RUTHFULLY YOURS

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.

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?

“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.”

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?

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.

‘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.

President Obama reiterated his determination to close the prison at Guantanamo Bay despite the attorney general’s affirmation to Congress that the administration would be breaking the law by moving detainees to U.S. soil.

In testimony before the House Judiciary Committee on Tuesday, Attorney General Loretta Lynch acknowledged that “as the administration has stated, the closure of Guantanamo Bay is something that is part of the administration’s policy and the Department Of Justice supports that as well.”

“At this point in time I believe the current state of the law is that individuals are not transferred from Guantanamo to U.S. shores,” Lynch said. “…And certainly it’s the position of the Department of Justice that we would follow the law of the land in regard to that issue.”

“I believe that it is the view of the department that we would certainly observe the laws as passed by Congress and signed by the president. Only very rarely would we take the step of finding that an unconstitutional provision was something that we could not manage.”

White House senior advisor Valerie Jarrett said criminal justice reform that reduces the prison population would make America safer.

Jarrett also said President Obama is focused on tackling the issue along with Congress and is not a “lame duck.” Obama has directed federal agencies to “ban the box,” which prohibits them from asking about an applicant’s criminal history. Jarrett said Obama wants Congress to do the same for federal contractors as well, which requires congressional action.

In addition, the Justice Department has decided to release about 6,000 inmates from federal prison who were convicted of drug-related offenses.

Jarrett was asked if reforming the criminal justice system could cause crime to rise.

“We are seeing crime go up in some cities. We’re also seeing it leveled in others and going down in the third category,” Jarrett said during the “Race and Justice in America” Summit held by The Atlantic.