U.S. Prison Populations Decline, Reflecting New Approach to Crime

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Photo Credit: Tim Pearce, Los GatosThe prison population in the United States dropped in 2012 for the third consecutive year, according to federal statistics released on Thursday, in what criminal justice experts said was the biggest decline in the nation’s recent history, signaling a shift away from an almost four-decade policy of mass imprisonment.

The number of inmates in state and federal prisons decreased by 1.7 percent, to an estimated 1,571,013 in 2012 from 1,598,783 in 2011, according to figures released by the Bureau of Justice Statistics, an arm of the Justice Department. Although the percentage decline appeared small, the fact that it followed decreases in 2011 and 2010 offers persuasive evidence of what some experts say is a “sea change” in America’s approach to criminal punishment.

“This is the beginning of the end of mass incarceration,” said Natasha Frost, associate dean of Northeastern University’s school of criminology and criminal justice.

About half the 2012 decline — 15,035 prisoners — occurred in California, which has decreased its prison population in response to a Supreme Court order to relieve prison overcrowding. But eight other states, including New York, Florida, Virginia and North Carolina, showed substantial decreases, of more than 1,000 inmates, and more than half the states reported some drop in the number of prisoners. (Figures for three states were estimated because they had not submitted data in time for the report.) The population of federal prisons increased slightly, but at a slower rate than in previous years, the report found.

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Costco backs Obama, Obama touts Costco

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In his nationally televised speech Wednesday, Obama sang the praises of retail giant Costco, whose founder Jim Sinegal gave Obama the maximum contribution in two elections and hosted fundraisers for his reelection. Costco has also lobbied for many of Obama’s legislative priorities, including higher minimum wage, Obamacare, and price controls on financial processing fees…

Sinegal contributed the maximum $35,800 to the Obama Victory Fund last year and also held a $35,800-a-plate fundraiser for Obama. In the 2008 election, Sinegal gave $43,500 to the DNC (here and here), which is, in effect, a contribution to Obama. On top of that, the Costco founder gave the maximum $2,300 to Obama’s campaign. So that’s more than $80,000 personally to Obama. Add in $100,000 to Obama’s SuperPAC, Priorities USA, plus the $2 million the July 2012 fundraiser reportedly brought Obama, and you’ve got a healthy amount of support…

Sinegal lobbied for Obamacare in 2009. His company has supported a higher minimum wage. Both of these regulations impose proportionally greater costs on the company’s smaller competitors — and almost every competitor is smaller, because Costco is the nation’s No. 2 retailer behind only Wal-Mart. Sinegal also spoke in Obama’s favor at the 2012 convention.

Costco’s founder did all these favors for Obama over five years, and on Wednesday, Obama returned the favor:

We’ll need our businesses, the best in the world, to pressure Congress to invest in our future, and set an example by providing decent wages and salaries to their own employees. And I’ll highlight the ones that do just that – companies like Costco, which pays good wages and offers good benefits; or the Container Store, which prides itself on training its workers and on employee satisfaction – because these companies prove that this isn’t just good for their business, it’s good for America.

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Feds Move to Seize Web Firms’ User Account Passwords

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Photo Credit: James MartinThe U.S. government has demanded that major Internet companies divulge users’ stored passwords, according to two industry sources familiar with these orders, which represent an escalation in surveillance techniques that has not previously been disclosed.

If the government is able to determine a person’s password, which is typically stored in encrypted form, the credential could be used to log in to an account to peruse confidential correspondence or even impersonate the user. Obtaining it also would aid in deciphering encrypted devices in situations where passwords are reused.

“I’ve certainly seen them ask for passwords,” said one Internet industry source who spoke on condition of anonymity. “We push back.”

A second person who has worked at a large Silicon Valley company confirmed that it received legal requests from the federal government for stored passwords. Companies “really heavily scrutinize” these requests, the person said. “There’s a lot of ‘over my dead body.'”

Some of the government orders demand not only a user’s password but also the encryption algorithm and the so-called salt, according to a person familiar with the requests. A salt is a random string of letters or numbers used to make it more difficult to reverse the encryption process and determine the original password. Other orders demand the secret question codes often associated with user accounts.

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Obama Hosts Ramadan Dinner at White House

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Photo Credit: ABCPresident Barack Obama saluted Muslim Americans on Thursday for their contributions in helping build the nation as business entrepreneurs, technology innovators and pioneers in medicine.

Obama spoke at a White House dinner he hosted to celebrate the Islamic holy month of Ramadan. The meal, or iftar, breaks the day of fasting when Muslim families and communities eat together after sunset.

Obama said Ramadan is “a time of reflection, a chance to demonstrate ones devotion to God through prayer and through fasting, but it’s also a time for family and friends to come together.”

He said it is a White House tradition to celebrate sacred days of various faiths, adding that these occasions celebrate diversity that defines the country and reaffirms the freedom to worship.

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College Republicans, Deemed Security Threat, Denied Admittance to Obama Speech

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Photo Credit: The College FixTen College Republicans were dubbed a security threat and refused admittance to President Barack Obama’s speech at the University of Central Missouri on Wednesday.

Despite the fact that the students had tickets to the event, security personnel turned them away at the door to the recreation center where Obama gave a speech on economic policy, telling the group it wasn’t about their politics but the president’s safety, State Treasurer of the College Republicans Courtney Scott told The College Fix.

The students, some of whom donned Tea Party T-Shirts and others who wore patriotic or Republican-inspired clothing, had protested the president earlier in the day on campus, but had put away their signs and said they were ready to simply listen to Obama when security shut them down – and even told them to leave the vicinity and stay several hundred yards away from the rec center.

The students had waited in a long line and under the hot sun to wind their way to the front of the line two hours in advance of Obama’s scheduled 5:30 p.m. remarks. Still, they were rejected.

“It just didn’t make any sense,” Scott told The Fix. “A lot of us traveled several hours to watch the speech. We were very disappointed not to be able to attend.”

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GOP Feuds Over Obamacare Funding

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Photo Credit: APBy Manu Raju and Jake Sherman

A brewing Republican versus Republican fight over whether to use a government funding measure to choke off Obamacare is splitting the party ahead of this fall’s budget battles.

A growing number of Republicans are rejecting calls from leading conservatives, including Sens. Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz and Rand Paul, to defund the president’s health care law in the resolution to keep the government running past Sept. 30. The rift exposes an emerging divide over how the GOP can best achieve its No. 1 goal — to repeal Obamacare — while highlighting the spreading fears that Republicans would lose a public relations war if the dispute leads to a government shutdown in the fall.

The debate is happening behind closed doors and over Senate lunches, as well as during a frank meeting Wednesday with House leaders in Speaker John Boehner’s suite where fresh concerns were aired about the party’s strategy. On Thursday, the dispute began to spill into public view, most notably when three Senate Republicans — including Minority Whip John Cornyn — withdrew their signatures from a conservative letter demanding defunding Obamacare as a condition for supporting the government funding measure.

Sen. Richard Burr (R-N.C.) called the push to defund the law through the continuing resolution the “dumbest idea” he had ever heard. Read more from this story HERE.

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Photo Credit: Reuters House GOP-ers: Defund Obamacare in CR

By Jake Sherman and John Bresnahan

More than 60 Republicans have signed a letter urging Speaker John Boehner to defund Obamacare when Congress funds the government in September.

The letter, being circulated by the office of freshman Rep. Mark Meadows, doesn’t explicitly say that supporters will vote against a government funding bill if it does not strip funding for Obamacare. But it says that signers of the letter are “urging [Boehner and Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.)] to defund the implementation and enforcement of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act in any relevant appropriations bill brought to the House floor in the 113th Congress, including any continuing appropriations bill.”

“In light of the Administration’s recent delay of the employer mandate and the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) scandal, it is imperative, now more than ever, that Congress do everything in its power to halt the implementation of the healthcare law,” Meadows writes. “It is entirely unacceptable that the IRS, a government agency that actively discriminates against Americans, is in charge of implementing a law that Americans do not want.” Read more from this story HERE.

FBI Ignored Warnings About Boston Bombers’ Radical Mosque

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Photo Credit: The Daily CallerFederal Bureau of Investigation officials ignored warnings about the radical origins and nature of the mosque frequented by the Tsarnaev brothers for years before this April’s deadly Boston Marathon bombings.

Outgoing FBI Director Robert Mueller has also said that although the FBI visited the mosque in the past — as part of its “outreach” to the Muslim community — he was unaware of the Islamist leanings of the Islamic Society of Boston (ISB), which runs the Boston bombers’ house of worship.

But the FBI was warned nearly four years prior to the bombings that the ISB was a nest of Islamic radicalism.

On May 1, 2009 our organization, Americans for Peace and Tolerance (APT), briefed representatives of the Boston FBI office on the ISB mosques’ affiliation with Islamic extremism. Nevertheless, the FBI continues to claim it was surprised by the background of the ISB.

In a June appearance before the House Judiciary Committee, Mueller described how it took four days after the Boston Marathon bombings for his agency to canvass the Tsarnaev brothers’ controversial mosque.

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Shock: Study Finds Washington D.C. the Least Honest Place in America

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Photo Credit: CorbisGeorge Washington believed honesty was the most enviable quality in a human being, but the residents of the city that bears his name clearly don’t agree.

People in Washington D.C. are by far the most dishonest in America, according to a new study, while their cousins in Hawaii and Alabama are basically saints.

Beverage company Honest Tea went to every U.S. state earlier this month and set up 61 unmanned kiosks offering tea for $1. Tea drinkers were instructed to place their buck in a box nearby.

But only eight in 10 beverage guzzlers in the nation’s capital paid for their tea, while the other 20 per cent of people skipped out on the minimal amount.

The other states where you should hold on to your purse were West Virginia where only 85 per cent of participants paid for their tea, followed by Texas and Kentucky at 87 per cent.

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The Explosive Secret Huma is Hiding

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Photo Credit: WNDWith the news media now profiling New York City mayoral candidate Anthony Weiner’s wife, there is a glaring part of Huma Abedin’s personal story that is not being told – her ties to the Muslim Brotherhood and other Islamic supremacists.

The connections not only extend to her mother and father, who are both deeply tied to al-Qaida fronts, but to Abedin herself, as WND previously reported in a series of exposes.

Abedin’s purported forgiveness of Weiner’s extramarital sexting is regarded as central to the politician’s continued candidacy.

The New York Times claimed Abedin was “eager to end a difficult period of social exile” and “a main architect of her husband’s rehabilitative journey, shaping his calculated comeback.”

Abedin has played a visible role in Weiner’s campaign and has been instrumental the effort to portray her husband as rehabilitated, leading to significant backlash from critics.

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College Enrollment Falls as Economy Recovers

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Photo Credit: William Widmer The long enrollment boom that swelled American colleges — and helped drive up their prices — is over, with grim implications for many schools.

College enrollment fell 2 percent in 2012-13, the first significant decline since the 1990s, but nearly all of that drop hit for-profit and community colleges; now, signs point to 2013-14 being the year when traditional four-year, nonprofit colleges begin a contraction that will last for several years. The college-age population is dropping after more than a decade of sharp growth, and many adults who opted out of a forbidding job market and went back to school during the recession have been drawn back to work by the economic recovery.

Hardest hit are likely to be colleges that do not rank among the wealthiest or most prestigious, and are heavily dependent on tuition revenue, raising questions about their financial health — even their survival.

“There are many institutions that are on the margin, economically, and are very concerned about keeping their doors open if they can’t hit their enrollment numbers,” said David A. Hawkins, the director of public policy and research at the National Association for College Admission Counseling, which has more than 1,000 member colleges.

The most competitive colleges remain unaffected, but gaining admission to middle-tier institutions will most likely get easier.

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