Reid Defends Obamacare Exemption for Congress: ‘That’s What the Law Says’

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Photo Credit: Daily Caller

Photo Credit: Daily Caller

Senate majority leader Harry Reid defended the special Obamacare exemptions carved out for lawmakers and their staff on Thursday during a Capitol press conference, insisting that Congress members and staff will participate in Obamacare’s exchanges.

Responding to the hoopla surrounding the health insurance policies on Capitol Hill, the Nevada Democrat flatly stated Thursday, “That’s what the law says, and we’ll be part of that.”

Reid said the Republicans and critics are just using the issue as a “diversion” to “try and embarrass the president.”

“Let’s stop these really juvenile political games,” Reid said. “The one dealing with healthcare for Senators and House members and our staff. We are going to be part of exchanges.”

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Col. West: Benghazi Can’t Be ‘the New Normal’ (+video)

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Photo Credit: Alex Wong/Getty Images

Photo Credit: Alex Wong/Getty Images

“We abandoned four Americans who were under attack, and that’s not who we are as a people. That’s not who we are as a nation,” a somber, but determined, Col. Allen West told WND.

“We, as a people, have to stand up, because we can not settle for this and come to believe the new normal is that an ambassador can call up and say ‘We’re under attack’ and have elected officials do nothing about it.”

West was in the nation’s capital to speak at the Justice for Benghazi Rally on the one-year anniversary of the attack on the U.S. diplomatic mission in Benghazi, Libya, and the twelfth anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks on New York and Washington, D.C.

The former Florida congressman told the crowd President Obama lacked a sense of “moral obligation” about the deaths of U.S. Ambassador Chris Stevens and security personnel who “ran to the sound of the guns, while others on that night ran to bed.”

President Obama’s representatives have repeatedly refused to divulge what he was doing the night of the attacks.

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Teen Convicted of Killing Baby Gets Life in Prison

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Photo Credit: AP

Photo Credit: AP

A Georgia teen convicted of fatally shooting a baby in a stroller was sentenced Thursday to spend the rest of his life in prison with no chance of parole after the grieving mother asked a judge to punish the gunman for taking “the love of my life.”

De’Marquise Elkins, 18, stood silent and showed no emotion as he was sentenced in a courtroom less than two weeks after a jury found him guilty of murder in the slaying of 13-month-old Antonio Santiago during a robbery attempt.

“His first word was never heard. His first sentence was never said,” Sherry West, the baby’s mother, said through tears on the witness stand as she read a statement made to rhyme like a poem or a nursery rhyme. “He never got to sleep in a toddler bed.”

The baby was in his stroller and out for a walk with his mother when he was shot between the eyes March 21 in the Georgia coastal city of Brunswick. West and a younger teenager charged as an accomplice testified at trial that Elkins killed the baby after his mother refused to give up her purse.

Elkins was spared the death penalty because the killing occurred when he was 17, which the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled is too young to face capital punishment. Under Georgia law, the only possible punishments for Elkins were life with or without a chance of parole.

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Student Destroys 9/11 Memorial Flag Display, Citing US Imperialism

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Photo Credit: Young America's Foundation

Photo Credit: Young America’s Foundation

Protesters at Middlebury College in Vermont uprooted 2,977 flags that were part of a 9/11 memorial display on Wednesday.

The flags symbolize each of the 2,977 people who died in the terrorist attacks on September 11th, 2001. The College Republicans and Democrats have jointly planted the flags in a field on campus every year for the last decade.

But this year, Ben Kinney — president of the College Republicans — happened to be walking by the display as 5 protesters finished removing the last of the flags and placing them in trash bags.

“At first, I thought the group was comprised of College Democrats helping put the flags away before the rain rolled in, but then I realized what they were doing,” said Kinney in a statement to The Middlebury Campus.

The protesters — at least one of whom was a student — explained that they were “confiscating” the flags in order to take a stand against U.S. imperialism.

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At Least Three Killed as Insurgents Attack U.S. Consulate in Afghan West

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Photo Credit: AFP-Getty Images

Photo Credit: AFP-Getty Images

At least three people were killed when insurgents attacked the U.S. consulate in western Afghanistan’s main city on Friday, detonating a powerful truck bomb outside the front gates and launching a gunbattle with security forces, officials said.

The bold attack in Herat, claimed by the Taliban, once again underscored a worrying security picture as Afghanistan prepares to take over from foreign combat troops after 12 years of war and stage crucial presidential elections next year.

While the circumstances of the attack were initially unclear, a spokesman for the U.S. embassy in the Afghan capital of Kabul said all U.S. personnel in the consulate in Herat were safe and had been accounted for.

He described the incident as a “complex” attack that included a car bomb. A U.S. State Department statement later said the attack was over.

Herat police chief General Rahmatullah Safi said a police officer and a translator had been killed and two Afghan staff working in the consulate had been wounded.

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Multiple NASA Websites Hacked

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Photo Credit: NASA

Photo Credit: NASA

Nearly a dozen NASA websites run from the heart of Silicon Valley were hacked on Tuesday and remain offline days later, following a politically motivated digital broadside against the space agency.

“My understanding is the entire NASA Ames Center had a hack attack that took the website down,” spokesman JD Harrington told FoxNews.com. However, another NASA spokesman later denied that the entire center was taken down, instead saying that the attack was of a much smaller scope.

The Ames Center in Mountain View, Calif., where scientists once worked on the Viking and Pioneer spacecraft, currently houses high-tech facilities for NASA and others; Google leases 42.2 acres at Ames for a planned 1.2 million square foot of office and R&D space, for example.

A group calling itself BMPoC took credit for the hack, saying it had taken down the sites to protest U.S. cyberintelligence activities.

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NSA Disguised Itself as Google to Spy, say Reports

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Photo Credit: CNET

Photo Credit: CNET

Here’s one of the latest tidbits on the NSA surveillance scandal (which seems to be generating nearly as many blog items as there are phone numbers in the spy agency’s data banks).

Earlier this week, Techdirt picked up on a passing mention in a Brazilian news story and a Slate article to point out that the US National Security Agency had apparently impersonated Google on at least one occasion to gather data on people. (Mother Jones subsequently pointed out Techdirt’s point-out.)

Brazilian site Fantastico obtained and published a document leaked by Edward Snowden, which diagrams how a “man in the middle attack” involving Google was apparently carried out.

A technique commonly used by hackers, a MITM attack involves using a fake security certificate to pose as a legitimate Web service, bypass browser security settings, and then intercept data that an unsuspecting person is sending to that service. Hackers could, for example, pose as a banking Web site and steal passwords.

The technique is particularly sly because the hackers then use the password to log in to the real banking site and then serve as a “man in the middle,” receiving requests from the banking customer, passing them on to the bank site, and then returning requested info to the customer — all the while collecting data for themselves, with neither the customer nor the bank realizing what’s happening. Such attacks can be used against e-mail providers too.

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Russia Entering Cultural Abyss – Close to Two Percent of Potential Population Aborted Every Year

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Photo Credit: AP

Photo Credit: AP

Foreign policy expert Ilan Berman says Russia is falling apart — and that could bode ill for the United States.

“The scale of social and cultural rot in contemporary Russian society is truly staggering,” Berman, vice president of the American Foreign Policy Council and editor of the Journal of International Security Affairs, told The Daily Caller in an email interview about his new book, “Implosion: The End of Russia and What it Means for America,” to be released Monday.

“Take abortion, for instance. According to official estimates, almost 1.2 million abortions are performed in Russia every year. That equals out to 300 babies every hour. According to unofficial projections, however, the true abortion rate could be as much as double that figure — which means that close to 2 percent of Russia’s potential population is being terminated every year!”

“Equally grim statistics can be found in the state of national health, in its alcoholism and drug addiction rates, and in its failing struggle to contain HIV/AIDS,” he continued. “It’s no wonder that one in five Russians now wants to live abroad — and almost half of Russians between the ages of 18 and 35 are actively considering doing so. Russia, simply put, is a dying project — and the Russians themselves know it.”

But the cultural rot is only part of Russia’s problem, Berman says. He says the country is imploding because its “population is constricting by close to half-a-million people every year as a result of both death and emigration;” because its population is “transforming” in that its “radicalizing” Muslim minority “isn’t facing the same demographic stressors as its Slavic majority is;” and because of the ”challenge from China.”

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Tattooed National Guard Sergeant Theresa Vail Takes on Miss America

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Photo Credit: Facebook

Photo Credit: Facebook

Watch out Miss America, Miss Kansas Theresa Vail is here.

The Miss America pageant was started as way to keep tourists coming to Atlantic City after Labor Day in the 1920s.

With the rise of the feminist movement and the civil rights movement, the pageant has tried to change with the times and to portray the contestants as something more than air headed, wholesome, white women whose goals in life are to either be a rocket scientist or a model, with the underlying emphasis on helping to bring world peace.

In the 1960s, the contest eliminated rule number seven, according to PBS’s 2011 documentary “Miss America,” which required contestants to be “in good health and white.” Professional women began competing in the 1970s as part of the pageants continuing effort to evolve.

But nothing previously adapted by the “scholarship” pageant will change perceptions as much as when Miss Kansas Theresa Vail steps on the stage in her bathing suit this weekend.

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Emails Show IRS’ Lois Lerner Specifically Targeted Tea Party

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Photo Credit: Tea Party

Photo Credit: Tea Party

Lois G. Lerner, the woman at the center of the Internal Revenue Service scandal over special scrutiny of conservative groups, specifically targeted tea party applications and directed that they be held up in 2011 in order to come up with an agency policy, according to several of Ms. Lerner’s emails released by a House committee Thursday.

In one 2011 email, Ms. Lerner specifically calls the tea party applications for tax-exempt status problematic, which seems to counter Democrats’ arguments that tea party groups weren’t targeted.

“Tea Party Matter very dangerous,” Ms. Lerner wrote in the 2011 email, saying that those applications could end up being the “vehicle to go to court” to get more clarity on a 2010 Supreme Court ruling on campaign finance rules.

In another email, from 2012, Ms. Lerner acknowledges that the agency’s handling of the tax-exempt applications had been bungled at the beginning, though she said steps had been taken to correct problems.

“It is what it is,” she wrote in the email, released Thursday by the Ways and Means Committee. “Although the original story isn’t as pretty as we’d like, once we learned [that we were] off track, we have done what we can to change the process, better educate our staff and move the cases. So, we will get dinged, but we took steps before the ‘dinging’ to make things better and we have written procedures.”

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