RUTHFULLY YOURS

Look out, Grandma: Medicare said on Wednesday it wants to start paying for end-of-life counseling.

It’s being sold as “death with dignity,” but it’s more like dying for dollars. Seniors are nudged to forego life-sustaining procedures and hospital care to go into hospice. That enriches the booming hospice industry and also frees up dollars for the left’s favored social causes.

Why is the government meddling with how we cope with death? The Institute of Medicine doesn’t mince words. Scrimping on seniors will free up money “to fund highly targeted and carefully tailored social services for both children and adults.” Just like ObamaCare. Robbing Grandma to spread the wealth.

In 2009, President Obama said seniors are getting too many procedures and maybe they’re “better off not having the surgery, but taking the painkiller.” Obama’s health guru Ezekiel Emanuel argues the elderly should be a lower priority because “they have already had more life-years.”

‘Progressive” is a funny word, one that often means the opposite of what it appears to mean. Hillary Rodham Clinton is a wanton and shameless trafficker in Nineties nostalgia, but the odd fact is that she intends to be sworn in as president in 2017 with the Democratic platform from 1948: weaponizing the tax code for use against disfavored businesses while offering rich new subsidies for compliant corporations, raising the minimum wage, aggrandizing the micromanagerial powers of the Department of Labor, expanding our already insolvent entitlements, adding mightily to our zero-return “investments” in government-school bureaucracies and dodgy energy programs, etc.

At least the Democrats of 1948 were also campaigning to repeal Taft-Hartley.

Mrs. Clinton’s accomplishments are restricted almost entirely to a series of prestigious job titles. We’d say that she’s padding her résumé, but at this point in her over-ripe career Mrs. Clinton is only padding her obituary, which is a morbid thing to do. She was an undistinguished senator holding office in a freshly adopted Democratic bastion as a craven tribute to her husband, and then she was a feckless and destructive secretary of state whose wake of incompetence spread, and spreads still, from Moscow to Tripoli. Now she seeks to attain the presidency on a series of intellectually dishonest and lightly considered economic nostrums.

They could all be confronted. But by the Obama administration?

The U.S. and its allies are faced with four major threats, and they are as diverse and yet as akin as the proverbial apocalyptic horsemen.

Vladimir Putin has a tsarist idea that he can reclaim insidiously the periphery of the old Soviet Union — Georgia, Crimea, Ukraine, the Baltic states — on the principle of protecting Russian-speaking minorities in these breakaway republics. More practically, he feels that any security guarantees extended by the West to these entities are about as valid as an Obama red line or a Greek assurance of financial reform.

By Western criteria, Putin’s Russia is broke. It is shrinking and dysfunctional. But by Putin’s own metrics, his people are energized by Russia’s new defiance of the West. And if Russia is increasingly autocratic, and bifurcated into a small elite and an impoverished mass, that is nothing new, but simply the way things have always been in Russia, whether tsarist or Communist. Putin seems to assume that, if he can succeed in reestablishing the 19th-century Russian empire and bullying Eastern Europe into becoming once again a neutral buffer between Russia and the West, then he will go down in history as another Peter the Great or Joseph Stalin.

Arguing that the future strength of the nation’s military depends on it, Defense Secretary Ashton Carter ordered a six-month review of transgender service members — starting from the assumption that they’re welcome in the armed forces.

“Over the last fourteen years of conflict, the Department of Defense has proven itself to be a learning organization. This is true in war, where we have adapted to counterinsurgency, unmanned systems, and new battlefield requirements such as MRAPs,” Carter said in a statement today. “It is also true with respect to institutional activities, where we have learned from how we repealed ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,’ from our efforts to eliminate sexual assault in the military, and from our work to open up ground combat positions to women. Throughout this time, transgender men and women in uniform have been there with us, even as they often had to serve in silence alongside their fellow comrades in arms.”

Congressman Louie Gohmert read a portion of my article “Pull Down the Slaver Flags of Islam” on the floor of Congress which addresses the hypocrisy of censoring the Dukes of Hazzard while opening the doors to Islamic racism and other forms of supremacist bigotry and nostalgia for slave-owning cultures.

When Obama condemned Christianity for the Crusades, only a thousand years too late, in attendance was the Foreign Minister of Sudan; a country that practices slavery and genocide. Obama could have taken time out from his rigorous denunciation of the Middle Ages to speak truth to the emissary of a Muslim Brotherhood regime whose leader is wanted by the International Criminal Court for crimes against humanity. But our moral liberals spend too much time romanticizing actual slaver cultures.

Her Madameship continues to underwhelm.

Hillary Clinton gave a big economics speech here on Monday and the snap reaction among Wall Street investors, economists and ardent financial reformers who thrill to the soak-the-rich rhetoric of Bernie Sanders was a collective: “Meh. What’s next?”

Clinton laid out the soft contours of a “growth and fairness economy” in a speech designed to appeal to struggling middle-class workers with promises of higher pay and more generous federal policies.

But she left out many hard specifics on tougher tax policy toward the rich and corporate America. And she offered limited pledges to crack down on big Wall Street banks while hitting her strongest notes promising to toss rogue bankers in prison while ripping recent worker productivity comments from Jeb Bush.

Former United States security advisers and officials are coming out of the woodwork to warn that the president is failing the American people on national security matters.

On Sunday, Richard Clarke, a former adviser to four presidents on national security, and Tom Ridge, the first secretary of Homeland Security, chided the president for not paying enough attention to security matters.

Late last month, a group of prominent American security advisers — including five with ties to the Obama Administration — warned that the Iran nuke deal was failing to provide adequate safeguards.

Clarke said on ABC’s Face the Nation that the Obama administration was guilty of “almost criminal negligence” for allowing China’s massive cyber attack on the U.S. government.

Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) said he wants to see a “Medicare for all” single-payer healthcare system in America and defended gun manufacturers during a public policy forum in Arlington.

A member of the audience asked Sanders about his stance on gun control, criticizing his vote to protect gun manufacturers from lawsuits.

Sanders refused to apologize for the vote.

“If somebody has a gun and somebody steals that gun and shoots somebody, do you really think it makes sense to blame the manufacturer of that weapon?” he said. “If somebody assaults you with a baseball bat, you hit somebody over the head, you’re not going to sue the baseball bat manufacturer.”

Last March, California Governor Jerry Brown declared that those who wished existing federal immigration law to be enforced — in the manner that would have saved the late Kate Steinle from a five-times deported, seven-times released felon illegal alien – were:

[A]t best … troglodyte, and at worst … un-Christian.

In California, if one assumes that the law as written should be followed, one is dubbed either a cave-dweller or an apostate. Meanwhile, sophisticated non-troglodytes in San Francisco have a sheriff — with a criminal record of his own — release a repeat felon and often-deported illegal alien, and that act is proof of his enlightenment.

Did Ms. Steinle rate any editorialization from the president or his administration in the manner of Trayvon Martin or Michael Brown? In all these cases, the allegation is that the state was culpable for the death of an innocent. But Ms. Steinle had no prior criminal record or brushes with the law, and was walking and not in a fight or in the process of being arrested, so therefore her death did not rise to the level of a Ferguson or Baltimore “teachable moment.”

We know what ISIS believe, what they do, where they are, and what they want. Do we really need to waste another ounce of breath debating what proper nouns or acronyms best describe those who march under the black flag? Just send in the drones already
In the July 4 Spectator, Rod Liddle wrote a typically amusing little piece on the interminable row over what to call the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant/Islamic State of Iraq and Syria/Islamic State/Daesh. Advocates of the various names have highly suspicious reasons for doing so. President Obama refuses to use ISIS, because it would inevitably draw attention to the fact that the Syrian opposition his administration funded was largely assimilated into ISIS. Center-right establishment politicians prefer Daesh, arguing that the Islamic State is neither Islamic, nor a state.

What authority Tony Abbott or David Cameron has to adjudicate what’s authentically Islamic, we’ve yet to determine. So, for the sake of cogency, Liddle has thrown a fifth alternative into the mix: ‘Really Horrible People Who Have Nothing to do With Islam’. Though, understanding that it’s a bit of a mouthful, Liddle suggests that we stick with the Islamic State, rather than jumping through loops to protect Muslims’ feelings or defend the honor of the Islamic religion.