Hamptons Group Home Workers Allegedly Ran ‘Developmentally Disabled Fight Club’ (+video)

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Photo Credit: Modern RelicsFour workers at a group home allegedly encouraged a person with developmental disabilities to attack another disabled person on Long Island, prosecutors said.

As CBS 2’s Carolyn Gusoff reported, prosecutors called it a disturbing abuse of their position for group home workers who were supposed to be taking care of disabled residents instead of taking advantage of them.

Erin McHenry of Brookhaven, Justin McDonald of Lindenhurst, Stephen Komara of East Moriches and Rosemary Vanni of Eastport face felony charges of endangering the welfare of an incompetent or physically disabled person, prosecutors said.

“These defendants encouraged two developmentally disabled adults to participate in, what I said on record, is a developmentally disabled fight club,” said special prosecutor Jacqueline Kagan, of the New York State Justice Center for Protection of People with Special Needs.

Kagan said one group home worker shot cell phone video while three others raucously laughed, as they encouraged two severely disabled men to fight.

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‘Caught Red-Handed’: Sekulow Details New ‘Smoking Gun’ IRS Emails (+video)

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Photo Credit: Fox NewsJay Sekulow, chief counsel at the American Center for Law and Justice, testified before a House committee yesterday on the IRS scandal. He’s representing 41 of the conservative groups that say they were illegally targeted by the IRS.

During his testimony, he pointed to emails sent by former IRS official Lois Lerner that appear to contradict the administration’s assertions that the targeting was not a coordinated effort from Washington.

The emails were released by the House Ways and Means Committee as part of its probe of the IRS scandal. Sekulow explained that the emails show Lerner in contact with the IRS’ chief counsel and other top lawyers at least a year before the scandal became public. He said that Lerner wrote about coming up with new rules to restrict non-profit groups.

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Ben Carson: Obama Officials ‘Acting Like Gestapo’

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Photo Credit: WNDDr. Ben Carson, the brain surgeon turned popular political analyst, told WND Obama administration officials are “acting like the Gestapo” with the Justice Department indictment of Dinesh D’Souza coupled with the Internal Revenue Service’s political targeting of the administration’s critics.

“I believe we are dealing with an extremely corrupt administration,” he said.

Dr. Carson himself became the subject of an IRS audit after criticizing Barack Obama’s policies at the annual National Prayer Breakfast in Washington last year.

“I’ve always been someone who has been very careful about my finances and the way I take care of my business,” said Dr. Carson. “I’ve never undergone this kind of scrutiny before, but then it comes after the prayer breakfast. They’re harassing my family. They’re harassing my colleagues. And they’re not finding anything – so that just makes them dig a little deeper.”

In a telephone interview today, Dr. Carson, who is talked about as a potential new brand of non-politician presidential candidate himself in 2016, said he was also disturbed by Obama’s comments in an interview with Fox News Channel’s Bill O’Reilly before the Super Bowl game last week.

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Obama Admin Files Papers to Force Notre Dame to Comply With HHS Mandate

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Photo Credit: LifeNewsThe Obama administration is not content to force Obamacare on the nation but it’s also not going to relent when it comes to religious businesses, schools and organizations that want to opt out of complying with the HHS mandate, that compels them to pay for birth control and abortion-causing drugs.

The Obama administration is fighting the University of Notre Dame’s request for a reprieve from complying with the HHS mandate and filed papers on Tuesday with the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals opposing the Catholic university’s attempt to get out from under it.

According to Politico:

The school, which is complying with the coverage mandate while fighting the policy in court, was denied a similar stay by the 7th Circuit late last year. Notre Dame re-filed its petition after the Supreme Court granted an injunction to the Little Sisters of the Poor Home for the Aged last month.

The school said its case is nearly identical to the Little Sisters; the Justice Department said Tuesday that the facts are not the same.

Notre Dame “Employees and other beneficiaries are currently receiving contraceptive coverage,” Justice Department officials wrote in their brief (posted here).The school “offers no reason why this Court should disrupt the status quo by entering an injunction pending appeal while it is considering the merits of the appeal on a highly expedited basis.”

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EPA Set To Strike Key Blow Against Coal?

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Photo Credit: Fox NewsStymied by the GOP’s long resistance to cap and trade legislation, the EPA this week began public hearings — the next step toward a final rule — to cut carbon dioxide emissions from new coal plants.

The rule would limit emissions to 1100 pounds per Megawatt hour, a level the coal industry says is technologically unattainable.

Green energy proponents disagree.

“Opponents say this will prevent ever building another coal-fired plant in the United States today. They say that the technology is not commercially available. These claims are scare tactics,” Rep. HenryWaxman, D-Calif., said in a press conference Thursday outside EPA headquarters in advance of the hearing.

Some supporters of the proposed rule say fracking has unleashed a treasure trove of cleaner natural gas. Its new abundance and low price has put coal at a competitive disadvantage, a welcome development, they say, given the consequences of global warming.

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Jeh Johnson: DHS Already Preparing to Implement Immigration Reform

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Photo Credit: REUTERS/Gary CameronThe Department of Homeland Securityis already preparing to implement immigration reform legislation, according to DHS Secretary Jeh Johnson.

“When reform legislation is enacted, DHS must be prepared to implement reform. So to prepare for this potential outcome, I have already directed the deputy director of homeland security to coordinate the process to ensure we are ready to implement the law,” Johnson said Friday at the Woodrow Wilson International Center, during his first major policy address since becoming DHS’s fourth secretary.

He praised the House Republicans recent statement of principles on immigration, calling them a “serious step forward” that “contains a lot to work with.”

“With both parties’ recognition that our immigration system is broken and needs to be fixed, this should not be an issue used in one way or another for political advantage,” Johnson said. “Rather we must look to find commonsense solutions to a problem we all know we have.”

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House GOP Report: Hillary Was ‘Aware’ of Benghazi Security Lapses

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Photo Credit: APHouse Republicans Friday released a blistering new report saying former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton “was certainly aware” of security problems in Libya before the deadly Sept. 11, 2012, attack on a U.S. diplomatic outpost in Benghazi, blasting her and successor John Kerry for failing to hold anyone accountable.

The report written by staff members of the House Foreign Affairs Committee’s GOP majority cited problems with the State Department’s Accountability Review Board examination of the attack that killed four Americans, including Ambassador Christopher Stevens, The Washington Times reported.

And despite the Obama administration’s assertion that review board examination shows the blame for the attack lies with lower-level employees, the House report says Clinton should have been held accountable – and both she and Kerry failed to fire anyone for security breaches that led to the deaths of Stevens, State Department staffer Sean Smith, and former Navy SEALs Glen Doherty and Tyrone Woods, the Times reported.

“Systemic failures at the State Department during Secretary Clinton’s tenure resulted in a grossly inadequate security posture in Benghazi,” the report states, according to the Times.

“These vulnerabilities contributed to the deaths of four Americans, including the first U.S. ambassador killed in the line of duty since 1979.”

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Berkeley Prof Forces Students to Tweet Pro-Islam Views

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Photo Credit: Youtube screenshotStudents in Professor Hatem Bazian’s class at the University of California at Berkeley are required to publicly denounce Islamophobia on Twitter while designing strategies to help Islamic groups improve their outreach efforts.

Bazian is a founder of “Students for Justice in Palestine” at Berkeley, where he teaches in the Near Eastern and Ethnic Studies departments. One of his classes, “Asian American Studies 132AC: Islamophobia,” requires students to tweet about Islamophobia, according to Tarek Fatah, a columnist for the Toronto Sun.

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Manchin: ‘We Haven’t Been Successful’ in Changing Afghanistan: ‘Time to Leave’

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Photo Credit: AP Photo/J. Scott ApplewhiteSen. Joe Manchin (D-W.V.) says it’s time to “rebuild America, not Afghanistan.” He and three other senators want Congress to debate a continued U.S. military presence in that country after 12-plus years of war:

“If military might or money would change that part of the world, we’d have changed it by now,” Manchin told a news conference on Thursday.

“We haven’t been successful nor do we believe we will be successful. That’s my deep-rooted commitment to getting out of this part (of the world) and basically protecting America, making sure that harm doesn’t come to any Americans, and we’ll do whatever it takes to protect them.

“But an occupation — that is not our goal. It’s not what we do well, and it’s not been proved successful at all. So again, I’d say if military might or money would have changed that part of the world after 12 years, we’d have changed it, and we haven’t. So it’s time to leave.”

Manchin on Thursday joined fellow Democrat Jeff Merkeley (Ore.) and Republicans Mike Lee (Utah) and Rand Paul (Ky.) in introducing a resolution that says Congress should vote on the Obama administration’s reported plan to keep 10,000 American troops in Afghanistan for another ten years.

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Great Lakes Ice Cover Spreading Rapidly; See Which Lake Set a New Record

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Photo Credit: NASAIce continued to build this past week on the Great Lakes due to the cold air and temperatures staying below freezing, and Lake Superior’s new record shows it.

The lake is 92 percent frozen, toppling a 20-year-old record of 91 percent set on Feb. 5, 1994. That statistic helped total Great Lakes ice cover soar, and we can expect to see more form in coming days.

The air temperatures this past week averaged around five degrees below normal for the Great Lakes area. This amount of deviation from normal means it was a fairly cold week.

As of February 5, 2014, the entire Great Lakes system is now reportedly covered 77 percent with ice, according to the Great Lakes Environmental Research Laboratory. Last week at this time the ice cover was 66 percent. The 77 percent ice cover now still lags behind 1994, when the entire Great Lakes system had an average ice cover of 84 percent on February 5. This data is according to Jia Wang, physical oceanographer at the Great Lakes Environmental Research Center in Ann Arbor, MI.

Let’s look at each individual lake…

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