RUTHFULLY YOURS

Disability judge Harry Taylor has long been accused of misconduct. The allegations have included repeatedly sexually harassing female colleagues and employees, frequently dozing off and audibly snoring during hearings, and making an inappropriate call to a legal expert representing clients. But even as he avoided significant reprimand, he continued to award disability benefits to thousands of claimants, often without even holding a hearing, at a taxpayer cost of around $2.5 billion. The kicker: Though the Social Security Administration knew of Taylor’s shortcomings, it allows him — to this day — to continue judging its disability cases.

That’s just one shocking finding among dozens in a report aptly titled “Systemic Waste and Abuse at the Social Security Administration,” released this week by the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. It finds that 191 of the SSA’s judges rubber-stamped cases, awarding disability benefits in more than 85 percent of the cases they decided, including to claimants who almost certainly weren’t entitled to them.

In addition to crunching these appalling numbers, the report pays much attention to three judges, including Taylor, whose abuses of the system were particularly outrageous.

Charles Bridges, who served as the chief administrative-law judge in the SSA’s Harrisburg, Pa., hearing office between 2004 and 2010, was so notorious for prodigally awarding benefits that one disability law firm enacted a so-called Bridges Policy: to accept “any individual as a client if their case was assigned to [Bridges], regardless of the evidence.” Between 2005 and 2013, Bridges singlehandedly awarded an estimated $4.5 billion in benefits.

The report also heavily features David Daugherty, a disability judge who awarded benefits in all but roughly 1 percent of the cases he heard. Previous reports, including ones from the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Government Affairs, the Wall Street Journal, and National Review, have detailed how Daugherty worked with a greedy disability attorney who was shamelessly gaming the system.

All three judges are deserving of opprobrium. Instead, as the report notes, they kept their jobs and were even periodically rewarded for their bad behavior. That’s because the SSA has adopted a warped set of benchmarks for just what counts as good performance from a disability judge.

Bringing Bergdahl home was useful for closing Gitmo and winding down the war.
Soon we shall get to the bottom of the swap of five Taliban kingpins from the Guantanamo Bay detention facility for one Sergeant Bowe Bergdahl.

In time we will learn whether Bergdahl really served with “honor and distinction” and was “captured on the battlefield,” as National Security Adviser Susan Rice has stated. Or whether, as fellow soldiers of his platoon insist, he was a deserter who left his comrades to seek out the Taliban.

We will soon discover whether Bergdahl’s serious health problems or imminent danger prompted President Obama to make the sudden swap. Or whether, as administration skeptics insist, the deal was a rushed political gambit to divert attention from the Veterans’ Affairs scandal — and a way to whittle down the Guantanamo population and erode laws demanding congressional approval before such detainees are released.

Amidst the swap conundrum, the president has defended the trade by referencing history and the American experience in past wars. But here, too, what the president states is not always accurate.

Obama insisted that “we have a rule, a principle, that when somebody wears our country’s uniform and they’re in a war theater and they’re captured . . . we’re going to do everything we can to bring ’em home . . . and regardless of whatever circumstances there are, it is our obligation to bring them home.”

Yet the United States has not routinely sought to bring captives home, “regardless of whatever circumstances there are.” During the Korean War, and for decades afterwards while on patrol in Korea, some American soldiers simply walked across the DMZ and turned themselves over to the North Koreans.

Both in war and peace, the United States often did little to bring them back, even when the deserters had second thoughts and wanted to return. Charles Robert Jenkins stayed in North Korea for nearly 40 years after deserting in 1965. Japan sought to pressure the U.S. government to pardon him and helped obtain his release. On his return, Jenkins pled guilty to charges of desertion and aiding the enemy and was given a dishonorable discharge.

Ethnic Studies = Social Justice Posted By Mark Tapson

As Latinos overtake non-Hispanic whites as California’s largest ethnic group, a bill is now before the California state Senate which would require the Education Department to form a task force to study the implementation of a standardized ethnic studies curriculum in high schools across the state.

Sponsored by Assemblyman Luis Alejo, who has a bachelor’s degree in Chicano Studies from UC Berkeley, bill AB 1750 seeks to succeed where similar efforts to establish mandatory ethnic studies classes elsewhere have proven controversial – and failed.

Arizona, for example, passed a law in 2010 to shut down a Mexican-American studies curriculum that included books which Attorney General Tom Horne described as shockingly racist (even New Mexico state Rep. Nora Espinoza – herself Latina – called them “hate books”). Under a law forbidding classes “that advocate the overthrow of the United States, promote racial resentment, or emphasize students’ ethnicity rather than their individuality,” seven books were removed from high school classrooms to reside in the library (not banned, as opponents insist on describing it). Among them were titles such as Critical Race Theory, Occupied America: A History of Chicanos, Rethinking Columbus: The Next 500 Years, Pedagogy of the Oppressed by Marxist activist Paulo Freire, and Message to Aztlan (Aztlan is a symbol for Latino activists who believe they have a legal right to the land the United States acquired from the Mexican-American War).

Tony Diaz, who co-founded the pro-ethnic studies movement Librotraficante to subvert the Arizonan law, says that anti-ethnic studies efforts are discriminatory and, curiously, “an attempt to turn colleges and high schools into finishing schools for corporations.” Diaz didn’t expound on why preparing students to succeed in the corporate workforce is bad or what it has to do with ethnic studies.

A movement to require Mexican-American courses in Texas recently fizzled out as well. Some Latino activists there say the public school curriculum reflects “institutionalized racism,” by which they mean that they resent being denied the opportunity to inflame students with their own anti-capitalist, racial supremacism.

Rodolfo Acuña, professor of Chicano Studies at Cal State University Northridge and author of the aforementioned Occupied America, claims to have worked on at least a dozen attempts himself to extend ethnic studies to public schools, but they never garnered legislative support. However, he said he doesn’t anticipate much opposition to the Californian bill. Assemblyman Alejo is optimistic too:

California is moving in a different direction, one that recognizes and values the history of the people who make up our state. This will put California on the cutting edge — while other states are trying to abolish ethnic studies, we can standardize and incorporate it into high school curriculum…

We’re trying to incorporate the histories and knowledge of different communities that make up our state — not limited to communities of color. Ethnic studies should be seen not just as Latino — but Irish, Jewish, Filipino — there is no limitation.

This week’s Glazov Gang was guest-hosted by Superstar Josh Brewster and joined by titans Nonie Darwish, author of “The Devil We Don’t Know,” Michael Hausam, a conservative writer and activist, and Karen Siegemund, founder of Rage Against the Media.

The Gang discussed: Why Obama Did the Prisoner Swap, analyzing the heart of a leftist administration’s darkness:

http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/frontpagemag-com/why-obama-did-the-prisoner-swap-on-the-glazov-gang/

The VA Scandal began at the Phoenix VA Health Care System where administrators earned promotions and bonuses by shunting patients who needed treatment into fake waiting lists.

As many as 40 veterans had died while waiting for care and 1,715 veterans in the Phoenix VA Health Care System had waited more than 90 days for an appointment. A retired Navy serviceman died of bladder cancer after being put on a 7-month waiting list after blood was found in his urine. He finally received an appointment a week after his death.

But each and every year, from 2009 to 2011, the Phoenix VA Health Care System put in solar panels. The solar panels at the Carl T. Hayden VA in Phoenix cost $20 million.

That $20 million could have saved the lives of dying veterans. Instead it went to Green Energy.

The situation at the Phoenix VA wasn’t unique. In 2009, Obama had signed a Green Energy executive order. Secretary of Veterans Affairs Eric Shinseki announced that “in order to continue providing Veterans with the best health care and benefit services, VA must adapt to climate change.”

Not only did Global Warming have nothing to do with serving veterans, but it got in the way of the VA’s central mission. While Shinseki was focused on building solar panels so the sky wouldn’t fall, veterans were waiting months to see a doctor.

At some South Texas facilities vets had to wait 85 days for a primary care appointment and 55 days for a mental health appointment with “a worst-in-the-nation, 145-day average wait for new patients seeking specialist care.”

One of the vets waiting for a mental health appointment, who suffered from waiting list cheating, committed suicide.

Notwithstanding that there are still thousands of American troops in harm’s way in Afghanistan and that it is a ripe dead certainty the five jihadist commanders with which President Obama has just replenished the Taliban will go back to the anti-American jihad—indeed, at least one of them is already bragging that he will do so—former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton told NBC news Wednesday that the Taliban Five were not really a threat to the United States.

Mrs. Clinton, who also did not see much of a threat from the anti-American jihadists in Benghazi, the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, and the al Qaeda-affiliated Boko Haram terrorists in Nigeria during her tenure at the State Department, complained that it was critics of the administration who “were kind of missing the bigger picture here.” You see, “these five guys are not a threat to the United States. They are a threat to the safety and security of Afghanistan and Pakistan.”

It was during the Bill Clinton administration that the Taliban was established, took over Afghanistan, and gave safe haven to al Qaeda. That was the arrangement that enabled bin Laden’s network to have a secure headquarters, expansive training camps, and the capacity to carry out attacks on American targets—including the bombing of American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, the bombing of the U.S.S. Cole in Yemen, and ultimately the 9/11 atrocities. As Tom Joscelyn has demonstrated, the five jihadist commanders Mrs. Clinton does not see as a threat to American national security were key players in cementing the alliance between the Taliban and al Qaeda.

Adopting Mrs. Clinton’s own reasoning, I don’t see the, shall we say, remarkable judgment she exhibited at the State Department as a threat to her presidential ambitions, not at all.

There are two words that recur like a drumbeat in the news stories about David Brat’s defeat of House Majority Leader Eric Cantor in the Virginia primary last night. One is “historic.” The second is some variant of “stunning” (“staggering,” “shocking,” etc.). John Fund does us the courtesy of deploying both: “Eric Cantor’s loss is historic,” he writes at National Review [1]. “No sitting House majority leader has lost an election since the office was created in 1899. While Cantor’s loss was a stunning surprise, the warning signals were around for a while.” He then supplies a list of explanations that seemed obvious only after David Brat won. Yesterday afternoon, the wise men of the commentariat would have dismissed them with a self-assured thoroughness and consistency that is truly marvelous to behold.

“Historic” and “stunning.” That is, the triumph of the tea-party-backed economics professor was both 1) important and 2) unexpected.

It was unexpected because (for example) Cantor outraised Brat by $5.7 million to $231,000 [2]. Cantor was the establishment candidate. He has (how long before that “s” becomes a “d”?) a national profile. Brat is . . . (pause for Wikipedia check) an economics professor at Randolph-Macon College, an obscure institution in Ashland, Virginia.

Frankly, though, what surprises me about such events as David Brat’s victory is the surprise they occasion. Nigel Farage and the other anti-EU politicians weren’t supposed to trounce the established parties in the European elections a couple of weeks ago. Members of the established parties and the human remora [3] that attend them told us so. But Farage, Le Pen, and the rest trounced them across Europe. This, said Manuel Valls [4], the French prime minister, was “a shock, an earthquake that all responsible leaders must respond to.”

Right. And how’s that working out? From where I sit, the response of “responsible leaders,” i.e., representatives of the conventional wisdom, has been mostly confined to what they used to call in the Wild West a circling of the wagons. Demonize the bastards. Ostracize ’em. Talk incessantly about “fringe candidates” and “extremists” who cannot win (except they just did), who will upset the status quo, which by an extraordinary coincidence just happens to benefit those registering their “shock,” their having been “stunned,” “staggered,” not to say “utterly dismayed.”

So Majority Leader Eric Cantor has lost to a Tea Party candidate. Correction, Majority Leader Eric Cantor was crushed by a Tea Party candidate.

In some ways, Cantor’s exit is a political tragedy. It shows that flirting with the existential enemies of the Constitution, of liberty, and of core Republican principles can bear a very heavy price. I’m convinced that had Cantor resisted the siren calls of the left on two key issues — immigration and giving Eric Holder renewed power over state elections — he would have won tonight.

The moral of the story tonight is that when a Republican flirts with the left, that Republican risks it all. This isn’t 1995 anymore. Party insiders are less equipped to drive a narrative than they used to be. Now, talk radio, conservative media and grassroots organizing can drive an outcome better than a party apparatus. Big Money doesn’t produce the big results it used to. Insurgents, in the right battlespace, can beat the most powerful incumbents if they battle smart.

Back to the two issues that undermined Cantor — immigration and reempowering Eric Holder to control state elections.

Immigration was by far the more dominant of the two issues in the Cantor loss. Others have covered it better than I will here. But something odd happened over the weekend.

First, I, along with other conservative leaders like former Attorney General Ed Meese and Ken Blackwell, sent Mr. Cantor a letter. The letter addressed a bill sponsored by Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner (R-Wi) that would reverse a Supreme Court decision and give Eric Holder renewed powers over state elections, including the power to block photo voter ID and citizenship verification procedures. It was a power wickedly abused by the Holder Justice Department (where I used to work) and is regularly used to help Democrats in the name of civil rights. The bill sponsored by Rep. Sensenbrenner explicitly removes white voters from the protection of the law and unleashes all sorts of other mischief and federal mandates on state election officials. The letter to Mr. Cantor stated:

This bill will fundamentally and intentionally change American elections into race-reliant battlefields where, for the first time in our history, the United States, as a legal matter, would EXCLUDE a majority of Americans as a class from the full protection of the law – based solely on the color of their skin. As House Majority Leader you alone have the authority to bring this bill to a vote. Therefore, your continued ambiguity on a bill that is so clearly and deeply flawed is troubling to say the least. On behalf of our organizations, and of the millions we collectively represent, we are compelled to reach out to you directly and ask for a meeting to address the issue and your intentions.

There it is. The election in Virginia tonight can be explained by two words: continued ambiguity. The continued ambiguity undermined Cantor’s brand as a fighter for limited government. Cantor went to Selma, Alabama, and marched with some of the most bitter racialists in American politics. It was all part of an effort to cozy up with the NAACP and ethic interest group crowd. Instead of snuffing out the effort to give Eric Holder more power over state elections, the majority leader may have tried to build a bridge with the left.

Four years ago I predicted that the result of America’s apparently successful effort to contain violence in Iraq through the so-called “surge” would be a devastating and uncontrollable civil war in Iraq. I titled the essay “Gen. Petraeus’ Thirty Years War,” arguing that

Petraeus created a balance of power between Sunnis and Shi’ites by reconstructing the former’s fighting capacity, while persuading pro-Iranian militants to bide their time. To achieve this balance of power, though, he built up Sunni military power to the point that – for the first time in Iraq’s history – Sunnis and Shi’ites are capable of fighting a full-dress civil war with professional armed forces.

Gen. David Petraeus, then the American commander in Iraq, quieted the Sunni opposition to the American-backed Shi’ite majority government by giving them money and weapons. By doing so the U.S. rebuilt the Sunni military capability that it had ruined in 2003 when it destroyed the government of Saddam Hussein. With the fighting capacity of the Sunni minority now on par with the Shi’ite-majority government army, as we saw in the fall of Mosul to the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria.

I have nothing to add to what I wrote four years ago about the bungling of the Bush administration as compounded by Obama. The present disaster in Iraq is not wholly of our making, but American policy was a key enabler. The “surge” made it inevitable. There will be no resolution now without the exhaustion of the contending forces, in a long war of attrition with dreadful consequences for civilians, starting with the 500,000 who fled Mosul this week.

In a broader sense, American bungling set the stage for Syria’s civil war as well. I had the Ghost of Cardinal Richelieu explain why in a 2012 essay:

Richelieu looked at me with what might have been contempt. “It is a simple exercise in logique. You had two Ba’athist states, one in Iraq and one in Syria. Both were ruled by minorities. The Assad family came from the Alawite minority Syria and oppressed the Sunnis, while Saddam Hussein came from the Sunni minority in Iraq and oppressed the Shi’ites.

In Andrew McCarthy’s excellent new book “Faithless Execution” he lists President Obama’s flouting of the law. While there is enough evidence to lead to impeachment, McCarthy recognizes that there is no public appetite for impeachment but still hopes that Americans and their legislators will insist that the President abide by the law and by the Constitution and by the mandates given to the President of the United States to govern with transparency.

Yesterday to my extremely pleasant surprise I learned of an organization that actually does insist on transparency in government with scrupulous research. Please go to their site and subscribe:

Open The Books founded by Adam Andrzejewski, is a project of American Transparency, a 501(c)3 non-partisan, non-profit organization. Visit us online at www.openthebooks.com.

“Open The Books” has become a national rallying cry for transparency in public spending.

U.S. Senator Tom Coburn, sponsor of the 2006 “Google Your Government Act,” recognized our work, “Open the Books is doing the work I envisioned when the Coburn-Obama bill became law. Their innovative app and other tools are putting sunlight through a magnifying glass.”

Please contact us to help “Open The Books” on your state and local units of government. Our goal is to post “Every Dime. Online.” of all government spending. Currently displayed are 1 billion lines of spending from federal, state and local governments across America.

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Read biography: www.openthebooks.com/adam-andrzejewski

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