UT Regent Uncovered Waste, Fraud And Abuse…And Might Be Fired For It

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Photo Credit: Wikimedia CommonsDays after taking office as a regent of the University of Texas, Wallace Hall began making discoveries that pointed toward considerable administrative wrongdoing, questionable admissions decisions and misuse of public funds.

Three years later, UT-Austin President Bill Powers and his friends in the Texas legislature are doing everything they can to silence Hall–and may take the unprecedented step of forcibly removing him from office.

As a pretext, administrators have claimed that Hall’s insatiable demand for UT records (he has requested that over 800,000 pages of documents be made public) hampered university operations.

“It’s time that there’s some action that has to be taken,” said Democratic Rep. Carol Alvarado, chair of the House transparency committee, in a statement to the Houston Chronicle.

Her committee is considering a move to impeach Hall, and has asked him to step down.

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10 Reasons Why John Kerry Deserves a Magna Cum Laude in Climate Pseudo-Science

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Photo Credit: Boston College Chronicle Speaking at the graduation ceremony of his alma mater Boston College, he said:

“If the US does not act and if it turns out that the critics and naysayers and the members of the Flat Earth Society – if it turns out they’re wrong, then we are risking nothing less than the future of the entire planet.”
He claimed:

“Recent reports, one from the UN and one from retired US military leaders warn us, not just of the crippling consequences to come but that some of them are already here. 97 per cent of the world’s scientists tell us that this is urgent. Why? Because crops can’t grow there’ll be food insecurity; if there’s less water because of droughts, if there are stronger and more powerful storms, things will change in a hurry and change for the worse. Climate change is directly related to the potential of greater conflict and greater instability. I’m telling you that there are people in parts of the world today in Africa, they fight each other over water, they kill each other over it. This is not a matter of politics or a matter of partisanship. It’s a matter of science and stewardship. And it’s not a matter of capacity it’s a matter of willpower.”

Hmm. Let’s fisk those statements, shall we?

1. Flat Earth Society. Lazy, inaccurate ad hom directed at people whose only desire that climate science and climate science policy should be evidence-based, rather than derived from modelled forecasts which bear increasingly little resemblance to observed, real-world data.

2. If it turns out they’re wrong… (aka the Precautionary Principle) This presupposes that there are no costs to doing what Kerry wants and acting on climate change now. But, of course, the costs of trying to combat climate change have already run into the trillions of dollars – with no evidence that they have made any difference.

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Gallup: Republicans Can’t Avoid Abortion in 2014 Elections

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The Republican establishment may boast that it beat back some Tea Party challengers in this week’s primaries, but GOP candidates cannot hope to retake the Senate if they ignore the issue of abortion, a new Gallup poll indicates.

One-quarter of Republican voters say a candidate must protect life to earn their vote, the polling company found.

Nearly one-in-five people (19 percent) say they would “only vote for a candidate who shares your views on abortion,” and pro-life voters are one-third more likely to feel that way than pro-abortion voters.

Self-described “pro-choice” voters are much more likely to say they “don’t see abortion as a major issue.”

“The pro-life side has more intensity on the issue,” Gallup reports of its most recent survey. In all, 11 percent of all registered voters said they would only vote for pro-life candidates, and eight percent said they would only vote for candidates who call themselves “pro-choice.”

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Issa: White House Warned YouTube Over Anti-Islam Video During Benghazi Attack

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Photo Credit: APRepublican Rep. Darrell Issa claimed that an email he’s reviewed shows the White House decided to reach out to YouTube within hours of the Benghazi terror attack, to warn the website about the consequences of posting an anti-Islam video.

The email would suggest the White House was connecting the attack to the video almost from the outset — though their initial claim that the attack sprung out of protests over the film would later be proven false.

According to Issa, who discussed excerpts from the otherwise classified emails on Wednesday, the email was sent at 9:11 p.m. ET on Sept. 11 to the Diplomatic Security Command Center.

According to Issa, the email said: “White House is reaching out to UTube to advise ramifications of the posting of the Pastor Jon Video.”

Issa said this email is “troubling” because it “contradicts” White House claims that the faulty storyline on the video was drawn from the intelligence community’s talking points.

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Air Force Security Team Botched Drill Simulating Attack On Nuke Missile Silo, Report Reveals

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Photo Credit: APA blistering internal review has revealed that an Air Force security team botched a training exercise last summer that simulated an attack on a nuclear missile silo, prompting expanded training to prepare for the possibility of a real attack.

A senior U.S. defense official confirmed the details of the report to Fox News. The report was first obtained by the Associated Press through a Freedom of Information Act request.

The review said the security forces were unable to speedily regain control of the captured silo during the exercise at Malmstrom Air Force Base in Montana, calling the failure a “critical deficiency.”

Air Force spokeswoman Ann Stefanek told Fox News that this misstep was the reason the 341st Missile Wing failed a safety and security inspection, which was widely reported last year.

Stefanek said the Air Force did not share the exact reason for the failure because doing so could have compromised security. However, she said since then the unit has improved.

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Poll: Nearly Half Of Unemployed Have Stopped Looking For Work

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Photo Credit: REUTERS / Jonathan ErnstA poll released Wednesday shows that 47 percent of unemployed Americans have given up looking for work.

Conducted on behalf of Express Employment Professionals last month, Harris Poll asked 1,500 unemployed adults whether they agreed with the statement “I’ve completely given up looking for a job.”

Seven percent said they “agree completely” with the statement; another seven percent said they “agree a lot”; 15 percent “agree somewhat”; 18 percent “agree a little”.

Eighty-two percent of those polled agreed that they were “becoming more discouraged the longer I am unemployed”.

A large majority of those polled indicated that unemployment benefits were keeping them from searching harder for a job. Politicians have divided largely along party lines over whether to extend unemployment benefits, with Republicans arguing that the benefits provide an incentive to remain unemployed.

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McConnell Foe Calls on Shinseki to Resign

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Photo Credit: Getty Kentucky Democratic Senate candidate Alison Lundergan Grimes is calling for Veterans Affairs Secretary Eric Shinseki to resign, putting her out ahead of Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), who hasn’t explicitly called for him to step down.

“We owe a solemn obligation to our veterans and our government defaulted on that contract. I don’t see how that breach of trust with our veterans can be repaired if the current leadership stays in place,” she said in a statement, after confirming she wants to see him step down.

Grimes, battling the Senate minority leader in one of this cycle’s top Senate fights, is the first major Democratic Senate candidate to call for the embattled VA chief’s resignation, and her request is a break with the majority of congressional Democrats.

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Everyone Should Know Just How Much the Government Lied to Defend the NSA

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Photo Credit: Philippe Lopez / AFP / Getty If you blinked this week, you might have missed the news: two Senators accused the Justice Department of lying about NSA warrantless surveillance to the US supreme court last year, and those falsehoods all but ensured that mass spying on Americans would continue. But hardly anyone seems to care – least of all those who lied and who should have already come forward with the truth.

Here’s what happened: just before Edward Snowden became a household name, the ACLU argued before the supreme court that the Fisa Amendments Act – one of the two main laws used by the NSA to conduct mass surveillance – was unconstitutional.

In a sharply divided opinion, the supreme court ruled, 5-4, that the case should be dismissed because the plaintiffs didn’t have “standing” – in other words, that the ACLU couldn’t prove with near-certainty that their clients, which included journalists and human rights advocates, were targets of surveillance, so they couldn’t challenge the law. As the New York Times noted this week, the court relied on two claims by the Justice Department to support their ruling: 1) that the NSA would only get the content of Americans’ communications without a warrant when they are targeting a foreigner abroad for surveillance, and 2) that the Justice Department would notify criminal defendants who have been spied on under the Fisa Amendments Act, so there exists some way to challenge the law in court.

It turns out that neither of those statements were true – but it took Snowden’s historic whistleblowing to prove it.

One of the most explosive Snowden revelations exposed a then-secret technique known as “about” surveillance. As the New York Times first reported, the NSA “is searching the contents of vast amounts of Americans’ e-mail and text communications into and out of the country, hunting for people who mention information about foreigners under surveillance.” In other words, the NSA doesn’t just target a contact overseas – it sweeps up everyone’s international communications into a dragnet and searches them for keywords.

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Charles Plosser Thinks There’s a Ticking Time Bomb at the Fed

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Photo Credit: Bloomberg The way Charles Plosser sees it, the Federal Reserve is sitting on a ticking time bomb that could severely damage the economy unless the central bank reacts quickly to defuse the looming threat.

The Philadelphia Fed president, viewed as one of the bank’s leading hawks, is worried about some $2.5 trillion in “excess” reserves. That is, loanable funds available to individual or corporate borrowers through the nation’s banks.

The Fed has created these reserves through unpredented purchases of U.S. Treasurys and mortgage-backed securities, a strategy known as quantatative easing.

These reserves are just sitting in the bank system, basically doing nothing. That’s because demand for loans has been unusually weak amid an economic recovery that’s the slowest on record since the Great Depression.

“These reserves are not inflationary right now,” Plosser said in a meeting Tuesday with reporters in Washington.

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Blunt on Christian Facing Martyrdom in Sudan: ‘She Is Wife of U.S. Citizen’

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Photo Credit: APSen. Roy Blunt (R.-Mo.) and Sen. Kelly Ayotte (R.-N.H.) sent a letter to Secretary of State John Kerry and Secretary of Homeland Security Jeh Johnson today flatly asserting that Meriam Ibrahim, who is eight months pregnant and who is imprisoned in Sudan with her 20-month-old son where she awaits martyrdom for refusing to renounce her Christian faith, is in fact the wife of an American citizen.

On Monday, State Department spokesperson Jen Psaki would not affirm that Ibrahim’s husband was a U.S. citizen when directly asked about it by CNSNews.com.

“As you are aware, after refusing to recant her Christian faith, Meriam was sentenced to death by hanging in a Sudanese court last week,” Blunt and Ayotte wrote in the letter to Kerry and Johnson. “Meriam, 27, is currently 8-months pregnant and has been imprisoned along with her 20-month-old son since February.

“She is the wife of U.S. Citizen Daniel Wani,” the senators said.

At Monday’s State Department press briefing, CNSNews.com asked spokesperson Jen Psaki about a report in the Morning Star News that said State Department officials at the U.S. Embassy in Khartoum had told Daniel Wani he would have to provide DNA evidence to prove he was the father of the 20-month-old boy imprisoned with his wife before the department would help him.

That news report quoted Wani as saying: “I provided wedding documents and the baby’s birth certificate and doors were closed on his face. … I’ve tried to apply for papers to travel to the USA with my wife and child, but the American Embassy in Sudan did not help me. My son is an American citizen living in a difficult situation in prison.”

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