Teen Convicted of Killing Baby Gets Life in Prison

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Photo Credit: AP

Photo Credit: AP

A Georgia teen convicted of fatally shooting a baby in a stroller was sentenced Thursday to spend the rest of his life in prison with no chance of parole after the grieving mother asked a judge to punish the gunman for taking “the love of my life.”

De’Marquise Elkins, 18, stood silent and showed no emotion as he was sentenced in a courtroom less than two weeks after a jury found him guilty of murder in the slaying of 13-month-old Antonio Santiago during a robbery attempt.

“His first word was never heard. His first sentence was never said,” Sherry West, the baby’s mother, said through tears on the witness stand as she read a statement made to rhyme like a poem or a nursery rhyme. “He never got to sleep in a toddler bed.”

The baby was in his stroller and out for a walk with his mother when he was shot between the eyes March 21 in the Georgia coastal city of Brunswick. West and a younger teenager charged as an accomplice testified at trial that Elkins killed the baby after his mother refused to give up her purse.

Elkins was spared the death penalty because the killing occurred when he was 17, which the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled is too young to face capital punishment. Under Georgia law, the only possible punishments for Elkins were life with or without a chance of parole.

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Student Destroys 9/11 Memorial Flag Display, Citing US Imperialism

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Photo Credit: Young America's Foundation

Photo Credit: Young America’s Foundation

Protesters at Middlebury College in Vermont uprooted 2,977 flags that were part of a 9/11 memorial display on Wednesday.

The flags symbolize each of the 2,977 people who died in the terrorist attacks on September 11th, 2001. The College Republicans and Democrats have jointly planted the flags in a field on campus every year for the last decade.

But this year, Ben Kinney — president of the College Republicans — happened to be walking by the display as 5 protesters finished removing the last of the flags and placing them in trash bags.

“At first, I thought the group was comprised of College Democrats helping put the flags away before the rain rolled in, but then I realized what they were doing,” said Kinney in a statement to The Middlebury Campus.

The protesters — at least one of whom was a student — explained that they were “confiscating” the flags in order to take a stand against U.S. imperialism.

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Multiple NASA Websites Hacked

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Photo Credit: NASA

Photo Credit: NASA

Nearly a dozen NASA websites run from the heart of Silicon Valley were hacked on Tuesday and remain offline days later, following a politically motivated digital broadside against the space agency.

“My understanding is the entire NASA Ames Center had a hack attack that took the website down,” spokesman JD Harrington told FoxNews.com. However, another NASA spokesman later denied that the entire center was taken down, instead saying that the attack was of a much smaller scope.

The Ames Center in Mountain View, Calif., where scientists once worked on the Viking and Pioneer spacecraft, currently houses high-tech facilities for NASA and others; Google leases 42.2 acres at Ames for a planned 1.2 million square foot of office and R&D space, for example.

A group calling itself BMPoC took credit for the hack, saying it had taken down the sites to protest U.S. cyberintelligence activities.

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NSA Disguised Itself as Google to Spy, say Reports

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Photo Credit: CNET

Photo Credit: CNET

Here’s one of the latest tidbits on the NSA surveillance scandal (which seems to be generating nearly as many blog items as there are phone numbers in the spy agency’s data banks).

Earlier this week, Techdirt picked up on a passing mention in a Brazilian news story and a Slate article to point out that the US National Security Agency had apparently impersonated Google on at least one occasion to gather data on people. (Mother Jones subsequently pointed out Techdirt’s point-out.)

Brazilian site Fantastico obtained and published a document leaked by Edward Snowden, which diagrams how a “man in the middle attack” involving Google was apparently carried out.

A technique commonly used by hackers, a MITM attack involves using a fake security certificate to pose as a legitimate Web service, bypass browser security settings, and then intercept data that an unsuspecting person is sending to that service. Hackers could, for example, pose as a banking Web site and steal passwords.

The technique is particularly sly because the hackers then use the password to log in to the real banking site and then serve as a “man in the middle,” receiving requests from the banking customer, passing them on to the bank site, and then returning requested info to the customer — all the while collecting data for themselves, with neither the customer nor the bank realizing what’s happening. Such attacks can be used against e-mail providers too.

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Emails Show IRS’ Lois Lerner Specifically Targeted Tea Party

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Photo Credit: Tea Party

Photo Credit: Tea Party

Lois G. Lerner, the woman at the center of the Internal Revenue Service scandal over special scrutiny of conservative groups, specifically targeted tea party applications and directed that they be held up in 2011 in order to come up with an agency policy, according to several of Ms. Lerner’s emails released by a House committee Thursday.

In one 2011 email, Ms. Lerner specifically calls the tea party applications for tax-exempt status problematic, which seems to counter Democrats’ arguments that tea party groups weren’t targeted.

“Tea Party Matter very dangerous,” Ms. Lerner wrote in the 2011 email, saying that those applications could end up being the “vehicle to go to court” to get more clarity on a 2010 Supreme Court ruling on campaign finance rules.

In another email, from 2012, Ms. Lerner acknowledges that the agency’s handling of the tax-exempt applications had been bungled at the beginning, though she said steps had been taken to correct problems.

“It is what it is,” she wrote in the email, released Thursday by the Ways and Means Committee. “Although the original story isn’t as pretty as we’d like, once we learned [that we were] off track, we have done what we can to change the process, better educate our staff and move the cases. So, we will get dinged, but we took steps before the ‘dinging’ to make things better and we have written procedures.”

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Greens, Lobbyists and Partisans Helping Obama’s Fed Energy Commission Pick Move Through Senate

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Photo Credit: AP

Photo Credit: AP

President Obama’s nominee to head the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission is coordinating his campaign with two lobbyists for energy companies, a Democratic strategy firm and several other green-technology strategists, according to emails that show an unprecedented effort to gain a position on the obscure board.

Ron Binz, the former head of Colorado’s Public Utilities Commission, has become an unlikely nomination battleground in the Senate, where commissioners for FERC, a regulatory agency that oversees the interstate transmission of electricity, oil and gas, are usually accepted without any problems.

Mr. Binz’s opponents say the lobbying effort is evidence that environmentalists are trying to expand Mr. Obama’s global-warming agenda to FERC, a quasi-judicial independent agency that had until recently had shied away from the contentious debate.

The new emails, which The Washington Times obtained from a pressure group that requested them under federal open-records laws, indicte that FERC employees worked closely with lobbyists, strategists and an employee of the Energy Foundation, a non-profit that is supposed to be limited in what lobbying it is allowed to do.

The coordination has become an issue because it raises questions about who, exactly, is backing Mr. Binz and why lobbyists are involved.

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New Poll Shows GOP Shifting in Fascinating New Direction

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Photo Credit: AP

Photo Credit: AP

Republicans in record numbers moving toward the ideals and principles of libertarianism, according to a new poll by released by the grassroots group FreedomWorks.

The survey of all registered voters, which was conducted last month, found that a full 78 percent of Republican and GOP-leaning voters self-identify as being fiscally conservative and socially moderate

The results of the survey were first shared with POLITICO.

The poll found that its Republican and independent-leaning respondents aren’t suddenly advocating legalized marijuana and instructing people to read “The Fountainhead.” Rather, as POLITICO’s James Hohman notes, many self-identified Republicans are simply falling in line with traditional libertarian views on limited government.

This comes after years of GOP domination by “defense hawks” and “social conservatives.”

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Sen. Lee: GOP Scheme to Both Defund AND Fund Obamacare ‘Disgraceful’ (+audio)

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photo credit: gage skidmore

photo credit: gage skidmore

In an interview on the nationally syndicated Mark Levin Show yesterday, Senator Mike Lee (R-Utah) slammed the Republican-led initiative to simultaneously propose legislation to fund and defund Obamacare.

Lee rhetorically asked Levin, “With Republicans like these, who needs Democrats?”

Lee explained that Republican leadership in the House of Representatives is putting forward two different legislative proposals in one single vote.

One would defund Obamacare. The other would be a continuing resolution that would fund everything in government, including Obamacare.

This would allow House Republicans to vote both to fund and defund the president’s signature health law simultaneously, according to Lee.

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Tea Party Increasingly Unhappy with GOP Leadership

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Photo Credit: Pew Research

Photo Credit: Pew Research

As lawmakers return for what promises to be a busy fall session, GOP congressional leaders face mounting disapproval among Tea Party Republicans. Just 27% of Republicans and GOP leaners who agree with the Tea Party approve of the job Republican leaders in Congress are doing, compared with 71% who disapprove.

The job rating of GOP leaders among Tea Party Republicans has fallen 15 points since February, from 42% to 27%. Disapproval has risen from 54% to 71% over this period. There has been no similar decline among Republicans who do not agree with the Tea Party. Currently, 42% of non-Tea Party Republicans and Republican leaners approve of how GOP leaders in Congress are handling their job, which is little changed over the past year.

This internal dissent contributes to the lower job ratings Republican leaders receive from the public when compared with Democratic congressional leaders. The latest national survey by the Pew Research Center, conducted Sept. 4-8 among 1,506 adults, finds that just 24% of the public approves of Republican leaders’ job performance, while somewhat more (33%) approve of the job of Democratic congressional leaders.

This modest advantage for Democratic leaders stems from the substantially more positive job ratings they receive from their own base: 57% of Democrats and Democratic leaners approve of how Democratic congressional leaders are handling their job. That compares with just 36% of Republicans and Republican leaners who approve of the job their party leaders are doing. Democratic and Republican leaders get similarly low job ratings from members of the opposition party.

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Iraq War Vet, now Democratic Congresswoman Strongly Opposes Military Strikes Against Syria

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Picture Tulsi GabbardDemocratic congresswoman and Iraq War veteran Rep. Tulsi Gabbard of Hawaii stated her opposition earlier this week to punitive military strikes against Syria, underscoring the Obama Administration’s struggle in trying to rally even members of his own party to back the use of force.

After participating in public and private sessions on Capitol Hill, Gabbard stated a U.S. military strike would be a serious mistake.

“As a soldier, I understand that before taking any military action, our nation must have a clear tactical objective, a realistic strategy, the necessary resources to execute that strategy, including the support of the American people, and an exit plan,” Gabbard said in a statement. “The proposed military action against Syria fails to meet any of these criteria.”

Gabbard, who served near Baghdad for a year and was a medical operations specialist, is a member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee.

The congresswoman joins other Democrats from Obama’s native state, including Sen. Brian Schatz and Rep. Colleen Hanabusa, in opposing aggressive U.S. military intervention in the Syrian civil war.

Rep. Gabbard explains her opposition to Greta Van Susteran “On the Record.”

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