RUTHFULLY YOURS

A fire broke out yesterday at the Ivanpah Solar Electric Generating System, the world’s largest solar thermal power station, causing the plant to shut down one of its electricity-generating water towers and leaving the facility at one-third capacity.

The $2.2 billion station — $1.6 billion in taxpayer-guaranteed loans — is run by a consortium that includes BrightSource Energy, NRG Energy and Google. Its 350,000 mirrors reflect sunlight on the water towers, creating steam which turns the turbines that produce the electricity.

The complex sprawls over five square miles and firefighters had no easy task battling the blaze.

Associated Press:

Firefighters had to climb some 300 feet up a boiler tower at the Ivanpah Solar Electric Generating System in California after fire was reported on an upper level around 9:30 a.m., fire officials said.

The plant works by using mirrors to focus sunlight on boilers at the top of three 459-foot towers, creating steam that drive turbines to produce electricity.

But some misaligned mirrors instead focused sunbeams on a different level of Unit 3, causing electrical cables to catch fire, San Bernardino County, California fire Capt. Mike McClintock said.

David Knox, spokesman for plant operator NRG Energy, said it was too early to comment on the cause, which was under investigation.

The fire was located about two-thirds of the way up the tower, said Jeff Buchanan of Nevada’s Clark County Fire Department, which also responded to the blaze.

This is just the latest setback for the facility, which drastically over-promises its benefits.

In Illinois, and many states, public service has little to do with serving the public and everything to do with using the public’s money to serve politicians. Whenever we open the books, Illinois is consistently among the worst offenders. Recently we found Cook County animal control officers making $105,000; suburban school administrators at $503,000; university doctors earning $1.3 million; and 72 small-town ‘managers’ out-earning every governor of the 50 states.

This week, Governor Bruce Rauner (R) told the state public employee union AFSME, “Illinois is broke.” Our data and analysis at OpenTheBooks.com shows he’s right. There are 50,000 public employees earning six-figure salaries who cost Illinois taxpayers $8 billion a year.

Using our interactive mapping tool, you can quickly review the public employees across Illinois who earn more than $100,000.

OTB_WheresTheSalaryHeat_graphic

In 2,500 units of local and state government at least one public employee makes $100,000+ in Illinois

Here are a few examples of what you’ll uncover by zip code:

18,900 teachers and school administrators – including $503,200 for Mohsin Dada, an administrator at North Shore School District 112 who earned $248,510 salary, plus a teacher’s retirement pension of $254,700 (ZIP – 60035).
9,000 college and university employees – including Dr. Fady Toufic Charbel at the University of Illinois at Chicago who earned $1.38 million (ZIP – 60601).
8,838 State of Illinois employees – including Steven Valasek, a $218,519 ‘contractual worker’ employed by Illinois Comptroller Leslie Munger (R) (ZIP – 62704).
5,122 small-town city and village employees – including 72 municipal managers who out-earn every governor of the 50 states at $180,000 per year.
5,007 City of Chicago rank-and-file managers and workers – including $216,000 for embattled Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel (D).

In total, there’s roughly $9.3 billion in total compensation flowing to highly-compensated government workers when counting 7,637 federal employees based in Illinois with six-figure salaries.

So, who are the biggest culprits in conferring six-figure salaries? We ranked the fourteen largest public pay and pension systems in Illinois:

At a time when large numbers of Americans say they are fed up with politics and politicians, why is it that the nation’s chief politician, President Obama, seems to skate above it unscathed?

Usually when an incumbent president is leaving office and a slew of candidates are battling for his job, that departing chief executive’s record is a major campaign issue.

But not this year, even though two of three Americans say the country is on the wrong track, job creation is sluggish, income inequality continues to rise and Mr. Obama’s job approval barely tops 50%. Moreover, approval of his handling of the war on terror and Islamic State is underwater, and a majority of Americans—white and black—say race relations are getting worse, not better.

When Mr. Obama ran for office in 2008, a central part of his campaign strategy was to heap blame on George W. Bush. How has Mr. Obama dodged similar treatment? One reason: Donald Trump’s bombastic candidacy is a huge distraction and often blocks out or obliterates more-substantive issues. That was the case even when his now-vanquished rivals tried to address serious topics. When Mr. Trump does criticize the president, it gets far less news play than his attacks on his opponents and critics, Republican or Democrat. As for Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton, they both are angling for a third consecutive Democratic administration, so are not eager to criticize Mr. Obama.

But another reason—a big one—why Mr. Obama is able to avoid being a target is that he is a deft manipulator of the media, probably more skillful at it than any president ever. He heads a savvy public-relations machine that markets him like a Hollywood celebrity, a role he obligingly and successfully plays. One of the machine’s key tactics is to place Mr. Obama in as many positive news and photo situations as possible. Ronald Reagan’s advisers were considered masters of putting their man in the best possible light, but they look like amateurs compared with the Obama operation—which has the added advantage of a particularly obliging news media.

A sampling over the past few weeks: A Washington Post photo captures President Obama blowing giant bubbles “At the final White House Science Fair of his presidency.” A New York Times photo shows the president mobbed by women admirers at a ceremony designating the Sewall-Belmont House on Capitol Hill as a national museum for women’s equality.

An ABC News video gives us Mr. Obama’s helicopter landing on the rainy grounds of Britain’s Windsor Castle, and then we visit the president and first lady lunching with Queen Elizabeth II on her 90th birthday.

In other news clips, we see a doctoral-robed Obama speaking to graduates of Howard University, a tuxedoed Obama yukking it up at the White House Correspondents Association dinner, a brave Obama drinking a glass of water in Flint, Mich., a cool Obama grooving with Aretha Franklin at a White House jazz concert, a serious Obama intently listening to Saudi King Salman, a jubilant Obama on his showy trip to Cuba.

A picture may be worth a thousand words, but with Mr. Obama you also get the thousand words.

Yet at the same time we were seeing those nice photos, videos and articles, a lot of other important stuff was going on where Mr. Obama was hardly mentioned, seen or questioned. For example, the U.S. economy grew at a meager 0.5% in the first quarter of 2016; Russian military planes lately have been buzzing U.S. Navy ships; and China is building its military forces and expanding their reach in the South China Sea. Early in May, a Navy SEAL was killed in Iraq (the president has assured the American public that U.S. troops there, increasing in numbers, are not in combat roles). Islamic State terrorist attacks in Baghdad in recent weeks have killed scores of civilians. The Taliban are on the march in Afghanistan. The vicious war in Syria continues. The Middle East refugee crisis shows no sign of diminishing. Military provocations by Iran and North Korea keep coming. CONTINUE AT SITE

Amid the drama that is today’s presidential race, serious subjects are getting short shrift. No one is happier about this than Barack Obama. And no agency within that president’s administration is more ecstatic than the Internal Revenue Service.

That tax authority’s targeting of conservative nonprofits ranks as one of the worst federal scandals in modern history. It is topped only by the outrage that no one has been held to account. Or perhaps by the news that the targeting continues to this day.

That detail became clear in an extraordinary recent court hearing, in front of a panel of judges for the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals. The paired cases in the hearing were Linchpins of Liberty, et al. v. United States of America, et al. and True the Vote Inc. v. Internal Revenue Service, et al. They involve several conservative nonprofits—there are 41 in Linchpin—that were, as they said, rounded up and “branded” by the IRS. The groups are still suffering harm, and they want justice.

A lower-court judge had blithely accepted the IRS’s claim that the targeting had stopped, that applications for nonprofit status had been approved, and that the matter was therefore moot.

The federal judges hearing the appeal, among them David B. Sentelle and Douglas H. Ginsburg, weren’t so easily rolled. In a series of probing questions the judges ascertained that at least two of the groups that are party to the lawsuit have still not received their nonprofit approvals. The judges determined that those two groups are 501(c)(4) social-welfare groups, which are subject to far less scrutiny than 501(c)(3) charities, yet are still being harassed by the IRS five years later. The judges were told that not only are the groups still on ice, but that their actions are still being “monitored” by the federal government.

As one lawyer for the plaintiffs noted, despite the IRS’s claim that it got rid of its infamous targeting lists, there is “absolutely no showing” that the agency has in fact stopped using the underlying “criteria” that originally “identified and targeted for mistreatment based on political views.”

The hearing also showed the degree to which the IRS has doubled down on its outrageous revisionist history, and its excuses. IRS lawyers again claimed that the whole targeting affair came down to bad “training” and bad “guidance.” They blew off a Government Accountability Office report that last year found the IRS still had procedures that would allow it to unfairly select organizations for examinations based on religious or political viewpoint. The lawyers’ argument: We wouldn’t do such a thing. Again. Trust us.

More incredibly, the IRS team claimed that the fault for some of the scandal rests with the conservative groups, for not pushing back hard enough during the targeting. In response to complaints that the groups had been forced to hand over confidential information (information the IRS now refuses to destroy), one agency lawyer retorted: “They didn’t have to give the information to the IRS if they thought it was inappropriate, they could have said so.” Really. CONTINUE AT SITE

Artificial intelligence (AI) via predictive analytics is a game-changer. At last week’s Kentucky Derby, an AI platform that had previously predicted the winners of the Oscars and Super Bowl predicted the Kentucky Derby superfecta. The AI platform predicted the first-, second-, third- and fourth-place horses at 540-1 odds, netting the technology’s inventor Louis Rosenberg $10,842 on a $20 bet. How will this translate to the federal government?
On May 3, The White House issued a very interesting document: “Preparing for the Future of Artificial Intelligence.” Recognizing that AI is a technology area full of both promises and potential perils, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy announced that it will co-host four public workshops topics in AI to spur public dialogue on AI and machine learning.

In addition, a new National Science and Technology Council (NSTC) Subcommittee on Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence was established to monitor state-of-the-art advances and technology milestones in AI and machine learning within the federal government.

Information technology research firm Gartner describes AI as a “technology that appears to emulate human performance typically by learning, coming to its own conclusions, appearing to understand complex content, engaging in natural dialogs with people, enhancing human cognitive performance or replacing people on execution of non-routine tasks.”

Emergent AI and its corresponding components of machine learning, augmented reality and cognitive computing technologies are no longer things of science fiction.

The Victimhood of Black Millionaires
Fresh from the success of Between the World and Me, professional literary victim Ta-Nehisi Coates snapped up a luxurious landmarked brownstone for $2.1 million. The brownstone featured original Tiger Oak, Maple, and Mahogany wood floors, a chef’s kitchen, wedding cake moldings, a tin ceiling, terrace, garden, carved woodwork, a fireplace and all the other expected trimmings of the downtrodden.

When the purchase was exposed and Coates was mocked on Twitter for his gentrifying ways, he posted a whiny self-pitying screed claiming that he could no longer live there because “you can’t really be a black writer in this country, take certain positions, and not think about your personal safety.”

Prospect-Lefferts Gardens is still a majority black area. Whatever risks to his personal safety Coates might have faced in his $2 million brownstone would have come from nearby gangbangers, not stealthy white ninja assassins out to hunt down black writers who “take certain positions.” The last recorded crime as of this writing involved an armed robbery with a “black male” fleeing the scene.

Ta-Nehisi Coates is the guru of black fragility. Between the World and Me is a gushing stream of hatred and self-pity in which the National Book Award winner and MacArthur genius grant recipient moaned that the firefighters and police officers who died on September 11 “were not human to me. Black, white, or whatever, they were menaces of nature; they were the fire, the comet, the storm, which could — with no justification — shatter my body.”

Neurotic black fragility justifies dehumanizing white people. White people are just evil forces of nature who might at any moment shatter Coates’ body, even while they’re dying trying to rescue people of all races from the World Trade Center, or impinge on his $2.1 million brownstone hideaway. Occasionally, in their inscrutable way, they might bestow a genius grant or a book award on him. But that’s just another example of how they exploit “black bodies” by financing their brownstone purchases.

This is a good season for the prophets and profits of victimhood. Black fragility is especially very profitable. The Civil Rights movement began with the assertion of moral strength and then eventually physical strength. The current crybullying claims only weakness. It’s a civil rights movement of fragile crybullying nerds who whine even while they’re winning.

The Mizzou protests were kicked off by Jonathan Butler, the son of a millionaire, who went on a hunger strike based on utter ridiculous nonsense. Butler insisted to the media that he was a “dead man walking”. Then the football team joined the protest to see “what can we do to make sure that Jonathan Butler eats.” That was last year. He’s still walking and whining. Also he’s available for “speaking engagements, personal appearances and corporate events”. Possibly also wedding and bar mitzvahs.

The Obama Administration is full of oddities — all ignored by the media. Obama’s bowing episodes, for example, with the international media video recording deep bows to the Saudi King and the Emperor of Japan. Then there is Obama’s personal contempt for certain foreign leaders, notably Benjamin Netanyahu and Vladimir Putin, but also 90-year-old Queen Elizabeth II (whose personal garden at Windsor Garden was ruined by three of Obama’s presidential helicopters in 2011).

Obama has constantly tried to meddle in the domestic affairs of our (former) allies, like Egypt and Israel, but also Britain. Obama publicly commanded Egypt’s President Mubarak to step down, a gross insult to a close ally. He tried to topple what was long considered to be the pillar of peace in the Middle East.

Then there is Obama’s much-resented advice to African countries like Kenya to allow freer homosexual behavior, when Africans are still dying from an HIV epidemic.

And now we have Obama’s Bathroom Gender Edict, telling local school districts to let boys and girls from six to sixteen decide whichever bathroom they “really” identify with, regardless of the rights of others. The President of the United States is coming to rescue you from gender-assignment tyranny, children!

Somehow the Founders forgot to include that as one of the enumerated powers of the President.

Troubling? Weird? Yes, you might think so.

President Obama’s bombshell transgender edict on bathroom and locker rooms last week to all American school districts did not come out of the blue.

Friday’s joint letter from the Departments of Education and Justice, plus Attorney General Loretta Lynch’s mind-bending comparison of separate sex bathroom policies to Jim Crow laws, was just the latest chapter in the assault on social norms begun in earnest by former Attorney General Eric H. Holder, Jr. as soon as he took office in 2009.

If the Trump campaign were wise, it would not blow kisses to the tiny, tiny percentage of the population that identifies as the other sex, and instead put Hillary Clinton in a vise — caught between her legions of LGBTQ supporters versus millions of average Americans shocked by the intrusion of the federal government into school restrooms. This issue is a visceral example of the dangers of overweening, centralized, establishment power without effective checks and balances. It’s made to order for the Trump insurgency.

But I digress. The main point is that this is not new. Here’s a case summarized in 2011 by American Civil Rights Union Policy Board member J. Christian Adams in his book Injustice: Exposing the Racial Agenda of the Obama Justice Department, which I offer with his permission:

Pink Wigs and Stiletto Heels

“Americans might be shocked to learn that the Obama DOJ thinks it is a federal civil right for boys to wear stiletto high heels and pink wigs to a public high school. In the Mohawk Central School District near Utica, New York, a 15-year-old male student wanted to come to class dressed as a flamboyant transvestite. Unsurprisingly, other students teased the boy, and the school attempted to enforce a reasonable dress code to maintain classroom order. But in the age of Eric Holder, this became a federal civil rights issue.

“The Civil Rights Division intervened in the affair to force the school to allow for child-transvestites. Where in the Constitution might this power be found? What could the legal theory possibly be? What federal right was at stake that could overcome the well-established power of schools to enforce order to facilitate learning? The answer, incredibly, is sex discrimination.

“’Gender non-conforming’ behavior has been elevated to a federal civil right under the Obama DOJ’s bizarre legal application of Title IX. This is not even within paddling distance of the mainstream. The law was intended to prevent discrimination against women, not against those who fantasize about having a different gender.

Christine Brim is a founder of Paratos LLC, a risk communications consultancy. Previously she served at the Center for Security Policy as a vice president and chief operating officer.
On May 13, the Washington Post published an online op-ed by former CIA director and CENTCOM commander David Petraeus, titled “Anti-Muslim bigotry aids Islamist terrorists.” The op-ed was noteworthy chiefly for Petraeus’ use of rhetorical clichés more commonly expected from the Council on American Islamic Relations and the Organization of Islamic Cooperation’s “Islamophobia Observatory,” including such standards as “inflammatory political discourse against Muslims and Islam,” “blanket discrimination on the basis of religion,” “those who flirt with hate speech against Muslims,” “those who demonize and denigrate Islam,” “who toy with anti-Muslim bigotry,” and the ever-reliable “demonizing a religious faith and its adherents.” Although the op-ed seemed to target Donald Trump, it also admonished all Americans to limit what we say about Islam.

Petraeus’s attack was so over-the-top, no expression critical of Islamic doctrine would escape his censorship. Have you criticized mainstream Islamic doctrine or the laws of Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates? You’re demonizing a religious faith. Do you object to authoritative Islamic doctrines justifying jihad, proclaimed by both Islamic governments and non-state Islamic militants alike? Stop toying with anti-Muslim bigotry; you’re just aiding “Islamist terrorists.”
Robert Spencer of Jihadwatch expertly summarized Petraeus’s specious logic: “So the upshot of Petraeus’ argument is that we must not say things to which Muslims might object, because this will just make more of them become jihadis. His prescription for minimizing the jihad against the West is for the West to practice self-censorship in order to avoid offending Muslims.”

Sadly, Petraeus’s attacks primarily undercut the foremost critics of Islamic doctrine: Muslim reformers, the group of Muslims who most need our support. A prominent young Muslim reformer, Shireen Qudosi, responded to his op-ed with this poignant tweet: “Petraeus doesn’t see that for much of the maddening world of Muslims and liberals, hate speech is conflated w/ truth.”

The theme of Petraeus’s op-ed, “Anti-Muslim bigotry aids Islamist terrorists,” was in line with a campaign to blame ISIS on Western critics of Islamic doctrine. For example, The Mirror: “ISIS wouldn’t be here if there wasn’t Islamophobia”; The Nation: “ISIS Wants You to Hate Muslims”; The Guardian: “Islamophobia plays right into the hands of Isis”; Salon: “After Brussels, far-right Islamophobes are doing exactly what ISIS wants them to do”; and last but not least, Hillary Clinton in The Daily Mail: “‘He is becoming ISIS’ best recruiter’: Hillary Clinton blasts Donald Trump for demonizing Muslims and using ‘bluster and bigotry to inflame people.”