RUTHFULLY YOURS

Some concerned Democrats are worried that their party may have lost the key blue-wall states because of its elitism, manifested as disdain for Americans between the coasts.

Perhaps emblematic of their worry is the strange metamorphosis of Hillary Clinton’s two presidential campaigns. In 2008, as Bill Clinton 2.0, she drank boilermakers, bragged about bowling and shooting, boasted about her resonance with the “white” working class, and clobbered Obama on his Pennsylvania clingers speech.

But after Obama’s win — and his assumed new formula of registering record numbers of minority voters and seeing them often vote in a bloc on the basis of racial solidarity — Clinton thought she too could follow this new pathway to Democratic victories. So she made the understandable political contortions

This time around, Clinton was bent on out-Obaming Obama’s “clingers” with her own “deplorables” and “irredeemables.” Her campaign was based on pandering to identity-politics groups — while she had cashed in on Wall Street in what can be fairly called a payola scheme with Bill to enrich the Clinton Foundation and thus indirectly themselves. The result was both a cultural and economic affront to what used to be the bedrock of the Democratic party.

Americans neither hate nor envy meritocratic elites. Here in one of the poorer areas of the nation in rural southwestern Fresno County, the poor admire the skilled surgeons who operate on their children. Most of the new agri-barons are up-by-their-bootstraps ethnics: Basques, Punjabis, and descendants of the Okie diaspora and the 1960s waves of immigrants from Mexico who may now farm more than 2,000 or 3,000 acres of orchards and vineyards and on paper be worth $10 or $15 million, though they dress in old clothes and drive run-down pickups. They are looked upon as success stories worthy of emulation because most talk and act like the people who work for and with them.

So perhaps what drives proverbially average Americans crazy is not the success and money of others, but the condescension and hypocrisy of what a particular elite says contrasted with how it lives: The disconnect recalls the Reverend Jimmy Swaggart, the televangelist who on Sunday mornings three decades ago used to break into tears as he loudly condemned the sins of the flesh, while he privately indulged his worldly appetites.

Elites, whose lifestyles lead them to burn lots of carbon, rail about the Paris accords to those who get by burning lots less. What is galling is to see how little the elites’ green rhetoric is backed up by their green behavior. Could Hollywood celebrities at least for a year swear off the use of their private jets that emit more carbon emissions in a year than entire small towns in Ohio?

Why do not college professors who are strident activists for climate change agree to limit their intercontinental jet trips to one a year? Could our pundits and politicians who warn Middle America to brace for radical changes in their lifestyles at least agree to live in houses smaller than 2,500 square feet?

How do our elites square the circle of identity politics and big money? The notion that reparatory admissions and hiring are based on race and gender presupposes that past endemic bias has led to oppression that in turn had hit hard the livelihoods of the Other. But what happens when after a half-century of affirmative action, many who receive preferences are richer than those whom they accuse of white privilege?

In the Mount Sinai Medical School, Class of 2020, there is a brilliant and beautiful and charming student who calls me “grams.” rsk

New York’s 45-bed Jews’ Hospital opened for patients on this date in 1855. It would change its name to the Mount Sinai Hospital after the Civil War. Founded by Sampson Simson, a philanthropist, on land that he owned on 28th Street between 7th and 8th Avenues in Manhattan, the hospital found its resources especially taxed by the war-wounded of the Union Army and by the draft riots of 1863, which took the lives of scores of black New Yorkers. Mount Sinai began appointing women to professional positions in 1872, and founded a school of nursing in 1881, which graduated 4,700 nurses (only one man among them) in its ninety years of existence. Mount Sinai was also the first hospital to use kidney dialysis in the U.S., to combine chemotherapy with radiation to combat breast cancer, to use a cardiac stress test, and to perform a fetal blood transfusion, among many other medical firsts. During the Holocaust, Mount Sinai gave jobs to many doctors fleeing Nazi Germany as early as 1933 and became a new home for a large number of émigrés. In 2005, Mount Sinai established one of the leading stem-cell research centers in the U.S. In 2013 Dr. David L. Reich became the first openly gay physician to serve as president of the hospital.

“During the first few years that it functioned, most patients were immigrants to the U.S. As the Jews’ Hospital was a charitable enterprise, its directors depended on donations from Jewish friends and members, as well as payments from the government, to provide enough to subsidize care. . . . [In 2013, the] hospital boasted 2,510 physicians, 1,097 residents and fellows, 2,278 nurses, 58,332 inpatient discharges, 644,527 outpatient and 102,639 emergency room visits. . .” –Judy Siegel-Itzkovich, Jerusalem Posthttp://jewishcurrents.org/the-jews-hospital/

He will be running against Republican Governor Rick Snyder. A quote from his issues page: ”

As governor, I will support our immigrant communities and fight for a pathway to citizenship. It’s time for Michigan to be a leader and consider what it can do to be a ‘Sanctuary State’.

Abdul El-Sayed was born and raised in Michigan. His family reflects the diversity of our state, including immigrants who left Egypt in pursuit of greater opportunity in America, and farmers, teachers, and small-business owners who have lived in Gratiot County, Michigan for generations. Abdul is a product of Michigan public schools. He captained his high-school football, wrestling, and lacrosse teams, and went on to play lacrosse for the University of Michigan. He graduated in 2007, where he was honored to deliver the student commencement speech alongside President Bill Clinton.

Abdul went on to become a Rhodes Scholar, earning a doctorate from Oxford University and a medical degree from Columbia University. As a public health professor, Abdul became an internationally recognized expert in health policy and health inequalities.

At 30, Abdul became the youngest health official of a major American city when he was brought home by Mayor Mike Duggan to rebuild Detroit’s Health Department after it was privatized during the city’s bankruptcy. As Health Director, he was responsible for the health and safety of over 670,000 Detroiters, working tirelessly to ensure government accountability and transparency, promote health, and reduce cross-generational poverty.

After witnessing the systematic failures of government only a few miles away in Flint, Abdul worked hard to ensure that children attending Detroit schools and daycares were drinking lead-free water. He has also served expectant mothers and women by creating programs aimed at reducing infant mortality and unplanned pregnancy. He built a program to give schoolchildren across the city glasses if they needed them. Abdul also stood up for children with asthma by taking on corporations that wanted to pump more harmful pollutants into our air, working with them to reduce emissions and invest in parks.

Though the work continues, under Abdul’s leadership, the Detroit Health Department has become a state and national leader in public health innovation and environmental justice, in one of the fastest municipal public health turnarounds in American history.

Abdul is called to public service by a core belief in people. He believes that all people can thrive when we value each other and our communities, we seek to protect and defend our vulnerable, and when we create the kinds of opportunities that empower people to dream for a better future.

Abdul lives in Detroit with his wife, Sarah, a mental health doctor. He loves water sports, working out, good biographies, coffee, and Michigan sports.

An evening stranded on an O’Hare airport runway is enough to make anyone mad, and on Monday Donald Trump responded with a plan for improving American air travel. The President endorsed spinning off air-traffic control from the Federal Aviation Administration, a decades-old idea that would improve passenger experience and safety.

Mr. Trump announced principles for converting air-traffic control into a nonprofit. The new entity would be governed by a board of directors, including representatives for airlines, unions, airports and others. Instead of taxes, the outfit would be funded by user fees, which is how Canada has financed air-traffic services since 1996. The outline makes small tweaks to House Transportation Chairman Bill Shuster’s proposal that stalled last year.

The proposal is being dismissed as one of Mr. Trump’s eccentric obsessions, though Al Gore supported a version in the 1990s. President Trump is right that while “every passenger has GPS technology in their pockets, our air-traffic control system still runs on radar,” circa 1945. The FAA’s modernization program known as NextGen is expected to crash through its 2025 deadline by as much as a decade.
One illustration is electronic flight strips. U.S. towers use pieces of paper to monitor a flight’s progress, even as FAA has promised to transition to digital slips, among other technology updates. How’s that going? The product will be rolled out somewhere between 2020 and 2028—to only 89 of the busiest towers, as the Reason Foundation’s Robert Poole has detailed. Canada’s air-traffic system NavCanada deployed electronic strips a dozen years ago.

In May the Transportation Department Inspector General offered some reasons why the FAA so routinely fails to deliver new technology: “overambitious plans, unreliable cost and schedule estimates, unstable requirements, software development problems, poorly defined benefits, and ineffective contract and program management.” Is that all?

FAA regulates itself, so a separation would end this conflict-of-interest and allow the agency to focus on safety and certification. This reform is endorsed by the International Civil Aviation Organization, and only the most cynical on the left could claim a spinoff threatens passenger safety. Democrats will say Mr. Trump is auctioning off air traffic to big business, but the principles are explicit that the entity must be a nonprofit. The outline gives airlines only two seats on the 13-member board.

After terrorists slaughtered seven people Saturday in London, England, President Trump turned up the heat in ongoing debates over Islam, terrorism, and immigration by criticizing London’s Muslim mayor Sadiq Khan for his permissive, laissez-faire attitude toward terrorism committed by his fellow Muslims.

“We must stop being politically correct and get down to the business of security for our people,” Trump tweeted after the killings at London Bridge and nearby Borough Market. “If we don’t get smart it will only get worse.”

The Metropolitan Police and British Prime Minister Theresa May have labeled the incidents terrorist attacks and Islamic State has reportedly claimed responsibility for the atrocities. May appeared to agree with Trump, saying “We cannot and must not pretend that things can continue as they are. Things need to change.”

Khan, a member of the left-wing Labour Party, doesn’t particularly care about the threat that Islamic terrorism poses to Western civilization.

It was just last Thursday (June 1) that Khan sounded as detached from reality as former Vice President Al Gore. “Climate change remains one the biggest risks to humanity,” he tweeted. “Now more than ever world leaders must recognise and act on this threat.”

Muslim terror is no big deal, shrugs Khan, who says terrorist attacks are “part and parcel” of city life.

Khan is one of those “urban elites … grotesquely out of touch with the lives of ordinary citizens,” writes Monica Showalter at American Thinker. “They dismiss terror deaths as ‘tragic’ suggesting the victims had some role in their own deaths as in the definition of tragedy.”

It’s easy for elitist hipsters like Khan to “claim global warming is a bigger problem than the immediate and deadly threat of terrorism,” she writes.

Taking action on global warming makes them feel good, costs them nothing and only threatens the livelihoods of farmers and fishermen and miners, not their own. As for terrorism, that’s no problem for them, either – you’ll never find an elitist like Khan strolling on London Bridge on a Saturday night for terrorists to take down. With his bodyguards and the protective bubble he lives in, terrorism is for little people.

Khan’s arrogance and disregard for the safety of others may help to explain why President Trump felt the need to slap him around on Twitter.

Trump mocked Khan, a Sharia-loving darling of the mainstream media, for trying to create a false sense of security among Britons. “At least 7 dead and 48 wounded in terror attack and Mayor of London says there is ‘no reason to be alarmed!'”

“This is our city… and we will never be cowed by terrorism,” Khan had previously said in a press release, adding that the killers were “barbaric cowards.”

“Londoners will see an increased police presence today and over the course of the next few days,” Khan continued. “There’s no reason to be alarmed. One of the things the police and all of us need to do is ensure that we’re as safe as we possibly can be.”

Media-savvy Trump used social media to treat the horrifying events in London as a teachable moment. He urged the courts to reinstate his stalled temporary travel ban aimed at six terrorism-plagued Muslim countries.

“We need to be smart, vigilant and tough. We need the courts to give us back our rights,” Trump tweeted. “We need the Travel Ban as an extra level of safety!”

One of the London terrorist attackers, British police revealed Monday, was Khuram Shazad Butt, 27, a British citizen born in Pakistan who had been investigated by police and MI5. A second attacker was Rachid Redouane, 30, also known as Rachid Elkhdar, and according to police a Moroccan or Libyan. At this writing, police have not revealed the name of the third attacker, but it is now apparent where he got his motivation to kill.

According to Daily Caller reporter Saagar Enjeti, Ahmad Musa Jibril, an Islamic preacher in Michigan, helped radicalize the attacker. Jibril was “well known on YouTube for preaching sermons that appear to lionize Islamic terrorists fighting in Syria.” He is a U.S. citizen of Palestinian descent who earned a degree in Islamic law from Saudi Arabia. As Enjeti notes, Jibril appears to have problems adhering to U.S. criminal law as “a convicted fraudster who at one time owed nearly a quarter of a million dollars in restitution to the U.S. government, and served nearly 7 years in prison.”

According to Newsweek, “Jibril preaches a Salafist version of Islam, one of the most conservative strands of the religion and the ideology from which members of the Islamic State militant group (ISIS) and Al-Qaeda derive their beliefs.” Based in Detroit, Jibril enjoys “a substantial following” online, with nearly a quarter million “likes” on Facebook, more than 40,000 on Twitter, and 16,000 subscribers on YouTube. He is described as a “subtle, careful, and nuanced preacher” and that comes across in videos like this one.

The London attacker, said the Newsweek report, “is believed to be a homegrown jihadist, from the east London suburb of Barking. The Detroit News cited a friend of the attacker who said “He used to listen to a lot of Musa Jibril. I have heard some of this stuff and it’s very radical. I am surprised this stuff is still on YouTube and is easily accessible. I phoned the anti-terror hotline. I spoke to the gentleman. I told him about our conversation and why I think he was radicalized.” The Detroit News also provided more detail on Jibril’s criminal record.

He and his father Musa Abdallah Jibril were convicted on 42 counts of bank fraud, conspiracy and money laundering. In the course of these proceedings, the government uncovered a family album with photos of Ahmad dressed as a jihadi, and photos of young children with firearms and “playing at holding each other hostage and aiming the weapons at each other’s heads.” Investigators also found that in 1996 Ahmad Musa Jibril sent a fax to CNN claiming responsibility for the Khobar Towers bombing in Saudi Arabia and warning “here will be a series of bombings that will follow no matter how many lives of ours are taken.”

The candlelight vigils didn’t work. After the Manchester Arena suicide bombing in England last month, liberal pundits suggested “mass vigils” and “community solidarity” as a counterterrorism response. The most important imperative, according to the media intelligentsia, was to signal that the West’s commitment to “diversity” and “inclusion” was intact.

Unfortunately, the three Islamic terrorists who used a van and knives to kill another seven civilians and critically injure dozens more in London on Saturday night were unmoved by the “diversity” message. Witnesses described the killers frantically stabbing anyone they could reach, while shouting “This is for Allah”; one witness said that a girl was stabbed up to 15 times.

The “candlelight vigil” counsel has been more muted after this latest attack, though the New York Times has predictably advised the candidates in Britain’s upcoming elections not to succumb to “draconian measures” or to do “just what the terrorists want” by undermining democratic values.

The usual “blame the West” strategy did make an appearance, with some politicians and commentators trying to change the subject from Islamic terrorism to alleged right-wing violence in the U.S. Congressman Adam Smith, from Washington state, reached back to the Oklahoma City bombing to claim that there was a “common thread” of “racism and fear of people who don’t look like you” in the “violence on the other side.” That right-wing violence would only be exacerbated if President Donald Trump’s ideas for fighting terrorism were realized, Smith suggested Sunday on Fox News. Likewise, a spokeswoman from the progressive think tank Demos said that the Trump administration “was tolerating right-wing hate and violence.”

The main response to the London attack, however, has been to reiterate opposition to Trump’s March 2017 executive order briefly suspending new visa issuance from six terror-ridden and terror-sponsoring countries: Iran, Somalia, Sudan, Yemen, Syria, and Libya. That modest three-month pause in new visas for travel to the U.S. was to be accompanied by a thorough review of security screening protocols in those six countries.

On Saturday night, following the London attacks, Trump had tweeted: “We need to be smart, vigilant and tough. We need the courts to give us back our rights. We need the Travel Ban as an extra level of safety!” Trump’s exhortation produced expletive-laden fury, as well as more sober dismay. Columnist Fareed Zakaria summarized two of the main arguments against the visa pause on CNN Monday morning. The pause is a “nonsense solution” to Islamic terrorism, Zakaria said, because the “vast majority” of attacks have been committed by “homegrown terrorists and locals.” In other words, “homegrown” Islamic terrorism is not an immigration problem. But a second-generation Muslim terrorist is more of an immigration problem than a first-generation Muslim terrorist. Such a killer demonstrates that the uncontrolled flow of immigrants from terror-breeding countries has overwhelmed the necessary process of assimilation. When security forces in a country like Britain can no longer keep track of Islamic extremists within their borders, that is a consequence of specific immigration policies.

Zakaria claimed that the problem is “ideology,” not immigration. But how will the West’s ability to counter that ideology be improved by bringing in more bearers of it without a better understanding of who is ripe for radicalization? Until we are confident of our ability to screen for radical Islamic ideology in newcomers and their progeny, the rational reaction is to temporarily slow things down.

Zakaria also invoked a study from the libertarian Cato Institute that allegedly shows that there has not been a terror attack on U.S. soil by a visa holder from the six visa-paused countries since 1975. Therefore, the argument goes, the U.S. could not possibly be attacked by someone from those six countries. But just because something has not happened yet does not mean that it cannot happen. The Trump administration chose the six countries on the travel pause list because, as the Obama administration previously declared, they are the most dangerous breeders of radical Islamic ideology on earth. Several of the countries have no functional government at all. There is no reason to think that the U.S. is immune from the North African-generated terror attacks plaguing Europe, especially if the U.S. mimics European immigration levels.

Washington, D.C. is known for its monuments, but it is also known for its “ivory tower” think tanks. These institutions can serve a valuable role in providing dispassionate and empirical analysis in divided times. One of the pre-eminent D.C. think tanks is the Brookings Institution, which has nearly half-a-billion dollars in assets and deep ties to political leaders on the left.

According to Brookings, its mission is to “conduct in-depth research that leads to new ideas for solving problems facing society at the local, national and global level.” Brookings says it values the independence of its scholars and prides itself on “open-minded” inquiry.

Yet, public spending records captured by our organization at OpenTheBooks.com tell a somewhat different story. Rather than focusing on “open-minded” inquiry, Brookings seems swayed by “open-wallet” inquiry. In many cases, Brookings doesn’t resemble a think tank, but a jukebox – add a little coin and Brookings will play your tune, if the price is right.

And these aren’t just dollars provided by private donors — these are your tax dollars funding partisan advocacy projects and papers.

Since 2008, Brookings amassed nearly $20 million in contracts and grants from 50 agencies – including the Obama Administration’s Office of the President. Despite assets of $496 million (IRS990, FY2014), our OpenTheBooks.com audit shows it was not enough. Brookings instituted an aggressive strategy to pursue federal business over the past nine-years.

The Federal Money Ball at The Brooking Institute funded by the U.S. Taxpayer

OpenTheBooks.com

Big Moneyball at The Brooking Institute funded by the U.S. Taxpayer

Under current federal law, none of this is illegal, but the question is whether it’s ethical to secretly coerce taxpayers into supporting partisan causes. Moreover, an organization loses all credibility to hold government accountable when the government becomes a donor. (To see the full list of the 227 federal awards to America’s foremost liberal think-tank, click here.)

An institution originally founded as an independent public policy think-tank, government watchdog, and public charity, Brookings learned how to dial into taxpayer money. A few examples:

Brookings reaped millions of dollars in fees from federal agencies including billing up to $50,000 for two-day training seminars. Additionally, five Brookings positions charged the agencies between $1,375 and $3,440 per day for “custom training” solutions;
Brookings collected $23,000 from Barack Obama’s “Office of the President” for employee training (2015);
Federal agencies – such as Veterans Affairs, Treasury and Energy – paid up to $6,135 to place key employees into Brookings “fellowships.” The Brookings sales pitch to donors touted their “legislative inner circle” and claimed their taxpayer-paid fellows were placed on the staffs of then-Senators Obama and Hillary Clinton and then-Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid;
Brookings charged federal agencies $2,575 per head for a seminar called “Inside the White House.”

Review just one Brookings federal contract here – running through 2018.