One of Gov. Christie’s Bodyguards Charged With Shoplifting in Pennsylvania (+video)

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Photo Credit: APOne of Governor Chris Christie’s bodyguards has suspended without pay from the New Jersey State Police, charged with shoplifting in Berks County, Pa.

A state police spokesman says that William Carvounis, 35, was assigned to the executive protection unit and had been on Christie’s security detail.

But police in Tilden Township, Pa. — north of Reading and west of Allentown — say last month the trooper stole nearly $300 in gun supplies and other merchandise from a Cabela’s sporting goods store.

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Obama on IRS Scandal: ‘Not Even a Smidgen of Corruption’

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Photo Credit: APPresident Obama, in an interview with Fox News’ Bill O’Reilly, tried to put behind him the scandals that have hung over his second term, suggesting his administration did not mislead the public on the Benghazi attack and going so far as to say the IRS targeting scandal had “not even a smidgen of corruption.”

Obama addressed concerns over Benghazi, the launch of HealthCare.gov and the IRS, during the interview Sunday before the Super Bowl. He adamantly rejected the suggestion that the IRS was used for political purposes by singling out Tea Party groups seeking tax exemption.

“That’s not what happened,” he said. Rather, he said, IRS officials were confused about how to implement the law governing those kinds of tax-exempt groups.

“There were some bone-headed decisions,” Obama conceded.

But when asked whether corruption, or mass corruption, was at play, he responded: “Not even mass corruption — not even a smidgen of corruption.”

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Obama to O’Reilly: Fox News Reason for My Problems

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President Barack Obama twice blamed Fox News Channel for misinforming the public on issues that have bedeviled his presidency in the past year during a pre-Super Bowl interview with the network’s Bill O’Reilly.

The two sat down in the White House on Sunday for a live pregame interview that started about 4:35 p.m. and aired for about 10 minutes.

O’Reilly first noted that Obama’s detractors believe he did not initially say the Sept. 11, 2012, attack in Benghazi, Libya, that left U.S. Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans dead was terrorism because it happened in the heat of an election.

Obama had just weeks earlier said al-Qaida was on the run after U.S. Navy SEALs assassinated its leader, Osama bin Laden.

“That’s what they believe,” O’Reilly said of Obama’s detractors.

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Does the Right to Self-Defense Have Boundaries?

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Photo Credit: WNDThe U.S. Supreme Court repeatedly has sided with defenders of the Second Amendment, ruling that the Constitution protects an individual’s right to bear arms and that states cannot unreasonably restrict that right.

There’s also a case pending before the U.S. Supreme Court considering whether or not states can limit the right to self-defense to a citizen’s private home.

Now, in a related move, U.S senators have proposed a law to establish that the right to bear arms cannot be restricted by political boundaries. The bill would establish that a permit to carry a concealed weapon in one state is valid in all states that allow concealed-carry.

Mississippi Republican Sens. Roger Wicker and Thad Cochran recently signed on as co-sponsors of the Concealed Carry Reciprocity Act of 2014.

The bill, they explain, “is intended to defend the 2nd Amendment rights of individuals with conceal carry permits, allowing them to carry those privileges from their home state to other states that also have conceal carry laws.”

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Best Super Bowl XLVIII Commercials (+video)

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Budweiser “Puppy Love”Average and okay.” That’s Lee Garfinkel’s three-word assessment of this year’s crop of Super Bowl ads. And Garfinkel knows of what he speaks. The CEO of DraftFCB NY is the auteur of numerous classic Super Bowl ads, most notably a series of iconic Pepsi spots featuring Cindy Crawford.

Garfinkel, who created high profile spots at BBDO, Lowe, DDB, and Havas Worldwide, knows how hard it is to make a great Super Bowl spot. The stakes are high and everyone has an opinion. “It’s a very delicate thing to create a great commercial, let alone a great Super Bowl spot,” he explains. “You need to take into consideration how people view Super Bowl spots, how it will do in the different Ad Meters and reviews, plus so many people are working on it that it’s easy to chip away at it and water it down.”…

Here are the ads, including a great spot that did not air during the game on Sunday.

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Welcome to the United States of Paranoia

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Photo Credit: APFeel like Big Brother is watching you these days? You’re not alone.

“This is not some far-out Orwellian scenario,” wrote the late William Safire of The New York Times in 2002, in the panicky aftermath of 9/11. “Here is what will happen to you: Every purchase you make with a credit card, every magazine subscription you buy and medical prescription you fill, every Web site you visit and e-mail you send or receive . . . will go into what the Defense Department describes as ‘a virtual, centralized grand database.’ ”

Twelve years on, this is the world we live in, but worse. Through a combination of fear, cowardice, political opportunism and bureaucratic metastasis, the erstwhile land of the free has been transformed into a nation of closely watched subjects — a country of 300 million potential criminals, whose daily activities need constant monitoring.

Once the most secret of organizations, the NSA has become even more famous than the CIA, the public face of Big Brother himself. At its headquarters on Savage Road in Fort Meade, Md., its omnivorous Black Widow supercomputer hoovers up data both foreign and domestic, while its new $2 billion data center near Bluffdale, Utah — the highly classified Intelligence Community Comprehensive National Cybersecurity Initiative Data Center — houses, well, just about everything. As James Bamford wrote in Wired magazine two years ago, as the center was being completed:

“Flowing through its servers and routers and stored in near-bottomless databases will be all forms of communication, including the complete contents of private e-mails, cellphone calls, and Google searches, as well as all sorts of personal data trails — parking receipts, travel itineraries, bookstore purchases, and other digital ‘pocket litter.’ ”

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Obama on Benghazi: ‘We Revealed What We Knew at the Time’

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Photo Credit: APPresident Obama said the attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya occurred because “not all the precautions that should have been taken were taken’ and denied any effort in the immediate aftermath to downplay the role terrorism played.

“That is inaccurate,” Obama said of Fox News’ Bill O’Reilly’s suggestion that the administration sought to sweep under the terrorist-nature of the attack in the final months of his 2012 re-election campaign.

“We revealed to the American people what we knew at the time,” said Obama.

n a contentious pre-Super Bowl interview with O’Reilly, Obama said early on during the attack — when then-Defense Secretary Leon Panetta informed him about the assault — that U.S. officials did not tell him exactly who was involved.

“People understood at the time that something very dangerous was happening,” Obama said. “In the aftermath what became clear was the security was lax — not all the precautions that should have been taken were taken.”

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A Super Bowl Commercial Guaranteed to Bring You Chills

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On January 8, Army 1st Lt. Chuck Nadd left his eight-month mission in Afghanistan to come home. He knew he’d be greeted by his girlfriend. But he didn’t know his hometown — and Budweiser cameras — were waiting for him, too.

Thanks to careful coordination with girlfriend Shannon Cantwell, Lt. Nadd thought he was flying to Florida to speak at the VFW. Hidden cameras caught the airport homecoming between Cantwell and Lt. Nadd and followed the couple to the site where an old-fashioned ticker-tape parade awaited.

Viewers get a front-row seat to the surprise parade sponsored by the VFW and Budweiser in the Army officer’s hometown of Winter Park, FL, with marching bands, antique vehicles, the VFW motorcycle club, and the Budweiser Clydesdales.

Check out Lt. Nadd’s reaction when he sees his mom around 0:42. She secretly flew in from Alabama and was waiting to close out the surprise at the end of the parade.

The homecoming provided so much great footage that Budweiser extended the 30-second ad to 60 seconds during the editing process. Budweiser released the spot, titled “A Hero’s Welcome,” exclusively to active and retired military Thursday.

The Super Bowl Sunday premiere will launch a year-long digital campaign by Budweiser to encourage their consumers to honor the military. Lt. Nadd, a 2011 West Point graduate, was honored to help kick it off.

“I think it’s a neat opportunity for America to think about the folks coming home and everything folks have given up to get to this point,” Lt. Nadd said. “So many have given so much more than me. They’re the real heroes. … Those with two, three, four, or more deployments, those seriously injured, and those who made the ultimate sacrifice for our amazing Republic — those are the real heroes.”

In February 2013, Lt. Nadd graduated from flight school in Fort Rucker, AL, where he trained to become a Black Hawk helicopter pilot. He’s been deployed in Afghanistan since.

Budweiser also produced a five-minute web documentary on Lt. Nadd that highlights his background, family, friends, and the campaign details. You can watch it below.

Cantwell works for Alabama Senator Richard Shelby as a legislative correspondent and deputy press secretary. She said she nominated Lt. Nadd in hopes it would inspire communities across America to salute the men and women in uniform who daily give themselves to defend freedom.

“Both Chuck and I feel so blessed to have this opportunity,” Cantwell said.

This article appeared originally at Heritage.com and is re-published in full with the Heritage Foundation’s permission.

US Secretary of State Threatens Israeli Boycott, Warns of ‘Deligitimization’ of Israel

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Photo Credit: CBSIsraeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Sunday brushed off U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry’s warning that Israel faced a growing boycott threat if peace talks with the Palestinians fail, saying the campaign would not achieve its goal.

In the latest flare-up between the two allies, two of Netanyahu’s Cabinet ministers went even further, lashing out at Kerry and accusing him of undermined the Jewish state’s legitimacy and the chances of reaching a peace agreement.

Israel and the Palestinians launched peace talks in July after a long lull and have thus far shown little signs of progress. Facing an April deadline, Israel is working against a backdrop of increasing international pressure to reach a deal, coupled with a growing call for boycotting Israel over its settlements in areas it captured in the 1967 Middle East war.

A small but growing number of European businesses and pension funds have begun to drop investments or limit trade with Israeli firms involved in the West Bank settlements. At a security conference in Germany this weekend, Kerry warned that a breakdown in Israeli-Palestinian talks would accelerate this trend and could threaten Israel’s economic prosperity and its safety.

“You see for Israel there’s an increasing de-legitimization campaign that has been building up. People are very sensitive to it. There are talk of boycotts and other kinds of things,” Kerry said. “Today’s status quo absolutely, to a certainty, I promise you 100 percent, cannot be maintained. It’s not sustainable. It’s illusionary. There’s a momentary prosperity, there’s a momentary peace.”

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Namath Honors Navy SEAL Chris Kyle at Super Bowl

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Photo Credit: TPNNNFL legend Joe Namath honored fallen soldier Chris Kyle as he did the coin toss at the Super Bowl on Sunday, February 2nd. Namath tweeted a picture of what he would be wearing in honor of Kyle, who died one year ago on February 2, 2013

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