Busted: AP Caught Covering for Obama’s Geography Fail

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After being widely criticized for editing out President Barack Obama’s geography gaffe made during his late-night TV interview with Jay Leno, the Associated Press has responded to public pressure and issued a thorough correction regarding its initial story.

“In an Aug. 7 story on President Barack Obama’s comments on the need to deepen U.S. harbors, The Associated Press wrongly inserted an interpretive phrase in parentheses into a quote by Obama,” the AP writes.

Here is the altered quote in question:

“If we don’t deepen our ports all along the Gulf – (and in) places like Charleston, S.C., or Savannah, Ga., or Jacksonville, Fla. – if we don’t do that, these ships are going to go someplace else and we’ll lose jobs.”

Many sharp viewers were quick to point out that neither Charleston, S.C., nor Savannah, Ga., or even Jacksonville, Fla., are located along the Gulf. Clearly, adding the “(and in)” alters the statement in a fundamental way, making the statement seem like it wasn’t a gaffe at all.

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IRS Agent: Tax Agency is Still Targeting Tea Party Groups

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Photo Credit: Fibonacci BlueIn a remarkable admission that is likely to rock the Internal Revenue Service again, testimony released Thursday by House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Dave Camp reveals that an agent involved in reviewing tax exempt applications from conservative groups told a committee investigator that the agency is still targeting Tea Party groups, three months after the IRS scandal erupted..

In closed door testimony before the House Ways & Means Committee, the unidentified IRS agent said requests for special tax status from Tea Party groups is being forced into a special “secondary screening” because the agency has yet to come up with new guidance on how to judge the tax status of the groups.

In a transcript from the committee provided to Secrets, a Ways & Means investigator asked: “If you saw — I am asking this currently, if today if a Tea Party case, a group — a case from a Tea Party group came in to your desk, you reviewed the file and there was no evidence of political activity, would you potentially approve that case? Is that something you would do?”

The agent said, “At this point I would send it to secondary screening, political advocacy.”

The committee staffer then said, “So you would treat a Tea Party group as a political advocacy case even if there was no evidence of political activity on the application. Is that right?” The agent admitted, “Based on my current manager’s direction, uh-huh.”

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Scandal Watch: Issa Expands IRS Targeting Investigation to FEC

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Photo Credit: TownHall Did officials at the Federal Election Commission collude with the IRS to unfairly target and abuse conservative groups? National Review drew attention to this potential angle last week, and now the House Oversight Committee is on the case. A “phony scandal” creeps closer to another federal agency, and CNN has the report:

House Oversight Committee Chairman Darrell Issa demanded Wednesday that the Federal Election Commission turn over records of more than five years of communications with the Internal Revenue Service — a move that significantly expands the California Republican’s ongoing probe of alleged federal targeting of conservative groups. In a letter to FEC Chairman Ellen Weintraub — a Democrat — Issa cited CNN reporting on Monday that raises “the prospect of inappropriate coordination between the IRS and the FEC about tax-exempt entities.” Among other things, Issa asked for records of all communications between the IRS and the FEC dating back to the start of 2008. He also requested records of any FEC discussions relating to tax-exempt applications or organizations since 2008.

[Issa’s] letter came after Don McGahn, the vice chairman of the FEC and a Republican, told CNN that he saw an e-mail from an FEC investigator to Lois Lerner, the former head of the IRS division responsible for reviewing applications from various groups for tax-exempt status. The investigator asked Lerner, herself a former FEC employee, to discuss the status of the American Future Fund, a conservative political advocacy group. McGahn noted that after Lerner was contacted, the IRS sent a questionnaire to the American Future Fund. Lerner, the figure at the center of the congressional investigation into alleged IRS targeting of conservative groups seeking tax-exempt status, invoked her Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination when called to testify before Issa’s panel in May. “Dealing with Lois Lerner is probably out of the ordinary,” McGahn said, stressing that FEC commissioners had not given their staffers permission to reach out to the IRS on the matter, a step typically required for such inquiries.

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Ex-Border Patrol Agents Warn: Politicians Helping Cartels in U.S.

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Photo Credit: Reuters In an open letter to the public in late July, several retired Border Patrol agents wrote on behalf of the National Association of Former Border Patrol Officers to warn that Mexican drug cartels are actively operating inside the United States spending millions every year to try to build their networks here. They argued that American politicians are protecting their activities as well.

“Transnational criminal enterprises have annually invested millions of dollars to create and staff international drug and human smuggling networks inside the United States; thus it is no surprise that they continue to accelerate their efforts to get trusted representatives in place as a means to guarantee continued success,” the Border Patrol agents wrote.

“We must never lose sight of the fact that the United States is the market place for the bulk of transnational criminal businesses engaged in human trafficking and the smuggling, distribution and sale of illegal drugs. Organized crime on this scale we are speaking about cannot exist without political protection.”

Gene Wood, a retired Border Patrol agent who once ran the agency’s San Diego station; William Glenn, a retired Border Patrol southwest region Chief Intelligence Agent; and Claude Guyant, another retired Border Patrol agent who served in leadership positions throughout the agency in his time there, all signed the letter.

“Most heroin, cocaine, meth, and marijuana marketed in the United States is produced outside of our country, and then smuggled into the United States,” they wrote. “The placement of trusted foreign employees inside the United States is imperative to insure success in continuing to supply the demand, and returning the profits to the foreign organization. Members of these vicious transnational crime syndicates are already well established in more than 2,000 American cities and their numbers are increasing as networks expand and demands accelerate. These transnational criminals present a real and present danger to all Americans, and they live among us.”

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RNC Chief: GOP May Partner with Conservative Radio on 2016 Debates

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Photo Credit: APThe chairman of the Republican National Committee says he is open to having conservative talk radio hosts moderate 2016 GOP presidential primary debates, an expansion of his threat to boycott CNN and NBC if the networks go ahead with planned programs on former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

Reince Priebus, while speaking Wednesday on air with conservative radio host Andrea Tantaros, said partnering with conservative talk radio on debates was “a very good idea.”

“There’s a lot of good people out there [in talk radio] that can actually understand the base of the Republican Party, the primary voters,” Priebus said.

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GAO Opens Investigation into Planned Parenthood’s Use of Taxpayer Money

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Photo Credit: Fibonacci BlueThe non-partisan Government Accountability Office confirmed Thursday it is launching an investigation into how the country’s largest abortion provider spent millions of taxpayer dollars.

Planned Parenthood received more than a half billion dollars in federal funding last year. The GAO’s investigation is in response to a request made by more than 50 members of Congress in February who asked for a detailed report on how money is being used by Planned Parenthood and other abortion providers across the country.

Specifically, lawmakers want to know what procedures and services they provided and the number of people who were served and how much it cost.

The GAO’s investigation comes on the heels of a settlement involving a Texas affiliate of the organization, which paid $4.3 million in July to settle allegations of fraud in billing to a health program for the poor. The settlement was $3 million more than what had been announced earlier by the Texas Attorney General.

However, when finalizing the settlement, which included state and federal recovery money, Planned Parenthood strongly refuted claims it has frequently over-billed the system.

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Marc Faber: Look out! A 1987-Style Crash is Coming (+video)

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Photo Credit: DannelsThe S&P has rallied 19 percent in 2013, which is impressive by any measure. But the market did far better in 1987, when stocks added more than 30 percent from the beginning of the year to Aug. 8. The problem?

The market ended up tanking in the second half of that year—dropping 36 percent from the Aug. 25 peak to the October low, before closing out 1987 nearly exactly where it began.

And Marc Faber, publisher of the Gloom, Boom & Doom Report, predicts that the very same thing will happen in the back half of 2013.

“In 1987, we had a very powerful rally, but also earnings were no longer rising substantially, and the market became very overbought,” Faber said on Thursday’s “Futures Now.” “The final rally into Aug. 25 occurred with a diminishing number of stocks hitting 52-week highs. In other words, the new-high list was contracting, and we have several breaks in different stocks.”

Faber says that’s exactly where we find ourselves this August.


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Congressmen Move to Strip Military Paycheck From Fort Hood Shooter, Other Violent Offenders

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Photo Credit: APA coalition of Republican congressmen have introduced the Stop Pay for Violent Offenders Act, which would suspend pay for military service members if charged with a violent offense, including rape, sexual assault, or murder.

The bill comes as a response to the revelation that the alleged Fort Hood Massacre shooter, Nidal Hasan, has received over $278,000 worth of military pay while awaiting trial for charges of 13 counts of premeditated murder and 32 counts of attempted murder.

The representatives co-sponsoring the bill include Reps. Joe Barton (R-TX), Tim Griffin (R-AR), Tom Rooney (R-FL), and Frank Wolf, (R-VA).

“It is outrageous that taxpayers continue to pay an accused terrorist that killed more than a dozen people,” said U.S. Rep. Joe Barton, R-Texas. “Does anyone think this make sense? You are innocent until proven guilty in this country, but that doesn’t mean you should be rewarded while awaiting trial.”

Hasan’s trial, which began Tuesday, added fuel to the fire once Hasan, representing himself, admitted he was guilty of the charges held against him. During his brief opening statement, he confessed that he “is the shooter,” and explained that his motivation came from jihadist principles, which led him to shoot American soldiers to stop the ‘war on Islam.’

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Foreclosure ‘Solution’ Smacks of Crony Capitalism

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Photo Credit: human Events The real-estate market is reviving so quickly that talk of the busted housing bubble is passé. These days, when real estate investors talk about bubbles, they are referring to the new one that might now be inflating as home sellers sift through a frenzy of offers.

Even cities that bore the brunt of the foreclosure crisis are seeing massive price jumps and many homeowners who were “under water” in their mortgages can start talking “home equity” again.

Yet some government officials seem to live in a time warp as they pursue a murky deal to “solve” the dissipating housing crisis by marrying government power with private enrichment. The Bay Area city of Richmond is the first one to sign on to an idea that lenders fear could sweep the state.

City officials would use eminent domain — i.e., the power to take property by force, upon the payment of “fair compensation” to the owner — to wrest control of hundreds of mortgages held by private-equity firms. They’re not taking the actual property, mind you, but grabbing the notes held by those who financed the homes.

Advocates see it as a way to halt foreclosures, but foreclosures are working their way out of the system — so much so that first-time home buyers struggle to compete with cash-paying investment groups that are grabbing these properties.

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FBI Ties Chicago Representatives to Zimbabwe Lobbying

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Two Democratic lawmakers from Illinois worked to help lift economic sanctions against Zimbabwe after being targeted by an illegal $3.4 million lobbying scheme, according to FBI testimony unsealed in federal court.

Reps. Danny K. Davis and Bobby L. Rush, both of the Chicago area, were identified by Chicago media as “U.S. Representative A” and “U.S. Representative B” in the case, given that they were the only Illinois Democrats to have sponsored a failed 2010 resolution to lift sanctions against Zimbabwe cited in court documents.

Two other Chicagoians, Prince Asiel Ben Israel and C. Gregory Turner, are charged with accepting millions in illegal payments from Zimbabwe officials to lobby U.S. lawmakers to remove sanctions against the African nation. Such sanctions have been in place for almost a decade due to long-time President Robert Mugabe’s record of abuses of power.

Davis and Rush were not named in the affidavit filed by FBI Special Agent Steven D. Noldin, dated July 16.

According to the affidavit, U.S. Representative A sent a letter on official Congressional letterhead to Mugabe in August 2009 requesting a meeting, saying that he had been briefed by Ben Israel, “who continues to ‘inform and sensitive African American Leadership on not only the plight of the people of Zimbabwe, but on the economic and political direction of the African Continent.’”

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