RUTHFULLY YOURS

Tom Price, President-elect Donald Trump’s nominee for secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, should be quickly confirmed for the post. However, Senate Democrats are desperately trying to throw a wrench in the gears of his confirmation process and hope to bring it to a halt. In the history of the department, there may not be another secretary with Price’s stellar combination of medical experience, health-policy expertise, proven leadership, public service in the state legislature and in Congress, and knowledge of the federal budget process. If anyone can cure what ails the American health-care system in a post-Obamacare world, it is the good doctor. And that’s what Democrats are afraid of.

Price is a six-term Georgia congressman representing suburban Atlanta. He serves on the House Ways and Means Committee, which has jurisdiction over health care and tax matters. After Obamacare was passed, he was the first congressman to put forth a serious, detailed proposal for replacing Obamacare with reforms that empower patients instead of the government. And he has taken the politically courageous step of proposing solutions to ensure the long-term solvency of important programs such as Medicare. He appeared on my radio show, Morning in America, making the case for these alternative plans long before anyone else. He knew that Obamacare would eventually unravel and that there would come a day when Republicans would need to be ready to offer a serious alternative plan.

Until recently, he served as chairman of the House Budget Committee. In that role, he helped forge balanced-budget agreements and demonstrated an in-depth understanding of the budgetary impact of programs and policies at HHS.

The U.S. Congress was not his first foray into public service. Price was elected to the Georgia state senate in 1996. He quickly earned a reputation for being a policy wonk and tireless problem-solver. Recognizing his leadership abilities, his colleagues in the senate chose him to be minority whip. In 2002, they elected him as the first Republican senate majority leader in Georgia history. His peers in the U.S. House of Representatives repeatedly chose him for leadership positions, and he willingly took them on.

Price accepted these roles because he felt he had a duty to make a difference. This sense of duty is what called him to follow in his father’s and grandfather’s footsteps and enter the medical profession. For more than 20 years, Dr. Price was a practicing orthopedic surgeon. He taught medical residents at one of the largest public hospitals in the country, where he tended to vulnerable, at-risk patients. He witnessed their unique needs and challenges in accessing care and was determined to make the health-care system work better for them. He saved and transformed lives with his surgical skills. We need him to do the same at HHS with his policy and leadership skills.

Those hoping for fireworks at Tuesday’s confirmation hearing for Alabama senator Jeff Sessions, Donald Trump’s nominee to head the Department of Justice, were treated instead to a slow Southern drawl of a day.

Known for being a particularly strident immigration hawk and an early congressional supporter of Donald Trump, Sessions has been accused variously of racism, sexism, and xenophobia for his legislative stances, and Democrats hope to claim an early scalp in the confirmation battles that will take up much of the Senate’s time over the next several days. However, on Tuesday, Sessions seemed comfortable parrying those accusations, pointing to a long record of prosecuting civil-rights violations (including of KKK members), to a distinguished twenty-year tenure in the Senate, and to plaudits from Senate colleagues, including former Pennsylvania senator Arlen Specter, who late in his career (and after becoming a Democrat) expressed regret for sinking Sessions’ nomination for a federal judgeship in 1986.

Controversies from those hearings have formed the centerpiece of Democrats’ case against Sessions. To accusations, resurrected from the 1980s, that he once called the NAACP “un-American,” Sessions denied the charge, explaining that he thought activities taken up by the organization to promote certain causes in Central America “could be perceived as un-American.” He pushed back, too, on the details of a decades-old voting-rights case (Perry County) that critics have said reveals a troubling attitude toward ballot access: The case, said Sessions, “was in response to pleas from African-American incumbent elected officials who claimed the absentee ballot process involved a situation in which ballots cast for them were stolen, altered and cast for their opponents.” He emphasized that, as attorney general, he would prosecute anyone who sought to violate the integrity of the ballot box. (Albert Turner Jr., whose parents were the defendants in Perry County, recently endorsed Sessions for attorney general, saying, “More than most I am very familiar with him. I believe he will be fair in his application of the law and the Constitution.”)

Sessions also objected to misrepresentations of more recent positions. “It is kind of frustrating to be accused of opposing the Violence Against Women Act when I have voted for it in the past,” he lamented, noting that while he opposed a revision of the law proposed by Vermont senator Patrick Leahy in 2013, a Democrat, he supported an (unsuccessful) alternative version authored by Iowa Republican Chuck Grassley that did not include expanded protections for LGBT persons, Native Americans, and immigrants. Likewise, while Sessions has been criticized for skepticism about the Voting Rights Act, he voted to reauthorize the act in 2006, and only objects to specific provisions that he contends are no longer necessary more than a half-century after the bill originally became law. In this, he is aligned with a majority of the U.S. Supreme Court, which invalidated a portion of the law in its 2013 Shelby County decision.

On other matters, Sessions’s testimony was precisely what one would expect from a Republican attorney-general nominee. On questions ranging from abortion access to the use of the detention center at Guantanamo Bay, the Alabama senator committed to enforcing the laws passed by Congress and to exercising legal judgment independent of the president. In response to questions about Russia’s attempted intervention in the 2016 election, he acknowledged clear evidence of “penetration throughout our government by foreign entities,” and discussed the need for stiff penalties against foreign governments or actors who violate American sovereignty. He also promised to recuse himself from all matters related to the ongoing investigation into Hillary Clinton’s email server, acknowledging that his close relationship with the Trump campaign throughout 2016 might create the appearance of a conflict of interest.

The only excitement in the otherwise low-drama affair was periodic outbursts by anti-Sessions and anti-Trump protesters, including members of Code Pink.

Public records uncovered in the days following the Ft. Lauderdale Airport massacre suggest that the shooter, Esteban Santiago, is a Muslim convert who years ago took on the Islamic name Aashiq Hammad.

According to a Judicial Watch report, Santiago/Hammad downloaded terrorist propaganda and recorded Islamic religious music online, suggesting a serious commitment to Islam years before he joined the U.S. Army.

The public records uncovered in the days after the massacre suggest Santiago (Hammad) is a radical Islamic terrorist that’s seriously committed to Islam. Besides taking on a Muslim name, he recorded three Islamic religious songs, including the Muslim declaration [of] faith (“there is no God but Allah and Muhammad is his messenger”) known as the Shahada. He also posted a thread about downloading propaganda videos from Islamic terrorists on a weapons and explosives forum. The investigative news site that unearthed this disturbing information connected the dots between Santiago, who is of Puerto Rican descent, and Hammad, an identity he created in 2007.

Indeed, it has been several days since the news site “Got News” uncovered the publicly available information, but the official story from authorities is that the gunman is a mentally ill Hispanic Army veteran who was suffering from PTSD after his tour in Iraq.

Only ABC dared to mention the possibility of Santiago’s “jihadist identity,” burying it deep in a piece about New York possibly being his original target.

A paragraph deep in the story mentions that investigators recovered Santiago’s computer from a pawn shop and the FBI is examining it to determine whether he created a “jihadist identity for himself using the name Aashiq Hammad…” The rest of the traditional mainstream media coverage promotes the government rhetoric that omits any ties to terrorism even though early on a photo surfaced of Santiago making an ISIS salute while wearing a keffiyeh, a Palestinian Arab scarf.

The rest of the media, for whatever reason, is sweeping under the rug some major clues about what might have inspired the Orlando shooter. CONTINUE AT SITE

Mr. Berezow is a senior fellow at the American Council on Science and Health, of which Mr. Campbell is president.

The environmental activist Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a vaccine skeptic, told reporters Tuesday in the lobby of Trump Tower that the president-elect has asked him to lead a commission “to make sure we have scientific integrity in the vaccine process for efficacy and safety effects.” Mr. Kennedy also suggested that Donald Trump “has some doubts about the current vaccine policies” and that “we ought to be debating the science.” This is insane.

Mr. Kennedy in the past has raised doubts about thimerosal, a mercury-containing preservative used in some vaccines, which has been wrongly accused of causing autism. The notion that vaccines cause autism was decisively rebutted in a 2002 paper published by the New England Journal of Medicine. The study examined data on more than 537,000 children in Denmark, most of whom had been received the vaccine for measles, mumps and rubella. Researchers concluded that it provided “strong evidence against the hypothesis that MMR vaccination causes autism.”

Thimerosal has since been removed from most vaccines, yet autism rates continue to increase. It’s clear that the preservative isn’t to blame.

Anti-vaxxers have also latched onto the idea that children are given too many vaccines at one time. This, too, is bunk. The immune system is capable of handling countless foreign substances. When children stick their dirty fingers into their mouths, they are “vaccinating” themselves against whatever germs are in their environment.

Fifteen years after the New England Journal of Medicine study, the evidence has grown only stronger that vaccines are safe and that autism is caused by something else, such as genetics. But it shouldn’t be surprising that Mr. Kennedy would back strange ideas about vaccines. He has even flirted with conspiracy theories about the assassination of his uncle John F. Kennedy.

After the 2008 presidential election, Mr. Kennedy’s name came up as a potential chief for the Environmental Protection Agency. Yet he was quickly taken out of the running.

Why? Mr. Kennedy had made plenty of controversial statements over the years that would have caused severe blowback for the Obama administration. For instance, he had co-written an article for Rolling Stone magazine and Salon.com purporting that “government health agencies colluded with Big Pharma to hide the risks of thimerosal from the public.” The article contained serious factual errors, and Salon eventually retracted it. Clearly, this would not mesh well with President Obama’s pledge to “restore science to its rightful place.”

Although it is encouraging that Mr. Trump is reaching out to people who did not support him, Mr. Kennedy belongs nowhere near the reins of power. We encourage the incoming president to follow his predecessor’s lead—and stay far away from this nonsense.

The Chicago video that features four black suspects assaulting a white man has sparked another discussion about “hate crimes,” but it also highlights a phenomenon that has been underreported by a liberal media more interested in political correctness.

Crime reporting these days seems more focused on the behavior of the police than on the behavior of criminals. Police shootings of black men are rare, for example, but they get far more media coverage than when black civilians shoot one another, which is much more common. There were 4,368 shootings in Chicago last year, according to the Chicago Tribune’s crime database. Almost all of the shooting victims were black, and more than 99% of the shootings were carried out by civilians, not cops. Obviously, young black men in Chicago don’t roam the streets in fear of getting shot by police.

When the media aren’t indulging liberal activists by pretending that police shootings drive black homicide rates, they’re playing down the very real episodes of black criminality shown in the video. For years, Asian students in public schools have complained of racially motivated harassment and bullying by black students. Surveillance cameras have caught young black men playing the “knockout game,” which involves sucker-punching random white pedestrians. Cities from Los Angeles to Philadelphia to Baltimore have experienced “wilding” incidents, which involve flash mobs of black youths rampaging through a mall or park or convenience store and physically attacking people in the process.

Most violent crimes involve a perpetrator and victim of the same race. But when they don’t, incidents of black-on-white crimes far exceed the reverse scenario. “In 2012, blacks committed 560,600 acts of violence against whites (excluding homicide), and whites committed 99,403 acts of violence (excluding homicide) against blacks,” writes the Manhattan Institute’s Heather Mac Donald, citing federal Bureau of Justice Statistics data. “Blacks, in other words, committed 85 percent of the non-homicide interracial crimes of violence between blacks and whites, even though they are less than 13 percent of the population.”

When the mainstream media discuss relations between poor black communities and law enforcement without including data on black crime rates, readers and viewers aren’t getting the full picture. Racially motivated attacks on blacks shouldn’t be ignored or played down, but neither should racially motivated attacks perpetrated by blacks.

Nationwide, crime is down from where it was in the 1990s, but it has ticked up in recent years in some major cities. Chicago’s murder rate in 2016 was the highest in two decades. Violent crime in Los Angeles has increased for three straight years. Liberals are quick to blame poverty or economic downturns or racial bias in policing, but those explanations can’t withstand scrutiny. CONTINUE AT SITE