California Assembly Passes Bill to Distribute Condoms to Prisoners

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Photo Credit: Sharon MollerusThe proposal from Oakland Democratic Assemblyman Rob Bonta comes despite a law prohibiting any sex between inmates, which creates a conflict that concerns both supporters and opponents of the legislation.

“It’s a felony for prisoners to have sex while they’re in prison, so I don’t think it’s good government for the state to encourage inmates to break the law,” said Republican Assemblyman Dan Logue of Marysville.

Bonta’s proposal would require the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation to make condoms available in five prisons by 2015 and expand the program to each of the state’s 33 adult prisons no later than 2020.

The bill, AB999, passed the Assembly and is awaiting consideration in the state Senate. If it becomes law, California would be the second state behind Vermont, which has a fraction of the inmate population, to provide condoms to all prisoners. Canada, most of the European Union, Australia, Brazil, Indonesia and South Africa already take that step, according to legislative researchers.

Currently, condoms are contraband in California prisons, though the state has tried a distribution program before but on a temporary and limited basis.

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Woman Declared ‘Dead’ Awakens Just Before Doctors Harvest Her Organs

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Photo Credit: Fox NewsImagine waking up to see operating room lights and doctors standing over you, armed with scalpels and other operating tools.

That’s exactly what happened to 41-year-old Colleen Burns, who had arrived at the emergency room at St. Joseph’s Hospital Health Center in Syracuse, N.Y., over a week earlier suffering from a drug overdose, Counsel and Heal reported. Mistakenly believing Burns to be dead, doctors at the center were about to harvest the woman’s organs for transplant, before she opened her eyes.

The 2009 incident is detailed in a recently revealed report from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), which also lists the series of mistakes by doctors that led to the terrible event.

Burns had been found unresponsive, likely due to an overdose of Xanax and Benadryl. According to the report, hospital specialists recommended treating her with activated charcoals in order to stop the drugs from being absorbed into her stomach and intestines – but the staff failed to follow through with this recommendation.

Burns eventually spent over a week at the hospital, with nothing being done to stop the drugs from being absorbed into her system. She started to suffer from seizures, though CT scans revealed her brain was normal.

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Navy Vet’s FOIA for the NSA’s Data Collection on Him Rejected Due to “National Security”

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Clayton Seymour, a 36-year-old IT specialist from Hilliard, Ohio, recently sent a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request to the NSA, curious as to whether any data about him was being collected.

What he received in response made his blood boil.

“I am a generally law abiding citizen with nothing I can think of that would require monitoring,” Seymour wrote to me, “but I wanted to know if I was having data collected about me and if so, what.”

So Seymour sent in an FOIA request. Weeks later, a letter from the NSA arrived explaining that he was not entitled to any information. “When I got the declined letter, I was furious,” he told me. “I feel betrayed.”

Seymour had decided to request his NSA file after coming across a recent post of mine instructing Americans on how to properly request such files from the FBI and NSA. A Navy vet and two-time Obama voter who supported the President’s platform of greater governmental transparency, Seymour was shocked by the letter he received.

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Still Time to Stop al-Jazeera U.S. Launch in August

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Photo Credit: AIMAl Jazeera is under scrutiny for subversion in Egypt, and facing a mutiny from its own reporters over supporting the Muslim Brotherhood there. But The Washington Post assures us in a story that the channel’s official launch in the United States is on August 20, and its coverage, will be different.

Philip Seib, author of The Al Jazeera Effect, is quoted as saying, “I don’t think you’ll see al-Jazeera America touting the Muslim Brotherhood. It will be more like CNN.”

But the foreign owners in Qatar will remain the same, and that is part of the problem. Former Attorney General Michael Mukasey has said that Al Jazeera’s purchase of Al Gore’s Current TV should be the subject of a congressional inquiry because of the channel’s foreign sponsorship.

As Accuracy in Media has been reporting for over six years, the anti-American channel works hand-in-glove with the Muslim Brotherhood and its associated terrorist groups, including al Qaeda and Hamas. Nothing has changed. In fact, Al Jazeera has become more open about its work as a foreign policy instrument of Qatar, including the promotion of al Qaeda-linked terrorist groups in Syria…

The Muslim Brotherhood website still carries a story referring to Al Jazeera as “the greatest Arab media organization.” The channel originally made a name for itself by airing al-Qaeda videos, and one of its correspondents was convicted of being an agent of the terrorist group that carried out the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

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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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