Court upholds first-ever use of a DHS drone to assist in arrest of citizen inside US

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A North Dakota court has preliminarily upheld the first-ever use of an unmanned drone to assist in the arrest of an American citizen.

A judge denied a request to dismiss charges Wednesday against Rodney Brossart, a man arrested last year after a 16-hour standoff with police at his Lakota, N.D., ranch. Brossart’s lawyer argued that law enforcement’s “warrantless use of [an] unmanned military-like surveillance aircraft” and “outrageous governmental conduct” warranted dismissal of the case, according to court documents obtained by U.S. News.

District Judge Joel Medd wrote that “there was no improper use of an unmanned aerial vehicle” and that the drone “appears to have had no bearing on these charges being contested here,” according to the documents.

Court records state that last June, six cows wandered onto Brossart’s 3,000 acre farm, about 60 miles west of Grand Forks. Brossart allegedly refused to return the cows, which led to a long, armed standoff with the Grand Forks police department. At some point during the standoff, Homeland Security, through an agreement with local police, offered up the use of an unmanned predator drone, which “was used for surveillance,” according to the court documents.

Grand Forks SWAT team chief Bill Macki said in an interview that the drone was used to ensure Brossart and his family members, who were also charged, didn’t leave the farm and were unarmed during the arresting raid.

Read more from this story HERE.

Video: The most vile ad in the history of television?

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Reflecting the accelerating moral implosion of the nation, Wm. Wrigley Jr. Company attempts to sell Skittles candy using a disgusting ad suggesting bestiality. This follows the Obama administration’s refusal yesterday to say whether it opposes polygamy.

Palin responds to Cheney’s slam that she was bad VP pick

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In an interview that aired on last weekend’s “This Week” on ABC, former Vice President Dick Cheney revealed his disappointment that Sarah Palin was the 2008 Republican vice presidential nominee. That revelation is still being discussed three days later and it has even drawn criticism from conservatives.

But on Tuesday night’s “On the Record with Greta Van Susteren” on the Fox News Channel, Palin herself responded to the former vice president, calling it a “misfire,” and saying that he had bought into the media’s story that has been generated over the last four years.

“Well, seeing as how Dick — excuse me, Vice President Cheney never misfires, then evidently, he’s quite convinced that what he had evidently read about me by the lamestream media having been written what I believe is a false narrative over the last four years, evidently, Dick Cheney believed that stuff, and that’s a shame,” Palin said. “So he characterized me as being a mistake.”

But Palin argued that the mistake wasn’t her selection. It would have been if she declined the nomination and pointed to her high numbers at the time of the 2008 presidential race that made her an attractive candidate.

“Here’s where the mistake would have been, Greta, I believe. It’s had I not answered the call — I was honored to get to run for vice president of the United States alongside Senator John McCain. I was honored to accept the nomination from the GOP. And I think that the mistake would have been me just deciding that, ‘Hey, I love my 86-87 percent approval rating up there in Alaska as the governor, moving and shaking and watching corrupt politicians and businessmen go to prison for crony capitalism, working on 16 to 20 percent of domestic energy supplies being able to be increased via Alaska’s resource development, ethics reform legislation that I was working on — that led to that 86 percent approval rating.”

Read more from this story HERE.

Video: Obama – “People faint at my events because I talk too much”

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While the lamestream media focuses on Romney’s supposed gaffes relating to the Olympics and the Palestinians, it almost complete ignores Obama’s ridiculous comments yesterday when someone fainted in front of him at a campaign event.

Photo credit: DonkeyHotey

Video: Syrian rebels slaughter Assad loyalists while crowd chants ‘Allahu Akbar’

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Warning: explicit content.  Watch rebels viciously machine gun four Assad loyalists in Syria while the surrounding crown shouts “Allahu Akbar.”  Although there is no evidence that these reckless executioners were members of Obama’s favored Muslim Brotherhood, there is no doubt that Obama’s policies in the Middle East has encouraged the rise of these type of Islamic fundamentalists (read more on Obama’s efforts after the video below):

 

Reuters just reported today that

President Barack Obama has signed a secret order authorizing U.S. support for rebels seeking to depose Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and his government, U.S. sources familiar with the matter said.

Obama’s order, approved earlier this year and known as an intelligence “finding,” broadly permits the CIA and other U.S. agencies to provide support that could help the rebels oust Assad.

Read more from this story HERE.

Romney answers allegations that he made a racist comment in Israel (+video)

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During Romney’s recent trip to Israel, he suggested that the Jewish culture is largely responsible for Israel’s successes and, by implication, that the Palestinian culture is largely responsible for Palestinian problems.  Palestinians called Romney’s statements “racist” and the US press is piling on:

 

This aggressive Palestinian response to Romney’s comments is somewhat curious given Romney’s insistence on a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.  Romney has openly advocated for an independent Palestine.

Nevertheless, the media frenzy surrounding his comments continues.  To address this, Romney issued the following statement:

During my recent trip to Israel, I had suggested that the choices a society makes about its culture play a role in creating prosperity, and that the significant disparity between Israeli and Palestinian living standards was powerfully influenced by it. In some quarters, that comment became the subject of controversy.

But what exactly accounts for prosperity if not culture? In the case of the United States, it is a particular kind of culture that has made us the greatest economic power in the history of the earth. Many significant features come to mind: our work ethic, our appreciation for education, our willingness to take risks, our commitment to honor and oath, our family orientation, our devotion to a purpose greater than ourselves, our patriotism. But one feature of our culture that propels the American economy stands out above all others: freedom. The American economy is fueled by freedom. Free people and their free enterprises are what drive our economic vitality.

The Founding Fathers wrote that we are endowed by our Creator with the freedom to pursue happiness. In the America they designed, we would have economic freedom, just as we would have political and religious freedom. Here, we would not be limited by the circumstance of birth nor directed by the supposedly informed hand of government. We would be free to pursue happiness as we wish. Economic freedom is the only force that has consistently succeeded in lifting people out of poverty. It is the only principle that has ever created sustained prosperity. It is why our economy rose to rival those of the world’s leading powers — and has long since surpassed them all.

The linkage between freedom and economic development has a universal applicability. One only has to look at the contrast between East and West Germany, and between North and South Korea for the starkest demonstrations of the meaning of freedom and the absence of freedom.

Israel is also a telling example. Like the United States, the state of Israel has a culture that is based upon individual freedom and the rule of law. It is a democracy that has embraced liberty, both political and economic. This embrace has created conditions that have enabled innovators and entrepreneurs to make the desert bloom. In the face of improbable odds, Israel today is a world leader in fields ranging from medicine to information technology.

Read more from this story HERE.

 

Signs of imminent food crisis lead US farmers to request suspension of ethanol quotas

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Photo credit: CraneStation

The Obama administration was urged on Monday to stop diverting grain to gas amid warnings of an “imminent food crisis” caused by America’s drought.

US government forecasts of a 4% rise in food prices for US consumers because of the drought have sharpened criticism of supports for producing fuel from corn-based ethanol.

Meanwhile, research published last week by the New England Complex Systems Institute warned of an “imminent food crisis” because of the diversion of corn stocks to ethanol.

“Necsi has warned for months that misguided food-to-ethanol conversion programs and rampant commodity speculation have created a food price bubble, leading to an inevitable spike in prices by 2013. Now it appears the “crop shock” will arrive even sooner due to drought, unless measures to curb ethanol production and rein in speculators are adopted immediately,” the researchers warned.

In the latest move, the country’s meat, dairy and poultry producers called on the Environmental Protection Agency to suspend this year’s quotas for corn ethanol production.

Read more from this story HERE.

Ted Cruz’s Victory Foretells Conservative Takeover of GOP

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Photo credit: Gage Skidmore

Richard A. Viguerie, Chairman of ConservativeHQ.com, made the following comments yesterday about Ted Cruz’s incredible victory in Texas:

“The victory of Ted Cruz in the Texas Republican Senate runoff primary means that the torch is being passed to a new generation of principled small government constitutional conservatives and that the ‘let’s make a deal’ Republican Party of old will soon go the way of the Dodo bird.

“Ted’s nomination sent a strong signal that a new conservative Republican Party is being born and, by 2016, principled conservatives will replace most leaders in Congress and the Party at the national, state, and local levels. GOP leaders should ‘ask not for whom the bell tolls — it tolls for thee.’

“The Cruz campaign was a contest in which the people–grassroots conservatives and Tea Partiers — routed the establishment and the special interests.

“Inspired by such national conservative leaders as Sarah Palin, Phyllis Schlafly, Ed Meese, James Dobson, by Senators Jim DeMint, Rand Paul, Mike Lee, and Tom Coburn, and by organizations such as The Club for Growth and FreedomWorks, the grassroots conservative and Tea Party voters of Texas took on the combined power of Governor Rick Perry, every Texas GOP state senator save one, and the good old boy network of Austin and DC lobbyists–and they won.

“By nominating Ted Cruz, the Republican voters of Texas today sent a strong message that what they want is an end to the crony capitalism, business-as-usual spending, and disregard for the Constitution that have dominated Washington no matter which party was in power.” Read more from this story HERE.

Another view:  Tea Party’s influence could reshape Senate Republicans

By Jennifer Steinhauer.  The tea party is very much alive in the drive for Republican control of the Senate, portending a potential shake-up in the mindset of the chamber.

The easy Republican primary victory in Texas on Tuesday of Ted Cruz, the 41-year-old Sarah Palin-blessed upstart, virtually assured the latest tea party candidate a seat in the chamber next year. And he will not be alone when it comes to those backed by the movement that propelled Republicans to control of the House in 2010.

Among 17 contested Senate races and in Texas, more than half a dozen of the Republican candidates — or those currently running ahead in their primaries — are tea party-embraced. The infusion of new conservative blood could alter the complexion of the Senate, increasing the sorts of conflicts between moderates and far-right Republicans disinclined toward compromise that have characterized the House for two years.

From Indiana — where Richard Mourdock recently toppled the veteran Republican Sen. Richard Lugar — to Wisconsin — where two tea party candidates are slowly unmooring the Republican front-runner, former Gov. Tommy Thompson — to Nebraska — where Deb Fischer surprisingly beat out a more established Republican candidate — tea party-backed contenders are surging. In Missouri, three Republicans are fighting to portray themselves as the candidate most strongly aligned with tea party values.

Even if Democrats maintain control, newcomers like Cruz are likely to quickly coalesce with veteran conservatives like Sen. Jim DeMint of South Carolina and freshmen like Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky, enlarging the ranks of members who stand well to the right of their party’s central platform. Read more from this story HERE.

Obama wants to kill the suburbs. Really.

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Photo credit: jdnx

Obama’s plans to undercut the political and economic independence of America’s suburbs reach back decades. The community organizers who trained him in the mid-1980s blamed the plight of cities on taxpayer “flight” to suburbia. Beginning in the mid-1990s, Obama’s mentors at the Gamaliel Foundation (a community-organizing network Obama helped found) formally dedicated their efforts to the budding fight against suburban “sprawl.” From his positions on the boards of a couple of left-leaning Chicago foundations, Obama channeled substantial financial support to these efforts. On entering politics, he served as a dedicated ally of his mentors’ anti-suburban activism.

The alliance endures. One of Obama’s original trainers, Mike Kruglik, has hived off a new organization called Building One America, which continues Gamaliel’s anti-suburban crusade under another name. Kruglik and his close allies, David Rusk and Myron Orfield, intellectual leaders of the “anti-sprawl” movement, have been quietly working with the Obama administration for years on an ambitious program of social reform.

In July of 2011, Kruglik’s Building One America held a conference at the White House. Orfield and Rusk made presentations, and afterwards Kruglik personally met with the president in the Oval Office. The ultimate goal of the movement led by Kruglik, Rusk, and Orfield is quite literally to abolish the suburbs. Knowing that this could never happen through outright annexation by nearby cities, they’ve developed ways to coax suburbs to slowly forfeit their independence.

One approach is to force suburban residents into densely packed cities by blocking development on the outskirts of metropolitan areas, and by discouraging driving with a blizzard of taxes, fees, and regulations. Step two is to move the poor out of cities by imposing low-income-housing quotas on development in middle-class suburbs. Step three is to export the controversial “regional tax-base sharing” scheme currently in place in the Minneapolis–St. Paul area to the rest of the country. Under this program, a portion of suburban tax money flows into a common regional pot, which is then effectively redistributed to urban, and a few less well-off “inner-ring” suburban, municipalities.

Read more from this story HERE.

Miami threatens to evict congregation over Pastor’s sermons calling homosexuality sin (+video)

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A Miami pastor is fighting back after the head of the Miami-Dade school district threatened to evict his church, which rents space on Sunday in one of the district’s schools, because of the pastor’s public stand against homosexuality.

After President Obama came out publicly in support of same-sex marriage, Pastor Jack Hakimian of Impact Miami, a Southern Baptist congregation that rents space on Sundays in North Miami High School, began to preach sermons pointing out that, according to the Bible, homosexual behavior is a sin.

According to Baptist Press News, the school district’s superintendent, Alberto Carvalho, responded to the sermons with a statement that Hakimian’s take on homosexuality “appears to be contrary to school board policy as well as the basic principles of humanity.” Carvalho told ABC television news affiliate local10.com that he had asked “for immediate legal review to seek the termination” of the church’s lease contract with the school district. “I am making this decision not on the basis of policy or politics, but as a rejection of prejudice and intolerance,” claimed Carvalho.

A spokesman for the district followed up Carvalho’s comments, saying that the school board and superintendent had reviewed the “allegations” against the pastor and found his words “disturbing and appalling.”

Hakimian immediately responded to Carvalho’s threats by calling a press conference and demanding an apology from the superintendent and a promise that the district would stop its harassment. “I never thought I’d be penalized for teaching on Christian marriage and sexual ethics from the Bible, the very Bible that presidents swear on, in a privately rented space at an event not sponsored by the school or district,” the Miami Herald quoted Hakimian as saying. “We ask Mr. Carvalho to retract his intolerant statements, apologize, and commit to never again to bully or discriminate against those he disagrees with.”

Here’s the video of Pastor Hakimian’s press conference responding to Miami-Dade school district’s eviction threat:

Read more from this story HERE.