Bloomberg News Hid Conflicting Fiscal-Cliff Poll Numbers, Pushed Results Favorable to Obama

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A poll conducted last week by an Iowa-based firm showed Americans are conflicted about whether or not to support raising tax rates on wealthy Americans to avert the so-called “fiscal cliff.” But that’s not how Bloomberg News, which commissioned the poll, reported the results Thursday.

In a story headlined “Americans Back Obama Tax-Rate Boost Tied to Entitlements,” Bloomberg reported that the poll showed most Americans support President Barack Obama’s insistence on increasing taxes for high-income earners.

“A majority of Americans say President Barack Obama is right to demand that tax-rate increases for the highest earners be a precondition for a budget deal that cuts U.S. entitlement programs,” the story, written by reporter Julie Hirschfeld Davis, began.

The poll asked respondents, “President Obama has said he will not negotiate with Republicans on cuts to entitlement programs, including Medicare, until they agree to raise tax rates on the wealthy. Do you think he is right or wrong to insist on that as a precondition to broader negotiations?”

As Bloomberg reported in its story, 58 percent percent of respondents indicated that the president was “right” to insist on the precondition, while 37 percent said he was “wrong.”

Read more from this story HERE.

Americans for Prosperity Files Police Complaint Over Tent Destruction

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On Thursday the conservative group Americans for Prosperity filed a police complaint after union activists destroyed a tent they had set up in Lansing, Mich., Fox News reported.

One of those inside the tent at the time it was destroyed told Greta van Susteren that two knife-wielding men in ski masks entered the tent and began cutting the canvas straps that tethered the tent to the ground.

According to the witness, rampaging union supporters overturned tables with hot coffee.

“It was scary,” she said.

According to an article at Talking Points Memo, AFP spokeswoman Annie Patnaude said protesters “threatened to blow up propane tanks inside the tent, potentially creating a deadly conflagration.”

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Report: Solar Firms Under Investigation for Stimulus Swindle

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photo credit: mountain/ash

The nation’s three most productive solar installation firms are under investigation for allegedly exaggerating business costs to get larger cash payments through a federal stimulus program.

The Treasury Department’s inspector general is asking SolarCity, SunRun and Sungevity to justify the more than $500 million in federal grants and tax credits they got for their work, according to The Washington Post.

The companies in question received payments through Treasury’s 1603 program, which was designed to increase renewable energy use.

The cash grant program pays installers up to 30 percent of the project cost. So by inflating business expenses, the firms would be eligible for a larger payout.

The firms might have to repay the government if found to have abused the program and could face other penalties.

Read more from this story HERE.

Surrender: McConnell Prepares to Raise the White Flag on Taxes

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Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell is privately signaling that Senate Republicans are open to a strategy that would effectively allow the Bush-era tax rates for high earners to expire in order to avert the year-end fiscal cliff.

At a dinner with lobbyists Thursday night, McConnell disclosed that Senate Republicans were eyeing a so-called “two-bill strategy” increasingly being pushed by lawmakers in both parties, according to multiple sources in the room.

The idea would be to advance two bills, giving each party an opportunity to vote on the approach they favored, but only one would be signed into law: The extension of the Bush-era rates for families who earn less than $250,000 annually.

But House Republicans haven’t bought into this scenario yet, the latest divide between the House and Senate GOP in the already tense negotiations.

Under one possible scenario, the House would take up a Senate-passed bill to extend the Bush-era rates for all but the top 2 percent of wage earners and increase taxes on capital gains and dividends from 15 percent to 20 percent, sending that to President Barack Obama’s desk on the backs of Democratic votes in the House.

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Family of Slain Border Agent Brian Terry Sues Federal Officials Over ‘Fast and Furious’

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PHOENIX (TheBlaze/AP) — The family of a slain Border Patrol agent has sued federal officials over the botched “Fast and Furious” gun operation.

Agent Brian Terry was mortally wounded on Dec. 14, 2010, in a firefight north of the Arizona-Mexico border between U.S. agents and five men who had sneaked into the country to rob marijuana smugglers.

Federal authorities conducting “Fast and Furious” have faced tough criticism for allowing suspected straw gun buyers for a smuggling ring to walk away from gun shops in Arizona with weapons, rather than arrest them and seize weapons. Further, there were no solid tracking mechanisms to trace the guns once they crossed into Mexico.

The lawsuit filed Thursday and made publicly available on Friday came from Terry’s parents against six managers and investigators for the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.

The family also sued a federal prosecutor who had previously handled the case but is no longer on it, and the owner of the gun store where two rifles found in the firefight’s aftermath were bought.

Read more from this story HERE.

Prosecutor: SEIU Organizer Committed Voter Fraud in 2011 Wisconsin Supreme Court Election

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Prosecutors believe a Service Employees International Union (SEIU) organizer fraudulently voted in a 2011 election in Wisconsin, according to documents provided to the Daily Caller by the Wisconsin-based government watchdog group Media Trackers.

An investigation by the Milwaukee County District Attorney’s Office has led to a subpoena of SEIU’s Washington, D.C. headquarters and has implicated the prominent labor union in a voter fraud case that threatens to lead to criminal prosecution.

Then-SEIU Senior Organizer-in-Training Clarence S. Haynes, who is no longer affiliated with the union and whose whereabouts are currently unknown, voted in the hotly contested April 2011 election for a Wisconsin Supreme Court seat despite not being a resident of Wisconsin and leaving the state shortly after voting, according to an October 19, 2012 affidavit prepared by Bruce J. Landgraf, the assistant district attorney for Milwaukee County.

Haynes, who maintained an official permanent residence in Clearwater, Florida, allegedly voted along with two other SEIU organizers in Glendale, Wisconsin on April 5, 2011 — using a Residence Inn as their official address.

Haynes’ Bank of America debit card was used to make a final transaction in Glendale, Wisconsin on April 11, 2011. He checked out of the Residence Inn on April 18. His debit card transactions from May through August 2011 “appear to be concentrated for the most part in the State of Florida,” according to the affidavit.

Read more from this story HERE.

Obama on Connecticut School Shooting: We Must “Take Meaningful Action … Regardless of the Politics”

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As the nation just began to mourn the killing of at least 26, including 18 children, at an elementary school in Newton, Connecticut today, a teary-eyed Obama didn’t waste a minute in his first televised statement on the massacre to politicize things. He suggest that his administration is going to “take meaningful action” to address these type of crimes.

As it’s unlikely that Obama is going to call for arming teachers, don’t be surprised when you hear that a major piece of gun control legislation is in the works.

Here’s a portion of his comments: “We’ve endured too many of these tragedies over the last few years. And each time I hear the news I react not as a president but as anyone else would, a parent…”

“As a country, we have been through this too many times, whether it’s an elementary school in Newton, a shopping mall in Oregon, or a temple in Wisconsin, or a movie theater in Aurora, or a street corner in Chicago, these neighborhoods are our neighborhoods and these children are our children. And we’re going to have to come together and take meaningful action to prevent tragedies like this regardless of the politics.”

New Hampshire Woman Tased by Police for Trying to Buy Too Many iPhones

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Blood-curdling screams stunned holiday shoppers at a New Hampshire mall this week as police tackled a 44-year-old woman to the ground and tased her outside an Apple store. Her offense? She tried to buy too many iPhones and wouldn’t leave the Apple store when asked, according to police.

Xiaojie Li of Newton, Massachusetts, said she bought two iPhones at the Apple store in Nashua’s Pheasant Lane Mall last week. Store policy wouldn’t allow her to buy more than two phones.

The store restricts iPhone purchases to two per person because of concerns over resellers buying the smartphone and selling them at marked-up prices overseas.

Li, who doesn’t speak English, decided to return to the store on Tuesday to see if she could buy additional phones, despite the policy. She said she planned to give the phones as gifts to her family in China.

When the store refused to sell her more phones, police asked her to leave and she refused, police said. Bruce Hansen of the Nashua Police Department said Li was told repeatedly that she was under arrest but that she refused to submit.

Read more from this story HERE.

Many Who Voted for Obama Now Seeing Weekly Job Hours Slashed Below 30 as Obamacare Kicks In

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photo credit: elvert barnes

It is the ultimate example of how you reap what you sow: Huge numbers of American workers who voted for Obama are now seeing their own jobs slashed below 30 hours a week as employers desperately try to avoid “Obamacare bankruptcy.”

Obamacare mandates for businesses only apply to those working 30 hours a week or more, and while many businesses do not want to cut workers’ hours, they are being forced to in order to stay afloat. This necessary action is causing businesses to lose money and become less competitive while at the same time destroying American jobs.

Some businesses are also slashing job positions in an effort to get below the 50-employee threshold above which Obamacare mandates kick in. So across the country, we’re not only seeing workers lose hours thanks to Obamacare; we’re also seeing workers losing their jobs.

But the Obama administration will announce these results to be a huge “job creation success!” because workers must now find two part-time jobs that usually pay less than the one full-time job they used to have. The raw job numbers, however, will be spun by the White House into a victory pronouncement of “twice as many jobs exist now!”

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Radical Texas Curriculum Under Fire for Teaching That Founders Were Terrorists, ‘Allah is the Almighty God,’ and More

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In the 70 percent of Texas public schools where a private curriculum has been installed, students are learning the “fact” that “Allah is the Almighty God,” charge critics of a new online curriculum that already is facing condemnation for its secrecy and restrictions on oversight.

The program, called CSCOPE, is a private venture operating under the umbrella of the Texas Education Service Center Curriculum Collaborative, whose incorporation documents state its independence from the State Board of Education of the Texas Education Agency.

Other reports previously have raised alarm over the curriculum’s depiction of the Boston Tea Party as a terrorist act on par with the 9/11 attack.

According to documentation that has leaked out, the program describes the Boston Tea Party this way: “A local militia, believed to be a terrorist organization, attacked the property of private citizens today at our nation’s busiest port. Although no one was injured in the attack, a large quantity of merchandise, considered to be valuable to its owners and loathsome to the perpetrators, was destroyed. The terrorists, dressed in disguise and apparently intoxicated, were able to escape into the night with the help of local citizens who harbor these fugitives and conceal their identities from the authorities. It is believed that the terrorist attack was a response to the policies enacted by the occupying country’s government. Even stronger policies are anticipated by the local citizens.”

There also have been reports that the curriculum – contrary to recent Supreme Court rulings – says the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, the right to bear arms, is limited to state-run organizations.

Read more from this story HERE.