Operation Choke Point: Congressman Proposes Cutting Off Funding For DOJ Program Targeting Gun Dealers

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Photo Credit: Daily Caller A Missouri congressman hopes to give the Department of Justice a taste of its own medicine with an amendment to halt an initiative that he says uses “intimidation tactics” and forces banks to sever relationships with legitimate businesses.

Blaine Luetkemeyer wants to choke off funding for “Operation Choke Point.”

“What it does is goes after an entire industry whether it’s obeying the law or not. And that’s just wrong,” Luetkemeyer said of the initiative in an interview with The Daily Caller.

The Republican lawmaker’s amendment was successfully attached to the Commerce, Justice, and Science appropriations bill which passed a vote in the House late Thursday.

The amendment comes on the heels of a staff report issued Thursday by the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. The report claims that “Operation Choke Point has forced banks to terminate relationships with a wide variety of entirely lawful and legitimate merchants.”

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US Diplomat Accused of Ties to Muslim Brotherhood, Lies to Congress about PA Support for Terrorism (+video)

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Photo Credit: FrontPageMagYou may remember Anne Patterson as Obama’s US Ambassador to Egypt who was forced to leave her post due to popular outrage in that country over her support for the Muslim Brotherhood.

Patterson called on Egyptians not to protest — including by meeting with the Coptic Pope and asking him specifically to urge the nation’s Christian minority not to oppose the Brotherhood,

El Fagr reported that, during their most recent phone conversation, Patterson demanded that Egypt’s recently appointed Supreme Commander of the Egyptian Armed Forces, General Abdul Fatah al-Sisi, release all Muslim Brotherhood members currently being held for questioning: “And when Sisi rejected this order, the American ambassador began threatening him that Egypt will turn into another Syria and live through a civil war, to which Sisi responded violently: ‘Neither you nor your country can overcome Egypt and its people.’”

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Restaurant Is Robbed On Same Day It Adopts Anti-Gun Policy

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Photo Credit: REUTERS / Shannon StapletonOn the same day that Sonic, an Oklahoma City-based fast food chain, issued a statement against customers carrying guns at their restaurants, an employee at the company’s Topeka, Kan. store was robbed.

According to Topeka police, two males robbed a carhop on Friday afternoon, reports the Topeka Capitol-Journal. Sonic is unique among major fast food eateries in that it provides customers the option of having carhops bring orders to their vehicle.

While police said no guns were displayed by the robbers, the crime follows a new policy that the Oklahoma City-based company issued Friday.

“We’ve considered the views and desires of our customers and employees that staff the drive-ins across the country,” the company said, according to USA Today. “Accordingly, we’re asking that customers refrain from bringing guns onto our patios or into our indoor dining areas. With respect to the storage of guns in vehicles, we ask that our customers continue to honor local laws.”

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Trump: ‘Clown’ Obama ‘The Biggest Liar I Know’

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Photo Credit: WNDTeasing his audience, once again, with indications that he might be the man to succeed the president, Donald Trump declared to the Republican Leadership Conference in New Orleans that “Barack Obama is a clown” and the “biggest liar I know,” drawing strong applause.

“We have a man in the White House who doesn’t have a clue,” said the billionaire real estate developer, who toyed with vying for the 2012 Republican Party presidential nomination.

Trump also noted it appears that Obama does not enjoy being president.

“It seems to me that Obama can’t wait to get out of the White House so he can go play golf. He doesn’t have the right instincts to be president. He isn’t tenacious and he isn’t tough,” he said.

Is Trump, then, the man with the instincts and tenacity needed to succeed in the Oval Office?

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‘Undocumented Immigrants’ Will Be Able to ‘Join the Military’

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Photo Credit: D’oh Boy (Mark Holloway)The Huffington Post reports that the “Obama Administration Plans To Let Some Young Undocumented Immigrants Join The Military.” The plans have been approved by the Pentagon.

“Pentagon officials have approved a policy that would allow a limited group of undocumented young people who came to the U.S. as children to enlist in the military, opening up a path for them to eventually become citizens, The Huffington Post has learned,” reports the liberal website.

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Guess How Much the Feds Will Spend Studying How Transgender Women Use Facebook

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Photo Credit: TownHall The National Institutes of Health will spend nearly $200,000 to study how transgender women use social networking sites, the Washington Free Beacon reports.

Head meet desk:

The Friends Research Institute, based in Maryland, received $194,788last month to begin the project operating on the premise that due to “transphobia” transgendered women are forced to use social media as an outlet, often leading to risky sexual behaviors.

“High-risk male-to-female transgender women (hereafter “transwomen”) face numerous concurrent cofactors for HIV acquisition and transmission including substance use, engagement in sex work, unemployment, low educational attainment, homelessness, and hormone misuse,” the grant’sdescription reads. “In Los Angeles County, estimates of HIV prevalence among transwomen are 15 [percent] overall, and 17 [percent] among Latinas, 29 [percent] among Native Americans, and 48 [percent] among African American/black transwomen.”

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Scientists Admit Polar Bear Numbers Were Made Up To ‘Satisfy Public Demand’

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Photo Credit: REUTERS / Heinz-Peter BaderThis may come as a shocker to some, but scientists are not always right — especially when under intense public pressure for answers.

Researchers with the IUCN Polar Bear Specialist Group (PBSG) recently admitted to experienced zoologist and polar bear specialist Susan Crockford that the estimate given for the total number of polar bars in the Arctic was “simply a qualified guess given to satisfy public demand.”

Crockford has been critical of official polar bear population estimates because they fail to include five large subpopulations of polar bears. Due to the uncertainty of the populations in these areas, PBSG did not include them in their official estimate — but the polar bear group did include other subpopulation estimates.

PBSG has for years said that global polar bear populations were between 20,000 and 25,000, but these estimates are likely much lower than how many polar bears are actually living in the world.

“Based on previous PBSG estimates and other research reports, it appears there are probably at least another 6,000 or so bears living in these regions and perhaps as many as 9,000 (or more) that are not included in any PBSG ‘global population estimate,’” Crockford wrote on her blog.

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Shinseki Resigns Over Growing VA Scandal

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Photo Credit: Fox NewsPresident Obama announced Friday that embattled Veterans Affairs Secretary Eric Shinseki would take the fall for the rapidly growing scandal over veterans’ health care, accepting his resignation under pressure from members of both parties.

The president announced that Shinseki would resign after they met at the White House and he received an update on an internal review of the problems at the VA. The review showed the problems were not limited to just a few facilities, Obama said, adding: “It’s totally unacceptable. Our veterans deserve the best.”

On the heels of those and other findings, Obama said, “Secretary Shinseki offered me his own resignation — with considerable regret, I accepted.”

He said Shinseki told him he did not want to be a distraction. “I agree,” Obama said. “We don’t have time for distractions. We need to fix the problem.”

The president had faced mounting calls from members of both parties to remove Shinseki; those calls accelerated after a damning inspector general report on Wednesday. Shinseki suffered another blow on Friday when Rep. Tammy Duckworth, D-Ill., a former top VA official, called for her former boss’ resignation.

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New Federal Database Will Track Americans’ Credit Ratings, Other Financial Information

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Photo Credit: ThinkstockAs many as 227 million Americans may be compelled to disclose intimate details of their families and financial lives — including their Social Security numbers — in a new national database being assembled by two federal agencies.

The Federal Housing Finance Agency and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau posted an April 16 Federal Register notice of an expansion of their joint National Mortgage Database Program to include personally identifiable information that reveals actual users, a reversal of previously stated policy.

FHFA will manage the database and share it with CFPB. A CFPB internal planning document for 2013-17 describes the bureau as monitoring 95 percent of all mortgage transactions.

FHFA officials claim the database is essential to conducting a monthly mortgage survey required by the Housing and Economic Recovery Act of 2008 and to help it prepare an annual report for Congress.

Critics, however, question the need for such a “vast database” for simple reporting purposes.

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Google Privacy Law ‘Means Total Rethink of Basic Freedoms’

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Photo Credit: dannysullivanHundreds of millions of people across Europe will be forced to change completely the way they use the internet, according to one of Google’s key advisers.

The era of freely available information is now over in Europe, warns Professor Luciano Floridi, who has been appointed by the £225bn search engine firm to find out how it should comply with a landmark ruling that allows people to ask for personal information to be taken down.

His warning comes as The Independent reveals that 12,000 requests were made on Friday, around 20 a minute, from people across Europe demanding to have their personal details removed from Google. More than 1,500 of these are believed to have come from people in the UK who were looking to take advantage of a service launched by Google to make it easier for people to apply for personal data to be removed.

The move follows a European court’s ruling earlier this month that gave people the “right to be forgotten”; convicted criminals are among those trying to hide links to stories from online search engines. An ex-MP who is seeking re-election is another of the thousands who have approached Google.

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