Photo Credit: Fox News Sean Hannity held up his end of a bet by cooking dinner for ‘The Five.’
Hannity lost a bet with Andrea Tantaros and Eric Bolling when he picked the Denver Broncos to win the Super Bowl. Of course, it was the Seattle Seahawks who took home the title.
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Photo Credit: CBSThe Denver District Attorney’s Office has declined to file criminal charges against a female Transportation Security Administration agent at Denver International Airport after a passenger complained the pat-down she received amounted to sexual assault.
“I felt sick to my stomach,” said Jamelyn Steenhoek, 39, when she learned Wednesday that Denver prosecutors were no longer pursuing her complaint and would not be filing criminal charges.
“Those TSA agents were purposely abusive to me,” said the Highlands Ranch mother. “And there isn’t any recourse. I still feel as if a crime was committed, and as an individual American I am powerless to do anything about it.”
Steenhoek was at DIA on Dec. 26 escorting her 13-year-old daughter to a flight. Steenhoek herself was not boarding a flight that day, but she still had to clear security to take her daughter to the concourse and gate.
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Photo Credit: InfoWarsThe U.S. Postal Service is currently seeking companies that can provide “assorted small arms ammunition” in the near future.
On Jan. 31, the USPS Supplies and Services Purchasing Office posted a notice on the Federal Business Opportunities website asking contractors to register with USPS as potential ammunition suppliers for a variety of cartridges.
“The United States Postal Service intends to solicit proposals for assorted small arms ammunition,” the notice reads, which also mentioned a deadline of Feb. 10.
The Post Office published the notice just two days after Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) announced his proposal to remove a federal gun ban that prevents lawful concealed carry holders from carrying handguns inside post offices across the country.
Ironically the Postal Service isn’t the first non-law enforcement agency seeking firearms and ammunition.
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Photo Credit: REUTERS/Larry DowningIdaho Republican Rep. Raúl Labrador said Wednesday that President Obama deserves to win the “Lie of the Year” award again in 2014 for saying there wasn’t a “smidgen of corruption” at the Internal Revenue Service when conservatives were targeted.
Labrador made the comments during a press availability with conservative lawmakers on Capitol Hill.
“I find it fascinating that this administration says there’s no smidgen of corruption, which I think will be the lie of this year,” Labrador said.
During a pre-Super Bowl interview with Fox’s Bill O’Reilly this week, Obama was asked about the revelation last year that the IRS had been intentionally targeting conservative groups for review.
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Photo Credit: CRAIG T. KOJIMAU.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia told law students at the University of Hawaii law school Monday that the nation’s highest court was wrong to uphold the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II but that he wouldn’t be surprised if the court issued a similar ruling during a future conflict.
Scalia was responding to a question about the court’s 1944 decision in Korematsu v. United States, which upheld the convictions of Gordon Hirabayashi and Fred Korematsu for violating an order to report to an internment camp.
“Well, of course, Korematsu was wrong. And I think we have repudiated in a later case. But you are kidding yourself if you think the same thing will not happen again,” Scalia told students and faculty during a lunchtime question-and-answer session.
Scalia cited a Latin expression meaning “In times of war, the laws fall silent.”
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Photo Credit: NewscomIn a largely unreported story, a couple in Pennsylvania is facing charges that could land them in jail for nearly seven years. Their crime? Sending their five year old daughter to a public school outside of their school district.
If it sounds bizarre, that’s because it is. And although breaking the law is never a good thing, the desperate wish of the Garcia family to send their children to a better school is playing out all across our country from sea to shining sea.
The fact is that millions of families have no choice when it comes to deciding on a school that best meets the educational needs of their children. If you are unfortunate enough to live in a school district with ineffective teachers and high crime and violence rates, you are often simply out of luck.
What makes this story from Pennsylvania especially representative of this terrible injustice is that a vast majority of those being deprived of a choice when it comes to education are Hispanic and African-American families. In too many states across the county, only wealthy families have the ability to decide for themselves where to send their children to school. For these families, they can choose to send their children to a better school without being constrained by where they live. Private school choice is a real possibility for these families.
Why not give this same freedom to other families?
This is the question that thousands of families have been asking in cities all across the country as part of the National School Choice Week shining a positive spotlight on the need for effective education options for all children. In rallies in city after city as part of a national whistle-stop tour, families have been joined by lawmakers, advocates and everyday Americans united by the common sense idea that every child should get the best possible education – whether it’s at a public, private, charter school, or through online learning or homeschooling.
And yet, this idea has powerful detractors who are more concerned about protecting the rights and interests of the adults in the system than the educational needs of millions upon millions of children stuck in underperforming schools. Among the fiercest opponents of school choice include the Obama Administration, which has tried to stop meaningful school choice options. The D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program, which has been serving as a lifeline for thousands of low-income families in our nation’s capital, is a prime example. It’s an effective program: 91 percent of students who used a scholarship to attend a private school of choice in DC graduate high school, and researchers Patrick Wolf and Michael McShane note that every dollar spent yields a $2.62 return on investment. Yet this Administration decided to side with the teachers’ unions and the powerful special interests by trying to eliminate funding for the OSP.
It’s not just choice in the nation’s capital. The Department of Justice spent much of last year suing the state of Louisiana’s school voucher program. Evidently, calls from grateful parents like Ms. Coretta Pittman, who praise the program for the ability to send their children to a safer school, fell on deaf ears at the Department of Justice and the White House.
For all of the President’s calls to increase opportunity in his latest State of the Union, this Administration’s own policies are hindering the ability for hundreds of thousands of students to succeed by attempting to limit their school choice options. Perhaps the President would care to know that in states that have expanded school choice measures, the racial achievement and attainment gaps have begun to narrow.
Until the President and this Administration embrace education reform policies like school choice, his rhetoric on freedom and opportunity will not match up with his actions.
Israel Ortega is the Strategic Initiatives Manager at The Heritage Foundation and the Editor of Libertad.org – The Foundation’s Spanish language website, www.libertad.org
This article appeared originally at Heritage.com and is re-published in full with the Heritage Foundation’s permission.
Photo Credit: AP Photo/Guillermo AriasSeveral influential conservative Republicans on Wednesday put House Speaker John Boehner and other GOP leaders on notice that immigration reform legislation is dead because they don’t trust President Obama to honestly implement any new legislation they might pass.
“Until we have that trust, there will be no immigration reform,” said Rep. Raúl Labrador, an Idaho Republican who backs reform including helping the 11 million illegals in the United States to stay.
Labrador said that it was a mistake for the GOP to get caught in a pre-election fight on the issue before the president can prove he will enforce current immigration laws and the GOP wins the Senate so that the party can offer a united front.
“The problem we have is really a problem of trust with this administration,” he said. “The president has lied and lied.”
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Photo Credit: gregwest98Big budget cuts over the next decade will force the Pentagon to make painful cuts to personnel and readiness and could make it hard to execute a global security strategy, defense analysts predicted on Wednesday.
Teams of analysts from four think tanks, who unveiled the results of a defense budget-cutting exercise at a Capitol Hill briefing, all found themselves slashing large numbers of civilian and uniformed personnel, along with ships and fighter jets, to help meet tough budget targets facing the Pentagon.
“It is very, very hard to reach the required level of budget savings in the first … (five-year planning period) if you don’t touch personnel, readiness or both, frankly, because that’s where the money is,” said Nora Bensahel, a fellow at the Center for a New American Security.
“You can’t do it by just picking out a few systems here and there,” she said.
The analysts unveiled their thinking on the 2015 defense budget and U.S. military strategy just a month before the Pentagon releases its own budget for the upcoming fiscal year as well as the Quadrennial Defense Review, a document produced every four years aligning U.S. strategy and resources.
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Photo Credit: David McNew/Getty ImagesShooter and victim were just a pair of pixels, dark specks on a gray streetscape. Hair color, bullet wounds, even the weapon were not visible in the series of pictures taken from an airplane flying two miles above.
But what the images revealed — to a degree impossible just a few years ago — was location, mapped over time. Second by second, they showed a gang assembling, blocking off access points, sending the shooter to meet his target and taking flight after the body hit the pavement. When the report reached police, it included a picture of the blue stucco building into which the killer ultimately retreated, at last beyond the view of the powerful camera overhead.
“I’ve witnessed 34 of these,” said Ross McNutt, the genial president of Persistent Surveillance Systems, which collected the images of the killing in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, from a specially outfitted Cessna. “It’s like opening up a murder mystery in the middle, and you need to figure out what happened before and after.”
As Americans have grown increasingly comfortable with traditional surveillance cameras, a new, far more powerful generation is being quietly deployed that can track every vehicle and person across an area the size of a small city, for several hours at a time. Although these cameras can’t read license plates or see faces, they provide such a wealth of data that police, businesses and even private individuals can use them to help identify people and track their movements.
Already, the cameras have been flown above major public events such as the Ohio political rally where Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) named Sarah Palin as his running mate in 2008, McNutt said. They’ve been flown above Baltimore; Philadelphia; Compton, Calif.; and Dayton in demonstrations for police. They’ve also been used for traffic impact studies, for security at NASCAR races and at the request of a Mexican politician, who commissioned the flights over Ciudad Juárez.
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Photo Credit: Google Glass/FacebookHave you ever seen someone wearing Google Glass out at the bar? Like a real person at a real bar actually wearing Google Glass? If so, you know how absolutely ridiculous they look. Which may be the only factor we have that will stop this:
A new app will allow total strangers to ID you and pull up all your information, just by looking at you and scanning your face with their Google Glass. The app is called NameTag and it sounds CREEPY.
The “real-time facial recognition” software “can detect a face using the Google Glass camera, send it wirelessly to a server, compare it to millions of records, and in seconds return a match complete with a name, additional photos and social media profiles.”
The information listed could include your name, occupation, any social media profiles you have set up and whether or not you have a criminal record (“CRIMINAL HISTORY FOUND” pops up in bright red letters according to the demo).
Photo Credit: NameTag
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