Mark Levin May Have Prompted IRS-Conservative Group Revelations

/0 Comments/in , /by

Photo Credit: Daily CallerConservative radio talker Mark Levin appears to have touched off the investigation into Internal Revenue Service targeting of conservative political groups back in March 2012.

In a letter last year on behalf of the Landmark Legal Foundation, an organization he heads, Levin requested an investigation into what he called “misconduct.”

On Friday, the Internal Revenue Service revealed that it had improperly targeted conservative groups for audits during the 2012 election. During a conference call, Lois Lerner, the IRS’s director of exempt organizations, explained that IRS staffers selected groups that included the words “tea party” or “patriot” in their applications for tax exempt status.

Levin told The Daily Caller Friday afternoon his organization had litigated similar complaints of political audits during the Clinton administration and specifically referenced the Heritage Foundation as one of the tax collector’s targets at the time.

More recently, Levin said, conservative and Tea Party groups approached him complaining of harassment by the IRS, which prompted his organization to petition Treasury Department Inspector General for Tax Administration J. Russell George.

Read more from this story HERE.

Mystery Plane Flying Over Metropolitan Boston; Is it Sampling for WMD’s?

/0 Comments/in , /by

Photo Credit: nickstone333A mystery in Quincy continues to deepen: Who is flying around the city from dusk to dawn, for the past ten days or so?

“It’s frightening, not just weird, but frightening,” said one resident of the Wollaston section.

Every night for nearly the last two weeks, residents have spotted a low-flying aircraft doing loops over the city. WBZ has learned the FAA knows what’s going on, but the agency isn’t telling.

“I mean it is strange. I don’t know if they’re looking for somebody, I have no idea,” one resident told WBZ.

It’s not the state or local police doing the flying, and the FAA is giving out little information, even to city officials.

Read more from this story HERE.

Obama Celebrates Mother’s Day With Free Birth Control (+video)

/0 Comments/in , /by

Obama celebrates Mother’s Day by promoting the federal government’s policy of providing free contraception. Here’s the tweet sent out by the White House:

Of course, no DC observers should be surprised at this. During his Mexican press conference last week, Obama made it clear that he was OK with girls as young as 15 years of age having sex and using the infamous Plan B:

Kidnap Victim’s Mother Says She’d Hug Ariel Castro, Say ‘God Bless You’ (+video)

/0 Comments/in , /by

Photo Credit: ABC NewsThe mother of Gina DeJesus, whom Ariel Castro allegedly abducted and kept as a sex slave in his Cleveland home for a decade, had a surprising answer when asked what she would say to Castro.

“I would hug him and I would say, ‘God bless you.’ I would say, ‘God bless you,’ and I’d hug him. I did not hate him. I forgave him years ago. I said it: I forgive whoever done it, just let her go,” Nancy Ruiz told “20/20” anchor David Muir in an exclusive interview Thursday.

“Because you know what?” Ruiz added. “When you start to hate a person, that eats you up. I don’t have time for that. I have to be, you know, I want to be happy, like I am now.”

Ariel Castro’s cousin, Maria Castro Montes, had a different answer when Muir asked her the same question.

“I wouldn’t be able to look at him. I couldn’t say anything to him. Why? Shame on you? How could you do this? I don’t even want to ask him those questions. I don’t even want to look at him,” Montes said in an exclusive interview Thursday.

Read more from this story HERE.

The Benghazi Scandal Grows (+video)

/0 Comments/in , /by

Photo Credit: Andrew Harnick CIA director David Petraeus was surprised when he read the freshly rewritten talking points an aide had emailed him in the early afternoon of Saturday, September 15. One day earlier, analysts with the CIA’s Office of Terrorism Analysis had drafted a set of unclassified talking points policymakers could use to discuss the attacks in Benghazi, Libya. But this new version​—​produced with input from senior Obama administration policymakers​—​was a shadow of the original.

The original CIA talking points had been blunt: The assault on U.S. facilities in Benghazi was a terrorist attack conducted by a large group of Islamic extremists, including some with ties to al Qaeda.

These were strong claims. The CIA usually qualifies its assessments, providing policymakers a sense of whether the conclusions of its analysis are offered with “high confidence,” “moderate confidence,” or “low confidence.” That first draft signaled confidence, even certainty: “We do know that Islamic extremists with ties to al Qaeda participated in the attack.”

There was good reason for this conviction. Within 24 hours of the attack, the U.S. government had intercepted communications between two al Qaeda-linked terrorists discussing the attacks in Benghazi. One of the jihadists, a member of Ansar al Sharia, reported to the other that he had participated in the assault on the U.S. diplomatic post. Solid evidence. And there was more. Later that same day, the CIA station chief in Libya had sent a memo back to Washington, reporting that eyewitnesses to the attack said the participants were known jihadists, with ties to al Qaeda.

Before circulating the talking points to administration policymakers in the early evening of Friday, September 14, CIA officials changed “Islamic extremists with ties to al Qaeda” to simply “Islamic extremists.” But elsewhere, they added new contextual references to radical Islamists. They noted that initial press reports pointed to Ansar al Sharia involvement and added a bullet point highlighting the fact that the agency had warned about another potential attack on U.S. diplomatic facilities in the region. “On 10 September we warned of social media reports calling for a demonstration in front of the [Cairo] Embassy and that jihadists were threatening to break into the Embassy.” All told, the draft of the CIA talking points that was sent to top Obama administration officials that Friday evening included more than a half-dozen references to the enemy​—​al Qaeda, Ansar al Sharia, jihadists, Islamic extremists, and so on.

Read more from this story HERE.

Hopefully, the scandal will widen as Americans dig into the Obama Administration’s falsehoods. Listen to what the “Commander-in-Chief” had to say about Benghazi in February:

Boehner Stands Between GOP House and Special Select Committee on Benghazi

/0 Comments/in , /by

Photo Credit: APSixty-two percent of the Republican members of the House of Representatives–143 of 231–are now co-sponsoring a bill that would authorize a special committee to investigate the Sept. 11, 2012 terrorist attack in Benghazi, Libya.

The only thing standing between this super-majority of House Republicans and the special investigative committee they seek is House Speaker John Boehner, who controls the legislation the Republican majority brings to the floor for a vote.

“In the last few days the public has learned stunning new revelations about the Benghazi terrorist attack and the Obama Administration’s troubling response in the hours and days that followed,” Rep. Frank Wolf (R.-Va.), the principal sponsor the legislation, said today in a letter to Boehner. “Much of this new information has come as brave whistleblowers have sought to right the record and, in doing so, may have jeopardized their careers. Increasingly it is becoming clear that we have only scratched the tip of the iceberg.”

While applauding the hearing that House Oversight and Government Reform Chairman Darrell Issa (R.-Calif.) held yesterday, Wolf argued that that hearing actually demonstrated the need for the special investigative committee that a super-majority of Boehner’s Republican colleagues now seek.

“Chairman Issa’s hearing yesterday was a positive step forward in the effort to investigate the administration for its apparent cover up of key information about the nature of the attack and its response,” Wolf told Boehner. “I appreciate your leadership and that of the committees to advance the investigation to this point.

Read more from this story HERE.

Rand Paul on 2016: It’s About Independents and Moderates

/0 Comments/in , /by

Republican Rand Paul is going to take his politicking to moderate voters, and away from fire-breathing ultra-conservatism that turns off people who favor same-sex marriage and abortion rights, he said in Iowa today.

But he also met for a full hour with deeply conservative Iowa pastors — a team of men who came away impressed, saying they’re certain that Paul has “a Biblical world view” and the Christian values they’re looking for in a presidential candidate.

“Elections are about independents and moderates,” Paul, a U.S. senator from Kentucky who has all but declared a White House bid for 2016, told reporters at a news conference this afternoon.

Paul’s trip was seen as a way to introduce himself as a presidential material in his own right, not just as a surrogate for his father Ron, a three-time presidential candidate. His itinerary seemed like one Iowans might see a month out from the 2015 caucuses. He booked a GOP fundraising dinner, a house party, a breakfast with activists and the private meeting with about 15 pastors who are influential with the GOP’s most faithful caucus-goers.

While Rand Paul, 50, and Ron Paul, 77, share the same limited-government philosophy and many of the same policy positions, their public personas are considered very different. The younger Paul, despite some recent controversies over statements that appeared to backtrack on his policy positions, is generally viewed as smoother and more credible than his father — with a promising strategy for a White House victory.

Read more from this story HERE.

Benghazi Talking Points Underwent 12 Revisions, Scrubbed of Terror Reference

/0 Comments/in , /by

Photo Credit: GettyBy Jonathan Karl. When it became clear last fall that the CIA’s now discredited Benghazi talking points were flawed, the White House said repeatedly the documents were put together almost entirely by the intelligence community, but White House documents reviewed by Congress suggest a different story.

ABC News has obtained 12 different versions of the talking points that show they were extensively edited as they evolved from the drafts first written entirely by the CIA to the final version distributed to Congress and to U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Susan Rice before she appeared on five talk shows the Sunday after that attack.

White House emails reviewed by ABC News suggest the edits were made with extensive input from the State Department. The edits included requests from the State Department that references to the Al Qaeda-affiliated group Ansar al-Sharia be deleted as well references to CIA warnings about terrorist threats in Benghazi in the months preceding the attack.

That would appear to directly contradict what White House Press Secretary Jay Carney said about the talking points in November.

“Those talking points originated from the intelligence community. They reflect the IC’s best assessments of what they thought had happened,” Carney told reporters at the White House press briefing on November 28, 2012. “The White House and the State Department have made clear that the single adjustment that was made to those talking points by either of those two institutions were changing the word ‘consulate’ to ‘diplomatic facility’ because ‘consulate’ was inaccurate.” Read more from this story HERE.

________________________________________________________

Benghazi e-mails show clash between State Department, CIA

By Scott Wilson and Karen DeYoung. New details from administration e-mails about last year’s attacks on the U.S. compound in Benghazi, Libya, demonstrate that an intense bureaucratic clash took place between the State Department and the CIA over which agency would get to tell the story of how the tragedy unfolded.

That clash played out in the development of administration talking points that have been at the center of the controversy over the handling of the incident, according to the e-mails that came to light Friday.

Over the five days between the attacks and the now-infamous Sunday show appearance by U.N. Ambassador Susan E. Rice, senior officials from the Central Intelligence Agency and the State Department argued over how much information to disclose about the assault in which four Americans, including Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens, were killed.

That internal debate and the changes it produced in the Obama administration’s immediate account of the attack have revived Benghazi as a political issue in Washington six months after the presidential election in which it played a prominent role. Friday’s revelations — ABC News published 12 versions of the talking points — produced the latest round of Benghazi post-mortems in the eight months since the attacks. Senior administration officials said in a briefing for reporters that none of Obama’s political advisers were involved in discussions around the original talking points, only national security staff officials.

According to various drafts of the talking points, shaped before the final editing by the White House and other agencies, State Department officials raised concerns that the CIA-drafted version could be used by members of Congress to criticize diplomatic security preparedness in Benghazi. Read more from this story HERE.

Obamacare Broke: Sebelius Begs for Donations

/7 Comments/in , /by

Photo Credit: Washington PostHealth and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius has gone, hat in hand, to health industry officials, asking them to make large financial donations to help with the effort to implement President Obama’s landmark health-care law, two people familiar with the outreach said.

Her unusual fundraising push comes after Congress repeatedly rejected the Obama administration’s requests for additional funds to set up the Affordable Care Act, leaving HHS to implement the president’s signature legislative accomplishment on what officials have described as a shoestring budget.

Over the past three months, Sebelius has made multiple phone calls to health industry executives, community organizations and church groups and asked that they contribute whatever they can to nonprofit groups that are working to enroll uninsured Americans and increase awareness of the law, according to an HHS official and an industry person familiar with the secretary’s activities. Both spoke on the condition of anonymity to talk openly about private discussions.

An HHS spokesperson said Sebelius was within the bounds of her authority in asking for help.

But Republicans charged that Sebelius’s outreach was improper because it pressured private companies and other groups to support the Affordable Care Act. The latest controversy has emerged as the law faces a string of challenges from GOP lawmakers in Washington and skepticism from many state officials across the country.

Read more from this story HERE.

Message to the Ruling Class: ‘If You Can’t Do the Job, Get Your A**es Out of Office’

/0 Comments/in , /by

Photo Credit: Bernt RostadObviously, Detroit, Michigan has more than its share of problems. And according to some residents, that’s due to the nearly-bankrupt city’s incompetent leadership.

In this news clip from a local Fox outlet, one lady lets the reporter know exactly how disgusted she is with her elected leadership.

Caution: off-color, no-holds barred language, with lots of bleeps:

Fox 2 News Headlines