RUTHFULLY YOURS

In his press conference on Wednesday, President-elect Donald Trump announced his selection for U.S. Secretary of Veterans Affairs. He chose the current Undersecretary of the department, David Shulkin.

“We’re going to straighten out the VA for our veterans,” Trump declared. “Because our veterans have been treated very unfairly.”

The Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) has fallen under fire in the past three years, for its record of shoddy care, long lines, and rampant corruption. The horror stories keep on coming: In November, an Iraq veteran committed suicide after the VA told him he’d have to wait months for treatment. In May, the current VA secretary, Robert McDonald, dismissed long wait times by comparing them to ride lines at Disney. In October, a veteran died with maggots in his wound at the VA, causing four employees to resign.

As a result of these horror stories, Concerned Veterans for America (CVA), a nonprofit group focused on VA reform, denounced the problem as cultural, and called for more health care choices for veterans and more accountability for staff at the VA.

“It is no secret that the VA has been failing veterans for years,” CVA Executive Director Mark Lucas said in a statement following Trump’s announcement. “While Shulkin already holds a leadership position at the VA, as Secretary, he will now have ultimate responsibility over the agency and we are hopeful he will take it in a new direction. CVA will seek to partner with Shulkin on urgently needed reforms, such as empowering veterans to access care outside the VA when the VA is failing them.”

“We are cautiously optimistic that Shulkin will turn things around and we want to give the Trump administration the opportunity to partner with us on choice and accountability reforms,” An anonymous source at CVA told PJ Media. “It must be noted, though, how horribly the VA has done under McDonald. So we hope Shulkin brings a fresh start now that he is in full control.”

So who is Shulkin? Here are 5 things you should know about Trump’s VA pick.
1. He is a medical doctor.

Shulkin graduated with an M.D. from the Medical College of Pennsylvania in 1986, and did his internship at Yale School of Medicine. He completed his residency and fellowship in General Medicine at the University of Pittsburgh Presbyterian Medical Center. He served as chief medical officer for multiple hospitals and hospital systems.

2. He was appointed by Obama.

Shulkin was nominated for Undersecretary of Health at the VA by President Obama in March, 2015. He would be the first member of the Obama administration chosen by President-elect Trump to join the new administration. He was confirmed unanimously by the Senate in June 2015, a sign that he might be Trump’s first uncontroversial pick as well.
3. He was a successful businessman.

Shulkin is an entrepreneur. He founded a health care information company called DoctorQuality. When he joined the VA, he resigned from a private sector position with an annual salary of $1.3 million, and now only makes $170,000 a year at the VA.

4. He is not a veteran.

Notably, Shulkin has never served in the military, although he has an extensive record in health care. As NPR’s Quil Lawrence reported in December, the VA has always been headed by a veteran. He will be the first non-veteran VA secretary.
5. He has presided over the VA scandal.

For good or ill, Shulkin’s tenure at the Department of Veterans Affairs has continued to be plagued by scandal. It is possible he would champion reforms to allow veterans more choice in health care, and that he might turn around the culture of unaccountability which plagues the VA, but scandals have continued under his watch. In January 2016, Shulkin launched a “VA Shark Tank” to target innovations and improvements to the VA medical centers. Still, it seems the fundamental problems are persisting.

His legacy, a failure. His opportunity, a waste. His impact, division.

President Barack Obama addressed a tearful crowd of 20,000 supporters in his hometown of Chicago on Tuesday, reflecting upon his two terms in the White House and calling for action to preserve his legacy. From NBC News:

Obama warned that “if every economic issue is framed as a struggle between a hardworking white middle class and undeserving minorities, then workers of all shades will be left fighting for scraps while the wealthy withdraw further into their private enclaves.”

Obama also warned that “Democracy can buckle when we give in to fear. So just as we, as citizens, must remain vigilant against external aggression, we must guard against a weakening of the values that make us who we are.”

Obama leaves office as a failed president. Unable to lead as a statesman and work with Congress to secure consensus legislation, Obama built his legacy on a combination of executive orders and administrative rule-making. The incoming Trump administration will be able to reverse as much of that as they wish, all but erasing Obama’s presidency.

The failure extends beyond statecraft. As the nation’s first black president, Obama had an opportunity that will never again present itself. He was given a chance to set the tone for American race relations for the 21st century. With that opportunity, he could have done anything. He might have chosen to lead the nation toward a truly post-racial worldview, fulfilling Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s dream of a world where individuals are judged by the content of their character rather than the color of their skin. Instead, Obama used his bully pulpit to drag us back to the 1960s.

There will no doubt be another black president someday. But there will never be another first black president. That unique opportunity to set a post-racial tone will never again manifest. Instead, the next black president will start from a disadvantage, inheriting the divisive baggage of Barack Obama.

On the bright side, the chance remains for the first female president to emerge as an inspiring and unifying figure. Had Hillary Clinton prevailed, she would have no doubt wasted the opportunity in much the same way Obama has. Americans of either gender and all racial backgrounds deserve better. CONTINUE AT SITE

The entire publicity apparatus of the media and government was enlisted to make a vote for him appear futile. Now poised to take power, many previously silent supporters will come out of the woodwork. His prospects of political success may be correspondingly larger.
In early December, when President-elect Donald Trump’s post-election “Thank You Tour” arrived at the US Bank Arena in Cleveland, someone hollered out of the audience, “We love you, Donald.” Trump yelled, “I love you, too”—one of the oratorical innovations of Barack Obama’s successful campaign for president in 2008 that few politicians have been able to resist imitating. But then, Trump pointed to the working-class fellow in the audience who had hollered in the first place. Trump said, in his unsyntactical way, “Guy. Some guy. Look at this guy. And I do love him. He’s a rough-looking cookie, though, I tell you. Love. We love. And there’s going to be a lot of love in this country.”

In a strange sense, spreading the love may be the biggest policy challenge Donald Trump faces as he approaches the presidency. His opponents are predicting catastrophe. Some of them are actively wishing for it. Hillary Clinton’s campaign backed an attempt to undo his election through legal challenges in three states. Not since Ronald Reagan has an American president arrived in the White House amid such widespread anxiety over his basic competence. Although Reagan was re-elected easily after four years, it took a long time to disabuse his detractors of the notion that he was too stupid to be president. And Donald Trump has a particular challenge. He was elected on an explicitly nostalgic campaign slogan—“Make America Great Again”. No politician can keep a promise to turn back the clock. Failure of one kind or another seems inevitable.

Yet Trump scored a triumph just days after his election. Carrier, an air-conditioning manufacturer that had been a special target of Trump’s bile on the campaign trail, agreed to cut in half a plan to move production facilities to Mexico. The initiative will keep 1100 jobs in Indiana. Newspapers have mocked Trump’s plans to bring industrial jobs back to the United States. “The reality is more complicated,” says the Los Angeles Times. Maybe so, but the Carrier deal is a sign that Trump is stronger than he looks. Voters who have had their credulity abused by politicians extolling capitalism’s theoretical benefits are likely to be patient with him. “They forgot that it was the American worker who truly built the country,” Trump said of the experts during his Cincinnati speech. Even if Trump cannot re-establish the high-paying manufacturing jobs of half a century ago, they are a symbol that he will not forget working people.

Over several hours before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on Wednesday, Rex Tillerson presented a largely clear-eyed view of Russia and American interests. Though the Secretary of State nominee had tense exchanges—with Marco Rubio over whether Vladimir Putin is a “war criminal,” with Tim Kaine on climate change, with others about his claim that Exxon had never “directly lobbied” against Russian sanctions—on the whole it was a sober, informed performance.

This sobriety was in marked contrast to the circus provoked by the publication of allegations—completely unsubstantiated—that the Russians hold compromising information about Donald Trump and worked with his surrogates to influence the 2016 election.

Among the allegations is that Mr. Trump hired prostitutes to perform degrading acts on a bed at the Ritz-Carlton in Moscow that had been slept in by President and Mrs. Obama. Another is that Mr. Trump’s lawyer, Michael Cohen, held a “clandestine meeting” with “Kremlin representatives” in Prague last August. These are two items drawn from 35 pages of memos prepared by a former British MI6 officer who was formerly stationed in Russia and who was paid first by Republican opponents of Mr. Trump and then by Democrats.

The memos had been circulating in press and political circles for some time. Yet even many publications that were vociferously anti-Trump declined to publish the material because they couldn’t substantiate the claims.

This changed Tuesday. First CNN published a dispatch noting that a summary of the memos had been attached to a report by the U.S. intelligence community on Russian hacking—though CNN did not include the uncorroborated details. The BuzzFeed website then published the 35 pages of memos even as its editor admitted “there is serious reason to doubt the allegations.”

The response was predictable. Mr. Trump took to Twitter to deny everything and ask with his familiar restraint if the U.S. is now “Nazi Germany.” Mr. Cohen said he’d never been to Prague. Amid Wednesday’s press conference brawl, it was easy to miss that Mr. Trump conceded for the first time that Russia was behind the hacks on the Democrats last year. Mr. Trump’s vehement denials also mean that if we learn in the future that Russia does have compromising details about him, his Presidency could be over.

All of this is a reminder—as if we need it—that the Trump Administration will be unlike any we’ve experienced. But when you look past the salacious, there’s been some healthy movement even on Russia. Mr. Tillerson showed that he’s nobody’s fool, that he has a good sense of the challenges America faces, and that the U.S. has paid a price for the Obama Administration’s retreat from leadership.

Notably he said that Russia “poses a danger,” that “there should have been a show of force” when the Russians invaded Crimea, and that the U.S. ought to give Ukrainians the arms they need to defend themselves against Russia. He had similar messages about how we have to “send China a clear signal” about its military buildup on contested islands in the South China Sea.

We wish Mr. Trump would handle these media frenzies with more presidential composure, but that’s all the more reason for the Senate to confirm Mr. Tillerson to advise him.

Senator Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) is a “very decent man” who has “served well and whose track record speaks for itself,” an Alabama pastor said on Capitol Hill Monday, as he and other black pastors spoke out in support for President-elect Donald Trump’s pick for Attorney General.

“We know in Alabama who Jeff Sessions is,” Bishop Kyle Searcy, senior pastor of the multi-racial, nondenominational Fresh Anointing House of Worship in Montgomery, Ala., told CNSNews.com.

“And it’s important to me that the truth comes out about him,” he added, “that he’s known for who is, he’s known for the good things he’s done in Alabama.”

“It’s time in America that we become fair, that we stop listening to talking points,” Searcy said, referring to allegations of racism against Sessions.

“When somebody comes up that some people would be against – based on either party affiliation or based on fears, they may be unfounded fears, but based on fears – then typically there’s a need to scrape the bottom of the barrel and try to dig out whatever you can find, that might be an accusation that people would hear that would transfer the fear they have to others,” he said.

Addressing the press conference, Searcy said, “Those of us in Alabama know him to be a very kind and a very decent man, man that both Democrats and Republicans alike both endorse and appreciate, a man who’s served well and whose track record speaks for itself.”

Also speaking at the event organized by the Family Research Council (FRC) was Rev. Dean Nelson, director of African-American outreach for FRC’s Watchmen on the Wall, a ministry to pastors, and chairman of the board for the Frederick Douglass Foundation.

Nelson noted that Sessions helped prosecute and insisted on the death penalty for Ku Klux Klan (KKK) member Henry Francis Hays, who had abducted and killed a black teenager.

“Senator Sessions has consistently demonstrated respect and care for people of all races while serving in his home state of Alabama,” Nelson said. “He has, in fact, worked relentlessly on the side of desegregation and justice.”

Bishop Harry Jackson, senior pastor at the Hope Christian Church in the D.C. area, pointed out that Sessions had “helped desegregate schools in Alabama, a huge issue.”

“Also he got the death penalty for a KKK murderer. I think that would qualify you as someone who’s eliminating racism, not one who’s perpetrating it on anyone.”

Rev. William Green, also a minister at the Fresh Anointing House of Worship, said he could always count on Sessions “to stand up and stand on Christian principles.”

Sessions is not racist, he said.

True racism, said Green, is “what you see when Dylan Roof walked in and shot people [in a Charleston church in June 2015] simply because they were black. True racism is what you see when the four young kids kidnapped that white kid and tortured him. That is true racism. I think we do true racism an injustice when we throw it around so lightly.”

Rev. Ralph Chittams, president of the D.C. chapter of the Frederick Douglass Foundation, recalled that Sessions had “spearheaded the effort to honor the mother of the civil rights movement, Rosa Parks. He spearheaded the effort to have bestowed upon her the Congressional Gold Medal [in 1999].”

Chittams quoted from a Senate floor speech by Sessions at the time in which he said, “Equal treatment under the law is a fundamental pillar upon which our republic rests… As legislators we should work to strengthen the appreciation for this fundamental governing principle by recognizing those who make extraordinary contributions towards ensuring that all American citizens have the opportunity, regardless of their race, sex, creed, or national origin, to enjoy in the freedoms that this country has to offer.”