News/Politics

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News/Politics 10-6-14

What’s interesting in the news today?

1. How Ebola spread out of control.

From TheWashingtonPost  “Frieden, the director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), knew it was no simple matter to properly carry away a body loaded with Ebola virus. It takes four people wearing protective suits, one at each corner of the body bag. On that grim day near the end of August, in a makeshift Ebola ward in Monrovia, Liberia, burial teams already had lugged 60 victims to a truck for the trip to the crematorium.

Frieden had seen plenty of death over the years, but this was far worse than he expected, a plague on a medieval scale. “A scene out of Dante,” he called it.

Shaken, he flew back to the United States on Aug. 31 and immediately briefed President Obama by phone. The window to act was closing, he told the president in the 15-minute call.

That conversation, nearly six months after the World Health Organization (WHO) learned of an Ebola outbreak in West Africa, was part of a mounting realization among world leaders that the battle against the virus was being lost. As of early September, with more than 1,800 confirmed Ebola deaths in Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone, there was still no coordinated global response. Alarmed U.S. officials realized they would need to call in the military.

 Obama eventually ordered 3,000 military personnel to West Africa; about 200 had arrived by the beginning of this month. They will be joined by health workers from countries such as Britain, China and Cuba. Canada and Japan are sending protective gear and mobile laboratories. Nonprofit organizations such as the Gates Foundation also are contributing. But it’s not at all clear that this belated muscular response will be enough to quell the epidemic before it takes tens of thousands of lives.”

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2. The Dallas hospital is blaming a flaw in the new electronic medical records for errors involving patient zero.

From CNSNews  “When a sick Liberian man walked into Texas Presbyterian Hospital last month, “Protocols were followed by both the physician and the nurses,” the hospital said in a statement released Thursday night.

The man told a nurse he had come from West Africa, where an Ebola epidemic is raging.

“However, we have identified a flaw in the way the physician and nursing portions of our electronic health records (EHR) interacted in this specific case.”

The hospital said its electronic health records include “separate physician and nursing workflows.” The hospital said the Liberian man’s travel history was located in the nurses’ portion of the EHR, but — “As designed, the travel history would not automatically appear in the physician’s standard workflow.”

“As result of this discovery, Texas Health Dallas has relocated the travel history documentation to a portion of the EHR that is part of both workflows. It also has been modified to specifically reference Ebola-endemic regions in Africa.”

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3. Yes please!

From TheWashingtonTimes  “Attorney General Eric Holder should be held in contempt of court for refusing to release “Fast and Furious” documents in line with a judge’s order — and even given jail time if necessary, lawmakers said.

Members of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee requested U.S. District Court Judge Amy Berman Jackson to fine Mr. Holder if he doesn’t comply with her own order issued back in August — the one where she said he couldn’t claim executive privilege to keep private certain documents related to the federal gun-running program, “Operation Fast and Furious,” Politico reported.

Mr. Holder was supposed to turn over the documents by Oct. 1. The attorney general has not — but instead, announced his resignation from office.

Lawyers for the lawmakers say the time has come when the judge should consider imposing fines on Mr. Holder, or even throwing him in jail.

“Should the Court determine that the Attorney General has violated that Order, the Court should impose on the Attorney General an appropriate penalty to coerce his compliance with the August 20 Order, including an escalating daily monetary fine against Eric H. Holder Jr., to be paid by Mr. Holder out of his personal assets, converting to incarceration if the payment of daily monetary fines does not produce compliance within a reasonable period of time,” House Counsel Kerry Kircher and other lawyers wrote in the filing, Politico reported.”

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4. Kick ineligible illegal immigrants off the exchange, get sued for violating their supposed rights. Don’t worry, I’m sure the DoJ has a settlement plan already in the pipeline.

From TheDailyCaller  “Two immigration groups have filed legal complaints against the Obama administration for kicking over one hundred thousand Obamacare customers off their insurance plans without sending notices in their native language, Modern Healthcare reports.

The Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights (ICIRR) and Philadelphia’s Southeast Asian Mutual Assistance Associations Coalition (SEAMACC) have both filed complaints with Health and Human Services’ Office of Civil Rights. The groups believe the Obama administration’s move to end the health plans of customers who failed to prove their legal immigration or citizenship status violate customers’ rights as immigrants.

The Obama administration terminated 115,000 customers’ Obamacare exchange health insurance on September 30, after customers failed to submit required documentation to prove their legal status in the U.S. 

The administration said it first reached out to each customer between eight and ten times through mail, phone and e-mail in an attempt to get them to update their documents on HealthCare.gov before finally kicking them off their plans.”

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5. The real war on women.

From CNSNews  “A record 55,553,000 women 16 years and older did not participate in the labor force in September, according to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). This means that 55,553,000 women in the United States did not have a job and did not actively seek one in the past four weeks.

The number of women not in the labor force increased from 55,345,000 in August to 55,553,000 in September, an increase of 208,000.

The participation rate for women also dipped in September to 56.7 percent; it has not been this low since September of 1988 when it was 56.6 percent. This means that only 56.7 percent of women participated in the labor force by either having a job during the month or actively seeking one.”

But thanks to the Obama admin’s fuzzy math, the unemployment rate for women dropped anyway.

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6. Some good news.

From MSN  “Nearly two-thirds of the abortion clinics remaining in Texas must close immediately after a federal appeals court ruled Thursday that the state may enforce a law that requires those facilities to be built to the same standards as hospitals.

That law — part of an omnibus bill with several measures that chip away at women’s access to abortion — was struck down in late August as unconstitutional by an Austin federal judge, who put it on hold while the state appeals.

But on Thursday, a three-judge panel of the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans tossed out U.S. District Court Judge Lee Yeakel’s August injunction, which allowed the estimated 20 abortion clinics in Texas to continue operating during the appeals process. Without that injunction, only seven clinics will be left.

In its ruling, the 5th Circuit said the “central” question it considered was “whether the state has shown a likelihood of success” in fighting Yeakel’s ruling “regarding whether the ambulatory surgical center provision is unconstitutional. We conclude that it has.”

The Center for Reproductive Rights, which sued the state on behalf of a coalition of abortion clinics, said that Thursday’s decision will force nearly 1 million Texas women of reproductive age to drive a minimum of 300 miles round trip “to access their constitutional right to an abortion.”

Oh, the horror…. 🙄

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by

News/Politics 10-3-14

What’s interesting in the news today?

1. You’re right Mr. President. Now let’s hope people vote accordingly. 🙂

From TheWashingtonPost  “President Obama was at Northwestern University on Thursday to deliver an economic speech that, he and his team hoped, would lay out the case for why the public is better off today than they were six years ago — even if they didn’t feel it in their everday lives. Instead, Obama just gave every Republican ad-maker in the country more fodder for negative ads linking Democratic candidates to him.

Here are the four sentences that will draw all of the attention (they come more than two thirds of the way through the speech): “I am not on the ballot this fall.  Michelle’s pretty happy about that.  But make no mistake: these policies are on the ballot.  Every single one of them.” Boil those four sentences down even further and here’s what you are left with: “Make no mistake: these policies are on the ballot.  Every single one of them.”

You can imagine Sen. Mark Pryor of Arkansas or Sen. Kay Hagan in North Carolina or Alison Lundergan Grimes in Kentucky grimacing when they heard those 28 words. That trio has spent much of the campaign insisting that this election is NOT about Barack Obama, that it is instead about a choice between themselves and their opponents.”

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2. Some folks ain’t gonna like this.

From MSN  “The Justice Department is not expected to bring civil rights charges against George Zimmerman in the 2012 shooting death of Trayvon Martin, according to three law enforcement officials, despite allegations that the killing was racially motivated.

The federal investigation of Zimmerman was opened two years ago by the department’s civil rights division, but officials said there is insufficient evidence to bring federal charges. The investigation technically remains open, but it is all but certain the department will close it.

Investigators still want to “dot their i’s and cross their t’s,” said one official, who like others spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to comment on the matter.”

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3. So what are they hiding? My guess is that it’s easy to game, and Democrats don’t want people to know it until they’re able to exploit it first.

From McClatchy  ”  A nonprofit watchdog group is suing an obscure Defense Department unit over its failure for three years to disclose the results of testing on the security safeguards of Internet voting systems that are increasingly being used to cast absentee ballots.

The Pentagon unit, the Federal Voting Assistance Program, has effectively bankrolled many states’ shift to online voting, disbursing tens of millions of dollars in grants for the purchase of equipment that includes Internet balloting options.

Its actions have drawn consternation from cyber experts, who have warned for years that Internet voting is an easy target for hackers who could tamper with or even fix election results. The government’s premier technology testing agency also has refused to endorse these systems.

Now, on the eve of another federal election in which at least 31 states plan to use some form of online voting, the Electronic Privacy Information Center is pressing a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit demanding disclosure of the test results so it can disseminate the information nationwide.”

 

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4. I don’t even know where to start with this one. 🙄

From TheChicagoTribune  “A white Ohio woman is suing a Downers Grove-based sperm bank, alleging that the company mistakenly gave her vials from an African-American donor, a fact that she said has made it difficult for her and her same-sex partner to raise their now 2-year-old daughter in an all-white community.

Jennifer Cramblett, of Uniontown, Ohio, alleges in the lawsuit filed Monday in Cook County Circuit Court that Midwest Sperm Bank sent her the vials of an African-American donor’s sperm in September 2011 instead of those of a white donor that she and her white partner had ordered.”

“Cramblett is suing Midwest Sperm Bank for wrongful birth and breach of warranty, citing the emotional and economic losses she has suffered.”

“Raising a mixed-race daughter has been stressful in Cramblett and Zinkon’s small, all-white community, according to the suit. Cramblett was raised around people with stereotypical attitudes about nonwhites, the lawsuit states, and did not know African-Americans until she attended college at the University of Akron.

“Because of this background and upbringing, Jennifer acknowledges her limited cultural competency relative to African-Americans and steep learning curve, particularly in small, homogenous Uniontown, which she regards as too racially intolerant,” the lawsuit states. Part of that learning curve has included getting her daughter’s hair cut, which according to the suit requires Cramblett to travel to a black neighborhood, “where she is obviously different in appearance, and not overtly welcome.”

How bigoted and intolerant of her.

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5. Can these numbers be accurate? I’d like to read the survey questions and wording. Seems awfully high.

From MSN  “About 10 percent of female University of Oregon students surveyed have been raped while attending the school and the vast majority of those sexual assault cases were never reported to campus officials, school researchers found.

The findings come after the school faced criticism over its handling of an alleged rape involving three basketball players that preceded the resignation of former university president Michael Gottfredson.

University researchers said 35 percent of students – and 14 percent of men – had at least one forcible sexual encounter and about 90 percent of students assaulted never told of the violence.

“We think it’s terrible,” said interim president and provost of the school Scott Coltrane.

He said the findings “reflect the incidence rates that we’re hearing from across the country, so that is not a surprise, but there are pieces there that are alarming,” chiefly the low number of students who report the crimes.”

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by

News/Politics 10-1-14

What’s interesting in the news today?

1. Yesterday the President blamed others, mostly the intel community, for his not noticing the rise of ISIS. His friends in the media had some excuses too. Eugene Robinson says there’s just too much info for one President to handle.

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But I think it has more to do with the fact that he’s missed over half his daily briefings.

From Breitbart  “A new Government Accountability Institute (GAI) report reveals that President Barack Obama has attended only 42.1% of his daily intelligence briefings (known officially as the Presidential Daily Brief, or PDB) in the 2,079 days of his presidency through September 29, 2014.

The GAI report also included a breakdown of Obama’s PDB attendance record between terms; he attended 42.4% of his PDBs in his first term and 41.3% in his second.

The GAI’s alarming findings come on the heels of Obama’s 60 Minutes comments on Sunday, wherein the president laid the blame for the Islamic State’s (ISIS) rapid rise squarely at the feet of his Director of National Intelligence James Clapper.”

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There’s no accountability with this guy. He was warned by others repeatedly as well.

From TheFreeBeacon  “Top government officials and military brass repeatedly warned of the consequences of sticking to a timetable on full Iraq War troop withdrawal, but President Obama proceeded with the plan in 2011 anyway.

U.S. Ambassador to Iraq Ryan Crocker cautioned against such a move in the years beforehand.

“I am certain that abandoning or drastically curtailing our efforts will bring failure,” he said in 2007. “An Iraq that falls into chaos or civil war will mean massive human suffering, well beyond what has already occurred within Iraq’s borders.””

“The Daily Beast quoted one former Pentagon official saying, “Either the president doesn’t read the intelligence he’s getting or he’s bull&%@%%&@#.”

Obama has already tried to rewrite history in the ongoing Iraq debacle by trying to pass responsibility for full troop withdrawal to the Bush administration.”

The buck always stops somewhere else.

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2. Obama’s pass the buck presidency.

From NationalJournal  ”  In attempting to downplay the political damage from a slew of second-term controversies, President Obama has counted on the American people having a very short memory span and a healthy suspension of disbelief. The time-tested strategy for Obama: Claim he’s in the dark about his own administration’s activities, blame the mess on subordinates, and hope that with the passage of time, all will be forgotten. Harry Truman, the president isn’t. He’s more likely to pass the buck.

His latest eyebrow-raiser came on 60 Minutes on Sunday, when the president blamed the failure to anticipate the rise of ISIS on his intelligence community for not informing him of the growing threat. “I think our head of the intelligence community, Jim Clapper, has acknowledged that I think they underestimated what had been taking place in Syria,” Obama said. Most early news reports dutifully pinned the blame on the intelligence agencies, with the president escaping any further scrutiny.”

“The elements of the administration’s blame, deny, and wait-it-out communications strategy has been front and center amid all the recent controversies. When the administration badly botched the launch of the health care exchange website, Obama said he was “not informed directly that the website would not be working the way it was supposed to.” This, for his signature achievement in office. Blame was later pinned on Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, who left the administration in April.

When officials at the Internal Revenue Service improperly targeted conservative outside groups for scrutiny, Obama first feigned outrage, saying he had “no patience for” the misconduct. But months later, as the public’s anger subsided, Obama said there “wasn’t even a smidgen of corruption” at the agency, and the administration has done little to hold anyone accountable since.”

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3. I feel safer already. After all, Obama’s told us repeatedly that religion plays no part in recent terror attacks all over the world, including Oklahoma. 🙄

From FoxNews  “The Justice Department is set to announce broad restrictions on racial and religious profiling in federal investigations, including those involving matters of national security.

The expected ban comes amid heightened concerns of Islamic militant groups executing a terror attack on U.S. soil and was reportedly opposed by national security officials.

A Justice Department official told Fox News on Monday that outgoing Attorney General Eric Holder will announce the policy change in the coming weeks and that it will also put an end to profiling based on ethnicity and sexual orientation.

Holder intended to announce the policy change several months ago, but the White House ordered a last-minute hold so the Department of Homeland Security could review the national security implications, a congressional aide told The Los Angeles Times, which on Saturday first reported the story.

The new policy will add to long-standing bans on racial profiling and extend them for the first time to national-security probes.”

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4. Northeast liberals losing House seats is a good thing.

From TheWashingtonExaminer  “The Northeast, once the nation’s political engine that produced presidents, House speakers and Senate giants including the late Edward M. Kennedy, is losing clout in Washington as citizens flee the high-tax region, according to experts worried about the trend.

The Census Bureau reports that population growth has shifted to the South and the result is that the 11 states that make up the Northeast are being bled dry of representation in Washington.

Critics blame rising taxes in states such as Massachusetts and Connecticut for limiting population growth in the Northeast to just 15 percent from 1983 to 2013, while the rest of the nation grew more than 41 percent.

The biggest impact comes in the loss of congressional representation.”

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5. I wonder why this isn’t bigger news? OK, not really.

From HotAir  “We haven’t heard anything on the debacle at the Veterans Administration in a while, but it’s refreshing to see that when it made it back into the news it was for something good. Three of the original whistle blowers at the Phoenix VA medical center have been granted an undisclosed settlement for the retaliation they suffered for speaking out about abuse in the system.

The Department of Veterans Affairs has come to terms with three Phoenix whistle-blowers who filed retaliation complaints after helping expose mismanagement and health-care breakdowns in the Phoenix VA medical center.

The trio — Dr. Katherine Mitchell, Paula Pedene and Damian Reese — accepted mostly confidential settlements for demotions and harassment they suffered at the hands of VA administrators after exposing delays in patient care, fraudulent wait-time data, bullying and other misconduct.”

But once again, no accountability for anyone involved. Nobody pays for their actions, except the taxpayers paying the bills and judgments.

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by

News/Politics 9-30-14

What’s interesting in the news today?

1. Under the bus with ’em!

Shockingly, Obama once again blames others for his administration’s shortcomings.

The buck stops….. somewhere else.

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2. Just like with the Ft. Hood shootings, the Obama admin refuses to admit the obvious.

From HotAir  “It’s becoming a disturbing trend.

For months, Ali Muhammad Brown, a man described as a devout Muslim convert, engaged in what prosecutors allege was a “bloody crusade” aimed at avenging the deaths of Muslims killed by American soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan. From Seattle, Washington to West Orange, New Jersey, Brown left four bodies in his wake. But the national press refused to report on his case until weeks after he was indicted. Almost none outside local media outlets in Seattle noted that Brown had intentionally targeted gay men is his campaign of vengeance.

A Seattle-based Fox affiliate called Brown a “radical jihadist,” but few other press outlets followed their lead. Perhaps because Brown was not receiving coded transmissions from Pakistani handlers, some apparently determined that his actions should not be considered terrorism. One has to wonder whether the members of Seattle’s gay community who use the social media app Brown utilized to target his victims felt terrorized. Whether we call it terrorism or not, the effect of Brown’s spree was to instill fear and to force those who survived his attacks to rethink their routines.

This familiar pattern is happening again, now in Oklahoma City. On Friday, what was reportedly a disgruntled former employee of a food processing facility decided to take his frustrations out on his coworkers. He killed one, according to initial reports, and wounded another before being incapacitated by the gun-carrying company’s owner.

But as more details emerged, the more an ominous pattern began to emerge. Some have begun to determine that they are again being lied to in service to the ignoble mission of defining terrorism down.”

And once again they’ll insist that Islam played no role in it.

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3. Is locking parents up for non-payment of child support a modern-day debtors prison? And is there a better way to do things that benefits all parties?

From TheWashingtonPost  “Dwayne Ferebee, 36, father of four, has been sent to jail four times over the past 12 years on civil contempt charges for failure to pay his court-ordered child support. The first two times, he spent a couple months behind bars until his mom came up with the $3,000 the judge told him he had to pay. The third go-around, he stayed in jail six of the maximum 12-month sentence before he could scrape together the money. The fourth, he had to wait until his fiancée received her tax refund. All told, he spent about a year locked up.

Ferebee, a high school dropout,  had a series of run-in with the law and ended up with a felony. You know the formula by now. Lack of education plus felony record equals poverty. Unless you can work two jobs. Which child support enforcement and the court told him to do. “And when am I supposed to see my kids?” he asked.

“All I was saying was, ‘Give me an opportunity instead of throwing me in jail because that just puts me further behind in child support,’” Ferebee says. “Let me find work so I can earn money.’”

A slow-moving but seismic shift is taking hold in Virginia’s child support enforcement community of judges and lawyers and case managers. That shift, still underway, has seen the rise of new partnerships between child support enforcement, the courts, social service agencies and fatherhood programs seeking to figure out what’s keeping parents from paying the child support they owe. And then — this is the seismic part — helping those parents  address their issues instead of locking them up. The state’s Intensive Case Monitoring Program joins a national movement nearly a decade in the making in which problem-solving measures in child support enforcement have been replacing punitive ones.

As they say in child support, there is a difference between deadbeat and dead-broke, and discerning it is key. Civil contempt is meant to coerce a parent to pay and get out of jail, says Craig Burshem, the director of Virginia’s Department of Social Services Division of Child Support Enforcement. “It’s not meant to be a debtor’s prison.”

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4. And school taxes will rise everywhere because of it.

From TheAP  “American schools are scrambling to provide services to the large number of children and teenagers who crossed the border alone in recent months.

Unaccompanied minors who made up the summer spike at the border have moved to communities of all sizes, in nearly every state, Federal data indicates, to live with a relative and await immigration decisions. The Supreme Court has ruled that schools have an obligation to educate all students regardless of their immigration status, so schools have become a safe haven for many of the tens of thousands of these young people mostly from central America living in limbo.

Delaware’s rural Sussex County has long attracted immigrants, partly because of work in chicken factories, and soybean and corn fields. The district’s population is more than one-quarter Hispanic, and for years has offered an early learning program for non-English speakers.

Still, officials were caught off guard by about 70 new students mostly from Guatemala – part of the wave crossing the border – enrolling last year, mostly at Sussex Central High School. The Indian River School District over the summer break quickly put together special classes for those needing extra English help.”

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5. Weak oversight on Wall St.? Not shocking.

From TheNYPost  “Wall Street is about to be rocked by secretly recorded audio tapes that purport to show a too-cozy relationship between the New York Federal Reserve Bank and the financial institutions it is supposed to regulate.

The 45 hours of tapes, made by Carmen Segarra, a former NY Fed worker, capture former co-workers, whose job was to keep banks like Goldman Sachs in line, instead deferring to the banks, being unwilling to take action and being extremely passive, according to public radio’s “This American Life,” and ProPublica which obtained the tapes and is scheduled to air a program about the matter Friday night.

Segarra, ironically, was hired by the NY Fed in October 2011 to help toughen up their oversight. She was fired in 2013 after, she claims in a lawsuit, she tried to get Goldman to toe the line on regulations.”

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by

News/Politics 9-26-14

What’s interesting in the news today?

1. Is Obama misleading the public? Well that depends on what the definition of “is” is.

From TheGuardian  “Want to decipher what the US military is really doing in Iraq and Syria, or figure out whether its regional war against the Islamic State (Isis) is legal? Good luck. The Obama administration’s secret efforts to redefine the ordinary meaning of key legal terms and phrases has made that near impossible.

For instance, in his Tuesday statement that US airstrikes that have expanded into Syria, Obama studiously avoided any discussion about his domestic legal authority to conduct these strikes. That dirty work was apparently left up to anonymous White House officials, who told the New York Times’s Charlie Savage that both the Authorization of Use of Military Force (AUMF) from 2001 (meant for al-Qaida) and the 2002 war resolution (meant for Saddam Hussein’s Iraq) gave the government the authority to strike Isis in Syria.

In other words: the legal authority provided to the White House to strike al-Qaida and invade Iraq more than a dozen years ago now means that the US can wage war against a terrorist organization that’s decidedly not al-Qaida, in a country that is definitely not Iraq.”

“As the New York Times’s Mark Landler detailed over the weekend, White House has “an extremely narrow definition of combat … a definition rejected by virtually every military expert.” According to the Obama administration, the 1600 “military advisers” that have steadily been flowing in Iraq fall outside this definition, despite the fact that “military advisers” can be: embedded with Iraqi troops; carry weapons; fire their weapons if fired upon; and call in airstrikes. In the bizarro dictionary of war employed by this White House, none of that qualifies as “combat”.

So when you hear the words “imminent attack”, “civilians”, militants” or “ground troops” from now on, be careful: if the government says they’re not misleading you, it might only be because they’ve secretly changed the definition of “misleading”.”

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2. Sure, what could possibly go wrong?

From Breitbart  “The FBI has been handcuffed in terms of investigating religious extremists in mosques, as a result of guidelines put out by the attorney general earlier this year. And so therefore, there is… a definite problem now in investigating those militants in the United States who are either recruiting for ISIS or have returned from Syria or Iraq having fought for ISIS, and are ready to carry out freelance or directed terrorist attacks on behalf of ISIS against the United States…

The Department of Justice [which] put out guidelines that restricted the FBI and other law enforcement agencies from using religious factors in identifying threats, national security threats to the United States in the homeland.

…we’re seeing ISIS recruiting biophysicists, engineers, social media types, people who have expertise in really carrying out sophisticated terrorist attacks coming back to the United States.

There’s one recruiter that [had been]… picked up [in the past], well identified, in Bloomington, Minnesota at the Al Farooq Mosque. There are recruiters going around the country in other mosques, where they identify potential volunteers. They test them out to see if they’re willing to die on behalf of martyrdom of the cause for Allah. Then they give them cash, they provide money for their families in case they die. They give them tickets to go to Turkey. Turkey has allowed them, hundreds, to go through to Syria, then to Iraq. And we [the U.S.] count Turkey as one of our top allies. We haven’t put [many of] them on the terrorism watch list, which we should. So there’s a major disconnect, Judge, here between what we should be doing to protect the homeland and protect American citizens.”

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3. While I understand and support the idea of the church helping the downtrodden, the poor, and others, I still don’t think they should be helping people break and flaunt this country’s laws.

From TheWashingtonTimes  “A network of two dozen churches has promised to offer “physical sanctuary” to illegal immigrants facing deportation, saying they want to create a safe haven that federal officials won’t invade as a way of preventing the migrants from being kicked out of the country.

The movement is the latest effort by activists trying to stop as many deportations as possible after failing to win relief from President Obama, who earlier this month temporarily shelved his plans to expand his nondeportation policies, angering Hispanics and immigrant advocates.”

“Dubbed Sanctuary 2014, the movement consists of 24 churches in 12 cities scattered across the country that have vowed to open their doors to holding illegal immigrants facing deportation. They said they have four active sanctuary cases.”

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4. Not shocking. In fact, completely expected and predicted..

From TheAP  “Tens of thousands of young families caught crossing the border illegally earlier this year subsequently failed to meet with federal immigration agents, as they were instructed, the Homeland Security Department has acknowledged privately.

An official with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement revealed that about 70 percent of immigrant families the Obama administration had released into the U.S. never showed up weeks later for follow up appointments.

The ICE official made the disclosure in a confidential meeting at its Washington headquarters with immigration advocates participating in a federal working group on detention and enforcement policies. The Associated Press obtained an audio recording of Wednesday’s meeting and separately interviewed participants.

On the recording obtained by the AP, the government did not specify the total number of families released into the U.S. since October. Since only a few hundred families have already been returned to their home countries and limited U.S. detention facilities can house only about 1,200 family members, the 70 percent figure suggests the government released roughly 41,000 members of immigrant families who subsequently failed to appear at federal immigration offices.

The official, who was not identified by name on the recording obtained by the AP, also said final deportation had been ordered for at least 860 people traveling in families caught at the border since May but only 14 people had reported as ordered.”

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5. Last night was the final home game in Yankee Stadium for the Captain, Derek Jeter. I’ve been watching him for his entire career and there has been no one who played the game better. And he ends it as he’s done many times before, in dramatic fashion. I’m gonna miss him.

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News/Politics 9-25-14

What’s interesting in the news today?

1. My guess would be Obama donors and ACORN like “Navigator” groups.

From TheHill  “The Obama administration has spent at least $3.7 billion to build and promote online marketplaces under the Affordable Care Act, but it can’t prove exactly where it all went, according to an audit released Monday. 

Federal investigators said the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) does not properly track certain data that public officials need in order to determine whether the healthcare law is working. 

The government tracks its healthcare spending in an outdated records system that cannot easily respond to data requests such as salaries or public relations contracts in certain departments. Instead, officials rely on manually prepared spreadsheets that can take months to produce. 

Out of that data, “we were not able to determine the reliability of most of the information,” according to the report by the independent Government Accountability Office (GAO). 

“CMS’s processes are inconsistent with certain federal accounting and internal control standards,” the report states. To improve the system, the GAO recommends that CMS staff create new procedures to provide more timely and reliable information to the public. “Particularly for programs subject to a significant degree of public and congressional scrutiny,” the GAO reports. “

That would be the same CMS that’s run by an Obama donor that totally blew the website launch.

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2. Yes, these are the same “moderates” that Obama just gave missiles and weapons to.

From TheLATimes  “In Iraq, Washington at least has the support of allies on the ground, including the army, affiliated Shiite Muslim militias and the spirited if ill-equipped Kurdish peshmerga force, not to mention a functional government to work with.

In Syria, however, the U.S. has no reliable on-the-ground partner, only disparate “moderate” rebels who have steadily lost territory to Islamist militants.”

“It’s not yet clear whether Washington’s purported allies in Syria are completely on board with the U.S. offensive against Islamic State. One of the administration’s favored moderate rebel factions, Harakat Hazm, part of the Free Syrian Army alliance and a recipient of U.S. missiles and training, issued a statement Tuesday denouncing the “external intervention” — that is, the U.S.-led bombing campaign in Syria — as “an attack on the revolution.”

The group said its main goal was toppling Assad. It is demanding “unconditional arming” of the Free Syrian Army, yet its members also acknowledge fighting alongside Al Nusra Front, the official Al Qaeda force in Syria.”

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3. The deafening silence of the anti-war left.

From HotAir  “The tragic lamentations howled by the septuagenarians who make up the remnants of Code Pink may never fully dissipate, but the majority of the once ascendant anti-war left seems to have dissolved.

And why wouldn’t they? Theirs was a movement which once bestrode the political and media complex with unmatched influence. The movement culminated in the toppling of Hillary Clinton as the likely Democratic nominee and the election of Barack Obama, the anti-war candidate, to the White House in 2008.

Just six short years later, it is Barack Obama who is deploying the American war machine in a preemptive engagement against Islamist threats in the Middle East. A president who twice campaigned on policies disengagement and retrenchment from the Middle East has utterly abandoned his own stated policy preferences. The sense of hopelessness among anti-war liberals is palpable.

The Washington Post’s Dana Milbank recently made the trek to a rather sad anti-war protest outside the White House that was attended by a meager 22 true believers.

“It was the latest display of how Obama has neutralized the left,” Milbank observed.”

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4. Silly reporters, you should have thought of that before you became his personal lap-dogs. Now you act shocked that only White House approved propaganda is allowed? 🙄 

From TheWashingtonPost  “White House press-pool reports are supposed to be the news media’s eyes and ears on the president, an independent chronicle of his public activities. They are written by reporters for other reporters, who incorporate them into news articles about President Obama almost every day.

Sometimes, however, the White House plays an unseen role in shaping the story.

Journalists who cover the White House say Obama’s press aides have demanded — and received — changes in press-pool reports before the reports have been disseminated to other journalists. They say the White House has used its unusual role as the distributor of the reports as leverage to steer coverage in a more favorable direction.

The disputed episodes involve mostly trivial issues and minor matters of fact. But that the White House has become involved at all represents a troubling trend for journalists and has prompted their main representative, the White House Correspondents’ Association, to consider revising its approach to pool reporting.”

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5. Your tax dollars at work……. watching porn.

 From CapitolCityProject  “Months after it was discovered an Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) employee was watching porn on the job, a new report shows they have yet to be fired and are still on the government payroll.

During a House hearing back in May, it was brought forth that a senior-level EPA employee had been watching between two and six hours of porn per day on their government issued computer. This wasn’t just a one time deal either, it dated all the way back to 2010 and the employee downloaded over 7,000 pornographic files.”

“How much pornography would it take for an EPA employee to lose their job?” Oversight and Government Reform Chairman Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) asked at the hearing.

Apparently more than two to six hours per day for years on end. The EPA has yet to fire the employee and they are still collecting their hefty government pay while on administrative leave, admitted EPA spokeswoman Liz Purchia. The name of the employee is not known as it has been withheld by investigators and the agency.”

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6. Atheists and the political left will not like this.

From HotAir  “This seems counterintuitive in an environment where many secularists believe that “separation of church and state” is a quote from the Constitution, but Pew’s results make sense when considering the broader context of American public life. In the same survey that found the general public split on whether businesses should be forced to participate in same-sex marriages, Pew also finds that Americans want more faith-based input on political matters:

Nearly three-quarters of the public (72%) now thinks religion is losing influence in American life, up 5 percentage points from 2010 to the highest level in Pew Research polling over the past decade. And most people who say religion’s influence is waning see this as a bad thing.

Perhaps as a consequence, a growing share of the American public wants religion to play a role in U.S. politics. The share of Americans who say churches and other houses of worship should express their views on social and political issues is up 6 points since the 2010 midterm elections (from 43% to 49%). The share who say there has been “too little” expression of religious faith and prayer from political leaders is up modestly over the same period (from 37% to 41%). And a growing minority of Americans (32%) think churches should endorse candidates for political office, though most continue to oppose such direct involvement by churches in electoral politics.”

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by

News/Politics 9-24-14

What’s interesting in the news today?

1. So the DoJ thinks it’s racist to ask for ID to vote, but when they ask for it here it’s not? 🙄

What about all those poor disenfranchised masses without ID? How racist. 🙂

From BizPacReview  “After Ferguson, Mo., issued a press release promoting five town hall meetings to address concerns of the community, the Department of Justice informed the city that no media or non-residents would be allowed to attend.

“This was not and never was a decision made by the City and it will be up to DOJ to enforce it if that is their policy,” Ferguson spokesman Devin James wrote in an email to the St. Louis Post Dispatch. “The City simply wants to do what’s in the best interest of residents so they can have the opportunity to have meaningful dialogue.”

The meetings are being conducted by the Department of Justice’s Community Relations Service, which generally handles conflict resolution, but it is “required by law to conduct its activities in confidence and without publicity.””

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2. Weeks of strikes and little progress.

From  TheNYTimes  “After six weeks of American airstrikes, the Iraqi government’s forces have scarcely budged the Sunni extremists of the Islamic State from their hold on more than a quarter of the country, in part because many critical Sunni tribes remain on the sidelines.

Although the airstrikes appear to have stopped the extremists’ march toward Baghdad, the Islamic State is still dealing humiliating blows to the Iraqi Army. On Monday, the government acknowledged that it had lost control of the small town of Sichar and lost contact with several hundred of its soldiers who had been besieged for nearly a week at a camp north of the Islamic State stronghold of Falluja, in Anbar Province.

By midday, there were reports that hundreds of soldiers had been killed there in battle or mass executions. Ali Bedairi, a lawmaker from the governing alliance, said more than 300 soldiers had died after the loss of the base, Camp Saqlawiya. The prime minister ordered the arrest of the responsible officers, although a military spokesman put the death toll at just 40 and said 68 were missing.”

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3. Darn those evil Republicans trying to buy elections. Oh wait…….

From Politico  “Democrats love to cast Republicans as the party of big money, beholden to the out-of-touch billionaires bankrolling their campaigns.

But new numbers tell a very different story — one in which Democrats are actually raising more big money than their adversaries.

Among the groups reporting the biggest political ad spending, the 15 top Democrat-aligned committees have outraised the 15 top Republican ones $453 million to $289 million in the 2014 cycle, according to a POLITICO analysis of the most recent Federal Election Commission reports, including those filed over the weekend — which cover through the end of last month.

The analysis shows the fundraising edge widening in August, when the Democratic groups pulled in more than twice as much as their GOP counterparts — $51 million to $21 million. That’s thanks to a spike in massive checks from increasingly energized labor unions and liberal billionaires like Tom Steyer and Fred Eychaner.”

So back in August while Harry Reid was ranting daily about the Koch brothers from the Senate floor. Told ya, Harry’s the King of Projecting.

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4. In case you missed it, there was a huge “Climate March” this week in NY. As you can imagine, the liberals/anarchists in attendance had some interesting ideas.

With a CONTENT WARNING!!!!! because they’re a foul-mouthed bunch.

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