Trump Not First President to Call HUD’s Block Grants Wasteful

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The president’s budget called for slashing funding for a block grant program primarily because it was difficult to determine whether it was getting the desired results.

That was President Barack Obama’s budget proposal for fiscal year 2012. It justified the $3.7 billion cut in the Department of Housing and Urban Development’s Community Development Block Grant program by asserting:

While flexibility may be one strong characteristic of the CDBG program, the use of funds and how states and communities distribute their funds lead to resources spread across many activities, diverse constituencies, and geographies without clear or focused impact. This makes the demonstration of outcomes difficult to measure and evaluate.

The Trump administration budget blueprint, issued Wednesday, calls for eliminating funding for HUD’s $3 billion Community Development Block Grant program.

“It isn’t just us who wanted this on the chopping block. Obama didn’t say get rid of it, but he did say it’s difficult to measure the outcomes,” Tom Schatz, president of Citizens Against Government Waste, said in a phone interview with The Daily Signal.

“Eligibility is so broad, [a block grant] has gone to Greenwich, Connecticut, one of the richest cities in America,” Schatz said.

Democrats and media commentators almost immediately criticized the Trump move, however. A Washington Post analysis framed it as:

The program provides cities with money to address a range of community development needs such as affordable housing, rehabilitating homes in neighborhoods hardest hit by foreclosures, and preventing or eliminating slums and community blight. It also provides funding for Meals on Wheels, a national nonprofit that delivers food to homebound seniors.

Liberal advocacy groups and entertainers also raised alarm about Meals on Wheels.

However, Forbes reported that only 3.3 percent of funding for Meals on Wheels comes from the federal government.

Meanwhile, Reason, a libertarian magazine, reported that cities are routinely spending the block grants on recreational centers, auditoriums, and gardens rather than alleviating poverty.

As a private program, states could kick in funding for the meals program for seniors, said Robert Rector, a senior research fellow specializing in poverty at The Heritage Foundation, who called the Community Development Block Grant program a “slush fund for urban mayors.”

Rector said the program is “barely a rounding error” in $1.1 trillion spent annually in 80 federal programs for the poor. Local governments are also less likely to look at results if the money is coming from the federal government, he said.

“To pretend that this program or that program is just one step between the poor and destitution is ridiculous,” Rector told The Daily Signal in a phone interview.

The Trump budget proposal states that eliminating funding for the CDBG program would save $3 billion, and used language similar to Obama’s.

“The federal government has spent over $150 billion on this block grant since its inception in 1974, but the program is not well-targeted to the poorest populations and has not demonstrated results,” the Trump proposal says. “The budget devolves community and economic development activities to the state and local level, and redirects federal resources to other activities.”

The Government Accountability Office determined in a 2012 report that some funding isn’t targeted to the cities in most need:

The distribution of grant funding per person in poverty in cities was not consistently aligned with overall poverty rates. Most cities, with the exception of those cities with the highest poverty rates, received roughly the same amount of economic development funding per person living in poverty. Further, when we examined how grant funds are distributed to cities based on their unemployment rates, we also found that some cities with higher unemployment rates received less funding per unemployed person than other cities with lower unemployment rates. However, we did find that a small number of cities (17 out of a total of 465 cities) with the highest unemployment rates received funding that was roughly 40 percent higher than the average for unemployed populations in all cities.

(For more from the author of “Trump Not First President to Call HUD’s Block Grants Wasteful” please click HERE)

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Two Things Government Wants Desperately to Control – Gold and People

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Yes governments can steal your gold and kill the people, that doesn’t mean they can control either. Look at what is happening in India…

Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government spent 16 months trying to persuade Indians to deposit their jewelry in the bank to earn interest, in an effort to curb soaring imports of the precious metal. But the program has only lured a tiny fraction of the $900 billion of gold that families and temples are estimated to have stashed away. On the other hand, Modi’s controversial decision to withdraw all high-value banknotes did the job instead. Source

Taking away their cash has not worked. People are still acquiring gold. Maybe not as much, especially of the “official” persuasion, but they are still adding to their stack every single day.

Gold doesn’t pay interest, remember? It is a barbarous relic held by central banks as a “tradition,” so I am little confused as to why the Indian government wants the 20,000+ tons of gold held by the people. Oh yeah, gold is money and represents freedom and independence – two things all governments hate. The Indians like their gold and want to keep it to protect themselves from thieving government officials.

“The government tried, but the people are not coming forward,” Devendra Kumar Pant, chief economist at India Ratings & Research Pvt., the local unit of Fitch Ratings, said by phone from New Delhi. The government is under less pressure to fix it because “the position right now on the current-account side is relatively comfortable.” Source

The Modi government thieves are demanding the people take their gold to an official assay company with a promise to return the gold or cash equivalent at the end of a specified “loan” period. Needless to say the Indians want nothing to do with this latest scheme to steal their gold.

Under Modi’s plan, holders hand over that jewelry, or at least part of it, to a bank in return for interest payments on the value of the precious metal and a promise to return the equivalent amount of gold or cash at the end of the loan term.

The customer first has to take the jewelry to an independent assay office nominated by the bank to verify its purity. The bank then sends the gold to a refiner before finding a buyer for the resulting bullion. At the moment, there are only about 440 assayers and 10 refiners across the country approved by the Bureau of Indian Standards. [Emphasis added] Source

This is truly a scheme operating in plain sight and the sad part is, the government thieves believe the people are going to fall for this nonsense. The Indians have not trusted paper currency for hundreds, if not thousands, of years. What makes Modi and his ilk think that today that is going to suddenly change? What an idiot.

As if the scheme, that was unleashed on the people in 2016, when Modi announced the government would be eliminating 86% of all cash in the country was some type of confidence builder for the people. Did they really think the people would see this vicious act as a sign the government was now going to represent the people instead of the bankster criminals? Seriously?

This latest scheme is going to fail just like all the other recent schemes have failed. The Indians will continue acquiring gold any way possible. The Indians will not trust the government to treat them with the respect they deserve nor will they believe anything the government says, especially about gold and currency. Why should they? With a track record like the one Modi is running on, it is a wonder the people listen at all. Oh, that’s right, they’re not. (For more from the author of “Two Things Government Wants Desperately to Control – Gold and People” please click HERE)

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Trump’s Disastrous Pick for National Intelligence Director

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It looks like Indiana Sen. Dan Coats will be confirmed by the Senate for the national intelligence director slot. On Wednesday, the Senate voted 88-11 to confirm Coats.

Coats advocates violating the Constitution, specifically the Fourth Amendment. He supported reauthorizing Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. 702 is used by the NSA to justify mass collection of phone calls and emails by collecting a huge amount of data directly from the physical infrastructure of communications providers without a warrant.

As a senator, Coats voted against the USA Freedom Act. The legislation would have outlawed the bulk collection of data. He also believes law enforcement should be able to bypass encryption.

Despite this hardline, some members of Congress doubt he is tough enough.

“I absolutely understand that this role demands someone who can stand up to the pressures that will be placed upon him,” Coats said during his confirmation hearing. “Given the situation that we are facing worldwide in terms of these threats, we don’t have time just to be the nice guy.”

Or defend and protect the Constitution, apparently.

Coats also supports the continuation of the Guantanamo Bay torture center. He characterized a 2014 Senate report condemning the US torture program as “unconstructive.”

“I support that detention, which I think is done in a lawful way,” he said.

He disagrees with Trump on Russia. “Russia’s assertiveness in global affairs is something I look upon with great concern, which we need to address with eyes wide open and a healthy degree of skepticism,” he said during his confirmation hearing before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence.

He also disagrees with Trump on the absurd contention Russia somehow influenced the election. “It’s publicly known and acknowledged and accepted that Russia definitely did try to influence the campaign,” he said.

It should be obvious by now to even the most inattentive American that Donald Trump represents more of the same—more war, more out of control federal spending, and a continuation and expansion of the surveillance state. (For more from the author of “Trump’s Disastrous Pick for National Intelligence Director” please click HERE)

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2 Federal Judges Block New Trump Travel Ban

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Federal judges in Hawaii and Maryland blocked President Trump’s “travel ban” executive order from taking effect as scheduled on Thursday, saying that the order discriminates against Muslims.

The rulings in Hawaii late Wednesday and in Maryland early Thursday excited civil liberties groups and advocates for immigrants and refugees, who complained that a temporary ban on travel from six predominantly Muslim countries violated the First Amendment. The Trump administration argued that the ban was intended to protect the United States from terrorism, as the countries temporarily banned have the largest population of jihadists.

In Greenbelt, Maryland, U.S. District Judge Theodore Chuang — who was appointed by then-president Barack Obama — called Trump’s statements about barring Muslims from entering the United States “highly relevant.” The second executive order removed a preference for religious minorities from the affected countries, among other changes that the Justice Department argued would address the legal concerns surrounding the first ban, which was also blocked in court. (Read more from “2 Federal Judges Block New Trump Travel Ban” HERE)

Long Before Neil Gorsuch, Judges Had to Be Liberal Enough for Chuck Schumer

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Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer arguably telegraphed his opposition to Neil Gorsuch as the next Supreme Court justice almost 16 years ago when, as a freshman Democrat from New York, he broke what he called a taboo to say the Senate publicly should make ideology a factor in confirming judges.

Today, Schumer is the Senate’s top Democrat and is leading the charge against President Donald Trump’s first high court nomination.

Schumer not only is the Senate minority leader but a senior Democrat on the Judiciary Committee that will begin hearings Monday on Gorsuch and decide whether to send his nomination to the Senate floor for a confirmation vote.

The New York Democrat applied the ideology test during the two terms of President George W. Bush’s administration. He also made his opposition to Gorsuch clear in a press conference March 15, where he and other Senate Democrats invited plaintiffs to accuse Gorsuch, a judge on the 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, of making the wrong ruling.

But Schumer, elected to the Senate in 1998, introduced his philosophy on using ideology in a New York Times op-ed in June 2001.

“For one reason or another, examining the ideologies of judicial nominees has become something of a Senate taboo,” the new senator wrote. “In part out of a fear of being labeled partisan, senators have driven legitimate consideration and discussion of ideology underground. The not-so-dirty little secret of the Senate is that we do consider ideology, but privately.”

He contended that ideological considerations aren’t new, noting the defeat of President George Washington’s nominee for Supreme Court, John Rutledge.

“If the president [then George W. Bush] uses ideology in deciding whom to nominate to the bench, the Senate, as part of its responsibility to advise and consent, should do the same in deciding whom to confirm,” Schumer wrote. “Pretending that ideology doesn’t matter—or, even worse, doesn’t exist—is exactly the opposite of what the Senate should do.”

In another Times op-ed just last month, Schumer criticized Gorsuch for not saying during a private meeting what his opinion was of certain cases, and asserted that, with Trump as president, Gorsuch will have to clear a higher hurdle than previous Supreme Court nominees:

Given the administration’s disdain for the judiciary, any nominee to the Supreme Court, particularly by this president, must be able to demonstrate independence from this president. The bar is always high to achieve a seat on the Supreme Court, but in these unusual times—when there is unprecedented stress on our system of checks and balances—the bar is even higher for Judge Neil M. Gorsuch to demonstrate independence.

Schumer, along with 11 other Democrats still in the Senate today, voted to confirm Gorsuch in 2006 to the appeals court position.

Schumer wrote that Gorsuch “refused to answer” his questions about past cases such as Citizens United and Bush v. Gore, and his view on the Emoluments Clause of the Constitution, because such answers might bias him in cases going forward.

“Judge Gorsuch must be far more specific in his answers to straightforward questions about his judicial philosophy and opinions on previous cases,” Schumer added. “He owes it to the American people to provide an inkling of what kind of justice he would be.”

Schumer applied his ideology test regarding specific issues to numerous times during the Bush administration.

“Schumer engineered the Democrats’ unprecedented campaign of filibusters against President George W. Bush’s appellate nominees,” Ed Whelan, president of the Ethics and Public Policy Center, told The Daily Signal in a phone interview. “Schumer deserves credit or blame—depending on your perspective—for escalating the judicial confirmation wars.”

In 2003, Schumer accused Bush’s nominee to the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, Charles Pickering, of opposing civil rights. The Senate Judiciary Committee in March 2002 voted 10-9 to block the nomination, when the Senate was under Democratic control. Bush renominated Pickering in January 2003 after Republicans recaptured the Senate, but Democrats filibustered the nomination. Even after Bush eventually recess appointed Pickering in January 2004, Democrats continued the filibuster, and Pickering withdrew his name from consideration in December 2004.

“This administration wants the courts to become the sword that destroys those rights,” Schumer said in a statement at the time. “And don’t think this stops with Judge Pickering. He’s just the tip of the iceberg.”

Bush nominated Miguel Estrada in 2001 to serve on the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia. Schumer filibustered the nomination seven times. After 28 months, Estrada withdrew.

Schumer called Estrada “a stealth missile—with a nose cone—coming out of the right wing’s deepest silo.”

A Democratic staffer for the Senate Judiciary Committee told the left-wing magazine The Nation in 2002: “Estrada is 40, and if he makes it to the circuit, then he will be Bush’s first Supreme Court nominee. He could be on the Supreme Court for 30 years and do a lot of damage.”

Schumer voted against confirming Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Samuel Alito, but later said he didn’t think he did enough.

“Charles Schumer is one of the people who weaponized the filibuster against judicial nominees, so it is no surprise he opposes a well-qualified nominee with bipartisan support like Judge Gorsuch,” Carrie Severino, chief counsel and policy director for the Judicial Crisis Network, told The Daily Signal in a phone interview. “Sen. Schumer has a longer history of this.”

In early 2016, after the Feb. 13 death of Justice Antonin Scalia, Schumer said the Senate had a duty to vote on whoever President Barack Obama nominated to fill the vacancy. He said:

Well, the job, first and foremost, is for the president to nominate and for the Senate to hold hearings and go through the process. … [Sen.] Ted Cruz holds the Constitution, you know, when he walks through the halls of Congress. Let him show me the clause that says [the] president’s only president for three years.

Does this mean we don’t hold hearings on anything? The president shouldn’t nominate Cabinet ministers? It certainly might mean the Republicans shouldn’t repeal Obamacare in the fourth year. And so, our job is to go forward with the process and then we’ll see what happens.

(For more from the author of “Long Before Neil Gorsuch, Judges Had to Be Liberal Enough for Chuck Schumer” please click HERE)

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After Paul Ryan Admits Obamacare Plan Needs Changes, Conservatives Hope to Strike Deal Uniting Party

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Conservatives in the House are proceeding with cautious optimism as they continue negotiating the bill that repeals and replaces Obamacare following an admission from House Speaker Paul Ryan that the legislation needs to undergo necessary “improvements and refinements.”

The concession from Ryan comes just a week after the Wisconsin Republican told his fellow Republicans the bill, called the American Health Care Act, was the “closest we’ll ever get to repealing and replacing Obamacare.”

But following the release of a report from the Congressional Budget Office that predicted premiums would initially rise under the proposal and 14 more million people would be without insurance next year, conservatives say they believe the door is now open for them to unite the conservative and moderate wings of the conference.

“We don’t want to completely ignore moderate members of the House,” Rep. Raúl Labrador, R-Idaho, told reporters Thursday at a monthly Capitol Hill gathering. “That would be bad negotiating.”

“The final product has to be representative of every member of Congress,” he continued.

Labrador and members of the House Freedom Caucus are drafting an amendment to the House GOP’s Obamacare replacement plan they say is designed to “find reasonable middle ground.”

The conservative lawmakers wouldn’t share the details of the plan, which will be presented to Republican leadership and members of the House Rules Committee next week.

But Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, said their amendment would be “consistent with the promise to the American people.”

“We’re focused on repealing Obamacare and bringing down the cost of premiums,” he said. “And that’s what our amendment is designed to reflect.”

Members of the Freedom Caucus have frequently criticized the insurance regulations and mandates implemented under Obamacare for raising the cost of premiums, and have called on GOP leaders to repeal those provisions.

The conservative lawmakers say they are vehemently opposed to the proposal rolled out by House leaders last week.

“The problem with this bill is that everything is wrong with it,” Labrador said Thursday.

But conservatives aren’t willing to abandon Ryan yet, and are instead saying they hope that the House speaker and the chamber’s right flank can begin negotiations.

“The rollout and the way it was rolled out was not indicative of an open process,” Freedom Caucus Chairman Mark Meadows, R-N.C., said of the Obamacare replacement plan. “Is it an indictment on his speakership? No, I don’t see that. I think we’re going to move on and end up finding a way to get this done.”

Since the House GOP revealed its long-awaited plan to repeal and replace Obamacare last week, Ryan has been fielding complaints from all sides of the House Republican conference.

Conservatives are concerned the bill will cause health insurance premiums to rise, and their fears were compounded by the CBO’s analysis of the legislation.

The nonpartisan agency, which works for Congress, estimated that under the Obamacare replacement plan, premiums would increase by 15 percent to 20 percent over the next two years before dropping 10 percent by 2026.

More liberal Republicans, meanwhile, say they want to ensure those newly enrolled in the Medicaid expansion are able to retain their coverage. Those lawmakers oppose any efforts to repeal the Medicaid expansion before 2020, a change conservatives have advocated.

The opposition from both wings has left Ryan trying to strike a delicate balance.

The speaker needs 216 votes—there are currently five vacant seats in the House—for the Obamacare replacement plan to pass. Republicans control 237 seats, and opposition from 22 GOP lawmakers would sink the bill in the lower chamber.

Initially, Ryan stressed the GOP’s proposal was a “binary choice.”

But after a closed-door meeting with his fellow Republican lawmakers Wednesday, Ryan conceded that the bill needed to be changed for it to pass the House and attributed the strategy shift to the CBO’s report.

“Now that we have our score … we can make some necessary improvements and refinements to the bill,” Ryan told reporters.

For conservatives, who have been meeting with President Donald Trump and administration officials frequently, the change of heart from the speaker was “welcome news.”

“I welcome the fact that Speaker Ryan is now talking about the fact that we’re going to actually negotiate in good faith, to come up with something that serves the American people,” Meadows said Wednesday night. (For more from the author of “After Paul Ryan Admits Obamacare Plan Needs Changes, Conservatives Hope to Strike Deal Uniting Party” please click HERE)

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How Local Citizens Can Take up the Fight Against Public Corruption

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We hear it all the time from politicians: They are finally going to stop the “waste, fraud, and abuse” in government.

In states with more corruption, like Pennsylvania, New York, or Illinois, calls to clean up government are frequent as well.

The problem is that these promises rarely come to fruition.

This week—Sunshine Week—is a perfect time to stop waiting for someone else to fix these problems. Let’s look to citizens, and a push for more open government, to get the job done. As the saying goes, sunlight is the best disinfectant of all.

New York might be the epitome of a state where corruption and abuse have run wild. Politicians here have long failed to live up to their promises to fix things.

The New York Legislature and governor have passed “ethics reforms” year after year of late, yet New York remains one of the most corrupt states in the nation. According to a University of Missouri study, New York has been home to the most corrupt officials in the U.S. over the past decade or so.

Waste and favor-trading is part of this culture of corruption, and it goes right down to the local level. On Long Island, one town official in Oyster Bay was convicted of tax fraud surrounding a scheme where he secretly guided taxpayer-backed contracts to a paving company, where he also worked.

These examples are just the tip of the iceberg.

That’s why Reclaim New York is engaging residents to fight the problem through the New York Transparency Project. This is a model that citizens across the country can benefit from.

The latest effort from this project is an innovative new citizen-driven online transparency platform, released this week to celebrate Sunshine Week.

It gives citizens the power to grade the performance of local governments and officials on 29 clear transparency practices. The extensive website covers 2,300 county, city, town, school district, and village governments.

As locals use the new site to rate how accessible governments are, elected officials who are interested in transparency will have a prime opportunity to step up and lead.

The process will also raise red flags when governments refuse to provide information. There’s something wrong when officials won’t show you how your money is being spent.

That’s something every American should know. We should all know when our government is meeting, what contracts it is signing, and how it is budgeting taxpayer dollars.

These are not revolutionary questions, but a citizen-driven effort to demand they are answered at every level of government definitely is.

The new online transparency platform is an important tool allowing citizens to demand proactive transparency. But, to reach that point, people must force government out of the shadows. That means using the law to make sure that public records are not hidden.

Reclaim New York was able to do this using New York’s Freedom of Information Law. The law does not just give citizens access to public records—it establishes timelines so that those citizens can obtain the records they seek in a timely manner.

But that has not stopped some towns and villages from dragging their feet.

When Reclaim New York filed records requests with over 500 local governments to show how every taxpayer dollar was being spent, scores of them pushed back—around 20 percent total.

But Reclaim New York filed—and won—lawsuits where necessary, and it has been successful in making this information public in its online database.

These cases also added to legal precedent that people should be reimbursed in cases of unreasonable denial, rather than be stuck paying thousands of dollars to see a public record.

Laws may be different throughout the country, but the principle is the same. Bad actors need to be shown that the days of hiding information from the public are over.

Additionally, where perhaps a local clerk is ignorant of the law, more education needs to be provided. To that end, Reclaim New York is conducting civic training sessions to help fix the capacity problem.

In the end, the solution for governments that have failed to provide records for any reason is the same: Be proactively transparent. Governments can’t run, and they can’t hide. With active and determined citizens, sunshine is the inevitable outcome.

That’s how we change the environment from one where government officials have too often failed to take their responsibility to taxpayers seriously, to one where proactive transparency is expected.

With access to better information, citizens can be the watchdogs we clearly need. People in states that have endured legacies of waste, favor-trading, and corruption should look to this approach.

No American should have to wonder if their hard-earned tax dollar is going to a road, or an insider’s slush fund. Sunshine Week is the perfect time to do something about it and restore ownership to citizens at every level of government. (For more from the author of “How Local Citizens Can Take up the Fight Against Public Corruption” please click HERE)

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New Planned Parenthood Ad Campaign Seeks to Defend Abortion Giant’s Government Funding

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After spending over $30 million on the 2016 election, Planned Parenthood has a new project: a million-dollar ad campaign defending its government funding.

The organization, which receives over half a billion dollars from taxpayers each year, stands to lose a significant portion of its government funding should Congress pass a reconciliation bill that includes the House Energy and Commerce Committee language making Planned Parenthood affiliates ineligible for receiving Medicaid reimbursements for one year after the enactment of the bill.

Desperate to keep the tax dollars flowing, Planned Parenthood’s latest campaign will reportedly highlight the abortion giant’s “cancer screening and prevention services,” as they are referred to in the group’s annual reports, which, according to Planned Parenthood’s own numbers, have decreased by 57 percent since 2010.

It’s not surprising that Planned Parenthood intends to highlight cancer-related services rather than its abortion activity. But policymakers should keep several important facts in mind during the debate surrounding tax dollars and entanglement with the abortion industry.

The most recent annual report for 2014-2015 shows that 94 percent of Planned Parenthood’s pregnancy resolution services were abortions and less than 1 percent were adoption referrals. In the same year, Planned Parenthood performed 323,999 abortions. Over the course of the last three reported years, Planned Parenthood has performed almost 1 million abortions.

Meanwhile, annual reports in recent years show that Planned Parenthood’s contraceptive services have dropped. STD and STI prevention and treatment services have dropped. Total services have dropped. And, importantly, cancer screening and prevention services have dropped.

LiveAction highlights that Planned Parenthood “only does 0.97 percent of Pap smears and 1.8 percent of breast exams” in the U.S. Planned Parenthood provides zero mammograms, despite often repeated claims to the contrary.

It’s also worth noting that the most recent data available about Planned Parenthood’s activity comes from the 2014-2015 annual report, which was released in December 2015. As previously discussed here at The Daily Signal, these annual reports are typically published in December or January, so the latest report addressing 2015-2016 was expected to be available by now.

But it’s nowhere to be found, and requests from The Daily Signal to Planned Parenthood’s press team have gone unanswered.

How many cancer screening and prevention services did Planned Parenthood provide during the most recent reporting year? How many unique patients were served? How many abortions were performed?

Planned Parenthood isn’t saying, but is going to great lengths to keep the tax dollars flowing in the meantime. (For more from the author of “New Planned Parenthood Ad Campaign Seeks to Defend Abortion Giant’s Government Funding” please click HERE)

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Jihadis Using Religious Visa to Enter US, Experts Warn

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A U.S. visa program designed to temporarily admit religious workers from other countries may be letting jihadists into the country, security experts and religious leaders warn.

The R visa program is for non-immigrant clerics and religious workers and allows successful applicants to stay in the U.S. for up to five years. They are then allowed to apply for a permanent residency under their R-1 status.

But some critics say the visa raises red flags and has long been abused by leaders with extreme views.

“People have come in and tried to come in with this visa to preach their hardline and dangerous views, and then encourage [the] vulnerable to travel back with them where they are further brainwashed and can potentially be used to harm the USA,” Adnan Khan, former president of the Council of Pakistan American Affairs, told Fox News. “The solution isn’t banning innocent Muslims and migration, but looking at visas like this one which have raised red flags and caused trouble in the past.”

Khan also said several letters have been written to federal agencies over the past four years concerning the R program, but they have failed to get a response. (Read more from “Jihadis Using Religious Visa to Enter US, Experts Warn” HERE)

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Menstruating Men and the Latest Examples of Transanity

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Have you heard about Toni the Tampon who teaches children that men can get periods too? Or about the mother and son who are about to become father and daughter? What about the transgender pastor who teaches that God is transgender?

This morning, as I was planning to write this very article, I received three emails from three different friends in three different parts of the country, all with links to different news headlines on major news websites, all with one theme in common: radical transgender activism. In fact, the links were to the three stories I mentioned here. My reply to each person was the same: This will be included in my latest article!

Transanity at Our Door

You see, this is something knocking at our doors, not something we went looking for. This is something being reported in the NY Post and the Daily Mail, which are major news outlets, albeit with a touch of sensationalism. This is what our kids are dealing with in their schools, what’s coming their way (and ours) via Hollywood, what’s being debated from the White House down to the local courthouse.

That’s why I address these issues, and that’s why I’ll continue to sound the wake-up call to our nation: There is an all-out war on sexual difference (often referred to as “gender”), and if it wins the day, it will lead to societal chaos.

But first, my standard caveat. We’re not just dealing with issues, we’re dealing with people. Some of them have biological or chromosomal abnormalities and are classified as intersex, and do not fit conveniently into our simple male or female boxes. We should treat them with compassion and respect, helping them find wholeness, just as we would treat anyone else with a physical handicap or defect.

Others – perhaps the larger number and the more vocal – are not intersex and simply suffer from gender identity confusion (now called gender dysphoria, primarily due to political pressure put on the APA by transgender activists). They too deserve our compassion (who can imagine the pain they have lived with?), but compassion calls us to dig deeper and helps us get to the root cause of their struggles, with the goal being transformation from the inside out (rather than from the outside in).

So, I do not write to mock or to degrade others in their struggle. I write to say (in loud, bold terms): God has a better way!

Five Recent Examples of Transanity

Here, then, are 5 recent examples of transanity.

1) Dr. Susan Berry reports, “The author of a children’s coloring book has invented a character named ‘Toni the Tampon’ to instruct children that men can menstruate.

“Cass Clemmer, the author of The Adventures of Toni the Tampon, has been using her coloring book character to ‘destigmatize’ menstruation. Now, however, she also wants to ‘de-gender’ the female biological process and to persuade children that men get periods too.”

Note to Cass: Men do not get periods, because menstruation is the result of ovulation, when the ovaries release an egg for fertilization. As explained by the Mayo Clinic, “If ovulation takes place and the egg isn’t fertilized, the lining of the uterus sheds through the vagina. This is a menstrual period.”

Fact: A man doesn’t have a uterus or a vagina or ovaries or eggs, which is why men can’t menstruate. Toni the Tampon is hereby corrected!

And sorry, Toni, but saying that a woman (especially one who still has her female organs intact and still menstruates) who identifies as a man is now a man is like saying that a woman who dresses up as her team’s tiger mascot is actually a tiger. Not so!

2) An article on LGBTQ Nation announces, “Father & daughter both come out as transgender, will transition together.” So, this is about a man and his daughter who now want to become a woman and a boy, right? Not at all. It’s about a mother and her son who want to become a man and a girl, yet the article refers to them as “father and daughter.”

On the one hand, I would encourage Christian conservatives to read this article, since it forces us to look at people and not just issues, and it’s hard not to feel pain for these two as they share their stories.

It’s not like they’re perverted sinners engaging in all kinds of horrific acts. Rather, they both have struggled deeply with their gender identity, with the mother saying, “When I was younger I used to wish for cancer so I would have to get a mastectomy.”

But compassion would say, “Let’s find out why you have struggled so deeply with a being a woman,” (and to the son, “Let’s find out why you have struggled so deeply with a being a boy”). In contrast, confusion says, “The woman has become this child’s father because she no longer identifies as a woman, and the son has become her daughter because he no longer identifies as a boy.”

May God help this family.

3) The Christian Post reports that a transgender pastor who opposes Texas’s bathroom bill teaches that “God is transgender.”

This pastor argues, “In the beginning, God created humankind in God’s image. … So God is transgender. We’re all created in the image of what is holy and divine and sacred, and we should all be treated that way.”

I addressed this deeply mistaken notion last year in my article, “A Rabbi Claims That God Is Transgender.” But in short, Genesis 1 does not teach that God is transgender (because He creates human beings in His image, male and female), any more than it teaches that God has sexual body parts or that He physically procreates.

Rather, it teaches that the fullness of male and female distinctives are found in Him, which does not mean that God is not transgender. Rather, it means that He transcends gender. And so, while male pronouns are used to describe and refer to Him, and while He is called the heavenly Father (not Mother), He can be likened to a compassionate mother, because, as stated, as an eternal Spirit, He transcends gender categories.

More importantly – really, much more importantly when it comes to the bathroom controversies – in the beginning He created us as male and female and called us to procreate (“Be fruitful and multiply”), which only a distinct male and a distinct female can do. There is no ambiguity here, nor is there ambiguity regarding male and female distinctives throughout the entire Bible.

4) Over at College Fix, we learn that “U. Minnesota drops homecoming ‘King and Queen’ — replaces with genderless ‘Royals’.”

Yes, “The University of Minnesota has become the latest university to do away with the traditional Homecoming King and Queen titles and replace them with the gender-neutral ‘Royals’ term.

“Taking it one step further, University of Minnesota officials also point out that the winners don’t even have to be one biological male and one biological female, stating on its website: ‘“Royals”… can be any combination of any gender identity.”

This kind of cultural insanity is so absurd that simply repeating these words is enough to expose the madness.

But there’s more: “Campus officials called the change a move ‘toward gender inclusivity’ that promotes ‘a spirit of inclusion at the University of Minnesota.’”

This is not “a spirit of inclusion”; this is a spirit of confusion.

5) Finally, an article on Vice tells the story of “The Trans Women Who Become Lesbians After Years as Gay Men.” (The article, which contains offensive language, actually celebrates this, noting, “There aren’t many people who are fortunate enough to have lived their lives first as gay men and later as lesbian women.”)

So, this is the story of biological men, who then identified as women, but who discovered they were attracted to women, and who now identify as lesbians.

The better course of action would have been to identify as biological males (which they are) who are attracted to women, as the vast majority of biological males are. But no. These biological males who have normal attractions to women now identify as lesbians.

This is why these examples of “transanity,” and this is why I will continue to raise my voice. The madness must stop. God has a better way. (For more from the author of “Menstruating Men and the Latest Examples of Transanity” please click HERE)

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