Report: Pentagon to Propose Shrinking Army to Pre-WWII Level, Scrapping Some Jets

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Photo Credit: REUTERS/LUKAS BARTHBy Reuters.

Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel will propose on Monday a reduction in the size of the U.S. Army to its smallest size since before World War Two and scrapping a class of Air Force attack jets, the New York Times reported on Sunday.

The plans, which the paper said were outlined by several Pentagon officials on condition of anonymity, would be aimed at reducing defense spending in the face of government austerity after a pledge by President Barack Obama to end U.S. involvement in wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

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Photo Credit: REUTERS/KEVIN LAMARQUEU.S. governors plan to urge Obama not to downsize National Guard

By Aruna Viswanatha.

Governors from both U.S. political parties plan to talk to President Barack Obama on Monday about preventing potential cuts to National Guard units, several governors said on Sunday.

“In downsizing the military, we want to make sure that reserve and National Guard is protected in our country,” Connecticut Governor Dannel Malloy said on CNN’s “State of the Union.”

“I’m going to have that discussion with the President tomorrow,” Malloy, a Democrat, said.

Many governors are in Washington this week for a national conference of state executives. They are scheduled to have dinner at the White House on Sunday and meet with Obama on Monday.

Several appeared on Sunday morning talk shows, where they said they wanted to speak to the president about the potential cuts to the National Guard. The Guard is a reserve force that is part of the Army but serves state governments often at times of crisis, such as during floods or after hurricanes.

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Former Justice Stevens: Change 2nd Amendment to Improve Constitution

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Photo Credit: AFPFormer Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens has released a new book focused, in part, on “improving” the Constitution through amending the Second Amendment–by making the rights protected therein applicable only to a militia instead of the citizenry at large.

Stevens’ book is titled Six Amendments: How and Why We Should Change the Constitution.

As written, the text of the Second Amendment is: “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms shall not be infringed.”

According to Bloomberg Businessweek, Stevens believes recent court decisions–notably District of Columbia v Heller (2008) and McDonald v Chicago (2010)–placed too much emphasis on individual rights, rather than on what he believes was the Founding Fathers’ primary goal: namely, to answer “the threat that a national standing army posed to the sovereignty of the states.”

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Bachmann: ‘Lawless’ Obama ‘Rules by Tweet,’ Congress Must Have Support from Voters to Impeach Him

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What will be President Barack Obama’s legacy after he leaves office?

According to former 2012 Republican presidential candidate Michelle Bachmann, Obama set precedents that will lead to the “establishment of lawlessness in the United States.”

“From stem to stern, this president has said, ‘The law doesn’t apply to me,’” Bachmann said in an exclusive interview with The Daily Caller. “It’s almost like when a parent raises a child with no rules. The child gets to do what ever they want to do; there is no discipline and no standards. The president has decided that the laws don’t apply to him. It’s as though the Magna Carta never existed.

“He’s brought the American people to think that some how he has been given a magic scepter that allows him to change the law into what ever Barack Obama wants the law to be, which is the opposite of our form of government,” Bachmann continued. “No man is above the law, including the president of the United States.”

Bachmann pointed to Obama’s autocratic modifications of Obamacare as evidence of lawlessness.

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Security Flaw Makes iPhones, iPads, Macs Vulnerable to Hackers

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Photo Credit: ReutersA major flaw in Apple Inc. software for mobile devices could allow hackers to intercept email and other communications that are meant to be encrypted, the company said on Friday, and experts said Mac computers were even more exposed.

If attackers have access to a mobile user’s network, such as by sharing the same unsecured wireless service offered by a restaurant, they could see or alter exchanges between the user and protected sites such as Gmail and Facebook. Governments with access to telecom carrier data could do the same.

“It’s as bad as you could imagine, that’s all I can say,” said Johns Hopkins University cryptography professor Matthew Green.

Apple did not say when or how it learned about the flaw in the way iOS handles sessions in what are known as secure sockets layer or transport layer security, nor did it say whether the flaw was being exploited.

But a statement on its support website was blunt: The software “failed to validate the authenticity of the connection.”

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U.S. Air Force Reveals ‘Neighborhood Watch’ Spy Satellite Program

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Photo Credit: ThinkstockThe United States plans to launch a pair of satellites to keep tabs on spacecraft from other countries orbiting 22,300 miles above the planet, as well as to track space debris, the head of Air Force Space Command said.

The previously classified Geosynchronous Space Situational Awareness Program (GSSAP) will supplement ground-based radars and optical telescopes in tracking thousands of pieces of debris so orbital collisions can be avoided, General William Shelton said at the Air Force Association meeting in Orlando on Friday.

He called it a “neighborhood watch program” that will provide a more detailed perspective on space activities. He said the satellites, scheduled to be launched this year, also will be used to ferret out potential threats from other spacecraft.

The program “will bolster our ability to discern when adversaries attempt to avoid detection and to discover capabilities they may have which might be harmful to our critical assets at these higher altitudes,” Shelton said in the speech, which also was posted on the Air Force Association’s website.

The two-satellite network, built by Orbital Sciences Corp will drift around the orbital corridor housing much of the world’s communications satellites and other spacecraft.

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North Carolina Joins List of States Banning Muslim Sharia Law

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Photo Credit: Bebeto Matthews, APNorth Carolina has become the seventh state to prohibit state judges from considering Islamic law in family cases, joining what critics say is a national anti-Muslim campaign.

Gov. Pat McCrory allowed the law, which was passed by state lawmakers in July, to take effect without his signature.

In an interview with The Associated Press, McCrory said the measure doesn’t do anything. “I didn’t think it was worth the time to pass, nor do I think it’s worth the time to have someone come back and vote on it again,” he said.

North Carolina now joins Arizona, Kansas, Louisiana, Oklahoma, South Dakota and Tennessee, according to Religion News Service, in banning Islamic Sharia law. A constitutional amendment seeking the same change in Alabama will be on the 2014 ballot. In Missouri, the governor vetoed an anti-Sharia bill because of its potential impact on international adoptions.

But the law in Oklahoma was struck down in court as unconstitutional, according to the Progressive Pulse, because it discriminated among religions without justification.

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Video – Allen West Inspires: What the GOP Should Stand For

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Photo Credit: Shark TankWest gave a short, yet inspiring portrayal of what the Republican Party stood for. West said that the GOP did not stand for the Grand Ole Party anymore, but that it stood for Growth, Opportunity and Prosperity.

We believe in the individual. We believe in the indomitable American spirit. We believe in individualism and entrepreneurship that can cause us to be here together in this great hall, that can allow a young man from the inner city from Georgia to stand before you tonight. That is who we are.-Allen West

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Feds Spend $356,337 on ‘Simulation Facility’ to Study How People Cross the Road

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Photo Credit: AP/Marcio Jose SanchezThe National Science Foundation has awarded a $356,337 grant to the University of Iowa to use virtual technology to study social influences on risky cycling and pedestrian behavior.

“This project will create a simulation facility that will advance a capability to study the social interactions of two children, or a child and parent, as the two people walk or bicycle across a traffic-filled roadway,” the grant announcement said.

It will “expand existing infrastructure” at the university “to build a new simulator that matches a recently installed simulator at the same institution, which will permit each of two experimental participants to inhabit their own separate simulated environment.”

Both stimulators will be connected by a “high-speed network and programmed to share a single, virtual environment that can be configured for either bicycling or walking.”

“Experimental participants will control their motion by actually walking or cycling across these virtual intersections, surrounded by graphically rendered images that show a real-time, first-person view of their motion through the environment,” the grant said.

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Convicted Child Rapist Flees Denver Halfway House After Ankle Monitor Cut (+video)

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Photo Credit: CNNA convicted child rapist apparently cut off his ankle monitor and left a Colorado group home where he was serving parole, a state official said.

A fugitive warrant was requested minutes after Eric Eugene Hartwell, 51, walked away from “Independence House” in Denver Friday evening, Colorado Corrections Department spokesman Roger Hudson told CNN Sunday.

Hartwell was convicted of raping a child in 1991 and attempted indecent liberties in 1996, according to the Colorado sex offender registry.

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Senators Demand FBI Head Answer Questions About Dinesh D’Souza’s Indictment

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Photo Credit: Getty ImagesBy Daniel Halper.

Four United States Senators have a written a letter to FBI director James Comey about the indictment of author and filmmaker Dinesh D’Souza. Senators Charles Grassley, ranking member of the Judiciary Committee, Jeff Sessions, Ted Cruz, and Mike Lee are the four senators, all Republicans, to have signed the letter…

The senators provide a dozen direct questions for the FBI director to answer. “To explain the details of these routine reviews and provide context to those who may be skeptical of the origins of this investigation, please provide answers to the following questions regarding FBI’s regular review of campaign files:

1. It appears from U.S. Attorney’s Office comment that the FBI conducts regular, perhaps random reviews of campaign filings. Is this correct? If so, what methodology does the FBI use to conduct these reviews?

2. Please identify and describe all methods by which a review of campaign filings may be initiated.

3. Please identify all other government entities involved in the FBI’s review of campaign filings and describe their involvement.

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Dinesh D’Souza Speculates on ‘Retribution’: ‘Vindictive’ Obama Sees Critics as Enemies

By Evan McMurry.

Author and filmmaker Dinesh D’Souza speculated to Megyn Kelly Friday night that FBI’s indictment of him for campaign finance fraud may be Alinsky-style political retribution for his anti-Obama film 2016. Earlier this week, four Senators sent a letter to FBI Director James Comey demanding an explanation for what they termed the “selective prosecution” of D’Souza.

“I am a public critic of the president and I do recognize this has made me vulnerable to a form of counterattack,” D’Souza said. He added that Obama, whom he characterized as “vindictive,” had released a video response to 2016 on his website, proving the film had gotten under the president’s skin.

Read more this story HERE.