RUTHFULLY YOURS

There was an interesting announcement on Wednesday for Ben Rhodes, formerly the Obama White House deputy national security adviser. Rhodes, you may recall, caught some flack at the end of Obama’s presidency for admitting to the New York Times that he was manipulating the media in his efforts to sell the Iran Deal: “We created an echo chamber,” [Rhodes] admitted, when I asked him to explain the onslaught of freshly minted experts cheerleading for the deal. “They were saying things that validated what we had given them to say.”

On Wednesday it was announced that Rhodes is joining the board of directors of the Ploughshares Fund:

If you know anything about the Ploughshares Fund, and their role in selling the Iran Deal, having Rhodes on their board is a good fit:

In March 2015, Joe Cirincione, president of a foundation called the Ploughshares Fund, was interviewed on NPR’s All Things Considered about the impending nuclear deal with Iran. “President Obama’s political opponents try to block everything he does,” he said. “But I think the center of the American security establishment is solidly behind the deal as it’s been outlined.” The interview was headlined on NPR’s website, “Nuclear Experts Remain Optimistic About Iranian Negotiations.”

Now that the Iranian deal has been finalized, so many discomfiting facts about the campaign to push it through a reluctant Congress have emerged that it’s difficult to keep track of them all. The latest revelations, however, are especially startling. On May 20, the Associated Press reported that Cirincione’s Ploughshares Fund apparently bought and paid for this favorable NPR coverage, giving the news outlet $100,000 last year and $700,000 in grants over a decade. Ploughshares also gave money to the Center for Public Integrity, which supports the influential nonprofit news outlet ProPublica, along with left-leaning publications such as Mother Jones and the Nation to beef-up their Iran coverage.

Every year in the United States, more than 600,000 prisoners wind up released from state and federal correctional institutions. According to the Justice Department, 67 percent of these ex-offenders get arrested within three years for committing a new crime. The federal government has sought for decades to solve the problem of recidivism by funding programs intended to lead ex-offenders to employment—a key factor in avoiding a return to crime—and analyzing their effectiveness. During 1971–74, for example, the Living Insurance for Ex-Prisoners (LIFE) initiative gave ex-offenders in the Baltimore area weekly income supports and help in finding jobs. The Job Training and Partnership Act of 1982 tried “vocational exploration” and “job shadowing.”

In 1994, Opportunity to Succeed provided job-placement assistance for “criminally involved individuals with substance abuse problems” in Kansas City, New York, Oakland, St. Louis, and Tampa. In the late 1990s, the Job Corps began providing “vocational and educational preparation coupled with job placement services.” Yet studies have shown little success for these projects in getting former offenders into long-term employment—and keeping them out of jail. “The accumulation of evidence during the past half-century indicates that ex-offender job placement programs are not effective in reducing recidivism,” wrote Marilyn Moses of the National Institute of Justice, the in-house think tank for the Justice Department, in a 2012 review of eight federally funded programs of this kind.

Government efforts in this area may have fared so poorly because it’s “not the government’s problem to fix,” as Brandon Chrostowski, a 36-year-old chef, puts it. “Since the beginning of time, it has been the people who move society.” In 2007, Chrostowski—who formerly worked in some of the world’s finest restaurants, including Charlie Trotter’s in Chicago and Le Cirque in New York City—founded the EDWINS (for “education wins,” Chrostowski has said) Leadership and Restaurant Institute in Cleveland to lead ex-prisoners into the culinary trades. A combination training course, restaurant, dormitory, and job-placement enterprise, EDWINS is doing what those federally funded initiatives have failed to do—reliably place the graduates of its six-month program into jobs, many for the first time in their lives. EDWINS operates its own dormitory for participants and some alumni; its curriculum includes a required seminar on French wines. Some 73 percent of its 150 “graduates” have found and kept jobs in one of the 60 Cleveland restaurants eager to hire those trained in the institute’s eponymous four-star French restaurant. EDWINS’s recidivism rate: 1.3 percent.

Columnist for National Review Andrew McCarthy spoke with Chris Buskirk and Seth Leibsohn about unpeeling all the layers of the ongoing story of the level of involvement of the Obama Administration in surveillance over former candidate and now President Donald Trump’s phone. They all discussed the Steele dossier, Nunes Memo, Grassley memo, and there is even a Gerald Ford joke worked into the mix. Listen to the podcast and read the transcript only at American Greatness.

Chris Buskirk: I am Chris Buskirk. He is Seth Leibsohn. Welcome back to The Seth and Chris Show. We’re joined by Andrew C. McCarthy. He is a columnist at National Review. He is a former federal prosecutor and he is the beneficiary of what I like to call the Andrew C. McCarthy Full Employment Act, which was one of the outgrowths of the Obama campaign and the Clinton campaign for President.

Andy, they’re never going to let you sleep as you unpeel the onion of the story of corruption during the final year of the Obama Administration, are they?

Andrew McCarthy: Boy, Chris, I will tell you, I have never, I’ve never seen a story like this that absolutely does not have a news cycle, maybe. I was a prosecutor still during the days of the Clinton, Lewinsky scandal, so maybe there was a story that maybe had a rhythm like this for a time but I’ve never seen anything quite like this. It’s amazing.

The bipartisan agreement to increase the Pentagon’s budget by $81 billion lets the U.S defense establishment fatten current programs and continue to do business as usual while avoiding questions about how to win wars. Such disconnection between ends and means puts bureaucratic interests over strategic success in war. Increasing the budget should be conditioned upon making sure that each increase actually contributes to victory in any theater of operations where the U.S is committed. And this means evaluating which missions—and in what ways—the dysfunctional parts of fiscal year 2019’s $678 billion should be reallocated

It would be difficult to argue that today’s budget does not contain at least $81 billion in waste. A few examples.

Since 2001, the U.S government has spent $2 trillion to $4 trillion—depending on whose estimates you believe—waging the “War on Terror.” The fight has been less than a shining success and, as currently conceived, is supposed go on forever. Why continue this hemorrhage of blood and treasure? Why not aim at ending it? What would it take to do that?

The Afghan war alone this year will cost at least $45.1 billion. Our military operations have no strategic objective, and no strategy for reaching any objective. Even continuing to prop up an unnatural, dysfunctional, Afghan central government seems less feasible by the day. America won’t be in Afghanistan forever. Figure out now how to leave advantageously.

Development of the F-35 fighter plane has cost at least $400 billion. The Pentagon says it needs another $1 billion to finish the plane’s development, and each fighter will cost $100 million. What does that contribute to prevailing in East Asia or anywhere else?

China’s J-20, roughly on the same technical level as the F-35, costs one-fifth as much. Quantity has its own winning quality. To achieve this unhappy balance, the U.S. government gave up on the best fighter in the sky, the F-22. If you cannot show how the number of F-35s you are planning to build before they bankrupt America can prevail in what theater of operations, stop pouring money into them, and figure out a way actually to prevail without them.

The news that billionaire investor Peter Thiel is decamping to Los Angeles to escape the stifling political conformity of Silicon Valley won’t shatter the republic, but pillars of the Valley would be wise to heed its warning. One reason the maestros of tech are becoming political targets is because they are seen as partisan and disdainful of middle America.

“Silicon Valley is a one-party state,” Mr. Thiel said last month during a debate at Stanford University. “That’s when you get in trouble politically in our society, when you’re all in one side.” He’s right.

Once such Valley icons as Intel and Hewlett-Packard were seen as nonpolitical. But the titans of recent vintage—Google, Facebook and others—are rightly seen as thoroughly allied with the political and cultural left. Google’s purging of conservative James Damore was something of a watershed of public recognition of this reality, and a declaration by a Facebook board member like Mr. Thiel is further affirmation of this bias.

Americans who once thought of Silicon Valley as a jewel of U.S. innovation are likely to turn against these companies if they see them as relentless political enemies. Mr. Thiel is giving his tech friends good advice.

Add 19-year-old Nikolas Cruz to the list of disturbed young men who have committed mass murder against other young men and women in their communities. A partial list of these awful incidents includes Chris Harper-Mercer at Oregon’s Umpqua Community College; Adam Lanza at Sandy Hook school; James Holmes in Aurora, Colo.; Jared Lee Loughner in Tucson; and Cho Seung-Hui, who killed 32 people at Virginia Tech in 2007.

All these events have two things in common: guns and mental illness. From that fact flows the demand, every time, that we “do something.” Saying it, however, is not the same as doing something that would in fact mitigate this recurrent carnage. Doing something in our system inevitably means putting in motion an array of actors toward this goal—elected or appointed public officials, the police, the medical community and not least parents.

Guns first. When a Parkland happens, the liberal half of America’s politics puts forth the same two-word solution: gun control. There is a simple causality to this argument—fewer guns, fewer murders. Always left out is evidence it would work.

Gun-control laws—for example, to regulate bump stocks, AR-15s or ammunition magazines—foundered because advocates have never offered credible evidence they would deter mass shootings. Because gun proponents believe, not without reason, that the left’s ultimate goal is confiscation, the political prospects for a gun control solution have been and will remain about zero.

The selection of the artists painting the Obamas’ new portraits commissioned for the Smithsonian revealed much more than two pieces of “art.”

One would surely think that the chosen artists of the former president and first lady of the United States would have been carefully vetted – for quality of work, appropriateness of artistic style for the venue, and reputation in the community.

Barack Obama’s selection of Kehinde Wiley for his portrait is proving to be more atrocious than the painting itself.

The major media outlets, though, such as CNBC, were quick to observe a momentous occasion, breathlessly reporting that “The Obamas made history not only as the country’s first African-American presidential couple featured in the gallery but also for selecting the first African-American painters to receive a presidential portrait commission from the museum.”

That same CNBC piece also recounted the history of Obama’s personal selection of Wiley, writing that Obama “thinks ‘it’s safe to say Kehinde and I bonded'” and “how much he and Wiley had in common.”

It was the painting itself, however, and not the artist, upon which my friends in the conservative Twittersphere focused at first. I couldn’t help offering my own opinion, sarcastically tweeting my suggested title: “Obama Manspreads in Sea of Poison Ivy.”