Man Tries Checking Rifles, Handguns and Ammo at JFK Airport- Things Didn’t Go So Well for Him

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Photo Credit: NBC New YorkPolice arrested 23-year-old Keenan Draughon at New York’s Kennedy International Airport Saturday morning after he tried to check two defaced rifles and two handguns.

Both rifles were missing their serial numbers and one had a round in the chamber. Police spokesman Joseph Pentangelo says the Tennessee man also tried to check two magazines capable of holding 15 rounds of 9-millimeter ammunition.

These magazines are illegal in New York.

Draughon was arrested trying to board a flight to Charlotte, N.C., after Port Authority of New York and New Jersey police found the weapons.

Police said the 23-year-old told a United Airlines attendant that he wanted to check two cases containing firearms for his flight to Charlotte, a spokesperson for the Queens County district attorney’s office said in a statement.

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Rubio Now Opposes Going to Conference with Senate Immigration Bill

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Photo Credit: Reuters A spokesman for Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL), a member of the Senate’s “Gang of Eight,” told Breitbart News exclusively on Saturday that the House should not pass individual piecemeal immigration bills in a “ruse” to get to a conference committee that would result in a comprehensive immigration bill.

“At this point, the most realistic way to make progress on immigration would be through a series of individual bills,” Rubio spokesman Alex Conant said in an email. “Any effort to use a limited bill as a ruse to trigger a conference that would then produce a comprehensive bill would be counterproductive. Furthermore, any such effort would fail, because any single senator can and will block conference unless such conference is specifically instructed to limit the conference to only the issue dealt with in the underlying bill.”

In taking such a stance, Rubio has now publicly opposed the procedural mechanism through which House GOP leadership and Senate Democratic leadership had planned to try to slip a backdoor amnesty through Congress and save the Senate bill.

Technically speaking, the House could pass any bill or group of bills related to immigration to move to conference. Several immigration bills are ready to be taken up on the House floor, having already made it through their respective committees. If such an immigration bill, or group of bills, passes the House, the Republican leadership could take the bill or group of bills to the Senate and open a conference committee. A conference committee is a formal negotiating body where the House and the Senate will each send key negotiators, or conferees, to argue with each other about both the Senate’s Gang of Eight bill and whatever bill or bills the House brings to the table.

As Breitbart News first reported in July, conservatives have expressed worry about such a committee. Endorsing the House’s piecemeal approach is not enough to stop the Senate’s Gang of Eight bill as congressional leaders in both parties and both chambers of Congress could slip the comprehensive Senate bill past everyone through procedural trickery.

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Protestors Swarm Capitol to Rally Against NSA’s Mass Surveillance

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Photo Credit: Daily Caller Nearly a thousand protestors, sponsored by one hundred public advocacy groups, marched on the Capitol in Washington, D.C. to rally against the National Security Agency’s mass surveillance sweeps on Saturday.

“Why are we here?” former NSA executive and whistleblower Thomas Drake asked the gathered crowd. “We’re against mass surveillance!”

Drake, who was prosecuted by the Department of Justice under the Espionage Act for leaking unclassified information to a Baltimore Sun reporter, declared that the government “tried to bankrupt me, silence me and imprison me,” and that he was fortunate not to end up in prison.

“We cannot let this happen to future whistleblowers,” he said, adding that reform efforts must include whistleblower protection and not rely on an “NSA honor system” that was dependent on the agency admitting to rights violations.

“The NSA does not have an honorable track record of telling the truth when tracking us without our consent,” he said.

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Marine Who Emailed Threat Warning Now Getting Bipartisan Hill Support

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Photo Credit: BREZLER FAMILYA Marine facing military discharge for mistakenly sending a threat warning from an unclassified email account is now getting bipartisan support on Capitol Hill from members who say he used the fastest and only method available to respond.

New York Democratic Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand is among the most recent congressional lawmakers to support Maj. Jason Brezler, a Marine Corps reservist, who faces a military hearing for his actions.

Gillbrand, a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, sent a letter earlier this week to a Marine general arguing Brezler was responding to an “urgent” request from fellow soldiers in Afghanistan concerned about a senior Afghan police official and that he immediately reported the potential security breach.

Brezler told his fellow Marines the official was a security risk, in part because of allegations he sexually abused minors on U.S. bases in Afghanistan.

Days later, one of the official’s assistants and purported victims opened fire and killed three U.S. Marines.

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Air Force Makes ‘God’ Reference Optional in Oath

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Photo Credit: Fox News The Air Force Academy has decided to make the phrase “so help me God” optional in its honor code in what it called an effort to “build a culture of dignity and respect.”

The decision to make the reference optional came after the Academy’s Honor Review Committee met to consider a complaint filed by the Military Religious Freedom Foundation (MRFF).

“Here at the Academy, we work to build a culture of dignity and respect, and that respect includes the ability of our cadets, Airmen and civilian Airmen to freely practice and exercise their religious preference – or not,” Lt. Gen. Michelle Johnson said in a prepared statement.

The current version of the Academy’s oath reads: “We will not lie, steal or cheat nor tolerate among us anyone who does. Furthermore, I resolve to do my duty and live honorably, so help me God.”

“In the spirit of respect, cadets may or may not choose to finish the Honor Oath with ‘So help me God,’” said Johnson, the superintendent of the Academy.

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U.N. Benghazi Report an Inconvenient Truth for Obama?

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Photo Credit: WND Is the State Department hiding the involvement in the Sept. 11, 2012, Benghazi attack of an Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood-linked terrorist group?

A new United Nations report ties perpetrators of the Benghazi attack to the Muhammad Jamal Network, or MJN.

The network and its founder, Egyptian Muhammad Jamal, were designated by Obama’s State Department this month as “specially designated global terrorists” affiliated with al-Qaida.

The designation not only sanctions MJN’s assets but now allows President Obama to use a Bush-era military doctrine to capture Jamal terrorists overseas.

The State Department document designating MJN as terrorists does not mention the Benghazi attack.

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Al Sharpton Threatens Barneys Boycott Over Racial Profiling Allegations

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Photo Credit: Carolyn KasterThe Rev. Al Sharpton threatened Saturday to boycott luxury retailer Barneys if the department store doesn’t respond adequately to allegations by black shoppers that they were racially profiled there.

“We’ve gone from stop and frisk to shop and frisk, and we are not going to take it,” the black civil rights leader said. “We are not going to live in a town where our money is considered suspect and everyone else’s money is respected.”

Two black Barneys New York customers, Trayon Christian and Kayla Phillips, said this week they were detained by police after making expensive purchases.

Christian sued Barneys, saying he was accused of fraud after using his debit card to buy a $349 Ferragamo belt in April.

Barneys said Thursday that it had retained a civil rights expert to help review its procedures. The CEO of Barneys, Mark Lee, offered his “sincere regret and deepest apologies.”

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Census Bureau: Means-Tested Gov’t Benefit Recipients Outnumber Full-Time Year-Round Workers

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Photo Credit: AP/Carolyn KasterAmericans who were recipients of means-tested government benefits in 2011 outnumbered year-round full-time workers, according to data released this month by the Census Bureau.

They also out-numbered the total population of the Philippines.

There were 108,592,000 people in the United States in the fourth quarter of 2011 who were recipients of one or more means-tested government benefit programs, the Census Bureau said in data released this week. Meanwhile, according to the Census Bureau, there were 101,716,000 people who worked full-time year round in 2011. That included both private-sector and government workers.

That means there were about 1.07 people getting some form of means-tested government benefit for every 1 person working full-time year round.

The Census Bureau counted as recipients of means-tested government programs “anyone residing in a household in which one or more people received benefits from the program.” Many of these people lived in households receiving more than one form of means-tested benefit at the same time.

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Steve Forbes: Obamacare Website Rollout ‘Incompetent From Top to Bottom’

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Photo Credit: Reuters/Landov By Andrea Billups and Kathleen Walter.

Publisher Steve Forbes minces no words when it comes to placing blame for over the disastrous website rollout by the Obama administration for its sweeping healthcare program.

“It’s incompetence from top to bottom,” Forbes told Newsmax in an exclusive interview Friday as Democrats continued to jump ship amid 2014 election fears and as the administration scrambled to fix a website that has kept untold thousands from registering from federally required health insurance.

“It starts with the top — with the president — and then everyone in the chain of command, including [HHS] Secretary [Kathleen] Sebelius,” said Forbes, publisher and editor-in-chief of his namesake magazine. “Everyone knew that there were going to be problems and then something as complex as this, you have to bird-dog it every step of the way.

“Clearly no one was in charge. They just let it contract and just hoped things would work out.”

Moving forward, Forbes, who sought the Republican White House nomination in 1996 and 2000, shares the views of a growing bipartisan group in Washington and around the nation that the healthcare program should be postponed.

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NY Times: Obama Deserves an ‘F’ on Healthcare.gov

By John Sexton.

Princeton economics professor Uwe E. Reinhardt gives President Obama a letter grade on the roll out:

President Obama taught constitutional law at the University of Chicago Law School. How would he have graded a student’s performance on, say, a term paper or test that the professor viewed as “unacceptable,” especially when there was “no excuse” for the paper’s deficiencies?

One would hope that the grade would have been F, even under modern grade inflation. I certainly would affix that grade to such inexcusably deficient work.

Reinhardt finds it incredible that the President was left out of the loop (as Sec. Sebelius has claimed). If true, he thinks this is one of the worst aspects of the overall failure:

As someone who has lectured on corporate governance and served on corporate boards, I find Secretary Sebelius’s statement astounding. Is this how the project was managed? They knew the Web site was not working and yet decided to go ahead with it anyway, without the president’s personal O.K. for so strategic and risky a decision?

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How Washington is Killing the Economy

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Photo Credit: APThe latest round of fiscal drama has sputtered to a temporary close, but the routine crises have one clear victim: the U.S. economy, which is once again losing altitude. And for the third year in a row, Washington gets much of the blame.

There’s not much hope for a quick turnaround.

The most recent slowdown — highlighted by poor job growth, softening corporate earnings and decimated confidence — comes just as Republicans and Democrats prepare to square off in a fresh fight over the federal budget with another potential shutdown looming in January and a renewed debt ceiling crisis possible in February.

Washington’s drag on the economy now springs from a multiplying array of sources, including the constant threat of devastating fiscal crisis, the blunt nature of the sequester spending cuts, the troubled roll-out of Obamacare and the now deeply strained relations with key economic allies over clandestine surveillance allegations.

Taken together, Washington’s toxic politics and poorly executed policies have all but ensured that fourth quarter growth comes in soft after forecasters initially predicted a strong close to the year. And they mean that 2014, which initially looked like a possible breakout year for the U.S. economy, now seems like it will be a dreary rerun of 2013 featuring sluggish growth, modest job creation and stagnant wages.

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