Remarks by President Obama in Address to the Parliament of Canada

Dixon - My emphasis denoted by yellow highlights.

By White House Press Release | whitehouse.gov | June 29, 2016

PRESIDENT OBAMA: Thank you so much. Thank you. (Applause.) Thank you, everybody. (Applause.) Thank you so much. Thank you. Please, everyone have a seat. Thank you. (Applause.) Thank you so much.

Good evening. Bonjour. Mr. Prime Minister, Mr. Speaker, members of the House, members of the Senate, distinguished guests, people of Canada -- thank you for this extraordinary welcome, which temps me to just shut up and leave. (Laughter.) Because it can't get any better than this. (Laughter.) Obviously I'm grateful for the warm welcome. I'm extraordinarily grateful for the close working relationship and friendship with your outstanding Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau, and his extraordinary wife, Sophie.

But I think it's fair to say that much of this greeting is simply a reflection of the extraordinary alliance and deep friendship between Canadians and Americans.

Justin, thank you for your very kind words, and for the new energy and hope that your leadership has brought to your nation as well as to the alliance. My time in office may be nearing an end, but I know that Canada -- and the world -- will benefit from your leadership for years to come. (Applause.)

So Canada was the very first country that I visited as President. It was in February. (Laughter.) It was colder. (Laughter.) I was younger. (Laughter.) Michelle now refers to my hair as the Great White North. (Laughter.) And on that visit, I strolled around the ByWard Market, tried a “beaver tail” -- (laughter) -- which is better than it sounds. (Laughter.) And I was struck then, as I am again today, by the warmth of the Canadians. I could not be more honored to be joining you in this historic hall -- this cathedral of freedom. And we Americans can never say it enough -- we could not ask for a better friend or ally than Canada. (Applause.) We could not. It’s true. It is true. And we do not take it for granted.

That does not mean we don't have our differences. As I understand it, one of the reasons the Queen chose this site for Parliament was that it was a safe distance from America’s border. (Laughter.) And I admit, in the War of 1812, American troops did some damage to Toronto. I suspect that there were some people up here who didn’t mind when the British returned the favor and burned down the White House. (Laughter.)

In more recent times, however, the only forces crossing our borders are the armies of tourists and businesspeople and families who are shopping and doing business and visiting loved ones. Our only battles take place inside the hockey rink. Even there, there’s an uneasy peace that is maintained. As Americans, we, too, celebrate the life of Mr. Hockey himself, the late, great Gordie Howe. (Applause.) Just as Canadians can salute American teams for winning more Stanley Cups in the NHL. (Laughter.)

AUDIENCE: Ooooh --

PRESIDENT OBAMA: I told you I should have stopped after the applause. (Laughter.)

State Department seeks 27-month delay for release of Clinton Foundation emails

By FoxNews.com | July 1, 2016

The State Department has sought to delay the court-ordered release of emails between four of Hillary Clinton's top aides and officials at the Clinton Foundation and a closely associated public relations firm.

The motion, filed in federal court by the Justice Department late Wednesday, seeks to put off the release of the emails by 27 months. It was first reported on by The Daily Caller.

In the filing, the State Department says it originally estimated that approximately 6,000 emails and other documents were exchanged between the aides — identified as former Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Michael Fuchs, former Ambassador-At-Large Melanne Verveer, Chief of Staff Cheryl Mills, and Deputy Chief of Staff Huma Abedin — and the Clinton Foundation and Teneo Holdings, a communications shop that former President Bill Clinton helped launch.

However, the State Department said that due to errors in the initial document search, the number of "potentially responsive documents" was in fact more than 34,000. The department estimated that it had more than 13,000 pages still left to review.

U.S. District Judge Rudolph Contreras had previously ordered the State Department to release the requested documents by July 21.

If the State Department request is granted, the emails would not be released until October 2018, nearly halfway through the first term of a potential Hillary Clinton presidency. The documents are being sought by the conservative nonprofit group Citizens United.

"The American people have a right to see these emails before the election," Citizens United President David Bossie told The Daily Caller, adding that the delay was "totally unacceptable."

The motion was filed two days after Attorney General Loretta Lynch met Bill Clinton at the Phoenix airport. Lynch denied the meeting was anything other than a chance encounter, but Republicans and Democrats have criticized her for at least creating the appearance of a conflict of interest in the midst of a federal investigation into Hillary Clinton's time as America's top diplomat.

On Thursday, State Department spokesman John Kirby cited a surge in Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests in explaining the State Department extension request.

"The Department handles FOIA in an entirely nonpartisan manner," Kirby said.

The former secretary of state has come under scrutiny over whether she used her position to aid corporate and foreign government donors to the Clinton Foundation.

In addition, Abedin worked as an employee at Teneo while simultaneously working at the State Department while Mills held a position at the Clinton Foundation while also serving in the State Department. Both matters have been flagged by Congress as possible conflicts of interest.

Fox News' Jennifer Griffin and Matt Dean contributed to this report.

Cafe told to remove 'God Bless America' banner

By Todd Starnes | FoxNews.com | June 30, 2016

Whenever folks in Penfield, New York get a hankering for pancakes for lunch – they head over to the 5 Mile Café.

The family-owned restaurant is known in those parts for serving breakfast any time of the day (order their homemade corned beef hash).

They are also known for their patriotism.

“We are very patriotic here at the café – all year round –not just this time of year,” owner Jennifer Aquino told me. “We have American flags and patriotic things around the café.”

So Jennifer decided to ask the town for a permit so she could post a “God Bless America” banner on the front of her restaurant. She wanted to display the banner from Memorial Day through Independence Day.

There was just one significant problem.

Penfield has a strict banner allotment policy. Businesses are only allowed to post banners for a total of three weeks out of the year. And Jennifer had used up her allotment.

“At one point we had banners all over the town and the town just looked trashy and our residents said enough’s enough,” town supervisor Tony LaFountain told WHEC.

Jennifer’s request was denied.

Instead of posting the banner outside the restaurant, she posted it inside. And that was that – until the Orlando terrorist attack.

“I decided on my way to work that I was going to put it up regardless of the town telling me I couldn’t,” she said. “So I put it up.”

A bit later that day she received an email from the town telling her to remove the banner. They warned her that she could face a possible fine for violating the ordinance.

Woman verbally attacked for breastfeeding in Conn. Target store

By FoxNews.com | June 16, 2016

A man verbally attacked a mother for publicly breastfeeding her baby inside a Connecticut Target store, and video of the encounter went viral, Fox-61 reported Tuesday.

Video of the Monday outburst was posted online by Jessie Maher, who was sitting in the café section of the Torrington, Conn. store, feeding her young child around 11:30 a.m.

Before she began filming, a man stared at Maher and called the public breastfeeding “[expletive] disgusting,” Maher wrote on Facebook.

“Can’t you do that somewhere else?” the unidentified man angrily asked Maher, she wrote.

Maher, of Canton, Conn., said she told the man she had the right to breastfeed her child and that he should walk away.

In the video, the man asks a Target employee for a refund after witnessing Maher’s breastfeeding, later accusing the mother of being disrespectful.

“Because I’m feeding my baby, this man is going crazy—and I’m shaking,” Maher can be heard saying quietly.

Another customer soon comes to Maher’s aid, telling her that feeding her baby is a “beautiful moment.”

A line of Target employees later separate Maher from the man. One employee gestures toward the man, apparently asking him to leave.

Connecticut law protects women who choose to breastfeed in public. Target corporate policy also allows for breastfeeding in their stores.

The video recorded 2.5 million hits as of Tuesday morning.

Torrington is located 30 miles west of Hartford.

“Islamic Refugee” With Gas Pipeline Plans Arrested in New Mexico Border County

By Judicial Watch | judicialwatch.org | June 15, 2016

UPDATE 7/1/16—Despite official denials from authorities Judicial Watch stands by its reporting, which was subsequently corroborated by National Association of Former Border Patrol Officers Chairman Zack Taylor.

Police in a U.S. town bordering Mexico have apprehended an undocumented, Middle Eastern woman in possession of the region’s gas pipeline plans, law enforcement sources tell Judicial Watch. Authorities describe the woman as an “Islamic refugee” pulled over during a traffic stop by a deputy sheriff in Luna County, New Mexico which shares a 54-mile border with Mexico. County authorities alerted the U.S. Border Patrol and the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s (FBI) Joint Terrorism Task Forces (JTTF) has been deployed to the area to investigate, sources with firsthand knowledge of the probe confirm.

The gas pipeline plans in the woman’s possession include the Deming region, law enforcement sources say. Deming is a Luna County city situated about 35 miles north of the Mexican border and 60 miles west of Las Cruces. It has a population of about 15,000. Last year one local publication listed Deming No. 1 on a list of the “ten worst places” to live in New Mexico due to high unemployment, poverty, crime and a horrible public education system. The entire region is a High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area (HIDTA), according to the Justice Department’s National Drug Intelligence Center due to the large amounts of methamphetamines, heroin, cocaine and marijuana smuggled through the state by Mexican traffickers. Specifically, the renowned Juárez and Sinaloa cartels operate in the area, the feds affirm in a report.

Judicial Watch has broken a number of stories in the last few years about Mexican drug traffickers smuggling Islamic terrorists into the United States through the porous southern border. Last summer high-level sources on both sides of the Mexico-U.S. border offered alarming details about an operation in which cartels smuggle foreigners from countries with terrorist links into a small Texas rural town near El Paso. Classified as Special Interest Aliens (SIA) by the U.S. government, the foreigners get transported to stash areas in Acala, a rural crossroads located around 54 miles from El Paso on a state road – Highway 20. Once in the U.S., the SIAs wait for pick-up in the area’s sand hills just across Highway 20.

The Orlando Terrorist Attack Is The Price We Pay For Not Destroying ISIS

By John Daniel Davidson | thefederalist.com | June 13, 2016

President Obama thinks terror attacks like the Orlando nightclub massacre are an acceptable price to pay for American nonintervention in the Middle East.

In the wake of the Orlando terrorist attack, which left 50 dead and for which ISIS claimed responsibility on Sunday, there’s one question we probably will not debate seriously: whether we should return to the Bush doctrine and shut down terrorist safe havens overseas, and specifically whether we should deploy troops to the Middle East to destroy ISIS.

Instead, gun control and anti-gay bigotry will be the going concerns, especially among our liberal and media elite in the days ahead, just as they were in the hours after the attack. Partisans on the Left believe they can bend those aspects to their advantage in domestic political battles, and that’s what they’ll talk about.

Indeed, it only took President Barack Obama a few minutes in his remarks Sunday afternoon to suggest that one of the proper responses to Orlando would be to pass stricter gun-control measures. This is one of the president’s favorite talking points after a “mass shooting,” regardless of who does the shooting or why. It matters little that the shooter, Omar Mateen, was armed with firearms he appears to have acquired legally, or that he was a licensed security guard and thus wasn’t the type of person who would be denied a firearm even under a far stricter gun control regime.

Obama Doesn’t Think Terrorism Is A Big Deal

No matter. We will hear more about gun control. But we won’t hear the president announce a new foreign policy to defeat ISIS because on a fundamental level Obama think these kinds of terrorist attacks are an acceptable price to pay for American nonintervention in the Middle East.

A passage from Jeffery Goldberg’s lengthy piece in the April edition of The Atlantic, “The Obama Doctrine,” captures the essence of Obama’s thinking about ISIS and radical Islamic terrorism generally. In the immediate aftermath of the Paris attacks last November, Obama, who had been on a globe-spanning presidential trip when the attacks occurred, was lambasted for failing to understand the fear among many Americans that something like that might happen here. But there was a reason Obama appeared to be unmoved, and it wasn’t just jet lag. Goldberg goes on to note that Obama

has never believed that terrorism poses a threat to America commensurate with the fear it generates. Even during the period in 2014 when ISIS was executing its American captives in Syria, his emotions were in check. Valerie Jarrett, Obama’s closest adviser, told him people were worried that the group would soon take its beheading campaign to the U.S. ‘They’re not coming here to chop our heads off,’ he reassured her. Obama frequently reminds his staff that terrorism takes far fewer lives in America than handguns, car accidents, and falls in bathtubs do.

Obama administration backs plan to relinquish Internet control

By FoxNews.com | June 9, 2016

The Obama administration is getting behind a plan that would have the U.S. government relinquish its last bit of control over the Internet – a move Republican lawmakers are fighting tooth-and-nail.

The transfer was set in motion two years ago when a Commerce Department agency said it would cede oversight over an obscure, but powerful, Los Angeles-based nonprofit called the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN).

The agency, the National Telecommunications and Information Administration, announced Thursday that the game plan they got back from ICANN – which would hand over the reins to a “multi-stakeholder” group, and not a single government – is now in line with what they want.

“The Internet’s multistakeholder community has risen to the challenge we gave them to develop a transition proposal that would ensure the Internet’s domain name system will continue to operate as seamlessly as it currently does,” NTIA Administrator Lawrence Strickling said in a statement. AFP first reported on the decision.

ICANN manages some of the most important elements of the Internet, including the domain name system and IP addressing. Domains include those tiny suffixes at the end of Internet addresses, like .com and .org; Internet Protocol addresses are the numerical sequences assigned to devices in a network.

Foreign governments had complained about the U.S. oversight, maintained through contracts with ICANN.

Yet the Obama administration has faced stiff resistance to a hand-off for months from vocal critics on Capitol Hill and in the tech community. One concern is that, in the void left by America's transfer of oversight, other nations that don't share the United States' commitment to free speech and expression could make a grab at Internet influence.

On Wednesday, Republican Texas Sen. Cruz and Republican Wisconsin Rep. Sean Duffy introduced legislation to prevent the transfer of functions related to the Internet Domain Name System unless specifically authorized by Congress.

The Protecting Internet Freedom Act also aims to ensure that the U.S. maintains sole ownership of the .gov and .mil top-level domains.

Commissioner says fraud from Obamaphone program approaching $500 million

By Rudy Takala | Washington Examiner | June 8, 2016

The federal subsidy known as the "Obamaphone" or "Obamanet" program could be losing nearly $500 million to fraud annually, according to a top Republican on the Federal Communications Commission.

Commissioner Ajit Pai made the accusation Wednesday in letter to the Universal Service Administrative Company, referring to the FCC's Universal Service Fund, which provides a monthly $9.95 subsidy for telecom service to low-income consumers.

The subsidy is limited to one per "independent economic household," or IEH, but telecom companies have the ability to override that restriction if applicants check a box stating they represent a separate household, even if they have the same address.

The Universal Service Administrative Company is a nonprofit organization designated by the FCC to administer the fund.

Pai wrote that data obtained by the FCC last month revealed carriers had enrolled nearly 4.3 million subscribers using the IEH override process between October 2014-April 2016, or 35.5 percent of total subscribers for the period. "It is alarming that over one-third of subscribers — costing taxpayers almost half a billion dollars a year — were registered through an IEH override.

"Just one year of service for these apparent duplicates costs taxpayers $476 million," added Pai, who now is asking the Universal Service Administrative Corporation for answers to several questions.

They include a list of any investigations or audits into the apparent fraud that USAC has conducted, and details about any process the company has in place to ensure that consumers who self-describe as being part of a separate household are being truthful.

"Given the hundreds of millions in taxpayer funds apparently lost to unscrupulous behavior in the Lifeline program, I hope you will agree that USAC's paramount task must be to eliminate waste, fraud and abuse from the Lifeline program," Pai wrote.

The program was originally established to help low-income consumers in rural areas obtain access to 911 services. It was expanded to include cellular devices in more recent years, and expanded in March to include Internet service.

Americans and Money

By Bill O'Reilly | billoreilly.com | May 24, 2016

Americans and money - That is the subject of this evening's Talking Points Memo.

There is no question that economic issues will be foremost in the upcoming presidential election. That's why Hillary Clinton's decision not to debate Bernie Sanders on Fox News is a major mistake for her. Sanders, as you know, wants to blow up capitalism because he says it's a corrupt system. The Vermont senator admires socialism whereby the government calls the shots in the private marketplace.

A debate with Sanders on Fox News would give Secretary Clinton a major opportunity to smash that theory to stick up for capitalism and perhaps persuade some voters she is not an ardent leftist. But again, Mrs. Clinton has refused the debate even though she said this back in 2008:

CLINTON: Honestly, I just believe this is the most important job in the world. It’s the toughest job in the world. You should be willing to campaign for every vote. You should be willing to debate anytime, anywhere.

Now on to you. A new poll by the Associated Press says that two thirds of American adults would have difficulty coming up with money to cover a one thousand dollar emergency expense.

75% of Americans making less than $50,000 dollars a year say they would have trouble with that.

67% of those making between $50-100,000 say the same thing.

Even for the country's wealthiest citizens households making more than $100,000 a year, 38% say they would have difficulty coming up with a thousand bucks to pay an emergency expense. Stunning.

And it all goes back to the change in how Americans view money.

In 1965 the poverty rate was 17% in America. In 2014, nearly 50 years later, the poverty rate was 15%. Obviously not a big improvement.

But here's the key - 50 years ago, personal disposable income, money you have on hand to spend, was just $14,000 dollars. In 2015 it was $38,000 dollars. A vast improvement in spending power.

The problem is that we spend it all. We don't save. We're not frugal. We want immediate gratification.

Alleged war criminal worked for TSA at Dulles Airport

By Andrea McCarren | USA Today | June 3, 2016

DULLES, Va. — An alleged Somali war criminal is on leave from his job at Dulles International Airport in Virginia after a CNN investigation discovered him working for the Transportation Security Administration there.

Yusuf Abdi Ali was dubbed Colonel Tukeh in the Somalian army, known for his violent acts during that country’s civil war.

Ali has been the subject of an investigation by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation since 1992, when journalists discovered him working in Toronto as a security guard.

During the Somali Civil War, which began in 1991, Ali was commander of a region of Somalia where unspeakable violence unfolded. Tens of thousands of men, women and children were killed there by government forces.

The name Colonel Tukeh, which means crow, was a reference to his sharp features.

According to CNN, Ali is accused of terrorizing the Isaaq people. The actions included mass executions and burning villages, CNN reported.

Canada deported Ali, who eventually made it to the United States. After a series of security jobs, he ended up working for TSA as an unarmed security guard at Dulles International Airport.

Government contractor Master Security hired Ali and confirmed this week he’s now on administrative leave. His access to the airport has been withdrawn.

Master Security confirmed Ali passed a criminal background check by the FBI and a security threat assessment by the TSA.

According to ABC News, the Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority, which runs Dulles airport, said in a statement: "We have verified that all of these processes were followed and approved in this instance."

According to the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, Ali was trained in the United States in 1986, as part of a Pentagon program for foreign military officers.