RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://www.wsj.com/articles/a-wake-up-call-for-congress-on-mental-health-reform-1459291136

Another shooting at the U.S. Capitol. This time, in an incident on Monday, 66-year-old Larry Dawson, a Tennessee man known to U.S. Capitol Police for his erratic behavior, was shot and wounded by a police officer when he pulled out what sources later said was a pistol-like pellet gun.

What is going on? One possible answer was offered earlier this month by 30-year-old Kyle Odom, who was arrested March 8 after throwing a letter to President Obama over the White House fence. The letter warned the president that there are at least 50 members of Congress, both Republicans and Democrats, who are Martians. Then, in a 21-page manifesto released to the media, Mr. Odom provided the names of these congressional Martians and described how they live “deep underground here and inside the moon.” Law-enforcement officials say that two days before the White House incident, Mr. Odom shot and critically wounded an Idaho minister, believing that the clergyman also was a Martian.

Kyle Odom had not always believed in extraterrestrials. He served four years as a decorated Marine, graduated from the University of Idaho with honors, and was accepted into a prestigious Ph.D. program in genetics. Then he developed delusions and auditory hallucinations, classic symptoms of schizophrenia. Like many with this disease, though, he apparently has had no awareness of his own illness.

Mr. Odom joins a long line of individuals with untreated mental illness who have come to the attention of Congress. In 1998 Russell Weston, with untreated schizophrenia, shot his way into the Capitol building, killing two guards before finally being stopped as he entered the office of then-House Majority Whip Tom DeLay. In response, Congress vowed to do something about untreated mental illness but did nothing.

In 2011 Jared Loughner, with untreated schizophrenia, severely wounded then-Rep. Gabrielle Giffords in Tucson, Ariz., and killed six others. In response, Congress vowed to do something but did nothing. Then in 2013 Miriam Carey, seriously mentally ill, was killed by U.S. Capitol Police on the Capitol grounds, causing a lockdown of the building. During these same years there have been at least 20 widely publicized mass shootings by individuals with serious mental illness that was not being treated. CONTINUE AT SITE

I’m sorry, did somebody order a hypocrite?

Obama used a Syracuse University event here Monday night to condemn the “divisive and often vulgar rhetoric” that has taken hold in politics…

Shocking, just shocking. I really wish we could go back to the genteel era when Obama was urging his supporters to get in people’s faces and telling Hispanics to punish their enemies.

“The No. 1 question I get right now as I travel the world and speak to world leaders is: What is happening in American politics?” Obama said in a keynote speech.

It’s been the question ever since Obama took office. But it’s a good thing he’s not divisive.

The president urged journalists to do their job and hold politicians accountable

Just politicians not named Obama…

“If I say that the world is round and someone else says it’s flat, that’s worth reporting. But you might also want to report on a bunch of scientific evidence that shows the world is round,” Obama said.

When I go to the synagogue on Passover, there will be a police officer at the door. There will be an NYPD officer in front of every synagogue. Police brass will make the rounds of each synagogue to check security and alertness. Local precincts will be on alert anticipating a Muslim terrorist attack.

As they are on every Jewish holiday.

In France, there are heavily armed soldiers outside synagogues. In Israel, the soldiers are more likely to be found inside the synagogues. That is what Jewish life is like under the shadow of Muslim terrorism.

The ADL, which was not outraged when Bernie Sanders posed with members of anti-Semitic hate groups such as SJP and CAIR, put out a press release denouncing Ted Cruz for calling for heightened police scrutiny of Muslim neighborhoods. But the alternative to a police presence in Muslim areas is a police presence in Jewish areas. If you can’t stop Muslim terrorism at the source, then you have to try and secure all the potential targets. That means police officers in front of synagogues and TSA agents checking your shoes. It means police forces that look like armies and soldiers in the streets.

The ADL denounced Cruz for calling for a return to the NYPD’s old tactics for breaking up Muslim terror plots. One of those “controversial” methods led to the breakup of a Muslim terror plot to blow up a synagogue in Manhattan. Ahmed Ferhani had been interfaith enough to also consider blowing up a church, but he settled on plotting to plant a bomb and then open fire inside a synagogue.

The same left that is now outraged by Cruz’s statement fought for Ferhani. They fought for a Muslim terrorist who boasted at his sentencing, “I intended to create chaos and send a message of intimidation and coercion to the Jewish population of New York City.” In the zero sum game of civil rights, the left fights for the civil rights of Muslim terrorists and against the civil rights of their Jewish victims.

When President Obama stages a photo op to publicize signing a measure he claims will “help” American workers, you can be almost certain that “unintended consequences” will outweigh ay intended benefits. Lacking even an elementary understanding of how a market economy works, he only makes things worse.

In an effort to avoid the Obamacare mandate, many companies reduced workers to fewer than 30 hours per week. This reduction of employees to part-time status continues to cause endless difficulties. Employees have fewer hours and less income than they want, and employers have a harder time staffing their companies. But the Obama administration continues to expand its grip on all aspects of American life.

In 2014, the Labor Department proposed that under the Fair Labor Standards Act, about five million U.S. workers [would be] newly eligible for overtime pay by more than doubling the salary threshold. This change is already being felt by many companies and now it will extend to colleges and universities.

How do businesses react? In some cases, “employers may attempt to convert these workers to an hourly wage, lowering their pay in the process so that their total weekly compensation, including overtime, remains constant. Other workers, whose salaries are just under the exemption threshold (expected to be $970/week in 2016), might see a small bump in their weekly pay to raise them above the new threshold.”

Some employers are apt to restrict workers to 40 hours per week in order to reduce overtime costs. Since the cost of compensation for regular (non-overtime) work should not change significantly as a result of these rules, employers would have an incentive to hire more part-time or full-time employees to make up for the lost overtime hours. Furthermore, because of the “duties test” managers may “be robbed of their flexibility” to assist with non-managerial parts of a job, thus impacting business operations.

I am certain that the headline for my article has you wondering if I may have lost my mind or am so determined to attract attention that I went “over the top.”

I can assure you that I am neither insane nor am I attempting to sensationalize my description of the events surrounding the alleged interaction between ICE agents and managers at USCIS (United States Citizenship and Immigration Services) in which the ICE agents were blocked from entering the USCIS facilities and denied access to the relevant immigration files.

USCIS is charged with providing a wide array of immigration benefits through the adjudications process, to aliens present in the United States. This includes providing aliens with political asylum, conferring lawful immigrant status upon aliens, and providing aliens with United States citizenship through the naturalization process.

In a manner of speaking, USCIS is the locksmith to America’s front door. An alien who has been granted lawful immigrant status and issued an Alien Registration Receipt Card (Green Card) or has become a United States citizen, may travel in and out of the United States at will.

Before we go any further, I want you to make an indelible note in your mind: USCIS currently adjudicates more than 6 million applications each and every year and would be charged with providing unknown millions of illegal aliens with lawful status should any sort of “immigration reform” program be enacted.

The 9/11 Commission made it clear that immigration benefits were the key to the 9/11 terrorist attack and, indeed, as I have noted in previous articles, terrorists such as Faisal Shahzad, the “Times Square Bomber,” was naturalized roughly a year before he attempted to detonate a bomb concealed in an SUV parked at Times Square. The terrorist Tsarnaev brothers, who carried out the murderous rampage at the Boston Marathon on April 15, 2013, had been granted political asylum along with other family member and become lawful immigrants. In fact, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev who, having been found guilty of committing numerous terror-related crimes and now sits on death row, became a naturalized America shortly before he participated in that savage attack.

Radical left-wingers want to free half the nation’s prisoners –including many violent offenders– a move that would cause an upsurge in crime rates for decades to come.

To many of today’s leftists criminality itself is an illegitimate concept. The mindless chanting of the slogan “no one is illegal” at open-borders rallies is part of the same school of thought.

Spearheaded by the American Civil Liberties Union and bankrolled by radical speculator George Soros, the “end mass incarceration” movement wants to reduce the U.S. prison population by 50 percent within the next 10 to 15 years.

This specific push is called the “Cut50” project.

“We have the largest incarcerated population in the world despite the fact that we’re a democracy and that we value individual freedoms,” Alison Holcomb, national director of the ACLU Campaign to End Mass Incarceration told public radio station KUOW in Puget Sound, Wash.

“The overuse of our criminal justice system has resulted in expanding a caste, a second class of citizens that lose their right to vote, that won’t be able to get loans to go to school, that will probably have difficulty renting an apartment and that is not healthy for our society and it’s actually compromising our safety.”

Like Black Lives Matter supporter and Baltimore riot organizer DeRay Mckesson, Holcomb doesn’t care about property rights.

She doesn’t want thieves and robbers jailed even briefly. If someone steals property, “why is the response to put that person in a cage?” she said.

Holcomb’s comrades want to unleash more than a million inmates –including violent offenders– on American society.

This week’s Congressional hearings have shown that a series of government errors—local, state and federal—caused Flint’s lead-contaminated water. The state is fessing up, but the Environmental Protection Agency is trying to pretend it had nothing to do with it.

“Looking back on Flint, from day one, the state provided our regional office with confusing, incomplete and incorrect information,” EPA chief Gina McCarthy told Congress on Thursday. “As a result, EPA staff were unable to understand the potential scope of the lead problem until a year after the switch.” Far from being an innocent bystander in Flint, the EPA obfuscated and played down the scope of the lead problem.

As Ms. McCarthy noted, federal law gives states primary responsibility for enforcing drinking water rules, “but the EPA has oversight authority,” which includes setting maximum limits on contaminants and monitoring compliance. After a change in Washington, D.C.’s water treatment in 2001 resulted in dangerously high lead levels, Congress keelhauled the EPA for lax oversight.

In 2006 the Government Accountability Office concluded that “EPA’s data on water systems’ violations of testing and treatment requirements are questionable” and flagged “weaknesses in the regulatory framework” for the 1991 Lead and Copper Rule. Virginia Tech researcher Marc Edwards told Congress on Tuesday that the EPA for a decade has ignored recommendations to revise its lead rule to reflect best scientific practices.

The EPA also ignored warnings from its own staff. On Feb. 25, 2015—about 10 months after the city switched its water source to the corrosive Flint River—a parent called EPA Region 5 complaining about high lead levels. On March 19, an EPA official called the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality “expressing concern.” CONTINUE AT SITE

Merrick Garland, the appellate judge whom President Barack Obama has nominated to the Supreme Court, is a “moderate.” Of that we are assured by all the best people writing in all the usual venues: USA Today, Politico, the Los Angeles Times.

A moderate what?

The question may be in this instance a purely intellectual one. Garland could be the second coming of Solomon, and Mitch McConnell and his Republican colleagues would be looking to leave him locked up in the Senate basement until after the presidential elections, after which President Cruz might choose a better candidate; President Clinton, a much worse one (which would probably result in the lame-duck Senate working to confirm Garland); or President Trump, the devil knows what. The immediate case against advancing Garland’s nomination has nothing to do with Garland and everything to do with the Senate rousing itself to do its constitutional duty and check President Obama’s executive imperialism with such tools as it has at its disposal.

Carrie Severino and others have argued here that Garland is no judicial moderate, that he is a quiet left-wing activist well disposed to political efforts to undermine the Second Amendment. On that question, I defer judgment to our experts. But there is another question we ought to consider, which is whether there is any such thing as a judicial moderate.

If the expanse of your political imagination is roughly the dimensions of the New York Times, that may seem an absurd question. We hear all the time about “moderates” and “extremists” in the nation’s courts. A great deal of huffing and puffing, which no doubt dishevels the pages of a nearby copy of The Economist, insists upon the virtue and the needfulness of such moderation.

But the fundamental question that we must ask about Supreme Court nominees — all nominees to all benches, in fact — is not one of degree, which is the sort of question that the criterion of “moderateness” would apply. Instead, it is an either/or question: Does the law say what it means and mean what it says, or are judges empowered to graft private notions of justice from their own souls onto the law and the Constitution?

The late Kathryn Steinle, an innocent young woman who was gunned down and killed on a San Francisco street by an illegal alien with seven felonies and five deportations already on his resumé, is just one of many Americans who are lying in their graves today as a direct result of the “sanctuary” policies that have turned hundreds of U.S. cities into safe havens not only for lone-wolf sociopaths, but also for organized members of Latin American drug cartels, violent criminal gangs, and Islamic terrorist cells. Moreover, countless additional victims have had their psyches forever scarred, their bodies permanently damaged, and their lives all but destroyed for precisely the same senseless reason. The numbers are ugly: Of the 9,295 deportable aliens who were released after their arrest by sanctuary jurisdictions during the first eight months of 2014 alone, some 2,320 were subsequently re-arrested, on new criminal charges, soon thereafter. And before their initial release, 58% of those 9,295 aliens already had felony charges or convictions on their records, while another 37% had serious prior misdemeanor charges.

Sanctuary policies bar police and other public-sector employees in many U.S. cities from notifying the federal government about the presence of illegal aliens residing in their communities. As such, these policies defiantly give the proverbial middle finger to the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act (IIRIRA ) that Congress passed twenty years ago to require that local governments cooperate with U.S. Immigration & Customs Enforcement (ICE). More than 200 cities nationwide currently observe formal sanctuary policies that are written as resolutions, ordinances, or executive orders. Numerous other cities, meanwhile, have implemented similar policies on an informal basis, meaning that they are unwritten but nevertheless authorized by local government leaders and obeyed by city workers. All told, approximately 340 U.S. cities administer either formal or informal sanctuary policies today.

President Barack Obama nominated Merrick B. Garland, who currently serves as Chief Judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, to replace the late Justice Antonin Scalia. The White House’s strategy was to pick someone whom they believe will be politically difficult for Republican senators to simply ignore – a stealth leftist recast as a “centrist.” The White House even created a new Twitter handle, @SCOTUSnom, to rev up activists seeking to pressure Senate Republicans into giving President Obama’s nominee, in Obama’s words, “a fair hearing and an up-or-down vote.”

The Democratic Party has lost no time making Obama’s nomination a highly charged partisan issue. All the Republicans want to do is to let the voters have their say this fall in choosing the next president before a lifetime position on the Supreme Court is filled. But Debbie Wasserman Schultz, Chair of the Democratic National Committee, insists that lame duck Obama must have his way and change the entire ideological balance of the Supreme Court for possibly decades to come. “Frankly, I’ve grown a little sick of Republicans in Congress and their antics that have ranged from simply unproductive to downright offensive,” she complained in a letter to Democrats. Somehow, in Wasserman Schultz’s fevered imagination, it is “offensive” and “obstructionism” to defer to the will of the voters in a presidential election year before making such a consequential decision.

The left’s propaganda machine will argue that Judge Garland is a centrist whom all fair-minded senators should support. The New York Times is already quoting Utah Senator Orin Hatch, who said back in 2010, when Judge Garland was being considered to fill another Supreme Court vacancy, “I know Merrick Garland very well. He would be very well supported by all sides.”

However, Senator Hatch made that statement when President Obama was looking to replace Justice John Paul Stevens’ seat. President Obama refused to take Senator Hatch’s “advice” and rejected Judge Garland. He nominated the more left-wing Justice Elena Kagan instead, whom the Senate confirmed. The ideological balance of the Supreme Court was not in jeopardy with Elena Kagan’s confirmation because she was replacing one of the more left-wing justices at that time. Judge Garland today, by contrast, would be replacing the intellectual leader of the Supreme Court’s more conservative members.