US Issues Global Travel Alert Amid Threat of Al Qaeda Terror Attack

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Photo Credit: Vox EfxThe State Department issued a worldwide travel alert on Friday and ordered the temporary closure of nearly 20 diplomatic outposts worldwide amid the threat of a potential al Qaeda terrorist attack.

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said her staff and other congressional leaders have been briefed by the administration on the situation, but declined to offer details on the nature of the terror threat.

“Now that it’s in the public domain that the embassies will be closed and there’s a travel alert for Americans traveling abroad, there’s some understanding of the seriousness of the threat,” Pelosi told reporters on Capitol Hill.

Rep. Ed Royce (R-Calif.), the chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, on Friday said Vice President Biden informed him and his Democratic counterpart, Rep. Eliot Engel (D-N.Y.), about the threat earlier this week.

“It’s my understanding that it is al Qaeda-linked, alright? And the threat emanates in the Middle East and in Central Asia,” Royce said on CNN.

Read more from this story HERE.

Daily Beast Harasses Private Citizens Who Donated to Palin’s PAC

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This week, the Daily Beast contacted and harassed private citizens who made contributions to Sarah Palin’s political action committee, SarahPAC. In doing so, the outlet attempted to also weaken her organization by smearing it in the eyes of those most responsible for ensuring Palin’s free-market populist message and conservatism is widely disseminated.

During the first half of 2013, a political off-year in which there are few elections, Palin’s political action committee spent $35,000 more than it took in. The Daily Beast seized on that number and tried to convince donors to SarahPAC that Palin was defrauding them by spending money on expenses common to every political action committee.

As the Daily Beast conceded, Palin’s donors were not buying the Beast’s malarkey. Tim Crawford, the treasurer of SarahPAC, told Breitbart News that since 2013 is an off-year, the organization did not aggressively raise money, cognizant of the fact conservative donors were flooded with requests during the 2012 election cycle.

“For the most part we gave our donors a break and didn’t fundraise aggressively at all. Very pleased with the results,” Crawford told Breitbart News. “It is an off year after a presidential election where every donor was bombarded with requests.”

As the Daily Beast mentioned, Palin’s PAC did make a $5,000 contribution to Jason Smith; the conservative Republican won a special election in Missouri’s Eighth Congressional District in June by a hefty margin, 67% to 27%.

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Huckabee: Welcome to the United POLICE States of America: No-Knock Raids Increase 3000% (+video)

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No-knock raids by police have increased by 3000% over the past decade. The results are frightening, many times with fatal results. Listen to this important documentary from Governor Huckabee:

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Photo Credit: West Midlands PoliceEyewitness Records Santa Ana Officer Shoot, Kill Unarmed Homeless Man

By CBSLA.com. An eyewitness recorded cellphone video of a Santa Ana police officer shoot and kill an unarmed 22-year-old homeless man at a shopping center earlier this week.

The witness, who wished to remain unidentified, was standing in the parking lot of the Harbor Place Shopping Center on South Harbor Boulevard around 3 p.m. Tuesday when he said he saw a confrontation in front of Jugo’s La Tropicana between an officer, later identified as a 13-year veteran, and victim Hans Kevin Arellano.

“She exited her patrol car, gun drawn, and asked the gentlemen to get on the ground. The gentlemen didn’t get on the ground, he was still inside the restaurant. She asked again. The man then exited the restaurant, and as he was exiting the restaurant, he said, ‘What are you gonna do, b—-?’ About a second later, she shot him in the chest,” he said.

CBS2’s Michele Gile showed officers the footage. In the video, Arellano is seen running into the juice shop and quickly reemerging outside before a shot is fired.

“Obviously this is the first time we’ve seen this,” said Cpl. Anthony Bertagna of the Santa Ana Police Department. “This is something that is going to be a key piece of evidence. It’s something that we encourage people, if they have, to bring forward, this needs to get in the hands of the D.A. and our detectives. Like the chief said yesterday, we’re trying to be open and honest. There’s three separate investigations that are going on simultaneously. This portion, as the chief said, I can’t comment on.”

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Explosive Revelation: DOZENS of CIA Operatives on the Ground DURING Benghazi Attack

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Photo Credit: Breitbart By Restoring Liberty. CNN is reporting this evening that, at the time of the Benghazi terrorist attack that killed U.S. Ambassador Christopher Stephen, the Central Intelligence Agency had literally dozens of agents on the ground inside of Benghazi.

This explosive revelation was apparently leaked by a source who has also reported the CIA has undertaken an unprecedented effort to keep all knowledge of its actions on the ground secret. The Agency has even gone as a far as to require monthly polygraph tests of all agents with knowledge of the Benghazi operation.

CNN reports that the CIA has been using “pure intimidation” against its agents to ensure that none of them are talking to the press or Congress about what was happening on the ground in Libya. One agent reported, “You have no idea the amount of pressure being brought to bear on anyone with knowledge of this operation.”

Another source reportedly claimed that the CIA is threatening agents’ families, stating, “You don’t jeopardize yourself, you jeopardize your family as well.”

Representative Frank Wolf, a Republican from the district that includes the CIA’s Langley headquarters, said that immediately after the Benghazi attack a number of CIA employees approached his office to give information about what happened the night in question. Apparently, the CIA’s intimidation has worked because they aren’t talking at all, now.

Whatever the CIA Benghazi operation was remains a mystery, as CNN’s sources provide no information on why dozens of US operatives would be in Benghazi at the same time the Ambassador was murdered. The sources also fail to explain why the dozens of CIA operatives on the ground apparently did not render direct assistance to the Ambassador’s compound when it came under attack.

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Photo Credit: ReutersRep. Wolf: sources say CIA was moving guns in Benghazi

By Kerry Picket. “We’re getting calls from people who are close to people who were [in Benghazi at the time] that they were moving guns. So where are the guns?” asked Rep. Frank Wolf (R-VA), a sub-committee chairman of the Appropriations Committee. Wolf also wonders what Ambassador Chris Stevens was actually doing in Benghazi on that night. Stevens and three others were killed over the course of the attacks.

“Are they in a warehouse somewhere? Some people say they moved on to Turkey and then from Turkey to Syria,” Wolf told Breitbart News on Thursday. “Did they fall into the hands of some of the Jihadis?”

“Nobody knows, so I think there are so many questions from the failure to respond to where the guns went,” he stated.

Wolf is currently attempting to create a Select Committee to investigate the Benghazi attack by launching a discharge petition from committee. He needs 218 signatures to take the issue to a vote on the floor. Read more from this story HERE.

Obama’s IRS Chief Admits to Congress He Wants to Keep His Healthcare, Doesn’t Want to be Forced into Obamacare (+video)

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At congressional hearing today, the following exchange took place between Rep. Sam Johnson (R-Tx) and the IRS chief, Daniel Werfel:

Congressman Johnson: “Mr. Werfel, last week your employees who are a member of the National Treasury Employee’s Union sent a form letter for union members to send in to ask they be exempt from the exchanges. Why are your employees trying to exempt themselves from the very law that you’re tasked to enforce?”

Commissioner Werfel: “I don’t want to speak for the NTEU, but I’ll offer a perspective as a federal employee myself and a federal employee at the IRS. And that is, we have right now as employees of the government, of the IRS, affordable health care coverage. I think the ACA was designed to provide an option or an alternative for individuals that do not. And all else being equal, I think if you’re an individual who is satisfied with your health care coverage, you’re probably in a better position to stick with that coverage than go through the change of moving into a different environment and going through that process.”

video:

FBI Claims it Couldn’t Have Prevented Boston Marathon Bombing, Needed Even MORE Surveillance Tools

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Photo Credit: Getty ImagesThe F.B.I. has concluded that there was little its agents could have done to prevent the Boston Marathon bombings, according to law enforcement officials, rejecting criticism that it could have better monitored one of the suspects before the attack.

That conclusion is based on several internal reviews that examined how the bureau handled a request from a Russian intelligence agency in 2011 to investigate whether one of the suspects, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, had been radicalized during his time in the United States.

Mr. Tsarnaev, who along with his brother, Dzhokhar, came to the United States about a decade ago from the Russian republic of Dagestan, was killed during a shootout with the police four days after he and his brother detonated two bombs at the finish line of the marathon, killing 3 people and injuring more than 200, the authorities say.

Members of Congress have contended that the F.B.I. should have done a more extensive investigation of Mr. Tsarnaev in response to the Russian request. And they have said the bureau should have followed up with Mr. Tsarnaev after he returned from a trip to Russia in 2012.

But F.B.I. officials have concluded that the agents who conducted the investigation and ultimately told the Russians that there was no evidence that Mr. Tsarnaev had become radicalized were constrained from conducting a more extensive investigation because of federal laws and Justice Department protocols. Agents cannot use surveillance tools like wiretapping for the type of investigation they were conducting.

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Obama Promises to Help Congressional Staffers Avoid Obamacare

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Photo Credit: ReutersWashington has been abuzz for months over the fear and loathing that Congressional staffers have for Obamacare. Many staffers and employees on Capitol Hill have been saying they’ll have to quit Washington if they are forced into Obamacare. Now the President is promising to fix it all for them.

At the very beginning of his closed-door meeting with Senate Democrats, the President addressed staffers’ worries that Obamacare will force them to quit working in Washington, promising “I’m on it.”

Currently congressional staffers have 75 percent of their healthcare insurance paid by taxpayers, but if their Cadillac Congressional healthcare plan is ended and staffers are pushed into Obamacare, many Congressional employees fear that their insurance costs will increase by thousands of dollars a year. This cost, many say, will force them to quit working in Washington.

The Republican-sponsored amendment to Obamacare introduced by Senator Chuck Grassley (R-IA) would require that lawmakers and their staffers must be covered by the same insurance exchanges that the rest of America will be forced into as mandated by Obama’s healthcare law. It is this amendment that staffers are protesting.

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Brent Bozell to GOP on Obamacare: “You Fund It, You Own It”

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Photo Credit: CNSNewsAt the launch of a campaign to deny any further funding for implementation of the Affordable Care Act, or Obamacare, dubbed “You Fund it, You Own It,” Brent Bozell, chairman of ForAmerica, a non-profit 501(c) organization, said Republicans in Congress will be held accountable for their upcoming budget votes.

“This is a ‘Come to Jesus’ moment for Republicans,” Bozell said at a press conference on Capitol Hill on Thursday co-hosted by the Tea Party Patriots. “They better get religion soon.”

“The voters out there are unequivocally fed up with inaction from those who promised action,” Bozell said.

“It’s a very simple proposition,” Bozell said. “If you fund it, you own it.”

Bozell and Jenny Beth Martin, national coordinator for the Tea Party Patriots, were joined by members of Congress and other grassroots groups at the event.

Read more from this story HERE.

Newspaper Editor Who Wrote, “Take Your Jobs Plan and Shove it, Mr. President,” Fired

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Photo Credit: Twitter The Chattanooga Times Free Press editorial page editor who criticized President Obama’s jobs plan courtesy of a Johnny Paycheck song is now out of a job.

Drew Johnson’s editorial, titled “Take your jobs plan and shove it, Mr. President: Your policies have harmed Chattanooga enough,” went viral and drew national attention earlier this week when President Obama visited the city.The newspaper released a statement Thursday saying Johnson had been fired for “placing a headline on an editorial outside of normal editing procedures.”

“The headline was inappropriate for this newspaper,” the statement read. “It was not the original headline approved for publication, and Johnson violated the normal editing process when he changed the headline.”

Johnson, who had been with the newspaper for just over a year, addressed his firing on Twitter.

“I just became the first person in the history of newspapers to be fired for writing a paper’s most-read article,” he tweeted.

Read more from this story HERE.

Hacker Publishes “Very Personal” Emails, Bikini Photos, Forces Colin Powell To Deny Affair with Foreign Diplomat

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As a notorious hacker seeks to distribute “very personal” e-mails sent to Colin Powell by a female Romanian diplomat, the retired general is denying that he engaged in an extramarital affair with the woman while he served as Secretary of State, though he recently advised her to delete all their online exchanges, The Smoking Gun has learned.

In a statement addressing his relationship with Corina Cretu, a member of the European Parliament who previously held a series of senior posts in the Romanian government, Powell, 76, wrote that he has known Cretu for about 10 years, having first met her “when I was the Secretary of State and she was an assistant to the President of Romania. We occasionally attended the same diplomatic and international meetings.”

Powell, who served in President George W. Bush’s cabinet for four years, said that he kept in touch with Cretu, 45, by e-mail after leaving the State Department in January 2005. “Over time the emails became of a very personal nature, but did not result in an affair. Those type of emails ended a few years ago. There was no affair then and there is not one now,” Powell added…

In the “very personal” correspondence cited by Powell, Cretu calls him the love of her life and describes a relationship that spanned more than a decade. The 2010-2011 e-mails would leave most readers with the clear impression that the forlorn Cretu is writing about the twilight of a lengthy romance…

Early this morning, “Guccifer” added a second update to the general’s Facebook page. It contained a new Google Drive link that led to e-mails and photos–some dating back eight years–that were lifted from Cretu’s newly hacked Yahoo e-mail account.

Read more from this story HERE.