RUTHFULLY YOURS

Obama has asserted, by pure fiat, on no legal, medical, scientific, or commonsense grounds whatsoever, that he can dictate how children use school bathrooms around the country. This is an obnoxious and dangerous abuse of federal power, and it looks suspicious. What is Obama’s motivation?

Adults may not remember the deep shame and embarrassment children often feel, as early as age four, around toilet training. Sibling rivalry can get pretty intense. Being called a “poopy kid” by your brother or sister might look pretty harmless to parents, but young children can experience it as a sink-through-the-floor feeling of overwhelming shame. Getting bowel control is a learning process, and losing bowel control feels like a world-shaking catastrophe to a young child.

Bathrooms are built for privacy because they are surrounded by fear and shame, even after a hundred years of “progressive” theories. Childhood shame around potty training occurs long before the even bigger ups and downs of puberty, another enormously sensitive time “down there.”

Sexuality is an enormous psychic force, not some parlor game. Sexual politics has reshaped generations of young people in Western schools, and from there sexual politics has swept the culture. You can see the results with your own eyes.

Liberals have a long, long history of trivializing the emotional tempests of childhood and adolescence via the myth of “progressive parenting.”

But human biology wins that battle every single time they try to fiddle with the facts of life.

Wise parents just don’t interfere with a child’s turbulent emotional growth; nature is much, much wiser than we are. We can protect children by giving them privacy and emotional support when they ask for it. The growing child is the only judge of what feels comfortable during the most vulnerable years. Leave it to nature. CONTINUE AT SITE

Federal bureaucrats announced earlier this year that they plan to upend the way Medicare Part B pays for drugs. The goal? To save money by getting doctors to alter their treatment choices. That’s bad medicine, flawed economics and destructive public policy—and Congress should pass legislation to stop this ill-conceived experiment.

Medicare plays a crucial role in the lives of more than 55 million Americans. It is the only way some seniors can get access to the drugs that keep them alive. The new policy from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services will jeopardize this access by inserting the government between doctors and patients in an unprecedented way.

The idea is to use financial incentives to push doctors to make “value-based care” decisions and prescribe cheaper treatments. Unfortunately, modern-day medicine isn’t as black and white as the administration seems to think. Take cancer care, my specialty. There are very few instances when the substitution of a less expensive cancer drug is appropriate or safe for patients. After all, there is a reason the newer, more advanced drugs—such as those that helped former President Jimmy Carter put his cancer into remission—are considered groundbreaking.

Moreover, it’s hard for doctors to accurately assess what bureaucrats deem to be “valuable,” because no details have been published. How will the government determine if patients can receive drugs or what prices are acceptable? We don’t know. But we are still being asked to allow the experiment to move forward. Don’t worry, bureaucrats say, the government will get things right and won’t leave cancer patients fighting for access to treatment.

More than 300 cancer clinics have closed over the past decade, as Medicare has shrunk payments for cancer care, according to the Community Oncology Alliance. CONTINUE AT SITE

The constitutional challenge to President Obama’s executive action on immigration keeps getting more remarkable. A federal judge has now exposed how the Justice Department systematically deceived lower courts about the Administration’s conduct, and he has imposed unprecedented legal measures to attempt to sterilize this ethics rot.

On Thursday District Judge Andrew Hanen of Texas found that Obama Administration lawyers committed misconduct that he called “intentional, serious and material.” In 2015 he issued an injunction—now in front of the Supreme Court—blocking Mr. Obama’s 2014 order that rewrote immigration law to award legal status and federal and state benefits to nearly five million aliens.

When 26 states sued to block the order in December 2014, Justice repeatedly assured Judge Hanen that the Department of Homeland Security would not start processing applications until February 2015 at the earliest. Two weeks after the injunction came down, in March, Justice was forced to admit that DHS had already granted or renewed more than 100,000 permits.

Justice has also conceded in legal filings that all its lawyers knew all along that the DHS program was underway, despite what they said in briefs and hearings. One DOJ lawyer told Judge Hanen that “I really would not expect anything between now and the date of the hearing.” As the judge notes, “How the government can categorize the granting of over 100,000 applications as not being ‘anything’ is beyond comprehension.”

Justice’s only explanation is that its lawyers either “lost focus on the fact” or “the fact receded in memory or awareness”—the fact here being realities that the DOJ was required to disclose to the court. The states weren’t able to make certain arguments or seek certain legal remedies because the program supposedly hadn’t been implemented, leaving them in a weaker legal position.

More to the point, an attorney’s first and most basic judicial obligation is to tell the truth. Judge Hanen concludes that the misrepresentations “were made in bad faith” and “it is hard to imagine a more serious, more calculated plan of unethical conduct.” Many a lawyer has been disbarred for less. CONTINUE AT SITE

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.