North Carolina Lawmakers Pass Bill Allowing Concealed Handguns in Bars, Restaurants

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North Carolina is on the verge of letting handgun owners with concealed-carry permits bring their weapons into bars and restaurants and other places where alcohol is served, as long as the businesses don’t forbid it.

The bill, passed Tuesday by North Carolina’s House and Senate, is on the desk of Republican Gov. Pat McCrory, who is expected to sign it.

Backed by Republican lawmakers as well as gun rights groups, the law would also allow concealed-gun permit holders to bring weapons on hiking trails, playgrounds and other public recreation areas.

And it would let gun owners store weapons in their cars on the campuses of public schools or colleges.

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Senate Passes Student Loan Plan

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Photo Credit: APA plan to restore lower interest rates on most college loans won Senate approval Wednesday, despite objections from a bloc of Democrats who warned it could ultimately increase the cost of a degree for many students.

The legislation, which is supported by President Obama and is expected to swiftly pass the House, would reinstate a market-based approach for calculating rates, tying them to the 10-year Treasury note. The new rate for undergraduate Stafford loans would be about 3.8% this year, slightly above the rate that expired July 1.

The final vote was 81-18. Sixteen Democrats, joined by Sens. Mike Lee (R-Utah) and Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), voted no.

A market-based system had been in place until 2006, when the rate was fixed at 6.8%. It was later gradually reduced to 3.4%.

Democrats successfully mounted an election-year campaign in 2012 to extend that lower rate for an additional year. As rates were set to return to 6.8% this year, congressional Democrats pushed for another temporary extension. But they found their position weakened by a White House budget plan that supported a return to a market-based plan.

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Book: Jimmy Carter Targeted by US and Foreign Assassins

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Photo Credit: qtschlepperPotential assassins have threatened the life of Jimmy Carter multiple times since he left the White House in 1981, making the one-term Georgian the most threatened former president in history, according to a new book about John F. Kennedy and his assassination 50 years ago.

In “The Kennedy Half Century: The Presidency, Assassination, and Lasting Legacy of John F. Kennedy,” Carter told author Larry J. Sabato that he has faced at least three home-grown assassination attempts since returning to Georgia and is constantly warned by the U.S. Secret Service of personal threats during his frequent overseas travel.

“I have had two or three threats to my life after I came home from the White House,” Carter said in the highly-anticipated book due out October 22. “When I go on an overseas trip almost invariably, I get a report from the Secret Service that where I’m going is very dangerous,” he added in the book provided in advance to Secrets.

Read more from this story HERE.

Tea Party Candidate Announces Senate Bid Against ‘Mud-Slinging Mitch’ McConnell

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Frankfort, Kentucky – Kentucky businessman Matt Bevin announced he would be running against Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell in the Kentucky Republican senate primary.

“Never before in American political history has the leader of a party lost a primary election,” Bevin acknowledged in his remarks, given in the rotunda of the Kentucky state capitol. “Never. But never before has it been so important to make that happen.”

Flanked by his wife and nine children, Bevin attacked the GOP as being “a party that is as complicit in our impending deficit crisis as the Democratic party,” according to his prepared remarks.

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Obstruction? NSA Says It Can’t Search Its Own Emails

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Photo Credit: George Frey/GettyThe NSA is a “supercomputing powerhouse” with machines so powerful their speed is measured in thousands of trillions of operations per second. The agency turns its giant machine brains to the task of sifting through unimaginably large troves of data its surveillance programs capture.

But ask the NSA, as part of a freedom of information request, to do a seemingly simple search of its own employees’ email? The agency says it doesn’t have the technology.

“There’s no central method to search an email at this time with the way our records are set up, unfortunately,” NSA Freedom of Information Act officer Cindy Blacker told me last week.

The system is “a little antiquated and archaic,” she added.

I filed a request last week for emails between NSA employees and employees of the National Geographic Channel over a specific time period. The TV station had aired a friendly documentary on the NSA and I want to better understand the agency’s public-relations efforts.

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60-Foot Petition Demands End to Benghazi Secrets

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Photo Credit: Human EventsBy Gina Loudon.

It has been almost one year since the tragedy in Benghazi, Libya, where four Americans were killed and 10 others were injured in a terror attack.

Included in those murdered that day were U.S. Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens, and two Navy Seals, Glen Doherty and Tyrone Woods.

But a lot of other information isn’t yet known about the attack that day.

So Special Operations Veterans have presented a petition of 1,000 names calling for a Select Committee in Congress to “end the cover-up” of the Benghazi scandal.

The petition is 60 feet long, and it was unrolled near the Capitol building Tuesday. Read more from this story HERE.

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General can’t explain why forces not deployed to Benghazi

By Aaron Klein. Gen. Carter Ham, the former head of U.S. forces in Africa, has admitted that highly trained Special Forces were stationed just a few hours away from Benghazi on the night of the attack but were not deployed to Libya.

Ham’s explanation for why the military assets stationed abroad were not utilized during the attack raises more questions than it provides answers about his decision-making.

During the Sept. 11, 2012 Benghazi attack, command of the Special Forces reportedly was transferred from the military’s European command to Ham’s AFRICOM, or the United States Africa Command.

The Special Forces unit is known as C-110, or EUCOM CIF. It is a 40-man Special Ops force maintained for rapid response to emergencies such as the Benghazi attack.

Ham told the Aspen Security Forum that he first received word of the Benghazi attack from his command post in Stuttgart, Germany. The post is where EUCOM CIF is normally based. The night the of the Benghazi attack, the unit was on a training mission in Croatia, as first reported by Fox News and now reconfirmed by Ham.

Read more from this story HERE.

DHS Nominee Under Investigation for Allegedly Helping Hillary Clinton’s Brother

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Photo Credit: APAuthorities are investigating the man President Obama tapped to take over the second highest spot at the Department of Homeland Security for allegedly using his position and power to unfairly obtain U.S. visas for foreign investors in a company run by Hillary Clinton’s brother, FoxNews.com has confirmed.

Alejandro Mayorkas, director of the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, was named by Homeland Security’s Inspector General’s Office as a target in an investigation involving the foreign investor program run by USCIS, according to an email sent to lawmakers late Monday.

The investigation was opened in September 2012 following a referral from an FBI counterintelligence analyst. The probe was first reported by The Associated Press.

The investigation into Mayorkas is based on allegations he helped secure U.S. visas for Chinese businessmen after they had been denied by his own agency’s officials. The visas had been sought by Gulf Coast Funds Management, a financing company headed by then-Secretary of State Clinton’s brother Anthony Rodham, according to an aide to GOP Sen. Charles Grassley, who had received internal USCIS emails about the matter from a department whistle blower.

According to an email sent to lawmakers Monday, the IG’s office said, “At this point in our investigation, we do not have any findings of criminal misconduct.” The email did not specify any criminal allegations it might be investigating.

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Defunding Obamacare Already Sees Success

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Photo Credit: WNDBy Garth Kant

Whether the GOP should press for debilitating cuts to Obamacare – and risk a government shutdown – is the talk of Capitol Hill, but a most important point may be getting lost in the chatter: The strategy is already working.

A discussion with the “House Doctor” indicates the strategy to defund Obamacare is already largely in effect and has scored some significant victories.

Rep. Michael Burgess, R-Texas, is uniquely qualified to assess Obamacare after spending nearly three decades practicing medicine in North Texas, serving as co-chair of the Congressional Health Caucus and authoring the WND book “Doctor in the House” with its prescriptions for more efficient and less expensive health care.

Burgess told WND, “In the last continuing resolution, there was a billion dollars cut out of the implementation of the Affordable Care Act. There was well over $300 million cut out of the Treasury Department budget for implementation of activities regarding the Affordable Care Act. So, those were some serious sideswipes.”

The doctor-turned-lawmaker said GOP efforts to limit the implementation of Obamacare are already seeing results. Read more from this story HERE.

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Government shutdown looms over ObamaCare

By Alexander Bolton. ObamaCare is at the center of a rapidly escalating fight that threatens to shut the government down this fall.

Senate Republicans, including two members of the leadership, are coalescing around a proposal to block any government funding resolution that includes money for the implementation of the 2010 Affordable Care Act.

But such a move is a nonstarter for President Obama and congressional Democrats. Republicans have tried this maneuver in Obama’s first term, only to back off later to the chagrin of Tea Party leaders.

This time, GOP lawmakers are emboldened by problems plaguing the administration’s ObamaCare implementation. But that zeal could put Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) and Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) in a tough spot. Both leaders have downplayed previous talk of shuttering the government.

In the House, 64 Republicans have signed onto a letter pressing Boehner not to bring any legislation funding ObamaCare to the floor. Read more from this story HERE.

Lookie Here! College Scans Students’ Eyeballs

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Photo Credit: WNDA public university in in Rock Hill, S.C., has announced it is implementing a new eye scanner system that collects and records data about the features of students’ eyes before granting access to school buildings this fall.

Winthrop University’s Associate Vice President for Information Technology James Hammond told Campus Reform the college plans to use the devices to stop “bad guys” from accessing buildings at the 445-acre campus.

The scanners, or “EagleEye stations,” cost an estimated $2,000 each. The university has already scanned the eyes of more than 1,600 of its students.

Winthrop University head of technology services, Patrice Bruneau, told WCNC-TV the school is taking extra precautions after Newtown, Conn., gunman Adam Lanza killed 26 people at Sandy Hook Elementary School and his mother Nancy Lanza, before taking his own life, on Dec. 14, 2012.

“The Newtown tragedy just got everybody’s attention,” Bruneau said.

Read more from this story HERE.

Is Common Core Failing the Test? (+video)

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Photo Credit: Ethan BlochPresident Barack Obama’s goal of holding all students across the U.S. to the same high academic standards may be on the verge of unraveling as states take a hard look at the more rigorous tests under development — and balk.

Backed by $360 million in federal grants, some 40-plus states have spent the past three years working with testing companies to develop math and language arts exams tied to the academic standards known as Common Core. They’re minimizing the dreary fill-in-the-bubble multiple choice in favor of more challenging tasks. Kids as young as third grade, for instance, will be asked to write essays synthesizing information from multiple nonfiction texts and to explain their reasoning on math problems.

Yet now that the new tests are almost ready, state officials are complaining that they’re too long and too costly and require too much computer technology. They’re also beginning to push back against the exams as an unwanted federal intrusion on local policy, echoing a groundswell of opposition from tea party critics of Common Core.

Georgia dropped out of the testing collaboration on Monday, saying it would create its own exams instead. Pennsylvania, Alabama, Oklahoma and Utah have already withdrawn. There are strong indications that Florida and Indiana will be next. Other populous states are also teetering. The Michigan Legislature has effectively nixed the new tests by blocking spending on them, though the ban may be revisited next fall. New York is officially undecided but it’s already spending heavily on alternatives. Texas and Virginia never signed on in the first place.

Read more from this story HERE.