RUTHFULLY YOURS

The federal agency that has the job of protecting the environment doesn’t seem to have too much concern for trees, at least the ones cut down to make furniture.

The Environmental Protection Agency over the past decade has spent a whopping $92.4 million to purchase, rent, install and store office furniture ranging from fancy hickory chairs and a hexagonal wooden table, worth thousands of dollars each, to a simple drawer to store pencils that cost $813.57.

The furniture shopping sprees equaled about $6,000 for every one of the agency’s 15,492 employees, according to federal spending data made public by the government watchdog OpenTheBooks.com.

And the EPA doesn’t buy just any old office furniture. Most of the agency’s contracts are with Michigan-based retailer Herman Miller Inc. According to the contracts, the EPA spent $48.4 million on furnishings from the retailer known for its high-end, modern furniture designs.

Just one of Herman Miller’s “Aeron” office chairs retails for nearly $730 on the store’s website. The EPA has spent tens of thousands of dollars to purchase and install those types of chairs in its offices.

While hundreds of thousands of Middle Eastern and Afghani refugees pour into the European Union’s member nations, the EU seems to be treating the crisis as an academic exercise. It can be better understood as a war game that the EU is losing.

It’s neither a faculty lounge problem nor a war game, of course. An estimated four million refugees from Syria, Iraq, Libya and Yemen — as well as Afghanistan — are fleeing the conflicts in their nations for the possibility of a more peaceful home in Europe. As is often said, it is the largest refugee crisis Europe has endured since World War II.

However, if you analyze the crisis in war game terms, it becomes clearer why and how Europe is losing and will be defeated.

Pope Francis didn’t make the list of “Eminent Persons” [1] assembled by the U.N. Secretary General to plan the “global development framework” for the world beyond 2015 and culminating in 2030. But the pope didn’t need to be on the list. After all, the Vatican has endorsed [2] the anti-capitalist “sustainable development” agenda that is being voted on by the nations of the world at the U.N.

However, the American people, through their elected representatives, have had absolutely no input in developing this new global agenda which President Obama will implement without the input or approval of Congress.

John Podesta, the chairman of the 2016 Hillary Clinton presidential campaign who previously served as counselor to Obama, was picked by U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon to be a member of the “high-level panel” of “eminent persons” planning the future of the globe.

The world body’s sustainable development goals [3] promise the end of poverty, education, clean water, justice, good health and well-being, jobs for all, decent shelter, and a life of personal dignity. “These are lofty goals,” says [4] Patrick Wood, a commentator on global issues, “but are they for real? Or do they sound like a bait-and-switch scheme that contains a potentially dangerous payload?”

Despite President Barack Obama and Secretary John Kerry’s enthusiasm in pushing a nuclear weapons agreement with Iran—an agreement a majority of lawmakers and Americans oppose—the Deputy Commander of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps, Brigadier General Hossein Salami. boasted to the government-funded Fars News Agency that his military has created advanced unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) technology.

Gen. Salami claimed that the UAVs, commonly called “drones,” are capable flying 3,000 kilometers—or 1,864 miles—to conduct stealth reconnaissance or to take part in combat missions, according to the Iranian news media on Wednesday.

If Obama were Dr. Jonas Salk, he would have spent the early 1950s crafting wheelchairs rather than curing polio.

Similarly missing the point, Obama wants to accept 100,000 Syrian and Iraqi refugees who have washed up on Europe’s shores and thrown themselves on the mercy of Western civilization. European leaders this week developed quotas to distribute these distressed souls, likely including some terrorist infiltrators, across the Continent.

Alas, wheelchairs cannot kill viruses, and refugee camps cannot erase the root cause of this humanitarian catastrophe: ISIS and its mayhem in Syria and Iraq. Obama should lead the West in killing ISIS, so that these refugees can go home, and the countrymen they left behind need not dash madly across the Mediterranean.

#share#While ISIS actually chops heads and blasts villages, Obama still bears much blame for this bloodshed. Desperate to “end” rather than win the Iraq War, Obama yanked out all American troops, failing to leave behind a stabilization force of perhaps 10,000 GIs — much like those brave Americans in uniform who still help maintain the post–World War II peace in Germany, Italy, and Japan. Just as dirt rushes into a vacuum cleaner, ISIS raced into the void created when Obama prematurely withdrew from Iraq.

The ensuing battle against ISIS oscillates between the cosmetic and the inadequate.

If the Demo­crat­ic Party cares to sal­vage a sliv­er of mor­al au­thor­ity, its lead­ers and early state voters need to send Hil­lary Rod­ham Clin­ton an ur­gent mes­sage: Come clean or get out. Stop ly­ing and de­flect­ing about how and why you stashed State De­part­ment email on a secret serv­er—or stop run­ning.

Tell her: We can’t have an­oth­er day like this:

Story 1: The State De­part­ment con­firmed that Clin­ton turned over her email only after Con­gress dis­covered that she had ex­clus­ively used a private email sys­tem. Ac­cord­ing to The Wash­ing­ton Post, the de­part­ment first con­tac­ted her in the sum­mer of 2014, at least three months be­fore the agency asked Clin­ton and three of her pre­de­cessors to provide their emails.

The story un­der­cuts Clin­ton’s claim that her de­cision to turn over self-se­lec­ted email was a re­sponse to a routine-sound­ing re­cords re­quest. She hasn’t been telling the truth.

Story 2: A fed­er­al court has helped un­cov­er more emails re­lated to the Benghazi raid that were with­held from con­gres­sion­al in­vest­ig­at­ors. Clin­ton has in­sisted she turned over all her work-re­lated email and com­plied with con­gres­sion­al sub­poen­as.

Again, she hasn’t been telling the truth.

Story 3: The FBI has re­covered per­son­al and work-re­lated e-mails from her private serv­er, rais­ing the pos­sib­il­ity that the de­leted in­form­a­tion be­comes pub­lic. “The FBI is in­vest­ig­at­ing how and why clas­si­fied in­form­a­tion ended up on Clin­ton’s serv­er,” Bloomberg re­por­ted.

While the Demo­crat­ic front-run­ner still in­sists there was no clas­si­fied in­form­a­tion on the un­se­cured serv­er, the FBI has moved bey­ond wheth­er U.S. secrets were in­volved to how and why. In the lan­guage of law en­force­ment, the FBI is in­vest­ig­at­ing her motive.

On Sunday, Clin­ton told Face the Na­tion host John Dick­er­son: “What I did was al­lowed. It was fully above board,” and “I tried to be fully trans­par­ent.” Both claims are ob­ject­ively and in­dis­put­ably false.

National Security Agency (NSA) director Mike Rogers admitted on Thursday that Hillary Clinton’s use of a private server to conduct official government business while she was secretary of state represented an “opportunity” for foreign spies.

“You really want to drag me into this one, sir?” Rogers laughingly asked Senator Tom Cotton (R., Ark.) during a Thursday cybersecurity hearing before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence.

Without mentioning Clinton’s name, Cotton had asked Rogers to respond to a hypothetical cabinet member’s request to use a private, non-governmental server for government business.

“My comment would be, ‘You need to ensure you’re complying with the applicable regulations and structure . . . for your department,’” Rogers replied, adding that he doesn’t know the rules for every federal agency.

There is only one guaranteed way to get fired from the Department of Veterans’ Affairs. Falsifying records won’t do it. Prescribing obsolete drugs won’t do it. Cutting all manner of corners on health and safety is, at worst, going to get you a reprimand. No, the only sure-fire way to get canned at the VA is to report any of these matters to authorities who might do something about it.

That, at least, is what the U.S. Office of Special Counsel recently reported to the president of the United States. The Special Counsel’s office is the agency to which government whistleblowers go to report wrongdoing.

“Our concern is really about the pattern that we’re seeing, where whistleblowers who disclose wrongdoing are facing trumped-up punishment, but the employees who put veterans’ health at risk are going unpunished,” Special Counsel Carolyn Lerner recently told National Public Radio.

Now, obviously, this shouldn’t happen. Everyone, except perhaps the managers at the VA, probably agrees with that. So by all means, let’s have some reforms and further protections for whistleblowers.

But that’s not a real solution. The real fix is to get rid of the VA entirely.

The biggest liability Hillary Clinton faces in getting the Democratic nomination may be that too many of her fellow Democrats don’t believe she is a good liar.

A new Fox News poll this week found that by 58 to 32 percent, Americans don’t think Hillary is telling the truth about her e-mail scandal. Surprisingly, 31 percent of Democrats and almost two-thirds of independents share that view. Perhaps most ominous for her is that 47 percent of Democrats (and 62 percent of all voters) “are worried that scandals would be a problem for a Clinton administration were she elected.”

Clinton loyalists are convinced that polls showing that majorities of voters find Hillary dishonest and untrustworthy will be irrelevant when it actually comes time to vote. One top Clintion adviser told Ron Fournier of the National Journal last spring: “Trust doesn’t matter.” Other aides point out that the day Bill Clinton won reelection in 1996 with 49 percent of the vote, a majority of Americans didn’t think he was honest or trustworthy — and that was before the Lewinsky scandal.

Democrats are starting to admit that the new scandals involving e-mails and the Clinton Foundation’s conflicts of interest are taking a worrying toll. Democratic Senator Chris Coons of Delaware admitted to the PBS affiliate in his state this week that there has been “a real loss of support by of some of the folks who I had expected would be just diehard, enthusiastic Clinton fans, in part because it’s a reminder of the Clinton era, when there seemed to always be some scandal going on about something.” Coons also criticized Hillary’s attempts at explaining the scandals: “Her answers to it have been less open and artful than I’d expected they would be.”

Twelve years ago, it was said that the western armies in Iraq would be welcomed as liberators. (They were – for a while.) Today in Germany, another conquering army are being welcomed as liberators – liberators from the residual moral stain of what remains of ethnic nationalism and cultural identity. Watching European news broadcasts right now is like an insane demotic inversion of the Emperor’s new clothes. “To a fool these thousands of fit young Muslim men appear well dressed and well fed. But a wise man such as Your Majesty can easily see that they are desperate starving refugees in rags.” And so as the trains pull in to German railway stations to disgorge men who meet no known definition of “refugees” they are greeted on the platform by volunteers offering food and second-hand clothes. The cameras do their best to alight on a telegenic moppet or a covered woman, but, even when they do, you notice that they’re surrounded by a sea of confident vigorous males – who, according to the UN, make up 75 per cent of the “refugees”.