Head of Fed’s CFPB Has No Idea How Many Americans the Agency Has Under Surveillance

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Photo Credit: Daily Caller A top official at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau could not tell the House Committee on Financial Services how many Americans are being monitored through the agency’s secretive data collection program Tuesday.

This response led some Republican lawmakers to question how seriously the bureau takes privacy concerns.

“It’s inconceivable to me, unless you’re the most dysfunctional agency in the entire world, that you’d come before the committee today unable to answer the very simple questions you’ve been asked,” Florida Republican Rep. Bill Posey told Steven Antonakes, the acting deputy director of the CFPB, at a contentious hearing.

…[W]hen Wisconsin Republican Rep. Sean Duffy asked Antonakes how many Americans were included in the new database, he had no answer.

“I couldn’t give you an accurate range,” Antonakes replied, prompting an incredulous response from the congressman. Previous reports have put the number of individual consumers monitored by the CFPB at least 10 million.

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Newspaper That Published Map of Gun Owners at it Again (+video)

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Photo Credit: Fox NewsThe suburban New York newspaper that created a firestorm earlier this year when it published the names and addresses of gun permit holders has requested more data regarding legal owners of firearms, apparently to determine if handgun ownership patterns have changed in the last six months.

The Journal News, a Gannett-owned paper that covers suburban counties just north of New York City, requested more personal information in May. This time, it included statistical data, as well as names and addresses of gun permit holders from Rockland, Putnam and Westchester counties. Out of the paper’s reach are the names of those that opted out of the public records under the NY SAFE law, passed after the Journal News published an interactive map showing the address of every registered handgun owner in two counties it covers.

“The request indicated that it was in relation to a ‘news event,’” Westchester County spokeswoman Rosia Blackwell Lawrence told FoxNews.com.

The latest document request, made on May 15, sought the names and addresses of all permit holders in the Westchester database, along with other data that pertained to some 9,996 opt-out requests, including reasons for the requests, total number of requests received, and the total number of requests approved.

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Sen. Mike Lee: Defund Obamacare or Shut Down the Government

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Photo Credit: APSen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, thinks President Obama’s delay of key provisions of Obamacare could force Senate Democrats to defend the unpopular law during the upcoming congressional debate on a new continuing resolution to fund the government through the 2014 election.

“If congressional Democrats want to oppose appropriations bills without additional Obamacare funding, shut down the government, and side with the president and Big Business against the American people, then it’s their choice,” Lee said.

“But three years in, even the president himself has now admitted that Obamacare won’t work. The only responsible choice now is to protect the country from Obamacare’s looming disaster, start over and finally begin work on real health care reform.”

Lee is responding to the Treasury Department’s July 5th announcement that it will delay implementation of Obamacare’s employer mandate on businesses to provide health insurance to workers.

The new CR would be the fourth such stop-gap funding measure since Congress failed to adopt an annual budget in 2010. The government is currently operating on a CR that expires Sept. 30.

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Is the Obama Admin. Imposing Anti-Religious Culture in Military?

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Photo Credit: JTF GuantanamoThere is a clear and present danger to religious liberty within the military, says a coalition of groups who believe the Obama Administration is pushing a secular, anti-religious culture on the nation’s armed forces.

“Christians who choose to live out their faith find themselves incompatible with the secular view of this administration,” said Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council. “We’re establishing a beach head for religious liberty and the evidence points to a very deliberate attack.”

Representatives of 14 groups concerned about religious liberty joined Reps. John Fleming R-La., Jim Bridenstine R-Okla., and Louie Gohmert R-Tex. on Capitol Hill to urge support for Fleming’s military religious freedom amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act.

The amendment protects the rights of servicemembers to not only hold religious beliefs but to act on them and speak about them. Fleming’s amendment has bipartisan support but the Obama Administration issued a statement “strongly objecting” to the legislation.

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Rush Limbaugh Says Rapper Jay-Z Takes Page Out of Obama’s Book, Snatches Private Data from Cell Phones

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Photo Credit: WNDRush Limbaugh gets it. Barack Obama gets it. Even Samsung and the producers who manage Jay-Z get it.

In a little more than a week after its June 24 launch, Jay-Z’s album “Magna Carta Holy Grail” had been downloaded free by more than a half-million people who purchased Samsung’s popular Galaxy S4 cellphone, Billboard reported.

Downloading Jay-Z’s new album on the Samsung phone required a special app that also retrieves a ton of personal information from the user and delivers it to Samsung.

Limbaugh explained to his radio audience Tuesday that it was “a data-mining app”…

“They had no idea. They just thought, ‘Holy, wowie zowie, Jay-Z, Magna Carta … Holy Grail for free.’ And they did what they had to do, and they ended up having every bit of data about themselves transferred from their phone back to Samsung and whoever else,” Limbaugh said.

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Amnesty Bill Opens US to Afghans

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Photo Credit: WNDThe text of the Senate’s immigration-reform bill contains a small section that increases by more than threefold the number of Afghans eligible for immigration to the U.S. under a special asylum program, WND has learned.

The legislation also further expands the previously strict qualifications for immigration from Afghanistan and allows for more family members to join admitted asylum seekers.

Page 450 of the 1,190 page immigration bill amends what is known as the 2009 Afghan Special Immigrant Visa Program. That program, set to expire this year, is now extended to 2018 by the immigration bill.

The special program previously allotted up to 1,500 visas for Afghans each year. The new immigration bill increases the visa quota to up to 5,000 Afghans per year, a difference detected by reading both the bill and the previous program.

The strict requirements of the previous program granted visas only to Afghan nationals employed by or on behalf of the U.S. government in Afghanistan on or after Oct. 7, 2001, for a period of one year or more. All applicants were required to demonstrate that they faced security threats due to their employment with the U.S.

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Gallup: Americans More Pro-Life than Pro-Choice

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photo credit: wht_wolf9653Many Republican insiders continue to push the narrative that the GOP lost in 2012 because of the Hispanic vote and social issues, rather than because a badly broken Republican nomination process produced a candidate who didn’t emphasize Obamacare and didn’t motivate downscale rural white Americans to vote. In light of this ongoing debate, it’s worth revisiting Gallup’s illuminating polling on abortion.

Gallup’s most recent polling on the issue, taken this spring, indicates that more Americans actually regard themselves as “pro-life” than “pro-choice.” According to the poll, 48 percent of Americans say they are “pro-life,” while 45 percent say they are “pro-choice.” What’s more, opposition to abortion is rather plainly on the rise, as those numbers were effectively flipped ten years ago — and as, in the mid-1990s, the number of people who considered themselves “pro-choice” outpaced the number who considered themselves “pro-life” by about 20 percentage points.

Another finding from Gallup’s polling, however, is perhaps even more illuminating. Those who work in America’s newsrooms are overwhelmingly in favor of abortion’s legality…

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Citing Abuses, House GOP Wants to Gut IRS’s Budget by One-Quarter (+video)

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Photo Credit: Fox NewsHouse Republicans want the IRS to pay for targeting political groups and are pushing legislation that would cut the tax collecting agency’s budget by $3 billion — nearly a quarter of what it received last fiscal year.

The House Appropriations Committee is scheduled to start “marking up” the spending bill Wednesday.

While it’s unlikely that such a severe cut will pass both congressional chambers, it does give lawmakers another opportunity to verbally punish the agency for unfairly scrutinizing conservative groups applying for tax-exempt status.

The bill would place additional restrictions on spending at the IRS and prohibit employees from implementing the individual mandate in the Affordable Care Act – commonly referred to as ObamaCare. It also bans conferences, the production of videos and curbs what lawmakers see as a number of abuses at the IRS.

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Illinois Becomes Last State in Nation to Allow Concealed-Carry

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Photo Credit: APIllinois on Tuesday became the last state in the nation to allow gun owners to carry concealed weapons, as lawmakers overcame a last-minute attempt by Gov. Pat Quinn to change the legislation.

Lawmakers were running up against a federal court’s deadline to allow concealed-carry in their state. After Quinn, a Democrat, unilaterally tried to add more restrictions into the legislation, lawmakers decided it was better to override the governor than risk the courts allowing virtually unregulated concealed weapons in Chicago, which has endured severe gun violence in recent months.

The Senate voted 41-17 in favor of the override Tuesday afternoon after the House voted 77-31, margins that met the three-fifths threshold needed to set aside what is known as an amendatory veto. Quinn had used his veto authority to suggest changes such as prohibiting guns in restaurants that serve alcohol and limiting citizens to one firearm at a time.

Quinn had predicted a “showdown in Springfield” after a week of Chicago appearances to drum up support for the changes he made in the amendatory veto. The Chicago Democrat faces a tough re-election fight next year and has already drawn a primary challenge from former White House chief of state Bill Daley, who has criticized the governor’s handling of the debate over guns and other issues.

Rep. Brandon Phelps, a Democrat from southern Illinois, predicted a history-making day in which lawmakers would dismiss Quinn’s changes as politically motivated.

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Director of National Intelligence Clapper Won’t Resign Over Lying to Congress

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Photo Credit: APDirector of National Intelligence James Clapper has no plans to resign following disclosures to the Senate Intelligence Committee that he misled Congress on widespread National Security Agency electronic surveillance of Americans.

“DNI Clapper explained his response in the letter to Chairman [Dianne] Feinstein [(D., Calif.)] and apologized for the misunderstanding,” said Michael Birmingham, spokesperson for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.

Clapper “values the decades-long stellar relationship he has with Congress and remains focused on leading the intelligence community,” Birmingham told the Free Beacon in a statement Monday.

White House National Security Council spokeswoman Caitlin Hayden said: “The president has full confidence in Director Clapper and his leadership of the Intelligence Community.”

Clapper disclosed in a June 21 letter to Feinstein that his answer to questions about the electronic surveillance were “erroneous” during March 2013 testimony before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence.

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