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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION

50 STATES AND DC, CONGRESS AND THE PRESIDENT

Big International Brother Wants to Watch U.S.: Michael Walsh

The World Government so beloved of American national socialists looms ever closer. Fox News reports:

EXCLUSIVE: The chief United Nations human rights agency, with the Obama administration’s apparent blessing, is creating a new “regional hub” for itself in Washington, to use as a center for organizing against the death penalty, among other things, and for affecting the legal frameworks, policies, and strategies of American counterterrorism.

In a management plan covering its activities through 2017, the agency, known as the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, or OHCHR, puts the U.S. in the same category for that counterterrorism “alignment” effort as countries like Iraq and Uganda.

The fast-tracked human rights “hub” also has a number of more nebulous “thematic” objectives for the U.S., which include, according to an OHCHR information document, “the establishment of national participatory bodies for reporting and implementing recommendations of human rights mechanisms” and the aim of “widening the democratic space” with the aid of undefined “National Human Rights Institutions.”

Trump’s Muslim-Registry Blunder The Donald is wrong, but so are many of his critics. By Andrew C. McCarthy

A national-security investigation may “not [be] conducted solely upon the basis of activities protected by the first amendment to the Constitution.” That clause, and others similar to it, are found throughout the Patriot Act and other provisions of federal law. They protect Americans from being subjected to surveillance based on nothing except their religious beliefs.

There’s an obvious reason for that — at least, I thought it was obvious until Donald Trump reportedly embraced the idea of forcing Muslims to register in a database. I say “reportedly” because it is not clear to me, after hearing a recording of Trump’s hectic gaggle with reporters, that he intentionally articulated such a proposal. More likely, he thoughtlessly agreed that it should be considered upon being asked some loaded questions — which is better, but not much.

The reason our law forbids investigations based on religion alone is also spelled out in the Patriot Act. As Section 102 explained: “The concept of individual responsibility for wrongdoing is sacrosanct in American society, and applies equally to all religious, racial, and ethnic groups.”

State Department spent $36.5 million polling foreigners’ opinions By Kellan Howell !!!!????

Would you spend money to find out what people in Spain think about their medical insurance or what people in Austria think about their government? That’s exactly what the federal government has been doing, using millions of Americans’ tax dollars.

Since 2007 the U.S. State Department has spent over $36.5 million to survey citizens in foreign countries on a wide range of topics, including general public opinion polling on how their own governments — many of them U.S. allies — are performing. And the biggest spike in that spending occurred on Hillary Rodham Clinton’s watch as secretary of state.

The polls included such topics as a “survey of medical insurance in Spain” costing $24,727, an “Elite Survey in Russia” that cost $117,000 and a “Public Opinion Poll Survey to Address Public Attitudes Toward Domestic and International Affairs in Austria,” costing $50,728.

The examples were compiled by federal spending watchdog OpenTheBooks.com in a larger oversight report on federal public opinion polling to be published after Thanksgiving.

Spending watchdogs say these polls, while informative, should be conducted and funded by private research organizations, not the U.S. taxpayer.

OPEN YOUR EYES AND OPEN THE BOOKS ****

http://www.openthebooks.com/
Showcased in today’s Washington Times, the State Department is awarded the “Golden Hammer Award” for the most egregious weekly example of waste, fraud, corruption and abuse in the nation.

The State Department spent $36.5 million polling the opinions of foreigners — even our allies, i.e. England, Spain, Italy, Germany, Poland, Japan, etc.

Read the Golden Hammer Award at Washington Times, click here

Where did tens of millions of ‘foreign polling expenditures’ flow?
Learn how the State Department hid $34 million in survey and polling under a category of ‘miscellaneous foreign vendors.’

What would Hilary do? Did Secretary of State Hilary Clinton increase or decrease expenditures on foreign polling? Did Clinton increase the transparency of State Dept spending?

Why was State polling countries like Suriname?

Familiar Tree Prevails in Car-Scent Trademark Suit By Andy Newman

“But on cross-examination, a lawyer for Car-Freshner, Jonathan Z. King, caught Mr. Elassir in an inconsistency.He recounted a deposition in which Mr. Elassir said he changed the freshener header card to more closely resemble his company’s canned fresheners, which are a bigger seller. Then he showed a photo showing that the color schemes were actually different.“Your canned products, which you say were the inspiration for your paper products, they don’t look anything like them, do they?”“No,” Mr. Elassir eventually conceded. A few minutes later, Mr. King ran through the similarities between Exotica’s packaging and Little Trees’ and asked Mr. Elassir, “Is your testimony under oath that that’s all just a coincidence?”

Little Trees, the giant in the forest of tree-shaped automotive air fresheners, trounced a small rival in a trademark suit in federal court in Manhattan on Thursday.

A jury found that the other company, Exotica Fresheners Company, had infringed on Little Trees’ trademark with the look of its product. In addition to changing its packaging, Exotica will have to pay the Car-Freshner Corporation, maker of Little Trees, $52,000.

Car-Freshner sued Exotica after Exotica changed the card at the top of its packaging, known as a header card, to include a green tree logo, upward-slanting text and a yellow background, all of which had been used by Little Trees for decades.

The case turned on whether some consumers were likely to be confused by the overall look of the product, known as its “trade dress.”

The President’s Sanctimony on Syrian Refugees By Rich Lowry —

President Barack Obama has seen the enemy, and it is the refusal to accept more Syrian refugees.

From the tone of his post-Paris remarks, you’d think that a sophisticated terrorist assault on a major Western city is a setback; sentiment in the U.S. against taking more Syrian refugees is an atrocity.

Obama warned this week against “that dark impulse inside of us,” as if we were debating whether Syrian refugees should be drawn and quartered. He said that “slamming the door in their faces would be a betrayal of our values.” He was joined by liberal commentators who scoffed and guffawed at worries over Syrian refugees after — ho-hum, nothing to see here — one of the Paris terrorists apparently posed as a refugee.

It’s remarkable that the president feels justified in lecturing anyone on humanitarianism. He has stood by while Syria has descended into a hellish chaos, and hasn’t betrayed any guilty conscience. There are roughly 10 million Syrians who are refugees (4.2 million) or internally displaced (6.5 million). At 10,000 over the next year, we are offering to take .1 percent of them.

One wonders when Obama begin caring so much about Syrians. If you put those 10,000 Syrian refugees back in their native country and let them get gassed, barrel-bombed, shelled, or shot, would he bat an eye, or would they just be part of the ever-growing casualty count?

JAY NORDLINGER ON REP. ILEANA ROSS LEHTINEN (R-FL DISTRICT 27)

As she walks down the corridor in the Rayburn House Office Building, she asks someone, “Are you coming to my hanging?”

The woman doing the asking is Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, known to some as “Ily.” She is a congresswoman from Miami, elected in 1989. (It was a special election following the death of an incumbent.) She is a Republican, and a force, and a joy.

Why “hanging”? Her portrait will be unveiled, and hung, in the hearing room of the Foreign Affairs Committee. She was chairwoman of that committee in the previous Congress.

Ileana Ros-Lehtinen is a champion of democracy, freedom, and human rights — not just in Cuba, land of her birth, but in all the world: the Middle East, the Far East, it doesn’t matter.

When you walk into the hearing room, the first portraits you see are those of Henry Hyde and Dante Fascell. I remember them well. (Shades of Hamlet?) Hyde was a congressman from the Chicago area; Fascell was from Florida.

The room is absolutely packed — cheek to cheek, shoulder to shoulder. Eliot Engel, the New York Democrat, says, “I’ve been a member of this committee for many years, and have never seen the room this full. Not even for a holiday party.”

Several speakers note that the room is a veritable United Nations, an atlas of the world. In other words, there are people who come from the four corners of the earth.

The MC is Yleem Poblete, who was once chief of this committee’s staff. She mentions that the attendees include officials from Taiwan, Ukraine, and Israel. Why am I not surprised? Those countries are threatened by wolves. They are exactly the kind of country to which Ileana lends particular support.

Israel’s ambassador says a few words. He is Ron Dermer, and guess where he grew up? Miami. In fact, his father was mayor of Miami Beach. So was his brother.

Charlie Rangel is present — handsome old devil. Seems to be handsomer now in his mid-80s than he ever was. I wonder whom he loves more: Ileana or Fidel?

“Everybody loves Ileana,” speakers say. And they are right. There are current House members here and former members. There are Republicans and Democrats. Ileana “reaches across the aisle.” She’ll work with anybody, to make what she regards as progress.

President Obama Demonizes Dissent – Again By Ian Tuttle —

Admitting Syrian refugees into the United States presents two concerns — one over security, and one over identity. The first is urgent and concrete, and failure will be measured in bodies; the second is long-term and, though more difficult to assess, no less consequential. If we want to aid the persecuted, without granting sanctuary to people who threaten our security and who are in tension with American ways, putting Syrian Christians and certain persecuted religious minorities, such as Yazidis, at the front of the refugee line is an obvious, common-sense proposal.

Predictably, it has not been treated as such. When Republican candidates Ted Cruz and Jeb Bush made the suggestion recently, they were roundly excoriated, the president of the United States going so far as to call any such proposal “shameful,” and that we ought “not to feed that dark impulse inside of us.” President Obama has since suggested: “When you start seeing individuals in position of responsibility suggesting Christians are more worthy of protection than Muslims are in a war-torn land — that feeds the ISIL narrative.”

The president’s fondness for strawmen is among his better-known traits. But the reduction of Cruz’s and Bush’s proposal, whatever one may think of it, to “xenophobia” is an insult not only to them, but to millions of Americans who espy legitimate concerns in our refugee-resettlement program. After all, Cruz’s statement in South Carolina over the weekend, “There is no meaningful risk of [Syrian] Christians committing acts of terror,” is, of course, correct. There is no significant minority of Syrian Christians engaged in slaughtering Yazidis in the Syrian hinterlands, or in murdering civilians in French cafés. Responsible for those abominations is an organization that, however much it might pervert or distort doctrine, finds its inspiration in a different religious tradition, Islam.

Obama’s Strategic Bumbling Is Theater of the Absurd : Jonah Goldberg

‘You’re all suckers.”That has to be what Barack Obama is thinking as the country falls for his head-fake.Let’s recap.

George W. Bush’s surge reduced the Islamic State’s precursor, al-Qaeda in Iraq, to a paltry 700 members, according to CIA director John Brennan. Its membership has grown by something close to 4,000 percent. As it metastasized, Obama yawned, calling it the “JV team.” When Syrian president Bashar al-Assad violated Obama’s “red line,” Obama yawned again, and the refugee crisis was born.

By August 2014, Obama was grudgingly conceding he needed a new counterterrorism strategy. One tactic he ruled out: building up pro-American Syrian forces. He told New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman that was an unworkable “fantasy.”

Then, within weeks, the Islamic State beheaded American journalist James Foley. On vacation in Martha’s Vineyard, Obama denounced the murder. Within eight minutes of that statement, he was on the golf course. He later conceded that was a mistake.

Three Media Lies About Syrian Refugees They’re not refugees. Daniel Greenfield

Thirty governors have come out against Obama’s policy of dumping Syrian migrants in their states. Some want more thorough vetting. Others have issued executive orders barring any further resettlement.

In response to these common sense measures, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton put on faces of mock moral outrage and the media is frantically spinning new lies about the migrants and national security.

But it’s time we told the truth about what is really going on and exposed their three biggest lies.

1 .The “Refugees” Are Not Fleeing Persecution, They’re Welfare Migrants

Syria is in the middle of a religious war between Sunni and Shiite Muslims.

But Sunni Muslims fleeing religious persecution can choose one of the many Sunni states in the region. Most Syrians have ended up in Jordan and Turkey, which are both Sunni countries. The Sunni Muslim countries are certainly not persecuting their fellow Sunnis. And neither country is run by ISIS.

Likewise Shiite Muslims can find sanctuary in Shiite Iran or parts of Lebanon.