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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Miami man Confesses to Killing Wife on Facebook, Posts Picture of her Body (+video)

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Photo Credit: Tampa BayDerek Medina’s life was open to the world.

On YouTube, the 31-year-old South Miami man posted scores of videos of himself enjoying sports.

He wrote six online books with long-winded titles about spirituality, saving the world and hunting ghosts. Medina snapped photos of his arm tattoos, meals, boating trips and drinks poolside with his wife.

But on Thursday, Medina shocked many by making one last announcement on Facebook — he had killed his wife, Jennifer Alfonso, 26, before posting a photo of her twisted, bloodied body lying on a linoleum floor.

“I’m going to prison or death sentence for killing my wife. Love you guys. Miss you guys. Take care. Facebook people you’ll see me in the news,” Medina wrote in a Facebook post that remained public for hours Thursday evening before the site removed his profile page at the request of police.

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BofA Not Alone, JPMorgan Chase May Face Criminal Charges Over Mortgages

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Photo Credit: Forbes Federal regulators are having a busy summer as they go after the nation’s two biggest banks for mortgage securities they issued before the financial crisis.

JPMorgan Chase JPM -0.85% has revealed in its quarterly regulatory filing it’s being investigated by criminal and civil divisions of the U.S. Department of Justice.

The news comes just a day after Bank of America BAC +0.55% was hit with civil suits from the DoJ and SEC.

JPM, the nation’s largest bank, said it is responding to “parallel investigations being conducted by the Civil and Criminal Divisions of the United States Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of California relating to MBS offerings securitized and sold by the Firm and its subsidiaries.”

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IRS and FEC Colluding to Attack Conservatives?

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Photo Credit: WNDBy Bob Unruh

House Republicans suspect election officials joined with the Internal Revenue Service in a strategy that curbed the effectiveness of conservative organizations in the 2012 election.

The allegations were revealed in a letter from the House Committee on Oversight and Government Report, which has been holding hearings and seeking evidence about the extent of the IRS targeting of conservative and Christian organizations.

Hundreds of self-described “tea party” and “patriot” organizations had applications for tax-exempt status delayed, in some cases for years. They also were subjected to invasive, improper and probably illegal queries into private matters such as the content of their prayers and how they will vote.

The committee’s letter, dated Wednesday, is addressed to Ellen Weintraub, chairwoman of the Federal Election Commission.

“Documents recently produced by the committee demonstrate that FEC personnel communicated with IRS personnel about tax-exempt groups engaged in political activities,” the letter says. Read more from this story HERE.

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Photo Credit: WNDSurprise! IRS Assault on Churches Started with Holder

By Jack Minor

The seeds of the IRS targeting of conservative groups were planted by Eric Holder in 2001 when as deputy attorney general under President Bill Clinton he convinced incoming Attorney General John Ashcroft to seize the building of a conservative megachurch, says the church’s retired pastor.

“Our church was taken over by the IRS in 2001 based on the recommendations of Deputy Attorney General Eric Holder to incoming Bush Attorney General John Ashcroft,” said Greg Dixon, former pastor of the Indianapolis Baptist Temple.

“The church was the sacrificial lamb to pave the way for the future targeting of conservative groups. We were among the first victims of the IRS’s targeting of conservatives long before the news broke earlier this year,” he said.

Evidence that has arisen in the current IRS scandal shows the agency singled out tea party and other conservative groups for special scrutiny, including asking for the content of members’ prayers and demanding they promise not to protest outside Planned Parenthood clinics or to run for office.

While the IRS initially insisted the targeting was limited to a few rogue employees, evidence now shows orders came from the top to delay the approval of scores of tea party and conservative groups through two election cycles, including the 2012 campaign in which Barack Obama was reelected.

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Republicans Revive ‘Penny Plan’ as Sequester Alternative to Balance Budget

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Photo Credit: APAs Congress faces a fast-approaching deadline on passing a federal spending bill, Republican lawmakers are reviving a Tea Party-backed plan with a catchy title that they claim could balance the budget.

The so-called “Penny Plan” would, according to its sponsors, balance the federal budget in two years by using just a 1 percent reduction in spending.

The lawmakers are pitching the plan in the simplest terms — cutting a penny from every dollar the government spends so that spending will soon equal revenue. They cast the plan as a pick-and-choose alternative to the sequester’s across-the-board budget cuts.

“Everybody should be able to live with one percent less in order to help bring this country back from the brink of catastrophic failure,” bill sponsor and Wyoming Republican Sen. Mike Enzi said in submitting the legislation just before August recess.

Enzi is joined by fellow GOP Sens. Rand Paul, of Kentucky; John Barrasso, of Wyoming; Jim Risch, of Idaho; David Vitter, of Louisiana; Johnny Isakson, of Georgia; and Marco Rubio, of Florida. Republican Georgia Rep. Austin Scott introduced similar legislation in the House.

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