Golf Coach Charged with Molesting Children Tried Hiring Hit Man to Kill Accusers…

Photo Credit: Handout, Courtesy Livermore Police Depart

Photo Credit: Handout, Courtesy Livermore Police Depart

A well-known Livermore golf coach charged with 75 felony counts alleging that he molested children is now facing accusations that he tried from jail to hire a hit man to kill three alleged victims.

Andrew Michael Nisbet, 32, wrote letters from Santa Rita Jail in Dublin expressing his interest in having the victims “taken care of,” Alameda County district attorney’s Inspector Jeff McCort wrote in a court affidavit.

Those letters, which included information about the alleged victims, ended up in the hands of a confidential informant, who in turn brought them to the attention of a sheriff’s deputy in February, authorities said.

The informant later received more letters from Nisbet “agreeing on a price for each victim and that Nisbet can get the (informant) money,” McCort wrote.

In March, a district attorney’s inspector, posing undercover as a hit man, visited Nisbet in jail during a secretly recorded meeting, authorities said.

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PA Cops No Longer Need a Warrant to Search Citizens’ Vehicles

Photo Credit: Lancaster Online

Photo Credit: Lancaster Online

Pennsylvania police officers no longer need a warrant to search a citizen’s vehicle, according to a recent state Supreme Court opinion.

The high court’s opinion, released Tuesday, is being called a drastic change in citizens’ rights and police powers.

Previously, citizens could refuse an officer’s request to search a vehicle. In most cases, the officer would then need a warrant — signed by a judge — to conduct the search.

That’s no longer the case, according to the opinion written by Supreme Court Justice Seamus McCaffery.

The ruling, passed on a 4-2 vote, was made in regard to an appeal from a 2010 vehicle stop in Philadelphia.

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Complaints of Border Security Abuse Against Americans Rise

Photo Credit: WILL SEBERGER — MCT

Photo Credit: WILL SEBERGER — MCT

A series of lawsuits filed in recent months in federal courts along the U.S. border with Mexico highlight what advocates say is a growing list of complaints against two U.S. agencies that have expanded rapidly amid the clamor to secure the nation’s borders.

In one lawsuit, centered on events in Chula Vista, Calif., a Border Patrol agent is accused of leaping on the hood of a car driven by a mother of five and shooting her dead. She was unarmed. The agent had been fired from his previous job as a sheriff’s deputy for a variety of misconduct.

In a second case, a Customs officer in Brownsville, Texas, violently pushed a disabled woman to the ground. She had a miscarriage the next day. Border officers also had to call firefighters to remove handcuffs that allegedly had bound her wrists too tightly.

For a third woman, her return to the United States was intrusive and painful. She was pulled from a line at an El Paso, Texas, border crossing, apparently on the suspicion that she was carrying drugs. She was handcuffed. Over the next six hours, agents escorted her to a hospital, where they oversaw the probing of her anus and vagina, forced her to take a laxative and then watched as she moved her bowels. When no drugs were found, they ordered her to submit to an X-ray and a CT scan.

When the ordeal was over, the officers asked her to sign a consent form before they allowed her to return to her home in New Mexico. When she refused, the hospital billed her thousands of dollars for the procedures.

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Email Shows White House Planned Benghazi Video Deception

Photo Credit: Reuters

Photo Credit: Reuters

By Neil Munro.

White House officials consciously planned to spin the successful 2012 jihadi attack on the Benghazi diplomatic compound as a spontaneous protest against an anti-Islam video, according to a new email exposed by the public-interest law firm Judicial Watch.

The Sept. 14 email by Ben Rhodes, President Obama’s chief foreign policy spokesman, described the public relations goals for a planned briefing of a top official — Susan Rice — who was scheduled to appear Sept. 16 on five Sunday talk-shows.

She was invited on the shows to explain the September 11 attack, which killed the U.S. ambassador and three other Americans. The subject of the email was “PREP CALL with Susan.”

The goal of the appearances, said Rhodes, is “to convey that the United States is doing everything that we can to protect our people and facilities abroad; [and] to underscore that these protests are rooted in an Internet video, not a broader failure of policy.”

In her Sunday appearances, Rice implemented the White House’s spin. ”Our current best assessment, based on the information that we have at present, is that, in fact, what this began as, it was a spontaneous — not a premeditated — response to what had transpired in Cairo,” she claimed on ABC.

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Krauthammer: New Benghazi Email A ‘Classic Cover-Up Of A Cover-Up’

By Brendan Bordelon.

Conservative columnist Charles Krauthammer declared the new email showing White House involvement in the Benghazi talking points “a classic cover-up of a cover-up,” calling it “a serious offense.”

Krauthammer appeared on a Fox News panel along with The Washington Post’s Charles Lane and Fox News host and former White House press secretary Dana Perino.

The panel discussed new Benghazi emails released by government watchdog Judicial Watch, which reveal an intense interest and involvement by top White House staff in then-U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice’s September 2012 claim that the Benghazi attacks were caused by a Youtube video.

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EPA Lied To Congress About Delaying Major Climate Rule

Photo Credit: REUTERS

Photo Credit: REUTERS

Documents reveal that Environmental Protection Agency chief Gina McCarthy may not have told lawmakers the truth when she said new climate rules were published in a timely manner.

The EPA published its so-called New Source Performance Standard (NSPS) for power plants in early January, more than two months after it was submitted to the Federal Register. Furthermore, the EPA announced the standard, which would effectively ban coal-fired power plants, in late September.

Republicans have alleged that the delay in publishing NSPS was politically motivated, arguing that the Obama administration’s actions will push the finalizing of the costly rule until after the elections this fall.

“Based on this sequence of events, it appears that the delay in the proposal’s publication may have been motivated by a desire to lessen the impact of the President’s harmful environmental policies on this year’s mid-term elections,” Oklahoma Republican Sen. Jim Inhofe wrote in a letter to McCarthy.

Inhofe wants to know why there was a delay. Did it originate within the EPA or within the White House’s Office of Management and Budget?

Read more from this story HERE.

Sources Saying Sebelius Now Refusing To Testify Before Senate Panel

Photo Credit: REUTERS / Larry Downing

Photo Credit: REUTERS / Larry Downing

Outgoing Health and Human Services Sec. Kathleen Sebelius is now refusing to testify before the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Labor, Health and Human Services, Education, and Related Agencies, a Senate aide told The Daily Caller Tuesday.

Sebelius had originally been set to testify before the subcommittee about the department’s 2015 $70 billion budget request on April 2.

According to another aide, however, several weeks after confirming the hearing date, she requested a date switch with the National Institutes of Health budget hearing on May 7. The committee accommodated her request.

Now, after announcing her resignation on April 11, she is refusing to testify according to the two aides, even though she is still the sitting secretary — remaining at the post until her successor, OMB Director Sylvia Mathews Burwell is confirmed.

“It appears that Sec. Sebelius has unilaterally decided that she is no longer accountable to Congress,” the first aide said.

Read more from this story HERE.

Kerry: I Didn’t Call Israel an “Apartheid State” But If I Did I Should Have Chosen Different Words

Photo Credit: Townhall

Photo Credit: Townhall

In case you missed it yesterday, the Daily Beast’s Josh Rogin reported on comments made by Secretary of State John Kerry saying that if Israel doesn’t come to a two-state agreement with the Palestinians, it will become an apartheid state. Kerry also said Israel needed a change in leadership.

The secretary of state said that if Israel doesn’t make peace soon, it could become ‘an apartheid state,’ like the old South Africa. Jewish leaders are fuming over the comparison.

If there’s no two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict soon, Israel risks becoming “an apartheid state,” Secretary of State John Kerry told a room of influential world leaders in a closed-door meeting Friday…

Now Kerry is walking back his comments and even flat out denying he even made the “apartheid” comment in a statement released last night by the State Department. In the same statement denying the comments, Kerry said he should have used different words to describe the situation. He also berated critics for daring to question his support for the Jewish State.

Read more from this story HERE.

Lois Lerner’s Attorney: It Would Be ‘Un-American’ to Hold Her in Contempt

Photo Credit: Townhall

Photo Credit: Townhall

Earlier this month, the House Oversight Committee voted to hold former head of tax exempt groups at the IRS Lois Lerner in contempt of Congress. The full House is set to vote on contempt charges for Lerner in May.

[A] memo from House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, R-Va., said the contempt vote would proceed unless Lerner agrees to testify before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee about the targeting scandal.

“Thorough investigations by the Oversight and Government Reform Committee as well as the Ways and Means Committee have revealed findings that indicate that Ms. Lerner played a central role in the illegal targeting of conservative groups by the IRS,” the memo reads.

Now her attorney, William W. Taylor III, is asking for the opportunity to defend her in front of Congress before the vote is taken. Taylor is arguing it would be unfair and “un-American” to hold Lerner in contempt.

“Holding Ms. Lerner in contempt would not only be unfair and, indeed, un-American, it would be flatly inconsistent with the Fifth Amendment as interpreted by the Supreme Court,” Lerner’s lawyer, William W. Taylor III, wrote in a letter to House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio.

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Millennials Have ‘Historically Low’ Levels Of Trust In Government

A new poll surveying young Americans’ political attitudes released by Harvard University’s Institute of Politics Tuesday found millennials have less trust in government than ever before.

Harvard’s poll showed millennials, which the pollsters defined as peopled aged 18 to 29, have lost trust in a variety of different major public institutions including the President, the military, Congress, the Supreme Court, and the federal government as a whole. Of all the institutions tracked by the poll, the President and the military lost the most trust among young Americans with a seven point drop. Overall, the pollsters said the level of trust millennials have in “most American institutions tested in our survey” had dropped below even “last year’s historically low numbers.”

This chart created by the pollsters shows the steep declines in their “composite trust index,” which is the level of trust on average in six different public institutions; the President, the U.S. Military, the Supreme Court, the federal government, and the United Nations. The drop is dramatic:

composite trust chart

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Conservative Lawmaker Predicts Boehner Won’t Run for Speaker Again

Photo Credit: AP

Photo Credit: AP

A House Republican who supported Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) in 2013 is predicting Boehner won’t run for the job again and says he would be surprised if he could win reelection by the House.

“I don’t think John Boehner will be Speaker this time next year,” Rep. Mo Brooks (R-Ala.) said in an interview. “But I think it’s because, in my judgment, he’s not going to run for reelection as Speaker, but if he does, I’ll be mildly surprised if he can get the 218 votes that the Constitution requires.”

Brooks, a conservative serving his second term, voted for Boehner on the floor of the House in January 2013, but he would not say if he would do so again in 2015.

His prediction came hours after Boehner used a private GOP meeting to walk back comments he made in Ohio last week that were seen as mocking his fellow Republicans for a lack of courage to pursue immigration reform.

“You only tease the ones you love,” Boehner told reporters, repeating a phrase he used inside the meeting. He acknowledged, however, that “sometimes I can rib people just a little too much.”

Read more from this story HERE.