RUTHFULLY YOURS

No sooner did President-elect Donald Trump name his pick for attorney general, Sen. Jeff Sessions, than allegations of racism began to fly. A writer at the website Slate lamented the Alabama senator’s “long history of racist words and bigoted deeds.” A headline at Salon called Messrs. Trump and Sessions “two peas in a racist pod.” Nonsense. The charge that Mr. Sessions is a latent racist is belied by a long trail of evidence, strewn with cocaine, through the country of Colombia.

The accusations stem from Mr. Sessions’s unsuccessful nomination for a federal judgeship in 1986. The Senate Judiciary Committee voted down that nomination after hearing testimony about remarks Mr. Sessions had purportedly made in the early 1980s that were deemed racially insensitive. Throughout three intervening decades of public life, Mr. Sessions hasn’t evinced an iota of racial animus. Yet Democrats are clucking that the now-ancient incidents—disputed even then as taken wholly out of context—should disqualify Mr. Sessions from being attorney general.

What should be far more relevant is a conversation Mr. Sessions had, and a legislative course he pursued, after being elected to the Senate in 1996. My small part of that story begins two years later on the steps of the U.S. Capitol.

In 1998 I arrived in Mobile, Ala., to write editorials for the daily Register newspaper—and I held my own private doubts about Sen. Sessions. As a self-styled “Jack Kemp Republican” determined to expel vestigial racism from the conservative movement, I had been a founding board member of the Louisiana Coalition Against Racism and Nazism. That was a group formed in 1989 to end the then-ascendant political career of former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke. I was thus naturally wary of Sen. Sessions, who supposedly had told a joke making light of the Klan’s evils.

On my first reporting trip for the Register to Washington, D.C., I requested interviews with both of Alabama’s senators. The timing was bad—lawmakers were in session—but Mr. Sessions’s press aide said the senator was eager to talk. I was instructed to meet him, between votes, on the Capitol steps.

Long story short, Sen. Sessions was on a mission. He wanted somebody, anybody, to write about the importance of American policy toward Colombia. That U.S. ally was at risk of being toppled by the narco-financed, communist guerrillas known by the acronym FARC.

It was a subject far from my interests. But Mr. Sessions put the stakes in memorable context. The senator can be a discursive speaker, but he kept returning to a central contention: FARC-allied drug lords were responsible for much of the cocaine that polluted the American streets. As a former federal prosecutor, he was concerned about the violent crime accompanying the cocaine scourge.

He spoke about addicts and criminals not with vilification, but with compassion. “You’ve got these poor guys in the inner city,” I remember him saying. “Nobody provided them much of an education; they can’t find a job; and somebody tells them they can get high for relatively cheap by smoking these crack rocks. They get addicted and they do something terrible and end up in jail and their lives get ruined. We’ve gotta help our Colombian allies defeat these drug lords at the source, where they grow this stuff. It’s just ruining all these lives.”

It was this same train of thought—compassion for the users of crack cocaine—that led Sen. Sessions to introduce the Drug Sentencing Reform Act in 2001. The law at the time punished crack cocaine 100 times more harshly than powdered cocaine. Mr. Sessions specifically argued that this created unfair racial disparities, since crack was the drug of poor inner cities, while powder was favored by white Wall Streeters. Such compassion for black addicts is far from a hallmark of someone motivated by racial animus. CONTINUE AT SITE

After taking white working-class voters for granted in November, the Democratic Party seems poised to do the same for Jews – and that could have important implications for the already troubled U.S.-Israeli relationship.

Sens. Bernie Sanders of Vermont and Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, who lead the party’s progressive wing, are backing Rep. Keith Ellison, an African-American Muslim with a long history of anti-Semitic leanings and anti-Israeli positions, as the party’s next chairman. So too is the incoming Senate Democratic leader, Chuck Schumer, who is considered one of Israel’s strongest Democratic backers.

Ellison’s bid and high-level backing reflect the party’s increasing leftward drift on Israel-related issues, in which one-sided views about the Jewish state – particularly related to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict – are far more acceptable as mainstream Democratic positions than a decade ago.That raises two major questions for the U.S.-Israeli relationship:

First, will a future Democratic president and Congress provide the party’s traditional support for Israel that dates to President Harry Truman’s recognition of the Jewish state just 11 minutes after it was created – support that now includes America’s generous military aid, its intelligence sharing and its protection from anti-Israel resolutions at the morally challenged United Nations?

Second, will U.S. support for Israel remain a bipartisan issue, or will it increasingly fall victim to partisan politics – with Republicans aligning themselves forcefully with Jerusalem while Democrats take a balanced approach to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and broader Arab-Israeli relations?

http://www.nationalreview.com/node/442535/print

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After the Democratic equality-of-opportunity agenda was largely realized (Social Security, Medicare, overtime, a 40-hour work week, disability insurance, civil rights, etc.), the next-generation equality-of-result effort has largely failed.

What is left of Democratic ideology is identity politics and assorted dead-end green movements as conservation has become radical environmentalism and fairness under the law is now unapologetic redistributionism. The 2016 campaign and the frenzied reaction to the result are reminders that the Left is no longer serious about formulating and advancing a practical agenda. In sum, for now it is reduced to a party of gatecrashers.

The Podesta archive, when coupled with the pay-for-play Clinton Foundation, summed up the liberal ideology: progressive platitudes as cover for an elite’s pursuit of power and influence. Examine a coastal Democratic establishmentarian, and there is little discernable difference in his lifestyle, income, or material tastes from those conservatives (usually poorer) whom he accuses of all sorts of politically incorrect behaviors. Self-righteous outrage is a Democratic selling point and a wise career move for journalists, academics, bureaucrats, and politicians.

Without an ideology that even remotely matched the life she led, Hillary Clinton could only run a campaign without consistent positions. She flipped on the Keystone pipeline and trade agreements. She refuted the entire 1990s Clinton economic and social agenda. Indeed, her positions of 2008 — anti–gay marriage, border enforcement, and rural populism — were the very positions that she smeared others for embracing in 2016. In 2008, Clinton damned Obama for his “clingers” speech; in 2016, she trumped him with her deplorables and irredeemables.

She both derided Wall Street and was enriched by it. Her 2008 brief flirtation with the white working classes as a modern Annie Oakley came full circle in 2016, with exultant promises to put coal miners out of work. In the end, Hillary had no ideology other than getting even richer by leveraging the office of secretary of state and pandering to identity politics in hopes that record numbers of women and minorities would vote for a 68-year-old white multimillionaire, much as they had voted for Barack Obama. The more she talked of the LGBT or Latino communities, apparently the more we were to think that the Clintons had subverted their offices and reputations to grift a $150 million personal fortune for the underprivileged.

One of the reasons Trump won without commensurate money, organization, ground game, big-name endorsements, establishment unity, conservative media encouragement, and despite a campaign of gaffes and opposition-planted IEDS, was that half the country felt it would not have survived four more years of the cynicism of left-wing politics. In other words, voters got tired of being accused of thought crimes from a party led by wealthy people who made them poorer while adding insult to injury.

Dr. Price, a fierce ObamaCare opponent, has his own plan to replace it ….
According to the Washington Post, President-elect Donald Trump has chosen Georgia Rep. Tom Price, a former orthopedic surgeon and staunch ObamaCare opponent to serve as the secretary of health and human services in his administration.

An insider from within the transition team told the Post that the public announcement of Trump’s selection of Price, could come as early as Tuesday.

As HHS secretary, Price would become the Trump administration’s point person on dismantling and replacing the Affordable Care Act, one of Trump’s major campaign promises.

Price, 62, who represents a suburban Atlanta district, has played a leading role in the Republican opposition to the law known as Obamacare and has helped draft several comprehensive bills to replace it.

During the campaign, Trump railed against the Affordable Care Act and vowed to repeal and replace it. But after meeting with Obama in the Oval Office shortly following the election, he was convinced to perhaps keep some of the more popular elements of the law intact and amend the law rather than repeal it.

Trump has said he would favor keeping the provision preventing insurers from refusing coverage for preexisting conditions as well as the one permitting children to stay on their parents’ health plans until age 26.

Price is a six-term congressman who chairs the House Budget Committee and is said to be close to House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.).