RUTHFULLY YOURS

U.S. Defense Secretary Ash Carter used his personal email account for government business, the Pentagon acknowledged late Wednesday, putting him among a group of officials that includes former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton who have drawn critical scrutiny for how they have handled official communications.

The disclosure of Mr. Carter’s private email use, which a top aide said he has discontinued, has threatened to overshadow a sensitive overseas mission in which the Defense secretary is visiting key U.S. allies to secure greater commitments in the international fight against Islamic State extremist group. He has visited Iraq and Turkey this week.

Mr. Carter, confirmed by the Senate in February as President Barack Obama’s fourth Defense secretary, occasionally used his personal email account for work-related matters, but concluded doing so was a “mistake,” and discontinued that practice, said a statement by the Pentagon press secretary, Peter Cook.

A proposal to admit 10,000 Syrian refugees to the United States has ignited a bitter debate in Washington, but more than 10 times that number of people from the embattled country have quietly come to America since 2012, according to figures obtained by FoxNews.com.

Some 102,313 Syrians were granted admission to the U.S. as legal permanent residents or through programs including work, study and tourist visas from 2012 through August of this year, a period which roughly coincides with the devastating civil war that still engulfs the Middle Eastern country. Experts say any fears that terrorists might infiltrate the proposed wave of refugees from United Nations-run camps should be dwarfed by the potential danger already here.

“The sheer number of people arriving on all kinds of visas and with green cards, and possibly U.S. citizenship, makes it impossible for our counterterrorism authorities to keep track of them all, much less prevent them from carrying out attacks or belatedly try to deport them,” said Jessica Vaughan of the Center for Immigration Studies.

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.

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:

The movement to raise the federal minimum wage has become ever more ambitious. In 2013 proponents deemed $9 an hour acceptable; today the demand is for $15.

Economists point to a crucial question: Will a higher minimum wage reduce the number of jobs for the country’s least skilled workers? President Obama says “there is no solid evidence that a higher minimum wage costs jobs.” On the contrary, a full and fair reading of the evidence shows the opposite. Raising the minimum wage will cost jobs, particularly those held by the least-skilled.

Economists have written scores of papers on the topic dating back 100 years, and the vast majority of these studies point to job losses for the least-skilled. They are based on fundamental economic reasoning—that when you raise the price of something, in this case labor, less of it will be demanded, or in this case hired.

Among the many studies supporting this conclusion is one completed earlier this year by Texas A&M’s Jonathan Meer and MIT’s Jeremy West, which reaffirmed that “the minimum wage reduces job growth over a period of several years” and that “industries that tend to have a higher concentration of low-wage jobs show more deleterious effects on job growth from higher minimum wages.”

The broader research confirms this. An extensive survey of decades of minimum-wage research, published by William Wascher of the Federal Reserve Board and me in a 2008 book titled “Minimum Wages,” generally found a 1% or 2% reduction for teenage or very low-skill employment for each 10% minimum-wage increase.

San Bernardino mass-murderer Tashfeen Malik wrote social-media posts that endorsed jihad and expressed disdain for America. Yet, that did not cause U.S. immigration agents to question her admission into our country, much less deny it. In fact, our government consciously avoided learning about Malik’s Islamist rants.

Commentators stunned by this dereliction are attributing it to “secret” guidance issued by the Department of Homeland Security. In truth, there is nothing secret about it. The instruction to refrain from scrutinizing social-media commentary, a precious source of intelligence, is a straightforward application of what passes for the official Obama administration “anti”-terrorism strategy, known as “Countering Violent Extremism.”

Malik, a native Pakistani, who immigrated to the United States in July after living for a time in Saudi Arabia, joined her husband, Syed Rizwan Farook, in slaying 14 people in San Bernardino, Calif., earlier this month. The jihad’s Bonnie and Clyde were finally killed in a gun battle with police.

Encumbered with a fossilized illiberal ideology, progressives must rely on what Robert Conquest called “thought-blockers”––empty words and phrases that comfort and rouse the party faithful, and camouflage the lack of coherent argument, consistent principles, and empirical evidence. More important, these empty words and phrases that lie at the heart of progressivism are the tools for increasing the progressives’ political power and influence, at the expense of everybody else’s freedom.

Here’s a quick catalogue of a handful of such verbal evasions: “Imperialism,” “colonialism,” “racism,” “black lives matter,” “sexism,” “war on women,” “income inequality,” “one percent,” “fair share,” “Islamophobia,” “nothing to do with Islam,” “climate change consensus,” “microagressions,” and “diversity.” Most lack any specific content or connection to historical evidence, and are devoid of consistent principle. They are ideological spells either chanted by the dim-witted or manipulated by the clever who lust for power and influence.

Take “diversity,” an important pseudo-concept that has lain at the heart of race-based college admissions and preferences since the 1978 Bakke vs. University of California Supreme Court case. In that decision, Justice Lewis Powell asserted that an undefined “diversity” could allow taking account of race in college admissions, for it was a “compelling state interest” that justified an exception to Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act’s ban on discrimination by race. In 2003, in Grutter vs. Bollinger the Supreme Court reaffirmed the “compelling state interest” of diversity since it provided, as Justice Sandra Day O’Conner argued, “the educational benefits that flow from a diverse student body.”