RUTHFULLY YOURS

Congress Is Waking Up on Mental Health By The Editors

Fervent gun-controllers and cynical political observers sometimes deride efforts to reform America’s mental-health system as a distracting, even unhelpful, answer to the problem of mass shootings. This is unfair, as no small number of young men who commit unspeakable acts of violence do indeed have diagnosable serious mental illnesses. But it is also ignorant, because fixing our mental-health system is also a response to everyday mass suffering — to the burden that serious mental illness presents for the 7 million or so Americans, many of them on the streets or in prison, who have serious illnesses, and the families and communities that want to help them.

Thankfully, Congress seems to be coming around. There is not just one bill currently floating around that would improve the mental-health system, but several, all of which would move public dollars toward treating serious mental illness (schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, etc.) and away from trying to diagnose and treat mental-health problems across the whole population.

The best bill is the one that Republican representative Tim Murphy, a psychologist from Pennsylvania, has been pushing for a couple of years now. Murphy’s bill, which has substantial bipartisan support, attacks some of the most perverse aspects of our laws regarding mental illness. It will finally change the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act so that family members of people with serious mental illness can know what medications they have been prescribed, when they are scheduled to see their doctors, and other crucial information. Murphy’s bill will also use federal mental-health grants to encourage the use of assisted outpatient treatment, which, unlike most of the work the federal mental-health bureaucracy supports, has been proven to be effective. The bill will require the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services to reconsider whether Medicaid should be paying for long-term hospitalization for the mentally ill. More broadly, the bill would reform the federal mental-health bureaucracy, pushing it toward supporting the seriously mentally ill and reducing support for “patient advocates” efforts that actually hamper effective treatment.

This week’s announcement that Fiamma Nirenstein was being appointed Israeli ambassador to Italy ‎made waves on both sides of the Mediterranean.‎

Nobody is better suited than Nirenstein for this role — particularly in the wake of the signing of the ‎P5+1 agreement with Iran — due to her proven ability to create bipartisan support for Israel. Prime ‎Minister Benjamin Netanyahu ought to be lauded for recognizing this fact and acting on it. ‎No wonder the Left is not pleased.‎

But because Nirenstein’s knowledge of international affairs and experience in the political/diplomatic ‎sphere are as vast as they are solid, what the media came up with to cast aspersions on her ‎appointment was to call her “loyalty” into question. More specifically, it was to suggest that Italian ‎Jews fear they will be accused of “dual loyalty” if Nirenstein takes up the post.‎

Donald Trump is a great communicator. He’s self-assured, entertaining, pungent. He could, as they say of talented actors, read the phone book and make it interesting (if, that is, hilariously boastful readings of the phone book are your kind of thing).

There is only one area where his communication skills are lacking: The man that Trump refers to as Trump is not always adept at expressing Trump’s views.

The loudmouth mogul may be very good at saying words, but coherence and consistency sometimes elude him. Especially when he gets beyond his comfort zone of extolling his own phenomenal awesomeness and calling America’s leaders stupid and the leaders of China and Mexico — the new axis of evil — smart and cunning.

After that, it gets foggy.

Consider his signature issue of immigration, where the incendiary words and stalwart tone evidently are a smoke screen for a poorly conceived amnesty scheme.

It happened sooner than even the doomsayers predicted. The era of artificial intelligence is here. A computer has become self-aware, a moral agent responsible for its own actions.

This breakthrough didn’t happen in Silicon Valley or at MIT. It happened, of all places, in Chappaqua, New York. And the person responsible isn’t even a computer scientist, but a lawyer and politician: Hillary Clinton.

Clinton’s critics say a lot of things about her, but who would’ve believed she was Skynet’s mother?

A little background. Clinton was forced to turn over her “home-brewed” e-mail server to the FBI this week, along with a flash drive unlawfully stored at her lawyer’s office. The server and the drive are tangible evidence of Clinton’s decision to circumvent laws and procedures designed to preserve government records and keep classified information secret. She says she never knowingly sent classified information, but Clinton leaves out that the whole reason federal officials are barred from using private servers is that such systems are invisible to the classification process.

The Clinton team claims it handed over the server voluntarily — a classic example of Clinton’s penchant for half-truths. For months, they insisted they’d never turn it over. They caved because they had to. The decision was about as voluntary as a bank robber relinquishing his sack of cash to the cops at gunpoint.

The late real estate magnate Leona Helmsley sealed her reputation as the “queen of mean” when she told a housekeeper, “We don’t pay taxes. Only the little people pay taxes.”

Hillary Clinton is under new scrutiny after the revelation that some of the e-mails on her now-infamous private server included information then classified as “top secret.” Her flat denial in March that classified information ever passed through the server was laughable at the time, and it’s been proven false now. But no one expects the Obama administration to punish Hillary the way it has so many “little people” who have mishandled classified data in the course of their government service.

Take former State Department analyst Stephen Kim. He’s now serving a 13-month sentence in a federal prison for leaking classified data on North Korea to Fox News reporter James Rosen, who in turn had his e-mail records searched by the Obama Justice Department without his knowledge. Journalist Peter Maass has made a compelling case that the North Korean material wasn’t sensitive: “According to court documents, one State Department official described the intelligence assessment as ‘a nothing burger,’ while another official said Rosen’s story had disclosed ‘nothing extraordinary.’” But Kim sits in prison nonetheless, a victim of the Obama Administration’s crackdown on the abuse of classified material.

Republican leaders on a summer tour of the Holy Land met with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu this week and the Iran deal was front and center in the talks, but according to The New York Times, Netanyahu did not try to push Republicans on which way to vote:

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu did not directly advise visiting Republican members of Congress how to vote on the Iran nuclear deal, the leader of the delegation told reporters on Thursday. The head of a Democratic Congressional group that visited Israel last week had said the same thing to journalists.

“He doesn’t tell us how to vote but he lays out concerns for the future about what the world could look like,” said Representative Kevin McCarthy of California, the House majority leader who is spending the week in Israel along with 35 mostly new members.

McCarthy says he doesn’t know of any Republicans that are voting for the deal with Iran and at least some Democrats, though it isn’t know how many, are expected to break ranks. If enough members of Congress vote against the deal it could over ride the veto President Obama has promised to use.

The leftist cancer on our society — funded by our own tax dollars.

George Orwell said, “There are some ideas so absurd that only an intellectual could believe them.” If one wants to discover the truth of Orwell’s statement, he need only step upon most college campuses.

Faculty leaders of the University of California consider certain statements racism and feel they should not be used in class. They call it micro-aggression. To them, micro-aggressive racist statements are: “America is the land of opportunity.” That is seen as perpetuating the myth of meritocracy. “There is only one race, the human race.” Such a statement is seen as denying the individual as a racial/cultural being. “I believe the most qualified person should get the job.” That’s “racist” because it gives the impression that “people of color are given extra unfair benefits because of their race.”

How the “progressive” Gestapo rules the American campus.Recently, the University of New Hampshire’s “Bias-Free Language Guide” (BFLG) was revealed to the public. There was a backlash and the President of UNH flew into damage-control mode.

Soon thereafter, administrators decided to pull the guide from its website.

While writing about the BFLG, I assured those readers who may not be in the know that UNH is all too typical of academia today. About as outrageous as the BFLG was President Mark W. Huddleston’s assertion that speech “is free and unfettered” on UNH’s campus.

The contemporary campus is many things, but a bastion of free and unfettered speech is not one of them.

Take the University of California’s program on “Diversity and Faculty development.” The program identifies a host of “micro-aggressions.” The latter are “the everyday verbal, nonverbal, and environmental slights, snubs, or insults, whether intentional or unintentional, that communicate hostile, derogatory, or negative messages to target persons based solely upon their marginalized group membership.”

The source of the nation’s heroin epidemic.

In the “Wild West” America’s pioneers who were heading west would employ a simple but effective strategy when they came under attack. They circled their wagons to form what was hopefully an impenetrable perimeter.

Further back in history, castles were protected by high walls and often moats were created to offer a buffer beyond the walls, requiring draw bridges to enable those who wanted to traverse the moat to either enter or leave the castle compound.

It is more than ironic, as we about to see, that Obama himself drew that very same analogy about border security concerning a moat. For good measure, he even threw in alligators to fill that moat.

Of course he used that language derisively to insult and ridicule anyone who dared suggest our borders are not secure, but that those borders must be made secure.

Editor’s note: The following is the first article in the FrontPage series “Obama’s Betrayals,” which will explore the president’s record of perfidy, malfeasance and crimes against the American people. As the Obama presidency enters its final stages, examples of this treachery are only becoming more numerous and brazen. “Obama’s Betrayals” will shine the spotlight on these attacks on the American polity, the incredible damage they are inflicting on the nation, and the dangerous agenda the president intends to complete before leaving office.

It doesn’t get any more explosive than this: a high-ranking former Obama administration official charging that the administration made a conscious decision to support al-Qaeda – so where is the mainstream media?

Brad Hoff reported in Foreign Policy Journal last Friday that “in Al Jazeera’s latest Head to Head episode, former director of the Defense Intelligence Agency Michael Flynn confirms to Mehdi Hasan that not only had he studied the DIA memo predicting the West’s backing of an Islamic State in Syria when it came across his desk in 2012, but even asserts that the White House’s sponsoring of radical jihadists (that would emerge as ISIL and Nusra) against the Syrian regime was ‘a willful decision.’”

When Hasan asked Flynn if “the administration turned a blind eye” to analyses explaining how the Syrian “rebels” against the Assad regime were actually Islamic jihadists who wanted to establish a hardline Sharia state in Syria, Flynn responded: “I don’t know that they turned a blind eye, I think it was a decision. I think it was a willful decision.”

“A willful decision to support an insurgency that had Salafists, Al Qaeda and the Muslim Brotherhood?,” asked Hasan.