RUTHFULLY YOURS

Our dysfunctional federal government’s bungling is killing people.

Example: Every year, more than half a million patients undergoing a common medical procedure risk getting a superbug infection because their doctor is using a contaminated instrument. A doctor inserts a thin, tubular scope down your throat and into your digestive system to treat cancer and other problems. You assume the tube is clean. Think again.

The scope’s defective design allows bacteria to grow even after it’s rigorously cleaned between patients. The Food and Drug Administration, whose job is to ensure the safety of medical devices, has known about this problem since 2012 but dawdled while patients died. Three months ago, Olympus, the manufacturer of most of these specialized scopes (duodenoscopes), began recalling them.

Yet numerous hospitals are still using them, and patients are still getting infected and dying – eight more infections and two more deaths according to last month’s FDA data.

Even at prestigious institutions such as UCLA Medical Center, New York-Presbyterian, Hartford Hospital in Connecticut, Massachusetts General in Boston and Thomas Jefferson University Hospital in Philadelphia, patients have been infected with superbugs from contaminated duodenoscopes.

When hospitals fail to warn patients about the risk, it makes a mockery of the idea that patients are giving “informed consent” before the procedure, says medical-safety expert Lawrence Muscarella.

Worse, the FDA and another federal agency, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, go along with the hush-up about which hospitals are having a problem. These agencies are supposed to work for us – the public – but clearly they’re siding with the hospitals. The FDA is stonewalling about where the two most recent deaths occurred.

In the wake of the terror attacks in Belgium, news reports once again focused on how so-called “No Go Zones” in Europe create neighborhoods where communities develop that, although are geographically located within major cities, insulate themselves from their surroundings, fostering the mindset that cooperating with law enforcement is dangerous and even traitorous.

The residents eye law enforcement officers with great suspicion if not outright animosity. The situation is exacerbated because while they fear law enforcement, they may well also fear their neighbors who may take revenge against them for cooperating with law enforcement.

These neighborhoods become “cultural islands” that eschew the cultures and values of the cities and countries in which they grow — a virtual malignancy that ultimately comes to threaten its host city and country because within this cocoon radical Islamists are shielded from law enforcement, find shelter and support and an ample supply of potential terror recruits.

These communities are inhabited by many Muslim refugees who cannot be effectively screened.

This makes assimilation by the residents of these isolated communities unlikely if not impossible and creates breeding grounds for crime and, in this era and under these circumstances- breeding grounds for terrorism.

While there are no actual “No Go Zones” in the United States, there are neighborhoods scattered around the United States, where the concentration of ethnic immigrant minorities is so great that police find themselves unable to make the sort of inroads that they should be able to make in order to effectively police these communities. Adding to the high density of these aliens in these communities is the issue of foreign languages often being the prevalent language in such “ghettos.” This gives new meaning to the term “Language Barrier.”

Another attempt by the Obama administration to run out the clock on a scandal.

For more than three years, the Treasury Department has been looking into fraud committed by solar companies who received taxpayer loans from the Obama administration. But they have yet to release their findings, and Congress wants to know what the hell is going on.

Daily Caller:

Republicans senators sent a letter Monday to Treasury Inspectors General Eric Thorson and J. Russell George, asking the officials for updates regarding the agency’s investigation into solar companies that inflated the market value of their products to get more taxpayer cash.

“As you are aware, the Department recently indicated that applicants included ineligible costs or otherwise overstated the value of their solar energy investments by claiming approximately $1.3 billion in unwarranted cash grants,” Republican senators, led by Jeff Flake of Arizona and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, wrote in a letter to Treasury officials obtained by The Daily Caller News Foundation.

The Treasury Department said it would publish its findings by June 2015, but that never happened. Republicans are once again hammering the agency for not releasing the results of a probe into whether taxpayers were fleeced for billions of dollars.

Republicans noted the amount of potential solar energy fraud was “more than two-and-a-half times the amount of the Solyndra default.”

Republicans wrote to the department in November asking for the status of their investigation into solar companies, and lawmakers are again asking for Treasury officials to handover the “final results of your investigations.”

“Based on the information available, we remain concerned that the 1603 cash grant program and the administration of the investment tax credits lack sufficient transparency, oversight and enforcement to protect taxpayers,” Murkowski and her colleagues wrote to the Treasury in November.