State Department Orders 5,000 Body Bags and 160,000 Hazmat Suits for African Ebola Outbreak

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Photo Credit: Michel du Chille / GettyBy David Martosko.

The U.S. Agency for International Development ordered 5,000 body bags from a Florida company last month as part of its planned response to an outbreak of the Ebola virus in western Africa.
And as President Obama prepares to enlarge America’s aid to affected countries, a company that makes protective clothing says the State Department, which oversees USAID, has invited bids for 160,000 hazmat suits.

The body-bag purchase came on August 19, just after the World Health Organization said the epidemic had killed 1,000 people. That death toll is now greater than 2,400.

The size of the contracts indicates how seriously governments are taking the threat, especially considering that all 5,000 body bags were destined only for Liberia – one of three countries whose citizens have been hammered with new disease cases and paralyzed with fear.

And the purchase says nothing about what resources might be coming as part of other nations’ contributions.

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200,000 from Ebola countries have visas to enter U.S.

By Paul Bedard.

There are about 200,000 Africans from countries hosting the deadly Ebola virus who hold temporary visas to visit the United States, greatly raising the stakes it could spread to America, according to a group following the immigration issue.

“Based on State Department nonimmigrant visa issuance statistics, I estimate that there are about 5,000 people in Guinea, 5,000 people in Sierra Leone, and 3,500 people in Liberia who possess visas to come to the United States today,” said Jessica M. Vaughan, director of policy studies at the Center for Immigration Studies.

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Congress Demands Obama Act to Keep Islamic Terrorists Out of U.S.

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Photo Credit: AP / Evan VucciWhile President Obama is focused on getting money to friendly-ish Syrian rebels, Congress is increasingly demanding he take more steps to stop militant fighters from coming to the U.S. by stripping Americans of their passports if they join the fight and by suspending countries that have large contingents of foreign fighters from the Visa Waiver Program.

More than half of the countries on the U.S. visa waiver list — including most close European allies — have had citizens join the fight in Syria, according to data from a June report by the Soufan Group. Analysts said they could use their passports to bypass initial levels of scrutiny by U.S. screeners.

“Islamic extremists holding British, German, French or other European passports can simply get on a plane and fly to America without a visa. The safety and security of Americans should be of the highest priority, and this Visa Waiver Program puts the American people in great danger,” said Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, a Hawaii Democrat who has two tours of duty as an Army National Guard captain under her belt.

Meanwhile, the estimated 100 or more Americans who have joined Islamist militants could pose a special danger to the U.S. if they bring their jihad back home.

In a letter last week to the State and Homeland Security departments, 14 Republican senators asked Secretary of State John F. Kerry to use the authority the law grants him to revoke passports of anyone who is discovered to have joined the militants.

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California Voters Worry Over Illegal Immigration but Support Path to Legality

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Photo Credit: AP California voters broadly support a path to legalization for immigrants in the U.S. without proper documents, despite widespread worry about the effects of illegal immigration, a new poll shows.

Three in four of those surveyed support an overhaul of federal immigration laws, the USC Dornsife/Los Angeles Times poll shows.

A majority of voters of all races, income levels and geography agreed that illegal immigration is a major problem, but there were significant differences over what to do about it, the Times reported Monday.

Beverly Bloom, a 59-year-old registered Democrat from Corona who works in physical education at a high school, said she doesn’t want to see punishment for the students and families she works with, many of them in the country illegally.

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U.S. Pushes Back Against Warnings That ISIS Plans to Enter From Mexico

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Photo Credit: ERIC GAY / APBy MICHAEL S. SCHMIDT.

Militants for the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria have traveled to Mexico and are just miles from the United States. They plan to cross over the porous border and will “imminently” launch car bomb attacks. And the threat is so real that federal law enforcement officers have been placed at a heightened state of alert, and an American military base near the border has increased its security.

As the Obama administration and the American public have focused their attention on ISIS in recent weeks, conservative groups and leading Republicans have issued stark warnings like those that ISIS and other extremists from Syria are planning to enter the country illegally from Mexico. But the Homeland Security Department, the F.B.I. and lawmakers who represent areas near the border say there is no truth to the warnings.

“There is no credible intelligence to suggest that there is an active plot by ISIL to attempt to cross the southern border,” Homeland Security officials said in a written statement, using an alternative acronym for the group.

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The Great Unraveling

By Roger Cohen.

It was the time of unraveling. Long afterward, in the ruins, people asked: How could it happen?

It was a time of beheadings. With a left-handed sawing motion, against a desert backdrop, in bright sunlight, a Muslim with a British accent cut off the heads of two American journalists and a British aid worker. The jihadi seemed comfortable in his work, unhurried. His victims were broken. Terror is theater. Burning skyscrapers, severed heads: The terrorist takes movie images of unbearable lightness and gives them weight enough to embed themselves in the psyche.

It was a time of aggression. The leader of the largest nation on earth pronounced his country encircled, even humiliated. He annexed part of a neighboring country, the first such act in Europe since 1945, and stirred up a war on further land he coveted. His surrogates shot down a civilian passenger plane. The victims, many of them Europeans, were left to rot in the sun for days. He denied any part in the violence, like a puppeteer denying that his puppets’ movements have any connection to his. He invoked the law the better to trample on it. He invoked history the better to turn it into farce. He reminded humankind that the idiom fascism knows best is untruth so grotesque it begets unreason.

Read more from this story HERE.

Nanny State: Vermont Bans Desserts in School

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Photo Credit: TownHallIn what may be the ultimate Nanny State move, Vermont has outlawed consuming or bringing brownies, cakes, or cookies to school. The mandates are part of a new program titled “Smart-Snacks-in-Schools” and will apply to lunch items, vending machines, and fundraising events between midnight and half and hour afterschool.

Boston.com reported:

“These changes are really supporting the types of diets that we as a country should be following to have a healthy diet and lifestyle,” said Laurie Colgan, child nutrition program director at the Agency of Education, in an interview with the Vermont Watchdog.

This healthy lifestyle has already been instated within the school.

“The new school lunch pattern has low-fat, leaner proteins, greater variety, and larger portions of fruit and vegetables,” Colgan said. Additionally, “the grains have to be 100 percent whole-grain rich.”

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Huh: Anti-Gun Billionaire Buys a Nazi Tank

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Photo Credit: TownHallIf you’ve paid attention at all to the gun control debate over the past two decades, you’ve certainly heard the argument from gun control activists, “What do you want? For people to be able to buy and own tanks?!”

That argument and question are red herrings. The average citizen is not trying to own or buy tanks (even though there are legal ways to do it), but an anti-gun billionaire dedicated to taking away your Second Amendment rights, just bought one.

Co-founder of Microsoft Paul Allen has dumped hundreds-of-thousands of dollars into anti-gun campaigns and now, he’s the proud owner of a WWII Nazi tank. Chris Egar over at Guns.com has more…

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Colorado Teenager Pleads Guilty to Conspiracy to Support ISIS

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Photo Credit: Joshua TrujilloA 19-year-old suburban Denver woman who federal authorities say intended to wage jihad despite their repeated attempts to stop her pleaded guilty Wednesday to trying to help the Islamic State militant group in Syria under a plea deal that requires her to help authorities find others with the same intentions.

Shannon Conley, appearing in a striped jail jumpsuit and a brown and black headscarf, pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy to provide material support to a foreign terrorist organization. She said nothing except noting that she understood the plea and its ramifications.

The agreement says she must cooperate with the FBI and other law enforcement agencies and provide information about other people in Colorado and elsewhere looking to help terrorists abroad. If she cooperates, prosecutors have promise to ask for a reduction in her sentence but the decision would ultimately would be up to a judge.

Conley was arrested in April while trying to board a flight at Denver International Airport that she hoped would ultimately get her to Syria, authorities said. She was charged with trying to help a terrorist organization and could face up to five years in federal prison and a $250,000 fine.

The trained nurse’s aide from Arvada, Colorado, told agents from the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force that if she couldn’t fight with the Islamic State group, she hoped to use her nursing skills to help the extremists, according to court documents.

Read more from this story HERE.

Democrats Working Overtime to Criminalize Dissent

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Photo Credit: Drew Angerer / Getty Dissent is the highest form of patriotism. Dissent is the lowest form of crime. If you are a drone in the hive of the Left, it is possible — easy, in fact — to believe both of those things at the same time.

Free speech just won an important victory in a federal courtroom, though it is shameful that the case ever even had to go to court. Ohio had enacted a plainly unconstitutional law that empowered a government panel to determine whether criticisms offered in political advertisements were sufficiently true to be permitted in the public discourse. Those who have followed the IRS scandal, the Travis County, Texas, prosecutorial scandals, or Harry Reid’s recent effort to repeal the First Amendment will not be surprised that this measure was used as a political weapon against a conservative group, in this case the anti-abortion Susan B. Anthony List. SBA List criticized a Democratic House member for having voted for the so-called Affordable Care Act (ACA), noting that the law will implicate American taxpayers in the funding of abortions, an entanglement previously minimized through measures such as the Hyde Amendment. Despite the fact that the ACA regime would, among other things, permit federal subsidies for abortion-funding insurance plans, the Ohio Inquisition ruled the ad impermissible, and banned it.

So much for free speech.

Fortunately, an Obama appointee whose ability to read the letter of the law had not been utterly drummed out of him ruled that the Ohio Inquisition obviously violated longstanding free-speech protections, the First Amendment notable among them. Last week, a similar case in Minnesota came to a similar conclusion.

Read more from this story HERE.

Amnesty-King John McCain Sounds Converted, Says ISIS is Trying to Cross Porous Southern Border

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Photo Credit: APBy Tony Lee.

After urging national Republicans not to make illegal immigration an issue in the midterms, Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) on Wednesday warned that ISIS is trying to exploit the porous U.S.-Mexico border to carry out terrorists attacks on American soil.

Appearing on Fox News with Sean Hannity after Obama’s foreign policy address to the nation on ISIS, McCain, the Gang of Eight member who has been one of the most prominent advocates of comprehensive amnesty legislation, said that ISIS terrorists are encouraging members to sneak into America through the southern border.

“On Twitter and Facebook, they are urging people to come across our border and attack the United States of America,” McCain said on Fox News of ISIS.

On CNN, McCain said America’s “porous” border with Mexico makes the country more vulnerable to a terrorist attack from ISIS. Former Homeland Security officials have previously conceded that ISIS terrorists may have already illegally entered the country through the porous U.S.-Mexico border.

Read more from this story HERE.

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BUCHANAN: EXECUTIVE AMNESTY WILL CAUSE ‘HELLISH FIRESTORM’

Breitbart TV.

Columnist and author Pat Buchanan predicted that President Barack Obama would “have a hellish firestorm on his hands” if he moved forward with plans to grant amnesty to illegal immigrants through an executive order on this weekend’s “The McLaughlin Group.”

“I’ll tell you, he’s going to have a hellish firestorm on his hands if, he in December, which my guess would be he would likely to do, he grants an executive amnesty…

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Obama's ex-Press Secretary: ‘It’s Not Going To Be A Good Year For Democrats’

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Photo Credit: Daily CallerFormer White House press secretary Jay Carney said Sunday that 2014 is “not going to be a good year for Democrats, by definition.”

The former White House spokesman appeared on CNN’s “State of the Union” panel to discuss the 2014 midterms in one of his first appearances on the network since joining on as a contributor.

Read more from this story HERE.