How an Obama Administration Policy is Destroying Lives

Photo Credit: AIMIn late August and early September, hospitals across the nation began reporting an explosion of severe respiratory illnesses among children. Children’s Hospital Colorado treated about 3,600 children between August 18 and September 24, and at least 692 since. On September 5th, Cincinnati Children’s Hospital saw a one day record of 540 kids. The emergency room was filled to capacity. Mobile, Alabama’s USA Children’s and Women’s Hospital reported 340 cases by September 12th. Children’s Mercy Hospital in Kansas City, Missouri had seen 450 patients as of September 7th, 60 of whom required intensive care. At least six Chicago area hospitals were so overwhelmed that they stopped admitting patients under 18 “until further notice.” Many infected children across the country are experiencing some form of paralysis. Six children and at least two adults have died.

Government health officials haven’t offered any explanation for the unusual outbreak. The Centers for Disease Control has pointedly refused to disclose the states where children have died or even specific locations of outbreaks. State and local officials are similarly closed mouthed. Except for suggesting routine precautions, public officials largely refuse to offer any details whatsoever, and in some cases have spread misinformation. And the media seem incapable of penetrating the wall of silence, simply repeating the official narrative. But there is significant, almost irrefutable evidence that this outbreak is the direct result of this year’s illegal alien invasion from Central America.

Frequently called the “mystery” illness, no healthcare professional has offered an explanation for how it got here or why it is hitting children now. The worst cases have been identified as stemming from Enterovirus D68 (EV-D68). Enteroviruses are among the most common pathogens, responsible for a wide variety of illnesses, including polio, but usually infections are mild. There are over 100 Enterovirus variants and about 10 to 15 million cases in the U.S. each year. The CDC explains away the outbreak by citing this figure, and noting that many more children die each year from influenza.

But this outbreak is different. Before this year, the D68 strand was almost unheard of. Between 1970 and 2005, only 26 cases of EV-D68 were reported in the U.S. Yet this year, in less than two months, the CDC has reported 780 cases in 46 states, and there are likely many more undiagnosed. Half the specimens tested by the CDC are EV-D68, but since August there have been thousands—perhaps even tens of thousands—of severe respiratory cases treated around the country that the CDC has not tested. D68 also seems to be associated with the paralysis occurring among many of the infected, but doctors are unsure how. In early 2014, a polio-like virus crippled 25 children in California. Enterovirus was suspected, and the symptoms were similar to those seen among children in Asia and Australia.

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FBI Quest for Smartphone Data Will Fuel Privacy Battle

In the battle over how much access law enforcement should have to your smartphone, don’t expect the government to be outsmarted without a fight.

FBI Director James Comey said as much Thursday in a speech at the Brookings Institution in Washington, suggesting the agency might ask congress to force companies to provide what amounts to a “back door” to law enforcement to obtain password-protected data on targeted personal mobile devices.

“We’re hoping to start a dialogue with congress” on updating laws that require tech companies to comply, he told the audience.

But he might find more than the usual resistance on Capitol Hill these days, and not just from known privacy critics and libertarians. A White House advisory panel convened in the wake of the Edward Snowden leaks about widespread government surveillance of Americans formally recommended that laws should “not in any way subvert, undermine, weaken or make vulnerable generally available commercial software.”

Moreover, typical law-and-order Republicans who might normally side with the FBI said they feel burned by government spying and want more assurances that Americans’ Fourth Amendment right against unreasonable search and seizures is protected.

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Houston to Pastors: Forget Your Sermons, Now We Want Your Speeches

Photo Credit: LifeNewsFive Christian pastors will no longer have to turn their sermons over to attorneys for the city of Houston. Instead, they will be forced to turn over their speeches related to the Houston Equal Rights Ordinance (HERO).

I don’t mean to point out the obvious here – but what do those attorneys think a sermon is? It’s a speech.

According to an amended motion filed Friday in Harris County, Texas court, the city’s attorneys will no longer demand sermons related to homosexuals, gender identity, or Mayor Annise Parker – Houston’s first openly lesbian mayor.

The amended subpoenas do require the pastors to turn over “all speeches or presentations related to HERO” – along with 17 different categories of information.

The Alliance Defending Freedom is a religious liberty law firm that is representing the pastors. Attorney Erik Stanley tells me the amended subpoenas don’t solve anything.

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'Dragon's Egg': Marines Who Guarded Saddam's Mysterious Bunker Fear Weapons Unleashed

Photo Credit: Fox NewsThe U.S. Marines who guarded the sprawling complex in northwest Iraq where Saddam Hussein’s 1980s war machine churned out some of the most deadly chemical and biological weapons known to man had a name for one especially mysterious bunker: The Dragon’s Egg.

Although the Americans assigned to the Al Muthanna facility until 2008 were forbidden by superiors from peering inside the bunker, they knew the larger complex’s history. From 1983 to 1990, the brutal dictator’s scientists worked there, developing mustard, sarin, VX and Tabun gases for use on Iranian soldiers and Iraqi Kurds. And although it was under the control of U.S. and Iraqi military forces for most of the last decade, the entire facility – and whatever it held – is now firmly in the grasp of the Islamic State, the terrorist army that has claimed a vast swath of Iraq and Syria and allegedly used chemical weapons against Kurds this summer.

The X-shaped bunker, encased in cement and shrouded in mystery, was one of two that were handled differently from the many other bunkers that made up the facility, according to Lt. Joshua Hartley, who was stationed there in 2008. It was off-limits.

“We were made aware of a particular bunker on the north side [of Al Muthanna] which we were informed was sealed and remotely monitored,” Hartley, who served in the weapons company of the 1st Battalion, 2nd Marine Regiment, told FoxNews.com. “We were not to approach, and definitely not to attempt to enter.”

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Nashville Police Chief Drops Major Allegation About Secret Service in Letter to House Oversight Committee

Photo Credit: https://www.nashville.govNashville Police Chief Steve Anderson is blowing the whistle on alleged misconduct by the U.S. Secret Service during a January 2013 incident involving a man who reportedly made fake death threats against President Barack Obama on Facebook.

The resident refused to let officers enter his home or follow orders to come outside . He was heard shouting at officers, “show me your warrant.”

In a letter to the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, Anderson claimed that a Secret Service agent asked a police sergeant to “wave a piece of paper” in order to “dupe” the suspect into thinking officers had a warrant.

Officers with the Metropolitan Nashville Police Department did not comply with the request, according to the police chief. Police officers ultimately determined that Secret Service agents had no legal basis to enter the resident’s home and the suspect didn’t actually threaten anyone. Fortunately, the situation was resolved without incident and law enforcement left.

In a past letter to then-Secret Service Director Julia Pierson and Assistant Director A.T. Smith, Anderson explained that the incident could have “escalated into a serious and/or embarrassing situation for both of our agencies” if MNPD officers complied with the Secret Service “directive.”

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Most of California Man's Body Eaten by Black Bear

Photo Credit: Jason EmpeyA wild black bear ate most of a Northern California man who likely died earlier of a heart attack, officials said Friday.

Humboldt County Deputy Coroner Roy Horton said he believes 65-year-old Marion Williams died outside his trailer in a remote area before the bear came upon him.

Authorities discovered the remains on Monday after friends reported Williams missing for five days.

Officials tried to trap and kill the bear but called off their attempt because it is doubtful the bear is still in the area near the man’s home in Redway, about 75 miles south of Humboldt, California Department of Fish and Wildlife spokesman Andrew Hughan said.

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Utah Lawmaker: State Colleges Can’t Limit Guns

Photo Credit: Susanne NilssonA day after an embattled feminist media critic canceled a university lecture when she learned handguns would be allowed in the room despite death threats, a state lawmaker said he believes firearms should be even more prominent on Utah campuses.

Rep. Curt Oda says he wants to reinforce Utah law allowing open carrying of guns at the state’s colleges and universities.

Oda says he’s just asking for clarification of the existing concealed-weapons law — at the request of an unidentified institution of higher education. The Clearfield Republican maintains there is nothing that bars open carrying on campuses right now.

On the same day when the FBI and other law enforcement agencies were searching for the anonymous emailer who threatened a mass shooting if gaming critic Anita Sarkeesian spoke at Utah State University, Oda said the video blogger didn’t need to cancel her speech and leave town.

“She’s overreacting,” he said Wednesday.

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Rev. Billy Graham: ‘America is Just as Wicked as Sodom and Gomorrah Ever Were’

Photo Credit: APReverend Billy Graham, arguably the most well-known and respected evangelical preacher of the last 50 years, said in a recently published commentary that America was “founded by men who believed in prayer” and that prayer can turn “the tide of history,” adding that while “America is just as wicked as Sodom and Gomorrah” and deserves “the judgment of God,” this judgment can be lessened through prayer.

“Even though America is just as wicked as Sodom and Gomorrah ever were, and as deserving of the judgment of God, God would spare us if we were earnestly praying, with hearts that had been cleansed and washed by the blood of Christ,” said Rev. Graham in his commentary for Decision magazine, published by the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association.

“The problems of the world will never be settled unless our national leaders go to God in prayer,” he said. “If only they would discover the power and wisdom that there is in reliance upon God, we could soon see the solution to the grave problems that face the world!”

Graham is 95 and reportedly often bedridden at his home in Montreat, N.C.

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The Obama Administration Proposed $72 Million In CDC Cuts Back In 2012

Photo Credit: TownHall“Republican cuts kill;” that’s an ad run by the Agenda Project Action Fund. Of all the things in the world, liberals have decided to politicize a deadly, incurable infectious disease to attack Republicans. Guy and Katie have written about the absurdity of this claim; even the Washington Post gave it four pinocchios:

This ad is simply a more extreme version of a new Democratic talking point — that GOP budget cuts have harmed the nation’s ability to handle the Ebola outbreak. It mixes statistics — the budget for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) “cut” $585 million (the ad offers no date range) — with disturbing images of the outbreak and various Republican leaders saying variations of the word “cut.”

On many levels, this line of attack is absurd.

Obama’s Republican predecessor oversaw big increases in public-health sector spending, and both Democrats and Republicans in recent years have broadly supported efforts to rein in federal spending. Sequestration resulted from a bipartisan agreement. In some years, Congress has allocated more money for NIH and CDC than the Obama administration requested. Meanwhile, contrary to the suggestion of the DCCC ad, there never was a specific vote on funding to prevent Ebola.

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WHOA! Rick Perry Has Tough Words for Radical Islam

Texas Governor Rick Perry is already a conservative superstar and is a likely 2016 Presidential candidate. But at a private meeting with the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean in London, Perry explained his foreign policy positions and just how serious the radical Islam threat is.

In addition, he described how dangerous the creeping “Islamification” of Britain is. He called for moral clarity in this ongoing global battle against terrorism.

Speaking on the dangers of radical Islam, Governor Perry chose not to follow the form of U.S. President Barack Obama or UK Prime Minister David Cameron by insisting that Islamic terrorists are “not Muslim,” a convenient dodge recently described as a “reassuring assertion, and one that almost everyone, including the vast majority of Muslims, would desperately like to believe”, but ultimately “wishful thinking.”

Instead, Perry asserted the moralistic strength of Western culture, and that of ISIS a “falsehood”: “Their twisted version of Islam amounts to a creed of human cruelty – pure sadism, and nothing more.”

He pulled no punches when describing in graphic detail the ISIS advance: “The enslavement, the beheadings, the crucifixions, the mass executions, the forced conversions. And all of this, of course, by men who tell themselves they are doing God’s work on this earth.” Criticising those who assert “quite plainly, that the Middle East is ultimately no concern of ours” Perry opposed moral relativism in the face of the barbarity of the Islamic State: “we have every right to judge, and every reason to act.”

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