McConnell and Begich Rank in the Top Ten Receivers of Lobbyists’ Money; See the Others

Photo Credit: Open SecretsIt seems a lobbyist’s work is never done.

You have to know policy, wrangle with legislative language, persuade important people of the rightness of your cause, market yourself to clients. And then, for many on K Street, there’s another key part of the job: pulling out your checkbook. Federal lobbyists are often campaign contributors, too — sometimes offering, sometimes responding to not-so-subtle requests.

And the sums can be large. In fact, the 25 lobbyists who have given the most to political campaigns in the first half of the 2014 cycle have combined to give a total of $1.85 million. Whether they give strategically or out of partisan passion depends on the donor, but there’s little doubt that their generosity can play a role in wedging doors open in congressional office buildings.

Or, as sixth-ranking lobbyist-donor Ben Barnes put it, “I think anyone could be sanctimonious and say they’re donating for the love of their country, but how you make a living has something to do with it.” Barnes, whose clients include Texas A&M University, Texas Gulf Energy and Huntsman Corp., has long been a fixture of Democratic politics in Texas, and is a top bundler for congressional campaigns. So far in this cycle, he has given out about $79,000.

Lobbyists rank 13th among all interest groups in contributions so far in the 2014 campaigns, a jump from 22nd at the end of the 2012 cycle. Individual lobbyists contributed far more than lobbying firms’ PACs — 22 times as much.

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Shocking Viral Video Gives a Dose of Realism to Syrian Violence

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Please note that Restoring Liberty’s sharing of this video does not constitute an endorsement of, or support for, the producing organization or its fundraising efforts.

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Photo Credit: Reuters Christians fleeing Syria head to Turkish ‘homeland’

By Ayla Jean Yackley.

When Louis Bandak fled the violence in Syria, he sought refuge in the country his grandfather was forced to abandon exactly 90 years ago this week.

Bandak, his wife and two daughters are part of a small but growing trickle of Christians arriving in Turkey after three years of civil war in Syria killed more than 140,000 people.

“Although I had never been here before, it does not feel strange. This too is my homeland,” says Bandak, sitting in warm winter sun outside the 5th Century Mor Abrohom Monastery in Midyat, 30 miles (50 km) north of the border.

While most Christian refugees are in Lebanon or Jordan, countries with which they share linguistic or cultural ties, several thousand have come to Turkey. For many it is a reversal of their ancestors’ flight around a century ago, when World War One and the subsequent building of the post-Ottoman Turkish state made Turkey a hostile land for millions of Christians.

The sectarian strife that has rent apart Syria’s delicate multi-ethnic fabric has spawned a severe humanitarian crisis and driven 2.5 million refugees into neighboring countries.

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US Network to Scan Workers with Secret Clearances

Photo Credit: AP Photo/The Guardian, Glenn Greenwald and Laura PoitrasStung by internal security lapses, U.S. intelligence officials plan to use a sweeping electronic system to continually monitor workers with secret clearances, current and former officials told The Associated Press.

The system is intended to identify rogue agents, corrupt officials and leakers and draws on a Defense Department model under development for more than a decade, according to officials and documents reviewed by the AP.

Intelligence officials have long wanted a computerized system that could monitor employees, in part to foil leakers like former National Security Agency analyst Edward Snowden, whose revelations bared massive U.S. surveillance operations. Such a system might also detect troubling signs in those who already hold security clearances, such as the shooter in last year’s mass killings at Washington’s Navy Yard. Many of the nearly 4 million government employees who hold secret clearances would be scanned by the new system, officials say.

An administration review of the government’s security clearance process due this month is expected to support continuous monitoring as part of a package of comprehensive changes.

Privacy advocates and government employee union officials expressed concerns that electronic monitoring could intrude into individuals’ private lives, prompt flawed investigations and put sensitive personal data at greater risk. Supporters say the system would have safeguards.

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Obama: Shut Off Your Cable and Cell Phone So You Can Afford Healthcare (+video)

That’s basically the gist of President Obama’s recent suggestion.

Last week, he participated in a town hall event geared toward the Hispanic community. One of the questions for him came from a man with a $36,000 annual income, who feels that his minimum monthly premium under Obamacare is too much for him. After offering Medicaid as a possible solution — and blaming states like Texas and Florida for not properly expanding Medicaid — President Obama suggested that people struggling to afford their monthly health insurance premiums just “haven’t prioritized health care,” and they might want to cut back on their cable and cell phone service.

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Did Secret CIA Whistle-Blower Leak to the Senate?

Does the Central Intelligence Agency have a secret whistle-blower who has been trying to help the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence investigate his or her own agency? That’s a possibility that panel chairman Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D) of California mentioned Tuesday on the Senate floor in her angry speech alleging that the CIA has illegally spied on committee computers.

At issue is how Intelligence Committee staffers obtained portions of a sensitive internal CIA study named the “Panetta report,” after former agency chief Leon Panetta.

Senator Feinstein in essence said that the Panetta report fell from the sky into the committee’s lap. Staffers flipping through millions of pages of digitized CIA documents, about Bush-era harsh interrogations of terror suspects, simply found the report via a CIA-provided search tool, according to the committee head.

“We have no way to determine who made the internal Panetta review documents available to the committee…. Further, we don’t know whether the documents were provided intentionally by the CIA, unintentionally by the CIA, or intentionally by a whistle-blower,” Feinstein said.

Why is the Panetta report such a big deal? That requires a bit of explanation.

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WATCH: Republican Representative Explodes on Obama

Photo Credit: APIgnoring President Barack Obama’s veto threat, the House voted on Wednesday for a bill that would expedite congressional lawsuits against the chief executive for failure to enforce federal laws.

The vote was 233-181 in the Republican-led House as GOP lawmakers excoriated Obama for multiple changes to his 4-year-old health care law, steps he’s taken to allow young immigrants to remain in the United States and the administration’s resistance to defend the federal law banning gay marriage.

Rep. Trey Gowdy, R-S.C., sponsor of the ENFORCE the Law Act, delivered a fiery speech and read a series of statements by Obama when he was an Illinois senator in which he warned of the encroachment of the executive on the powers of the other branches of government.

“How does going from being a senator to a president rewrite the Constitution?” Gowdy asked. “What’s different from when he was a senator? Mr. Speaker, I don’t think there’s an amendment to the Constitution that I’ve missed. I try to keep up with those with regularity.”

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CBS Allows A Real Journalist to Resign

Photo Credit: Newsbusters After months of pressing the CBS News brass to get out of her contract, reporter Sharyl Attkisson was finally granted her request. While that is good for her, it ought to underline how CBS has abandoned hard-hitting reporting in the Obama era.

Politico’s Attkisson headline was “The right loses its hero at CBS,” and liberal blogs tried to guess how long it would take for her to sign up with Fox News Channel. That might happen. Roger Ailes loves scooping up talent from other networks. That’s meant as an insult, of course. Only those dreadful right-wing propagandists challenge Team Obama.

But it’s insulting on a different level altogether. I do not know Ms. Attkisson, but I suspect she’d be insulted to be viewed as any partisan group’s “hero.” She would not have been employed for CBS for more than 20 years if she was a Democrat-wrecking right-winger. She’s merely a “polarizing figure” for failing to do what Dan Rather called “kiss ass, move with the mass.”

Remember this the next time a pompous liberal anchorman like Brian Williams laments that “politics is broken.” Journalism is broken. There is no such thing as journalistic independence. When a veteran reporter stands out like a sore thumb by merely trying to get answers for the American people on how a fiasco like Benghazi happened, she is not the issue. Her network purporting to be in the news business is.

Attkisson had every reason to want out of her contract. According to the Tyndall Report, in 2007,she was the 18th most used reporter in major network nightly news, with 160 minutes on the evening newscast. In 2008, she held steady at 18th, with 145 minutes, and in 2009, she was 19th, with 152 minutes. She hasn’t landed in the top 20 since…Obama scandals bubbled up, and she started covering them.

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House Votes to Cut Funds for Universities Over Gay-Themed Books

Photo Credit: REUTERSThe South Carolina House of Representatives approved nearly $70,000 in cuts to two public universities on Wednesday in retaliation over reading material containing homosexual themes, a move decried as “censorship” by critics but called necessary by supporters.

The House approved the cuts to the College of Charleston and the University of South Carolina-Upstate as part of the 2014-2015 budget bill after bids by Democrats to restore the funding failed. The bill now heads to the Senate.

Republican state Rep. Garry Smith proposed $52,000 in cuts to the College of Charleston and $17,142 in cuts to the USC-Upstate. The amount represents the costs of the schools’ required-reading programs.

The College of Charleston’s program selects one book a year for the entire campus to read, which this year was Alison Bechdel’s “Fun Home,” a memoir about the author growing up as a lesbian in rural Pennsylvania. USC-Upstate’s program has first-year writing students all read the same book, which this year was “Out Loud: The Best of Rainbow Radio,” a compilation of stories shared on South Carolina’s first radio station for gays and lesbians.

Smith told FoxNews.com he received complaints from constituents who have children at both schools. He said when they or their students objected to the books’ content, they were told they could not read an alternative book.

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Former MLS Player Lost his Battle with Cancer, but He Won So Much More

Photo Credit: The Kuykendall FamilyIf you were to ask about the greatest play of Shawn Kuykendall’s life, it was the day he learned that he was going to die…

“We are all given this great gift of life and we have this finite time to do whatever we want. So we live the best we can, and for me, that means living the way I think God wants me to live. I need God more than ever now.” There was a pause as he rubbed his head, once full of dark flowing hair, now bald from the chemo.

“So praise be to God. I’m not going to waste time being sad or worried or scared. I have to fight. If I trust in him and fight, everything else will take care of itself.” We sat in silence for a moment. I mean, how do you follow up a thought like that? Well, if you’re Shawn …

“But seriously, can we talk about Liverpool’s buildup play? Four passes to get up the field and a shot on goal. Four passes!? Bazilly.” That was his essence. A thoughtful, spiritual, athletic, and vibrant soul. Shawn radiated life and love. Some people would call it style. Shawn would probably have called it swag. I believe it to be faith. Whatever “it” was, people loved him for it. Hundreds and thousands of people loved Shawn Kuykendall.

It was all very much worth it. None of it was wasted. Everything went to plan.

Shawn won.

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Debris Discovered? Government Agency Captures Image of Floating Objects in The Sea

Photo Credit: Sky News By Sky News.

Malaysia and Vietnam sent aircraft to the sea off the southern tip of Vietnam and east of Malaysia on Wednesday evening after China released satellite images appearing to show potential debris.

Datuk Azharuddin Abdul Rahman, the head of Malaysia’s Department of Civil Aviation, said: “There is nothing. We went there, there is nothing.”

Vietnamese officials previously said the area had already been “searched thoroughly”.

The release of the images briefly raised hopes of an end to the mystery surrounding the fate of flight MH370, which left Kuala Lumpur bound for Beijing six days ago with 239 people on board.

The pictures, taken on Sunday and released by a Chinese government agency, appeared to show three floating objects of varying sizes in the sea.

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No debris found at spot shown on Chinese satellite images, Malaysia says

By Fox News.

No signs of the missing Malaysian jetliner have been found at a location where Chinese satellite images showed what was thought to be plane debris, Malaysia’s civil aviation chief said Thursday.

Datuk Azharuddin Abdul Rahman said planes searched the location Thursday. “There is nothing. We went there, there is nothing,” he told reporters in Kuala Lumpur.

China’s official Xinhua News Agency reported late Wednesday a government website has satellite images of suspected debris from the Malaysia Airlines plane that vanished with 239 people aboard just hours after leaving Kuala Lumpur for Beijing early Saturday.

The satellite images from the morning of March 9 appear to show “three suspected floating objects” of varying sizes in the sea off the southern tip of Vietnam and east of Malaysia – a part of the original search area for the aircraft, which was en route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing.

Pham Quy Tieu, Vietnam’s deputy transport minister, told The Associated Press that the area had been “searched thoroughly” by forces from other countries over the past few days. Doan Huu Gia, chief of air search and rescue coordination center, said Malaysian and Singaporean aircraft visited area again Thursday.

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