RUTHFULLY YOURS

Adam Andrzejewski is the Chairman of American Transparency, website: OpenTheBooks.com

The EPA Spends How Much On Office Furniture? Try $92 Million Over The Past Decade

Confronted with our data analysis and hard questions from the Washington Times, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) tries to justify $92 million in mostly upscale furniture costs during the past decade.

Data posted at OpenTheBooks.com shows that the Obama administration cut the number of EPA employees by nearly 2,000 positions from 17,359 to 15,492 over the past five years. But during this period, the EPA approved massive furniture spending sprees benefiting key employees.

Based on the EPA’s current workforce, the $92 million in furniture cost was equivalent to $6,000 in furniture allowance per staffer. Since President Obama took office, $3,000 per employee or $45 million went into furniture. That’s quite an office decorating bonus at a time when wage growth is stagnant for many American workers.

Lavish furniture is part of the EPA culture. For example, under George Bush, the EPA spent roughly the same amount on furniture per staffer. The $813 pencil drawer? It was purchased in 2007.

Last night on FOX News, Bill O’Reilly followed-up with an EPA spokesman who tried to justify the spending splurge by claiming that the old furniture just wouldn’t fit into the new office buildings. And, since the new leases were a lot less than the old rent – despite spending tens of millions of dollars on fine furnishings – the EPA actually saved taxpayers money.

President Obama’s continuing focus on removing Syria’s President Assad to secure America’s co-operation with Russia to destroy Islamic State – whilst President Putin has now independently commenced Russian air strikes in Syria – supposedly on Islamic State forces – exposes both leaders lack of credibility and political judgement.

Obama addressing the United Nations General Assembly on 28 September asserted:

“The United States is prepared to work with any nation, including Russia and Iran, to resolve the conflict. But we must recognize that there cannot be, after so much bloodshed, so much carnage, a return to the pre-war status quo…

… Yes, realism dictates that compromise will be required to end the fighting and ultimately stamp out ISIL. But realism also requires a managed transition away from Assad and to a new leader, and an inclusive government that recognizes there must be an end to this chaos so that the Syrian people can begin to rebuild.”

Obama’s acceptance of Russia and Iran as acceptable partners – but not Syria – makes no sense. Russia and Iran have propped up Assad’s hold on power in Syria for the last five years enabling the bloodshed and carnage in Syria to continue unabated.

Putin however argues for co-operation with Syria’s armed forces:

“We think it is an enormous mistake to refuse to cooperate with the Syrian government and its armed forces, who are valiantly fighting terrorism face to face. We should finally acknowledge that no one but President Assad’s armed forces and Kurds militias are truly fighting the Islamic State and other terrorist organizations in Syria.”

The sound you’d be hearing this morning if you live in the devastated city of Homs in Syria, would be Russian jets doing bombing runs against your neighbors rebelling against dictator Bashar al-Assad.

And not just in Homs. The roar of those Russian jets is being heard around the world; it’s the sound of Vladimir Putin becoming the new alpha male and power broker of the Middle East.

What I dubbed in a recent NR article the Pax Putinica is rapidly taking shape. Just as the earlier Pax Americana was aimed at containing the Soviet Union, so Putin’s new world order is aimed at smashing the U.S.’s influence as a superpower, first in Europe and now in the eastern Mediterranean.

Our president, meanwhile, is letting it all happen. If Vladimir Putin is the dominant alpha male in the new international pecking order, Barack Obama has emerged as his highly submissive partner.

There are various reasons why we are being subjected to the humiliating spectacle of an American president, so-called leader of the free world, rolling over on the mat at Putin’s feet.

Of course, there have been signs for years that Obama is prone to submitting to males who act dominantly in his presence. Who can forget his frozen performance with Mitt Romney in the first presidential debate in 2012, where Romney ruled the stage while Obama seemed to shrink away (Romney then threw away his alpha-male advantage in the next debate). We’ve seen it in his interactions with China’s president Xi Jinping; his strange bowing and scraping with the Saudi king; and his various meetings with Putin, including the last at the United Nations on Monday where a tight-lipped Obama could barely bring himself to look at the Russian president while Putin looked cool and confident—as well as he should.

Codename: Liberal New York City honors a monster.
New York’s city council has taken it upon itself to posthumously honor Ethel Rosenberg, a Soviet spy who helped, in her modest way, the worldwide Communist enterprise to murder some 100 million people.

Manhattan Borough President Gale Brewer was joined by three city-council members earlier this week in issuing proclamations honoring Rosenberg for “demonstrating great bravery.” They also affirmed their belief — in spite of heavy evidence to the contrary — that she was wrongfully executed for her role in the Soviet spy ring dedicated to stealing information about the U.S. atomic-bomb program in order to give Stalin et al. another weapon in their battery of terror.

Daniel Dromm, who for his sins is a Democrat representing Queens on the city council, said: “A lot of hysteria was created around anti-Communism and how we had to defend our country, and these two” — note that two — people were traitors, and we rushed to judgment and they were executed.”

There is practically no one left defending the innocence of Julius Rosenberg — even his children have admitted that he was a traitor and a spy. The only people who doubt the guilt of his wife, Ethel, are those with a very strong ideological resistance to the facts of the case. Among other things, we have the word of Nikita Khrushchev, who writes in his memoirs of the help the Rosenbergs, plural, provided in the Soviet nuclear-weapons program; we have the communications of the Soviet spymaster to whom they answered, who in his missives to Moscow describes Ethel as an operative; we have the Venona papers, the declassified Soviet archives in which that same handler, Aleksandr Feklisov, writes of Ethel’s role in recommending new espionage recruits, etc. Yes, there are instances of conflicting testimony in the case, as there are in every mugging, and Ethel’s brother, who had originally omitted any mention of his sister’s role in the spy ring, changed his testimony when his wife told a different story. None of this is enough — not nearly — to outweigh the plain archival evidence in Soviet records.

It would seem to go without saying, but: Before accusing myriad individuals and organizations of defrauding the American people, it’s advisable to make sure you are not currently doing the same.

With that in mind, meet Jagadish Shukla, professor of climate dynamics at George Mason University. On September 1, Dr. Shukla and 19 other climate scientists sent a letter to President Obama, Attorney General Loretta Lynch, and White House Office of Science and Technology policy director John Holdren calling for “a RICO investigation of corporations and other organizations that have knowingly deceived the American people about the risks of climate change,” a (criminally irresponsible) tactic initially proposed by Rhode Island senator Sheldon Whitehouse in a Washington Post op-ed in May. The letter could be found on the website of the Institute of Global Environment and Society (IGES) — the “non-profit, tax-exempt research institute” founded and headed by Dr. Shukla.

​And then it couldn’t. In late September, the “RICO20” letter vanished from the IGES website; in its place is a message explaining that “the letter was inadvertently posted on this web site [and] has been removed.” (It is still visible here.)

Donald Trump’s call for a wall along the whole 2,000-mile border with Mexico has gotten a lot of immigration hawks excited. I understand the emotional appeal of his proposal, but it addresses what is actually the least serious vulnerability in our immigration system.

Border infiltrators were indeed the main type of illegal immigrants for a long time. Estimates dating from the 1990s were that about 60 percent of the illegal population had jumped the border.

But since then our effort at the border really has improved. While the number of border agents and the miles and type of fencing are all still inadequate, not all the money we’ve spent there over the past two decades has been wasted. Border crossings really are way down. We’re much more able than we were before to patrol the border effectively, though we have an administration in Washington that often chooses not to do so, as we’ve seen with the ongoing surge of Central American teenagers and families into South Texas.

But even if we were to build a wall, and elect a president interested in using it to protect America’s sovereignty, we’d be missing most of the problem — because the majority of new illegal aliens are actually visa overstayers.

We all have our own American Dreams. Some of us aspire to be chief executive officers or the owners of our own small businesses. Others aspire to be talented teachers or skilled engineers. No matter the dream, we all want success, and we all want to be able to provide for ourselves and our families. We work hard so we can live comfortably, safely, and securely. In the 20th century, having a college degree usually guaranteed this outcome. If you graduated from a traditional four-year university, you could attain a well-paying job and eventually start a family.

Today, we have this same dream, but the global economy has vastly changed. Thanks to innovative ideas and new advancements in technology, 21st-century jobs require more technical skills and training than ever before. Having a college degree no longer guarantees that you will be competitive in the job market. Too often, students struggle to find employment after graduation and face massive student-loan debt. In America today, college graduates have more than $1 trillion in combined student loans, and that number only continues to climb.

The goal of public policy must be to ensure not only that an abundance of jobs are available for our people, but also that our people are equipped with the skills needed to attain those jobs. We can start by supporting the many innovative education approaches that have sprung up in recent decades, including technical schools, online colleges, and other alternative institutions. They help people get the advanced training and skills they need with more flexibility, lower costs, and less debt than most traditional colleges and universities.

As any month ends, I am always amazed as to how much news gets packed into a mere thirty or thirty-one days. September was no exception. Flash floods in Utah killed nineteen and fires in California destroyed 1000 homes. The refugee crisis in Europe worsened.and Russia sent troops and equipment to Syria. The Pope came to the Americas, first to Cuba and then to the United States. John Boehner announced his intent to resign his seat in Congress and as Speaker of the House. The month saw both Rick Perry and Scott Walker drop out of the Republican race for President, and the e-mail hole Hillary Clinton has dug became deeper.

September 11th marked the fourteenth anniversary of the Islamic terrorist attack on the United States. In our politically correct world, fear of triggering unhappy feelings in others, including our avowed enemies, drives out common sense. It is forgotten that more people were killed that day than sailors at Pearl Harbor or American soldiers on D-Day. The war against Islamic terrorism persists, as we know from ISIS, Al Qaeda, Boko Haram, Hamas, Hezbollah and the Iranian-fueled Quds Force, to name only a few. Yet Mr. Obama refuses to put the modifier “Islamic” before the noun “terrorism.” Perhaps for that reason, the world has become more dangerous since he became President. According to the International Institute for Strategic Studies, fatalities resulting from armed conflict increased by a factor of four since 2010, with the vast majority of the deaths being caused by Islamic groups.

“Anti-Immigrant bigotry” and lack of jobs are causing the rise of ISIS?

President Barack Obama continued his feckless foreign policy charade at the United Nations on September 29th before returning to Washington. He chaired what was billed as “The Leaders’ Summit on Countering ISIL and Violent Extremism,” and he met with Cuban President Raul Castro.

At the summit, Obama claimed major progress in rolling back the Islamic State (or ISIL, as he refers to the jihadist caliphate occupying large portions of Syria and Iraq). By now, the president is certainly aware of the reported complaint, backed by 52 defense analysts, to the Pentagon’s inspector general, which alleged that intelligence reports on the war against the Islamic State were doctored in order to support the Obama administration’s claims that the fighting was going well. Some of these doctored reports were reportedly used to brief the president and other high government officials, telling them what they wanted to hear. The defense analysts, who are career professionals, have painted a far more pessimistic picture of the fight so far than the Obama administration wants the public to believe. Nevertheless, while Obama acknowledged at the summit that the Islamic State fighters are “resilient” and that there will be some setbacks along with successes, he continued the false narrative that the Islamic State is in retreat. The fact is that Russian President Vladimir Putin is taking advantage of Obama’s lack of leadership in the fight against ISIL. Putin is taking the lead himself, providing direct military support to the Syrian regime and building his own coalition including Iraq and Iran.

A case study on how the media and duplicitous politicians hide the truth from the public.

As ISIS, the Nusra Front (an al Qaeda affiliate operating in Syria) and other terror organizations continue spreading death and violence in Syria, increasing numbers of Syrians are literally running for their lives.

Europe has witnessed a tsunami of refugees and Secretary of State John Kerry has promised to increase the number of refugees that the United States will admit.

Communities that have already been accepting refugees, and not just from Syria, are questioning the wisdom of this effort and the way that refugees are being vetted. One such community is to be found in Spartanburg, South Carolina.

It is important to note that the member of the House of Representatives who represents Spartanburg in Congress is none other than Representative Trey Gowdy who also chairs the House Subcommittee on Immigration. He has also voiced serious concerns about the way that the refugee program is being administered and has been unhappy with the lack of information being provided — even to him as the chairman of the subcommittee that is constitutionally mandated to provide oversight over our entire immigration system. He has been quoted as describing responses to his questions about the resettlement of refugees in Spartanburg as being “sorely inadequate.”

On June 4, 2015 the local newspaper, Spartanburg Herald Tribune (GoUpstate.com) published a report, “First refugees arrive in Spartanburg despite questions raised by Gowdy.”

As questions continued to go unanswered, I was invited to be the keynote speaker at a public forum in Spartanburg, South Carolina on the issue of the vetting process being used to screen refugees on September 20, 2015.

Among those in attendance at the town hall meeting were newspaper reporters, including one from the New York Times, Richard Fausset.