Head Of Immigration Union: America Is Highly Vulnerable To An ISIS Attack

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Photo Credit: Daily CallerBy VINCE COGLIANESE.

The United States is highly vulnerable to a terrorist attack because of America’s “lax immigration POLICIES,” according to the head of a government union composed of nearly 12,000 immigration officials.

Kenneth Palinkas, president of the National Citizenship and Immigration Services Council, announced Thursday that there is an “extremely real and serious threat that ISIS has already or will soon slip across our porous southern border.”

“[I]t is also essential to warn the public about the threat that ISIS will exploit our loose and lax visa POLICIES to gain entry to the United States,” Palinkas said in a statement obtained by The Daily Caller.

“INDEED, as we know from the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993, from the 9/11 terrorist attacks, from the Boston Bombing, from the recent plot to bomb a school and courthouse in Connecticut, and many other lesser-known terror incidents,” he wrote, “we are letting terrorists into the United States right through our front door.”

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Photo Credit: AP / Carolyn KasterKerry: ISIS Is ‘the Order of Satan’

By Melanie Hunter.

Secretary of State John Kerry on Thursday defended President Barack Obama’s statement that the Islamic State is not Islamic, saying that they can call themselves whatever they want, but “they’re not a state, and they do not represent Islam.” In fact, he said, they are “the order of Satan.”

“The Islamic State, they can call themselves what they want to call themselves. We shouldn’t compound the sin by allowing them to get away with it and calling them what they’re not. They’re not a state, and they do not represent Islam,” said Kerry at the House Foreign Affairs Committee’s hearing on the U.S. strategy against ISIS.

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Photo Credit: Alex Wong / Getty Senate approves Obama’s plan to arm and train Syrian rebels

By Dan Roberts.

Senators gave their tacit blessing to President Barack Obama’s strategy for fighting the Islamic State (Isis) on Thursday, overwhelmingly passing a budget bill that also grants him authority to arm and TRAIN rival Syrian rebel groups. Despite attempts by Senator Rand Paul to separate the Syrian authorisation from the wider bill on the grounds that it deserved a separate debate, just 27 senators stood in the way of the cloture motion, which allowed Obama to avoid a potentially embarrassing direct vote.

Paul CLAIMED that the bill, which finally passed by 78 to 22, represented a “sad day for the US Senate” and also criticised the underlying strategy of arming groups which, he claimed, had little interest in fighting the Islamic extremists.

“It’s not that I’m against all intervention. I do see Isis as a threat to us – but I see our previous POLICY as having made it worse,” said Paul. “There are valid reasons for war. They should be few and far between … They should not be [hidden] in the pages of a 1,000-page bill and shuffled under the rug.”

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Inspector General: Maybe VA Fraud in Phoenix Did Result in Deaths After All

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Photo Credit: TownHallRemember the VA scandal? You might be forgiven for letting it slip your mind, given that (a) its series of disgraceful revelations was several crises ago, and (b) that Congress has passed decent (but not permanent) legislation to “fix” the system. But there’s a reason why the CNN correspondent who’s covered this story most closely bluntly questioned the feasibility of RIGHTING the VA ship without “throwing out” vast numbers of its managers: An endemic culture of corruption and accountability-dodging. Drew Griffin’s skepticism was no doubt reinforced when the department’s Inspector General released its findings in late August, concluding that it could not definitively link the VA’s pervasive and deliberate manipulation of wait times and care lists to any deaths. Critics immediately questioned the methodology behind that verdict, complaining that the IG’s standards of proof made were “virtually impossible” to meet. Whistleblowers had previously alleged that VA corruption had resulted in at least 40 deaths in the Phoenix area alone. Sources told CBS News that agency officials successfully pressured the IG to “water down” its findings:

Two of the doctors who first blew the whistle on the veterans’ deaths in Phoenix say the inspector general botched the investigation and went too easy on the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA). One says the IG engaged in a whitewash of what happened there, bowing to pressure from inside the agency, reports CBS News correspondent Wyatt Andrews. The issue surrounds the investigation into whether more than 40 veterans at the Phoenix VA died while waiting to see the doctor. The IG’s final report in August concluded that it “[could not] conclusively assert” that long wait times “caused the deaths of these veterans.” According to one whistleblower who spoke to CBS News, however, that crucial assertion was not in the original draft of the report. He told CBS News that the Inspector General added the line about how wait times did not cause the deaths at the last minute. Our source, who works at VA headquarters and who spoke exclusively to CBS News, said officials inside the agency asked for a revision of the first draft. That’s standard practice, but in this case the source said it amounted to pressure on Inspector General Richard Griffin to add a line to water down the report. “The organization was worried that the report was going to damn the organization,” the whistle-blower said. “And therefore it was important for them to introduce language that softened that blow.”

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Marine Vets Walk 300 Miles to Tell Obama: Free Tahmooressi

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Photo Credit: AP / Rich PedroncelliTwo former Marines — Lance Cpl. Terry Sharpe and fellow Marine Allen Brown — have taken their plea to free Sgt. Andrew Tahmooressi to the streets, walking nearly 300 miles to Washington to petition President Obama in person.

They’re about 100 miles shy of hitting the capital city, they told Fox News’ Greta van Susteren.

Mr. Tahmooressi has been jailed in Mexico for months, after he CLAIMS he took a wrong turn and crossed the border with firearms — that he owned legally — in the trunk of his car. Under Mexico law, however, his firearms possession was illegal.

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Happy Constitution Day! Ninth Circuit Affirms That It’s Illegal To Wear American Flag Shirts On Cinco De Mayo

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Photo Credit: calaggieIt’s official: the U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals has issued an order declining a request for an en banc hearing in a case involving four students in at a California high school who were sent home for wearing American flag T-shirts on Cinco de Mayo.

The full slate of Ninth Circuit judges has thus agreed with a lower district court and with a trio of appellate judges that officials at Live Oak High School in Morgan Hill, Calif. could censor students who wanted to wear flag-emblazoned shirts.

The federal appeals court issued its denial of an en banc hearing on Sept. 17 — Constitution Day.

“[N]o further petitions shall be permitted,” the court ordered.

The trouble dates back to Cinco de Mayo (May 5) in 2010, when officials at Live Oak High — a school with a predominant Mexican-American student body — forced the students to remove their American flag-festooned shirts. Administrators called the shirts “incendiary” and worried that fighting would break out between white and Latino students if Latino students noticed the shirts. So, assistant principal Miguel Rodriguez told the students to turn their shirts inside out or leave school.

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Alleged ISIS Photo Controversy Engulfs Sen. John McCain

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Photo Credit: BreitbartSen. John McCain (R-AZ) and his aides swear the Syrian “rebels” he was pictured last year with weren’t ISIS members or supporters, and the mainstream media is by and large buying the 2008 GOP presidential nominee’s story.

Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) has endured brutal criticism—media fact checkers, reporters, and political figures have shredded him—for questioning just who McCain posed with.

But a closer look at the situation tells perhaps a different story than McCain’s office or the mainstream media have pushed.

The criticism of McCain centers around how the Arizona senator met with Syrian rebel leaders in May 2013 when he visited the country. McCain posed for photographs with those people, and since then rumors have sprouted up across the Internet that he met with ISIS or some other terrorist kidnappers or nefarious forces.

“The people in the pictures with Senator McCain in Syria included General Salim Idris, then-Chief of Staff of the Supreme Military Command of the Free Syrian Army (FSA), Mouaz Moustafa, the Executive Director of the DC-based Syrian Emergency Task Force (which supports the moderate opposition and helped arrange some of the trip), and fighters and commanders from the Northern Storm Brigade, a FSA-aligned group,” McCain’s spokesman Brian Rogers told Breitbart News.

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Al Gore: Climate Skepticism Will Haunt Republicans in 2016

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Photo Credit: SAUL LOEB / AFP / GettyAl Gore says Republicans seeking the White House in 2016 are in a bind on climate change.

Asked if it would hurt the GOP nominee to be a climate skeptic or advocate against taking action on global warming, Gore replied: “Oh, yes. Definitely.”

“In a general election? At the national level, where moderate voters hold the balance? It would be extremely harmful to a Republican candidate,” Gore told National Journal in an interview Wednesday.

But Gore doubts that a “pro-climate” Republican can get the GOP nod, because “carbon polluters and anti-government extremists control many of the state primaries, if not most.”

Gore’s comments arrive as potential 2016 Republican White House candidates are beginning to stake out turf on climate change and energy.

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Mayor: New High School Won't be Named After President Obama

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Mayor Rahm Emanuel backed off Thursday from naming a new elite high school after President Barack Obama amid ongoing criticism from African-Americans who felt the honor inappropriate for a school slated for a wealthy, predominantly white part of the Near North Side.

Instead of naming the new school after his former boss, the mayor indicated he would consider other names for the selective enrollment high school set to be built near the site of the former Cabrini-Green public housing project just northwest of downtown.

“Over the last few months, my team has listened to questions and concerns from the community, ranging from location of the building to the naming of the school. We take that community input seriously, which is why – as we CONTINUE to look for a thoughtful way to honor President Obama – we will look for other possible names for this future school,” Emanuel said in a statement.

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Hell Freezes Over: Limbaugh Unloads on Republicans

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Photo Credit: WNDListeners have been asking Rush Limbaugh why he hasn’t devoted much airtime to election-related polls or analyzing the Republican Party’s chances of triumphing in the next election.

Thursday, Limbaugh addressed these questions, explaining that he “is not gonna talk about something if I have to do it perfunctorily, if I’m not into it and don’t care about [it].”

And if he can’t get excited about “the nuts and bolts of the election,” he explained, it’s because he doesn’t know “what the Republican Party message is” anymore.

Polls show that Obama and the Democrats are less popular than they’ve been in years, but at the same time, Limbaugh noted, these polls don’t exactly foreshadow an upcoming Republican landslide, either.

Limbaugh tried to explain why.

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Florida Shooting: Man Kills Six Grandchildren and Daughter in Murder-Suicide

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Photo Credit: HANDOUT / REUTERS A grandfather shot and killed his daughter and six grandchildren at his Florida home on Thursday before turning his gun on himself, law enforcement officials in Florida said.

The children’s ages ranged from three months to 10 years, Gilchrist County sheriff Robert Schultz said at a press conference in Bell, a small town in central Florida about 30 miles west of Gainesville.

Schultz named the killer as Don C Spirit, 51, a town resident who called 911 at about 4pm making threats against his family and himself. He was alive when the first sheriff’s deputy arrived at the house, Schultz said, but killed himself soon after.

The Orlando Sentinel reported that in 2001 a man named Don C Spirit accidentally shot and killed his eight-year-old son Kyle with a high powered rifle in a hunting accident. Florida Department of Corrections records show he was released from jail in 2006 after serving three years for firearms offences relating to that incident.

At the press conference on Thursday, Schultz said there was an interaction between Spirit and the deputy, but that it was believed the seven victims were already dead by the time the officer arrived.

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Hundreds, More than a Thousand, Sleep Outside NYC’s Main Apple Store for iPhone 6

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Photo Credit: Showbiz 411If you’d told me this story I wouldn’t have believed it. But on Thursday night, walking from a screening of “Bhopal: A Prayer for Rain” to dinner at Todd English’s Food Hall in the Plaza Hotel, we were gobsmacked. More than a thousand people are lined up, with sleeping bags, for the 8am release of the NEW IPHONE 6. The line goes from Madison Avenue and 59th St. to Fifth Avenue in front of the tony Cipriani restaurant, then jumps onto the plaza in front of FAO Schwarz, next to Apple.

Along the 59th St. queue, it is mostly Asians. There are some Europeans, and no Americans from what we could tell. In some cases there were whole families. No one could adequately explain what the heck they were doing sleeping outside on a Manhattan street. The IPHONE 6 is not very different than the iPhone 6. It’s certainly not different enough to do this.

We surmised that most of the people were buying more than one iPhone, with the expectation of selling a few for big bucks. Especially overseas. One young man from Belgium could not say why he wanted the 6, since he already had the 5. “I just want it,” he said.

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