Pentagon Admits Christian Ministry Not a ‘Hate Group,’ Says Label Does Not Reflect Official Doctrine

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Photo Credit: APThe Pentagon has admitted that information used in an Army briefing that labeled the American Family Association (AFA) as a domestic hate group was not acquired from official sources and does not reflect Army doctrine.

Meanwhile, the president of the well-respected Christian ministry says his organization may file a defamation lawsuit against the military.

“We are probably going to be taking legal action,” said Tim Wildmon, president of one of the nation’s most prominent Christian ministries. “The Army has smeared us. They’ve defamed the American Family Association.”

The AFA was listed alongside domestic hate groups like the Ku Klux Klan, Neo-Nazis, the Black Panthers and the Nation of Islam during a briefing last week at Camp Shelby in Mississippi.

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Former San Diego Mayor Filner Pleads Guilty To Felony

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Photo Credit: APFormer San Diego Mayor Bob Filner, who resigned from the helm of California’s second-largest city after a string of sexual harassment allegations, pleaded guilty on Tuesday to charges of false imprisonment and battery involving three women, prosecutors said.

A former Democratic congressman who served only a brief mayoral tenure after being elected last year, Filner was charged with felony false imprisonment and two misdemeanor counts of battery, the San Diego Superior Court and state prosecutors said.

“This conduct was not only criminal, it was also an extreme abuse of power,” said state Attorney General Kamala Harris, who filed the complaint against Filner. “This prosecution is about consequence and accountability. No one is above the law.”

Under the terms of a plea agreement, Filner will serve three months of home confinement and will be on probation for three years, the attorney general said in a statement.

Filner resigned in August as part of a settlement with the city over how to handle a lawsuit filed by his former press secretary, Irene McCormack Jackson, who was among at least 18 women who accused the 71-year-old politician of making unwanted sexual advances. She is so far the only one to sue him.

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SecureDrop Project Will Pay To Install WikiLeaks-Style Anonymous Submission Systems for the Media

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Photo Credit: Forbes In an age of pervasive surveillance that makes no exception for the media, the idea of a WikiLeaks-style secure submission system for anonymous whistleblowers may be more important than ever. Now one group believes in those leaking tools so strongly that it’s willing to pay for mainstream media to install them.

On Tuesday the non-profit Freedom of the Press Foundation (FPF) announced the launch of SecureDrop, a piece of open-source software designed to serve as an anonymous submission systems for media organizations. And to encourage news outlets to install it, the Foundation has offered to send one of SecureDrop’s creators, security consultant James Dolan, to willing news outlets to help install it, in some cases even paying for the necessary hardware.

“We want to take all the pain out of this process so that they have no excuse but to use this technology. The barrier has been cost and the technical ability,” says Trevor Timm, the Freedom of the Press Foundation’s executive director. ”So we’re actually going to physically fly [Dolan] around the country to major media organizations to install this.”

SecureDrop, which like WikiLeaks depends on the anonymity software Tor to hide leakers’ identities, was developed from the open-source software DeadDrop, initially created by the late coder and activist Aaron Swartz along with Dolan and Wired editor Kevin Poulsen. The system was initially created to serve as a leak submission system for Wired, but was dropped after a management shakeup at the magazine and adopted instead by fellow Conde Nast publication the New Yorker under the name Strongbox and launched in May. The code behind that system has remained free and open-source, allowing any other media outlet to adopt it.

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High Stakes for Obama: No Deal Means First Modern President to Default

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Photo Credit: APFor President Barack Obama, the outcome of this week’s fiscal fights with Republicans could have broad consequences for his stalled second-term agenda.

A favorable deal for the White House might give Obama an opening to marginalize the tea party Republicans who have tried to win concessions from him in order to reopen the government and raise the nation’s debt ceiling. But if no agreement is reached by Thursday’s debt limit deadline, Obama will become the first modern president to preside over a government default, a dubious distinction with potentially calamitous economic consequences that could consume the White House for the foreseeable future.

Another, perhaps more likely, option: Obama ends up signing short term bills that keep Washington in the never-ending cycle of deadline-driven budget battles. For Obama, that would mean fiscal issues would keep consuming the oxygen in the nation’s capital at a time when he is already watching his window for passing significant domestic legislation close.

“It’s a ticking clock,” Julian Zelizer, a political historian at Princeton University, said of presidential second terms. “He’s already into the red zone in terms of getting things done.”

On Monday, Obama and Senate leaders indicated they were optimistic that an agreement might be at hand to prevent a national financial default and reopen the government after a two-week partial shutdown. Officials in both parties were discussing a proposal to raise the debt ceiling through the spring, as well as a shorter deal to fund the government for several weeks.

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US Army Defines Christian Ministry as ‘Domestic Hate Group’

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Photo Credit: Fox News Several dozen U.S. Army active duty and reserve troops were told last week that the American Family Association, a well-respected Christian ministry, should be classified as a domestic hate group because the group advocates for traditional family values.

The briefing was held at Camp Shelby in Mississippi and listed the AFA alongside domestic hate groups like the Ku Klux Klan, Neo-Nazis, the Black Panthers and the Nation of Islam.

A soldier who attended the briefing contacted me and sent me a photograph of a slide show presentation that listed AFA as a domestic hate group. Under the AFA headline is a photograph of Westboro Baptist Church preacher Fred Phelps holding a sign reading “No special law for f***.”

American Family Association has absolutely no affiliation with the controversial church group known for picketing the funerals of American servicemembers.

“I had to show Americans what our soldiers are now being taught,” said the soldier who asked not to be identified. “I couldn’t just let this one pass.”

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Catholic Priest Threatened with Arrest If Voluntarily Conducts Mass On Navy Base During Shutdown

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Photo Credit: WNDIn what has been described as “an astonishing attack on religious freedom,” Catholics at a Navy base were banned from attending worship services because of the partial shutdown of the federal government.

In response, the Thomas More Law Center announced it has filed a lawsuit over the orders at Kings Bay Naval Submarine Base in Georgia.

The legal team said a Catholic priest who serves the community on the military base “has been prohibited from even volunteering to celebrate Holy Mass without pay and was told that if he violated that order, he could be subject to arrest.”

Without explanation, however, Protestant services continued.

“This is an astonishing attack on religious freedom by the federal government and the latest affront toward the military since the beginning of the shutdown,” said a report by the Thomas More Law Center.

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Unions Poised to Win Delay of ObamaCare Tax in Budget Deal

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Photo Credit: majunznkLabor unions are poised to score the delay of an ObamaCare tax in the bipartisan budget deal emerging in the Senate.

The bargain under negotiation would make small adjustments to the healthcare law, including delaying the law’s reinsurance fee for one year. The three-year tax is meant to generate revenue that will stabilize premiums on the individual market as sick patients enter the risk pool.

The tax applies to all group health plans, but unions argue it will raise their healthcare costs while providing them no benefit.

The reinsurance tax figured prominently in discussions at a recent AFL-CIO convention, where workers passed a resolution demanding changes to ObamaCare.

The White House recently denied labor’s top priority on ObamaCare, ruling that union health plans are not eligible for the new subsidies because they are already helped by the tax code.

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NSA Collects Millions of E-mail Address Books Globally

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Photo Credit: Social BIz SolutionsThe National Security Agency is harvesting hundreds of millions of contact lists from personal e-mail and instant messaging accounts around the world, many of them belonging to Americans, according to senior intelligence officials and top-secret documents provided by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden.

The collection program, which has not been disclosed before, intercepts e-mail address books and “buddy lists” from instant messaging services as they move across global data links. Online services often transmit those contacts when a user logs on, composes a message, or synchronizes a computer or mobile device with information stored on remote servers.

Rather than targeting individual users, the NSA is gathering contact lists in large numbers that amount to a sizable fraction of the world’s e-mail and instant messaging accounts. Analysis of that data enables the agency to search for hidden connections and to map relationships within a much smaller universe of foreign intelligence targets.

During a single day last year, the NSA’s Special Source Operations branch collected 444,743 e-mail address books from Yahoo, 105,068 from Hotmail, 82,857 from Facebook, 33,697 from Gmail and 22,881 from unspecified other providers, according to an internal NSA PowerPoint presentation. Those figures, described as a typical daily intake in the document, correspond to a rate of more than 250 million a year.

Each day, the presentation said, the NSA collects contacts from an estimated 500,000 buddy lists on live-chat services as well as from the inbox displays of Web-based e-mail accounts.

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Feds Reviewed Only One Bid for Obamacare Website Design

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Photo Credit: Washington Examiner Federal officials considered only one firm to design the Obamacare health insurance exchange website that has performed abysmally since its Oct. 1 debut.

Rather than open the contracting process to a competitive public solicitation with multiple bidders, officials in the Department of Health and Human Services’ Centers for Medicare and Medicaid accepted a sole bidder, CGI Federal, the U.S. subsidiary of a Canadian company with an uneven record of IT pricing and contract performance.

CMS officials are tight-lipped about why CGI was chosen or how it happened. They also refuse to say if other firms competed with CGI, or if there was ever a public solicitation for building Healthcare.gov, the backbone of Obamacare’s problem-plagued web portal.

Instead, it appears they used what amounts to a federal procurement system loophole to award the work to the Canadian firm.

CGI was one of 16 companies that had been qualified by HHS during President George W. Bush’s second term to deliver, without public competition, a variety of hardware, software and communication products and services.

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Why College Costs Will Soon Plunge

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Photo Credit: AP“My goal,” says the candidate, “is a healthier America. That is why I am setting an ambitious target of sending 1 million more Americans to the hospital in the next five years. To make sure they get there, I am announcing a new, low-interest loan program to help them pay for their treatment. This will ensure that hospital costs stay within reach of the typical American family.”

If you heard a speech like that, you probably would start scratching your head. Sure, people with acute medical conditions need hospital care. But most people don’t have to lie for weeks in a hospital bed to get healthy. And lavishing more money on hospital care will simply drive the price up — just as giving everyone a $2,000 vehicle subsidy would jack up prices for cars and trucks.

Yet this is what politicians routinely propose for higher education: Send more people to college, and give them more money to help them get there. Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell proposed cranking out 100,000 more college degrees in 15 years. Around the same time, President Barack Obama said he wanted the U.S. to have “the highest proportion of college graduates in the world” — which would more than double enrollment. His new higher-ed plan calls for yet more financial aid….

Trend lines like these cannot go on — and they won’t. But not because of politicians’ efforts to rein in college costs. College costs will drop because of market forces politicians will be powerless to stop.

In his new book Average Is Over, George Mason University economist Tyler Cowen explains why: Thanks to the Internet, you no longer have to sit in a lecture hall to get a superb education. And you certainly don’t have to shell out ungodly sums for five-star dormitories, Olympic-level gymnasiums and sushi bars.

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