Conservatives Question US Chamber’s Plan to Spend Millions to Defeat Tea Party-Style Candidates in 2014

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Photo Credit: Reuters

Photo Credit: Reuters

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce says it will back “pro-business” candidates against Tea Party-styled opponents in this year’s elections, largely in response to conservative lawmakers fueling last year’s partial government shutdown fight.

“In 2014, the chamber will work to protect and expand a pro-business majority in the House and advance our position and our influence in the Senate,” Chamber President and CEO Tom Donohue said Wednesday. “We will support candidates who want to work within the legislative process.”

Donohue, in his annual State of American Business speech, didn’t single out the Tea Party specifically but said afterward the chamber’s frustrations are with the movement’s extreme faction and politicians who have linked themselves to the Tea Party.

“It’s people who don’t want to play,” Donohue told Fox Business, referring to last year’s budget stalemate that partially closed the federal government for 16 days and the ensuring debt-ceiling negotiations that almost resulted in the same outcome.

“The Tea Party has lots of good ideas,” Donohue said. “But those people are not helping us.”

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Surprise! Walmart Health Plan is Cheaper, Offers More Coverage than Obamacare

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Photo Credit: AP Photo/Nick Ut

Photo Credit: AP Photo/Nick Ut

New Obamacare health insurance enrollees may feel a pang of envy when they eye the coverage plans offered by Walmart to its employees.

For many years, the giant discount retailer has been the target of unions and liberal activists who have harshly criticized the company’s health care plans, calling them “notorious for failing to provide health benefits” and “substandard.”

But a Washington Examiner comparison of the two health insurance programs found that Walmart’s plan is more affordable and provides significantly better access to high-quality medical care than Obamacare.

Independent insurance agents affiliated with the National Association of Health Underwriters and health policy experts compared the two at the request of the Examiner.

Walmart furnished employee benefit information to the Examiner. Neither Obamacare advocate Families USA nor the United Food and Commercial Workers, which backs anti-Walmart campaigns, responded to Examiner requests for comment.

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Video: Open-Carry Gun Advocate’s Confrontation with Grand Rapids Police that Sparked Lawsuit

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Gun Open CarryA police car dash cam video obtained by MLive and The Grand Rapids Press shows the encounter between Grand Rapids Police officers and open-carry advocate Johann Deffert that sparked a federal lawsuit.

Deffert’s suit – filed in U.S. District Court in Grand Rapids – is against the city, Police Chief Kevin Belk, Officer William Moe and two other officers.

In response to request for video of the encounter, the city has released in-car video of the March 3 incident. The camera view shows only a portion of the encounter, but it captures extensive audio from the day in question.

Responding to a report of a man with a holstered handgun, Moe stopped his patrol car on Michigan Street NE near Lakeside Drive.

“It does look like he’s got a handgun on,” Moe told a dispatcher.

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New Scandal, Same Old Christie

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Photo Credit: National Review

Photo Credit: National Review

After swiftly dismissing a top official in his administration, Chris Christie was characteristically caustic when pressed by the press for the lesson to be drawn from the scandal: “Don’t lie to the governor.”

But that was then — three years ago. This week, the raging bull turned sad puppy for two hours of bravura contrition after cashiering yet another top aide who, he says, lied to him. It is a different time, and this is a very different scandal. Yet, I can’t help suspecting it’s the same old Christie.

Back in 2010, it was Bret Schundler, Christie’s education chief, who was shown the door after purportedly deceiving the boss. The controversy that led to Schundler’s abrupt termination was considerably drier than the “Bridgegate” scandal currently engulfing the governor — the former was just run-of-the-mill governmental bungling, as the Bergen Record relates.

New Jersey had failed to qualify for federal “Race to the Top” education funds, falling a measly three points short of the 500-point threshold prescribed by an abstruse Washington formula. The amount of money involved was enormous, $400 million. But in a country where trillion is the new billion, that’s a few digits shy of grabbing the public’s attention. Plus, Christie — just hitting his stride, his eccentric brand of tough-guy bipartisanship not yet stale — was not then a national figure. So the fact that the Garden State lost out because its application omitted two years of budget data (a five-point penalty!) was big news in Trenton, but nowhere else.

This past September’s bumper-to-bumper snarls are quite another matter. They hit New Jerseyans where we live much of the time: on our derrieres, behind the wheel hours on end, crawling tortoise-like from place to place — especially when one of those places is the Big Apple. So the ongoing scandal is about traffic . . . but, of course, it’s juicier than that. It’s about hellacious traffic jams that were willfully manufactured — much as that may sound like a coals-to-Newcastle errand. It’s about Christie’s administration maliciously slamming already beleaguered commuters — and, worse, subjecting police, fire departments, emergency medical teams, school buses, and small-business merchants to withering gridlock — as payback against at least one recalcitrant Democratic mayor.

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Maryland Officials Were Warned for a Year of Problems with Online Health-Insurance Exchange

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Photo Credit: Sarah L. Voisin/The Washington Post

Photo Credit: Sarah L. Voisin/The Washington Post

More than a year before Maryland launched its health insurance exchange, senior state officials failed to heed warnings that no one was ultimately accountable for the $170 million project and that the state lacked a plausible plan for how it would be ready by Oct. 1.

Over the following months, as political leaders continued to proclaim that the state’s exchange would be a national model, the system went through three different project managers, the feuding between contractors hired to build the online exchange devolved into lawsuits, and key people quit, including a top information technology official because, as he would later say, the project “was a disaster waiting to happen.”

The repeated warnings culminated days before the launch, with one from contractors testing the Web site that said it was “extremely unstable” and another from an outside consultant that urged state officials not to let residents enroll in health plans because there was “no clear picture” of what would happen when the exchange would turn on.

Within moments of its launch at noon Oct. 1, the Web site crashed in a calamitous debut that was supposed to be a crowning moment for Maryland officials who had embraced President Obama’s Affordable Care Act and pledged to build a state-run exchange that would be unparalleled.

Instead, by the next morning only four people had signed up using the Web site — and amazed that anyone had gotten through the system successfully, state officials contacted each of them to make sure they were real. The site’s problems continue to prevent Marylanders from signing up for health insurance. As of Friday, 20,358 people had selected private plans, and state officials have said they do not expect to come close to their initial goal of 150,000 by the end of March.

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Google’s Military Robotics: Humanoid Robots Future of Ground Warfare?

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Photo Credit: REUTERS/Eduardo Munoz

Photo Credit: REUTERS/Eduardo Munoz

Google CEO Larry Page has rapidly positioned Google to become an indispensable U.S. military contractor.

Google recently purchased Boston Dynamics, a robotics pioneer that produces amazing humanoid robots for the U.S. Defense Department.

This development invites attention to Google’s broader military contracting ambitions — especially since Boston Dynamics is the eighth robotics company that Google has bought in the last six months.

Just like drones are the future of air warfare, humanoid robots and self-driving vehicles will be the future of ground warfare according to U.S. defense plans.

There are many other reasons why the U.S. military is on path to become Google’s single largest customer. Likewise these reasons indicate Google has a closer working relationship with the NSA than it acknowledges publicly.

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Texas Judge Orders Home Schooled Children Removed from Christian Parents Home

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Photo Credit: WND

Photo Credit: WND

A controversy has erupted in Texas after a judge ordered children removed from the home of their Christian homeschooling parents – over the homeschooling itself – even though the Texas Home School Coalition notes the state doesn’t allow that.

A 2005 memo from the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services notes that,”Whether parents choose to homeschool their children or send their child to another private or public school is not relevant to the CPS investigation. When CPS staff investigates a family for abuse/neglect, the investigation must focus on the occurrence, or risk, of abuse/neglect and not on the child’s educational setting,” according to the Texas Home School Coalition.

However, of the allegations brought against Trevor and Christina Tutt, who had four biological children and three foster children removed by Child Protective Services several weeks ago, all have been about the educational setting.

According to a report this week at Christian News, social workers were brought in when a child temporarily in the Tutts’ care, a four-year-old with autism, and an eight-year-old, wandered a short distance from the home in September.

A police officer found the children before Tutt, who was searching nearby, and the subsequent report attracted the attention of CPS.

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Alaska Governor Unveils New Plan for Gas Pipeline

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Photo Credit: Arthur Chapman

Photo Credit: Arthur Chapman

Gov. Sean Parnell on Friday announced a new way forward on a long-hoped-for natural gas pipeline that includes scrapping the terms of a 2007 law he says no longer works well for the situation.

In a major policy speech in Anchorage, Parnell said the state and Canadian pipeline builder TransCanada Corp. have agreed to terminate their involvement under the Alaska Gasline Inducement Act. He made clear, however, that TransCanada would remain a partner in the project, just under new terms.

Parnell said he would seek legislative approval for the state to participate in a new commercial agreement with TransCanada; the North Slope’s three major players, Exxon Mobil Corp., BP PLC and ConocoPhillips; and the Alaska Gasline Development Corp. He said he expected a set of terms to be signed soon.

Natural Resources Commissioner Joe Balash called the commercial agreement a “broad roadmap” and statement of intent. He said in an interview that legislation would have to be passed to accomplish what is being contemplated and the state plans to enter a separate, more narrowly defined agreement with TransCanada for pipeline services.

The terms of the inducement act will remain in force for the time being, though the parties envision transitioning into the new arrangement once enabling legislation is passed, Balash said.

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Remembering An Earlier Time When a Theft Unmasked Government Surveillance

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Photo Credit: WND

Photo Credit: WND

On March 24, 1971, I became the first reporter to inform readers that the FBI wanted the American people to think there was an “FBI agent behind every mailbox.” That rather alarming alert came from stolen FBI files I had found in my own mailbox at The Washington Post when I arrived at work the previous morning. ¶ It was the return address on the big tan envelope that prompted me to open it first: “Liberty Publications, Media, PA.”

I had worked at the Evening Bulletin in Philadelphia before coming to The Post in January 1970, so I knew of Media, a small town southwest of Philadelphia. ¶ The letter inside the envelope informed me that on the night of March 8, 1971, my anonymous correspondents — they called themselves the Citizens Commission to Investigate the FBI — had broken into the Media FBI office and stolen every file. They did so, I learned later, in the dark and as the sounds of the first Muhammad Ali-Joe Frazier boxing match filled the streets.

“Enclosed you will find,” the letter said, “copies of certain files from the Media, Pennsylvania, office of the FBI which were removed by our commission for public scrutiny. We are making these copies available to you and to several other persons in public life because we feel that you have shown concern and courage as regards issues which are, in part, documented in the enclosed materials.”

I wasn’t aware of having shown any courage, but I was, to put it mildly, eager to read those files — 14, as it turned out, of 1,000 files that they had taken.

For 43 years the people who sent those files to me then have remained unknown to the general public. This week, five of the Media FBI burglars — a group that pulled off an act that led to congressional investigations of all intelligence agencies, congressional oversight and significant reforms in the FBI — are coming forward for the first time.

In a book I have written and in “1971,” a documentary film by Johanna Hamilton, the burglars tell their story — the ultimate result of a chance encounter I had at a dinner party in 1989 with acquaintances in Philadelphia, who told me they were involved in the Media burglary.

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Watch: What if Beethoven’s Mother Aborted?

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Photo Credit: WND

Photo Credit: WND

A short, award-winning film, produced by Hollywood legend Jason Jones along with executive producer Pattie Mallette, the mother of Justin Bieber, is changing hearts and minds on the issue of life.

“Crescendo” recounts the struggles of Maria Magdalena Beethoven, the mother of 19th-century composer Ludwig van Beethoven.

When producer Jones was 17 years old, his pregnant girlfriend’s father, who discovered her secret when the girl sought to obtain prescription vitamins, forced her to have an abortion. After the procedure, the abortionist announced that the baby was a girl. “Crescendo” is dedicated to “Jessica Jones,” their aborted baby, who would have been 23 years old at the time of the film’s release. Jason Jones believes that, if a pregnancy center was available to his girlfriend to serve her prenatal needs, their daughter would be alive today.

Mallette, the executive producer, became pregnant as a teenager and gave birth to Justin at 18. Her friends urged her to get an abortion.

Read more from this story HERE.