RUTHFULLY YOURS

Henry Miller, a physician and molecular biologist, is the Robert Wesson Fellow in Scientific Philosophy and Public Policy at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution. He was the founding director of the Office of Biotechnology at the FDA.

One of the ways that scientists traditionally measure the well-being of a nation is to track the rate at which its citizens die, and how long they can be expected to live. So the news out of the National Center for Health Statistics earlier last month was disturbing: The overall U.S. death rate has increased for the first time in a decade, and that led to a drop in overall life expectancy for the first time since 1993.

The finding is thought to be due to a confluence of issues, including more obesity in the population, increasing long-term unemployment, more patients with chronic diseases, and a lack of breakthrough innovations to reduce the costs of care while increasing the quality of life. But the new data certainly highlight the critical need to provide better life-saving and life-prolonging therapies for patients.

While policymakers and stakeholders continue to debate how to solve these problems, there are some things that we know Congress can do to address them: enact smart, evidence-based policies, invest in private-public partnerships that enhance innovation, and eliminate roadblocks to America’s innovators.

The 21st Century Cures Act is an example of smart policies spurring solutions to the nation’s problems. This commonsense legislation, signed into law last month, is the result of years of negotiations, compromises, and passionate advocacy among countless stakeholders, including patient groups, health-care providers, hospitals, the life-science community, regulators, and more. Although not perfect, the legislation will boost research into some of the most vexing medical challenges our health-care system faces, while making sure that there are expedited pathways coupled with new resources for medical innovators and regulators to get breakthrough therapies to patients without delay.

Many roadblocks limit our nation’s innovators and entrepreneurs, some of which could be removed rapidly by Congress, especially when there is already broad, bipartisan agreement to do so. Perhaps no better example of this would be the permanent repeal of the disastrous medical-device excise tax. This monstrosity, a provision of the Affordable Care Act, was a dark cloud over medical-technology innovation during the years it was in place and led to drastic cuts in R&D, job losses, and lost opportunities to improve patient care. Congress recognized how detrimental this policy was to innovation and suspended the tax for two years, but if nothing is done, it will resume in 2018. Fully repealing the medical-device tax once and for all — which has been spearheaded by Representative Erik Paulsen (R., Minn.) — is a commonsense approach that would remove a massive obstacle to improving patient outcomes and the creation of high-tech manufacturing jobs.

There is a word missing from the non-classified report issued Friday, in which three intelligence agencies assess “Russia’s Influence Campaign Targeting the 2016 US Presidential Election.” The FBI, CIA, and NSA elide any mention of . . . “Podesta.”

Seems like a pretty significant omission — not just because of how the 2016 campaign played out but also in light of the intelligence community’s recent history of politicizing its analyses.

The report is replete with references to Russian “cyber espionage,” “covert intelligence,” “false-flag,” “propaganda,” and “influence” operations by which Vladimir Putin is alleged to have tried to put his thumb on the electoral scale. Very sinister stuff, to be sure. But when the public hears these terms, it thinks of spies, misdirection, disinformation campaigns — i.e., schemes intended to deceive the target audience. People don’t instantly think, “Oh, you mean an effort to publicize true but embarrassing information”; they don’t read “covert operation” and say to themselves, “That must mean they subjected only one side of a political contest to a high level of scrutiny.” That’s the kind of behavior people associate with the American media, not the Kremlin.

The three intelligence agencies’ report pointedly declines to tell us what specific information gives them such “high confidence” that they know the operation of Vladimir Putin’s mind. They plead that the nature of their work does not allow for that: To tell us how they know what they purport to know would compromise intelligence methods and sources.

Fair enough. The problem, though, is that if you’re essentially going to say, “Trust us,” you have to have proven yourself trustworthy over time.

Here, we are talking about a community whose own analysts have complained that their superiors distort their reports for political purposes. In just the past few years, they have told us that they had “high confidence” that Iran suspended its nuclear weapons programs in 2003; that the NSA was not collecting metadata on millions of Americans; and that the Muslim Brotherhood is a moderate, “largely secular” organization. We have learned that the Obama administration intentionally perpetrated a disinformation campaign — complete with a compliant media “echo chamber” — to sell the public on the Iran nuclear deal (and the fiction that Iran’s regime was moderating). We have seen U.S. intelligence and law enforcement complicit in the Obama administration’s schemes to convince the public that “violent extremism,” not radical Islam, is the explanation for terrorist attacks; that a jihadist mass-murder attack targeting soldiers about to deploy to Afghanistan was “workplace violence”; that al-Qaeda had been “decimated”; that the threat of the ISIS “jayvee” team was exaggerated; and that the Benghazi massacre was not really a terrorist attack but a “protest” gone awry over an anti-Muslim video.

I can attest that the intelligence agencies overflow with patriotic Americans who do the quiet, perilous, thankless work that saves American lives. We can acknowledge this incontestable fact and still observe that, on this record, the intelligence community as an institution cannot very well expect that “Trust us” is going to get them very far.

Which brings us back to what the new report studiously avoids mentioning.

The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) was founded in 1971 by two Alabama attorneys, Morris Dees and Joseph Levin Jr. The latter served as the Center’s legal director from 1971-76, but it was Dees, who views the U.S. as an irredeemably racist nation, who would emerge as the long-term “face” of the organization.

Identifying itself as a “nonprofit civil rights organization” committed to “fighting hate and bigotry” while “seeking justice for the most vulnerable members of society,” SPLC describes the United States as a country “seething with racial violence” and “intolerance against those who are different.” “Hate in America is a dreadful, daily constant,” says the Center, and violent crimes against members of minority groups like blacks, Latinos, homosexuals, and Arabs/Muslims “are not ‘isolated incidents,’” but rather, commonplace. To combat this ugly state of affairs, SPLC dedicates itself to “tracking and exposing the activities of “hate groups and other domestic extremists” throughout the United States. Specifically, the Center’s “Hate & Extremism” initiative publishes its findings in SPLC’s Hatewatch Blog and in its quarterly journal, the Intelligence Report.

SPLC first gained widespread national recognition in 1987, when it won a $7 million verdict in a high-profile civil lawsuit against the United Klans of America (UKA). By the time that lawsuit was filed, UKA was already a destitute, impotent, disintegrating entity that virtually all white Americans emphatically rejected; the SPLC lawsuit merely drove the final nail into the UKA coffin. SPLC boasts that it has likewise won “crushing jury verdicts” that effectively shut down groups like the White Aryan Resistance, the White Patriot Party militia, and the Aryan Nations.

This has been SPLC’s modus operandi since its inception: to initiate lawsuits against prominent hate groups for crimes that their individual members commit. In these suits, declares Morris Dees proudly: “We absolutely take no prisoners. When we get into a legal fight we go all the way.” The leftist writer Ken Silverstein, who in 2000 wrote a penetrating exposé of SPLC for Harper’s magazine, has noted that the targets of these lawsuits tend to be “mediagenic villains” who are “eager to show off their swastikas for the news cameras.” As Dees and SPLC well understand, such figures stand the best chance of triggering an emotional public response that translates, in turn, into financial contributions from donors eager to combat the perceived threat.

SPLC claims that there are currently 892 active “hate groups” in the U.S. Asserting that the vast majority of such organizations are “right wing,” the Center says they include “the Ku Klux Klan,” “the neo-Nazi movement,” “neo-Confederates,” “racist skinheads,” “antigovernment militias,” “Christian Identity adherents,” and a variety of “anti-immigrant,” “anti-LGBT,” “anti-Muslim,” and “alternative Right” organizations. While also identifying a tiny smattering of black separatist entities as hate groups, SPLC takes pains to point out that black organizations must be judged by a different standard than their white counterparts, because “much black racism in America is, at least in part, a response to centuries of white racism.”

Democrats and left-wing activists are planning to vigorously attack President-elect Donald Trump’s cabinet nominees before Trump even takes office at Noon on Jan. 20.

The purpose of this early resistance to the incoming Trump administration is not only to deprive Trump of political legitimacy but also to undermine his authority and make it impossible for him to govern.

All this talk of a vast Russian conspiracy to hack U.S. computer networks to put Trump in the White House is also part of the leftists’ scheme. So was Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein’s goofy fundraising campaign disguised as recounts in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania.

Commie agitprop director Michael Moore is encouraging angry left-wing mobs to come to Washington, D.C., and riot in the streets of the nation’s capital on Inauguration Day in an effort to prevent or at least cast a shadow over Trump’s assumption of the powers of the presidency. Moore’s idea is to do as much damage as possible to Trump before he even gets sworn in. It worked against George W. Bush.

Feminists are planning a Women’s March on Washington for Trump’s first full day as president. Organizers hope 200,000 people will show up but that number seems very optimistic.

“We plan to make a bold and clear statement to this country on the national and local level that we will not be silent and we will not let anyone roll back the rights we have fought and struggled to get,” said Tamika Mallory of Al Sharpton’s National Action Network.

President Obama is part of this too. He is planning to stay behind in Washington after Inauguration Day in order to obstruct Trump’s efforts to undo his destructive legacy.

So with just one decisive election that reduced Democrats nationwide to their lowest ebb since at least 1920, the left-wingers who spent the Obama years denouncing Republicans as the “party of no” have suddenly decided being the “party of no” is fine by them.

Fort Lauderdale Airport terrorist Esteban Santiago registered on MySpace under the name “Aashiq Hammad” and recorded Islamic religious music on the site, 3 years before he ever deployed to Iraq as a U.S. soldier, destroying the lying mainstream media’s narrative that he was just a mentally disturbed veteran and that “Islam had nothing to do with it.”

Here’s how we know all that:

A search of public records database Nexis reveals that Puerto Rican Esteban Santiago has a brother named Bryan Santiago and two e-mails registered to his name:

naotaemail

The second e-mail, “Naota33@hotmail.com”, is how GotNews exclusively visually identified Santiago before every mainstream media outlet and discovered he was posting on an explosives/weapons forum about mass-downloading Islamic terrorist propaganda videos in 2007 yesterday.

Today, we discovered the first e-mail, “Naota017@gmail.com”, in the MySpace database that was leaked earlier this year. This is the raw data we found:

211355052:naota017@gmail.com:aashiqhammad:0x313afa5189c150b7b0f3e6d39e0fa223f88ec42b:

The middle entry “aashiqhammad” can be added to the MySpace URL to discover the profile that was registered to the e-mail address “Naota017@gmail.com”.

Sure enough, Esteban Santiago registered a MySpace account under the name “Aashiq Hammad”:
myspace1

Archive here.

“Aashiq Hammad” lists Penuelas, Puerto Rico as his location, just like Esteban Santiago’s records in Nexis.

And take a look at the three songs recorded by “Aashiq Hammad.” The first one is titled “La ilaha illAllah”, which is Arabic for “There is no God but Allah,” and the first half of the Muslim declaration of faith, the Shahadah:
myspace2

Archive here.

If the location and e-mail weren’t enough proof, “Aashiq Hammad” also has Bryan Santiago — Esteban’s brother — as a connection:
myspace3

Archive here.

myspace4

The song “La ilaha illAllah” by “aashiq” is indeed just an Arabic recitation of the Muslim declaration of faith “There is no God but Allah, and Muhammad is his messenger.” We recorded the song and you can download and listen to it for yourself here.

“Intentional” recitation of the Shahadah is generally considered sufficient to convert to Islam. Listen to that song. It sure sounds like Esteban Santiago was “intentional” about what he was saying!

And the best part?

That song was recorded in 2007, 3 years before Esteban Santiago went to Iraq as a U.S. soldier in 2010, destroying the lying mainstream media’s narrative that he was a “mentally disturbed veteran”, although even they admit Santiago went into an FBI office in 2015 and told agents he was being forced to watch ISIS videos by voices in his head (or something).

2007 was also the year that “Naota33” was posting on an explosives/weapons forum about mass-downloading Islamic propaganda videos, as GotNews exclusively revealed yesterday.

Santiago was definitely mentally disturbed, but if he was calling himself “Aashiq Hammad”, recording Islamic religious music online, and downloading Islamic terrorist propaganda all in 2007, 3 years before his first deployment to Iraq, what do you really think is the root cause here?

You won’t hear this stuff from the lying mainstream media. Keep the GotNews mission alive: donate at GotNews.com/donate or send tips to editor@gotnews.com. If you’d like to join our research team, contact editor@gotnews.com.

Stay tuned for more.

Our researchers shut down Facebook’s biased left-wing trending news team. They discovered never before seen footage of a young Barack Obama whining about white privilege in Kenya. They debunked and destroyed Hillary Clinton’s narco baby mama Alicia Machado, who quit giving interviews because of us. If you’d like to hire our research team, email us at editor@gotnews.com.

WASHINGTON — National Action Network president Rev. Al Sharpton promised a “season of civil disobedience” in reaction to the nomination of Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) for attorney general in the Trump administration.

Sharpton, an MSNBC host, said activists have planned a march in Washington on Jan. 14 during the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday weekend to protest the Sessions nomination. Sharpton recalled spending 90 days in jail for protesting on U.S. Navy land against military exercises on the island of Vieques in 2001 when George W. Bush was president, adding that civil disobedience usually works because it changes policy.

“We’re not just doing this to be doing it. We do it because it can lead to change and, believe me, there will be a season of civil disobedience particularly around the Sessions nomination,” he said Friday on a conference call with other civil rights organizations’ leaders such as Cornell William Brooks, president and CEO of the NAACP, and Janet Murguia, president and CEO of the National Council of La Raza.

Sharpton offered a preview of the mass march, explaining that activists plan to outline their intent to visit senators’ offices and make some house calls to “make them understand” they will be held accountable for voting in favor of Sessions, whose confirmation hearings in the Senate Judiciary Committee are scheduled for Tuesday and Wednesday.
Sponsored

“Make them understand that if they think they are voting based on some courtesy of a Senate colleague and will not face a real backlash in their own states, then they have another thing coming. This is not going to be some regular ceremonial procedure that they’re going to be able to bluff their way through,” he said.

“We intend to make this a critical stand in terms of where people are with civil rights and voting rights in this country. No one will be given a pass to say ‘I had to vote for my colleague.’ This is an affront to everything the civil rights and voting rights community has stood for historically and a vote for Sessions should be held accountable and punishable by the voters,” he added.

In 2010, then-Maj. Gen. Michael Flynn, at the time the top U.S. military intelligence official in Afghanistan, slammed the U.S. spy apparatus he helped to oversee as bloated and out of touch. Four years later, he was fired as the head of the military’s largest intelligence agency—in his view for speaking truth to power about the inadequacies of the nation’s national security preparedness.

Today, Gen. Flynn, who retired in 2014 as a lieutenant general, is in a position to again push his views of how America should protect itself, this time as President-elect Donald Trump’s choice for national security adviser.

Gen. Flynn and senior Trump advisers are eyeing potential structural changes to components of the U.S. intelligence community. The Wall Street Journal reported this past week that transition team officials have discussed paring back the authorities of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and reducing the size of its staff, and also discussed possible changes at the Central Intelligence Agency.

The effort is still the subject of internal discussions, and the Trump transition team has made no formal plans, people familiar with the discussions said. Sean Spicer, a Trump spokesman, said Thursday that discussions have been “tentative,” and denied there were plans for an overhaul.

“The president-elect’s top priorities will be to ensure the safety of the American people and the security of the nation, and he’s committed to finding the best and most effective ways to do it,” Mr. Spicer said.

But Mr. Trump’s aggressive skepticism of the intelligence community clearly echoes Gen. Flynn’s views on both the organization and the quality of national intelligence and the need for changes, according to officials familiar with the transition team and Gen. Flynn. As the president-elect’s closest adviser on national security, he briefs Mr. Trump on developments and sits in on classified presentations from U.S. intelligence officials.

The Trump transition team said Gen. Flynn wasn’t available to comment.

In a series of tweets, Mr. Trump has questioned intelligence conclusions that Russia-linked hackers intervened to help him win the election. Current and former intelligence officials have said that they see Gen. Flynn’s influence in those tweets and in Mr. Trump’s frequent allusions to the intelligence community’s botched 2002 analysis of Iraq’s suspected weapons program.

“I absolutely see Mike Flynn’s fingerprints on that,” said a former U.S. official with ties to the Trump transition who is familiar with Gen. Flynn.

Proposed changes to the Office of Director of National Intelligence have been offered for years by critics who said the office had grown too large and beyond its original scope. In that respect, some officials said Gen. Flynn’s proposals could be the latest iteration of longstanding proposals. Others also detect a whiff of revenge.

Gen. Flynn was removed as head of the agency by James Clapper, the director of national intelligence, and Michael Vickers, the civilian head of Pentagon intelligence at the time, because of his poor management of the agency, said U.S. officials who were familiar with his removal. CONTINUE AT SITE