Bill ‘Wild Bill’ Guarnere, of ‘Band of Brothers’ Fame, Dies at 90

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Photo Credit: APWilliam “Wild Bill” Guarnere, one of the World War II veterans whose exploits were dramatized in the TV miniseries “Band of Brothers,” has died. He was 90.

His son, William Guarnere Jr., confirmed Sunday that his father died at Jefferson University Hospital in Philadelphia. Guarnere was rushed to the hospital early Saturday and died of a ruptured aneurysm early Saturday night.

The younger Guarnere told FoxNews.com that like so many of his generation, “Wild Bill” didn’t talk about his service, even though he lost his leg in combat.

“All we knew was he lost his leg, and that was it,” William Guarnere Jr. said. “People knew more about (his service) than we did.”

The HBO miniseries, based on a book by Stephen Ambrose, followed the members of Easy Company, 506th Regiment, 101st Airborne Division from training in Georgia in 1942 through some of the war’s fiercest European battles through the war’s end in 1945.

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Palin Fires a Shot Over the GOP Establishment’s Bow at CPAC and Throws in Some Dr. Seuss Just for Fun

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CPAC 2014Once again former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin wowed the crowd at CPAC and, in the process, put the establishment on notice if they do not stand for conservative principles, they will lose her support and that of many other Americans too.

In the closing address at the nation’s largest conservative conference, Palin sounded a similar theme to several of the firebrands–including Ted Cruz, Mike Lee and Rand Paul–who addressed the DC gathering of thousands from around the country. The spirit of their remarks can be summarized using the old Tom Petty lyrics, “I won’t back down, you can stand me up at the gates of hell, but I won’t back down.”

To the Republican Party leadership, Palin let them know that it’s time to have a “come to Jesus moment. America is counting on the GOP to get it right.” Why should any Republican get elected or re-elected who is for higher taxes, more government and more regulations? Why should they be rewarded with your vote, Palin queried. Borrowing a turn of phrase from Barack Obama, she reminded the GOP, “You know that 2010 election victory that swept you into power, you didn’t build that, the tea party did.”

Palin pointed to the examples of Senator Ted Cruz and House members like Louie Gomert and Trey Gowdy as the type of leadership that the times require. She fully supported Cruz’s ObamaCare filibuster believing it a great service to the country, and also approved of his reading of Dr. Seuss’ “Green Eggs and Ham” while he held the Senate floor last fall.

Sarah Palin debuted her own version of the classic tale for today’s CPAC audience: “I do not like this Uncle Sam. I do not like his health care scam. I do not like these dirty crooks, or how they lie and cook the books. I do not like when Congress steals, I do not like their crony deals. I do not like this spying, man, I do not like, ‘Oh, Yes we can,'” which drew laughter and cheers from the CPAC crowd.

She continued, “I do not like this spending spree, we’re smart, we know there’s nothing free. I do not like reporters’ smug replies when I complain about their lies. I do not like this kind of hope, and we won’t take it, nope, nope, nope.”

The former Alaska Governor went on to bring up the crisis in the Ukraine and wondered why in the world the United States was reducing its conventional forces to pre-World War II levels and drastically cutting its nuclear arsenal in light of it. Palin advised, “Mr. President the only thing that stops a bad guy with a nuke is a good guy with a nuke,” prompting the crowd to rise to its feet with approval. She then added with a slight smirk, “I’m probably being too hard on the President, afterall who could have seen this coming.” Catching the reference, the crowd rose back to its feet cheering.

Palin ended on an upbeat note saying there is a “great awakening” happening in America.”The Age of Obama is almost over, marking the end of an error.” The message of liberty has resonated “since a band a brothers dumped tea in the Boston Harbor,” she exhorted. Because of that, she has hope. “The best is yet to come.”

Cruz and Lee at Top of Palin’s List if She Doesn’t Run in 2016

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Former Alaska Gov. and Republican vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin closed out CPAC on Saturday and blasted the Republican establishment for marginalizing conservatives and the Tea Party after the historic 2010 elections in which the Tea Party gave House Republicans back their majority.

Palin, whose endorsement carries the most weight in GOP primaries, had a simple message for the “Beltway Boys”: “You didn’t build that. The Tea Party did.”

Palin closed out CPAC as the conference’s featured speaker for the second time in the last three years. Last year, Sen. Ted Cruz, who said he would not be in the U.S. Senate were it not for Palin, closed out the conference. Palin, whose endorsement is the most influential in Republican primaries, said that if she does not run for president in 2016, Cruz and Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) are at the top of her list. And she had plenty of praise for Cruz on Saturday, thanking Texas for helping put Congress on “Cruz control.”

She said reinforcements have to be sent to Washington to fight for American workers who “are caught between the crony capitalism that benefits the politically collected and the income redistribution that benefits the politically favored.”

Palin also spoke about how conservatives are now pushing back in winning in the culture wars, as was evidenced by A&E’s reinstatement of Duck Dynasty patriarch Phil Robertson, and took on the Democrats’ phony “war on women” rhetoric by saying Democrats think women are cheap, and that all they need are cheap lines about birth control to get their votes. Palin asking the women in the audience to not be cheap political accessories and said one will not hear Democrats scream, “I am women, hear me roar,” because while donkeys bray, “only Mama Grizzlies can say, ‘Hear Me Roar!'”

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Snowden Says ‘Many Other’ Spy Programs Remain Secret, For Now

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Photo Credit: US News Exiled whistle-blower Edward Snowden told the European Parliament in testimony published Friday there are many more surprises in the classified cache of documents he downloaded and distributed last year.

But, Snowden said, he will allow the journalists with whom he’s shared the material to decide what to report.

“There are many other undisclosed programs that would impact EU citizens’ rights, but I will leave the public interest determinations as to which of these may be safely disclosed to responsible journalists in coordination with government stakeholders,” he said.

The documents that have already been reported on reveal massive efforts by the National Security Agency and its British partner, the Government Communications Headquarters, to scoop up electronic data.

“I don’t want to outpace the efforts of journalists, here, but I can confirm that all documents reported thus far are authentic and unmodified, meaning the alleged operations against Belgacom, SWIFT, the EU as an institution, the United Nations, UNICEF, and others based on documents I provided have actually occurred,” he said. “I expect similar operations will be revealed in the future that affect many more ordinary citizens.”

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Kerry Urges US Envoys to Make Climate Change a Priority

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Photo Credit: AFP Photo/Alberto PizzoliUS Secretary of State John Kerry has called on American ambassadors around the world to make the fight against climate change a top priority ahead of new UN talks next year.

In his first department-wide policy guidance statement since taking office a year ago, he told his 70,000 staff: “The environment has been one of the central causes of my life.”

“Protecting our environment and meeting the challenge of global climate change is a critical mission for me as our country’s top diplomat,” Kerry said in the letter issued on Friday to all 275 US embassies and across the State Department.

“It’s also a critical mission for all of you: our brave men and women on the frontlines of direct diplomacy,” he added in the document seen by AFP.

He urged all “chiefs of mission to make climate change a priority for all relevant personnel and to promote concerted action at posts and in host countries to address this problem.”

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President’s Brother George Asked Dinesh D’Souza, Not Obama, for $1,000

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Photo Credit: Gage Skidmore/flickrBestselling author, academic, and filmmaker Dinesh D’Souza joined Breitbart News Saturday’s live broadcast from CPAC on Sirius XM Patriot channel 125 and explained the difference between him and President Obama is, “I am a third world guy who has embraced America, and, as I see it, he is an American-born guy who has adopted a third world ideology.”

D’Souza shared his thoughts with Breitbart News Executive Chairman Steve Bannon and Editor-in-Chief Alex Marlow. Marlow asked what D’Souza thought about Obama’s new My Brother’s Keeper initiative. The filmmaker had a story to tell that shed light on just how the President treated his real brother, George Obama. D’Souza recounted that he had interviewed George for his movie 2016: Obama’s America, which he shot in Kenya prior to the 2012 presidential election.

Right before the 2012 election was to occur, D’Souza received a phone call from Kenya. “I get a call, and I look at my phone, and it is from Kenya. Like, who’s calling me in Kenya? It’s George!” George explained to D’Souza that he had fathered an illegitimate child, who was a year and a half old, and asked if he could please have $1,000 for some emergency treatment that his child needed:

He’s like, “Dinesh, can you help me?”

I said, “How am I going to get you money?”

“Oh, it’s easy,” he said. “Western Union.”

I say, “Well, isn’t there someone else you can call?”

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DHS Tells American Border Guards to Run Away from Illegal Immigrants Hurling Rocks at Them, Fleeing in Vehicles

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Photo Credit: Daily Caller Top administration officials have directed 21,000 border patrol officers to retreat whenever illegal immigrants throw rocks at them, and to avoid getting in front of foreign drug-smugglers’ vehicles as they head north with their drug cargoes.

“Agents shall not discharge firearms in response to thrown or hurled projectiles… agents should obtain a tactical advantage in these situations, such as seeking cover or distancing themselves,” said the instructions, issued Mar. 7, under the signature of Michael Fisher, chief of U.S. Border Patrol.

Agents were also directed to keep their weapons holstered when drug smugglers drive by.

Agents can’t use guns against “a moving vehicle merely fleeing from agents,” say the instructions.

The new instructions do allow agents to use guns to defend themselves from vehicles that drive at them. “Agents shall not discharge their firearms at a moving vehicle unless the agent has a reasonable belief that… deadly force is being used against an agent,” the new instructions say.

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Watchdog Says Schultz Misrepresented its Reporting, Facts about Keystone XL Letter

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Photo Credit: APMSNBC’s Ed Schultz featured a Nebraska Watchdog.org story on his “Ed Show” on Friday about the Keystone XL oil pipeline but Schultz’s words didn’t match the reporting the group has done on the issue this week, the group said Saturday.

During the opening to his show, Schultz put on screen Wathdog’s May 2013 story about the $27.4 million lobbyists spent in Nebraska in 2011-2012. That figure includes $700,000 spent by TransCanada lobbying for the pipeline it wants to build across America. He then cut to former Sen. Abbie Cornett, a Republican, saying there was heavy lobbying on both sides, Watchdog reports.

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IRS: 89K Fewer Audits in 2013 Because of ‘Sequestration and Furloughs’

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Photo Credit: APBy Terence P. Jeffrey.

Because of “sequestration and furloughs” the number of individuals audited by the Internal Revenue Service fell by 80,000 in fiscal 2013 and the number of businesses audited fell by 9,000, according to the IRS’s Budget in Brief released this week.

“As a result of the impacts of sequestration and furloughs, the IRS delivered key enforcement programs below 2012 levels,” said the budget document. “Total individual audits fell 5 percent from 1.48 million to 1.40 million, while audits of high income individuals declined from 179,000 to 172,000. Business return audits dropped 13 percent from 70,000 to 61,000”

Because of the decline, says the IRS, the federal government pulled in only $9.83 billion in revenue from audits in fiscal 2013, the lowest in ten years.

However, the IRS’s overall revenue from enforcement actions increased by $3.1 billion, climbing from $50.2 billion in fiscal 2012 to $53.3 billion in fiscal 2013.

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The IRS’s behavior taxes credulity

By George F. Will.

What’s been said of confession — that it is good for one’s soul but bad for one’s reputation — can also be true of testifying to Congress, so Lois Lerner has chosen to stay silent. Hers, however, is an eloquent silence.

The most intrusive and potentially most punitive federal agency has been politicized; the IRS has become an appendage of Barack Obama’s party. Furthermore, congruent with exhortations from some congressional Democrats, it is intensifying its efforts to suffocate groups critical of progressives, by delaying what once was the swift, routine granting of tax-exempt status.

So, the IRS, far from repenting of its abusive behavior, is trying to codify the abuses. It hopes to nullify with new rules the existing legal right of 501(c)(4) groups, many of which are conservative, to participate in politics. The proposed rules have drawn more than 140,000 comments, most of them complaints, some from liberals wary of IRS attempts to broadly define “candidate-related political activity” and to narrow the permissible amount of this.

Lerner is, so far, the face of this use of government to punish political adversaries. She knows what her IRS unit did and how it intersects with the law, and for a second time she has exercised her constitutional right to remain silent rather than risk self-incrimination. The public has a right to make reasonable inferences from her behavior.

And from Obama’s. After calling the IRS behavior “outrageous,” he now says there is not a “smidgen” of evidence of anything to be outraged about. He knows this even though the supposed investigation of the IRS behavior has not been completed, or perhaps even begun. The person he chose to investigate his administration is an administration employee and a generous donor to his campaigns.

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Philadelphia Judge Issues Ruling That Could Give Anonymous Online Commenters Second Thoughts

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Photo Credit: GREG WOOD/AFP/Getty ImagesA Philadelphia judge has ordered philly.com to reveal the name of an anonymous commenter, in a defamation suit brought by electricians’ union leader John Dougherty.

An attorney in the case says it could have a broad impact on incendiary online comments and those users, sometimes called “trolls,” who post them anonymously.

The anonymous defendant in the suit, disguised by the nonsense name “fbpdplt,” called Dougherty a name in the comments section of an article on the website, one of the properties in the media group that also owns the Philadelphia Inquirer and Daily News.

The website is not a party to the suit but it received a subpoena, more than a year ago, for information on the commenter. Its attorney, Eli Segal, says, “the company went to Court to make sure that the defendant received notice and an opportunity to be heard.”

The commenter remained anonymous but was represented in court by Phil Blackman, who argued that identifying his client would violate his, or her, First Ammendment right to speak anonymously.

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