Photo Credit: TownHall
“In an extraordinary step, U. S. District Court Judge Emmett Sullivan has launched an independent inquiry into the issue of the missing emails associated with former IRS official Lois Lerner,” President of Judicial Watch John Fitton said in a statement…
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Photo Credit: Katie Frates – Daily Caller
“I think he’s very, very serious,” said Terry Giles, who recently agreed to serve as chairman of the campaign if Carson pulls the trigger on a run. “If it were on the big board in Vegas, I’d probably be betting in favor of the fact he’s going to run.”
Carson — the former director of pediatric neurosurgery at Johns Hopkins Hospital — has acknowledged that he is considering a White House campaign. The author and public speaker has been increasingly mentioned as a possible candidate, following a burst of attention last year for famously arguing a conservative message at the National Prayer Breakfast as President Obama sat just a few feet away.
“I am in the process of arranging my life so that if Ben wants me to be involved in the campaign, I could take the time off for how ever long that is from all my other businesses and activities in order to do that,” Giles said. “I don’t think he would ask me to do that if he wasn’t serious.”
Giles, a businessman from Texas who has known Carson for 20 years, told TheDC he doesn’t expect Carson to make up his mind for another “six, seven or eight months.”
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Photo Credit: REUTERS / Mal Langsdon
“It’s really unfortunate because the House passed it on voice vote to make it permanent, and now the Senate is messing it up,” president of the Taxpayers Protection Alliance David Williams told The Daily Caller in an interview. “I mean Harry Reid in particular is messing this up.”
On July 15, the House passed the Permanent Internet Tax Freedom Act (PITFA) via voice vote — in true bipartisan fashion — which would allow permanent freedom from Internet taxes and eliminate the need for extensions. The Senate still has to pass the bill. On July 31, right before the August recess, Republican Texas Sen. Ted Cruz tried to bring the bill to the floor, but was shut down by Sen. Majority Leader Harry Reid.
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Several dozen soldiers deployed in the Rio Grande Valley are part of the up to 1,000 troops called up by Gov. Rick Perry last month, Texas National Guard Master Sgt. Ken Walker of the Joint Counterdrug Task Force said Thursday.
Several guardsmen were seen Thursday afternoon manning an observation tower along the busy road leading to the Hidalgo International Bridge.
This first batch of soldiers was specifically trained to man such observation towers in the area belonging to local law enforcement agencies and U.S. Customs and Border Protection, Walker said. They will serve as extra eyes on the border and report suspicious activity to authorities.
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“We broke the [ISIS] siege of Mount Sinjar,” Obama told reporters. “We helped vulnerable people reach safety, and we helped save many innocent lives.”
The Yazidis are a religious minority that have been targeted by Islamic militant group ISIS, which demands they convert to Islam or be killed.
The United Nations disagreed that the crisis is over, saying in its own press conference Thursday that thousands more Yazidis are still stranded on Mount Sinjar and need assistance.
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Photo Credit: AP
Judge Emmet G. Sullivan on Thursday ordered the IRS to provide a new sworn declaration giving more details about Lerner’s computer troubles, just days after the IRS submitted several to the court as part of a case brought against the agency by a conservative watchdog group.
Sullivan said the IRS must provide the declaration from an official with the “authority to speak under oath for the agency” by August 22. IRS officials previously said under oath that Lerner’s emails were lost when her computer crashed, and technicians were unable to recover the drive’s data.
Sullivan said the explanation must include how the IRS attempted to retrieve the emails of Lerner, a central figure in the agency’s targeting of conservative groups, from alternative sources such as mobile devices. Sullivan also asked the IRS to explain in detail how the agency tracks hard drives when they are being serviced and provide information from an outside source to verify the agency’s policy regarding the destruction of hard drives.
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Photo Credit: REUTERS / Jonathan Ernst
House Energy & Commerce Committee Ranking Democrat Henry Waxman — who oversees the FCC — received more than $12,000 in campaign contributions from three television executives in danger of losing broadcast rights after their company missed a crucial agency deadline. The company was subsequently granted the sole exception to the FCC’s rule.
“The timing of the campaign donations is very suspicious,” a source at the FCC familiar with the spectrum deliberations told The Daily Caller. “It appears that you can buy special favors from the FCC worth millions of dollars by giving money to Democrats. Would the result have been the same if the company’s executives were Republican donors? I doubt it.”
In May the FCC finalized plans to hold a spectrum incentive auction, the goal of which is to free up and transition broadcast television ultra-high frequency spectrum space over to the growing mobile broadband services market.
Starting sometime in mid-2015, TV broadcasters will have the opportunity to sell spectrum back to the commission, which will then re-sell it to wireless carriers. Broadcasters choosing not to sell will be repacked (or moved to different spectrum) in order to stay in business.
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Senator Jeff Sessions (R., Ala.) called for Americans to pressure their senators about voting against President Obama’s expected executive orders on immigration, which he described as a “chilling” plot with activists to undermine national laws.
“Recent developments suggest the president’s planned executive amnesty could be increasingly imminent and broad in scope. House Democrat Leader Pelosi — clearly one of the White House’s closest allies — has just urged the president to issue ‘the broadest possible’ executive actions,” Sessions said in a statement on Wednesday.
“Open-borders groups have grown bolder and louder in their unlawful demands, launching a campaign for the president to ‘go big,’ and demanding that he ‘stand up’ to Congress and ‘expand DACA,’” he added, citing an Associated Press report that administration officials were meeting with immigration activists and the Chamber of Commerce.
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Photo Credit: Manuel Balce Ceneta, AP
By Alberto R. Gonzales.
Along our southwestern border, not far from where I was born, tens of thousands of Central American children are turning themselves over to U.S. Border Patrol officers. The overwhelming majority are not criminals, drug dealers or violent offenders, rather most are escaping those threats in their home countries. Poor economic conditions, the threat of violence, and a parent’s hope for a better life are the reasons for this situation – the children are not to blame.
In spite of this humanitarian crisis and the economic burdens it creates for state and local governments, recently members of Congress failed to pass legislation to address these issues before heading home for the August recess. In response, the President announced that he will take executive action even though he previously professed publicly his power to deal with the influx of young immigrants was limited.
I support the President’s commitment to address this issue provided his actions are consistent with his duty under the Constitution to faithfully execute our laws. Determining the limits of the president’s inherent power to act in the absence of either an express constitutional or congressional grant of authority is one of the most difficult challenges in constitutional law. In part, this is because our courts have been inconsistent in defining the scope of the President’s inherent authority. (search “the courts’ abandonment of judicial review that limits Congress’s power…”)
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ABC reporter Jon Karl grilled deputy White House spokesman Eric Schultz about a new report showing how many executives who pursue corporate mergers overseas to avoid onerous U.S. tax laws — a move Obama has called “unpatriotic” — have donated millions to the Democratic Party and President Obama’s former campaigns.
On Wednesday, Bloomberg reported that top Obama and Democratic donors — including an investment banker who hosted a fundraiser for the president, a co-chairman of the 2012 Democratic National Convention and a bundler who raised $200,000 for Obama’s reelection campaign — are all guilty of pursuing “corporate inversions,” which Obama has called unpatriotic and is seeking to limit through executive actions.
“Is the president going to be asking Democrats to return money contributed, or seek to return money contribution, by some these corporate inversions?” Karl asked Schultz at a Martha’s Vineyard press conference.
“No,” Schultz said simply.
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Obama Won’t Return Money From Tax Deals He Dislikes
By Richard Rubin and Annie Linskey.
President Barack Obama won’t return campaign donations to executives, advisers and directors who have profited from offshore mergers that reduce corporate taxes using a technique he has called “unpatriotic.”
Responding to a Bloomberg News report that described connections between more than 20 Obama donors and the tax-cutting transactions, White House Deputy Press Secretary Eric Schultz said the president will keep the cash.
“We are not privy to the details and have no role in any individual company’s plans,” Schultz said yesterday at a briefing on Martha’s Vineyard where Obama is vacationing. “But what the president is focused on is stopping the problem.”
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Photo Credit: WIRED / Platon
In an interview in the September issue of Wired, Snowden said that MonsterMind software aims to identify the start of foreign attacks and block them from entering the U.S. What makes MonsterMind unique is its ability to “automatically fire back” at these attacks without human involvement, he said.
Snowden described MonsterMind as problematic, noting that cyberattacks are often routed through computers in “innocent” third countries. This raises the possibility of U.S. counter attacks against the wrong targets. “You could have someone sitting in China, for example, making it appear that one of these attacks is originating in Russia,” he said. “And then we end up shooting back at a Russian hospital. What happens next?”
The former NSA contractor also views MonsterMind as a massive threat to privacy, warning that the agency would have to get access to virtually all private communications entering the U.S. from overseas.
“If we’re analyzing all traffic flows, that means we have to be intercepting all traffic flows,” he said. “That means violating the Fourth Amendment, seizing private communications without a warrant, without probable cause or even a suspicion of wrongdoing. For everyone, all the time.”
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