Tea Party Loses Court Battle Over Targeting to IRS

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Photo Credit: Lauren Victoria Burke, APA federal court dismissed two lawsuits against the Internal Revenue Service Thursday, ruling that the tax agency is no longer targeting conservative tax-exempt groups for greater scrutiny.

“Unless an actual, ongoing controversy exists in this case, this court is without power to decide it,” U.S. District Court Judge Reggie Walton ruled, dismissing one lawsuit brought by True the Vote, a conservative vote-monitoring organization.

True the Vote, an offshoot of the Tea Party-affiliated King Street Patriots, had its application as a social welfare group help up because the IRS suspected it was engaging in direct political election campaigning, which is forbidden under section 501(c)(4) of the tax code. IRS agents found that its web site contained “Democratic attacks and Republican/conservative response,” according to confidential IRS documents obtained by USA TODAY.

Walton said the IRS has assured the public that they’re no longer screening applications for tax exemptions based on its political leanings, a practice that led to the dismissal of several top IRS officials when it was disclosed by Treasury inspectors last year.

“Thus, the allegedly unconstitutional governmental conduct, which had delayed the processing of the plaintiffs’ tax-exempt applications and spawned this litigation, is no longer impacting the plaintiffs,” Walton said in a second opinion dismissing a lawsuit brought by Linchpins of Liberty and 40 other groups in 22 states.

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Jews Under Siege in Jerusalem Amid Obama Promise

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Photo Credit: WNDDid behind-the-scenes White House support for the Palestinian position on eastern Jerusalem help embolden a violent Palestinian campaign against Israeli civilians in those areas?

The campaign of rock-throwing and other acts of violence and intimidation has been targeting Jews in eastern sections of Jerusalem – areas the Palestinians claim as a future capital. The Palestinian claim has been bolstered by Obama administration behind-the-scenes support, as WND reported earlier this month.

A terrorist yesterday used a vehicle to plow through a crowd of Israelis at an eastern Jerusalem light rail station, killing a 3-month-old baby and injuring seven other people.

The terrorist has been identified as Abdel Rahman Al-Shaludi, a Palestinian resident of the eastern Jerusalem neighborhood of Silwan.

Netanyahu blames Palestinian president

While security officials are investigating whether he was acting alone, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu squarely blamed Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas for supporting a culture of terrorism.

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U.S., Allies Scramble Jets Almost Daily to Repel Russian Incursions

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Photo Credit: APRussian military provocations have increased so much over the seven months since Moscow annexed Crimea from Ukraine that Washington and its allies are scrambling defense assets on a nearly daily basis in response to air, sea and land incursions by Vladimir Putin’s forces.

Not only is Moscow continuing to foment unrest in Eastern Ukraine, U.S. officials and regional security experts say Russian fighter jets are testing U.S. reaction times over Alaska and Japan’s ability to scramble planes over its northern islands — all while haunting Sweden’s navy and antagonizing Estonia’s tiny national security force.

The White House months ago leveled economic sanctions on several Russian businesses and political players, and recent weeks have seen President Obama intensify his rhetoric toward Moscow. But many in Washington’s national security community say the response is simply not firm enough and that, as a result, Mr. Putin actually feels emboldened to push the envelope — Cold War-style.

“What’s going on is a radical escalation of aggressive Russian muscle flexing and posturing designed to demonstrate that Russia is no longer a defeated power of the Cold War era,” says Ariel Cohen, who heads the Center for Energy, National Resources and Geopolitics at the Institute for the Analysis of Global Security in Washington.

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Obama Asks Judge To Hide Emails To Attorney General Holder’s Wife

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By NEIL MUNRO.

President Barack Obama is asking a judge to keep secret the contents of emails apparently sent between Attorney General Eric Holder and his wife.

The request is part of Obama’s three-year stonewall against Judicial Watch’s inquiry into the Operation Fast and Furious scandal, during which the Department of Justice watched while military-style weapons were bought in the United States and smuggled to Mexican drug gangs. The scandal went public once one of Obama’s employees — a U.S. border guard — was killed by a criminal using one of the smuggled guns.

Late Oct. 22, moments before a judicial deadline, the White House sent the judge a 1,307-page list of 15,662 Fast and Furious documents that it wants to keep hidden from Judicial Watch and the public.

The list includes almost 20 emails between Attorney General Eric Holder and his wife, Sharon Malone.

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Obama Asserts Fast and Furious Executive Privilege Claim for Holder’s Wife

Judicial Watch announced today that it received from the Obama Department of Justice (DOJ) a “Vaughn index” detailing records about the Operation Fast and Furious scandal. The index was forced out of the Obama administration thanks to JW’s June 2012 Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request and subsequent September 2012 FOIA lawsuit (Judicial Watch v. Department of Justice (No. 1:12-cv-01510)). A federal court had ordered the production over the objections of the Obama Justice Department.

The document details the Attorney General Holder’s personal involvement in managing the Justice Department’s strategy on media and Congressional investigations into the Fast and Furious scandal. Notably, the document discloses that emails between Attorney General Holder and his wife Sharon Malone – as well as his mother – are being withheld under an extraordinary claim of executive privilege as well as a dubious claim of deliberative process privilege under the Freedom of Information Act. The “First Lady of the Justice Department” is a physician and not a government employee.

This is the first time that the Obama administration has provided a detailed listing of all records being withheld from Congress and the American people about the deadly Fast and Furious gun running scandal. The 1307-page “draft” Vaughn index was emailed to Judicial Watch at 8:34 p.m. last night, a few hours before a federal court-ordered deadline. In its cover letter, the Department of Justice asserts that all of the responsive records described in the index are “subject to the assertion of executive privilege.”

The Vaughn index explains 15,662 documents. Typically, a Vaughn index must: (1) identify each record withheld; (2) state the statutory exemption claimed; and (3) explain how disclosure would damage the interests protected by the claimed exemption. The Vaughn index arguably fails to provide all of this required information but does provide plenty of interesting information for a public kept in the dark for years about the Fast and Furious scandal.

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Gun-Toting Grandpa Defends Wife, Granddaughter From Rapists In NC Home Invasion

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Photo Credit: Daily CallerA North Carolina man exchanged fire with three home invaders after they tried to rob his house and rape his granddaughter, reports the Fayetteville Observer.

At his Lumberton home on Monday, Kenneth Byrd, 67, was approached by an individual claiming to have car problems. When Byrd invited the man into his home, he was rushed by two additional assailants wearing black clothes and ski masks.

The home invaders — all three brandishing handguns — corralled Byrd, his wife Judy and their 19-year-old granddaughter and demanded money and other valuables from the family safe.

Byrd initially complied with their demands, but when the men began to beat Judy and attempted to rape his granddaughter, he grabbed a hidden firearm and let loose a flurry of shots at the assailants.

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Prepare for Biological Weapons

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Photo Credit: National ReviewAmericans should be grateful that it is only Ebola we are dealing with right now. After all, compared with other viruses, the Ebola virus is more difficult to transmit, and the contagion period corresponds with outward symptoms. Other viruses are far more contagious, and their contagion periods occur when sick persons show no symptoms.

As has been the case with the multiple attempted terrorist attacks that failed only because of operator error, our government’s prevention and response efforts to the Ebola virus leave much to be desired. Better to be lucky than good is a nice cliché, but it cannot be how America faces a 21st century fraught with danger.

Recall, it was just a few months ago that a raid in the Middle East produced a laptop with significant details on how to develop and use biological weapons. We could minimize al-Qaeda’s ability to weaponize viruses, but the Islamic State has too many people and too much funding for us to take the possibility of a biological threat lightly any longer.

The response thus far to the Ebola virus indicates that the federal government has done too little over the last decade to prepare for a biological event in America. The fumbled issues we see reported on the nightly news were well known by the federal government.

Beginning 15 years ago, the federal government used a national full-scale exercise program to identify issues in preventing and responding to a wide variety of terrorist threats. As a senior official in the Bush administration, I oversaw the national exercise program, TOPOFF 3, in 2005. In TOPOFF 3 we tested the federal, state, and local response to a pneumonic plague in New Jersey.

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Top Iranian Adviser: Obama is 'Weakest of US Presidents'

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Photo Credit: APPresident Barack Obama is “the weakest of U.S. presidents” and his time in the White House has been “humiliating,” a top Iranian official said in an interview with the country’s Fars News Agency, according to a translation provided to The Free Beacon.

“Obama is the weakest of U.S. presidents, he had humiliating defeats in the region,” said Ali Younesi, senior adviser to Iranian President Hassan Rouhani, in comments coming as the United States is trying to persuade his country to join the international coalition fighting against the Islamic State.

His words could also be a sign that the Rouhani regime does not intend to concede to the United States’ demands concerning Iran’s nuclear program.

U.S. Under-Secretary of State Wendy Sherman told Reuters Thursday that Iran will be considered responsible if a deal to curb the nuclear program is not reached in exchange for relief from extensive sanctions placed on the country.

The United States, along with Britain, China, France, Germany, and Russia have set a deadline of Nov. 24 for reaching a deal on the sanctions, and Sherman said Iran’s best hope is to reach an agreement.

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Residents Ask 'Illegal Pete's' to Change Name (+video)

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Three weeks shy of opening his newest Illegal Pete’s in Old Town Fort Collins, restaurant owner Pete Turner came to Fort Collins on Wednesday to listen to a crowd of concerned residents who asked that he change his business’ name.

The Boulder-based restaurant with six locations in Boulder and Denver is modeled after Mexican food from San Francisco’s Mission District, specifically over-sized burritos. The name Illegal Pete’s, Turner said, is a literary reference to a bar in a novel he read as an English major in Boulder. “Pete” also refers to his own name and his father’s. When he started the restaurant in 1995, Turner hoped the name would be ambiguous enough to spark people’s interest, perhaps referring to counterculture activity.

But on Wednesday, 30 or so community members explained the negative context of the word illegal, or the “I-word,” as some referred to it, and its importance, down to its use as the name of a restaurant.

“Since I know the context, and I have been labeled with (the word illegal), it makes a huge difference to me,” said Lucy Gonzalez, 25.

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Peter King On Islamic Terror: ‘Nobody Should Feel Safe’

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By ALEX GRISWOLD.

New York Republican Congressman Peter King told Fox’s Greta Van Susteran that in the wake of the gun attack in Ottawa against Canada’s Parliament, “nobody should feel safe” from Islamic terror.

KING: We were anticipating something like this. Since 9/11 we’ve been on our guard. But especially since this war with ISIS has broken out, we were expecting attacks against the United States, against Canada, against any of the allied countries involved, obviously including the British. And again, when it comes to ISIS they do want to go for the military, for the police, for the national monuments and memorials, they’ve been calling for this. It’s not a secret.

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Photo Credit: Papanikos / NewscomSocial Media Prove Double-Edged Sword for ISIS

By Helle Dale.

ISIS has issued a warning to its members about their use of social media. A new directive from the group’s leaders, first reported by the Financial Times, warned against the dangers presented by metadata and other information contained in digital postings.

A new ISIS hashtag has appeared in Twitter in recent weeks, Himlat Takteem Ialami—the media restraint campaign. And an instruction manual in online behavior was distributed to ISIS members, a copy of which was seen by reporters of the FT. It reads in part:

“A number of security gaps have appeared that have benefited the enemy and have helped expose the identities of some brothers or identify some sites used by the mujahideen with ease,” the manual begins. The information revealed in digital communication, it explains, is the kind of “data that could turn your hair gray.”

Data revealed by Twitter, YouTube and Facebook postings comes in many forms—from more obvious information about individual identities and landscape and urban geography in photos to encoded data from email accounts, servers and location of signals. All this has helped make the air campaign against ISIS more effective.

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WATCH: Canada’s Sergeant at Arms Gets Standing Ovation after Shooting Terrorist While Wearing Tails

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Portrait of a bada**. This is Kevin Vickers moments after he brought down a suspect who had already claimed one victim. He’s Mr. Carson with a pistol, dusting off his jacket and rebuffing any notions of heroism with the declaration that this is simply his job.

Parliament reopened today, and Vickers got the kudos he deserves:

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