Alaska Soldiers Train With Unmanned Aircraft

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Photo Credit: Dan Joling, Associated PressThe Army is flying a new bird over south central Alaska — and the pilots sit in the back of a Humvee.

Paratroopers with the 425 Brigade Special Troops Battalion on Thursday trained with a RQ7 Shadow unmanned aircraft system. The remotely operated aircraft are designed to provide reconnaissance for troops without putting observers in danger.

The unmanned aircraft provide near real-time video and information from infrared sensors. Operators can’t distinguish individual faces, said Sgt. Brandon Byers, but they can detect heat signatures and vehicle tracks.

“They’re able to distinguish the features and different marks on the ground,” he said.

Byers oversees the maintenance section. Besides the usual repairs, the unit launches the unmanned aircraft from pneumatic catapult launchers mounted on trailers.

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Cruel, Heartless Obama Mocks his Most Loyal, Unquestioning Supporters

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Photo Credit: YahooIn a speech in Wisconsin on Thursday, President Barack Obama insulted perhaps the most fervent members of his political base: art history majors.

The politically clumsy moment occurred during the president’s remarks at General Electric’s Waukesha Gas Engines facility.

After extolling his own economic policies at some length, Obama observed that “manufacturing jobs typically pay well” in the United States. “We want to encourage more of them,” he said.

Then, he began to speak — apparently extemporaneously — about the benefits of working in America’s ever-diminishing manufacturing sector.

“A lot of parents, unfortunately, maybe when they saw a lot of manufacturing being offshored, told their kids you don’t want to go into the trades, you don’t want to go into manufacturing because you’ll lose your job,” the president opined. “Well, the problem is that what happened — a lot of young people no longer see the trades and skilled manufacturing as a viable career.”

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Obama Will Take ‘Executive Action’ to Reduce Prison Population

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Photo Credit: APCongress can pass legislation giving judges more discretion in the sentencing of prisoners, but President Obama “also has the ability to take executive action” to commute the sentences of “low-level” drug offenders — and that’s just what he plans to do, Deputy Attorney General James Cole told the New York State Bar Association annual meeting on Thursday.

“A little over a month ago, the President commuted the sentences of eight men and women who were sentenced under severe — and out of date — mandatory minimum sentencing laws,” Cole said.

“But the President’s grant of commutations for these eight individuals is only a first step. There is more to be done, because there are others like the eight who were granted clemency. There are more low-level, non-violent drug offenders who remain in prison, and who would likely have received a substantially lower sentence if convicted of precisely the same offenses today. This is not fair, and it harms our criminal justice system.

“To help correct this, we need to identify these individuals and get well-prepared petitions into the Department of Justice. It is the Department’s goal to find additional candidates, who are similarly situated to the eight granted clemency last year, and recommend them to the President for clemency consideration.”

Although commutation of sentence is an “extraordinary remedy that is rarely used,” that’s about to change.

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Donald Trump Confirmed to Speak at CPAC 2014

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Photo Credit: APReal estate magnate, television star, and conservative provocateur Donald Trump is a confirmed speaker for the upcoming 2014 Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), Breitbart News has learned.

Trump has been a hit at several recent CPACs, with the crowd loving his populist no-nonsense politics.

“Donald Trump is a successful entrepreneur who cares deeply about his country,” American Conservative Union (ACU) Chairman Al Cardenas said in a statement provided to Breitbart News. “He pulls no punches and always calls it like he sees it. Clearly a crowd favorite in the past, we welcome him to our 50th anniversary, CPAC 2014.”

CPAC is an annual gathering of thousands of conservatives in Washington, D.C. aimed at unifying the movement and connecting leaders with grassroots activists. The ACU hosts the event. It takes place from March 6 through March 8 at the Gaylord National Resort & Convention Center in National Harbor, Maryland, right outside Washington, D.C.

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TSA Adds Bomb-Sniffing Dogs in NJ for Super Bowl

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Photo Credit: bill85704/flickrNewark Liberty International Airport is going to the dogs — the bomb-sniffing kind.

The Transportation Security Administration said it has added about two dozen dogs to monitor passengers coming in and out of the airport around the Super Bowl. Tens of thousands of extra travelers are expected to visit the region for the game.

Neighboring LaGuardia and John F. Kennedy airports aren’t adding any additional K-9s for the big game.

On Saturday morning, TSA agents demonstrated how the dogs can sniff out many different types of explosives. Once they do, they’re trained to sit rather than attack, so as not to raise suspicion or create a panic.

The dogs are mainly Labradors or Lab mixes, which are considered a good hunting breed and people-friendly. TSA spokeswoman Lisa Farbstein said the dogs undergo 12 weeks of training, which costs about $200,000, factoring in food, vehicles and salaries for trainers.

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What is Boehner’s Secret Immigration Plan?

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Photo Credit: AP Photo/J. Scott ApplewhiteWhat did House Speaker John Boehner really mean on Thursday when he announced that the GOP will back a multi-stage amnesty for 12 million illegals, and increase the flow of foreign workers into the country?

The various GOP legislators and advocates can’t tell if Boehner is faking solidarity with the GOP’s immigration-boosting business donors, or is moving slowly to muffle voters’ worries about competition for jobs and wages.

So they’re looking for clues to what Boehner will do next. They’re checking his statements and demeanor, his quips, claps and shrugs, to find out if he really want to push the unpopular bill though the House.

They’re also trying to gauge the willingness of GOP legislators to go through a painful process that would split the GOP base before November, distract the media and voters from Obamacare, and perhaps leave the Democrats in control of the Senate after the November election.

They’s also working to cajole, pressure, spin and lobby to drag Boehner over to their side.

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Brave 6-Year-Old Asks For Help in Store Bathroom After Being Kidnapped (+video)

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Photo Credit: KHOUU11 TEXASA Texas man suspected of kidnapping a 6-year-old girl was arrested soon after the tiny victim bravely called for help in a store bathroom — when he was spotted in a hospital, where his wife gave birth to their child, police said.

Joaquin Ramos, 23 — who allegedly snatched little Kelly Tellez from outside her Houston home — was collared after relatives told police he was with his wife at Memorial Hermann Hospital with their baby on Thursday, according to KHOU-TV…

The terrifying ordeal began after the victim and her mother pulled into a garage near their Wirt Road apartment, police said. As the mother unloaded groceries from the vehicle, Kelly stepped outside to look at the ice frozen to a fence next to the garage, police said.

Suddenly, a man grabbed the little girl and forced her into his Jeep Cherokee. The panicked mother saw the struggle but couldn’t run to the vehicle before it sped away, according to KTRK-TV.

About an hour later, Ramos pulled into a parking lot at the Memorial City Mall and said he needed to use a restroom. He took the victim into a Target, where he told the girl to use the bathroom, the news station reported.

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Congressman: We Can Defeat Executive Order Amnesty

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Photo Credit: WNDThe Democrat plan to give amnesty to millions of illegal aliens in the U.S. can be thwarted, despite apparent wavering by House Republican leadership, contends a Texas congressman.

In an interview with Michael Savage on his “Savage Nation” nationally syndicated show Friday, Rep. John Culberson, R-Texas, insisted, furthermore, that if President Obama tries to advance amnesty or any other initiative through illegal executive orders, he can be stopped, because the House holds the purse strings and can cut off funding for actions that can’t be justified legally.

“The power of the purse is the secret to this guy – the most illegal, unlawful president in American history,” said Culberson, who had just returned from a GOP retreat in Cambridge, Md., where House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, distributed a two-page list of broad principles on immigration.

Seven months after the Senate passed a bipartisan bill with a “path to citizenship,” House Republican leaders Thursday said for the first time they would be open to allowing illegal aliens to live and work legally in the U.S. but would not offer a “special path” to citizenship.

That step in the direction of the Senate plan has many border-security-first advocates, including Savage, worried.

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Bill Maher Makes Country Music Awards Shooting Joke

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Photo Credit: APTaking a swipe at conservatives on gun control, liberal comic Bill Maher joked that a mass shooting should take place at the Country Music Awards.

“Now that liberals have forwarded their agenda by inserting a mass gay wedding into the Grammys, conservatives must match them tit-for-tat by having a mass shooting at the Country Music Awards,” Maher said Friday during his HBO program, “Real Time with Bill Maher.”

Maher’s joke follows the mass weddings performed during the Grammys this past Sunday, in which both same-sex and heterosexual couples were married. Conducted as musician Macklemore and Ryan Lewis sang “Same Love,” it was widely viewed as a call for marriage equality.

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Confessions Of An Ex-TSA Agent

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Photo Credit: Politico Once, in 2008, I had to confiscate a bottle of alcohol from a group of Marines coming home from Afghanistan. It was celebration champagne intended for one of the men in the group—a young, decorated soldier. He was in a wheelchair, both legs lost to an I.E.D., and it fell to me to tell this kid who would never walk again that his homecoming champagne had to be taken away in the name of national security.

There I was, an aspiring satire writer, earnestly acting on orders straight out of Catch-22.

I quickly discovered I was working for an agency whose morale was among the lowest in the U.S. government. In private, most TSA officers I talked to told me they felt the agency’s day-to-day operations represented an abuse of public trust and funds.

Charges of racial profiling by the TSA made headlines every few months, and working from behind the scenes we knew what was prompting those claims. Until 2010 (not long after the TSA standard operating procedure manual was accidentially leaked to the public), all TSA officers worked with a secret list printed on small slips of paper that many of us taped to the back of our TSA badges for easy reference: the Selectee Passport List. It consisted of 12 nations that automatically triggered enhanced passenger screening. The training department drilled us on the selectee countries so regularly that I had memorized them, like a little poem:

Syria, Algeria, Afghanistan
Iraq, Iran, Yemen
and Cuba,
Lebanon-Libya, Somalia-Sudan
People’s Republic of North Korea.

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