RUTHFULLY YOURS

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.”

President Barack Hussein Obama bid farewell last night to the nation he despises in what was, for him, a mercifully brief speech.

“America is a better, stronger place than it was when we started,” he said in all apparent seriousness.

After sending aid and comfort to an Islamic supremacist dictator in Egypt, he falsely claimed to have pulled the rug out from the Islamic Republic of Iran’s nuclear weapon program. The Nobel Peace Prize winner left out how his illegal war destabilized Libya and the fact that the U.S. military deeply distrusts him.

He pretended the economy is going gangbusters while leaving out the fact that nine days away from his departure from the Oval Office, his signature legislative accomplishment, Obamacare, is collapsing as insurers run away from the so-called insurance exchanges. He acted as if fighting alleged manmade global warming was more important than just about everything.

It some ways it wasn’t much different than the warm and fuzzy victory speech the Divider-in-Chief gave in Chicago in 2008, except in this speech he got to lie about his record while throwing in cheap shots against his critics and the incoming president. (A transcript of Obama’s final great oratorical atrocity is available here.)

In a forum resplendent with the echo-acoustics our megalomaniacal president prefers, the pathologically dishonest Obama tried last night to cast himself as a unifying figure:

It falls to each of us to be those anxious, jealous guardians of our democracy; to embrace the joyous task we’ve been given to continually try to improve this great nation of ours. Because for all our outward differences, we in fact all share the same proud title, the most important office in a democracy: Citizen. Citizen.

So you see that’s what our democracy demands. It needs you. Not just when there’s an election, not just when your own narrow interest is at stake, but over the full span of a lifetime. If you’re tired of arguing with strangers on the Internet, try talking with one of them in real life.

A life form that just arrived from Alpha Centauri might have been moved as Obama tried to whitewash the unmitigated catastrophe his presidency has been.

Deploying all the usual tired old left-wing smears against conservatives, the lawless 44th president recited a long series of America-boosting sayings most of which he has never believed in. He said nice things about the dead white men much-derided by the Left whom we call the Founding Fathers, along with the government-restraining Constitution he has spent so much of his life spitting on. With a straight face this despotic destroyer of the rule of law called the Constitution “a remarkable, beautiful gift.”

Of course Chicago was an appropriate locale for the goodbye address. It’s a violent one-party city that is collapsing under the weight of its own corruption. He gave the speech at Lakeside Center at McCormick Place in Chicago, not too far from storied Hyde Park and the site of the future Obama Presidential Center.

The Windy City is where community organizing guru Saul Alinsky, whose teachings on tactics deeply influenced Obama, learned his craft from the Al Capone crime gang. Obama got his start in nasty Alinsky-style community organizing with the assistance of groups like the Developing Communities Project, Catholic Campaign for Human Development, and the Gamaliel Foundation.

Chicago is where young Obama cut his organizing teeth running the successful get-out-the-vote drive for ACORN-affiliated Project Vote in 1992 that elected the awful one-term senator, Carol Moseley Braun of Illinois. She was a friend of Communist Cuba and African dictators who worked closely with agitator Heather Booth of the Midwest Academy, Democratic Socialists of America, and the Communist Party USA, all of which Obama welcomed into his political coalition.

Chicago is where the half-black Obama whose purported father was from Kenya learned to portray himself as what the Left calls “authentically” black, soaking up vile racist hatred while sitting in the pews of Jeremiah Wright’s sinister Nation of Islam-like church.

Tom Price, President-elect Donald Trump’s nominee for secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, should be quickly confirmed for the post. However, Senate Democrats are desperately trying to throw a wrench in the gears of his confirmation process and hope to bring it to a halt. In the history of the department, there may not be another secretary with Price’s stellar combination of medical experience, health-policy expertise, proven leadership, public service in the state legislature and in Congress, and knowledge of the federal budget process. If anyone can cure what ails the American health-care system in a post-Obamacare world, it is the good doctor. And that’s what Democrats are afraid of.

Price is a six-term Georgia congressman representing suburban Atlanta. He serves on the House Ways and Means Committee, which has jurisdiction over health care and tax matters. After Obamacare was passed, he was the first congressman to put forth a serious, detailed proposal for replacing Obamacare with reforms that empower patients instead of the government. And he has taken the politically courageous step of proposing solutions to ensure the long-term solvency of important programs such as Medicare. He appeared on my radio show, Morning in America, making the case for these alternative plans long before anyone else. He knew that Obamacare would eventually unravel and that there would come a day when Republicans would need to be ready to offer a serious alternative plan.

Until recently, he served as chairman of the House Budget Committee. In that role, he helped forge balanced-budget agreements and demonstrated an in-depth understanding of the budgetary impact of programs and policies at HHS.

The U.S. Congress was not his first foray into public service. Price was elected to the Georgia state senate in 1996. He quickly earned a reputation for being a policy wonk and tireless problem-solver. Recognizing his leadership abilities, his colleagues in the senate chose him to be minority whip. In 2002, they elected him as the first Republican senate majority leader in Georgia history. His peers in the U.S. House of Representatives repeatedly chose him for leadership positions, and he willingly took them on.

Price accepted these roles because he felt he had a duty to make a difference. This sense of duty is what called him to follow in his father’s and grandfather’s footsteps and enter the medical profession. For more than 20 years, Dr. Price was a practicing orthopedic surgeon. He taught medical residents at one of the largest public hospitals in the country, where he tended to vulnerable, at-risk patients. He witnessed their unique needs and challenges in accessing care and was determined to make the health-care system work better for them. He saved and transformed lives with his surgical skills. We need him to do the same at HHS with his policy and leadership skills.

Those hoping for fireworks at Tuesday’s confirmation hearing for Alabama senator Jeff Sessions, Donald Trump’s nominee to head the Department of Justice, were treated instead to a slow Southern drawl of a day.

Known for being a particularly strident immigration hawk and an early congressional supporter of Donald Trump, Sessions has been accused variously of racism, sexism, and xenophobia for his legislative stances, and Democrats hope to claim an early scalp in the confirmation battles that will take up much of the Senate’s time over the next several days. However, on Tuesday, Sessions seemed comfortable parrying those accusations, pointing to a long record of prosecuting civil-rights violations (including of KKK members), to a distinguished twenty-year tenure in the Senate, and to plaudits from Senate colleagues, including former Pennsylvania senator Arlen Specter, who late in his career (and after becoming a Democrat) expressed regret for sinking Sessions’ nomination for a federal judgeship in 1986.

Controversies from those hearings have formed the centerpiece of Democrats’ case against Sessions. To accusations, resurrected from the 1980s, that he once called the NAACP “un-American,” Sessions denied the charge, explaining that he thought activities taken up by the organization to promote certain causes in Central America “could be perceived as un-American.” He pushed back, too, on the details of a decades-old voting-rights case (Perry County) that critics have said reveals a troubling attitude toward ballot access: The case, said Sessions, “was in response to pleas from African-American incumbent elected officials who claimed the absentee ballot process involved a situation in which ballots cast for them were stolen, altered and cast for their opponents.” He emphasized that, as attorney general, he would prosecute anyone who sought to violate the integrity of the ballot box. (Albert Turner Jr., whose parents were the defendants in Perry County, recently endorsed Sessions for attorney general, saying, “More than most I am very familiar with him. I believe he will be fair in his application of the law and the Constitution.”)

Sessions also objected to misrepresentations of more recent positions. “It is kind of frustrating to be accused of opposing the Violence Against Women Act when I have voted for it in the past,” he lamented, noting that while he opposed a revision of the law proposed by Vermont senator Patrick Leahy in 2013, a Democrat, he supported an (unsuccessful) alternative version authored by Iowa Republican Chuck Grassley that did not include expanded protections for LGBT persons, Native Americans, and immigrants. Likewise, while Sessions has been criticized for skepticism about the Voting Rights Act, he voted to reauthorize the act in 2006, and only objects to specific provisions that he contends are no longer necessary more than a half-century after the bill originally became law. In this, he is aligned with a majority of the U.S. Supreme Court, which invalidated a portion of the law in its 2013 Shelby County decision.

On other matters, Sessions’s testimony was precisely what one would expect from a Republican attorney-general nominee. On questions ranging from abortion access to the use of the detention center at Guantanamo Bay, the Alabama senator committed to enforcing the laws passed by Congress and to exercising legal judgment independent of the president. In response to questions about Russia’s attempted intervention in the 2016 election, he acknowledged clear evidence of “penetration throughout our government by foreign entities,” and discussed the need for stiff penalties against foreign governments or actors who violate American sovereignty. He also promised to recuse himself from all matters related to the ongoing investigation into Hillary Clinton’s email server, acknowledging that his close relationship with the Trump campaign throughout 2016 might create the appearance of a conflict of interest.

The only excitement in the otherwise low-drama affair was periodic outbursts by anti-Sessions and anti-Trump protesters, including members of Code Pink.