NRA’s LaPierre: Country ‘Slipping Away,’ Gun Owners ‘Willing to Fight’ for Control

Photo Credit: Screenshot

Photo Credit: Screenshot

National Rifle Association executive vice president and CEO Wayne LaPierre said Friday that the country is on edge like he’s never seen it before, and that it’s up to attendees at the group’s annual meeting and like-minded individuals to fight for its future.

“NRA, this organization, is about giving a voice to all the people like all of us in this room today and everyone else in the country that feels like we do,” he told the crowd at an opening event at the group’s annual meetings.

“I love it because corporations can’t control it, politicians can’t control it, the media can’t control it,” he said. “By gosh, there is an organization … that says ‘this is what we stand for, and we’re willing to fight for it.’ And that’s what I love about it. And that’s what it’s about.

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A Legal Way To Kill?

Photo Credit: Townhall

Photo Credit: Townhall

When President Obama decided sometime during his first term that he wanted to be able to use unmanned aerial drones in foreign lands to kill people — including Americans — he instructed Attorney General Eric Holder to find a way to make it legal — despite the absolute prohibition on governmental extra-judicial killing in federal and state laws and in the Constitution itself.

“Judicial killing” connotes a lawful execution after an indictment, a jury trial, an appeal and all of the due process protections that the Constitution guarantees defendants. “Extra-judicial killing” is a targeted killing of a victim by someone in the executive branch without due process. The president wanted the latter, and he wanted it in secret.

He must have hoped his killing would never come to light, because the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution could not be more direct: “No person shall be … deprived of life, liberty or property without due process of law.”

Due process has a few prongs. The first is substantive, meaning the outcome must be fair. In a capital murder case, for example, the defendant must not only be found guilty by a jury, but he also must truly be guilty.

The second prong of due process is procedural. Thus, the defendant must be charged with a crime and tried before a neutral jury. He is entitled to a lawyer, to confront the witnesses against him and to remain silent. The trial must be presided over by a neutral judge, and in the case of a conviction, the defendant is entitled to an appeal before a panel of three neutral judges.

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Arizona VA Boss Accused of Covering Up Veterans’ Deaths Linked to Previous Scandal

Photo Credit: Fox News

Photo Credit: Fox News

A Veterans Affairs official accused of keeping double books to hide the fact that dozens of veterans died awaiting care previously ran a Washington state VA facility that allegedly fudged suicide numbers, FoxNews.com has learned.

Sharon Helman, director of the Phoenix Veterans Affairs Health Care system, is accused with other management officials of keeping a fake waiting list that made it appear sick veterans were being treated in a timely manner — while hiding the real list that showed up to 1,600 sick veterans were waiting months to see a physician. Rep. Jeff Miller, R-Fla., chairman of the House Committee on Veterans Affairs, said investigators have evidence that two sets of records were kept by the facility to conceal the lengthy delays in care.

At least 40 veterans on the secret list allegedly died while waiting for appointments, prompting congressional committees to launch investigations into the circumstances surrounding the deaths.

Helman, who is said to have approved and defended the Phoenix facility’s actions, previously served as director of the Veterans Affairs facility in Spokane, Wash., where the VA’s Office of Medical Investigations found the number of veteran suicides were being miscounted.

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Oregon County Puts Stop to Incinerating Aborted Babies for Electricity: ‘We Are Outraged’

Photo Credit: LifeSiteNews

Photo Credit: LifeSiteNews

The Marion County Board of Commissioners announced late Wednesday that they are putting a stop to a waste-to-energy facility’s program that was incinerating aborted babies to produce electricity.

The B.C. Catholic’s Steve Weatherbe revealed April 21 that the British Columbia government was sending fetal remains to the Covanta Marion waste-to-energy facility to be burned along with other medical waste. The story made national news after LifeSiteNews reported on the revelation Wednesday afternoon.

“We are outraged and disgusted that this material could be included in medical waste received at the facility,” said Commissioner Janet Carlson in a Wednesday statement.

“We did not know this practice was occurring until today. We are taking immediate action and initiating discussions with Covanta Marion to make certain that this type of medical waste is not accepted in the future.”

The board says it has called an emergency meeting for Thursday morning at 9:00 a.m. to discuss the issue.

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Boehner Mocks GOP Colleagues on Immigration Reform

Photo Credit: The Enquirer / Tony Jones

Photo Credit: The Enquirer / Tony Jones

House Speaker John Boehner theatrically mocked his fellow Republican Congressmen for being afraid to reform immigration policy when he spoke Thursday before the Middletown Rotary Club in his home district.

“Here’s the attitude. Ohhhh. Don’t make me do this. Ohhhh. This is too hard,” Boehner whined before a luncheon crowd at Brown’s Run County Club in Madison Township.

“We get elected to make choices. We get elected to solve problems and it’s remarkable to me how many of my colleagues just don’t want to … They’ll take the path of least resistance.”

Boehner said he’s been working for 16 or 17 months trying to push Congress to deal with immigration reform…

The GOP-controlled House has refused to pass the immigration proposal passed by the Democrat-led Senate that includes a path to citizenship for millions of people living illegally in the United States. Critics characterize it as amnesty. Boehner is advocating for a step-by-step process that starts with securing borders and enforcing immigration laws. He can’t get the House to consider it.

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The American Middle Class Is No Longer the World’s Richest

Photo Credit: NYT

Photo Credit: NYT

The American middle class, long the most affluent in the world, has lost that distinction.

While the wealthiest Americans are outpacing many of their global peers, a New York Times analysis shows that across the lower- and middle-income tiers, citizens of other advanced countries have received considerably larger raises over the last three decades.

After-tax middle-class incomes in Canada — substantially behind in 2000 — now appear to be higher than in the United States. The poor in much of Europe earn more than poor Americans.

The numbers, based on surveys conducted over the past 35 years, offer some of the most detailed publicly available comparisons for different income groups in different countries over time. They suggest that most American families are paying a steep price for high and rising income inequality.

Although economic growth in the United States continues to be as strong as in many other countries, or stronger, a small percentage of American households is fully benefiting from it. Median income in Canada pulled into a tie with median United States income in 2010 and has most likely surpassed it since then. Median incomes in Western European countries still trail those in the United States, but the gap in several — including Britain, the Netherlands and Sweden — is much smaller than it was a decade ago.

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Intelligence Agency Fails to Report Admissions of Criminal Conduct by Employees and Contractors

Photo Credit: Human Events

Photo Credit: Human Events

Here’s a nasty little companion piece to today’s story about tax-delinquent employees of the Internal Revenue Service receiving big performance bonuses, courtesy of McClatchy News, which has been working on the story for years:

The nation’s spy satellite agency failed to notify authorities when some employees and contractors confessed during lie detector tests to crimes such as child molestation, an intelligence inspector general has concluded.

In other cases, the National Reconnaissance Office delayed reporting criminal admissions obtained during security clearance polygraphs, possibly jeopardizing evidence in investigations or even the safety of children, according to the inspector general report released Tuesday , almost two years after McClatchy’s reporting raised similar concerns.

Child molestation? And not just an old incident, either. It turned out that the contractor in question was still actively in contact with the victim:

In one instance, one of the agency’s top lawyers told colleagues not to bother reporting confessions by a government contractor of child molestation, viewing child pornography and sexting with a minor, the inquiry by the inspector general for the intelligence community revealed.

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Lawsuit: Cops Found Nothing in Raid, So They Planted Drugs to Frame Innocent Woman

Photo Credit: Youtube screenshot

Photo Credit: Youtube screenshot

California cops planted drugs in a woman’s home to frame her after finding nothing in their illegal search of her home, a lawsuit alleges.

Allison Ross has filed a federal lawsuit against against the Santa Clara sheriff’s department, crime lab and 12 officers that she claims participated in a conspiracy to plant drugs in her house and frame her for a crime she did not commit.

Ross was initially charged with being under the influence of methamphetamine, but the case against her was thrown out after the district attorney determined that the police made false statements about Ross’s arrest.

Most shocking of all, Ross’s lawsuit alleges that dashcam footage actually recorded the police discussing their plan to plant drugs inside her house.

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Justice Sotomayor and the Affirmative Action Bitter-Enders Have Lost Bigtime

Photo Credit: American Thinker

Photo Credit: American Thinker

The American public has woken up to the folly of trying to end racial discrimination by practicing it, dooming affirmative action to a slow death, and the racialist left is not taking the news very well. That is the only conclusion to draw from the extraordinary dissenting opinion yesterday by Justice Sonia Sotomayor in Schuette v BAMN, the case in which the Court upheld Michigan’s law outlawing racial preferences in state-funded higher education. Sotomayor took the unusual step of reading the dissent aloud from the bench, indicating her vehemence.

Justice Sotomayor’s dissent was actually longer than all the other opinions in the case combined, so that reading took a while. But she was faced with a difficult task in explaining why refusing to treat races differently is actually racial discrimination, so of course she need a lot of verbiage, background, and pretzel twisting.

Four aspects of her argument stand out:

She attempted to re-brand “affirmative action” as “race-sensitive admissions.”

“Although the term “affirmative action” is commonly used to describe colleges’ and universities’ use of race in crafting admissions policies, Instead use the term “race-sensitive admissions policies.” Some comprehend the term “affirmative action” as connoting intentional preferential treatment based on race alone—for example, the use of a quota system, whereby a certain proportion of seats in an institution’s incoming class must be set aside for racial minorities; the use of a “points” system, whereby an institution accords a fixed numerical advantage toan applicant because of her race; or the admission of otherwise unqualified students to an institution solely on account of their race. None of this is an accurate description of the practices that public universities are permitted to adopt after this Court’s decision in Grutter v. Bollinger, 539 U. S. 306 (2003).” (fn. 2)

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Washington Becomes First State to Lose its Waiver from No Child Left Behind

Photo Credit: Rachel La Corte / AP

Photo Credit: Rachel La Corte / AP

Washington state lost its waiver from implementing certain parts of the No Child Left Behind education law, an action that could lead to layoffs and program cuts, Gov. Jay Inslee said in a statement Thursday.

In a letter to the state superintendent, Education Secretary Arne Duncan said that he would not renew the waiver because the state had failed to implement promised changes to how it evaluates teachers and principals. The state is the first to lose its waiver.

In February 2012, the state committed to making student learning growth a substantial factor in those reviews. Last August, it was placed on high-risk status for failing to implement that and other changes, giving the state until May 1 to produce a plan. Because that would require a legislative change and Washington’s legislature won’t reconvene until next January, Duncan said the state would be losing its waiver.

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