Head Of Immigration Union: America Is Highly Vulnerable To An ISIS Attack

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Photo Credit: Daily CallerBy VINCE COGLIANESE.

The United States is highly vulnerable to a terrorist attack because of America’s “lax immigration POLICIES,” according to the head of a government union composed of nearly 12,000 immigration officials.

Kenneth Palinkas, president of the National Citizenship and Immigration Services Council, announced Thursday that there is an “extremely real and serious threat that ISIS has already or will soon slip across our porous southern border.”

“[I]t is also essential to warn the public about the threat that ISIS will exploit our loose and lax visa POLICIES to gain entry to the United States,” Palinkas said in a statement obtained by The Daily Caller.

“INDEED, as we know from the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993, from the 9/11 terrorist attacks, from the Boston Bombing, from the recent plot to bomb a school and courthouse in Connecticut, and many other lesser-known terror incidents,” he wrote, “we are letting terrorists into the United States right through our front door.”

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Photo Credit: AP / Carolyn KasterKerry: ISIS Is ‘the Order of Satan’

By Melanie Hunter.

Secretary of State John Kerry on Thursday defended President Barack Obama’s statement that the Islamic State is not Islamic, saying that they can call themselves whatever they want, but “they’re not a state, and they do not represent Islam.” In fact, he said, they are “the order of Satan.”

“The Islamic State, they can call themselves what they want to call themselves. We shouldn’t compound the sin by allowing them to get away with it and calling them what they’re not. They’re not a state, and they do not represent Islam,” said Kerry at the House Foreign Affairs Committee’s hearing on the U.S. strategy against ISIS.

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Photo Credit: Alex Wong / Getty Senate approves Obama’s plan to arm and train Syrian rebels

By Dan Roberts.

Senators gave their tacit blessing to President Barack Obama’s strategy for fighting the Islamic State (Isis) on Thursday, overwhelmingly passing a budget bill that also grants him authority to arm and TRAIN rival Syrian rebel groups. Despite attempts by Senator Rand Paul to separate the Syrian authorisation from the wider bill on the grounds that it deserved a separate debate, just 27 senators stood in the way of the cloture motion, which allowed Obama to avoid a potentially embarrassing direct vote.

Paul CLAIMED that the bill, which finally passed by 78 to 22, represented a “sad day for the US Senate” and also criticised the underlying strategy of arming groups which, he claimed, had little interest in fighting the Islamic extremists.

“It’s not that I’m against all intervention. I do see Isis as a threat to us – but I see our previous POLICY as having made it worse,” said Paul. “There are valid reasons for war. They should be few and far between … They should not be [hidden] in the pages of a 1,000-page bill and shuffled under the rug.”

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Inspector General: Maybe VA Fraud in Phoenix Did Result in Deaths After All

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Photo Credit: TownHallRemember the VA scandal? You might be forgiven for letting it slip your mind, given that (a) its series of disgraceful revelations was several crises ago, and (b) that Congress has passed decent (but not permanent) legislation to “fix” the system. But there’s a reason why the CNN correspondent who’s covered this story most closely bluntly questioned the feasibility of RIGHTING the VA ship without “throwing out” vast numbers of its managers: An endemic culture of corruption and accountability-dodging. Drew Griffin’s skepticism was no doubt reinforced when the department’s Inspector General released its findings in late August, concluding that it could not definitively link the VA’s pervasive and deliberate manipulation of wait times and care lists to any deaths. Critics immediately questioned the methodology behind that verdict, complaining that the IG’s standards of proof made were “virtually impossible” to meet. Whistleblowers had previously alleged that VA corruption had resulted in at least 40 deaths in the Phoenix area alone. Sources told CBS News that agency officials successfully pressured the IG to “water down” its findings:

Two of the doctors who first blew the whistle on the veterans’ deaths in Phoenix say the inspector general botched the investigation and went too easy on the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA). One says the IG engaged in a whitewash of what happened there, bowing to pressure from inside the agency, reports CBS News correspondent Wyatt Andrews. The issue surrounds the investigation into whether more than 40 veterans at the Phoenix VA died while waiting to see the doctor. The IG’s final report in August concluded that it “[could not] conclusively assert” that long wait times “caused the deaths of these veterans.” According to one whistleblower who spoke to CBS News, however, that crucial assertion was not in the original draft of the report. He told CBS News that the Inspector General added the line about how wait times did not cause the deaths at the last minute. Our source, who works at VA headquarters and who spoke exclusively to CBS News, said officials inside the agency asked for a revision of the first draft. That’s standard practice, but in this case the source said it amounted to pressure on Inspector General Richard Griffin to add a line to water down the report. “The organization was worried that the report was going to damn the organization,” the whistle-blower said. “And therefore it was important for them to introduce language that softened that blow.”

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Scotland Referendum: Scots Reject Independence in Historic Vote

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Photo Credit: Fox NewsScotland voters have decided to remain part of the United Kingdom, rejecting independence in a historic referendum.

The decision prevented a rupture of a 307-year union with England, bringing a huge sigh of relief to the British political establishment. Scots voted 55 percent to 45 percent against independence in a vote that saw an unprecedented turnout.

“The people of Scotland have spoken,” Alistair Darling, leader of the “Better Together” campaign said early Friday after the result was confirmed. “We have chosen unity over division.”

Despite major victories for the “Yes” campaign in Dundee and Glasgow, the “Better Together,” a majority of voters did not embrace Scottish First Minister Alex Salmond’s impassioned plea to launch a new state, choosing instead the security offered by remaining in the United Kingdom.

Salmond conceded defeat, saying “we know it is a majority for the No campaign” and called on Scots to accept the results of the vote.

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Marine Vets Walk 300 Miles to Tell Obama: Free Tahmooressi

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Photo Credit: AP / Rich PedroncelliTwo former Marines — Lance Cpl. Terry Sharpe and fellow Marine Allen Brown — have taken their plea to free Sgt. Andrew Tahmooressi to the streets, walking nearly 300 miles to Washington to petition President Obama in person.

They’re about 100 miles shy of hitting the capital city, they told Fox News’ Greta van Susteren.

Mr. Tahmooressi has been jailed in Mexico for months, after he CLAIMS he took a wrong turn and crossed the border with firearms — that he owned legally — in the trunk of his car. Under Mexico law, however, his firearms possession was illegal.

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Happy Constitution Day! Ninth Circuit Affirms That It’s Illegal To Wear American Flag Shirts On Cinco De Mayo

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Photo Credit: calaggieIt’s official: the U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals has issued an order declining a request for an en banc hearing in a case involving four students in at a California high school who were sent home for wearing American flag T-shirts on Cinco de Mayo.

The full slate of Ninth Circuit judges has thus agreed with a lower district court and with a trio of appellate judges that officials at Live Oak High School in Morgan Hill, Calif. could censor students who wanted to wear flag-emblazoned shirts.

The federal appeals court issued its denial of an en banc hearing on Sept. 17 — Constitution Day.

“[N]o further petitions shall be permitted,” the court ordered.

The trouble dates back to Cinco de Mayo (May 5) in 2010, when officials at Live Oak High — a school with a predominant Mexican-American student body — forced the students to remove their American flag-festooned shirts. Administrators called the shirts “incendiary” and worried that fighting would break out between white and Latino students if Latino students noticed the shirts. So, assistant principal Miguel Rodriguez told the students to turn their shirts inside out or leave school.

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Duck Dynasty’s Phil: ‘We Legislate Murder, That’s What Abortion Is'

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Photo Credit: A&EDuck Dynasty patriarch Phil Robertson gave one of the sermons Sunday at his church, where he criticized political correctness for diminishing the reality of sin and said the “politically correct crowd” had killed 55 million babies by ABORTION, and that this was legislated “murder,” adding that now the government is “legislating perversion.”

In a Sept. 14 sermon focusing on how few people in the media, the UNIVERSITIES, and in movies rarely ever talk about sin or even use the word “sin,” Phil Robertson, an elder at the White’s Ferry Road Church in West Monroe, La., quoted from Webster’s dictionary about political correctness and then emphasized that murder is a sin.

“Noah Webster’s heirs at least were not kind to political correctness,” said Robertson, in reference to the dictionary publisher’s intellectual descendants. “Political correctness is usually used disparagingly to connote dogmatism – this way or the highway, you either gonna’ agree with us, yeah, we’re hollering tolerance but we’re only tolerant of anyone who agrees with us. They connote dogmatism, the excessive sensitivity to minority causes. It just goes on and on.”

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Alleged ISIS Photo Controversy Engulfs Sen. John McCain

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Photo Credit: BreitbartSen. John McCain (R-AZ) and his aides swear the Syrian “rebels” he was pictured last year with weren’t ISIS members or supporters, and the mainstream media is by and large buying the 2008 GOP presidential nominee’s story.

Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) has endured brutal criticism—media fact checkers, reporters, and political figures have shredded him—for questioning just who McCain posed with.

But a closer look at the situation tells perhaps a different story than McCain’s office or the mainstream media have pushed.

The criticism of McCain centers around how the Arizona senator met with Syrian rebel leaders in May 2013 when he visited the country. McCain posed for photographs with those people, and since then rumors have sprouted up across the Internet that he met with ISIS or some other terrorist kidnappers or nefarious forces.

“The people in the pictures with Senator McCain in Syria included General Salim Idris, then-Chief of Staff of the Supreme Military Command of the Free Syrian Army (FSA), Mouaz Moustafa, the Executive Director of the DC-based Syrian Emergency Task Force (which supports the moderate opposition and helped arrange some of the trip), and fighters and commanders from the Northern Storm Brigade, a FSA-aligned group,” McCain’s spokesman Brian Rogers told Breitbart News.

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Australia Thwarts Beheading Plot, says Islamic State Threat Persists

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Photo Credit: Joel Carret / European Pressphoto AgencyAuthorities in Australia have charged a 22-year-old Sydney resident with preparing to sow terror in the country by seizing a person at random and beheading him in a videotaped execution, Australian media reported Thursday.

Omarjan Azari exhibits “an unusual level of fanaticism,” Prosecutor Michael Allnutt told a Sydney court in a successful attempt to deny bail for the bearded young man, who is facing a possible life sentence.

The plot to carry out a random terrorist attack was foiled after a four-month surveillance operation revealed a network of violent Muslim extremists allegedly being directed by a former Australia resident, Mohammad Ali Baryalei, now a major figure in the Islamic State militant group in Syria, the Australian Broadcasting Corp. reported. Raids carried out in two Australian cities Thursday resulted in more than a dozen arrests, officials said.

Authorities expressed concern over the scores of Australians being drawn into the violent culture of Islamic State, which has seized broad swaths of territory in Iraq and Syria and proclaimed it a Muslim “caliphate” ruled by a harsh and medieval version of Sharia, or Islamic law.

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Outlawed in America: The American Flag

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Photo Credit: WNDI’m old enough to remember when the big controversy surrounding American flags was whether or not we should make it illegal for dim-bulb protesters to burn them in public. There was quite a bit of energy behind flag-burning bans for a while there. Instead, it has become illegal to display an American flag, at least in certain places and times.

For example, you’d better not fly the Stars and Stripes at Woodruff High School in South Carolina, especially on September 11. WSPA News reports:

Several people SHOWED up with American flags to protest Woodruff High School’s decision to make students remove flags from their vehicles.

On September 11, four students SHOWED up at the school with U.S. flags flying from their vehicles. The flags were confiscated after officials said it was against school district policy to “draw attention” to one’s vehicle. The flags were returned at the end of the day and the students were not punished.

Parents who were upset with the decision went to social media to voice their opinion. They also planned the protest, which took place Monday morning.

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Al Gore: Climate Skepticism Will Haunt Republicans in 2016

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Photo Credit: SAUL LOEB / AFP / GettyAl Gore says Republicans seeking the White House in 2016 are in a bind on climate change.

Asked if it would hurt the GOP nominee to be a climate skeptic or advocate against taking action on global warming, Gore replied: “Oh, yes. Definitely.”

“In a general election? At the national level, where moderate voters hold the balance? It would be extremely harmful to a Republican candidate,” Gore told National Journal in an interview Wednesday.

But Gore doubts that a “pro-climate” Republican can get the GOP nod, because “carbon polluters and anti-government extremists control many of the state primaries, if not most.”

Gore’s comments arrive as potential 2016 Republican White House candidates are beginning to stake out turf on climate change and energy.

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