Gov. Perry announces he will not seek re-election in 2014

/2 Comments/in , /by

Photo Credit: APTexas Governor Rick Perry, the longest-serving governor in Texas history, announced on Monday afternoon that he will not seek re-election in 2014.

Gov. Perry made the announcement to a gathering of supporters in San Antonio at the largest Caterpillar plant in the country.

“The time has come to pass on the mantle of leadership. Today I will not seek reelection as Governor of Texas,” said Perry. “I am looking forward to serving out the next 18 months. Any future considerations I will announce in due time.”

Read more from this story HERE.

The Obamacare Train Wreck Continues: Now, the HHS Fraud Prevention Mandate Thrown Out (+videos)

/6 Comments/in , /by

Photo Credit: ThinkstockHHS gives up on Obamacare’s anti-fraud measures

By Philip Klein. One of the biggest administrative hurdles facing Obamacare was the ambitious plan to verify the income and insurance status of applicants for federal health coverage subsidies. In theory, on Oct. 1 of this year, a prospective beneficiary of Obamacare was supposed to be able to visit a website like Orbitz, enter basic information, and wait as multiple state and federal government databases communicated with one another to confirm in real time the applicant’s income level, and then display the level of subsidy to which the applicant was entitled, if any. It was a level of technological sophistication unlike anything ever attempted by the government. Now, with less than three months to go before Obamacare’s health insurance exchanges are set to begin enrolling applicants, Obama’s Department of Health and Human Services is throwing up its hands. Just as it did with the employer mandate, the administration has announced it would delay the implementation of these anti-fraud procedures due to the administrative difficulty.

In a regulation released Friday and flagged by Washington Post reporters Sarah Kliff and Sandhya Somashekhar, the administration will now rely on self-reported data. You read that correctly. A man who earns $50,000 per year and gets insurance through his employer could log on to the new government website and say he earns $20,000 and gets no insurance through his employer, and the government would not even attempt to confirm that the information is accurate before forking over generous taxpayer subsidies. It’s a recipe for rampant fraud, which is already widespread in Medicare and Medicaid.

Read more from this story HERE.

_______________________________________________________________________

Photo Credit: Washington Examiner Obamacare was simply bad legislating

By Timothy P. Carney. President Obama’s signature legislative achievement was simply a bad bit of legislating. The administration’s decision to postpone the employer health insurance mandate is just the latest evidence that this law was poorly built.

An analogy: You may think Frank Lloyd Wright’s buildings are beautiful or ugly. But that’s a matter of taste, and it’s a different question from whether they are built soundly.

Analogously, you may share Obama’s views of government or reject it, but that’s a separate issue from whether this law was well made. With Obamacare, the architects used nails where screws were needed, and the angles aren’t quite right. This structure can’t bear its own weight.

The employer mandate was always a bad idea, and not only from the perspective of economic liberty. Liberal health-care wonks knew that the employer-based health-insurance system was a big part of our problem. If people get their insurance from work, then they lose their insurance when they switch jobs, exacerbating the problem that insurers typically don’t cover preexisting conditions. Also, when the HR director is doing the insurance shopping for all employees, insurers don’t face real competitive pressure.

Read more from this story HERE.

_______________________________________________________________________

Photo Credit: TownhallWhat the Employer Mandate Delay Says About Obamacare’s Dysfunction

By Kevin Glass. The Obama Administration’s decision to delay implementation of one of Obamacare’s big regulations – the employer mandate – led to some progressives actually cheering. “Delaying Obamacare’s employer mandate is the right thing to do. Frankly, eliminating it — or at least utterly overhauling it — is probably the right thing to do,” wrote the Washington Post’s Ezra Klein. “In my view, the Administration should have gone further than delaying the employer mandate. They should have also proposed a bill to remove it entirely,” writes economist Austin Frakt. Talking Points Memo’s Brian Beutler writes, “I think you can make a decent case that the administration is actually doubling down on the most crucial and politically high-valence part of the law.”

These have come along with typical blame-Republicans condemnations. If the employer mandate is so bad, why wouldn’t Congressional Republicans just team up with Democrats to repeal it entirely, for example?

These critics are largely missing the point.

President Obama promised perfection when it came to the Affordable Care Act. More insurance coverage, better health outcomes, cheaper premiums, and you can keep your health care plan. That last one was particularly key when it came to selling the whole package. “If you like your health care plan, you can keep it” was repeated time and again in the President’s PR campaign for the health legislation. Read more from this story HERE.

UPDATE: Asiana Boeing 777 Crash Caught on Film, One Victim May Have Been Run Over (+video)

/1 Comment/in , /by

Photo Credit: Carlos Avila GonzalezOfficial: SF plane crash victim may have been run over

By Jaxon Van Derbeken. An autopsy was being conducted Sunday to determine whether one of the two teenaged passengers killed on the Asiana Airlines flight had been run over by a San Francisco fire rig at the crash scene.

The 16-year-old girl was found near the evacuation slide near the left wing of Asiana Flight 214 which crashed Saturday during a landing at San Francisco International Airport. The girl was not identified.

San Francisco Fire Chief Joanne Hayes-White said Sunday her injuries are consistent with her having been run over.

“As it possibly could have happened, based on the injuries sustained, it could have been one of our vehicles that added to the injuries, or another vehicle,” Hayes-White said. “That could have been something that happened in the chaos. It will be part of our investigation.”

Hayes-White said that a runway video recording of the first seconds of the crash could help unravel what occurred. “Part of it was pretty good vantage point,” she said. Read more from this story HERE.

______________________________________________________________

Photo Credit: APCrash Survivor: Flight attendants ‘fell out’ of the back of the plane

By Madeleine Morgenstern. A survivor of the Asiana Airlines plane crash at San Francisco International Airport said flight attendants “fell out” of the back of the plane after the tail section broke off.

“Right when it appeared to coast for the landing,…(he) sped up, like the pilot knew he was short,” Elliott Stone told CNN, according to the Agence France-Presse news agency. “And then the back end just hit, and flies up in the air, and everybody’s head goes up to the ceiling. And then it just kind of drifts for a little bit, for a good 300 yards and then tips over. Fire starts.”

Two passengers identified as teen girls from China were found outside the wreckage and confirmed dead, and 182 people were transported to area hospitals, 49 with critical injuries. The flight had been carrying 307 people.

Stone said he was able to evacuate safely because he was seated in the middle of the Boeing 777, but the flight attendants seated in the back “got hammered, because we landed short.”

“And then they all fell out – and it was just the most terrible thing I’ve seen,” he said. Read more from this story HERE.

Analysis: George Zimmerman Probably Won’t Be Convicted of Murder or Manslaughter – Here’s Why (+video)

/16 Comments/in , /by

Photo Credit: API drew a legal conclusion on “Good Morning America” Saturday that would have surprised the Dan Abrams who covered the George Zimmerman case leading up to, and shortly after, his arrest.

Now that the prosecution’s case against Zimmerman is in, as a legal matter, I just don’t see how a jury convicts him of second degree murder or even manslaughter in the shooting death of Trayvon Martin.

So what happened? How can an armed man who shot and killed an unarmed teen after being told by the police that he didn’t need to keep following him, likely be found not guilty of those crimes?

I certainly sympathize with the anger and frustration of the Martin family and doubt that a jury will accept the entirety of George Zimmerman’s account as credible. But based on the legal standard and evidence presented by prosecutors it is difficult to see how jurors find proof beyond a reasonable doubt that it wasn’t self defense.

Prosecutors are at a distinct legal disadvantage.

Read more from this story HERE.

Edward Snowden’s Nightmare Comes True

/7 Comments/in , /by

Photo Credit: APBy Philip Ewing. Edward Snowden’s nightmare may be coming true.

Not exile; not the danger of imprisonment or prosecution; and not his newfound association with dictators, lawyers and impresarios.

Snowden’s worst fear, by his own account, was that “nothing will change.”

“People will see in the media all these disclosures, they’ll know the lengths the government is going to grant themselves powers, unilaterally, to create greater control over American society and global society,” he told The Guardian last month after he’d asked it to identify him as its source. “But they won’t be willing to take the risks necessary to stand up and fight to change things, to force their representatives to actually take a stand in their interests.”

One month after The Guardian’s first story, which revealed an order from the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court authorizing the National Security Agency to collect the phone records of every Verizon customer, there has been no public movement in Washington to stop the court from issuing another such order. Congress has no intelligence reform bill that would rein in the phone tracking, or Internet monitoring, or cyberattack planning, or any of the other secret government workings that Snowden’s disclosures have revealed. Read more from this story HERE.

_____________________________________________________________________

Last chance for Edward Snowden?

By Associated Press. An influential Russian parliament member who often speaks for the Kremlin encouraged NSA leaker Edward Snowden on Sunday to accept Venezuela’s offer of asylum.

Alexei Pushkov, who heads the international affairs committee in Russia’s parliament, posted a message on Twitter saying: “Venezuela is waiting for an answer from Snowden. This, perhaps, is his last chance to receive political asylum.”

Russian officials say Snowden has been stuck in the transit area of Moscow’s Sheremetyevo Airport since arriving on a flight from Hong Kong two weeks ago, unable to travel further because the United States annulled his passport.

Pushkov’s comments appear to indicate that the Kremlin is now anxious to be rid of the former National Security Agency systems analyst, who the U.S. wants returned to face espionage charges.

The asylum offer from Venezuela came in the early hours of Saturday, Moscow time, and there has been no response from the Kremlin or Russian Foreign Ministry. As Pushkov’s tweet indicated, Snowden also is not known to have responded to Venezuela’s offer. Read more from this story HERE.

_____________________________________________________________________

Photo Credit: DPASnowden Claims German Intelligence “in Bed” With the NSA

By Spiegel. For weeks now, officials at intelligence services around the world have been in suspense as one leak after another from whistleblower Edward Snowden has been published. Be it America’s National Security Agency, Britain’s GCHQ or systems like Prism or Tempora, he has been leaking scandalous information about international spying agencies. In an interview published by SPIEGEL in its latest issue, Snowden provides additional details, describing the closeness between the US and German intelligence services as well as Britain’s acquisitiveness when it comes to collecting data.

In Germany, reports of the United States’ vast espionage activities have surprised and upset many, including politicians. But Snowden isn’t buying the innocence of leading German politicians and government figures, who say that they were entirely unaware of the spying programs. On the contrary, the NSA people are “in bed together with the Germans,” the whistleblower told American cryptography expert Jacob Appelbaum and documentary filmmaker Laura Poitras in an interview conducted with the help of encrypted emails shortly before Snowden became a globally recognized name.
Snowden describes the intelligence services partnerships in detail. The NSA even has a special department for such cooperation, the Foreign Affairs Directorate, he says. He also exposes a noteworthy detail about how government decision-makers are protected by these programs. The partnerships are organized in a way so that authorities in other countries can “insulate their political leaders from the backlash” in the event it becomes public “how grievously they’re violating global privacy,” the former NSA employee says.

Intensive Cooperation with Germany

SPIEGEL reporting also indicates that cooperation between the NSA and Germany’s foreign intelligence service, the BND, is more intensive than previously known. The NSA, for example, provides “analysis tools” for the BND to monitor signals from foreign data streams that travel through Germany. Among the BND’s focuses are the Middle East route through which data packets from crisis regions travel. Read more from this story HERE.

_____________________________________________________________________

Photo Credit: APCuba’s Raul Castro backs asylum offers for Edward Snowden

By Fox News. Cuba’s Raul Castro stood Sunday with Latin American countries that have expressed a willingness to grant asylum NSA leaker Edward Snowden.

Venezuela and Bolivia both made asylum offers to Snowden over the weekend, and Nicaragua has said it is also considering his request.

Snowden has until Monday to respond to Venezuela’s offer.

“We support the sovereign right of …. Venezuela and all states in the region to grant asylum to those persecuted for their ideals or their struggles for democratic rights,” Castro said in a speech to Cuba’s national assembly, according to state-run newspaper Juventud Rebelde.

The foreign media was not given access to the session, but the speech was expected to be broadcast in its entirety later Sunday. Read more from this story HERE.

_____________________________________________________________________

Photo Credit: APBrazil Top Target of NSA Eavesdropping, Second Only to the US

By Reuters. The U.S. National Security Agency monitored the telephone and email activity of Brazilian companies and individuals in the past decade as part of U.S. espionage activities, the Globo newspaper reported on Sunday, citing documents provided by fugitive Edward Snowden, a former NSA intelligence contractor.

The newspaper did not say how much traffic was monitored by NSA computers and intelligence officials. But the Globo article pointed out that in the Americas, Brazil was second only to the United States in the number of transmissions intercepted.

Brazil was a priority nation for the NSA communications surveillance alongside China, Russia, Iran and Pakistan, Globo said.

In the 10-year period, the NSA captured 2.3 billion phone calls and messages in the United States and then used computers to analyze them for signs of suspicious activity, the paper said. In the United States, the NSA used legal but secret warrants to compel communications companies to turn over information about calls and emails for analysis.

Some access to Brazilian communications was obtained through American companies that were partners with Brazilian telecommunications companies, the paper reported, without naming the companies. Read more from this story HERE.

Sen. Ted Cruz’s Dad Compares Obama to Castro, Suggests US is Headed the Way of Cuba (+video)

/7 Comments/in , /by

Photo Credit: YouTubeSenator Ted Cruz’s dad, Rafael Cruz, gave a rousing speech at the “Free the People” symposium this past weekend where he compared Obama to Fidel Castro.

Rafael spoke about how the same sort of “change” was promised by Fidel but, when that “change” actually came to fruition, it was horrendous. It drove Rafael from Cuba to the United States.

Egypt Continues to Spiral into Extreme Violence as Obama Fumbles Away (+videos)

/3 Comments/in , /by

Egypt violence: Gang throws rivals to their deaths from top of a building

By A bloodthirsty gang is filmed flinging r­ivals to their deaths from the top of a building as violence spirals out of control in Egypt.

Horrific scenes captured on a mobile phone and posted on YouTube show a group of men surrounded by captors in the north-east city of Alexandria, the Sunday People can report.

Sickeningly, the victims are tossed head-first from a ledge. They land on the ­concrete roof below, where they are beaten and left for dead.

Clashes between opponents and supporters of deposed President Mohamed Morsi intensified yesterday, leaving 36 people dead. British tourists were feared to be at risk of terrorist attack last night after the head of al Qaeda, Ayman al-Zawahiri, issued a call to arms after the military coup ousted Islamist Morsi. Read more from this story HERE.

________________________________________________________________

Sexual Assaults Reportedly Rampant During Egypt Protests

By Soraya Sarhaddi Nelson. From afar, Tahrir Square appears almost festive as protesters chant against the Islamist president who was overthrown by the Egyptian military last week. But inside the crushing crowds, the scene can be a lot more sinister.

In a video posted by the Muslim Brotherhood, an unidentified woman cries out as men attack her. The group, from which former President Mohammed Morsi hails, claims the attack occurred in Tahrir Square in late June.

Human Rights Watch reports a sharp rise in sexual assaults here since anti-Morsi protesters took to the streets in record numbers last week. Activists report more than 100 sexual assaults in or near Tahrir Square during the past week alone, many of them gang rapes.

Most of the victims are Egyptian, though some are Western journalists covering the protest.

The rights group says the latest attacks follow an all too familiar pattern since mass protests began in 2011: A few men force a girl or woman away from the people she’s with; rip off her clothes and assault her. Passersby join in the attacks, which range from groping to gang rapes that can last more than an hour. Read more from this story HERE.

________________________________________________________________

Photo Credit: Ahmed Ali/APDemocracy doesn’t on its own mean effective government

By Tony Blair. The events that led to the Egyptian army’s removal of President Mohamed Morsi confronted the military with a simple choice: intervention or chaos. Seventeen million people on the street is not the same as an election. But it is an awesome manifestation of people power. The equivalent turnout in Britain would be around 13 million people. Just think about it for a moment. The army wouldn’t intervene here, it is true. But the government wouldn’t survive either.

The Muslim Brotherhood was unable to shift from being an opposition movement to being a government. Of course governments govern badly or well or averagely. But this is different. The economy is tanking. Ordinary law and order has virtually disappeared. Services aren’t functioning properly. Individual ministers did their best. A few weeks back, I met the tourism minister, who I thought was excellent, with a sensible plan to revive Egypt’s tourist sector. A few days ago, he resigned, when the president took the mind-boggling step of appointing as governor of Luxor (a key tourist destination) someone who was affiliated to the group responsible for Egypt’s worst-ever terror attack, in Luxor, which killed more than 60 tourists in 1997.

Now the army is faced with the delicate and arduous task of steering the country back on to a path towards elections and a rapid return to democratic rule. We must hope that they can do this without further bloodshed. Meanwhile, however, someone is going to have to run things and govern. This will mean taking some very tough, even unpopular decisions. It is not going to be easy.

What is happening in Egypt is the latest example of the interplay, visible the world over, between democracy, protest and government efficacy. Democracy is a way of deciding the decision-makers, but it is not a substitute for making the decision. I remember an early conversation with some young Egyptians shortly after President Mubarak’s downfall. They believed that, with democracy, problems would be solved. When I probed on the right economic policy for Egypt, they simply said that it would all be fine because now they had democracy; and, in so far as they had an economic idea, it was well to the old left of anything that had a chance of working.

I am a strong supporter of democracy. But democratic government doesn’t on its own mean effective government. Read more from this story HERE.

________________________________________________________________

Disgraced Senator Menendez Agrees with Obama: Muslim Brotherhood Should Be Part of Egypt’s Government

Disgraced Senator Bob Menendez believes – as does Obama – that the Muslim Brotherhood should have an active role in the next Egyptian government:

…an Egypt for all includes in my mind, participation from the Muslim Brotherhood. But, you know, President Morsi himself acted rather dictatorially back in November when he said that his decrees were not subject to judicial review, when he said the constitutional assembly was not subject to judicial review. So at the end of the day, while I would have liked to have seen early elections and then see him test his support among the people and the people would have had a choice and, therefore, less likely to have them be further … radicalized, at the end of the day, that’s not what happened. So now the question is can we bring everybody together to create a more inclusive society in terms of the representation that it has in government? If we can do that, then Egypt has a possibility.

________________________________________________________________

Photo Credit: APRep. Mike Rogers: Egyptian military deserves continued U.S. support

By David Sherfinski and David Eldridge. Rep. Mike Rogers said Sunday that the Egyptian military is a stabilizing force and should continue to receive U.S. aid, despite its role in deposing a democratically elected government.

Mr. Rogers, a Michigan Republican who is chairman of the House intelligence committee, said on CNN’s “State of the Union” that he would support making an exception to U.S. law that calls for the suspension of U.S. aid in the case of a military coup.

“We should continue to support the military, the one stabilizing force that can temper down the political feuding that you’re seeing going on now,” he said. Read more from this story HERE.

________________________________________________________________

Egyptian military supporters flood Tahrir Square

By Ghazi Balkiz and Andrew Rafferty. Cairo’s Tahrir Square on Sunday filled with supporters of the Egyptian military, demonstrating in favor of the army’s actions to remove President Mohammed Morsi and blasting those who have called the leader’s ouster a military coup and not a revolution.

Street clashes between Morsi supporters and opponents in recent days have claimed more than 30 lives.

On Sunday, it was tens of thousands of people gathered in the infamous focal point of the Arab Spring to voice support for the military, whose leaders removed the democratically elected president Morsi last week and put him under house arrest.

“It’s not an army decision it’s our revolution, this is the way that we choose it and we thank the army for supporting us for this decision,” Nasham Basharah told NBC News while demonstrating in the square. Read more from this story HERE.

________________________________________________________________

Obama Golfing, Kerry Boating, “Terrible Optics” for Administration

Congressman: IRS Has Been Leaking Personal Financial Info on Political Enemies

/3 Comments/in , /by

Photo Credit: APIn an exclusive interview with Breitbart News, Rep. Mike Kelly (R-PA) said that the next stages of the IRS scandal will likely focus on the tax agency’s alleged abuse of power in areas like politically motivated audits and leaking of personal information.

“I think what we’re going to find out and I think that the deeper part is not so much the Tea Party and the ‘Patriot’ and those people who were targeted, but the information that has been leaked,” Kelly, a member of the House Ways and Means Committee which is conducting one of the congressional investigations into the matter, said in a phone interview.

“The information that the IRS has on file on people goes pretty deep into personal lives. It is being leaked out and given to people for very specific political reasons. I think this is something that should be the most chilling thing for Americans to understand.

“This is a branch of government and it is under the executive branch that can be used for a lot of different intimidation elements. Think of what these people have, think of what they have on everybody. If they leak that out to the right person at the right time in the right movement that’s looking to do something, they can completely destroy individuals.”

Kelly believes the revelation the IRS targeting of various conservative organizations was just the beginning of a larger scandal that will continue unraveling. Kelly sees this burgeoning scandal cutting to the core of the IRS as a whole, and likely tying in more prominent Obama administration officials.

Read more from this story HERE.

Study: Pentagon’s MIA Recovery Program “Woefully Inept and Even Corrupt”

/2 Comments/in , /by

Photo Credit: APThe Pentagon’s effort to account for tens of thousands of Americans missing in action from foreign wars is so inept, mismanaged and wasteful that it risks descending from “dysfunction to total failure,” according to an internal study suppressed by military officials.

Largely beyond the public spotlight, the decades-old pursuit of bones and other MIA evidence is sluggish, often duplicative and subjected to too little scientific rigor, the report says.

The Associated Press obtained a copy of the internal study after Freedom of Information Act requests for it by others were denied.

The report paints a picture of a Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command, a military-run group known as JPAC and headed by a two-star general, as woefully inept and even corrupt. The command is digging up too few clues on former battlefields, relying on inaccurate databases and engaging in expensive “boondoggles” in Europe, the study concludes.

In North Korea, the JPAC was snookered into digging up remains between 1996 and 2000 that the North Koreans apparently had taken out of storage and planted in former American fighting positions, the report said. Washington paid the North Koreans hundreds of thousands of dollars to “support” these excavations.

Read more from this story HERE.

Amnesty-Backers Bring Bush Out of Retirement to Push for Bill

/8 Comments/in , /by

Photo Credit: Reuters Bush says immigration reform ‘complex,’ optimistic Congress can fix ‘broken system’

By Fox News. Former President George W. Bush expressed optimism Sunday that Congress will pass immigration reform legislation, expressing disappointment that his attempt failed but suggesting the timing is now right to “fix a broken system.”

Bush, out of office since 2009, expressed understanding about why the White House and both parties in Congress have wrangled over the issue point-by-point while the rest of America waits for them to resolve the issue of roughly 11 million illegal immigrants living in the United States.

“Sometimes, it takes time for some of these complex issues to evolve, the 67-year-old Republican said in an interview for ABC’s “This Week.” “And it looks like immigration has a chance to pass.”

Bush said immigration reform is very difficult to pass because it has “a lot of moving parts” and the legislative process “can be ugly.” Read more from this story HERE.

______________________________________________________________________

Photo Credit: APChair of House Homeland Security Committee: Senate bill throws ‘candy’ at border

By Kevin Cirilli. The chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee said on Sunday the Senate immigration plan just threw “a bunch of candy” at the border in order to gain votes.

“What the Senate just passed was, again, a bunch of candy thrown down there — a bunch of assets thrown down there to gain votes but without a methodical, smart border approach. We want a smart border and smart immigration plan, something that makes sense,” Rep. Mike McCaul (R-Texas) said on CBS’s “Face The Nation.” Read more from this story HERE.