Maj. Gen Vallely: Saddam’s Right-Hand Man Is ISIS Ringleader

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Photo Credit: Interdependent By Bill Hoffmann.

A ruthless ally of Saddam Hussein is one of the top ringleaders involved in the violent overtaking of key cities in Iraq by the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), retired U.S. Army Maj. Gen. Paul Vallely has revealed.

“In the past 24 hours, the attacks coming out of eastern Syria and down toward Baghdad have all been conducted by Gen. Ibrahim al-Douri,” Vallely told “The Steve Malzberg Show” on Newsmax TV.

“He was the right hand man of Saddam Hussein. If you remember the conference tables in Saddam’s offices, al-Douri was the guy with the beret and the mustache and the red hair.”

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Photo Credit: APNancy Pelosi: Obama Doesn’t Need Approval for Iraq Airstrikes

By Todd Beamon.

President Barack Obama does not need approval from Congress to begin airstrikes to stem the Iraqi crisis, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi said on Thursday.

“The president does not need any additional congressional authority to act upon measures for our national security,” the California Democrat said, Politico reports.

She added that she, like Obama, did not support putting “boots on the ground.”

“Generally speaking, I think that you have to be careful about sending special forces, because it’s a number that has a tendency to grow, because I would like to see the context, purpose, timeline and the rest for anything like that,” Pelosi told Politico.

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Is America Over?

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Photo Credit: National Review Recently, my 91-year-old father-in-law and I were talking about the dire state of our nation, and he said, “I am sure glad I will not be around to see the end.”

My father-in-law is a great American patriot, who, as an Albanian immigrant, was processed through Ellis Island at the age of six. He often says the greatest gifts of his life were his family, his Catholic faith, and the opportunity to be American. In World War II, he was an engineer stationed at the Washington Navy Yard, where he worked on electronic circuitry for mines and torpedoes. After the war, he was recruited by the CIA. During several tumultuous decades he was a field operative fighting the Cold War in Europe, and then Vietnam and Laos. At his 90th-birthday party, he expressed utter astonishment that he had reached that milestone, given how many times he had cheated death during his career.

Considering his life experience, I was shaken to the core by his gratitude at the prospect of “not seeing the end” of America — not because I was surprised he said it, but because I totally agree that “the end” is coming and that my husband and I probably will be around to see it.

We are dismayed at the increasing secularization of a nation founded on Judeo-Christian principles, coupled with political, social, cultural, economic, moral, spiritual, and infrastructure decline everywhere we turn. During the 2012 presidential election, there was much discussion among Republicans to the effect that if Obama won reelection it would signal “the end of our nation as we know it.” The theory was that our nation would not be able to withstand another four years of President Obama’s “transforming” policies. The biggest fear of all was that, since his name would never again be on the ballot, Obama would be empowered to do whatever the heck he wanted.

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Why Darrell Issa Just Asked the IRS to Hand Over a Hard Drive

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Photo Credit: ThinkStockHouse Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Darrell Issa on Tuesday issued a subpoena to the Internal Revenue Service, ordering the agency to turn over the hard drive they claim is responsible for wiping out two years of critical email communications.

Issa has dramatically widened his probe into the IRS after the agency announced last week that it had lost the emails, which may have provided information about an IRS policy of targeting for extra scrutiny and delay many conservative groups seeking tax-exempt status.

Issa is not only seeking emails, but wants equipment, “communication devices,” printed documents and just about anything else related to former IRS official Lois Lerner, who has refused to testify before Congress and who the GOP believes is a central player in the targeting scheme.

“After a year of beating down efforts by the Obama administration and its allies to obstruct an investigation into targeting, the IRS now says it lost perhaps the most critical evidence,” Issa said. “We still do not have answers about how and why the IRS tried to deceive Congress about these missing e-mails. This subpoena seeks those answers.”

This latest order comes a day after Issa suppoenaed IRS Commissioner John Koskinen to testify at an Oversight hearing on June 23.

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Federal Prosecutors Reopen Probe of Air Marshal Gun Scheme

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Photo Credit: Fox News The U.S. Attorney’s Office in the Eastern District of Virginia has reopened its criminal investigation into allegations of illicit gun-selling at senior levels of the Federal Air Marshal Service (FAMS), multiple sources told FoxNews.com.

“They’re taking another look at everything. They appear to have received new information they did not have during their initial investigation,” one of the sources briefed on the case told FoxNews.com.

In addition to the criminal probe, sources said internal investigations within the Air Marshal Service and the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) have involved a larger number of senior officials than previously had been reported. Those senior officials may have illicitly purchased guns or been involved with a June 2009 contract bid awarded to Sig Sauer, the weapons manufacturer whose guns allegedly were involved in the gun-selling scheme.

Sources said the U.S. attorney’s office reopened the case following congressional inquiries into the matter and an April 10 FoxNews.com story revealing the existence of the investigation. The probe initially focused on allegations Danny Poulos, an Air Marshal supervisor, benefited from his professional relationship with Sig Sauer to receive free or discounted weapons, which were then allegedly sold to senior FAMS executives, including recently retired director Robert Bray.

A TSA spokesman, when asked about the case, confirmed the internal probe remained ongoing but referred FoxNews.com to the U.S. attorney’s office regarding the federal investigation. The spokesman said: “TSA has found no evidence of criminal misconduct by any senior FAM or TSA manager.”

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Rick Perry: Feds Gobble Up Available Rooms for Illegal Children — Nothing Left for Texans

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Photo Credit: Washington Examiner Texas Gov. Rick Perry said that the federal government has taken up every bit of spare available space in his state to house the tens of thousands of illegal children flooding over the U.S. border, leaving him with no rooms for Texans who might be left homeless in a natural disaster like a hurricane.

“Were we to have a major event, I literally would not have places to house our citizens because of this influx from Mexico,” he warned at a media luncheon hosted by the Christian Science Monitor.

“I am greatly concerned about the huge catastrophe that could occur with those two events happening simultaneously,” he said of the potential for a hurricane hitting as the federal government continues to embrace illegal youths instead of sending them home.

Federal authorities are housing the youths in hotels and even military bases while they search for relatives to turn them over to.

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Social Security Administration CLOSES 597 Offices

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Photo Credit: Daily Caller Social Security has long-term financial challengers but the agency that administers it faces more immediate problems, according to a bipartisan report.

Sixty-four Social Security offices have closed since 2009, despite an ever-increasing backlog of applications for benefits, MarketWatch reports. The Senate Special Committee on Aging discussed these findings earlier this week.

Only 1,245 offices are currently operational in the country as of 2014, since 533 temporary mobile offices have also been closed, and of the offices still remaining, availability hours have been significantly reduced.

The Social Security Administration (SSA) is in its largest five-year decline since it was created 79 years ago. Aside from offices, over 11,000 workers have been laid off in the last three years.

“They don’t do any kind of analysis on what would happen to a community when their field office closes, including figuring out how the most vulnerable populations would make their way to the next-closest office,” said Florida Democratic Sen. Bill Nelson, chairman of the Aging Committee.

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Cantor Replaced: Rep. Kevin McCarthy Selected as New House Majority Leader

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Photo Credit: APIn a GOP leadership shuffle, Republican lawmakers voted Thursday for California Rep. Kevin McCarthy to succeed Rep. Eric Cantor as House majority leader after Cantor’s unexpected primary defeat last week.

McCarthy, a fourth-term lawmaker who had held the No. 3 GOP position, was elected by secret ballot.

“America is struggling,” he said after the vote. “We’re struggling with a stagnant economy, a failed health care law, and so many are living paycheck to paycheck. They are looking for individuals that put people before politics. I make one promise: I will work every single day to make sure this conference has the courage to lead with the wisdom to listen.”

The day’s second election, to succeed McCarthy as party whip, was a much tighter three-way competition among Reps. Steve Scalise of Louisiana, Peter Roskam of Illinois and Marlin Stutzman of Indiana. Scalise, 48, scored the victory.

Scalise, who won his seat in a special election in 2008, campaigned as head of the Republican Study Conference, a group of that sometimes serves as a conservative thorn in the side of leadership.

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Kerry: Foreign Gov’ts Must Accept Same-Sex Spouses of US Personnel Stationed Abroad (+video)

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Photo Credit: AFPThe U.S. is leading by example in promoting lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgendered (LGBT) rights at home and around the world, Secretary of State John Kerry said Thursday.

He said the federal government recognizes same-sex marriages of foreign diplomats stationed in the U.S., and it expects all other countries to do the same in their treatment of U.S. personnel deployed abroad.

“Let me be clear: We oppose any effort by any country to deny visas for spouses of American staff,” he said. “It’s discriminatory, it’s unacceptable, it has no place in the 21st century.”

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Boehner: Obama’s ‘Wheels are Coming Off’

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Photo Credit: Gage Skidmore Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) on Thursday castigated the Obama presidency on a slew of issues, saying the White House was unprepared for, and often exacerbated, a series of crises at home and abroad.

Opening his weekly Capitol press conference, Boehner offered up a global tour of problematic flash points for the administration and blamed Obama for squandering U.S. gains in Iraq, the scandals at the Department of Veterans Affairs and the Internal Revenue Service, lackluster economic growth and the influx of immigrant children flooding at the U.S.-Mexico border.

“You look at this presidency, and you can’t help but get the sense that the wheels are coming off,” Boehner said.
The Speaker and other congressional leaders met with Obama at the White House on the deteriorating situation in Iraq, and while he said he learned “a little bit,” it appeared to be less than the full strategy he was hoping the president would outline.

Boehner characterized Iraq in the context of what he described as a broader foreign policy failure by the administration.

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24 Things the Media Claim Were Caused by ‘Global Warming’

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Photo Credit: Flickr / Creative Commons It seems like with global warming embedded in our politics (for now), anything we don’t fully understand can now be ‘legitimately’ blamed on the weather. Forget the trusty old excuse about the dog eating your homework: A sampling of news stories tells us instead that global warming might really be the cause of all our problems. Allegedly, thanks to global warming:

Your breakfast got even less exciting. Your morning coffee is going to be more expensive. Also, the cost of cereal could climb by as much as 30 percent because of global warming according to an Oxfam report(their recommendation to General Mills and Kellogg’s: “intensify” effort to cut greenhouse gases, which ironically would also likely increase the cost of cereal and beverages). Thankfully, populations of feral cats and dogs are liable to increase, and these could suffice as possible “bridge food” for climate change refugees.

History and culture have been redefined. Leonardo DiCaprio’s Jack Dawson didn’t make it off the Titanic in 1912 thanks to global warming. Two years later the world engaged in WWI, followed by the Great Depression, and WWII, all of which apparently slowed the pace of global warming. In current cultural events, the arts world has been subjected to climate change…the musical. And a horror movie. Some congregations have been subjected to a new topic for bad sermons. And employees are less productive at work.

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