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Feds shelling out billions to public relations firms:Getty Images By Megan R. Wilson

Posted By on December 9th, 2015

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.

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OPEN YOUR EYES AND OPEN THE BOOKS ON FEDERAL SPENDING

Posted By on December 9th, 2015

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.

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Judicial Watch: New Benghazi Email Shows DOD Offered State Department “Forces that Could Move to Benghazi” Immediately – Specifics Blacked Out in New Document

Posted By on December 9th, 2015

“They are spinning up as we speak.” U.S. Department of Defense Chief of Staff Jeremy Bash Tuesday, September 11, 2012, 7:19 PM

(Washington, DC) – Judicial Watch today released a new Benghazi email from then-Department of Defense Chief of Staff Jeremy Bash to State Department leadership immediately offering “forces that could move to Benghazi” during the terrorist attack on the U.S. Special Mission Compound in Benghazi, Libya on September 11, 2012. In an email sent to top Department of State officials, at 7:19 p.m. ET, only hours after the attack had begun, Bash says, “we have identified the forces that could move to Benghazi. They are spinning up as we speak.” The Obama administration redacted the details of the military forces available, oddly citing a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) exemption that allows the withholding of “deliberative process” information.

Bash’s email seems to directly contradict testimony given by then-Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta before the Senate Armed Services Committee in February 2013. Defending the Obama administration’s lack of military response to the nearly six-hour-long attack on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi, Panetta claimed that “time, distance, the lack of an adequate warning, events that moved very quickly on the ground prevented a more immediate response.”

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The President As Pangloss{ Walter Russell Mead

Posted By on December 9th, 2015

Most of the public is no longer listening to President Obama on national security. He needs a better strategy for describing and defending his policies to the American people.

With public approval of his anti-ISIS efforts at 33 percent, President Obama took to the airwaves last night to bolster support for his counterterrorism strategy. Judging by the reaction in the national press, the speech fell flat. We shall see what the polls say, but it seems safe at this point to rule out a dramatic surge in the President’s support as a grateful nation responds to his dramatic appeal. A president once compared to Lincoln as an orator and Eisenhower as a strategist by his adoring supporters no longer seems credible or even interesting on the terror threat that many voters now think is the biggest concern facing the nation.
Most of the public is no longer listening to President Obama on this topic; it is waiting for 2017 and the decisive repudiation of a global strategy that many of the President’s closest advisors and senior aides believe has failed. One thinks of the famous Boston Globe headline about a Jimmy Carter speech, added by a printer as a placeholder that somehow survived to the first morning edition: “More Mush From the Wimp.” Fairly or not, that is what more and more Americans hear when Obama speaks about terror.The political consequences of the perceived failure of Obama’s national security approach are already on display. Secretary Clinton is running against the foreign policy of the man she served for four years

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Arabs, the Holocaust, and Peace with Israel : Andrew Harrod

Posted By on December 9th, 2015

Could the Holocaust have a humanizing effect upon Arabs – Palestinians in particular – and aid Israel in its quest to establish peaceful regional relations? Washington Institute for Near East Policy experts Mohammed S. Dajani and Robert Satloff sure think so, as indicated by their vision of Arab-Israeli peace rising from the Auschwitz ashes.

Dajani, a Palestinian sociologist and peace activist, and Satloff, a Jewish-American historian, recently spoke about the unlikely topic that brought Arabs and Jews together: the Nazi genocide and its legacy. Dajani, who was once a radical nationalist, related hispersonal journey “out of the cave of ignorance” from the taboo- and hate-filled Palestinian society. His Israeli-Palestinian peacemaking quest as a former professor at Jerusalem’s Al Quds University prompted him to lead a Palestinian study tour of Auschwitz as an act of Israeli-Palestinian historical reflection.

While the Arab and wider Muslim world is rife with Holocaust denial, Arab historical memory emphasizes Israel’s 1948 creation as a catastrophe (“Nakba” in Arabic) for Palestinians. Dajani rejected the common Palestinian comparison between the Holocaust – a singular act of genocide – and this Palestinian suffering. As he and Satloff wrote in aMarch 2011 editorial, Israeli-Palestinian would benefit from a rejection of the “facile equation that ‘the Jews have the Holocaust and the Palestinians have the Nakba.’”

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It’s still Iran, stupid: Ruthie Blum

Posted By on December 9th, 2015

According to Israeli defense officials, it’s only a matter of time before Islamic State terrorists perpetrate a major attack on the Jewish state.

You don’t have to be a Hezbollah or Hamas rocket scientist to have figured this out. ISIS has been increasing the frequency of its warnings to Israel on YouTube. And by now, anyone who doesn’t take such threats seriously is an idiot, a left-wing ideologue or the president of the United States.

This is not to say that Israel needs further proof that Islamists mean business when it comes to executing plans or innocent people. Nor do we Israelis really care what the jihadis in our midst or along our borders are called. “Daesh” is just another group to which terrorists out for our blood attach themselves. The fact that rivalries exist among them only matters where cutting their funding or other self-defense strategies are concerned.

But the rest of the world likes to categorize terrorists as “moderates” or “extremists,” and rank panic levels accordingly. The current bogey man happens to be ISIS, not only due to its flamboyant videos of beheadings and other atrocities, but because it took responsibility for the Paris, Mali and San Bernardino massacres.

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Benjamin Weingarten: Did Inequality Cause ISIS? Thomas Piketty thinks so.

Posted By on December 9th, 2015

Last year’s release of Capital in the Twenty-First Century catapulted Thomas Piketty to international stardom. In the 700-page tome, the French economist argued that inequality is a grave social evil and capitalism is the root of all inequality. Now he’s added a spurious spin to his thesis: inequality is responsible for the rise of ISIS. As the Washington Post reports, Piketty asserts in a recent Le Monde column that “Inequality is a major driver of Middle Eastern terrorism, including the Islamic State attacks on Paris earlier this month—and Western nations have themselves largely to blame for that inequality.” Piketty’s supposedly revelatory argument is symptomatic of the materialist mindset that transfixes the Western elite and thus leaves the West vulnerable to—and hapless against—the global jihad.

Piketty claims that Middle Eastern wealth, concentrated among several oil monarchies governing small populations in “semi-slavery,” has created conditions ripe for jihadism. In Piketty’s reading of history, the West is responsible for driving oil “to the emirs” through military interventions such as the first Gulf War, and then backing such petro-regimes “militarily and politically.” The Obama administration was derided earlier this year for promoting what critics called “jobs for jihadis” as a means of tackling the “root causes” of terrorism. But while poor economic conditions may typify Europe’s most fertile jihadist breeding grounds, poverty in itself isn’t the cause of jihadism. Throughout history, billions of people have lived in squalor without strapping on suicide bombs or taking up arms against “the infidel.” Wealthy Muslim regimes in Saudi Arabia have financed jihadist groups, and Osama bin Laden was born to a wealthy family.

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A Missed Warning? Scanner traffic indicates law enforcement may have investigated San Bernardino shooter Syed Farook a week before the attack.By Stephen F. Hayes

Posted By on December 9th, 2015

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.”

BOOKS Comments turned off

A Plan to Restore Free Speech on Campus By Stanley Kurtz

Posted By on December 8th, 2015

The slowly metastasizing assault on free speech that has played out on American college campuses since the 1960s has reached a crisis point. What’s needed is a concrete plan to restore liberty of thought and discussion to the American academy — a plan capable of focusing the support of sympathetic students, faculty, parents, alumni, administrators, trustees, and citizens, and their elected representatives. I offer here the outlines of such a program.

The greatest difficulty faced by those who support the ideal of intellectual freedom is locating levers for change on campuses where the greater part of the faculty and administrators have either abandoned classic liberal ideals or forsaken their defense. The actual mechanics of restoring freedom of speech are not mysterious. Campuses need to forthrightly identify liberty of thought and discussion as their central value, educate students in this principle, and energetically guard against its violation. But how can we restore freedom of speech when so many of those charged with its defense on campus have either turned against it or subordinated it to other ideals?

While it is true that a great many faculty members have rejected classic liberal values, other faculty — and especially many students — have not. To a considerable extent, a willful faction of students and allied faculty has succeeded in intimidating the larger number of students who continue to adhere to classic liberalism. Our goal must be to marshal support from the broader public for this weakened and wavering yet potentially powerful majority of students. We need a program that can simultaneously energize a movement of students on campus and marshal concrete support from the broader public.

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Petition Demands Adele Admit She’s Successful Only Because She’s White, and Insists She Give Away Her Money By Katherine Timpf

Posted By on December 8th, 2015

A petition addressed to Adele, President Obama, and Billboard on Change.org demands that the singer admit that she has “little talent” and is succeeding mainly because of her white privilege.

“Adele sold over 3.38 million copies of her album ‘25′ and the media is praising her as if Adele’s success has everything to do with talent,” reads the petition, written by Rhianna Jones.

“Rather, it’s her white privilege that has put her on top,” it declares.

The petitioners also “demand that Adele donates her money to African-American causes such as #Blacklivesmatter.”

It’s not clear why exactly the petition is also addressed to President Obama — perhaps Ms. Jones is outraged that the leader of the free world hasn’t pushed the less important issues like ISIS aside to deal with the more serious ones like a singer’s being white and successful at the same time. (I mean, would an executive order requiring Adele to admit she is only successful because she is white and give away her money to people who are not white in order to stay in the country really be too much to ask?)