Mike Lee Wants to Fight Cronyism in Government to Restore American Exceptionalism

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Photo Credit: AP

Photo Credit: AP

Sen. Mike Lee (R., Utah) spoke about the problems of cronyism in American government during a speech he gave at the Heritage Foundation Wednesday.

“Cronyism simultaneously corrupts our economy and our government, turning both against the American people,” Lee said. “It forces American families who ‘work hard and play by the rules’ to prop up, bail out, and subsidize elite special interests that don’t.”

Cronyism is leading to unequal opportunity in the United States. Lee said the GOP must address this threat to American exceptionalism by rooting out cronyism privilege and restoring fairness.

“Free enterprise works—morally and materially—because it aligns the interests of the individual and society,” Lee said. “It’s a system governed by an ‘invisible hand’ that rewards the creation of value, and by an ‘invisible foot’ that punishes complacency, especially at the top.”

Lee went after both indirect and direct subsidies in his speech.

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Largest Coal Producing State Slams Administration Over EPA Rules

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Photo Credit: Fox News

Photo Credit: Fox News

The American coal industry is accusing the Obama administration of using the Environmental Protection Agency to end the use of coal despite the president’s claim of having an “all of the above” energy policy.

Earlier this year, the EPA issued its Mercury Air Toxics Standards (MATS), which the agency said will eliminate 90 percent of mercury and acid gas released into the air by coal-fired power plants.

“I would say this administration is certainly unfriendly towards coal,” Wyo. Governor Matt Mead said. “And in my view it is a war on coal.”

Mead proudly pointed out that Wyoming is currently the nation’s largest coal producing state. “We export more coal than any other state by far…about 400 million tons per year. Wyoming coal produces a lot of electricity in this country,” he said.

He and others in the coal industry are concerned, however, that the EPA’s MATS rules, which go into effect in January 2016, will devastate coal production in America and force many older power plants to close because the cost of retrofitting them will be too high.

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Cruz: ‘Where We Are Today Reminds Me a Great Deal of the Late 1970s’ & Carter

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Photo Credit: AP

Photo Credit: AP

The economic and political scene in America today is similar to what was occurring in the late 1970s, but this is not all bad news for conservatives because “it took Jimmy Carter to give us Ronald Reagan,” said Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) in a tele-town hall sponsored by the conservative group ForAmerica.

“I understand that looking at what’s happening in this country, it’s easy to be demoralized, to feel despondent at the continual assault on our liberty,” said Cruz. “But I want to encourage everyone — it often takes things getting really bad, to wake people up. It took Jimmy Carter to give us Ronald Reagan.”

Cruz drew a comparison between what was happening under President Jimmy Carter with the last five years under President Barack Obama, along with other observations about the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare), youth unemployment, the national debt, foreign policy, and the Benghazi scandal.

ForAmerica, which sponsored the tele-town hall on April 29, was founded by author, columnist, and activist L. Brent Bozell III. ForAmerica supports personal freedom, a limited, constitutional government, a strong national defense, and a commitment to Judeo-Christian values.

Bozell is also the president of the Media Research Center, the parent organization of CNSNews.com.

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Obama’s 2014 Golf Outings Cost Taxpayers Nearly $3M

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Photo Credit: AP / Jacquelyn Martin

Photo Credit: AP / Jacquelyn Martin

President Obama’s golf outings in 2014 cost taxpayers nearly $3 million – $2,952,278 – for just flight expenses alone, according to records from the Department of the Air Force obtained by Judicial Watch.

“According to the Department of Air Force documents, the flights to and from, Palm Springs for the February 17-20, 2014 trip totaled 9.8 hours at $210,877 an hour, which comes to a total of $2,066,594.60 in flight expenses,” according to Judicial Watch. “The total cost for flights to and from Key Largo, Florida for the March 7-9 trip totaled 4.2 hours at $210,877, which comes to a total of $855,683.40 for flight expenses.”

The trip in Key Largo was spent at the exclusive Ocean Reef Club, which “boasts two championship 18-hole courses, a rarity in the Florida keys…

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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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?

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Sources Saying Sebelius Now Refusing To Testify Before Senate Panel

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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.