RUTHFULLY YOURS

WASHINGTON – Sen. Elizabeth Warren batted down calls for her to take a DNA test to prove her Native American heritage in an interview that aired Sunday.

“I know who I am. And never used it for anything. Never got any benefit from it anywhere,” Warren said of her ancestry on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”

The Massachusetts Democrat has been under increased pressure to provide evidence of ​her ​Native American roots, with President Trump repeatedly mocking her as “Pocahontas” as recently as Saturday.

An editorial this month in Massachusetts’s Berkshire Eagle urged Warren to buy a DNA test for $99 to resolve the issue once and for all.

“All the senator needs to do is spit into a tube, wait a few weeks and get her answer,” the paper said.

Asked whether she’d take an ancestry test, Warren said she wants to hold onto the folklore of her parents’ love story.

“My mother and daddy were born and raised in Oklahoma,” Warren said. “My daddy first saw my mother when they were both teenagers. He fell in love with this tall, quiet girl who played the piano. Head over heels. But his family was bitterly opposed to their relationship because she was part Native American. They eventually eloped.”

She said her parents survived the Great Depression and other hardships as they raised her and her three brothers.

“That’s the story that my brothers and I all learned from our mom and our dad, from our grandparents,” Warren said. “It’s a part of me and nobody’s going to take that part of me away.”

Few conditions are as wrenching as the destruction of memory known as Alzheimer’s, and few diseases have so eluded drug companies and researchers looking for a cure. So it’s welcome news that the Food and Drug Administration is inviting more innovation, and more broadly revamping the agency’s review process.

FDA recently updated its scientific thinking on early Alzheimer’s, along with other neurological conditions, and this matters because such draft guidance informs industry and academic efforts. One reality of Alzheimer’s is that the disease may “progress invisibly for years,” as Commissioner Scott Gottlieb said in the announcement, and by the time clinical symptoms arrive a patient may have lost significant function.

One important change is that FDA says it’s open to considering a novel drug for early stages that can affect cognition, or measures of a person’s thinking or memory. FDA previously said a drug had to deliver on two endpoints: cognition and function, and the latter involves an ability to perform tasks. FDA’s guidance also includes a discussion on biomarkers, which are measurable substances that offer clues to the presence or progress of a disease.

The bias of many Americans against American values has blinded them from seeing the reasons we immigrants went through hell to come to this country. Many Americans believe that those who criticize the culture from which we escaped must be “Islamophobic.” They seem not to understand why we never again want to see what we have gone through so much to escape from.

Such attacks on the white majority in Americans are, bluntly, racist. It is a shame that so many Americans are unable or refuse to see what many immigrants see: that it was under this white majority that millions of oppressed people — of all colors and creeds — from around the world were rescued from tyranny, Sharia law, slavery, discrimination, Islamism and a miserable existence under corrupt, war-torn and famine-stricken nations. Instead, many seem to want to bring all that here.

We watched American freedoms as a dream: to be able to smile back at a man who opened the door for you without accusations of being a loose woman for smiling. To be able to wear what you want, go out when you want, work or get an education or not, and venture to hope one day to live under a system that respects monogamy and equal rights for women and minorities. Yes, it is the American culture where whites are the majority, no problem with that, that made our dreams come true. Despite its shortcomings no other country in the world offers its citizens the chance to be whatever they would like. We might never get back what we already have.

Every day we hear on television, “We need an honest discussion about race in this country”.

Many well-meaning Americans, however, may have had enough of this endless, empty and dysfunctional discussion of race. To an outsider, Americans seem obsessed with race; and the discussion always deteriorates to shouting, insulting, blaming, finger-pointing, distorting reality and removing any hope of taking responsibility for oneself. The goal of the discussion always seems to be to try to claim that “I am holier than thou.”

We immigrants, on the other hand, the minute we land in the US, we feel the political struggle for our vote.

The day I got my citizenship and went out to register to vote, some people in the room told me to register as a Democrat because the Democrats would protect my rights from the racist establishment and give me “stuff.” Many of the people who had come with me did register that way, but I found the urging alarming. I grew up under a socialist, totalitarian system under the leadership of President Gamal Abdel Nasser in Egypt — a nanny state that also gives you “stuff’.” What many Americans do not realize is that the free stuff can be too expensive

This week delivered two bits of very bad news for the Obama Administration: Top Republican lawmakers formally requested the appointment of a special counsel to investigate the Justice Department’s conduct in 2016 and 2017, and long-withheld documents related to the Operation Fast and Furious scandal will finally be released to Congress.

It couldn’t have happened to a more deserving bunch.

The public behavior by several Obama officials since Donald Trump’s election has been shameful and shameless. It would be easy to write it off as sour grapes, to treat them like a sad group of ex-wives grumbling about why they got dumped. But their actions are more insidious—and unprecedented—than that. Bitter about their unexpected defeat in November 2016 and terrified that their Trump-Russia conspiracy scheme will be exposed in full by Congress, Obama loyalists have been working overtime to discredit the president, smear Republican lawmakers, and keep the focus on Robert Mueller’s investigation into the Trump campaign.

Just days after Trump won the election, Josh Earnest, Obama’s press secretary, openly began to question the legitimacy of Trump’s victory and peddled Trump-Russia conspiracy tales to an eager, Trump-hating press corps. Obama holdover Sally Yates refused to enforce Trump’s travel ban in her position as acting Attorney General. (She is now emerging as a central figure in the case against Michael Flynn.)

Loretta Lynch, Obama’s last attorney general, recorded a video advocating violence to resist the new administration, comparing it to other great American struggles. “It has been people, individuals, who have banded together, who simply saw what needed to be done, who have made the difference,” Lynch said. “They’ve marched. They’ve bled. Yes, some of them have died. This is hard. Every good thing is.”

Former FBI director James Comey, who was fired by Trump in May 2017, routinely tweets cryptic—if not childish—political messages aimed at the president and Congress while defending the agency whose credibility he helped degrade:
James Comey
✔ @Comey
All should appreciate the FBI speaking up. I wish more of our leaders would. But take heart: American history shows that, in the long run, weasels and liars never hold the field, so long as good people stand up. Not a lot of schools or streets named for Joe McCarthy.

And ol’ Uncle Joe Biden told CNN’s Chris Cuomo last month that Trump is a “joke.”