RUTHFULLY YOURS

An Ohio man who prosecutors say was sympathetic to the Islamic State posted the names and addresses of 100 members of the military on social media, calling for them to be killed, according to a federal indictment issued on Tuesday.

A grand jury charged 25-year-old Terrence J. McNeil of Akron with three counts each of solicitation of a crime of violence and threatening military personnel.

Mike Tobin, a spokesman for the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Cleveland, said prosecutors are not aware of any attacks on the service members named.

Assistant U.S. Attorney General John Carlin said McNeil ‘solicited the murder of members of our military by disseminating violent rhetoric, circulating detailed U.S. military personnel information, and explicitly calling for the killing of American service members in their homes and communities.’

In Decline and Fall: Europe’s Slow-Motion Suicide, a 2007 book about the dysfunctions of the EU, I often emphasized the problems of Europe by contrasting it to the US. Our economy was more open and dynamic, with GDP growth higher, regulatory regime less onerous, unemployment lower, and ease of doing business greater. We had problems with entitlement spending and high taxes, but nothing like the EU drunken-sailor governments, or the regressive VAT tax that helps subsidize social welfare transfers. We had problems with immigration, but nothing like those caused by the dangerous mix of unassimilated Muslims with jihadist proselytizing. We still had a vigorous presence of faith in the public square. And despite the costs, mistakes, and setbacks in the Middle Eastern wars, our military and its prowess were feared, and respected; the US was the dominant and indispensible power in the region and beyond.

Yes, there were ominous signs––expanding entitlements, excessive deficit spending, internal opposition to vigorously waging the war against militant Islam; a culture, media, and schools dominated by an ideology of national self-loathing and guilt; and the incessant assault on public faith. But despite all that, in the 2004 election, at the height of the bloody insurgency in Iraq, George W. Bush defeated John Kerry–– a “European at heart,” as French intellectual Bernard-Henri Lévy called the French-speaking Senator––who like his party looked longingly at the EU model of distrust for national identity and penchant for technocratic rule. America clearly was not interested in following the EU paradigm.

And then came Barack Obama.

When Syed Rizwan Farook and his wife Tashfeen Malik murdered fourteen people and wounded twenty-one at a holiday party in San Bernardino, California, Farook’s family, having lawyered up, instructed its legal representatives to tell the world how shocked – shocked! – they were by the massacre. However, just as Captain Renault is handed his winnings immediately after telling Rick Blaine of his shock that gambling was going on in Rick’s Café Americain, so also in this case did the family’s shock seem increasingly less genuine the more that became known about them.

Initially, however, the lie was fed easily to a credulous mainstream media. One of the Farook family lawyers, David Chesley, immediately found the nearest microphone and declared: “None of the family members had any idea that this was going to take place. They were totally shocked.”

Even in stories that reported this, however, the story started to unravel. No sooner had the Associated Press quoted Chesley that it noted that he and another Farook family lawyer, Mohammad Abuershaid, said that “Farook’s mother lived with the couple but she stayed upstairs and didn’t notice they had stockpiled 12 pipe bombs and well over 4,500 rounds of ammunition.”

As half the world knows by now, Donald Trump has gone “Full Monty” on Muslim immigration, calling for a “total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States.”

That’s our Donald — never a master of understatement! (But he certainly knows how to make monkeys out of the media — kudos for that.)

Like most commentators, however, I don’t agree with him — I support the Constitution and its freedoms — but to deny we have a gigantic Muslim problem in this country and in the world is to be a troglodyte of epic proportions. Something has to be done, domestically and internationally, even if it’s not Donald’s “Full Monty.”

But since this is about immigration, let’s deal with the domestic side for a moment.

The source of the conundrum is not just Syrian refugees; it’s the entire Middle East. Almost all people visiting or immigrating from the area are potential jihadists, not to mention other Muslims across the world from Western Europe to Indonesia. This isn’t racial profiling — it’s reality. The husband and wife fanatics who wreaked havoc in San Bernardino did time in Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, both of which masquerade as allies. Despite what might seem like red flags in their backgrounds, the couple passed blithely into this country without incident.

WASHINGTON—The House overwhelmingly approved legislation Tuesday to limit certain travel privileges granted to citizens of 38 friendly foreign countries, the first step in what lawmakers expect will be a larger response to an evolving terrorist threat.

The terror attacks in San Bernardino, Calif., and Paris have prompted a new emphasis on security but left lawmakers struggling to determine the appropriate response. The strikes reach into so many different policy areas—travel, guns, technology, mental health, immigration and intelligence—that coming up with a comprehensive plan has been challenging.

Instead, a piece-by-piece approach appears to be emerging. The initial step was legislation to put some restrictions on the visa-waiver program, which allows travelers from the 38 mostly European and Asian nations to enter the U.S. without obtaining a visa. The measure would ban people from those nations who had traveled to places including Iraq or Syria since March 2011 without first getting a visa.

The federal government has spent more than $4 billion on public relations services since 2007, according to a watchdog group, with more than half of the money going to the world’s largest firms.

A review conducted by Open the Books found that there are now 3,092 public affairs professionals working in the government, an increase of 15 percent — or about 400 people — over the past seven years.

During that time, 139 federal agencies inked $2.02 billion in outside contracts with firms that perform public relations, polling, research and marketing consulting.
“We always applaud agencies who make information available,” Open the Books said in its report. “But … agencies are not charged with making that information interesting or newsworthy. Agencies certainly aren’t charged with using taxpayer funds to engage in thinly-veiled propaganda campaigns that are primarily designed to protect their budgets and hype outcomes.”

The $2 billion tally calculated by the watchdog group includes millions of dollars on international polling for the State Department and $57.7 million in marketing and advertising contracts from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) to promote the National Flood Insurance Program.

Federal agencies spend billions on self-promotion By Kellan Howell

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2015/dec/7/federal-government-agencies-spend-billions-on-self/

The federal government for years has been using Americans’ tax dollars to pay for its own PR through carefully coordinated marketing campaigns, to the tune of billions of dollars.

Over the past seven years, federal agencies have spent more than $4.3 billion on self-promotion and marketing, according to government contract data compiled from USASpending.gov in an oversight report by spending watchdog OpentheBooks.com.
Federal agencies spent $2.35 billion in salary and bonus payments to federal employees with the job title of “public affairs officer” and more than $2 billion on outside contractors for additional public relations projects, according to the report.

In fact, the U.S. government employs so many public affairs officers that it ranks as the second-largest public relations firm in the world in terms of the number of employees.

Although it is certainly important and necessary for federal agencies to engage in public relations in order to make information available to taxpayers and to understand the markets they serve, the report highlights cases in which the government’s marketing budget appears to border on propaganda and pandering.

Law enforcement officials in San Bernardino and Los Angeles may have investigated Syed Farook one week before the shooting on the community development center on December 2, 2015, that left 14 dead and 17 injured, according to a review of police communications immediately following the attacks.

Federal and local authorities have insisted that neither of the attackers had aroused suspicion before the assault earlier this month and that both Syed Farook and his wife, Tashfeen Malik, were unknown to law enforcement and US intelligence. But conversations between law enforcement officials in the hours after the shootings leave a different impression.

Farook is first identified by name at approximately 11:40am local time, just a half hour after the shooting began. The information came from a county worker, who noted that Farook had been acting nervous and left the holiday party twenty minutes before the shooting began.

In a subsequent exchange at approximately 12:08pm the dispatcher addresses an officer nicknamed “Trav” upon hearing “Syed Farook.” She says: “Reference that name, I believe one of the [garbled] was working that name up for something last week. I’ll have to check.”