends every year with billions in unspent funds. He further notes that most of the construction projects undertaken by the VA are over budget and behind schedule. And even when state-of-the-art facilities are finally constructed, the VA is unable to staff them with a sufficient number of doctors. This reality has forced them to spend millions of dollars sending veterans to clinics in other cities and states, wasting veterans’ time and taxpayers’ money.

Some of the details of patient care illuminated by the report are truly disturbing. One Navy veteran, forced to wait months to see a doctor, died of Stage 4 bladder cancer. He had been rushed to the hospital in September 2013, but was sent home despite a medical chart saying his situation was “urgent.” His daughter made effort after effort to get him an appointment but was constantly rebuffed. He finally got an appointment on December 6—one week after he died. Another veteran received a tooth extraction, despite having dangerously low blood pressure. On his way home, he had a stroke that left him paralyzed. In another case, doctors never spotted a growing lesion on a veteran’s lung during an annual chest x-ray. He died as the result of that carelessness.

The warmists have their models, grants and tidings of doom, but the researchers whose tree ring data has best predicted recent temperature trends see the mercury dropping, perhaps by as much as 4 degrees. If they are right, then there is reason to be worried, very worried indeed

There was a time in climate science when tree rings were used for good instead of evil, a time of innocent enquiry, a time that ended in the corruption of science. From that time, one of the best predictions of climate ever made (weighted for distance and accuracy) was by two Californian researchers, Leona Libby and Louis Pandolfi. In 1979, they used tree ring data from redwoods in Kings Canyon to make a remarkably accurate forecast1. From a Los Angeles Times interview of that year,

When she and Pandolfi project their curves into the future, they show lower average temperatures from now through the mid-1980s. “Then,” Dr. Libby added, “we see a warming trend (by about a quarter of 1 degree Fahrenheit) globally to around the year 2000. And then it will get really cold—if we believe our projections. This has to be tested.”

How cold? “Easily one or two degrees,” she replied, “and maybe even three or four degrees.”

Sure, the Prophet’s gun-toting, plane-hijacking, head-lopping adherents represent only a small minority in the ranks of ‘the religion of peace’, but what of the largely mute majority? If silence gives consent it also confirms that Islam is antithetical to the secular values and traditions of the West.

Even on Fox News they still refer to ‘radical Islamists’, presumably to distinguish them from the overwhelmingly vast multitude of moderate Muslims who mind their own business as they go about practicing their religion of peace. They got one thing right. They certainly mind their own business. There is nothing to see here as the hands and heads come off and the bombs go off; nothing to do with us.

What really impresses me is the inoffensive, head-scarfed, top-to-toe covered, Muslim lady who regularly fronts the cameras to explain how moderate and peaceful she and her community are. I assume she is sped from place to place in a very fast jet. Of course, maybe there is more than one of them? I can’t tell. What I suspect is that she (or they) will be beaming and cheering when the Islamic flag is raised aloft over some Western European parliament building.

OK, where is this going? Let me explain by way of analogy.

When Liverpool Football Club brought home the first of its European Cups in 1977 half of the city was out on the streets to welcome the returning heroes. It is likely the overwhelming majority of those cheering and clapping had never been to a match. And of those who attended matches perhaps only a quarter were fanatical.

Half-a-million people were on the streets. Only two per cent were fanatics; the other 98 per cent were moderates. They were all cheering. The representatives of their tribe had tasted victory. It was a heady brew.

Who are these sporting fanatics and what drives them? ‘I don’t know’ is my answer, but what is abundantly clear is that they wear their fanaticism like a badge of honour. It distinguishes them from the crowd. And the crowd acknowledges their commitment. They are congratulated personally by their workmates and friends when their team wins.

They simply couldn’t be fanatics without the tacit approval and acknowledgement of the much greater number of the non-fanatical. The head couldn’t live without the body. How do I know all of this? I was a fanatic in my youthful days, suffering serious funk when Liverpool lost and exhilaration when they won.

A community stops illegal-immigrant kids from being held in its town.

California suburbanites are engaged in a fight with the federal government over its attempt to turn a residential building into a detention center for illegal-immigrant children.

The Department of Health and Human Services submitted an application to the city of Escondido’s Planning Commission to use a 35,200 square-foot facility to house almost 100 children. On Tuesday night in this suburb of San Diego, the city commission held a hearing to review the request and unanimously voted to oppose the application. Several hundred people filled the chamber hall to make their voices heard, and people at the meeting say the overwhelming majority opposed the application. The standing-room-only crowd spilled over into an adjacent room and nearby hallways, and onto the grass outside.

“You couldn’t park within two blocks of city hall,” says Jeff Weber, the chairman of the Escondido City Planning Commission. “One of our commissioners was late because he couldn’t get a parking place.” Weber says the event required a police presence, and one officer coached him on how to respond in case of a disturbance.

If Kitty Demry had missed a notice about the application placed on the building during a walk around the neighborhood with her husband, the application might have received less scrutiny. Demry, a longtime Escondido resident who lives about a third of a mile away from the facility’s proposed location with her young family, says that, at first, she didn’t think anything of it. She says she decided to pursue the matter only after discussing it in greater detail with her husband.

After speaking with a city official to gain more information and discovering that local officials did not know much about the shelter, Demry says she grew concerned. “Really, nobody knew about it,” Demry says. “And that more than anything is what terrified me.” Demry then created a flyer, made 150 copies, and began knocking on doors to spread the word. The information gained traction on social media, and soon public officials began to weigh in.

Mayor Sam Abed says he’s concerned that the children would not receive proper health screening and criminal-background checks before arriving at the proposed facility. “We feel that the federal government should keep housing them in federal facilities and not [be] sending them to the local small communities where land use is very limited,” he says. The Republican mayor emigrated to the U.S. from the suburbs of Beirut, Lebanon, and worked as an IBM engineer before entering political life. He’s running for re-election in November.

Cochran won by appealing to Republicans and liberal Democrats.

Just two days before the Mississippi runoff, an African-American state senator from the state’s 13th district, Willie Simmons, sent a letter to his constituents. Simmons himself, according to a report by the Associated Press, had voted in the state’s June 3 Democratic primary and was therefore prohibited from voting in Tuesday’s Republican runoff, but he wrote to urge his constituents to cast their ballots for Republican senator Thad Cochran in Tuesday’s runoff. He touted the “millions of dollars” in appropriations Cochran had secured for Mississippi’s Head Start programs and his support for “Food Stamps programs.”

A mailer distributed in heavily African-American precincts struck similar notes, advertising Cochran’s support for Mississippi’s public schools and his tea-party opponent’s opposition to food-stamps programs. The headline: “The Tea Party intends to prevent blacks from voting.”

“I don’t know who put it out,” former Mississippi governor Haley Barbour says of the fliers. “I can’t imagine the Cochran campaign did that.” Barbour says that support for Cochran among Democrats bubbled up organically and that the six-term senator, who first won a seat in Congress in 1972, has always had bipartisan appeal. “Within a week of the first primary some black churches in Hattiesburg started running ads on the radio in Hattiesburg by raising the money themselves,” he says.

But Cochran’s opponent, state senator Chris McDaniel, and many of his supporters smell a rat. In the midst of the non-concession speech McDaniel delivered Tuesday evening, he argued, “There is something a bit unusual about a Republican primary that’s decided by liberal Democrats.” In Hattiesburg, where a crowd of McDaniel supporters had gathered for what most expected to be his victory party, the candidate was seething, not celebrating: “So much for principle,” he said from the podium.

Less than 24 hours after Cochran seized victory by a little more than one percentage point, his campaign’s decision to woo Democrats is exacerbating the intra-Republican battle between the grassroots and the establishment.

Chris Chocola, the president of the Club for Growth, which spent over $3 million in its attempt to oust Cochran, came out swinging against the powers that be in the GOP. “They say they believe in pro-growth policy,” he says, “but when it comes time to take action, here it’s revealed, probably more powerfully than it’s ever been, that they care more about the preservation of political power and the status quo.”

In Mississippi, Chocola says, the establishment fought for a candidate whose message was “Vote for me and I’ll give you more government.” Throughout the primary and the runoff, Cochran campaigned on his ability to funnel federal dollars to Mississippi, a poor state that has long depended on Washington’s largesse.

Obama brings to mind the supposed Chinese curse: “May you live in exciting times.”

As I was lunching with a few conservative political types earlier this week, the subject turned, as it does, to the 2016 field. When the name of a highly regarded former governor came up, the judgment was unequivocal: “He’s just so . . . boring.” That was not intended as an endorsement.

It should be.

Barack Obama has been anything but boring. “May you live in exciting times” may be a fake Chinese curse, but the wisdom communicated therein is real. Thought experiment: Consider the presidency of Barack Obama from the point of view of the sort of person who is likely to support such men. Having vanquished George W. Bush, he has now given us: a military mess in Iraq complete with the deployment of U.S. troops and a mission that is probably unachievable; the continuing disintegration of Afghanistan and its reversion to a jihadist safe haven; an economy that is shrinking significantly and probably is dipping back into recession; a defense and intelligence apparatus that is abusing its powers and the trust of the American people in ways that are not obviously related to defeating terrorist plots; millions without health insurance; millions out of work; corruption in our public institutions, ranging from the IRS to our universities; a self-aggrandizing political elite that is busy enriching itself through the vulgar exploitation of political connections while incomes for ordinary Americans stagnate or decline; etc. There has been a great deal of excitement, but if you voted for Obama because you were angry about the wars, the surveillance state, and the economy, things aren’t looking any better at all.

The most boring president of the modern era probably was Dwight Eisenhower, whose administration was marked by relative peace, prosperity, and confidence in the effectiveness and integrity of our institutions. The most boring president ever surely was Calvin Coolidge, who pinched pennies and kept at his plow, more or less leaving the country free to go about its own business, which turned out to be an excellent economic program. Our most exciting recent presidents? John Kennedy, who was privately corrupt and publicly inept; Richard Nixon, who was privately corrupt and publicly corrupt; Bill Clinton, who combined the worst features of Kennedy and Nixon, adding a distasteful dose of sanctimony to the mix.

It is part of every election season. You can count on it like the sun coming up in the morning. The Democrats spread anger and fear in the black community over the imaginary Republican desire to “put y’all back in chains”, as Biden put it during the last election season.

“Those racist Republicans want to keep you from voting. They want to turn back the clock on civil rights. Republicans oppose big government because they hate black people. You must vote to stop them.” That’s the story they sell. It is a divisive and socially destructive tactic that does great harm to our country. But what it does to the country is a secondary issue for those who sell the lies. The primary goal is to get an angry, motivated voting block to the polls.

Thad Cochran was defeated by Chris McDaniel in the initial vote for Mississippi Senator but Cochran was not defeated by enough votes to avoid a run-off election. In preparation for the run-off election a decision was made by the Cochran team to tear the ‘race-baiting’ page from the Democrat playbook and to use it against McDaniel.

Large amounts of money were spent in Democrat districts on phone calls, fliers, and door-to-door pleas to encourage a vote against the racist Republican. A Cochran flier sold the lie that “Tea Party” candidate McDaniel “intends to prevent blacks from voting on Tuesday”. “Mississippi cannot and will not return to a bygone era of intimidating black Mississippians from voting. We must rise up on Tuesday to have our voices heard…”

This is classic, despicable race-baiting being used by a six- term Republican against a fellow Republican who had the nerve to challenge him and to challenge the way things are done in Washington.

Robocalls supporting Cochran targeted black districts with a message trashing the Tea Party and supporting President Obama. The message was essentially that the racist Tea Party was making it very difficult for our “African-American” president. Tea partiers want to oppose our wonderful president and so you need to vote against racists like McDaniel.

This was a race-based, pro-Obama, anti-Tea Party message paid for by Republicans. Establishment Republicans worked hard for and funded this dishonest campaign.

IN THE ALASKA PRIMARY OF 2010 LINDA MURKOWSKI LOST IN THE PRIMARY, BUT WENT ON TO MOUNT A THIRD PARTY CANDIDACY AND WON (INCIDENTALLY, USING AN ENDORSEMENT OF SENATOR TED STEVENS WHO WAS THEN DEAD). MURKOWSKI IS HARDLY A ROLE MODEL- BUT I CAN BE DONE AND McDANIEL CAME VERY CLOSE AND COULD MOUNT AN INDEPENDENT CAMPAIGN…..RSK

Mississippi state Sen. Chris McDaniel indicated moments ago that he’s not yet conceding last night’s runoff, arguing the election was “rife with irregularities” that need to be investigated.

With all precincts reporting, six-term incumbent Sen. Thad Cochran (R-Miss.) had 191,508 votes to McDaniel’s 184,815 — 50.9 percent to 49.1 percent.

According to FiveThirtyEight, “About 375,000 voters showed up Tuesday compared with 318,904 on June 3, an increase of more than 17 percent. Cochran raised his vote total by more than 38,000 votes, while McDaniel pulled in only an additional 30,000. That was more than enough to erase McDaniel’s 1,386 vote lead in the first round.”

Cochran’s strategy rested on widening the voter base: courting African-Americans who could legally vote in the runoff regardless of party as long as they hadn’t cast a ballot in the Democratic primary three weeks ago.

“The conservative movement is alive in Mississippi,” McDaniel said in a statement. “The Republicans who voted last night made it clear they’re looking for conservative change in Mississippi.”

“But the results also tell another story. They tell the story of some members of our party who are willing to engage in tactics unbecoming of the party of Ronald Reagan. It’s no wonder so many conservatives don’t feel welcome in the Republican Party,” he continued.

“If our party and our conservative movement are to co-exist, it is paramount that we ensure the sanctity of the election process is upheld. And we will do that. In the case of yesterday’s election, we must be absolutely certain that our Republican primary was won by Republican voters.”

McDaniel promised that “in the coming days, our team will look into the irregularities to determine whether a challenge is warranted.”

“After we’ve examined the data, we will make a decision about whether and how to procede [sic],” he said.

Here’s a headline from Forbes that caught my eye:

“IRS Employees Union Is ‘Very Concerned’ About Being Required To Enroll In Obamacare’s Health Insurance Exchange [1]”

You can’t blame ’em. Workers in the private sector are also “very concerned” about getting dumped into Obamacare’s subsidized insurance exchanges as, one by one, employers are forced to give up providing health insurance for their employees.

It’s possible that, like me, you are entertaining an un-Christian feeling of Schadenfreude about this happening to a large, widely loathed, and deeply politicized government agency.

But thing thing that should really arrest your attention about this headline, and the story it introduces, is contained in the first three words: “IRS Employees Union.”

The government’s tax collecting agency is unionized? Think about that for a moment.

The union in question is the National Treasury Employees Union [2]. According to the web site of the NTEU [3], the mission of the union is “to organize federal employees to work together to ensure that every federal employee is treated with dignity and respect.” That’s a tall order, in part because there are so very many federal employees. The NTEU’s web site includes a nifty interactive graphic that shows you just how many there are in each state: 279,622 in Texas, for example, 350,544 in California, 165,943 in New York, etc., etc. There are, in short, millions of them.

Karl Marx brought us the labor theory of value, which posited that the more work you put into producing something, the greater its worth.

That turned out to be rubbish [1]. If you build a bridge to nowhere, then no matter how much labor you have poured into the project, the bridge is useless. You could spend months digging a huge hole in the ground with a teaspoon; it would be a lot of work, but that is no guarantee that by the end you would have produced anything of value. Quite likely you would simply have squandered time, effort and better opportunities in order to dig yourself into a large hole in the ground.

So it goes for U.S. negotiators at the Iran nuclear talks in Vienna, who seem to be laboring under the theory that if they just work hard, and harder, and even harder, then in concert with Russia, China, France, Britain and Germany, they will produce a deal that will stop Iran’s nuclear weapons program. Actually, it’s even muddier than that. The aim by now seems to be to leave Iran with a nuclear program, but somehow promise that there will be no Iranian bomb at the end of this rainbow, and assure the world that Iran’s nuclear program will be — in the oft-repeated words of a U.S. senior administration official — “exclusively peaceful.”

It remains a mystery how that might work in practice, or what power, precisely, might enforce this vision of “peace” buttressed by Iranian nuclear facilities. On Tuesday, senior U.S. officials gave a briefing on the Iran nuclear talks — dubbed the P5+1 negotiations — to the House Committee on Foreign Affairs. Following the briefing, Rep. Ed Royce, chairman of the committee, released a statement [2]noting that “many Members of the Committee are concerned about the direction of these negotiations,” the biggest concern being that they are leading to a situation in which, ultimately, “it would be very easy for Iran to produce material for nuclear weapons — on a massive scale.”

But for U.S. officials engaged in these talks, the guiding imperative seems to be some sort of labor theory of diplomacy. Never mind the direction in which this diplomatic work crew might be shuffling. The idea seems to be that if the U.S. just works hard enough, with its cohorts, to produce a deal, then the deal will surely be worth something.