Two Men Use Girl As Human Shield — Until Her Father Guns Them Down

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Photo Credit: Daily Caller A St. Louis couple is likely thankful to have guns in their home after they were forced to use them to defend their daughter against two men Monday night.

The men, one of whom had an extensive rap sheet, confronted the couples’ 17 year-old daughter after she stepped outside of the house to go to her car, reports the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.

Cortez McClinton, 33, and Terrell Johnson, 31, held a gun to the girl’s head and used her as a shield as they entered the family home, where a five-year old child was also present.

Read more from this story HERE.

What Eric Cantor’s Primary Loss REALLY Means To The Republican Party…

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Photo Credit: Peter Stevens / Flickr
House Majority Leader Eric Cantor faced a tenacious – and ultimately victorious – foe in Virginia’s Republican primary election Tuesday. Economics professor and Tea Party favorite David Brat mounted a grassroots campaign that helped draw 37 percent more voters to the polls this week than during the same race two years ago.

Even with that voter increase, Cantor received nearly 10,000 fewer voters than he did during his previous re-election bid. In the end, the establishment Republican’s conservative challenger scored a big win that many Tea Party supporters hope will set the tone for upcoming elections.

“This is a miracle from God that just happened,” Brat said of his victory…

Another self-described grassroots Tea Party candidate, Alaska’s Joe Miller, weighed in on the significance of Brat’s win.

He echoed the Madison Project statement, noting that some within the GOP “have done all they can this election cycle to announce the demise” of Tea Party and unabashedly conservative candidates.

“Well,” he continued, “maybe they should have checked with the grassroots before making such proclamations.”

Read more from this story HERE.

Convenient: IRS Has ‘Lost’ Two Years of Lois Lerner’s Emails

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Photo Credit: TownHallBy Katie Pavlich.

According to the House Ways and Means Committee, the IRS has “lost” two years of emails belonging to former head of tax exempt organizations Lois Lerner. The IRS doesn’t have a record of her emails to outside groups or government agencies from January 2009 through April 2011, conveniently encompassing some of the same time when tea party groups were being targeted for extra scrutiny and possible criminal prosecution. The IRS says the loss of emails is due to a “computer crash” and claims emails from or to Lerner from the White House, Democratic members of Congress, the Treasury Department, FEC and Department of Justice cannot be located. They do however have emails belonging to Lerner that she sent to other IRS employees.

“The fact that I am just learning about this, over a year into the investigation, is completely unacceptable and now calls into question the credibility of the IRS’s response to Congressional inquiries. There needs to be an immediate investigation and forensic audit by Department of Justice as well as the Inspector General,” Ways and Means Committee Chairman Dave Camp said in a statement. “Just a short time ago, Commissioner Koskinen promised to produce all Lerner documents. It appears now that was an empty promise. Frankly, these are the critical years of the targeting of conservative groups that could explain who knew what when, and what, if any, coordination there was between agencies…

Read more from this story HERE.

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Photo Credit: Getty Images IRS claims it has LOST two years’ worth of emails from embattled former official Lois Lerner as tea party targeting scandal heats up again

The Internal Revenue Service has lost two years worth of emails to and from embattled former tax official Lois Lerner, the agency told congressional investigators on Friday.

The IRS promised on May 8 to turn over all her emails but now blames a computer crash for huge tranches of missing documents.

Lerner is under investigation for allegedly orchestrating a years-long program that targeted tea party groups and other conservative organizations for unusually intrusive scrutiny when they applied for tax-exempt status beginning in the year before the 2010 congressional midterm elections.

The House Ways and Means Committee, one of two bodies probing the case, said Friday that the IRS says that for the period of January 2009 through April 2011, the only Lerner emails it can find are those that were sent to or from other IRS employees.

Emails whose sender or recipient was outside the government, or inside other agencies, have mysteriously disappeared.

Read more from this story HERE.

Obama ‘Committed to Escalating’ Lawlessness at Border

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Photo Credit: APBy Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-AL).

There is now an unprecedented crisis unfolding at the border. The flow of illegal immigrant youth across the southern border is on track to reach 130,000 next year—a projected increase of more than 2,000% from 2011. The White House estimates the cost of “resettling” these illegal immigrants in the United States will reach $2.3 billion in a single year.

This crisis is a direct and predictable result of the President’s sustained and deliberate campaign to dismantle immigration enforcement. His administration has announced to the world that our nation’s immigration laws will not be enforced and that, in particular, they will not be applied to foreign youth.

The world has heard and heeded the President’s message. A wave of illegal immigration has overwhelmed authorities, producing a completely preventable humanitarian crisis—and further diminishing the integrity of our national borders. And there is but one way for the crisis to end: for the President of the United States to declare to the world: “Do not attempt to come here illegally. Our border is no longer open. Our laws will be enforced.”

A local TV station in Texas recently issued a telling report. They revealed that information is being disseminated in Central America urging people to make the life-threatening trek north in pursuit of amnesty: “A mother and child told Channel 5 News that the message being disseminated in their country is, ‘go to America with your child, you won’t be turned away.'”

Read more from this story HERE.

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Photo Credit: TownHallAfter Leaked Photos Expose Unaccompanied Child Crisis, Border Patrol Agents Threatened With Firings

By Katie Pavlich.

Last week, photos surfaced from Texas and Arizona showing Border Patrol processing centers overwhelmed as thousands of unaccompanied children from Central America continue to need shelter and resources. The photos show hundreds of children sleeping in crowded, chain linked cages. Agents have described the situation as a humanitarian crisis.

In response to the leaked images out of Arizona, Patrol Agent in Charge Leslie Lawson is cracking down on the use of personal technology by agents in the Nogales Border Patrol processing center.

“Due to the recent unauthorized use of a personally owned electronic device in the Nogales Processing Center, the use of such devices will be restricted to locations outside of detention areas,” Lawson wrote in a June 6 memo to all employees at the Nogales station. “Effective immediately, the use of personally owned cellular phones, cameras, or recording devices in the Nogales Detention Facility and the Nogales Processing Center is strictly prohibited…

Read more from this story HERE.

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.

Read more from this story HERE.

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…

Read more from this story HERE.

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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.

Read more from this story HERE.

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…

Read more from this story HERE.

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.

Read more from this story HERE.

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.

Read more from this story HERE.

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?”

Read more from this story HERE.

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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.