Obama Quietly Institutes Mandatory HIV Testing

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Photo Credit: APWith almost no public notice, President Obama has issued an imperial decree executive order requiring universal HIV testing. Yasmeen Abutaleb of Reuters published a blandly-title dispatch, “Obama orders stepped up effort against U.S. HIV/AIDS epidemic” that takes seven paragraphs before getting to what should be the lead:

The new order follows recommendations this year from the U.S. Preventive Service Task Force that all 15 to 65 year olds be screened for HIV infection, something that will be covered under Obama’s signature heath reform, the Affordable Care Act.

If you’ve never engaged in receptive anal intercourse or shared a needle, the odds of you getting AIDS are very low, now that blood for transfusions is tested. Nevertheless, Kathleen Sebelius going to be coming up with a plan to order you to report for the blood draw the government will now require.

The order said a working group chaired by Grant Colfax, director of the Office of National AIDS Policy, and Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius would have 180 days to deliver recommendations to the president.

Read more from this story HERE.

Bombshell Drops in IRS Scandal: Obama’s IRS Chief Counsel Directly Involved (+video)

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Photo Credit: Getty ImagesBy Peggy Noonan. The IRS scandal was connected this week not just to the Washington office—that had been established—but to the office of the chief counsel.

That is a bombshell—such a big one that it managed to emerge in spite of an unfocused, frequently off-point congressional hearing in which some members seemed to have accidentally woken up in the middle of a committee room, some seemed unaware of the implications of what their investigators had uncovered, one pretended that the investigation should end if IRS workers couldn’t say the president had personally called and told them to harass his foes, and one seemed to be holding a filibuster on Pakistan.

Still, what landed was a bombshell. And Democrats know it. Which is why they are so desperate to make the investigation go away. They know, as Republicans do, that the chief counsel of the IRS is one of only two Obama political appointees in the entire agency…

Mr. Hull [a retired, 48-year veteran of the IRS] told House investigators that at some point in the winter of 2010-11, Ms. Lerner’s senior adviser, whose name is withheld in the publicly released partial interview transcript, told him the applications would require further review [by the IRS Chief Counsel]…

The IRS chief counsel is named William Wilkins. And again, he is one of only two Obama political appointees in the IRS. Read more from this story HERE.

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IRS Inspector Attacked by Democrats, Claims Liberals’ Treatment of IG is “Unprecedented”

By Fox News. The government watchdog who issued the report that found the IRS was targeting conservative groups was turned into a punching bag by Democrats in the second half of a tense hearing Thursday, leading Inspector General J. Russell George to chide lawmakers for their attacks on his office.

“This is unprecedented,” he said of his treatment before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee at the end of the hearing.

The first half of the hearing was devoted to testimony from IRS officials who claimed higher-ups in Washington, D.C., were involved in applying additional scrutiny to Tea Party and other groups. Read more from this story HERE.

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Rep. Chaffetz Lets Administration Have It Over Misleading Nation on IRS Scandal

“When you have the spokesman for the president of the United States make a definitive statement that it was two rogue agents, and start poking at these people who have no power to do anything about it, that is wrong,” Rep. Chaffetz stated during congressional hearings on the IRS scandal today.

Photographs of Bloodied Dzhokhar Tsarnaev Climbing Out of Boat Leaked; Police Photographer Suspended

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Dzhokhar Tsarnaev: dramatic new pictures of Boston suspect’s capture

By Ed Pilkington. He is standing with a bright red bead from a sniper’s laser trained directly in the middle of his forehead, his nose bloodied and his blood-stained hand raised in apparent surrender. Around him are the shredded shrouds of the boat in which he made his last stand.

According to the photographer who took the haunting picture, this is the real face of terrorism, not the “glamourised” image of the surviving suspect of the Boston marathon bombings, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, that appears on the cover of next month’s Rolling Stone magazine. The photograph was taken by Sergeant Sean Murphy, a tactical photographer with the Massachusetts state police, who accompanied Swat teams as they apprehended Tsarnaev in Watertown in April following one of the largest manhunts in US history.

Murphy released a sequence of his official pictures to Boston magazine as an expression of his anger towards Rolling Stone’s depiction of the bombing suspect. The release was unauthorised and Murphy was relieved of his duties on Thursday night, pending an investigation.

The move adds to the billowing controversy surrounding Rolling Stone‘s choice of cover image that has Tsarnaev staring straight out at the reader, his dark curls framing his face above the headline ‘The Bomber’. Read more from this story HERE.

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Bloodied and bruised at the moment of surrender: Dramatic new pictures emerge of the moment ‘Boston bomber’ climbed from the boat where he had been hiding as a sniper took aim at his head

By David McCormack, James Nye and Helen Pow. Dramatic new images have been released showing alleged Boston bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev bruised and bloodied with his hands in the air as he emerges from his final hiding place.

Cornered by police, the photos show the 19-year-old in a blood-splattered black jumper, with hands stained red and a sniper’s laser aimed directly at his forehead.

The sobering pictures were released by Sergeant Sean Murphy, a tactical photographer with the Massachusetts state police, in a bid to show the real face of terrorism in reaction to the ‘glamorized‘ image of Tsarnaev that graces the cover of Rolling Stone magazine’s controversial new issue.

The officer has now been suspended over his decision to leak the photos, and will find out next week whether or not he will be allowed to keep his job.

Murphy accompanied the Swat teams as they descended on a boat in the backyard of a Watertown home, where Tsarnaev sought refuge following one of the biggest manhunts in U.S. history. Read more from this story HERE.

Jim DeMint Back at War With RINO’s

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Photo Credit: John ShinkleJim DeMint’s at war with Republicans — again.

The tea party firebrand who made his mark in GOP primary races across the country is now at the helm of the Heritage Foundation where its political arm is doing the same thing: holding conservatives’ feet to the fire.

DeMint only joined the group earlier this year, but already Heritage’s political arm has had some early fights out of the gate that have Republican leaders both angry and frustrated – feeling like DeMint is diminishing one of the party’s most powerful intellectual engines by turning it into a group taking cheap shots at Republicans.

The tensions have spilled into the open. Heritage urged members to vote against the farm bill – dealing an embarrassing loss to Speaker John Boehner – then even urged a “no” vote on the bill that stripped out food stamps and other provisions, even though Heritage had urged House leadership to strip them out.

And in the House, the tensions are so raw that House Republicans are beginning to protest including staffers from the three-year-old political arm, Heritage Action, in weekly meetings the Heritage Foundation has hosted for decades for conservative lawmakers.

Read more from this story HERE.

Feds Moving Toward Prosecution, Order State of Florida to ‘Hold’ Zimmerman’s Gun

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Photo Credit: APBy DAVID MARTOSKO. The U.S. Department of Justice, overseen by Attorney General Eric Holder, has ordered the Sanford, Florida police department to keep possession of all the evidence from George Zimmerman’s second-degree murder trial – including the exonerated neighborhood watch volunteer’s gun.

Sanford police confirmed on Thursday that the DOJ asked the agency not to return any pieces of evidence to their owners. Zimmerman was expected to get his firearm back by month’s end.

The development is a sign that the criminal section of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division is seriously investigating Zimmerman to determine if federal civil rights charges should be filed.

Zimmerman was acquitted of murder and manslaughter on Sunday in a Florida courtroom, but civil rights violations provide an exception to the U.S. Constitution’s protection against double jeopardy after a defendant has been found ‘not guilty’ in a state or local jurisdiction.

That’s because if Zimmerman were tried in federal court, he would be charged with violating Trayvon Martin’s civil rights, not causing his death.

Read more from this story HERE.

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Photo Credit: Fox NewsFed’s Expand Fishing Expedition to Find Any History of Racism in Zimmerman’s Past

By FOX NEWS. Amid pressure from the NAACP and several Democratic lawmakers to pursue Zimmerman, the department expanded its probe Wednesday by setting up a public email address asking for any tips or information regarding the case.

The department also held a conference call with civil rights leaders on Monday.

The conference call included DOJ officials, along with representatives from the FBI and federal prosecutors. They spoke to civil rights leaders from Sanford, Fla., as well as others from around the country.

The call was convened by Tom Perez, assistant attorney general for the Civil Rights Division.

A Justice official told Fox News that both the conference call and the email address asking for tips and information are fairly standard procedure when dealing with a high-profile investigation such as this one. The department has used such tip lines in the past, including in a probe last year of the Albuquerque, N.M., police department. Read more from this story HERE.

McCain: I Don’t Know How Many Passports the Amnesty Bill Lets Illegal Aliens Forge

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Photo Credit: APSenator John McCain (R-Ariz.), a member of the “Gang of Eight” that helped write and pass the immigration reform bill in that chamber, said he did not know how many passports a person could forge under the proposed law before being charged with a crime.

On Capitol Hill on Wednesday, CNSNews.com asked McCain, “Senator McCain, can I ask you a question about the Senate immigration bill? Under the bill, how many passports can someone forge before it becomes a crime?”

McCain said, “You’re going to have to ask our folks that, I don’t think that we stand for any forgeries”…

In the legislation that passed in the Senate, Section 1541 “Trafficking in Passports,” it explains in detail that a person can be charged for a crime if they forge “3 or more passports,” meaning that they potentially would not be charged if they falsely made only one or two passports. The criminal charges and penalties do not kick in until after “3 or more passports” are falsely made, issued, or transferred, etcetera.

Read more from this story HERE.

Nuclear Doomsday is Coming Today. You’ll Want to See This.

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Photo Credit: APIt’s Thursday, July 18, and nuclear Armageddon is upon us. Or at least you might be excused for thinking so when you glimpse on your colleague’s computer monitor a compelling simulation of a mushroom cloud rising over your home town.

That’s the 2.0 version of NUKEMAP — now in three dimensions! — expected for launch by late Thursday, the brainchild of a guy named Alex Wellerstein.

A historian with the American Institute of Physics, Wellerstein has had 3 million visitors to the original two-dimensional edition of his website, who have virtually detonated a whopping 17.4 million nuclear warheads over their choice of locations virtually anywhere around the world.

Launched in February 2012, the initial or “classic” version of NUKEMAP featured your choice of 18 preselected cities — from Beijing or Berlin to Tehran or Tokyo — and 23 preset atomic-warhead explosive capacities, or “yields,” numbering in kilotons, or even more stratospheric megatons. A pick of North Korean, Indian, Pakistani, Russian and U.S. bombs was on offer, along with others.

You could have gone wild and plugged in any city across the planet along with a numerical yield for your notional attack, clicked the clearly marked “Detonate” button and wham: A multicolor bulls-eye appeared onscreen, overlaid on your designated city map — described as a “mashup” of Google Maps and algorithms for nuclear blast effects.

Read more from this story HERE.

Former GOP Senate Candidate Christine O’Donnell’s Tax Records Breached in 2010

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Photo Credit: Washington TimesMore than two years after her upstart Senate campaign rocked the Delaware political world, Christine O’Donnell got an unexpected contact from a U.S. Treasury Department agent warning that her private tax records may have been breached.

The phone message earlier this year shocked the battled-scarred candidate, a tea party favorite who knocked off Republican mainstay Michael Castle in the primary before losing in a bid to win Vice President Joseph R. Biden’s former seat.

“Ms. O’Donnell, this is Dennis Martel, special agent with the U.S. Department of Treasury in Baltimore, Md. … We received information that your personal federal tax info may have been compromised and may have been misused by an individual,” he said in the January message left on her cellphone.

For Ms. O’Donnell, the message immediately raised red flags.

On March 9, 2010, the day she revealed her plan to run for the Senate in a press release, a tax lien was placed on a house purported to be hers and publicized. The problem was she no longer owned the house. The IRS eventually blamed the lien on a computer glitch and withdrew it.

Read more from this story HERE.

Anonymous Hacked into Official Congressional Email, Threatens to Compromise Accounts if Congress Doesn’t Act to End Surveillance State

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Photo Credit: GettyHacker posts email addresses, passwords of House and Senate staffers online

By Alex Pappas. A hacktivist associated with Anonymous claims to have posted online thousands of email addresses and passwords for Capitol Hill staffers.

According to a Twitter account that posted a link to the hacked information, House and Senate staffers were targeted in protest of the National Security Agency’s domestic spying program.

“Dear #Congress: We are paying very, very close attention to how you handle #NSA #FISA & #PRISM Don’t.. F**k.. Up….,” Twitter user OpLastResort wrote before posting a link to the email addresses and passwords.

PRISM is the government’s secret data mining program recently revealed by NSA leaker Edward Snowden. FISA refers to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act which deals with electronic surveillance. Read more from this story HERE.

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Photo Credit: AFPWhite House stays silent on renewal of NSA data collection order

By Spencer Ackerman. The Obama administration is refusing to say whether it will seek to renew a court order that permits the National Security Agency’s bulk collection of phone records on millions of Verizon customers when it expires at the end of this week.

Officials declined to discuss what action they intend to take about the order at the center of the current surveillance scandal, which formally expires at 5pm Friday.

The looming expiration of the order, issued by the secretive Fisa court, provides an early test of Barack Obama’s claim to welcome debate over “how to strike this balance” between liberty and security. Beyond the question of the phone records collection, the court order authorizing it is a state secret.

On Thursday, the administration would not answer a question first posed by the Guardian six days ago about its intentions to continue, modify or discontinue the Verizon bulk-collection order. The White House referred queries to the Justice Department. “We have no announcement at this time,” said Justice Department spokesman Brian Fallon. The NSA and office of the Director of National Intelligence did not respond to questions.

A spokesman for the Fisa court, Sheldon Snook, said the court “respectfully declines to comment”. Read more from this story HERE.

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NSA chief says leak damage ‘irresponsible and irreversible’

By Catherine Herridge. National Security Agency chief Keith Alexander said Thursday the damage from recently leaked information is “irresponsible and irreversible” because it has given terrorist groups the intelligence community’s “playbook.”

He also described the leaks as “crazy.”

Addressing the Aspen Security Forum, Alexander said the NSA was secretive about its programs out of necessity because the “operatives are among us.”

He added that, based on damage assessments, there is “concrete proof” terrorists now have changed their tactics. Read more from this story HERE.

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Photo Credit: gaelxCongress: Anonymous Hack Got Only Old Emails and Passwords

By Ginger Gibson. The hacking group Anonymous published the login information for a constituent contact system used by thousands of congressional staffers, posting addresses and passwords on an online message board, according to a memo sent to Hill staffers.

Anonymous presented the information — when it on Thursday posted more than 2,100 email addresses and passwords, as login data for official congressional email accounts. But in a memo to staff from the Office of the Chief Administrator of the House, officials said the information was actually old login data for iConstituent, which is an online system used to contact voters.

“While this incident did not compromise the House email system, out of an abundance of caution, iConstituent Gateway eNewsletter account holders will be required to change their House network login,” said the memo, which was obtained by POLITICO.

The passwords, some of which belonged to individuals who no longer work for Congress, were expired, according to the memo.

“Earlier today, hackers disclosed expired login information (email addresses and passwords) of numerous iConstituent Gateway eNewsletter accounts outside of the House network,” the memo stated. “These passwords have expired and can no longer be used to access the external iConstituent service.” Read more from this story HERE.

Largest City in History of US Files for Bankruptcy (+video)

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Flashback: Obama boasted in 2012: ‘We refused to let Detroit go bankrupt’

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Photo Credit: J.D. PooleyLargest City in History of US Files for Bankruptcy

By Dominic Rushe. Sinking under huge debts and decades of mismanagement, Detroit formally filed for bankruptcy on Thursday, becoming the biggest US city ever to take such a drastic measure.

Kevyn Orr, Detroit’s emergency manager, took the decision after failing to broker a deal between the city’s bondholders and its pension funds.

The filing sets a new record for municipal bankruptcies and dwarfs the previous record filings by Jefferson County, Alabama, and Stockton, California. No other city of Detroit’s size has ever gone bust.

Orr and the city’s creditors and pensioners will now begin a fraught legal consultation period while a court determines whether the city is eligible for “chapter 9” bankruptcy protection for its $18.5bn debts and liabilities.

In a letter posted with the filing, the Michigan governor Richard Snyder confirmed he had received Orr’s request to start the bankruptcy proceedings. He said it was “clear that the financial emergency in Detroit cannot be successfully addressed outside of such a filing, and it is the only reasonable alternative that is available.”

Here’s the Governor’s explanation:

Read more from this story HERE.

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W.H. says Obama monitoring Detroit bankruptcy

By Reid J. Epstein. President Barack Obama is monitoring Detroit’s municipal bankruptcy, a White House spokeswoman said Thursday, but has not committed any federal help for the beleaguered city.

“The president and members of the president’s senior team continue to closely monitor the situation in Detroit,” spokeswoman Amy Brundage said Thursday. “While leaders on the ground in Michigan and the city’s creditors understand that they must find a solution to Detroit’s serious financial challenge, we remain committed to continuing our strong partnership with Detroit as it works to recover and revitalize and maintain its status as one of America’s great cities.”

The tepid reaction Thursday comes after saving the Detroit auto industry was a central feature of Obama’s re-election campaign – when Democrats savaged Republican Mitt Romney for a New York Times op-ed headlined “Let Detroit Go Bankrupt.” Read more from this story HERE.

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Related: Municipality Selling Off Museum Artifacts to Reduce Crushing Debt

By Rick Leventhal, Kathleen Foster. An East Coast city that’s been sitting on a Wild West gold mine is finally cashing in on the loot.

Harrisburg, Pennsylvania’s state capital, is auctioning off thousands of antique artifacts this week, hoping the sale will help pull the city out of debt.

Back in 1980, the citizens of Harrisburg elected Stephen Reed as mayor. He envisioned the city as a tourist destination, filled with museums, including one showcasing Harrisburg’s one-time claim to fame as the gateway to the West. He spent more than $8 million on roughly 10,000 pieces, including antique guns, old horse-drawn wagons, “Wyatt Earp’s Days of the Week Shaving Set,” Jesse James and Billy The Kid wanted posters and sheriff’s badges. The city built one museum, but went broke before it could build three more, as the mayor intended.

“He went about it in ways that were not exactly according to rules,” said Arlen Ettinger, President of Guernsey’s, the New York City-based auction house the city hired to sell the items.

“He took city monies to acquire things that he thought would look well in museums, and he was a great fan of the old West.” Read more from this story HERE.