RUTHFULLY YOURS

The Obama administration tried to defuse growing bipartisan discontent with the visa waiver program by announcing enhancements to the program that eases travel from Europe.

Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), the top Dem on the Senate Intelligence Committee, announced days after the Paris terror attacks that she and Sen. Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.) would be introducing a bill after Thanksgiving to crack down on what she called “the soft underbelly of our national security policies.”

The visa waiver program allows 90 days of travel visa-free to the United States from 38 countries, including European terrorist hotspots such as Belgium. In its lobbying corner: business and tourism industries. Some 20 million travelers use the program to arrive visa-free in the U.S. each year.

Feinstein and Flake quickly got to work crafting a bill to make “several changes” to the program, including the requirement that anyone who has traveled to Iraq or Syria in the past five years must apply for a visa through the traditional process of an interview at a U.S. embassy or consulate.

Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), who has taken up the task of chronicling government waste since notorious pork-fighter Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) retired, today revealed a nearly half-million-dollar video game produced for climate-change education.

The Climate Change Narrative Game Education (CHANGE) is being developed by researchers at the University of South Florida and piloted at Hillsborough County high schools. It received a nearly $450,000 grant from the National Science Foundation.

“CHANGE’s goal is to help high school students learn complex Global Climate Change science by making it personally relevant and understandable,” says the USF description of the game, which uses “scientifically realistic text narratives about future Florida residents” about 50-100 years into the future and “simulations & games based on scientific data to help students learn principles of GCC so students can experience and try to cope with potential long term effect of GCC via role-play and science-based simulation.”

In his Waste Report today, Paul slammed the project as “a video game aimed at indoctrinating kids into the climate change way of thinking.”

A University of Chicago engineering student was arrested for making online threats against the school’s students and faculty.

Jabari Dean’s motive was to exact revenge for the killing of 17 year old Laquan McDonald by a Chicago police officer who shot the teen 16 times.

This is my only warning. At 10 a.m. on Monday mourning (sic) I am going to the campus quad of the University of Chicago. I will be armed with a M-4 Carbine and 2 Desert Eagles all fully loaded. I will execute aproximately (sic) 16 white male students and or staff, which is the same number of time (sic) Mcdonald (sic) was killed.

He also threatened to kill white policemen.

“I then will die killing any number of white policemen that I can in the process. This is not a joke. I am to do my part to rid the world of the white devils. I expect you to do the same,” the post read.

The school was shut down in response to the threat:

Sophomore literally means “wise fool.”

Though they’re wise in their own eyes, the title’s three leftists – even former Secretary of State Clinton – own America’s diminishment and the predictable subsequent chaos around the world.

Skipping over Cuba and Asia, here’s your evidence that they act foolishly in the Middle East and Central Asia.

1. Hillary’s private email server while secretary of state shows bad judgment.

One exception to our Middle East focus – this folly has gone around the globe.

How dumb can she be?

Be sure that China and Russia and any number of countries have hacked it and now possess compromising secrets about her. This may (and should) disqualify her from the White House.

2. The worst failure: overthinking, peacenik Obama campaigned on withdrawing military from Iraq and did so. Now ISIS has swamped the zone.

This is what happened in Vietnam. We withdrew, and the North overwhelmed and slaughtered countless people in the South. Kerry has a history of bad foreign policy decisions.

Now the Syrian refugees (and others) are naturally streaming into better places. Safe havens in the area would have been adequate and less costly until the conflict cooled down.

Let’s figure out this ISIS swamp by using the logic of history and our knowledge of Islam.

Little children have imaginary friends. Modern liberalism has imaginary enemies.

Hunger in America is an imaginary enemy. Liberal advocacy groups routinely claim that one in seven Americans is hungry—in a country where the poorest counties have the highest rates of obesity. The statistic is a preposterous extrapolation from a dubious Agriculture Department measure of “food insecurity.” But the line gives those advocacy groups a reason to exist while feeding the liberal narrative of America as a savage society of haves and have nots.

The campus-rape epidemic—in which one in five female college students is said to be the victim of sexual assault—is an imaginary enemy. Never mind the debunked rape scandals at Duke and the University of Virginia, or the soon-to-be-debunked case at the heart of “The Hunting Ground,” a documentary about an alleged sexual assault at Harvard Law School. The real question is: If modern campuses were really zones of mass predation—Congo on the quad—why would intelligent young women even think of attending a coeducational school? They do because there is no epidemic. But the campus-rape narrative sustains liberal fictions of a never-ending war on women.

‘The traveler comes to the Appalachians in the lovely season. He sees the hills, the streams, the foliage—but not the poor.” That passage comes from “The Other America,” Michael Harrington’s 1962 book that opened the eyes of liberal policy makers to America’s invisible poverty. The classic work helped provide the intellectual ammunition for President Lyndon Johnson’s “unconditional war on poverty,” announced in his State of the Union address two years later.

Fast forward to today. The latest touchstone of liberal policy, the regulation of greenhouse-gas emissions, is causing economic destruction and pushing poverty higher in the Appalachians. But those backing the climate-change agenda are doing their best to keep this reality hidden from the public.

Since 2012, 27 coal-mining companies with core operations in Central Appalachia, a region roughly centered in southern West Virginia, have filed for bankruptcy protection. The list includes a number of large-cap, publicly traded entities, such as Alpha Natural Resources, James River Coal and Patriot Coal. Production of coal in southern West Virginia declined by 45% between the first half of 2011 and the first half of 2015, according to data from the Energy Information Administration. Since 2009, 332 coal mines in West Virginia have been closed, and 9,733 jobs—roughly 35% of the industry’s total employment in the state—have been lost, figures from the West Virginia Coal Association show.