NRA’s LaPierre: ‘Let Them Be Damned!’ (+video)

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Photo Credit: Gage Skidmore

Wayne LaPierre, the CEO of the National Rifle Association, let loose against the media and government who have recently characterized the gun lobbyist’s talking points as “crazy.”

“Let them be damned!” roared LaPierre.

In a speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference, LaPierre accused gun-control advocates of offering “illogical” solutions to the problems of gun violence.

“They denigrate, and they call us ‘crazy’ for holding fast to [our opposition to gun control]. In their distorted view of the world, they’re smarter than we are; they’re special; they’re more worthy than we are; they know better than we do,” he said. “The liberal media can keep hating on me, but I’m still standing.”

LaPierre dismissed the Obama administration’s efforts to curb gun violence as ineffective and an infringement on Second Amendment rights. He described Democrats’ calls for expanding background checks as a “placebo” to which criminals won’t submit. “There are only two reasons for government to create that federal registry of gun owners, to tax them or to take them,” LaPierre said.

LaPierre reserved his harshest criticism for Janet Napolitano’s Department of Homeland Security, which suggested in a recent Web video that citizens use objects like scissors when faced by an active shooter.

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Video: Coulter Blasts Feinstein’s Reaction To Ted Cruz’s Gun Regulation Questions

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In an appearance on Sean Hannity’s Fox News Channel program on Thursday night, conservative commentator Ann Coulter blasted California Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein for telling Texas Republican Sen. Ted Cruz at a hearing earlier in the day that she’s “not a sixth-grader” when he attempted to analogize the First and Second Amendments.

“He asked some very important questions, and Dianne Feinstein, like her other ‘I am woman, hear me roar’ Democratic female Hillary Clinton, as soon as they get a question they don’t like, they start crying,” Coulter said. “Oh that’s fantastic.”

Coulter, the author of “Mugged: Racial Demagoguery from the Seventies to Obama,” then made her own comparison of the first two amendments.

“She raised the First Amendment and she said, ‘Well, we banned child pornography.’ The very answer proves the absurdity of what is happening. The First Amendment protects speech, not photographs. It certainly does not protect photographs of genitals. If we interpreted the Second Amendment,which protects arms, the way we interpreted the First Amendment, you would have a right to your own personal nuclear weapon. That’s how extreme it is, and I would add in fact the First Amendment does protect virtual child pornography. It certainly protects writing about child pornography, and for her to say, ‘Well don’t worry, we’re not banning these other guns,’ well OK, how about we just ban The New York Times because we still have The Daily News and The New York Post.”

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Court Orders CIA to Acknowledge Drones

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The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) must acknowledge whether an armed drone program exists, a federal appellate court ruled on Friday.

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) took the CIA to court after filing a Freedom of Information request about drone strikes overseas. The CIA denied the request, saying it could not release any documents because even acknowledging the existence of the program would harm national security.

“The existence or nonexistence of CIA records responsive to this request is a currently and properly classified fact, the disclosure of which reasonably could be expected to cause damage to the national security,” the CIA argued to the court, which initially agreed.

But on Friday, the appellate court overturned the earlier decision, noting that President Obama and other senior intelligence officials have talked openly about drone strikes in recent months, undercutting the CIA’s argument that acknowledging its role in the operation could harm national security.

“The defendant is, after all, the Central Intelligence Agency. And it strains credulity to suggest that an agency charged with gathering intelligence affecting the national security does not have an ‘intelligence interest’ in drone strikes, even if that agency does not operate the drones itself,” Chief Judge Merrick B. Garland wrote.

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North Dakota Passes Most Restrictive Abortion Bills In Nation

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North Dakota’s Senate passed a pair of anti-abortion measures Friday that are considered to be the most restrictive in the nation, including one that would prevent women from having an abortion based on a genetic defect.

The measures now to go to Republican Gov. Jack Dalrymple who has indicated he will sign them.

The new state laws are even more strict than one finalized last week in Arkansas that would make the procedure illegal after 12 weeks of pregnancy. One North Dakota measure would prevent women from having abortions based on a genetic defect, like Down syndrome. The other would ban doctors from performing an abortion if a fetal heartbeat is detected — as early as five or six weeks.

Republican state Rep. Bette Grande of Fargo sponsored both bills. Grande, a ninth-term legislator, is one of the more conservative lawmakers in the state. She’s pushed for controversial right-to-life issues and has been vocal about the issues.

Grande recently said she had relatives who had children born with genetic abnormalities and has been surprised at the discrimination she’s seen. “It takes you back to Hitler, and we know where that went,” she has said. “He started going after those with abnormalities, and I think it’s an absurdity we would go back to that kind of thing.”

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Insecure Social Security: House Oversight Committee Investigating Fraud And Waste In Social Security Program

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Fraud could be a major reason that the number of people enrolled in Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI) has risen so dramatically over the past 10 years, according to two letters written by the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee.

The number of enrollees in the program grew by almost 60 percent between 2003 and 2012, from 5.58 million to 8.82 million people, the March 11 letter to acting commissioner of the Social Security Administration Carolyn Colvin says. This rate of growth is twice what the previous decade experienced.

The increase is likely not coming from people who actually need the care, the letter contends. Fraudulent enrollment and improper payments are pushing up the numbers.

The letter, signed by Committee Chairman Darrell Issa (R., Calif.) and two subcommittee chairmen, points out “significant management problems that lead to misspending within the program.”

The letter says many ineligible people are receiving benefits citing a 2010 Government Accountability Office report. For example, some people receive SSDI before receiving a Commercial Drivers License, which requires a rigorous physical exam—indicating that they are not disabled. And some people simply lie about their income to receive the benefits, according to the chairmen.

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Interior Chief: Shell ‘Screwed Up,’ Must Improve To Resume Arctic Affort

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Royal Dutch Shell “screwed up” in 2012 during its troubled efforts to begin oil exploration off Alaska’s coast, and must improve planning and contractor oversight before regulators will let it return, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar said.

Interior on Thursday released the findings of its 60-day review of the oil giant’s mishap-filled effort to begin looking for oil in Arctic waters off Alaska’s coast last year.

“Shell screwed up in 2012 and we are not going to let them screw up” when they seek to resume their effort, Salazar told reporters on a conference call.

“This review has confirmed that Shell entered the drilling season not fully prepared in terms of fabricating and testing certain critical systems and establishing the scope of its operational plans,” the review states.

Interior said it would require Shell to develop a “comprehensive and integrated” operational plan and complete a third-party audit of its management systems, which are two of the various recommendations in the report.

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Senate Democrats Would Increase Taxes — And The National Debt

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Before Wednesday it had been more than 1,400 days since Senate Democrats had produced a federal budget. After only a few hours of Senate Budget Committee testimony, it quickly became apparent why they waited so long.

Now that Obamacare has become law, it is impossible for Democrats to put together a tax-and-spending plan that does not increase taxes by hundreds of billions of dollars yet still add trillions to the national debt.

The Democrats are so eager to raise both taxes and spending that the budget plan they submitted yesterday for the next fiscal year increases spending this year by $46 billion. Then they hike spending another $116 billion next year on their way to a 60 percent increase over the next 10 years.

To put that in perspective, the budget submitted Tuesday by House Budget Chairman Paul Ryan, R-Wis., increases spending by just 40 percent over that same time frame. The Ryan budget, which returns federal spending to its post-World War II historical average, calls for outlays of $41.5 trillion over 10 years. That’s $4.9 trillion less than the Democratic total of $46.4 trillion.

In addition to historically high government spending, the Democratic budget also raises taxes by $1 trillion starting immediately. Thanks to the weakest economic recovery since World War II, federal taxes as a percentage of GDP are still below historic norms. But as the economy improves, Democrats steadily ramp up the government tax burden, reaching a high of 19.8 percent in 2023. Only once since World War II — right before the tech bubble collapsed in 2000 — has the nation’s tax burden ever been that high.

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LA Times Says Conservative White Men Worse Than Terrorists, Monitoring Needed

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According to an op-ed at the Los Angeles Times, conservative white men who support the Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms are worse than international terrorists and need to be monitored by the federal government, Infowars reported Wednesday.

The op-ed, written after the Southern Poverty Law Center demanded the Justice Department and the Department of Homeland Security “crack down on Americans expressing opposition to an increasingly tyrannical federal government,” claims there are “cells of angry men in the United States preparing for combat with the U.S. government.”

“They are usually heavily armed, blinded by an intractable hatred, often motivated by religious zeal,” the Times wrote.

Kurt Nimmo accused the paper of racism for singling out white men as the culprit that needs to be dealt with by the federal government.

“They are white, right-wing Americans, nearly all with an obsessive attachment to guns, who may represent a greater danger to the lives of American civilians than international terrorists,” the Times said.

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RNC to Revamp GOTV Operations

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The Republican National Committee is moving forward with a comprehensive overhaul of its antiquated voter turnout operation, including a focus on fixing a collection of broken state parties, CQ Roll Call confirmed Friday.

The effort will be directed by the RNC’s political department, under the supervision of political director Chris McNulty and a full-time state party director — a new committee position created as part of the get-out-the-vote overhaul. The modernized national field operation will focus on improving voter registration, identification and turnout through a “bottom-up” approach that reinvigorates the party organization at the precinct, congressional district and state levels.

Under this strategy, the RNC plans to immediately reform its training program for grass-roots activists to encompass the committee’s new attention on data gathering, technology and analytics with a complete revamp of its political education department slated to conclude by May 1. Similar to President Barack Obama’s successful formula, the RNC wants to transform its GOTV into an ongoing national program that relies on “peer-to-peer” contact where people live, work, worship, learn and buy their coffee.

“This is a big initiative in which we will be simultaneously revamping our grass-roots organizing infrastructure and voter contact programs from top to bottom while integrating a minority engagement structure to work in unison toward the goal of electing more Republicans,” McNulty told CQ Roll Call. “The key to the entire grass-roots infrastructure will be working with state and county parties toward a new and exciting bottom-up precinct team structure. All of this will be driven by the new and improved data infrastructure and analytics at the RNC.”

Overhauling the RNC’s field operation was one of several recommendations included in an autopsy report of the 2012 elections that RNC Chairman Reince Priebus is scheduled to unveil Monday.

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The Axis of Torpor: Against Waging War as an NGO.

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I greatly enjoy the new Hollywood genre in which dysfunctional American families fly to a foreign city and slaughter large numbers of the inhabitants as a kind of bonding experience. Liam Neeson takes his estranged wife and their teenage daughter for just such a vacation in Taken 2, in which the spectacular mountain of corpses in Istanbul brings the family back together again and ends with them (spoiler alert) enjoying a chocolate malt back at the soda fountain in California and getting to know the daughter’s new boyfriend. “Don’t shoot this one, Dad,” she cautions. “I really like him.” And they all have a good chuckle over it. In Die Hard 5 or whatever we’re up to, Bruce Willis and his estranged son fly to Moscow and do to the Russians what Neeson does to the Turks and Albanians. I gather that in the forthcoming Finding Nemo 2 Marlin and Dory’s marriage is going through a rocky patch until Nemo is kidnapped by a Ukrainian sex cartel and Marlin and Dory swim up the Dnieper River and gun down every pimp in Kiev.

Alas, outside Hollywood, foreigners are somewhat less pliable than the body count of Liam Neeson’s and Bruce Willis’s obliging extras would suggest. The funniest line in Taken 2 was Neeson’s advice to his daughter in an emergency: “Go to the U.S. embassy. You’ll be safe there.” It opened a couple of weeks after Benghazi.

There are drones, of course, which offer the consolations of technological badassery, as if Liam Neeson could take out all the Albanians from the X-Box in his basement. But don’t worry. According to Politico, at a recent meeting with Senate Democrats, President Obama assured them that they had no need to worry about his awesome power to rain down death from the skies because, as he put it, he’s not Dick Cheney.

Meanwhile, back at the GOP, Senator Rand Paul is no Dick Cheney either: At CPAC this week, the narrow bounds of his smash-hit filibuster — questioning drone assassinations on Americans in America — broadened somewhat, not just to questioning drone assassinations on Americans anywhere, nor to questioning drone assassinations on anyone, nor even to questioning the “war on terror” or war in general, but to questioning the very assumptions of American global order, starting with our bankrolling of Mohamed Morsi in Cairo. The Egyptians send mobs to torch the U.S. embassy, the Saudis wage ideological warfare against Western civilization, the Turks call Israel a “crime against humanity” and threaten a cultural and demographic takeover of Europe, the Pakistanis are ramping up nuke production to sell to any loon in town — and those are just our “allies.” With friends like these, who needs foreign policy? There are fewer and fewer takers for the burdens of global superpower, and whoever wins the nomination in 2016 will be considerably less Cheney and more Randy.

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