The Clintons Say they Left the White House in Debt. Wait, What?

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Photo Credit: WNDOn Monday morning, ABC teased an interview between all-but-announced presidential candidate Hillary Clinton and the network’s Diane Sawyer set to air later in the evening.

One particular exchange jumped out at us. Clinton says that she and her husband, former President Bill Clinton, left the White House in debt, and needed the speaking fees they both earned in order to pay those debts.

SAWYER: You’ve made five million making speeches? The president’s made more than a hundred million dollars?

CLINTON: Well, you have no reason to remember, but we came out of the White House not only dead broke but in debt. We had no money when we got there, and we struggled to piece together the resources for mortgages for houses, for Chelsea’s education. You know, it was not easy. Bill has worked really hard and it’s been amazing to me. He’s worked very hard. First of all, we had to pay off all our debts. You know, you had to make double the money because of, obviously, taxes, and then pay off the debts and get us houses and take care of family members.

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US Spy Agencies Knew During Benghazi Attack Who Was Doing the Attacking

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Photo Credit: TownHall While the administration would much prefer that the “false controversy” of Benghazi be swept under a rug, never to be talked about again, Americans know there’s more to the story and want answers. While the Benghazi select committee seems promising, in the meantime, the public became privy to new information on Wednesday that further discredits the White House’s story that the attack was a spontaneous reaction to a YouTube video.

On Fox News’ “Special Report” last night, Bret Baier aired an interview with retired Air Force Major Eric Stahl, who was also the commander and pilot of the plane used to transport not just the 4 Americans that died in the attack on the consulate, but also the remaining consulate staff (including the wounded) from Tripoli to the U.S. base in Ramstein, Germany.

I highly recommend watching the video in its entirety, but here are a couple major takeaways…

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Photo Credit: TownHall Sources: DOD memo sent after Benghazi attack listed suspects with Al Qaeda ties

By Catherine Herridge.

A targeting memo sent to the State Department by the Defense Department’s Africa Command two days after the Benghazi attack listed 11 suspects with ties to Al Qaeda and other groups, counter-terrorism and congressional sources confirmed to Fox News.

This is significant because it arrived two days before then-UN ambassador Susan Rice appeared on television shows blaming the assault on an inflammatory video. It also came nearly a day before presidential aide Ben Rhodes sent an email also suggesting the video – and not a policy failure – was to blame for the Sep, 11, 2012 attack that claimed four American lives.

The memo, which was referred to in passing during recent congressional testimony, was drawn up by the Defense Department’s Africa command, known as Africom, and was sent to the State Department as the best available intelligence in the early morning hours of September 14, 2012.

It included the names of 11 suspects, four connected to the Al Qaeda affiliate in North Africa known as AQIM, and seven connected to Ansar al-Sharia, a group with ties to the terrorist network.

“They knew from the get-go that Al Qaeda was involved in the attack so the idea that the Obama administration didn’t know that early on or they suspected it was something else entirely basically is willful blindness,”said counter-terrorism analyst Thomas Joscelyn of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies.

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Some Church Members Tried To Get This Pastor Fired For Packing Heat. This Is What He Did Instead…

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Photo Credit: NatalieMaynor / Creative CommonsBy F. Peter Brown.

A pastor in Birmingham, Alabama regularly carries a .45 pistol around with him as is his right under the law. Some trustees and deacons of the Friendly Baptist Church were so upset with his decision to carry the gun that they fired him.

However, the pastor, Cedric Stringer, responded that “nobody can fire him but God” and fired the trustees and deacons who opposed him and replaced them with ones who were willing to support the pistol carrying pastor.

Birmingham, where the church is located, is one of Alabama’s largest cities, not exactly in the middle of nowhere.

Now the opposing parties have both involved lawyers, and there is a court battle that looms ahead. The Friendly Baptist Church has actually suspended services until the legal dispute is resolved.

Read more from this story HERE.

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Photo Credit: TownHall Reality Check: Guns Sales Up, Crimes Committed With Guns Down

By Katie Pavlich.

Earlier this week, Michael Bloomberg’s new anti-gun Everytown released a bogus report claiming since Newtown in December 2013, 74 school shootings have taken place. The report was so bogus, even CNN went out of the way, twice, to correct the record. More from Ed Morrissey:

For the second time in two days, CNN went out of its way to debunk the Michael Bloomberg/Barack Obama claim that mass shootings have become epidemic and a “new normal” in American society. The day after CNN debunked the Bloomberg-funded Everytown claim that there were 74 Newtown-style mass shootings since Sandy Hook, Jake Tapper interviewed Northeastern University criminology professor James Alan Fox to look at the data rather than the anecdotes…

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New Ruling Shows the NSA Can’t Legally Justify Its Phone Spying Anymore

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Photo Credit: Getty Images The Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals said no this week to tracking your movements using data from your cell phone without a warrant when it declared that this information is constitutionally protected.

The case, United States v. Davis , is important not only because it provides substantive and procedural protections against abuse of an increasingly common and highly invasive surveillance method. It also provides support for something Christopher Sprigman and I have said before — that the government’s other “metadata” collection programs are unconstitutional.

The Davis decision, in effect, suggests that the U.S. government’s collection of all kinds of business records and transactional data — commonly called “metadata” — for law enforcement and national security purposes may also be unconstitutional.

Your phone sends signals to the nearest cell towers so that the communications network system knows where to route a call should one come in. Many providers collect and store the location of towers a customer connects to at the beginning and end of the call for billing purposes. FBI agents in Davis obtained these records without a search warrant and used them to place the defendant, Quartavious Davis, near the scene of a number of robberies.

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Influx of Minors Across Texas Border Driven by Belief That They Will Be Allowed to Stay In U.S.

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Photo Credit: Getty ImagesThere is growing evidence that a surge of tens of thousands of Central American minors across the Mexican border into Texas is being driven in large part by the perception they will be allowed to stay under the Obama administration’s immigration policies.

Administration officials — after initially dismissing such reports — are now attempting to push back on the idea, warning parents not to send their children as officials scramble to accommodate tens of thousands who already have arrived in Texas.

“Those who cross our border today illegally, even children, are not eligible for an earned path to citizenship,” Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson said this week. “Those apprehended at our borders are priorities for removal . . . regardless of age.”

The crisis marks another immigration-related political dilemma for President Obama and has been seized on by Republicans as an argument against legislation to allow millions of undocumented immigrants to remain in the country legally. It could also hamper Obama’s ability to meet the demands of his liberal base by using executive authority to ease enforcement policies if Congress fails to act.

The administration has emphasized that the influx of minors is being driven foremost by widespread gang-related violence in Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador. Most of the children are crossing over the Rio Grande Valley into Texas, often under the guidance of human-smuggling cartels, and many are seeking to reunite with parents already in the United States, aid workers said.

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Obama: ‘Our Future Rests’ On The Success Of DREAM Kids

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Photo Credit: DonkeyHoteyBy Joel Gehrke.

President Obama reminded Democratic donors that “our future rests” on the success of people brought to the United States illegally as children, who would qualify for citizenship if Congress had passed the DREAM Act.

“About 30 to 40 percent of the kids in this school, by the way, are DREAM kids,” Obama said Wednesday evening. “You wouldn’t know it looking at them, because they are as American as apple pie. But every single one of these kids, you might not be able to tell the difference, but a whole bunch of them — they’re worried about whether or not they’re going to be able to finance their college education of their immigrant status. They’re worried about whether, in fact, this country that they love so deeply loves them back and understands that our future rests on their success. Why wouldn’t we want to give them that certainty that you are part of the fabric of this nation, we’re counting on you, and we’re going to make sure you succeed? Why wouldn’t we want to do that?”

Obama made the comments at a Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee fundraiser in Massachusetts, in reference to students at Worcester Tech. “So these young people are graduating, ready to go to college, but also certified nurses, EMT folks. Many of them are choosing to join the military and will contribute to our country in this way,” he said. “And looking out as I was speaking to them and then shaking their hands, and giving them hugs and high-fives and all the things that kids do on a graduation, I thought to myself: How could we not want to invest in these kids?”

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Photo Credit: AP / Rick ScuteriBorder Patrol changing diapers, heating baby formula for surge of children

By Stephen Dinan.

Gil Kerlikowske, commissioner of U.S. Customs and Border Protection, said Friday that many of the illegal immigrant children his agents are encountering trying to slip across the U.S.-Mexico border have never even seen a doctor before.

He described scenes of Border Patrol agents changing diapers and heating baby formula in order to care for some of the youngest children, and said agents are being asked to do things way beyond their skill set — particularly for so many of the agents who are young, single men.

“I’ve been down there, a lot, and spent a lot of time and I’ve seen these agents doing incredible things,” he said.

The commissioner was pushing back against a complaint filed by the American Civil Liberties Union and several immigrant-rights groups this week charging that agents and officers have been neglecting or abusing many of the children, verbally or physically.

Read more from this story HERE.

Pentagon Studying Protesters to Prep for ‘Mass Civil Breakdown’

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Photo Credit: AP / Mary AltafferThe Department of Defense has disbursed some funds to universities so that scientists might study the dynamics of civil unrest — and how the U.S. military might best respond.

It’s called the “Minerva Research Initiative,” and it’s a program that was kicked off in 2008 to “improve DoD’s basic understanding of the social, cultural, behavioral and political forces that shape regions of the world of strategic importance to the U.S.,” The Guardian reported.

More to point: the multi-million dollar research program seeks to uncover “warfighter-relevant insights” to help senior ranking officials in the “defense policy community” come up with “combatant commands” that work in civil unrest situations, The Guardian reported.

One area of study that’s planned for the 2014-2017 time frame partners Cornell University researchers with the U.S. Air Force Office of Scientific Research to come up with a model for the “dynamics of social movement mobilization and contagions,” the text of the program stated. That particular research area will ultimately determine the “critical mass (tipping point),” of civil uprisings, where protests turn violent, the program text states, The Guardian reported.

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It Looks Like Chelsea Clinton Made $26,724 For Each Minute She Appeared On NBC

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Photo Credit: Rob Kim / GettyOn Friday morning, Politico published on the previously unknown and “closely held” details of former First Daughter Chelsea Clinton’s contract with NBC News. According to the story, Clinton was given an annual salary of $600,000 when she joined NBC News as a “special correspondent” in November 2011. Based on these figures, Clinton has earned about $26,724 for each minute she subsequently appeared on air.

NBC News declined to confirm Politico’s report about Clinton’s salary. A spokesperson for the news outlet instead said they, “don’t comment on details of existing contracts.” Politico also said Clinton’s contract “was up for renewal or nonrenewal this year” and she was placed on the payroll on a month-to-month basis to allow her to cut ties with the network if her mother, Hillary Clinton, launches her long rumored presidential bid in 2016.

Assuming Politico’s reporting is correct and that Clinton is still earning at the same rate after moving to month-to-month payment, she has earned about $1.55 million from NBC News.

Read more from this story HERE.

After 550 Homosexual Couples Wed, US Judge Stays Her Ruling

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Photo Credit: Andy Davis / The Stevens Point Journal / APA week after striking down Wisconsin’s ban on same-sex marriage as unconstitutional, a federal judge in Madison, Wis., issued an order Friday postponing her decision pending the outcome of an expected appeal.

But US District Judge Barbara Crabb took the action only after more than 550 same-sex couples in the state cited her June 6 decision in order to get married over the past seven days.

Judge Crabb had been asked two weeks ago by state officials to issue a stay of any ruling striking down the state’s same-sex marriage ban until the issue could be heard by an appeals court.

The officials expressed concern that same-sex marriages should not be performed until appellate courts have an opportunity to examine the underlying legal and constitutional issues.

On Friday, the judge acknowledged that there had been “much confusion among county clerks” regarding the legal effect of her decision last week.

Read more from this story HERE.

Study: West Antarctic Glacier Melt Due To Volcanoes, Not Global Warming

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Photo Credit: REUTERS / Pauline AskinA new study by researchers at the University of Texas, Austin found that the West Antarctic Ice Sheet is collapsing due to geothermal heat, not man-made global warming.

Researchers from the UTA’s Institute for Geophysics found that the Thwaites Glacier in western Antarctica is being eroded by the ocean as well as geothermal heat from magma and subaerial volcanoes. Thwaites is considered a key glacier for understanding future sea level rise.

UTA researchers used radar techniques to map water flows under ice sheets and estimate the rate of ice melt in the glacier. As it turns out, geothermal heat from magma and volcanoes under the glacier is much hotter and covers a much wider area than was previously thought.

“Geothermal flux is one of the most dynamically critical ice sheet boundary conditions but is extremely difficult to constrain at the scale required to understand and predict the behavior of rapidly changing glaciers,” UTA researchers wrote in their study, which was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The geothermal heat under the glaciers is likely a key factor in why the ice sheet is currently collapsing. Before this study, it was assumed that heat flow under the glacier was evenly distributed throughout, but UTA’s study shows this is not the case. Heat levels under the glacier are uneven, with some areas being much hotter than others.

Read more from this story HERE.