Poll: Nearly Half Of Unemployed Have Stopped Looking For Work

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Photo Credit: REUTERS / Jonathan ErnstA poll released Wednesday shows that 47 percent of unemployed Americans have given up looking for work.

Conducted on behalf of Express Employment Professionals last month, Harris Poll asked 1,500 unemployed adults whether they agreed with the statement “I’ve completely given up looking for a job.”

Seven percent said they “agree completely” with the statement; another seven percent said they “agree a lot”; 15 percent “agree somewhat”; 18 percent “agree a little”.

Eighty-two percent of those polled agreed that they were “becoming more discouraged the longer I am unemployed”.

A large majority of those polled indicated that unemployment benefits were keeping them from searching harder for a job. Politicians have divided largely along party lines over whether to extend unemployment benefits, with Republicans arguing that the benefits provide an incentive to remain unemployed.

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World’s Worst Employee Makes Dozens of Bomb Threats to Get Out of Work

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Photo Credit: Twitter The next time you find yourself crammed into your cubicle and fuming over all the god-awful people in your office, just be thankful you’ll never have to work with James Allen Bea.

A leading contender for the world’s worst colleague, the 21-year-old is facing felony charges for relentlessly terrorizing his fellow employees at a financial services firm in Seattle.

During his short-lived tenure at Jack Henry and Associates, Bea allegedly sent dozens of bomb threats to co-workers in texts and emails, usually filled with unsettling details about their personal lives. Prosecutors also allege that the disgruntled employee-from-hell circulated photographs of his deceased brother splayed out in a coffin. His campaign began just days after he started his job, and in what appears to be an elaborate ruse to avoid going to work (or to just provide himself cover), Bea also cast himself as one of the bomber’s primary targets.

“The defendant orchestrated a sophisticated, calculated scheme that delivered waves of terror for weeks, permeating a multi-state company and leaving many people fearful to come to work,” wrote King County deputy prosecutor Ian D. Ith in court papers.

Read more from this story HERE.

McConnell Foe Calls on Shinseki to Resign

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Photo Credit: Getty Kentucky Democratic Senate candidate Alison Lundergan Grimes is calling for Veterans Affairs Secretary Eric Shinseki to resign, putting her out ahead of Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), who hasn’t explicitly called for him to step down.

“We owe a solemn obligation to our veterans and our government defaulted on that contract. I don’t see how that breach of trust with our veterans can be repaired if the current leadership stays in place,” she said in a statement, after confirming she wants to see him step down.

Grimes, battling the Senate minority leader in one of this cycle’s top Senate fights, is the first major Democratic Senate candidate to call for the embattled VA chief’s resignation, and her request is a break with the majority of congressional Democrats.

Read more from this story HERE.

Everyone Should Know Just How Much the Government Lied to Defend the NSA

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Photo Credit: Philippe Lopez / AFP / Getty If you blinked this week, you might have missed the news: two Senators accused the Justice Department of lying about NSA warrantless surveillance to the US supreme court last year, and those falsehoods all but ensured that mass spying on Americans would continue. But hardly anyone seems to care – least of all those who lied and who should have already come forward with the truth.

Here’s what happened: just before Edward Snowden became a household name, the ACLU argued before the supreme court that the Fisa Amendments Act – one of the two main laws used by the NSA to conduct mass surveillance – was unconstitutional.

In a sharply divided opinion, the supreme court ruled, 5-4, that the case should be dismissed because the plaintiffs didn’t have “standing” – in other words, that the ACLU couldn’t prove with near-certainty that their clients, which included journalists and human rights advocates, were targets of surveillance, so they couldn’t challenge the law. As the New York Times noted this week, the court relied on two claims by the Justice Department to support their ruling: 1) that the NSA would only get the content of Americans’ communications without a warrant when they are targeting a foreigner abroad for surveillance, and 2) that the Justice Department would notify criminal defendants who have been spied on under the Fisa Amendments Act, so there exists some way to challenge the law in court.

It turns out that neither of those statements were true – but it took Snowden’s historic whistleblowing to prove it.

One of the most explosive Snowden revelations exposed a then-secret technique known as “about” surveillance. As the New York Times first reported, the NSA “is searching the contents of vast amounts of Americans’ e-mail and text communications into and out of the country, hunting for people who mention information about foreigners under surveillance.” In other words, the NSA doesn’t just target a contact overseas – it sweeps up everyone’s international communications into a dragnet and searches them for keywords.

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Where VA Has Taken Veterans, Obamacare is Leading All Americans

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Photo Credit: Cliff Owen, APBy Kevin OBrien.

The White House says Americans can’t draw any conclusions yet about just how screwed up is the Department of Veterans Affairs medical care system.

Well, yes, Americans can. And if they have any sense — always a debatable proposition — Americans will.

One conclusion we can draw is an old, familiar one: No matter what the issue or activity, bureaucracy’s first and strongest instinct is to protect itself in the face of a perceived threat.

Another conclusion is probably just dawning on those Americans with the wit to see it, because so very few of us have had a brush with a medical system of which government is the sole proprietor: Putting a government bureaucracy in charge of one’s health is a gamble likely to end badly.

And yet, if Obamacare stands, that is precisely the gamble each and every American eventually will take.

Read more from this story HERE.

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Photo Credit: AP / Susan WalshObama: ‘We All Know It Often Takes Too Long for Veterans to Get the Care They Need’

By Susan Jones.

“Even if we had not heard reports out of this Phoenix facility or other facilities, we all know that it often takes too long for veterans to get the care that they need,” President Obama said Wednesday in his first public comments on the growing scandal at the Department of Veterans Affairs.

“That’s not a new development. It’s been a problem for decades. And it’s been compounded by more than a decade of war. That’s why, when I came into office, I said we would systematically work to fix these problems, and we have been working really hard to address them.”

The president noted that he served on the Veterans Affairs Committee when he was a U.S. senator — “and it was one of the proudest pieces of business that I did in the legislature.”

Bringing the VA system into the 21st Century “is not an easy task,” Obama said. He also touted the “progress” made during his presidency — including record levels of VA funding, expanding the number of veterans eligible for disability benefits, improving care for women veterans, reducing homelessness among veterans, and helping millions pursue higher education, training, and jobs.

Read more from this story HERE.

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Miami VA Whistleblower Exposes Drug Dealing, Theft, Abuse

By Jim DeFede.

When asked why he would risk his job and speak publicly, Detective Thomas Fiore considered the question carefully before answering.

“People are dying,” he finally said, “and there are so many things that are going on there that people need to know about.”

Fiore, a criminal investigator for the VA police department in South Florida, contacted CBS4 News hoping to shed light on what he considers a culture of cover-ups and bureaucratic neglect. Among his charges: Drug dealing on the hospital grounds is a daily occurrence.

“Anything from your standard prescription drugs like OxyContin, Vicodin, Percocet, and of course marijuana, cocaine, heroin, I’ve come across them all,” he explained.

Even inside the hospital, he says he was stopped from doing his job – investigating reports of missing drugs from the VA pharmacy. When the amount of a particular drug inside the pharmacy doesn’t match the amount that the pharmacy is supposed to have, a report, known as a “discrepancy report” is generated. Normally it was his job to investigate the reports to determine if they were the result of harmless mistakes or criminal activity. But all that changed, he said, about two years ago.

Read more from this story HERE.

FBI Chief: ‘Be Suspicious’ of Government Power (+video)

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Photo Credit: Getty ImagesThe head of the FBI says he understands why people worry about the scope of the government’s powers, and in fact, he agrees with them.

“I believe people should be suspicious of government power. I am,” Director James Comey told the Senate Judiciary Committee on Wednesday morning.

“I think this country was founded by people who were worried about government power so they divided it among three branches,” he added.

In the months since Edward Snowden leaked documents detailing the country’s intelligence programs, Comey said that “it’s hard for me, sometimes, to find the space and time to talk about what I do and why I do it.”

Though the controversial surveillance raised privacy concerns and made people fret that the government was snooping on their behavior, Comey said that the FBIs programs are run responsibly. He added that those operations had also helped to track down kidnappers and save children.

Read more from this story HERE.

Charles Plosser Thinks There’s a Ticking Time Bomb at the Fed

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Photo Credit: Bloomberg The way Charles Plosser sees it, the Federal Reserve is sitting on a ticking time bomb that could severely damage the economy unless the central bank reacts quickly to defuse the looming threat.

The Philadelphia Fed president, viewed as one of the bank’s leading hawks, is worried about some $2.5 trillion in “excess” reserves. That is, loanable funds available to individual or corporate borrowers through the nation’s banks.

The Fed has created these reserves through unpredented purchases of U.S. Treasurys and mortgage-backed securities, a strategy known as quantatative easing.

These reserves are just sitting in the bank system, basically doing nothing. That’s because demand for loans has been unusually weak amid an economic recovery that’s the slowest on record since the Great Depression.

“These reserves are not inflationary right now,” Plosser said in a meeting Tuesday with reporters in Washington.

Read more from this story HERE.

Blunt on Christian Facing Martyrdom in Sudan: ‘She Is Wife of U.S. Citizen’

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Photo Credit: APSen. Roy Blunt (R.-Mo.) and Sen. Kelly Ayotte (R.-N.H.) sent a letter to Secretary of State John Kerry and Secretary of Homeland Security Jeh Johnson today flatly asserting that Meriam Ibrahim, who is eight months pregnant and who is imprisoned in Sudan with her 20-month-old son where she awaits martyrdom for refusing to renounce her Christian faith, is in fact the wife of an American citizen.

On Monday, State Department spokesperson Jen Psaki would not affirm that Ibrahim’s husband was a U.S. citizen when directly asked about it by CNSNews.com.

“As you are aware, after refusing to recant her Christian faith, Meriam was sentenced to death by hanging in a Sudanese court last week,” Blunt and Ayotte wrote in the letter to Kerry and Johnson. “Meriam, 27, is currently 8-months pregnant and has been imprisoned along with her 20-month-old son since February.

“She is the wife of U.S. Citizen Daniel Wani,” the senators said.

At Monday’s State Department press briefing, CNSNews.com asked spokesperson Jen Psaki about a report in the Morning Star News that said State Department officials at the U.S. Embassy in Khartoum had told Daniel Wani he would have to provide DNA evidence to prove he was the father of the 20-month-old boy imprisoned with his wife before the department would help him.

That news report quoted Wani as saying: “I provided wedding documents and the baby’s birth certificate and doors were closed on his face. … I’ve tried to apply for papers to travel to the USA with my wife and child, but the American Embassy in Sudan did not help me. My son is an American citizen living in a difficult situation in prison.”

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Yes, Some People Will Have to Pay Back Their Obamacare Subsidies

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Photo Credit: Reuters Obamacare offers subsidies to help pay for health insurance – if you are buying insurance through the federal exchange and your income qualifies. But now the word is out that at least 1 million people are probably getting the wrong subsidy amounts.

The Washington Post has inside sources providing all sorts of juicy details on this problem – but it didn’t take an investigative reporter to predict this was going to happen.

Heritage expert Alyene Senger warned that Obamacare’s subsidies are tied to income – and if your income changes at any point during the year, your subsidy is supposed to change, too. She explained in January:

if a person’s income fluctuates, which happens more frequently than many realize, the subsidy amount will change from month to month. Thus, when it comes time to file taxes in April, the amount of subsidy received over the past year must be reconciled with the final calculation of the total subsidy for which the individual was eligible—based on actual income for the entire tax year.

So if you qualify for more subsidy help than you receive during the year, you’ll get a tax refund. But if you were given more subsidy than your income qualifies you for, you will be required to repay the excess subsidy.

>>> Watch Heritage’s Alyene Senger on Fox News:

Now, the Post reports that the government is attempting to keep up with this – except that the part of Obamacare’s computer system that is supposed to match proof of income with people’s Obamacare applications is, well, not built yet.

Since taxpayers are funding the subsidies, it’s important to make sure the correct amounts are going to the correct people, right? Well, that does make the Obama administration “sensitive” these days, the Post says:

Beyond their concerns regarding overpayments, members of the Obama administration are sensitive because they promised congressional Republicans during budget negotiations last year that a thorough income-verification system would be in place.

This setup is a disaster. And it will ensnare a lot of people. Senger pointed to one analysis estimating that nearly 38 percent of families eligible for subsidies also experience “large income increases” at some point during the year – meaning they would have to pay back some or all of their subsidies.

“The issue is symptomatic of many problems that will plague the law in coming years,” Senger said.
Is it any wonder that 60 percent of voters in a recent poll said the debate about Obamacare is not over? And 89 percent said Obamacare will affect their voting decisions this fall.

Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal is right – Obamacare is still not the answer for America’s health care needs. It’s time for Congress to look at patient-centered alternatives that would restore choice to American health care – and stop the unending tales of Obamacare disaster.

This article appeared originally at Heritage.com and is re-published in full with the Heritage Foundation’s permission.

Marine Jailed in Mexico Receives Order to Report to USMC Superiors

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Photo Credit: Fox News It might be the first order U.S. Marine Sgt. Andrew Tahmooressi doesn’t obey.

The mother of the reservist, who is being held in a Mexican jail after mistakenly crossing the border with registered guns, told FoxNews.com her son just got an “Order to Muster” letter from the Marines telling Tahmooressi to report to the 4th Civil Affairs Group in Hialeah, Fla., on June 14. Although a Marine spokeswoman later told FoxNews.com that the corps is aware of Tahmooressi’s current circumstances and does not expect him to report, failure typically can result in “other than honorable discharge” and affect Veterans Administration benefits.

“You are among the elite citizens of our nation who, if needed, are ready to answer the call to defend our freedom,” reads the May 9 order written by Sgt. Maj. M.E. Sprague, which also reminds the recipient that, “Once a Marine, always a Marine.”

Jill Tahmooressi said the letter was the latest painful reminder of her son’s plight despite service to his country that includes two tours of duty in Afghanistan resulting in post-traumatic stress disorder. Tahmooressi was arrested March 31, after accidentally driving into Mexico with three legally purchased weapons in his truck.

A Marine Corps spokesman told FoxNews.com reservists on Individual Ready Reserve, as Tahmooressi is, are contractually required to attend the one-day session to have their physical readiness evaluated should they be recalled to active duty. The letter does not represent a call-up to active duty.

Read more from this story HERE.