Report: 2 Men with HIV thought To Be Cured See Reappearance of Virus

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Photo Credit: NIAID

Photo Credit: NIAID

Researchers are saying a pair of HIV-positive men from Boston, thought to have been cured of the disease after undergoing bone marrow transplants, has since seen the reappearance of the virus that causes AIDS in their bloodstream.

The Boston Globe reports a team led by Dr. Timothy Henrich, an infectious disease specialist at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, revealed the disappointing findings on Friday at a Florida conference on HIV.

“This suggests that we need to look deeper, or we need to be looking in other tissues . . . the liver, gut, and brain,” Henrich told The Globe. “These are all potential sources, but it’s very difficult to obtain tissue from these places so we don’t do that routinely.”

Both patients reportedly had undergone bone marrow transplants to combat lymphoma – and had since then stopped taking the costly cocktail of medicines that keeps HIV from reproducing in the body. HIV is a virus that attacks – and destroys – the body’s immune system. An HIV-positive patient is said to have AIDS once their immune system has deteriorated beyond a certain, clinically measured point.

In one of the Boston patients’ cases, the virus reportedly reappeared after 12 weeks of not having taken medication. In the other, it returned after 32.

Read more from this story HERE.

Calif. Health Exchange Shares Consumers’ Data Without Permission

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Photo Credit: REUTERS

Photo Credit: REUTERS

The California health exchange has admitted it has been divulging contact information for tens of thousands of consumers to insurance agents without their permission or knowledge in an effort to hit deadlines for coverage.

Covered California said it was handing out consumer information as part of a pilot program to help people enroll ahead of a Dec. 23 deadline to have health insurance in place by the new year, according to the Los Angeles Times. The consumers in question had gone online to research insurance options, but didn’t ask to be contacted.

Social Security numbers, income and other information were not provided to the agents, but names, addresses, phone numbers and email addresses were made available, exchange officials said.

The names provided by Covered California include people who started an insurance application on the website but didn’t complete the process.

State officials say they do not know exactly how many people are affected by the information sharing.

Read more from this story HERE.

What Obama Got Right and What He Got Wrong on Economic Mobility

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Photo Credit: Reuters

Photo Credit: Reuters

When it comes to economic mobility, the President often starts out by making some statements that Republicans and Democrats have always agreed on, such as:

While we don’t promise equal outcomes, we have strived to deliver equal opportunity—the idea that success doesn’t depend on being born into wealth or privilege, it depends on effort and merit.

The idea that a child may never be able to escape that poverty because she lacks a decent education or health care, or a community that views her future as their own, that should offend all of us and it should compel us to action.

But then he spoils it. The President’s speech at the Center for American Progress on Wednesday linked policy prescriptions for increasing economic mobility to reducing income differences in America—as though the opportunity problems facing inner-city kids are somehow because Warren Buffett has a lot of money. But not only do the facts show no link between income inequality and a lack of mobility; focusing on inequality actually distracts from the true causes of low economic mobility.

The President identified several social factors that are essential to upward mobility. “Disparities in education, mental health, obesity, absent fathers, isolation from church, isolation from community groups—these gaps are now as much about growing up rich or poor as they are about anything else.” He’s right about these things. But income redistribution will not fix these.

Read more from this story HERE.

Ex-Official Claims FBI Can Secretly Activate Webcams Without the Indicator Light Turning On

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Photo Credit: Shutterstock

Photo Credit: Shutterstock

The FBI can secretly activate a computer’s webcam to spy on an individual without turning on the indicator light, a former official revealed to the Washington Post in an article published Friday.

According to the Washington Post’s account of what Marcus Thomas — former assistant director of the FBI’s Operational Technology Division in Quantico — said, “The FBI has been able to covertly activate a computer’s camera — without triggering the light that lets users know it is recording — for several years, and has used that technique mainly in terrorism cases or the most serious criminal investigations.”

Read more from this story HERE.

Houston Mayor Accused of Instituting ‘Mob Rule’

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Photo Credit: WND

Photo Credit: WND

Houston Mayor Annise Parker is being accused of instituting “mob rule” after imposing a policy that will pay benefits to same-sex couples who have been legally married.

Jared Woodfill, chairman of the local Harris County Republican Party, has signed on to a lawsuit in response, charging the mayor “unilaterally disposed of the Houston City Charter and the Texas Constitution without anything even resembling democratic process.”

Parker announced Nov. 20 that the new policy will offer health and life insurance benefits to all spouses of legally married employees, including same-sex couples.

A voter-approved charter amendment in 2001, however, banned benefits to same-sex couples.

Parker has lived in a lesbian relationship with Kathy Hubbard for 24 years but will remain ineligible for benefits because she is not legally married, the Houston Chronicle reported.

Read more from this story HERE.

Ex-Obama Guard Talks ‘Out of Control’ Government

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Photo Credit: WND

Photo Credit: WND

He swore to take a bullet for the president and then left it all behind to take a bullet for the American people.

Hear Secret Service Agent Dan Bongino tell his story at the Heritage Foundation in Washington, D.C, on Dec. 9 at noon.

WND-TV will live-stream his presentation on why he resigned from his six-figure Secret Service job to embark on a campaign to warn the American people of the dangers of an out-of-control, unaccountable government…

Bongino, who during his 12-year tenure in the Secret Service guarded Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama, resigned in 2010. He walked away in favor of sounding a clarion call to the American people in defense of sane government and the U.S. Constitution.

The author of the explosive New York Times bestseller “Life Inside the Bubble: Why a Top-Ranked Secret Service Agent Walked Away From It All” will present to the audience at the Heritage Foundation an intimate look at life inside the presidential “bubble,” which he describes as a haze of staffers, consultants, cronies, acolytes, bureaucrats and lobbyists that creates an “alternate reality” in which monumental policy decisions are made.

Read more from this story HERE.

Redress Sought After Supreme Court Takes Away Law License of State Attny Gen Who Took on Abortion Industry

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Photo Credit: WND

Photo Credit: WND

A Kansas Supreme Court that recommended former Attorney General Phill Kline’s law license be suspended indefinitely for his investigation of alleged criminal activity on the part of abortionists is being petitioned to correct its own ruling.

The fight over the abortion industry in the state, which included Wichita late-term abortionist George Tiller as well as Planned Parenthood, the American abortion industry’s biggest player, has gone on for years, pitting Kline, in his office as attorney general and then in the position as Johnson County district attorney, against the whole of the abortion industry including state officials who ardently supported abortion.

Among those was Gov. Kathleen Sebelius, now Health and Human Services secretary, who went way beyond being pro-abortion to being “pro-death,” according to attorneys who worked on the brief. The petition was filed by attorneys working with the Life Legal Defense Fund, and seeks a rehearing or modification in Kline’s case, in which the suspension of his license was recommended over issues such as his alleged failure to make certain grand jurors understood state law after he explained it to them.

The brief makes it clear that Kline is facing an uphill fight in the Kansas court system, providing a background for the dispute:

“It is doubtful any criminal suspect in the history of this nation has ever so successfully used a high court to thwart legitimate investigations while persuading the judicial branch of government to put the prosecutor on trial. While the executive branch of the Kansas government ran cover for two abortion providers by (in one instance) shredding evidence of crimes and (in the other instance) conducting a sham prosecution that did everything but stipulate to the abortion provider’s innocence, the judicial branch pursued a two count, multi-charge disciplinary proceeding against Mr. Kline for alleged ethics violations.”

Read more from this story HERE.

Waitress in ‘Anti-Gay’ Receipt Flap Fired

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Photo Credit: Facebook

Photo Credit: Facebook

A New Jersey waitress who raked in thousands in donations after claiming a couple didn’t tip her because she’s gay was fired from her job on Saturday.

Dayna Morales, 22, was finally canned from Gallop Asian Bistro in Bridgewater — nearly a month after she made national headlines over what’s likely a hoax.

The restaurant announced her termination on Facebook Saturday shortly after it was revealed she was returning donations from supporters across the world.

“In light of … recent events, both Ms. Morales and Gallop Asian Bistro have made a joint decision that Ms. Morales will no longer continue her employment at our restaurant,” the eatery wrote. “We wish her well in the future.”

The waitress, a former Marine, claimed the couple stiffed her on a $93.55 bill and left a note saying, “I’m sorry but I cannot tip because I do not agree with your lifestyle.”

Read more from this story HERE.

Generic Vote Shaping Up to Be Like 2010 Again for GOP

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Photo Credit: AP

Photo Credit: AP

One interesting, but not always precisely reliable, measure of partisan preference is what pollsters call the generic vote — which party’s candidates people would vote for in elections to the House of Representatives. Over the past two decades, responses have tended to underpredict Republicans’ performance in subsequent elections, though that was the case more in 1992-2002 than recently.

The last two months have seen sharp shifts in the generic vote, as National Journal’s Charlie Cook notes, with Democrats peaking during the government shutdown in the first half of October and then a sharp swing to Republicans after the spotlight shifted to the Obamacare rollout. (The Huffington Pollster provides a vivid graphic on this.)

The current RealClearPolitics average of recent polls shows Republicans leading Democrats 43 percent to 41 percent (they actually put it at 43.5 percent to 41 percent, but I prefer to round off to integer percentages and always round the .5 percentages down). I went back to RealClearPolitics’ 2010 figures to see how they compared.

Read more from this story HERE.

Barack Obama’s Dictatorial Tendencies

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Barack_Obama_addresses_joint_session_of_Congress_2009-02-24Dear Friend of Liberty,

Earlier this week, Senator Ted Cruz explained remarks made by his father comparing Barack Obama to Fidel Castro and agreed with him that Barack Obama disregards the law, like in “dictatorial societies.” I completely concur with this assessment.

Cruz’s father, Rafael, fled Cuba in search of freedom in the United States following Castro’s rise to power in the late 1950s.

Ted Cruz, while granting there are vast differences between the United States and Cuba, said, “But the point my father was making, he was focusing on a sentence that President Obama used in the last two State of the Union addresses where he said, ‘If Congress doesn’t act, I will.’”

Cruz offered ObamaCare as exhibit A in his case of the President changing numerous provisions of the law, without congressional authorization.

These unilateral acts are in no way limited to the healthcare law. The President’s infamous pronouncement to act with or without Congress was made in regards to climate change, which he did through EPA regulation. He has also failed to enforce immigration law and mandatory sentencing minimums for federal crimes.

The list of abuses goes on. He unilaterally chose not to enforce the Defense of Marriage Act; he made recess appointments when Congress was not in recess; his Administration has stonewalled congressional investigations into Fast and Furious, Benghazi, the NSA and the IRS. This President feels that somehow he is above the law and does not have to answer to the people.

You know where I stand; I’m not “Johnny come lately” to this fight!

You don’t have to wonder whether I’ll fight for your Constitutional Liberties. You don’t have to wonder whether I’ll speak up for those who can’t speak for themselves. You know I will.

Our country is at peril, and there is little time to turn it around. It’s time to take a bold stand for the country we love and fight for its future.

When I am elected to the United States Senate, I pledge to confront this lawless administration. You can count on it!

I cannot do this alone; but together we can make a difference.

Thanks for your generosity and support.

In the fight,

Joe