RUTHFULLY YOURS

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) spent over $15 million on outside public relations consultants despite employing nearly 200 full-time in house PR workers.

A new report on EPA spending released by Open the Books, a nonprofit organization dedicated to transparency, found numerous examples of questionable expenditures within the agency.

Among them, the EPA spent over $15.1 million on outside public relations consultants between 2000 and 2014. The funding was on top of the $141.496 million in salaries and $1.5 million in bonuses on full-time public affairs officers the EPA has spent since 2007. As of 2012, the EPA employed 198 public affairs employees. The average EPA employee salary is $111,165.

“Everyone is under the impression that the EPA is spending money to ‘clean the environment.’ But, it turns out EPA is running a $160 million PR Machine, $715 million police agency, a near $1 billion employment agency for seniors, and a $1.2 billion in-house law firm,” said Adam Andrzejewski, the founder of Open the Books.

EPA’S $160 MILLION SPIN MACHINE
Last night, Special Report with Bret Baier showcased our OpenTheBooks Oversight Report – U.S. Environmental Agency. Why does a major federal agency have nearly 200 PR staff employees?

Recently, the New York Times exposed the EPA for PR excess which was covered last night on Special Report…

Using a Thunderclap social media product to generate nearly one million online “grassroots comments” on new regulations regarding the Clean Water Act. 90% of the comments were positive. But, the Anti-Lobbying Act prohibits the use of tax dollars to advocate for a public position.

Our story first broke on Monday at Washington Free Beacon by reporter Elizabeth Harrington – click here to read the article.

“The EPA wasting $160 million on public relations dwarfs our recent exposure of their high-end furniture purchases ($92 million), Nothing is emblematic of government excess like an army of highly compensated PR agents sitting in their easy chairs. It’s simply waste.” OpenTheBooks

The Obama Administration’s crusade against carbon returned to the Supreme Court on Wednesday, as the Justices heard an important federalism challenge to an energy scheme that usurps state powers to promote the green agenda. The oral arguments suggested they may be queueing up another judicial rebuke.

The culprit this time is the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, or FERC, which regulates most of the electric grid. In 2011 FERC ordered transmission operators to pay retail energy users to reduce their power consumption during peak periods, a program known as “demand response.” The idea is to send a price signal to encourage large consumers to use power when the most capacity is available—instead of, say, on a hot summer afternoon when everybody’s air conditioners are running.

In FERC v. Electric Power Supply Association, the problem is that Congress explicitly limited the commission’s mandate to the interstate power markets—i.e., to the wholesale power supply. Under a 2005 law, the “exclusive jurisdiction” of retail pricing and patterns of energy consumption belongs to the states.

How does Islam understand the concept of non-Muslims or “different” Muslims? Do Sunnis believe non-Sunni Muslims have rights equal to Sunnis? Is there one central authority that can decide today who speaks for all Muslims?

Sadly, the Muslim world is in total turmoil. We could discuss the traditional Muslim legal code regarding non-Muslims, but, given the political upheaval now going on in the Muslim world, none of the historic answers seem relevant.

Why is this so? Though we in the West tend to view Islam as a religion and understand it in that context, Islam has always had another side—the political side—that throughout Islamic history has often been the dominant factor in Islamic politics. This is true both when the Muslim world is stable, and most definitely so when that Muslim world is filled with instability, as it is today.

Those who know their place

The notion of an Islamic economy or of “Islamic economics,” is rife with fallacies. An Islamic economy is a contradiction in terms. Why?

As the term economy is understood to be a system of trade – a barter system, or laissez-faire, or a mixed economy with the freedom to trade and produce hampered, saddled and skewed by government controls and regulations – on the other hand, the notion of an Islamic economy or of “Islamic economics,” is rife with fallacies.

An Islamic economy is a contradiction in terms. Why?

Islam is a looter’s system of wealth seizure and expropriation. It produces nothing, it does not encourage the production of values to trade, and it is essentially anti-capitalist and anti-life. Overall, it is a system for the maintenance by force of a class of parasites. Islamic “economics” prescribes, as its essential and inherent goals, the sustained activity of wealth, social, and – need we remind anyone – sexual plunder. Its Economics in One Lesson is the Koran. Instead of a genuine economist such as Henry Hazlitt, Islam has as its primary “economist” the delusional, “voice-hearing” cave-dweller Mohammad.

Islam has been a looters’ system from the very beginning of the Islamic calendar, when Mohammad left Medina in 630 A.D. with his 10,000 converts/warriors and marched on Mecca, which he had fled eight years before because his “peaceful” proselytizing for his own moon-worshipping religion netted him few converts but many enemies. Or so the legend goes. Robert Spencer casts serious and well documented doubts on whether or not the Prophet of Plunder even existed in his excellent, eye-opening book, Did Muhammad Exist? An Inquiry into Islam’s Obscure Origins.

Campus groups press anti-Israel message with seemingly little money, but gain leverage with allies.

The arts district along Mamaroneck Avenue in downtown White Plains is something of a cultural hub in Westchester County. Special blue street signs — Arts Ave., they read — and colorful flags give the area the feel of a historic district, anchored by ArtsWestchester’s handsome brick headquarters.

There, on the fourth floor of 31 Mamaroneck Ave., is the office of a group that is far more interested in politics than arts. And controversial politics, at that.

Suite 403 houses the nonprofit group WESPAC Foundation, and its location in an arts-rich area belies its role as one of the key conduits in a mysterious network that helps to fuel the BDS (Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions) movement.

In recent days I suggested that things might have unfolded in a very different manner in Europe had the Jewish people been armed and better able to defend themselves.

Sometimes it is hard to find the right words to talk about the kind of evil that defies reason and destroys lives. We saw that evil on full display during the Holocaust perpetuated by the fanatical and tyrannical Nazi regime under Adolph Hitler. The lessons to be drawn from those darkest of days in world history are plentiful, and as relevant today as they were nearly 80 years ago.

In recent days I suggested that things might have unfolded in a very different manner in Europe had the Jewish people been armed and better able to defend themselves. What would have been the impact on Hitler’s war machine if his victims had had more access to guns? It is something that we will never know for sure.

What I do know however, beyond any shadow of a doubt, is that I never intended for my words to diminish the enormity of the tragedy or in any way to cause any pain for Holocaust survivors or their families.

Both those who perished and those who survived the Nazi camps deserve our deepest reverence, as do the partisan fighters who rose in armed opposition.

Reality-based demography
Top Israeli opposition figures — Isaac Herzog, Tzipi Livni and Yair Lapid — recently echoed the erroneous assumption, shared by the White House and State Department, that Arabs will eventually become a majority in the combined area of Judea and Samaria and pre-1967 Israel. Driven by demographic pessimism and fatalism — which has eroded Israel’s negotiation position — they urge a retreat from geography (the mountain ridges of Judea and Samaria) so as to secure demography.
They rely on Israel’s demographic establishment, which regurgitates the numbers of the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics without examination, ignores the dramatic transformation of Jewish and Arab demography, understates Jewish fertility, overstates Arab fertility, disregards the flawed practices of the PCBS, overlooks the burgeoning Arab net-emigration and Jewish net-immigration and discards the feasibility of significant waves of aliyah (Jewish immigration), which have occurred — in defiance of the demographic establishment — every two decades since the 1930s.

But this establishment has forgotten that it was built on providing guns to Jews.

Historical revisionism is what the left does best. American Jewish history in the last century is a revisionist history in which the heroes are the “establishment”. The truth lies buried in old papers and lost documents. And it’s a deeply compelling truth of how the left suppressed Jewish self-defense.

The Jewish Defense Association was the first time that uptown establishment German Jews and downtown Eastern Jewish immigrants came together. The JDA’s goal had little in common with the empty rubber chicken dinner agendas of what the establishment that grew out of it would become.

Instead the Jewish Defense Association’s mission was simple. Buy guns for Jews.

Its agenda, as reported by the New York Times was, “New massacres are preparing. Our people must be possessed of arms to defend themselves and their honor.”

The year was 1905. The slow bloody beginning of the Russian Revolution was underway. Much like the Syrian Civil War, brutal militias aligned with different factions from the left to the right would arise out of the violence. Like the Christians in Syria, the Jews were an isolated minority. Xenophobia allowed both Communists and Czarists to score populist points by massacring the Jews in violent pogroms.

The Jewish Defense Association responded with a call to arms. Its motto took a part of Hillel’s credo, “If I am not for myself, who will be for me.” Its membership encompassed the left and the right, Zionists and anti-Zionists, religious and secular Jews.

A march of 200,000 Jews to Union Square included 5,000 former Russian soldiers, the volunteer Zion Guards in blue uniforms carrying rifles and the young men of the Manhattan Rifles, begun in the Lower East Side’s Educational Alliance as the Alliance Cadets, which had been formed in imitation of the Jewish Lads Brigade, a group that had put thousands of Jewish boys in the UK through military training.

The final resolutions declared that, “Eternal vigilance is the price of the Jew’s life, and that we urge our people to take up arms against their assailants, and if need be to sell their lives most dearly.”

It concluded with the ringing challenge, “We call Jews everywhere toward the defense of the Jewish people.”

In the words of the New York Times, “A ripple went through the crowd like wind rising to a hurricane which roared “Aye!”

As Muslims are imported, they’re thrust upon cities and towns across America. No location is immune. Case in point: Idaho. As reported by World Net Daily (WND), Idaho is slated to receive 2,000 “refugees” who will be settled in Boise and Twin Falls. This would be on top of the refugees Idaho has already absorbed. It turns out Idaho’s quite a hot spot for refugee resettlement. And of late, that means a lot Muslims, as the current round of invaders will be from Syria, Iraq, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and possibly Somalia.

WND reports that community leaders found out about the plan to import them at a conference at Boise State University, where church groups, social services providers, and other stakeholders were in attendance. Unfortunately, American citizens were not, and are not, seen as stakeholders, even though the stakes are as high as they get in this suicidal fiasco.

So what’s going on in Idaho? WND reports:

While Idaho remains largely a rural farm state, it is not new to the refugee business. The Agency for New Americans, an arm of Episcopal Migration Ministries, operates from an office in Boise doing the organizational work on the ground needed to resettle refugees and get them “integrated” into the community. The International Rescue Committee, whose top executive is former British Foreign Secretary David Miliband, also resettles refugees in Idaho.