Issa Accuses State Department of Dodging Benghazi Questions

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Photo Credit: Fox NewsTop Republican Rep. Darrell Issa Friday accused the State Department of trying to repeatedly dodge congressional efforts to look into the 2012 terrorist attack in Benghazi, Libya.

The House Oversight and Government Reform Committee chairman sent a 37-page letter to the newly-created House Select Committee on Benghazi detailing attempts he claimed were made to sidestep providing documents and answering questions about the attack from September 2012 until May 2014.

Issa said the State Department promised to cooperate with Congress but failed to actually provide information requested and missed many deadlines.

He also claimed the State Department threatened to destroy “committee property necessary for internal organization of in camera documents” and called out “abusive State Department document redaction practices.”

According to the letter, the State Department in early 2013 refused to hand over documents to the committee and demanded that the documents be reviewed in private. Issa’s letter added State officials also started leaving some of the documents behind or forgot to bring them to meetings.

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Teachers Union Abruptly Breaks Rank On Common Core

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Photo Credit; YouTube In a major surprise, the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), the country’s second-largest teachers union, opened its biannual convention Friday by announcing a step back from its support for Common Core education standards.

The group, gathering in Los Angeles, announced that it will now provide monetary grants from its Innovation Fund for teachers who want to critique the standards or even write entirely new ones themselves.

The AFT’s executive council is also introducing a resolution, to be voted on at the convention, which would declare that the standards had noble intentions but have fallen short due to outside meddling and an inordinate focus on standardized tests.

The announcement came as part of a general opening address by AFT President Randi Weingarten.

“Some of you in this room think the standards should be jettisoned,” told thousands of assembled teachers. “Some of you, myself included, think they hold great promise, but they’ve been implemented terribly.”

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Democrat Congressman: Tax Drivers for Every Mile They Drive

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Photo Credit: CNSNews.com / Penny StarrWhile the House and the Senate this week issued measures intended to temporarily replenish the Highway Trust Fund before it runs out of money next month, Rep. Earl Blumenauer (D-Ore.) ended the week by proposing to hike – then abolish – the federal fuel tax and replace it with a per-mile “fee.”

“The policy development that I’m most excited about and that will reinforce the right practices for the future: After we raise the gas tax, we should abolish it,” Blumenauer said on Friday at the liberal Center for American Progress in Washington, D.C. “The time is right to replace the gas tax, because it’s no longer an accurate reflection of road use and benefit because of these wildly changing fuel consumption patterns, and replace it with a vehicle mile travel fee regardless of the choice of vehicle fuel.

“That technology is available,” said Blumenauer, whose home state of Oregon has already had pilot vehicle mile travel fee programs in place for a decade.

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Colorado Is Consuming Way More Pot Than Anyone Ever Believed

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Photo Credit: Time About 9% of Colorado’s population consumes marijuana, according to a market demand study conducted by the state department of revenue’s Marijuana Enforcement Division and the state’s Marijuana Policy Group. And those users, it’s estimated, will get through about 121.4 metric tons of pot every year.

According to the report, that consumption — calculated through survey results, demographic data and source data — is “31 percent higher than a recent department of revenue assessment, 89 percent higher than a study by the Colorado Futures Center, and 111 percent higher than an older study by the Colorado Center for Law and Policy.”

The state’s Marijuana Enforcement Division analyzed the market demand for the drug, which Colorado began selling for recreational use in January, in an effort to “effectively manage production within the regulated industry,” according to a press release.

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‘Coal Rollers’ Protesting EPA Regulations or Just Blowing Smoke?

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Photo Credit: Fox News By Fox News Insider.

Some truck owners are steaming mad over President Barack Obama and EPA regulations.

Some of these so-called “coal rollers” are making a political statement, thumbing their noses at the Obama administration’s effort to lower carbon emissions. Others are generally flipping off environmentalists.

These drivers are modifying their diesel trucks by installing a smoke stack to create bursts of black smoke.

Read more from this story HERE.

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Photo Credit: Chris ButlerEPA regs likely to kill 68-year-old Louisiana peach orchard

By Chris Butler.

The peach orchards at Mitcham Farms, near the north Louisiana city of Ruston, have survived winter freezes, droughts and dangerous hail storms, but they evidently will not survive the Environmental Protection Agency and its regulations.

The family-owned business, established in 1946 and featured in tourism magazines, is Louisiana’s largest peach orchard, according to its website, but owner Joe Mitcham expects he’ll close up shop in only a few years.

The federal government’s banning of a chemical in 2005 known as methyl bromide, used to treat diseased peach trees, has really given him no choice, as most of his trees won’t survive without it.

Read more from this story HERE.

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Photo Credit: REUTERSEPA claims it has the power to garnish wages without court approval

By Fox News.

The Environmental Protection Agency has quietly claimed that it has the authority to unilaterally garnish the wages of individuals who have been accused of violating its rules.

According to The Washington Times, the agency announced the plan to enhance its purview last week in a notice in the Federal Register. The notice claimed that federal law allows the EPA to “garnish non-Federal wages to collect delinquent non-tax debts owed the United States without first obtaining a court order.”

The push remains up in the air, however, as the agency says any “adverse comments” would prevent the EPA from moving forward — and some criticism has emerged in recent days.

Absent that, the rule could take effect Sept. 2. The EPA said the rule was not subject to review because it was not a “significant regulatory action.”

The EPA has claimed this new authority by citing the Debt Collection Improvement Act of 1996, which gives all federal agencies the power to conduct administrative wage garnishment, provided that the agency allows for hearings at which debtors can challenge the amount or the terms of a repayment schedule.

Read more from this story HERE.

TheDC Uncovers Another VA Backlog: Months Of Neglected Medical Records

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Photo Credit: Daily Caller The Memphis VA Medical Center has yet another medical records backlog, The Daily Caller has learned — this one estimated at three to five months long.

According to the whistleblower, who provided the photo of this second set of medical records piling up at the Memphis VA Medical Center, the individual responsible for scanning in these records is Carnell Clark, an employee at the facility who is currently busy helping to catch up on a backlog TheDC exposed in June.

Sandra Glover, the spokeswoman for the Veteran Integrated Services Network 9, told TheDC the records are for “Intensive Care Unit (ICU) ‘flow sheets,’ also referred to as ‘work sheets,’ which contain real-time vital sign, input/output, and other pertinent information during the time a patient is in the ICU.” Veteran Integrated Services Network 9 includes the Memphis facility.

According to a March 2014 Office of Special Counsel (OSC) complaint filed by another employee of the Memphis VA, the hospital has known about this problem — and an alleged cover-up — since at least that time.

Read more from this story HERE.

IRS Isn’t the Only Government Agency to Destroy a Hard Drive

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Photo Credit: The Daily Signal The way it’s going, government hard drives might be the next protected class under federal law.

Internal Revenue Service hard drives containing two years of emails to and from Lois Lerner, the senior Obama administration official at the heart of the alleged political targeting of conservative nonprofits, have been “recycled” and the contents destroyed. So have six of her colleagues’ hard drives. A U.S. House committee is investigating.

Hard drive shenanigans aren’t just a federal issue.

A Broward County Sheriff’s Office internal affairs audit has revealed information on outgoing Sheriff Al Lamberti’s hard drive was lost after his subordinates destroyed it with a hammer. The audit was first reported by the Sun-Sentinel newspaper.

No motive was given in the report, but public information could have been destroyed. Investigators can’t be sure, but complete backup copies of Lamberti’s hard drive were not located.

Read more from this story HERE.

Fed Up: Anger Rising Across America

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Photo Credit: AP / Jacquelyn MartinEvery Fourth of July we have a family dinner and take turns reading sections of the Declaration of Independence. When my kids were young they were thoroughly bored. When they were teenagers they rushed through the reading so they could ditch the family and see their friends, who weren’t subjected to such July 4th indignities. But my children are grown now, and this year brought their friends to our family dinner.

We handed out slices of American Flag cake along with copies of the Declaration and commenced reading, going around the table. My children were apprehensive their friends would think their parents were too corny, and their friends looked on politely, but unenthusiastically. The first few lines were familiar to everyone: “When in the Course of human events”…and…. “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights…”

We’re seeing the stirrings of a movement against Washington’s governing elite, an increasingly angry reaction to their abuse of power.

Read beyond those first two paragraphs, though, and you get the long list of grievances the Colonials had against the King. Some of our readers this year were in the military, two were Special Forces guys, just back from some of the fiercest fighting in Afghanistan. The rest were recent college graduates, struggling to find jobs, get apartments they could afford, and payoff college loans.

This year our reading of the Declaration clicked.

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Obama’s Spiritual Advisor Jim Wallis Goes On Race Rant

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Photo Credit: Daily Caller Dr. Jim Wallis has been an icon in the liberal evangelical world for decades, through his political advocacy and as the editor-in-chief of the liberal Christian magazine Sojourners. Currently, in addition to his editorial duties, he is also a spiritual advisor to President Obama, one that visits the White House on a regular basis. The White House visitors log has 65 mentions of a Jim or James Wallis, often marked specifically as a meeting with the President or the First Lady.

So what does this man, who has the ear of the leader of the free world, actually believe? Well on Sunday, June 29, Wallis gave a speech at Wild Goose Festival, a progressive Christian music festival in Hot Springs, North Carolina, entitled, “Racism is America’s Original Sin.” In his speech, Wallis called America a country founded on racism and accused all Americans, especially those who take conservative political stances, of being racists.

Wallis opened with the story of when his son Jack was studying immigration in school. In his role as part of the Soros-funded Evangelical Immigration Table, Wallis has been very active in pushing for immigration reform and a path to citizenship in particular. Wallis was invited to address Jack’s class, during which he told them about the roughly 11 million illegal immigrants in the United States.

“The kids said, ‘Why don’t they fix this?’” he recalled, “’The Congress, why don’t they fix this?’” Wallis, rather than giving the pros and cons of various immigration proposals, decided in would be easier to slime his opponents as racist in a public school setting.

“‘Well, they say they’re afraid,’” Wallis told the classroom. “And I looked at this class, this fifth grade public school class, and I saw Latinos, African-Americans, Asians-Americans, Native Americas, Samoans, Maltese, Australians, and I looked at them and I said, ‘They’re afraid of you!’”

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Video: Unhinged Pro-Abortion Protester Knows Little about Human Biology … Or Criminal Law

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Let’s just say that this isn’t going to make Burger King’s rainbow Whopper highlight reel in terms of public relations. A woman wearing her work uniform threatened, attacked, and berated pro-life demonstrators who didn’t appear to be anywhere near a BK outlet in Columbus, Ohio. She started off by loudly insisting that a baby at the 12-week gestational mark has no distinguishing features whatsoever — yelling incoherently about “clump of cells” at one point to the bemused but disciplined young man — and then started kicking signs and shoving protesters, all on camera (warning: language NSFW):

It’s not difficult to catalog the number of potential legal issues that Victoria Duran creates for herself here, or for that matter credibility issues. It’s amusing in one respect to see someone so passionately engaged in exposing her ignorance of human biology while attempting to lecture someone else about it, as well as her ignorance on basic American civics. I’m sure that a few die-hard supporters of Planned Parenthood would applaud the “no uterus, no right to talk about it!” Duran declaration, but as the police must have informed her at the end of this spree, that’s far from the case here in the US.

Read more from this story HERE.