RUTHFULLY YOURS

It isn’t that the barbarians are at the gate. The barbarians control the gate. I don’t know what else to call a president and attorney general who have opened the U.S. border to literally tens of thousands of “children” – some described as “sexually active” teens, some even suspected of ties to gangs. This not only breaks laws, it breaks trust. Opening the border this way also opens the most outrageous front to date in what increasingly looks like a kind of war aimed at “fundamentally transforming the United States of America.” And the people’s elected representatives do nothing.

Children are usually just children, but when 130,000 of them are expected to storm the border in the coming year, they more closely resemble an advancing column, a kind of foreign legion of child-mercenaries raised abroad with cynical promises of booty in the form of cradle-to-grave taxpayer charity.

But who will fight “children”? This is the audacity of this latest Obama “crisis”: Trojan horse as “humanitarian crisis.” For the literary set, call it “Camp of the Saintlets,” a twist on the prophetic “Camp of the Saints,” the 1973 novel by French author Jean Raspail envisioning an apocalyptic “invasion” of Europe by successive boatloads of Third World nationals, which is today old news out of Spain, Italy and other nations.

Of course, there is an undeniable genius to this form of border attack. All “the kids” from the rest of the world (do you really think Central America is the end?) have to do is serve as pitiful proxies of the assault. Once vanquished by pangs of conscience, however false, we’ll support them forever. We’ll have to. Have you taken a look at your local police department’s massive and bristling military hardware lately? Just shut up and watch as this newfangled children’s crusade turns our border, the concept of nationhood itself, into dust. Welcome to Obamaland.

Of course, even the 17-year-old gangbangers among the youngsters aren’t the masterminds or generals. Like American citizens, they are pawns, dupes, lured by promises Washington may indeed extract from Us, the People. “Go to America with your child, you won’t be turned away,” one Guatemalan mother told a radio station in the Rio Grande Valley. She is right. Come one, come all.

Once they are over the increasingly irrelevant line, Obama officials welcome the invading junior armies, shepherding them straight into an enfolding and enlarging federal safety net from which they may never have to emerge. These are just the newest wards of a brave new state that bears no resemblance to the republic as defined by those antique documents kept under glass in the dim light of the National Archives.

President Obama is being blamed for this fiasco. The truth is that the Georges (Bush One and Two) are equally to blame. With all the grandiloquent names given to incursions on Iraq (Operation Freedom, Shock and Awe) there was no plan for victory, no recognition of Radical Islam and Jihad as the enemy. Shock and Awe became Aw Shucks…let’s get out of here…..rsk
The magnitude of the debacle now unfolding in Iraq is becoming clearer by the day, with the terrorist army of the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham, or ISIS, marching ever closer to Baghdad. On Tuesday the al Qaeda affiliate captured Mosul, a city with a population greater than Philadelphia’s, a day later it took Tikrit in the Sunni heartland, and on Thursday ISIS commanders announced they plan to attack the Shiite holy cities of Najaf and Karbala.

No one should underestimate the danger this presents to the stability of the region and to America’s national and economic security. An extended civil war seems to be the best near-term possibility. More dangerous is ISIS’s ambition to establish a Muslim caliphate in the heart of the Persian Gulf, which would mean a safe haven for Islamic terrorism that would surely target the U.S. The danger to Iraq’s oil exports of three million barrels a day is already sending prices up and global equities down.

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The threat to Baghdad is real and more imminent than is widely understood. Four Iraqi divisions have melted away before the 3000-5,000 ISIS force, which is gaining deadlier weapons as it advances. One source says Iraqi soldiers who are supposed to protect Baghdad are dressing in civilian clothes beneath their military uniforms in case they have to flee. Iraq’s air power, such as it is, could soon be grounded if civilian contractors are endangered.

President Obama finally addressed the spreading chaos during a photo-op with Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott on Thursday, noting “a lot of concern” but making no commitments to help. The White House turned down an urgent appeal from Baghdad to intervene with air strikes, leaving Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki little choice but to turn to Iran to fill the breach—and extend its influence. Meanwhile, Vice President Joe Biden is said to be on top of things from the Situation Room. Inshallah.

The prospect of Iraq’s disintegration is already being spun by the Administration and its media friends as the fault of George W. Bush and Mr. Maliki. So it’s worth understanding how we got here.

Iraq was largely at peace when Mr. Obama came to office in 2009. Reporters who had known Baghdad during the worst days of the insurgency in 2006 marveled at how peaceful the city had become thanks to the U.S. military surge and counterinsurgency. In 2012 Anthony Blinken, then Mr. Biden’s top security adviser, boasted that, “What’s beyond debate” is that “Iraq today is less violent, more democratic, and more prosperous. And the United States is more deeply engaged there than at any time in recent history.”

Dr. McHugh, former psychiatrist in chief at Johns Hopkins Hospital, is the author of “Try to Remember: Psychiatry’s Clash Over Meaning, Memory, and Mind” (Dana Press, 2008).

The government and media alliance advancing the transgender cause has gone into overdrive in recent weeks. On May 30, a U.S. Department of Health and Human Services review board ruled that Medicare can pay for the “reassignment” surgery sought by the transgendered—those who say that they don’t identify with their biological sex. Earlier last month Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel said that he was “open” to lifting a ban on transgender individuals serving in the military. Time magazine, seeing the trend, ran a cover story for its June 9 issue called “The Transgender Tipping Point: America’s next civil rights frontier.”

Yet policy makers and the media are doing no favors either to the public or the transgendered by treating their confusions as a right in need of defending rather than as a mental disorder that deserves understanding, treatment and prevention. This intensely felt sense of being transgendered constitutes a mental disorder in two respects. The first is that the idea of sex misalignment is simply mistaken—it does not correspond with physical reality. The second is that it can lead to grim psychological outcomes.

The transgendered suffer a disorder of “assumption” like those in other disorders familiar to psychiatrists. With the transgendered, the disordered assumption is that the individual differs from what seems given in nature—namely one’s maleness or femaleness. Other kinds of disordered assumptions are held by those who suffer from anorexia and bulimia nervosa, where the assumption that departs from physical reality is the belief by the dangerously thin that they are overweight.

With body dysmorphic disorder, an often socially crippling condition, the individual is consumed by the assumption “I’m ugly.” These disorders occur in subjects who have come to believe that some of their psycho-social conflicts or problems will be resolved if they can change the way that they appear to others. Such ideas work like ruling passions in their subjects’ minds and tend to be accompanied by a solipsistic argument.

The Terrorist Army Marching on Baghdad

The Iraqi military simply may not be capable of launching a sufficient counteroffensive.

We’re losing Iraq. Mosul, a great city in northern Iraq, now belongs to the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS). The world has changed overnight as a former al Qaeda affiliate wrested a major city from a state by force—and without a fight. Within two days of taking Mosul, ISIS pushed south toward Baghdad, collapsing the Iraqi security forces like dominoes in cities from Mosul to Tikrit. ISIS also attacked the Shiite holy city of Samarra. Baghdad is within their sights.

It is already clear that, regardless of whether Baghdad falls, the ascendancy of ISIS is going to redraw and redefine the Middle East. The Kurdish Regional Government, seeing the rest of Iraq in turmoil and government troops pulling out of Kirkuk, moved on Wednesday to secure the oil-rich province—a prize the Kurds had long sought. With the city now controlled by the Kurds’ Peshmerga military, conditions are ripe for the Kurdish region to secede from Iraq. If that happens, the effects are likely to cascade across neighboring states, erasing Middle East borders established in 1916 by the Sykes-Picot agreement. Nevertheless, the greater threat to Middle East sovereign states is ISIS itself, which seeks to establish a transnational emirate. Yet the government in Baghdad would still need the Kurds even if they splinter off: With the Iraqi army in retreat, Iraq may have to enlist the Peshmerga to try to retake the north from ISIS.

These jihadists present a formidable military foe. Disavowed by al Qaeda for unsanctioned advances into Syria, ISIS is a vicious religious organization that possesses daunting military power. Unlike al Qaeda, ISIS has designated its own Islamic state and is expanding it through force. Seated in the city of Raqqa in northern Syria, ISIS has just gained a second regional capital in Mosul and a third in Tikrit, making their cross-border state a reality. The ISIS military campaign in northern Iraq is already a mighty victory—well-designed, well-prepared and well-executed. The question now is how far ISIS can go.

The extremists are encircling Baghdad and likely planning an offensive. But ISIS may move again to strike Samarra, 70 miles to the north and close to the ISIS front line. If these Islamists, who are Sunnis, seize Samarra’s al-Askari mosque—a revered Shiite monument—the country will be thrown into another sectarian civil war. That has long been ISIS’s aim. In a civil war, ISIS thinks it can emerge as the stronger military power. Then the group would have a state, would be fully armed and ready to expand westward, into Syria’s northern cities beyond ISIS-held Raqqa.

David Hume used to extol “the calm sunshine of the mind.” It radiates a gratifyingly clear and uplifting nimbus, that cognitive luminosity, all the more precious on account of its rarity. My friend Kevin Williamson has been a conspicuous source of such refreshing clarity, and his essay “Catholics Against Capitalism [1]” at NRO is a work of particular scintillation.

The occasion for Kevin’s piece was the meeting in Washington, D.C., last week of some Catholic intellectuals and clergy under the leadership of the Honduran cardinal, His Eminence Oscar Andrés Maradiaga [2]. The title of the conference was “Erroneous Autonomy: The Catholic Case against Libertarianism,” though as Kevin points out, the real object of criticism was not libertarianism particularly but free market economics generally. And as Kevin also points out, the Church has no special grace to pronounce authoritatively on such secular matters and, in the case of its reflections on matters economic, “the best that can be said of the clergy’s corporate approach to economic thinking is that it is intellectually incoherent, which is lucky inasmuch as the depths of its illiteracy become more dramatic and destructive as it approaches coherence.”

Kevin’s longish essay is worth reading carefully, for it is full of wisdom and is expressed with patient brio. The basic position of Cardinal Rodríguez Maradiaga is the familiar leftist litany: “Capitalism” is bad because it creates great wealth, while it also “destroys wealth, value and jobs. Those ‘wondrous technologies’ also manifest as wrathful deities, efficiently eliminating or reducing the need for labor.” (Kevin quotes from a truly obtuse review [3] of Conscious Capitalism, Whole Foods CEO John Mackey’s book, in Tricycle). “The implicit economic hypothesis here,” Kevin points out, “is that producing a certain amount of goods more efficiently — in this case, with less labor — makes the world worse off. . . . The reality is the opposite, and that is not a matter of opinion, perspective, or ideology — it is a material reality, the denial of which is the intellectual equivalent of insisting on a geocentric or turtles-all-the-way-down [4] model of the universe.”

Here’s the bottom line: Capitalism is the greatest engine for the production of wealth the ingenuity of man has ever invented. Are you interested in helping the poor? Embrace capitalism. Do you want to help clean up the environment? Embrace capitalism. Are you interested in obliterating the scourge of malnutrition or some ghastly African disease or illiteracy or [fill in your personal do-good desideratum here]: yep, embrace capitalism. The global poverty rate, Kevin reminds us, has been cut in half [5] in the last 20 years. Think about that. Then think about the sorrowful history of our species up to about 1830. How much progress against widespread — really, near total — poverty had there been from the beginning of time until then — until, that is, capitalism started to take off? Not much.

GIDEON KING: LOEB KING CAPITAL MANAGEMENT

Has anyone thought deeply about Gitmo lately? The leader of our nation is taking action that may very well
endanger our lives, and more importantly the lives of our children.

On March 7th, 2011 it was established that Executive Order 13567 would be carried out
under the framework of section 1023 of the National Defense Authorization Act.
A Periodic Review Board process was established wherein government appointed
officials examine whether or not Guantanamo detainees continue to pose a threat
to our country. Each detainee is appointed a personal representative and
witnesses may provide testimony at the behest of any relevant party.

Once a recommendation is made a review committee will determine whether it is
warranted to keep a detainee in “law of war detention.” The review committee is
made up of the Secretary Of State , the Secretary of Defense, the Attorney
General, the Secretary of Homeland Security, the Director of National
Intelligence, and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
The very first review was completed on or about January 9, 2014; it was
determined that Mahmud Abd Al Aziz Al Mujahid was no longer a threat to our
country. He is known as a member of the “Dirty Thirty” which included 30 UBL
bodyguards. He is a committed jihadist, originally recruited by Yemeni Shaykhs.

He has familial ties to UBL. He was trained at the al-Qaida al-Faruq training
camp. He was present in fights against the U.S. in Tora Bora and is reported
to have had knowledge of planned terrorist attacks. A hearty congratulations to
the team that is letting this demonstrably militant enemy of our state go
free(I couldn’t think of another way to express my sense of desperate sarcasm).

Wait, more congratulations are in order.

The Periodic Review Board has helped to clear 78 of the remaining 149 prisoners
and more hearings are to come. The prisoners are claiming psychosocial reform.
They have cited yoga and Martin Luther King books as their inspiration for moral
enlightenment. They profess a desire to get back to farming with their families.

Intelligence officials admit they are very limited in ability to track released
prisoners. There is vast evidence that roughly 1 out of 3 prisoners returns
to war against us; Obama’s own director of intelligence noted that 178 of the
614 prisoners transferred away from the prison have re-engaged in terrorism
including the Benghazi attacks, numerous roadside attacks, and other high
profile misdeeds. One of the five Taliban prisoners recently released in
exchanged for Bergdahl has already pledged to rejoin the fight against us.

Obama is not by any means squarely to be blamed for the misguided release of
those who would kill us. George Bush Junior released 500 Gitmo detainees. But
it is Obama, in a fit of moral indignation that only graduates of our finest ivy
league institutions can gin up, that made it his raison d’etre to shut Gitmo
down.

It is Obama that issued executive order 13567. It is Obama that recently
released a commonly alleged traitor to the U.S. Army in exchange for human dirt.
Obama is the architect of the institutional process to free these bastards.

Without doubt Obama raised legitimate human rights issues when decrying the
behavior of the top brass at Gitmo. But one should seriously question why it is
so terribly important for Obama to free the Gitmo prisoners. If his respect for
the law is so fierce then we must be missing something, as he has subverted the
law on numerous occasions in reversing elements of the ACA, illegally
circumventing(as Diane Feinstein recently pointed out) the process by which
congress approves prisoner swaps, trampling on settled bankruptcy laws to
appease unions during the impending insolvency of General Motors, and presiding
over an administration that is addicted to hyperbole, prevarication, and poor
comportment in Benghazi, Fast and Furious, the V.A. flap, the Internal Revenue
Service scandal, and so much more.

Why is Obama so deeply committed to freeing
these prisoners? Just plain why? We don’t have many detained and we have
hundreds of thousands of people in jail for minor violation at the tax payer’s
expense.

One hopes the explanation is that he is just not a serious man—that his
puerile obsession with left wing peccadilloes such as carbon emissions, Gitmo
human rights violations(I know I know I know those are serious issues and I
wouldn’t like it if my son was subjected to such indignations), equal treatment
in the White House(notwithstanding that this is already settled law and that the
document he signed in one of his morally righteous spasms brought on by low
approval ratings was a cosmetic limp paper with no effect whatever), eclipses
what should be his focus on the fact that the world is burning around us with
the profusion of radicalism from Latin America to the Middle East to Florida to
United States jail cells, and on the fact that America is spending itself into
oblivion.

Put another way, pounding the proverbial table over a series of issues
which get people excited but which are not elemental to the standard of living
of our citizenry and our national security, is easy populist pickings for a man
too small to tackle the truly existential and thorny issues of our time such as
radicalism, national security, sluggish GDP growth, and the fact that too many
citizens are becoming economic wards of the state.

It is ever so comfy to whip the populace up into moral indignation in a diversionary tactic that shifts
focus away from our slippage as a world leader on so many fronts. We are mired
in politically explosive and psychologically radioactive dialogue about income
inequality and the Keystone pipeline and Obama is vociferous about these issues
because they are easy fodder for ideological division.

Yet, as radicals reabsorb Iraq into their fold, Obama is surprisingly silent. We telegraph our
departure from every war, pay the consequences for such a silly public
projection, and then slip into quiescence when everything we worked for
dissolves into chaos.

We walk on the hot coals of politically correct polite
fictions about income inequality but neglect to point out that income inequality
is more aptly measured by the disparity in what one member of society can
consume of goods and services versus another member of society. In dollars, the
disparity has grown, no doubt, but what can be bought is what counts, as
billions of dollars does nobody any good if they live out in the middle of the
ocean where no consumable goods and services are available.

The gap between rich and poor is actually narrowing when one analyzes the issue through the
revealing lens of relative buying/consuming power. If only we had a serious man
or woman at the helm! Then at least we would introduce some balance into our
national dialogue. Either he is not sophisticated enough for this balance, or
it does not serve his political bent well to do other than take bellows to the
flame of our divisions. He should get a rebate from Harvard or be excoriated
for having a disingenuous soul.

If he is not a serious man, that’s a shame. If there is another explanation for
his willingness to engage in things that seem inapposite to our desire to
protect our nation from attack, then his hideous approval ratings should be even
worse.

That he is a bad leader presiding over a mendacious and craven White
House is obvious(how many lies has the press confirmed now? one needs a math
degree to count that high)…….but what truly are the intentions of a man that is
so passionate about the release of our worst enemies? And knowing how
vulnerable New York City and the rest of our country is to attack , should we
be worried that Obama does not have the best interest of our children in mind as
he releases those who would harm them. The Bergdahl deal is perverse on so
many levels it is almost not addressable.

No doubt, some that read this will stomp on my words as gross
oversimplifications and misguided accusations. But even Shakespeare had it
wrong sometimes, for things are often as they appear. And it appears to me that
our president is “hard at it” when it comes to freeing our enemies and dividing
us as a nation.

What should we do with Gitmo detainees? That’s a discussion better had offline.
Gk.

Disclosure: Adam Andrzejewski is founder of OpenTheBooks.com where 1.1 billion lines of government spending is posted online. All spending figures cited in this editorial are posted online at our website.

A month after Congressional hearings and the resignation of VA Secretary Eric Shinseki, the VA finally disclosed just how systemically routine the delays in treatment were for veterans. Their internal audit showed 70% of facilities used non-compliant appointment scheduling to make their official numbers look better. Since 2011, 56,000 returning veterans had to wait three months for a doctor’s appointment and 65,000 vets never actually got to see a doctor.

So for the last three years, where was the VA’s highly compensated auditing apparatus? Since 2008, $103 million was paid to Big Four accounting firm Grant Thornton and just in the last three years, executives at the Inspector General Office in Washington, D.C. collected $56 million in salary plus bonuses.

Then there’s the case of the $9,345 rescinded bonus to embattled Phoenix VA Director Sharon Helman: then Secretary Shinseki cited “administrative error,” but CEO of the Southwest Region Susan Bowers had vigorously defended the bonus as the “result of a highly successful rating.”

What’s going on in the executive suite at the VA with their well-paid armies of Inspector Generals, Quality Assurance Officers and third party contracted auditors who are supposed to shine the light and correct malfeasance? Of the 400,000 job bonuses totaling $300 million since 2007, how many were not deserved and also due to “administrative error”?

Data collected via the Freedom of Information Act and posted at OpenTheBooks.com shows that the ongoing mistreatment of veterans isn’t a question of money but instead questionable practices and mis-allocation of resources. Since 2007, $136 billion in salary was paid out to employees of the VA, but less than 1 in 10 employees are doctors.

In an interview during a media tour to promote her latest memoir, Hillary Clinton acknowledged that she kept extensive notes during the attack on the American consulate in Benghazi but said that she won’t turn them over to congressional investigators if asked.

“Did you keep a diary during your time?” NBC News’ Cynthia McFadden asked Clinton in an interview on Tuesday.

“I kept a lot of notes,” said Clinton.

McFadden followed up, asking the former secretary of state what she would do with the notes if they were requested by a House Select Committee appointed to investigate the attack — which left U.S. Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans dead.

“If the committee wants your notes, would you turn those over?”

“They can read it in the book,” said Clinton, referencing her book “Hard Choices,” which was released amid much buzz on Tuesday.

“Let’s see whether this is on the level or not because that really matters to me. I don’t want to be part of something which, in any way, politicizes or demeans the sacrifice that we saw happen there.”

Clinton has already caused a stir with other comments she’s made about the Benghazi attack. In an ABC interview on Monday, Clinton said that the acrimony surrounding Benghazi provided “more of a reason to run [for President] because I do not believe our great country should be playing minor-league ball.”

“We ought to be in the majors,” she said. “I view this as really apart from — even a diversion from — the hard work that the Congress should be doing about the problems facing our country and the world.”

Florida Sen. Marco Rubio disagreed.

“I don’t think the issue of Benghazi is ‘minor-league ball’,” he told CBS This Morning. “Four Americans have lost their lives serving our country. We need to investigate it to understand what went wrong so that the people responsible for those decisions can be held accountable.”

The Middle East is rapidly changing. Indeed, it is convulsing. After generations of stasis, where strong, despotic central governments ruled with an iron fist and everyone knew who he was and who he was not, today everything – borders, regimes, identities – is in flux.
Take Iraq. Last week, residents of Mosul lived under Iraqi government control. On Tuesday, they lived under al-Qaida control.

Today national governments throughout the Islamic world are incapable of defeating strategically minded and aggressive jihadist militias like al-Qaida and proxy forces for the likes of Iran.

The most prominent example of an organization that is strategically flexible and capable of evolving and learning is Hezbollah. Since Iran founded the Shi’ite terrorist organization in 1982, Hezbollah has operated on multiple levels simultaneously.

Today it is an international terrorist organization with cells throughout the world. It is Iran’s foreign legion. It is a member of the Lebanese government.

It controls south Lebanon. And it fields its own formidable military force that now serves as the core of Syrian dictator Bashar Assad’s military forces in the Syrian civil war.

All of these disparate tasks require an enormous capacity for organizational flexibility and learning.

This brings us to Israel.

College tuitions continue to rise in excess of inflation. Student loans have doubled over the past seven years. Unemployment and underemployment among college graduates aged 22 to 27 stands at 45%. On Monday, President Obama signed an Executive Order expanding the 2010 “pay as you earn” (PAYE) program. In doing so, he made it clear that tuitions would continue to rise. With easier terms for borrowers, he has assured that loan volume would increase; however, terms will be easier, though not for taxpayers. And he did nothing to alleviate the employment situation.

What he did was to ensure college administrators that federal money would continue to flow, that taxes will continue to rise and that personal responsibility and thrift would not be part of students’ curricula.

While we must acknowledge the importance of a college education, we must also recognize that not everyone need go to college, nor is a college education necessary for a fulfilled and happy life. As many of today’s college graduates know, there are many jobs that don’t require knowledge of Chaucer or the Pythagorean Theorem. We should also keep in mind that while college costs have risen in excess of inflation, they have risen less than the Dow Jones Industrial Averages over the past 54 years. For example, tuition and fees at Harvard College cost $1,520 in 1960 and $42,292 in 2014 – a compounded increase of 6.3%. In the same period the total return to the S&P 500 has been about 8.5%. However, if Harvard’s tuition had risen in line with CPI (2.3%), today’s tuition would be $5,200 – such is the power of compounded returns, which are to our advantage when they reflect assets, but to our detriment when they represent liabilities.

The environment is tougher today. Starting salaries for college graduates have declined as a percent of tuition. In 1960, beginning salaries were about $4,000 – 70% above the cost of tuition. In 2013, they were about $45,000, or 6.5% above tuition costs. Life was simpler, and a moral sense was prevalent, including obligations toward debt incurred. Expectations for the future were more open-ended in those distant days. People expected their lives to be better than that of their parents. The world was at relative peace. The economy in the decade and a half since the end of World War II was strong, and the U.S. was the unquestionable leader of the free world. On the other hand, much of the Country was segregated and women were distinctly treated as second-class citizens, particularly in terms of the workplace. That period could be termed, “the calm before the storm.”