President Obama, Vladimir Putin Talk Ukraine Unrest

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Photo Credit: AP

Photo Credit: AP

President Barack Obama and Russian President Vladimir Putin spoke by telephone Monday but appeared to do little to narrow or obscure the wide gulf between the U.S. and Russian governments over the continuing unrest in Ukraine.

A Russian foreign ministry statement about the leaders’ phone call described a situation in Ukraine starkly different from the picture painted by U.S. officials and Western news outlets.

U.S. officials have accused Russian-backed paramilitaries and militia forces of taking over government buildings in eastern Ukraine, less than two months after Russian troops and well-armed fighters with few visible insignia staged similar takeovers in the Crimea region.

However, the Russian statement referred to “southeastern regions” of Ukraine being “engulfed by mass protests against the policies of the current authorities in Kiev.”

Russia effectively annexed Crimea last month after a referendum there in which voters reportedly backed such a move by overwhelming numbers. The vote was not recognized by most world powers.

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‘Heil Hitler’ Shooting Kills 3 at Kansas City-Area Jewish Centers (+video)

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Photo Credit: Pam Broviak / Creative Commons

Photo Credit: Pam Broviak / Creative Commons

A gunman opened fire at two Jewish facilities near Kansas City on Sunday, killing three people, police said.

Authorities are investigating whether the shootings were a hate crime, Overland Park Police Chief John Douglass told reporters.

“It’s too early in the investigation to try to label it. We know it’s a vicious act of violence. Obviously, at two Jewish facilities, one might make that assumption, but we’re going to have to know more about it,” he said.

Suspect Frazier Glenn Cross faces charges of premeditated first-degree murder. He is scheduled to appear in court on Monday, Lt. Craig Buckendahl from the Johnson County Sheriff’s Office said.

Video from CNN affiliate KMBC showed a man who appeared to be the suspect sitting in the back of a patrol car and shouting, “Heil Hitler.”

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Ex-CBS Journalist Active in Covering Benghazi, Fast & Furious Describes ‘Chilling Effect’ Obama Admin. Has on Reporting

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Photo Credit: Reuters

Photo Credit: Reuters

Former CBS News investigative journalist Sharyl Attkisson took a swing at her former employer Sunday and described the “chilling effect” she says the Obama administration has on reporting.

“I didn’t run into that same kind of sentiment (at CBS) as I did in the Obama administration when I covered the Bush administration very aggressively,” Attkisson told “Media Buzz” host Howard Kurtz.

“It never runs,” she continued. “Or it dies the death of a thousand cuts, as some of us say. If it’s something they don’t want it will be changed and revised and shortened and altered so much that it’s a shadow of its former self if it does air.”

Attkisson, who had been active in covering the aftermath of the Benghazi terror attacks and the Fast and Furious scandal, abruptly announced she had resigned from CBS News last month. According to Politico, sources said Attkisson had grown increasingly frustrated by what she perceived as a liberal bias at CBS News.

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Official Campaign Kickoff Event – Monday, April 21st!

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I have an exciting announcement! Our official campaign launch will be Monday, April 21st in Wasilla at Screen Shot 2014-04-11 at 2.14.37 PMthe Wasilla Lake Resort at 6pm, and conservative radio talk show host Lars Larson will be on hand, broadcasting live nationwide! 
 
The Alaska race for the U.S. Senate is heating up, and it is shaping up to be one of the most watched races in the country. In these momentous and challenging times, the need of the hour is for new leadership in Washington committed to restoring the constitutional rule of law and reviving the American spirit.


 
I pledge to you as Alaska’s next United States senator, I won’t back down in the fight to roll back the encroaching socialist state brought about under the Barack Obama, Harry Reid, and Mark Begich regime. I will stand with reformers like Ted Cruz and Mike Lee and bring your voice and your vote to Washington, DC in the cause of restoring our freedom!

I can’t do this alone. The Karl Rove’s and other Washington elite have set their eyes on the Alaska seat and have pledged millions to defeat reform candidates nationwide. We simply cannot go back to the Big Government, failed policies of the last decade and hope to survive as a nation.
 
My agenda is clear: constrain the federal government to its constitutional limits, balance the budget, revive the American economy, create jobs, defend the right to life, repeal ObamaCare, and secure our borders.  
 
If I truly believed that any of the other candidates who entered the race were willing to exercise the kind of leadership required to get the nation back on track, I would not be running. The cost is too high to me and my family, but I simply cannot stand by while the greatest nation in the history of the world plunges headlong towards ruin.
 
Our campaign is catching fire. We have seen a dramatic rise in the polls head-to-head against Begich putting us within striking distance, and the Republican primary is anyone’s race! 
 
The DC elites know this too, and I expect their full fury to be unleashed in the weeks following our campaign kick-off. I ask you to stand with me and send a powerful message to the Establishment, that We the People are sovereign and the government is our servant.
 
Together we can make a difference and do our part, so the great story and the great experiment that is America can go forward.
 
Thank you for your friendship and support!

Barack Obama Lets NSA Keep Some Internet Security Flaws Secret

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Photo Credit: AFP

Photo Credit: AFP

Stepping into a heated debate within the nation’s intelligence agencies, President Barack Obama has decided that when the National Security Agency discovers major flaws in Internet security, it should – in most circumstances – reveal them to assure that they will be fixed, rather than keep mum so that the flaws can be used in espionage or cyberattacks, senior administration officials said Saturday.

But Obama carved a broad exception for “a clear national security or law enforcement need,” the officials said, a loophole that is likely to allow the NSA to continue to exploit security flaws both to crack encryption on the Internet and to design cyberweapons.

The White House has never publicly detailed Obama’s decision, which he made in January as he began a three-month review of recommendations by a presidential advisory committee on what to do in response to recent disclosures about the National Security Agency.

But elements of the decision became evident Friday, when the White House denied that it had any prior knowledge of the Heartbleed bug, a newly known hole in Internet security that sent Americans scrambling last week to change their online passwords. The White House statement said that when such flaws are discovered, there is now a “bias” in the government to share that knowledge with computer and software manufacturers so a remedy can be created and distributed to industry and consumers.

Caitlin Hayden, the spokeswoman for the National Security Council, said the review of the recommendations was now complete, and it had resulted in a “reinvigorated” process to weigh the value of disclosure when a security flaw is discovered, against the value of keeping the discovery secret for later use by the intelligence community.

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Muslim Brotherhood Launches Own U.S. Political Party

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Photo Credit: Anuradha Sengupta

Photo Credit: Anuradha Sengupta

With an eye toward the 2016 election, the radical Muslim Brotherhood has built the framework for a political party in America that seeks to turn Muslims into an Islamist voting bloc.

‘Muslim voters have the potential to be swing voters in 2016,” said Nihad Awad in launching the benign-sounding U.S. Council of Muslim Organizations, whose membership reads like a Who’s Who of Brotherhood front groups.

“We are aiming to bring more participation from the Muslim community.”

USCMO also aims to elect Islamists in Washington, with the ultimate objective of “institutionalizing policies” favorable to Islamists — that is, Shariah law.

This development bears careful monitoring in light of the U.S. Brotherhood’s recently exposed goal to wage a “civilization jihad” against America that explicitly calls for infiltrating the U.S. political system and “destroying (it) from within.”

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Judges: ‘Law Provides Executive No Authority’ to Cut Drug Sentences As Holder Did

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Photo Credit: AP Photo / J. Scott Applewhite

Photo Credit: AP Photo / J. Scott Applewhite

Two federal judges on the U.S. Sentencing Commission said Thursday that Attorney General Eric Holder stepped “outside the legal system” and exceeded the authority of the executive branch by sending “improper instruction” to federal prosecutors to reduce drug sentences before they were officially approved by either the commission or Congress.

“I have been surprised at the attorney general’s steps taken to proceed with this reduction outside of the legal system set up and established by the Sentencing Reform Act of 1984,” Judge Ricardo Hinojosa, the commission’s vice chair, said during a public hearing in the Thurgood Marshall Federal Judiciary Building in Washington.

“As you all know, the commission in the act is given the authority to promulgate and amend guidelines on a yearly basis. And in the act itself, Congress has preserved its right to reject any potential promulgation of, or amendment to, any guidelines made by the commission itself after the commission has acted.

“Meaning that if Congress does not reject a guideline amendment, it will not go into effect until November 1st of this year if we vote in favor of this amendment.,” said Hinojosa, who is also the chief judge of the Southern District of Texas.

“When the attorney general testified before us, he failed to mention that the night before, at around 11 pm, the department had ordered all of the assistant U.S. attorneys across the country to (and it’s not clear to me whether it was supposed to be not oppose or to argue for, in fact the U.S. attorneys in front of my court have said they’ve been asked to argue for) the two-level reduction in all drug trafficking cases before the commission has acted and before Congress has had the opportunity to vote its disapproval of the commission’s actions, if Congress is so inclined, which is certainly the right that they have preserved for themselves in the Sentencing Reform Act of 1984,” Hinojosa said.

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MSNBC’s Harris-Perry: ‘Is Eric Holder The Obama We Had Been Hoping For?’

By Mike Miller.

During her MSNBC show on Saturday, after Melissa Harris-Perry said that Barack Obama’s “accomplishments” might not be recognized “for a decade or so,” she rattled off a string of “accomplishments” by Attorney General Eric Holder:

Shortening prison sentences for non-violent drug offenders, suing Texas and North Carolina over their respective voter ID laws, issuing a directive expanding government recognition of same sex marriage.

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7 Babies Found Dead in Utah Home; Woman Arrested

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Photo Credit: Pleasant Grove Utah Police

Photo Credit: Pleasant Grove Utah Police

A woman has been arrested on six counts of murder after authorities found the bodies of seven infants packed into separate cardboard boxes at a home in Utah, police said.

Police arrested Megan Huntsman, 39, of Pleasant Grove, on Saturday following a gruesome discovery at a residence formerly occupied by the woman who they say moved out in 2011.

Officers responding to a phone call from a family member who is currently living at the Pleasant Grove residence arrived at the home to find the first baby which “appeared to be a full term,” according to a police statement.

“A family member was cleaning out the garage and came across a box that looked suspicious. Upon opening the box they found the infant inside,” Capt. Michael Roberts of the Pleasant Grove Police Department told ABC News.

Read more from this story HERE.

5 Democratic Senators Facing Uphill Battles for Reelection

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Photo Credit: Thinkstock

Photo Credit: Thinkstock

With Congressional elections growing closer, some Senators will be facing a more difficult road to reelection than others. Incumbency is often an advantage, but after the year we’ve had, some will be struggling to get the votes they need. Democrats historically have struggled in midterm elections, something President Barack Obama pointed out in early March, reminding Democrats in Congress of how much they have riding on the election. In the Democratic party, there are five that stand out more than the rest as having their work cut out for them. Let’s take a look at the specific political challenges headed for to this group.

1. Senator Mark Begich (D-Alaska)

Senator Begich is likely feeling especially blue in his red state this year, with increasing pressure from Republicans hoping to exploit voters’ frustration with President Obama and Congress’ inactivity as a whole. He said, according to The Washington Post, that he doesn’t “care to have [Obama] campaign for” him. As a result, Begich — like many other Democrats — is putting some distance between himself, his party, and the Obama administration. His ad campaigns use rhetoric like “standing up to the Washington Bureaucracy,” and “Begich has fought to cut wasteful spending and government red tape,” revealing the extent to which frustration with Congress is influencing many Democrats’ campaign strategies. His ads also focus on his father, his family history in the state, oil drilling successes, and anti-Koch brother sentiment.

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Trump: Politicians ‘All Bull—-, All Talk’

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Photo Credit: AP

Photo Credit: AP

Billionaire Donald Trump framed himself as a job-creating anti-politician in a preview of his potential 2016 presidential pitch to a crowd of conservatives in New Hampshire Saturday.

Speaking at the New Hampshire Freedom Summit, a gathering of conservative activists and figures organized by Americans for Prosperity and Citizens United, Trump told the crowd that “we need somebody who’s gonna get things done, and politicians are all talk and no action.”

“All talk, it’s all bull—-,” he added. “It’s all talk, and it’s no action.”

In contrast, he touted his work improving an ice-skating rink in New York City’s Central Park and defended himself against what he said were erroneous reports that he had filed for bankruptcy. He also told the crowd that America needs “somebody that’s going to make the great deals for this country.”

“We need to make our country rich again,” Trump said.

Read more from this story HERE.