Convicted Murderer Mistakenly Freed Recaptured in Illinois

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Photo Credit: Cook County Sheriff’s OfficeCHICAGO – A convicted murderer from Indiana who was mistakenly released after a Chicago court appearance was back in custody Saturday after authorities tracked him down at a house in southern Illinois about 60 miles away.

Steven L. Robbins, 44, was rearrested late Friday night without incident in Kankakee, the Cook County Sheriff’s Department said in a news release. Although the details of his capture weren’t immediately released, officials said they used various leads and interviews with friends and family members at police headquarters to locate him.

The reason Robbins was able to escape in the first place, Illinois officials acknowledged, was because they lost paperwork directing them to return him to Indiana.

Robbins was serving a 60-year sentence for murder in Indiana and was escorted by Cook County sheriff’s deputies to Chicago this week for a court appearance in a separate case involving drug and armed violence charges — a case that had actually been dismissed in 2007.

After appearing before two Cook County Circuit Court judges, Robbins was taken to a jail on Chicago’s South Side. He was released hours later, instead of being sent back to Indiana to continue his murder sentence. The public was not alerted that he was on the loose for about 24 hours.

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The Reality of Long Term Unemployment

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Photo Credit: mediajorgenycIn his “Mission Accomplished” moment, Barack Hussein Obama ended his jobs council on Thursday, January 31, 2013. Despite the fact that more than 12 million people in the U.S. are still out of work.

Obama’s allies will point out that when the jobs council began two years ago, unemployment was above 9 percent and has since improved to 7.8 percent. What they conveniently overlook is that the unemployment number has shifted downwards in large part due to people who have exceeded their unemployment benefits are no longer being counted.

So, if you are a middle aged worker who has experienced long term unemployment, you have forever lost what for most people were the peak earning years of life. A time when under normal circumstances, the opportunity to save for retirement was most feasible financially.

Instead you were drawing unemployment benefits worth less than half what you used to make. As the result, instead of saving for retirement, you reduced your expenditures (read: standard of living) by half. Not to mention the loss of medical, vacation, 401k and other employer provided benefits. Then to add insult to injury, the self-imagined, self-appointed “progressive” intellectual elite ruling class decide that the expiration of the unemployment benefits that sustained your Spartan existence means that for the purposes of their statistics, you are no longer out of work.

Even if you have honestly sought work for years and have been unsuccessful thanks to an economy crippled by their “progressive” economic policies, have used up all your personal savings and are a month or two away from living on the street.
The reality of long term unemployment is not being accurately portrayed by the Obama administration, their “progressive” political allies, or their devoted supporters within the institutionalized “progressive” left.
The economy is not growing. Jobs are not being created. If you are unemployed, prospects for future employment look bleak.
Their big government “stimulus” spending was devoted primarily to helping their “progressive” allies in blue states that needed the money to balance their own indebted balance sheets.

Every dollar spent on “stimulus” was obtained through a tax on the private sector. Instead of the private sector having the money they earned to invest in growing business and creating jobs, it was sent to Washington DC, where the cost of an ever growing, bloated bureaucracy was first removed, then redistributed to those deemed fit by the same self-imagined, self-appointed “progressive” intellectual elite ruling class that has shown through their handling of the nation’s unemployment statistics that they are far more concerned with retaining their own grip on power than truly helping the little guy.

If you have a job, thank God and pray to keep it.

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Harvard Scandal: Students Punished for Cheating in . . . ‘Introduction to Congress’

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Photo Credit: Patricia DruryHarvard University said Friday it has issued academic sanctions against dozens of students, bringing to a close a cheating scandal that involved the final exam in a class on Congress and drawing criticism from a high-profile alumnus.

he Ivy League school implicated as many as 125 students in the scandal when officials first addressed the issue last year.

The inquiry started after a teaching assistant in a spring semester undergraduate-level government class detected problems in the take-home test, including that students may have shared answers.

In a campus-wide email Friday, Faculty of Arts and Sciences Dean Michael D. Smith said the school’s academic integrity board had resolved all the cases related to the cheating probe.

He said “somewhat more than half” of the cases involved students who had to withdraw from the college for a period of time.

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America’s Last Chance

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Let’s expose presidential prevarication. Earlier this year, President Barack Obama warned that Social Security checks will be delayed if Congress fails to increase the government’s borrowing authority by raising the debt ceiling. However, there’s an issue with this warning. According to the 2012 Social Security trustees report, assets in Social Security’s trust funds totaled $2.7 trillion, and Social Security expenditures totaled $773 billion. Therefore, regardless of what Congress does about the debt limit, Social Security recipients are guaranteed their checks. Just take the money from the $2.7 trillion assets held in trust.

Which is the lie, Social Security checks must be delayed if the debt ceiling is not raised or there’s $2.7 trillion in the Social Security trust funds? The fact of the matter is that they are both lies. The Social Security trust funds contain nothing more than IOUs, bonds that have absolutely no market value. In other words, they are worthless bookkeeping entries. Social Security is a pay-as-you-go system, meaning that the taxes paid by today’s workers are immediately sent out as payment to today’s retirees. Social Security is just another federal program funded out of general revenues.

If the congressional Republicans had one ounce of brains, they could easily thwart the president and his leftist allies’ attempt to frighten older Americans about not receiving their Social Security checks and thwart their attempt to frighten other Americans by saying “we are not a deadbeat nation” and suggesting the possibility of default if the debt ceiling is not raised. In 2012, monthly federal tax revenue was about $200 billion. Monthly Social Security expenditures were about $65 billion per month, and the monthly interest payment on our $16 trillion national debt was about $30 billion. The House could simply enact a bill prioritizing how federal tax revenues will be spent. It could mandate that Social Security recipients and interest payments on the national debt be the first priorities and then send the measure to the Senate and the president for concurrence.

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Report Shows UN Admitting Solar Activity May Play Significant Role in Global Warming

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The Earth has been getting warmer — but how much of that heat is due to greenhouse gas emissions and how much is due to natural causes?

A leaked report by a United Nations’ group dedicated to climate studies says that heat from the sun may play a larger role than previously thought.

“[Results] do suggest the possibility of a much larger impact of solar variations on the stratosphere than previously thought, and some studies have suggested that this may lead to significant regional impacts on climate,” reads a draft copy of a major, upcoming report from the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

The man who leaked the report, StopGreenSuicide blogger Alec Rawls, told FoxNews.com that the U.N.’s statements on solar activity were his main motivation for leaking the document.

“The public needs to know now how the main premises and conclusions of the IPCC story line have been undercut by the IPCC itself,” Rawls wrote on his website in December, when he first leaked the report.

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Mark Steyn: Containing Hagel – Tehran Is Pleased That We Aren’t

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You don’t have to be that good to fend off a committee of showboating senatorial blowhards. Hillary Clinton demonstrated that a week or so back when she unleashed what’s apparently the last word in withering putdowns: What difference does it make?

Quite a bit of difference it seems. This week, an over-sedated Elmer Fudd showed up at the Senate claiming to be the president’s nominee for secretary of defense, and even the kindliest interrogators on the committee couldn’t prevent the poor chap shooting himself in the foot.

Twenty minutes in, Chuck Hagel was all out of appendages.

He warmed up with a little light “misspeaking” on Iran. “I support the president’s strong position on containment,” he declared. Breaking news!

Obama comes clean on Iran! According to Hagel, the administration favors “containment.” I could barely “contain” my excitement! Despite official denials, many of us had long suspected that, lacking any stomach for preventing a nuclear Tehran, Washington would settle for “containing” them. Hagel has been a containment man for years: It worked with the Soviets, so why not with apocalyptic ayatollahs? As he said in a 2007 speech, “The core tenets of George Kennan’s ‘The Long Telegram’ and the strategy of containment remain relevant today.” Recent history of pre-nuclear Iran — authorizing successful mob hits on Salman Rushdie’s publishers and translators, bombing Jewish community centers in Buenos Aires, seeding client regimes in Lebanon and Gaza — suggests that these are fellows disinclined to be “contained” even at the best of times. But, even if Iran can be “contained” from nuking Tel Aviv, how do you “contain” Iran’s exercise of its nuclear status to advance its interests more discreetly, or “contain” the mullahs’ generosity to states and non-state actors less squeamish about using the technology? How do you “contain” a nuclear Iran from de facto control of Gulf oil, including setting the price and determining the customers?

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Public Employee Unions Spending More on Lobbying as Membership Booms

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Unlike their private sector counterparts who have seen steady membership declines for several decades, federal career civil service employee unions are expanding their numbers even as they devote more dues money to lobbying Congress and the White House, often on issues only tangentially related to goverment workplace conditions, according to OpenSecrets.org’s Janie Boschma.

Approximately half of the federal government’s 2.1 million career employees are union members, and the largest of those unions is the American Federation of Government Employees, an AFL-CIO affiliate that saw a 43 percent increase in members to 282,535 last year, Boschma said. The increase came about “partly because AFGE began representing Transportation Security Administration employees last year.” she said.

The union “also increased its lobbying budget to $1.49 million last year, an increase of $190,000 over 2011, the biggest jump for federal unions in 2012. According to its fourth-quarter report, AFGE mostly lobbied budget and appropriations issues to secure funding for Customs and Border Patrol, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and the Federal Emergency Management Agency, for example.”

AFGE is the largest of the federal employee unions but it is not the biggest spending public employee union lobbyist. That distinction belongs to the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees, also an AFL-CIO affiliate, which Boschma said spent $2.68 million on lobbying in 2012.

“According to its fourth-quarter report, AFSCME lobbied on Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security, as well as job creation bills, Hurricane Sandy relief and the fiscal cliff negotiations,” she said.

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Chinese Hackers Hit U.S. Media

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photo credit: Philip JägenstedtWASHINGTON—Chinese hackers believed to have government links have been conducting wide-ranging electronic surveillance of media companies including The Wall Street Journal, apparently to spy on reporters covering China and other issues, people familiar with the incidents said.

Journal publisher Dow Jones & Co. said Thursday that the paper’s computer systems had been infiltrated by Chinese hackers, apparently to monitor its China coverage. New York Times Co. NYT +2.19% disclosed Wednesday night that its flagship newspaper also had been the victim of cyberspying.

Chinese hackers for years have targeted major U.S. media companies with hacking that has penetrated inside newsgathering systems, several people familiar with the response to the cyberattacks said. Tapping reporters’ computers could allow Beijing to identify sources on articles and information about pending stories. Chinese authorities in the past have penalized Chinese nationals who have passed information to foreign reporters.

Journal sources on occasion have become hard to reach after information identifying them was included in emails. However, Western reporters in China long have assumed that authorities are monitoring their communications and act accordingly in sensitive cases.

Chinese Embassy spokesman Geng Shuang condemned allegations of Chinese cyberspying. “It is irresponsible to make such an allegation without solid proof and evidence,” he said. “The Chinese government prohibits cyberattacks and has done what it can to combat such activities in accordance with Chinese laws.” He said China has been a victim of cyberattacks but didn’t say from where.

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Despite Criticism, MSNBC’s Silence Regarding Doctored ‘Heckling’ Video Deafening

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A video doctored by MSNBC featuring the grieving father of one of the children who died in the Sandy Hook tragedy from has set the Internet aflame this week. The video, which first aired on the Monday, January 28 broadcast of the liberal network’s “Martin Bashir”show is only the latest video controversy to include NBC and its crazy liberal stepchild MSNBC.

We’re now three days — and counting — into the scandal and MSNBC still hasn’t come clean and admitted what it did.

The video showed Newtown, Conn. father Neil Heslin’s testimony about guns speaking at a legislative hearing. Bashir then claimed Heslin was heckled by a gun supporter at the hearing. “A father’s grief, interrupted by the cries of a heckler,” Bashir declared.

Bashir’s declaration was at best wrong and at worst outright misrepresentation by the network. The video cut out the part of Heslin’s testimony where he posed a question to the crowd. Hearing no response, Heslin then appeared to act like no one was able to challenge his argument, which is why some present did so.

This latest controversy has made MSNBC the target of criticism from AP, The Washington Post and even some commentators like David Frum. After Tweeting about the alleged heckling incident, CNN’s Anderson Cooper then deleted his Tweet and clarified the situation, much to his credit.

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The Spending Sequester Will Grow the Private Economy — Don’t Back Off

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Photo Credit: Tax CreditsYesterday’s report of a 0.1 percent GDP decline for the fourth quarter came as a surprise to most forecasters. But it actually masks considerable strength in the private economy. Namely, housing investment in the fourth quarter jumped 15.3 percent annually, business equipment and software spiked 12.4 percent, and real private final sales rose 2.6 percent. All in, the domestic private sector of the economy increased 3.4 percent annually — a very respectable gain.

And here’s one for the record books: Working ahead of year-end tax hikes, individuals shifted so much money to the fourth quarter at the 35 percent top rate that personal income grew by 7.9 percent annually — a huge number. And there’s more: In order to beat the taxman, dividend income rose 85.2 percent annually. You think tax incentives don’t matter? Guess again.

Now, all this private-sector strength occurred despite the fact that government spending — namely military spending — dropped 6.6 percent. Inventories also lost ground and the trade deficit widened.

But here’s a key point: Military spending has now fallen virtually to its lower sequester-spending-cut baseline. It did so in one quarter by about $40 billion. So the brunt of the impact over the coming years has already been felt. (Normally, as of recent years, military spending has been virtually flat.)

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