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December 2015

Meet The 2nd Largest PR Firm In The World: The U.S. Government by Adam Andrzejewski

Hilary Clinton led State Department spent $630,000 on a PR campaign to get taxpayers to ‘like’ the agency Facebook page.
$88.26 per hour billed to feds by PR firm Ketchum — for their interns.
Million dollar ad executives – Booz Hamilton Allen bills agencies for $525 per hour for their ‘management executive’ – that’s $1.192 million per year!
$214,395 per lot for a fancy ‘z-card’ – a wallet sized plastic card with foldout informational inserts.
Telemarketing firms billing the IRS for $70 per hour, while paying the employee $9 per hour.
In 2013, then-U.S. Senator Tom Coburn criticized the then Hillary Clinton-led State Department for spending $630,000 to convince taxpayers to “like” the State Department on Facebook. The State Department argued it was informing the world of its activities. Coburn wasn’t impressed. He argued the Department was simply promoting itself, rather than the best interests of the United States or its taxpayers.

At OpenTheBooks.com, we decided to take a closer look at federal PR expenditures. Our organization, American Transparency, quantified this spending in our just released OpenTheBooks Oversight Report – The Department of Self-Promotion, How Federal Agency PR Spending Advances Their Interests Rather Than The Public Interest.

Here’s what we found:

We were surprised to find the U.S. government not only leads in military spending, but also public relations spending. The federal government, in fact, is the 2nd largest PR firm in the world in terms of number of officers.

MY SAY: THE DEBATE AND 2016 ELECTIONS

Finally- the words “jihad” and “Islam (Radical natch)” have made their way into the foreign policy and terrorism debate.

One winner was Wolf Blitzer who moderated fairly and efficiently. One loser was Hugh Hewitt who got appropriately booed by asking a dumb question of Dr. Ben Carson.A few days will tell will be the declared winners and losers by the poll weevils.

As for the candidates? I have only one real litmus test now. Who can beat Hillary?

My bet is on Marco Rubio….so far.

And speaking of Rubio,he will leave the Senate and an open seat in Florida.

Ron de Santis a great Congressman who currently represents District 6 has already announced a run. During his active duty Navy service, he served as a military prosecutor, supported operations at the terrorist detention center in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba and deployed to Iraq during the 2007 troop surge as an advisor to a U.S. Navy SEAL commander in support of counterinsurgency operations in Iraq. He has also performed duties as a federal prosecutor, taught courses on military law, and written on constitutional issues.

He has introduced the Terrorist Refugee Infiltration Prevention Act in order to strengthen national security and ensure that terrorists cannot exploit the United States’ refugee resettlement program.

Stay tuned!!

In Las Vegas Debate, a Rubio-Cruz Showdown Takes Center Stage By Tim Alberta & Alexis Levinson

— Nine candidates took the stage here Tuesday night for the final primetime Republican debate of 2015, but in critical moments it seemed there were only two: Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio.

The pair of freshmen senators went toe-to-toe several times, most notably on the issues of the National Security Agency’s data collection and immigration, participating in lengthy back-and-forth exchanges that left the other candidates sidelined while CNN featured the budding rivals in a split-screen presentation.

Tuesday may have foreshadowed a Rubio-Cruz battle for the nomination that more and more Republicans are now predicting, as Cruz continues to consolidate the support of conservative voters and Rubio emerges as the favorite of center-right, establishment-oriented voters. The headlines coming out of the Nevada debate could further cement the narrative of a collision course for the two senators, who presently occupy very different places in the Republican field. Rubio, despite strong debate performances, remains stuck in the mid-teens in early-state polling; Cruz this week surged to the top of several Iowa surveys and is gaining momentum nationally.

The looming threat to such a binary battle continues to be Donald Trump, who continues to place at or near the top of virtually every poll in the early nominating states. But the bombastic real-estate mogul was largely absent from the defining moments of Tuesday night’s debate inside the towering Venetian hotel and casino here on the famed Las Vegas strip.

The first direct conflict in the suddenly fierce rivalry between Senate colleagues, heretofore conducted via dueling press releases, came when co-moderator Dana Bash asked Rubio about Cruz’s support for a bill that limited the NSA’s ability to collect metadata from US citizens.

“Is Senator Cruz wrong?” Bash asked Rubio, who voted against the bill. “He is,” replied Rubio. “And so are those who voted for it.” His campaign fleshed out the jab hidden in those words with a press release showing Cruz surrounded by other senators who voted for the bill: Democrats Harry Reid, Chuck Schumer, Al Franken, and Barbara Boxer.

John O’Sullivan :The Myth of Multicultural Amity

“The Islamists are growing in numbers, in part through immigration, but they are still a minority within a minority. Yet they have succeeded in reducing freedom of speech throughout Europe, and in local areas where the Islamists dominate they impose rules such as “no alcohol” and a “modest” dress code for women through threats and beatings. By contrast liberal governments tell Muslim pupils that they need not sing the national anthem if it offends them, and neurotically avoid giving the slightest offence to supposed Muslim sensitivities.”
Malcolm Turnbull is fond of proclaiming that Australia is a multicultural society, but this is loose talk. A multicultural society is a contradiction in terms, since common cultural understandings are the glue that holds a society together. Just look at France and the way its very fabric is ripped asunder
We were about thirty hours from sending this issue of Quadrant to the printers when the news broke that terrorist attacks in Paris had killed more than a hundred people. It seemed an important enough event, throwing light on both European and Australian concerns, to justify commissioning serious commentaries on it. That in turn pushed us into re-shaping this Quadrant around the concept of France’s emerging civil war.

Chance favours the prepared mind, it is said, and that concept had been planted in our minds the previous week when we received an article from our perceptive cultural critic Michael Connor titled “Paris, at Five Minutes to Midnight”. On a visit to France, Michael was struck by the unstable jostling blend of joyful cultural entertainments, car-burnings in resentful anti-white suburbs, the smart bookshops running out of republished Occupation-era fascist novels, all within a few stops on the Metro. “Nowhere in Paris is far from possible danger,” he writes. “The theatres and museums operate under strict security. Armed soldiers punctuate the street outside the Shoah Memorial, as they do outside Sacré Cœur.”

THE MASS MURDERS in Paris took place following a summer that had seen a vast non-military invasion of Europe, mainly by young men from the Middle East and Africa sweeping over Europe’s external and internal borders under the guise, not false in all cases, of refugees from the Syrian civil war.

Douglas Murray: Europe’s Fatal Contradiction

Even more than most other first-world nations modern Europe suffers from a potentially fatal cognitive dissonance. All the time we hold two wholly contradictory ideas in our heads.

The first idea is that our countries are multicultural paradises where anyone from anywhere in the world can come and deserves to settle if they so wish. We believe that those who come here will assimilate, but at the same time we do not especially mind if they do not, and offer no incentives for them to do so. Indeed if they do not wish to assimilate we respect them for holding on to their own culture. At the same time it is natural that we should decry as “racist” anyone who wants to hold on to what is left of our own culture. This part of our brain talks about “integration” and “radicalisation” and “violent extremism” and all the other weakly euphemisms of our time.

Yet all the time our brains hold another idea—ordinarily pushed to the very recess of our minds but always capable of breaking out. This holds the possibility that this is all nonsense. That integration if it does ever happen takes centuries to occur and has certainly not happened in present-day Europe. This part of the brain knows from observation and from an awareness of history that a strong religious culture when placed into a weak and relativistic culture will make itself felt long before it will significantly adapt. If there is a reason why we repress this instinct and favour the wilfully optimistic version of events it is because the consequences of accepting this truth are so utterly calamitous and damn the majority beliefs of a whole generation.

The Islamic State and Turkey’s Betrayal Why Erdogan is the problem. Joseph Puder

Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan fancies himself as the protector of Sunni Islam. As such, he has been known as a major supporter of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, and Hamas in Gaza. The recent accusation Putin’s Russia leveled at Erdogan that he is aiding and abetting the Sunni Islamic State (IS) is not far-fetched.

Saudi Arabian-based Arab News (December 7, 2015) reported that “Turkey was astonished by Iranian accusation that Ankara is supporting IS and involved in oil dealing with the terrorists in Iraq and Syria.” The Turkish Foreign Ministry responded by saying that “there was nothing in Tehran’s accusations to take seriously.”

In a statement Erdogan issued last Thursday, he warned his Iranian counterpart Hassan Rouhani over media reports that alleged that he and his family were involved in oil trade with IS terrorists. Erdogan stated that he spoke to Rouhani on the telephone and told him, “You will pay a high price if it continues like that.” He was referring to the Iranian media reports that accused Erdogan of dealing with IS.

Boston University’s Irene Gendzier on Oil, Israel, and ‘Palestine’ Is the U.S.-Israel alliance really all about oil? Mara Schiffren

There is a certain class of academic for whom historical references to oil become a clarion call to rise up, denounce, and publish. A recent book talk proved the point. Rashid Khalidi, Columbia University’s Edward Said Professor of Modern Arab Studies, pronounced himself “lucky” to have previewed the work of the speaker, Irene Gendzier, professor emerita in the department of political science at Boston University:

She has . . . discovered things that those of us who thought we knew something about Palestine often found a revelation.

High praise from the former PLO spokesman for Gendzier’s new book, Dying to Forget, Oil, Power, Palestine and the Foundations of U.S. Policy in the Middle East. A mix of students, colleagues, friends of the author, and the public totaling about forty-five squeezed into a tight space on the second floor of a bookstore near Columbia.

Gendzier began by lamenting the recent ISIS attack on Paris, only to pivot to the upheaval currently overwhelming the Middle East:

[W]hat about all the other events taking place? What about Beirut? What about Yemen? What about Iraq? What about Syria? Why are we selective? The selectivity of the mourning comes with something more. . . . A kind of indifference about . . . “the deaths of others.”. . . [T]he terrible despair that comes from those that are permanently uprooted and displaced, and exist nowhere as a result of wars. We seem not to think about them.

Carson Demands CAIR Probe Islamist front group claims innocence. Matthew Vadum

GOP presidential candidate Ben Carson is demanding the federal government investigate the links that the notorious Council on American-Islamic Relations has to Islamic terrorism.

“The Department of State should designate the Muslim Brotherhood and other organizations that propagate or support Islamic terrorism as terrorist organizations, and fully investigate the Council on American-Islamic Relations as an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood and a supporter of terrorism,” Carson wrote in a policy paper in which he also called for a formal declaration of war against Islamic State (a.k.a. ISIS, ISIL, and Daesh).

Although political correctness prevents Democrats and many Republicans from admitting it, it is already well established that CAIR has ties to terrorism.

CAIR, which masquerades as America’s largest Muslim civil rights group, is an outpost of international jihadism. It is an enemy propaganda organization whose longstanding ties to the terrorist underworld have been exhaustively documented at DiscoverTheNetworks and elsewhere. CAIR aims to influence America’s domestic and foreign policies. CAIR wants to make America safe for Sharia law by bullying Americans into not questioning Islam, a religion-centered ideology that has been generating a body count for 1,400 years.

Welcome to Hamas West, aka Connecticut College When twisted Islamist ideas and lethal Jew-Hatred are protected in the name of diversity. Phyllis Chesler

The Connecticut College administrators have finally put it in writing.

And they did so on the last day of the semester before the winter break when they knew that students would be leaving or already gone.

Based on what they wrote, these administrators would welcome a professor who teaches that the earth is flat. One can only wonder if they would also welcome Darwin’s discoveries about evolution—or might they view evolution as Darwin’s own opinion to which he has every right unless it offends a person of color who might become violent, in which case, Darwin’s ideas may be taught as long as Creationism is given equal time.

The American campus now welcomes all expressions, Big Lies, lethal narratives, speech that incites people to violence, junk science, ideas that are false and that endanger their own students—all are welcome.

Here is the statement just issued by Connecticut College administrators. I have never read a more intellectually vacuous statement—but the good news is this: they have opened the door to the truth. I can only hope and pray that organizations begin to tell the truth via posters on every campus from coast to coast. Here is your permission:

Republicans Take a Stand against the PC Jihad at the Terror Debate “Political correctness is killing people.” Daniel Greenfield

The Republican debate may have been taking place in Vegas, but over it hung the shadows of the killings in San Bernardino. And many of the Republican candidates stepped up vowing a tougher fight against the Islamic State and other foreign enemies of the United States, including Russia and North Korea.

There were divisions over many of the details, but there was also a consensus that the war had to be won, the military had to be rebuilt and that the truth about terrorism had to be told.

“The war that we are fighting now against radical Islamist jihadists is one that we must win. Our very existence is dependent upon that,” Ben Carson said, after calling for a moment of silence for the victims of the San Bernardino Islamic terrorist attack.

Throughout the debate, Carson made political correctness into his target. America was a patient, he warned, who “would not be cured by political correctness.” He urged us to “get rid of all this PC stuff” and argued that we must do the right thing without worried about being labeled “Islamophobic”.