DeMint On Prospect of Jenny Sanford Replacing Him: ‘She’s Great’

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WASHINGTON — Sen. Jim DeMint suggested in a brief interview with The Daily Caller on Thursday that he would approve if former South Carolina first lady Jenny Sanford is tapped to take over the Senate seat he is vacating next month.

“She’s great,” DeMint said Thursday afternoon, as he walked off the Senate floor after a vote.

DeMint, a Republican, announced last week that he’s resigning from the U.S. Senate to take over as head of the Heritage Foundation, a Washington D.C.-based conservative think tank.

South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley will appoint DeMint’s successor. Haley is thought to be considering at least five people for the seat, including Sanford, whose ex-husband, Mark Sanford, was governor of the state.

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GOP Lawyer: Republicans Must End Cronyism of ‘Little White Boy Consultants’

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A top GOP legal adviser to several House and Senate Republicans says the Republican National Committee’s newly formed panel to study the GOP’s failed 2012 election strategy must focus on rooting out cronyism among the party’s consultant class.

“Until Chairman Priebus and other GOP leaders focus on rooting out the greed, cronyism, and corruption of the ‘little white boy’ consultants who make millions of dollars, year in and year out, and yet lose elections—and until there is real accountability and transparency to donors to ensure that integrity is restored to GOP circles—none of these initiatives will matter,” said Cleta Mitchell.

The assembling of the Republican panel comes on the heels of an investigation by Breitbart News contributor Patrick Michael Leahy that showed that the Romney campaign paid over $150 million to two consulting firms with ties to top RNC and Romney campaign staffers.

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Conservative Purge: House Leadership Office Cites ‘The A–hole Factor’

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Back-bench freshmen Justin Amash, Tim Huelskamp and David Schweikert are gaining martyr status among conservative activists after they were “purged” from House committees for what they say is a matter of sticking to their principles on tough votes.

But some of their colleagues say the trio got yanked by the leadership-driven Republican Steering Committee because they’re jerks — or worse.

In an interview with POLITICO, one member of the Steering Committee called them “the most egregious a—holes” in the House Republican Conference.

The argument: This went beyond voting records. The members who were booted made life harder for other Republicans by taking whacks at them in public for supporting the team, according to Republican sources familiar with the Steering Committee’s decision.

In a closed-door meeting of the House Republican Study Committee on Wednesday, Amash and Huelskamp argued that they had been unfairly targeted for their conservative voting records, complaining that the leadership used a “secret scorecard” to rate their loyalty.

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Threat of Mass Cyberattacks on U.S. Banks Is Real, McAfee Warns

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The wave of distributed denial of service attacks that hit U.S. banks in October was next-to-nothing compared to what could happen if cybercriminals actually carry through with their plans for next year.

According to a report (PDF) released today by McAfee Labs, an impending attack on U.S. financial institutions — dubbed Project Blitzkrieg — isn’t only a possibility, it’s a “credible threat.”

“McAfee Labs believes that Project Blitzkrieg is a credible threat to the financial industry and appears to be moving forward as planned,” the report reads. “Although Project Blitzkrieg hasn’t yet infected thousands of victims and we cannot directly confirm any cases of fraud, the attackers have managed to run an operation undetected for several months while infecting a few hundred.”

Project Blitzkrieg is believed to be headed by an individual known as vorVzakone, according to McAfee. In September, vorVzakone announced a massive fraud campaign to be launched against 30 U.S. banks in spring 2013.

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U.S. Terror Agency To Tap Citizen Files

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photo credit: donkey hotey

Top U.S. intelligence officials gathered in the White House Situation Room in March to debate a controversial proposal. Counterterrorism officials wanted to create a government dragnet, sweeping up millions of records about U.S. citizens—even people suspected of no crime.

Not everyone was on board. “This is a sea change in the way that the government interacts with the general public,” Mary Ellen Callahan, chief privacy officer of the Department of Homeland Security, argued in the meeting, according to people familiar with the discussions.

A week later, the attorney general signed the changes into effect.

Through Freedom of Information Act requests and interviews with officials at numerous agencies, The Wall Street Journal has reconstructed the clash over the counterterrorism program within the administration of President Barack Obama. The debate was a confrontation between some who viewed it as a matter of efficiency—how long to keep data, for instance, or where it should be stored—and others who saw it as granting authority for unprecedented government surveillance of U.S. citizens.

The rules now allow the little-known National Counterterrorism Center to examine the government files of U.S. citizens for possible criminal behavior, even if there is no reason to suspect them. That is a departure from past practice, which barred the agency from storing information about ordinary Americans unless a person was a terror suspect or related to an investigation.

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Rand Paul Targets Paul Ryan for ‘Purge’ of House Conservatives

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Add Rep. Paul Ryan to the list of House Republican leaders under fire for removing conservatives from key congressional committees.

A fundraising email sent by Kentucky Republican Sen. Rand Paul urges supporters to sign a petition protesting the move, targeting the party’s 2012 vice presidential nominee and House Budget Committee chairman, as well as Speaker of the House John Boehner.

“The petition urges John Boehner and Paul Ryan to stop purging fiscal conservatives from committee assignments, and to reinstate the four already purged from their positions,” reads the message from RAND PAC, Rand Paul’s political action committee.

Rand Paul noted that “according to news reports, two of the congressmen were purged from the Budget Committee for voting for a five-year balanced budget plan — instead of Paul Ryan’s budget which balanced in 28 years.”

Michigan Republican Rep. Justin Amash and Kansas Republican Rep. Tim Huelskamp both voted against the Ryan budget in committee last year. As a result, the spending blueprint only cleared committee by a narrow 19-18 vote.

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Senator’s Office Gone Wild: Sex Offenders, Hookers and Homeland Security

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photo credit: paul lowry

New Jersey Senator Bob Menendez, who allegedly often visits the Dominican Republic to have sex with underpaid hookers at “bunga bunga” style sex parties, employed a sex offender to work as an intern in his office on immigration policy throughout 2012. Zavaleta just so happens to be an illegal immigrant but the Department of Homeland Security instructed ICE agents to postpone deporting him until after Menendez’s reelection in November. You just can’t make this stuff up.

U.S. Sen. Robert Menendez employed as an unpaid intern in his Senate office an illegal immigrant who was a registered sex offender, now under arrest by immigration authorities, The Associated Press has learned.

The Homeland Security Department instructed federal agents not to arrest him until after Election Day, a U.S. official involved in the case told the AP.

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Jimmy Hoffa Warns Of ‘Civil War’ in Michigan (+video)

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(CNN) – Jimmy Hoffa, president of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, said Tuesday he expects Michigan unions and lawmakers to break out into “civil war” after the state legislature passed right-to-work bills that would weaken unions’ power.

“This is just the first round of a battle that’s going to divide this state. We’re going to have a civil war,” Hoffa said on CNN’s “Newsroom.”

The Republican-controlled state House passed two bills that had already been approved by the GOP-dominated state Senate. Gov. Rick Snyder, also a Republican, . . . sign[ed] the bill, which would allow workers at union-represented employers to forgo paying dues.

As thousands of protestors gathered at the state capitol on Tuesday, Hoffa called the legislation a “tremendous mistake” and “a monumental decision to make” by outgoing lawmakers in a lame duck session.

Watch interview:

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University of Iowa First to Offer ‘Transgender’ Option on Admissions Application

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IOWA CITY, Iowa – The University of Iowa has become the first public U.S. university to include optional questions about sexual orientation and gender identity on its application, a move hailed Wednesday by advocates hoping to improve the college experience for gays and lesbians.

University officials say the move sends a strong signal that they value the diversity that gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender students bring to campus. They say that knowing some students’ sexual orientation will allow them to track their enrollment and graduation rates and promote housing, student groups and programs that might improve their social and academic success.

“This is a question whose time had come,” university admissions director Michael Barron said.

Iowa’s decision was praised by Campus Pride, an advocacy group that has been lobbying colleges to ask the questions so schools can track the progress of LGBT students. Elmhurst College, a private liberal-arts school in suburban Chicago, became the first — and is still the only other — college to do so last year.

Iowa’s new application, which went into use Dec. 1, asks students whether they “identify with the LGBTQ Community.” The item is listed with other optional questions about topics such as their interest in military programs and fraternities and sororities. A second change added “transgender” as an option for an applicant’s gender.

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How Much Taxation Would it Take to Fund the Federal Budget?

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photo credit: marcus demery

To best understand this spending aspect of the current budget negotiations in Washington, we must answer one crucial question: how much taxation on the top income-earners would be required to fully fund the present level of government spending?

To do so, we must first make the unreasonable assumption that the rich will not respond to confiscatory tax rates and hide money from being taxed. This is unreasonable because no scheme of taxation since WW2 has been able to capture more than 21% of GDP. With current spending levels around 23% of GDP, history suggests that no level of taxation we have yet tried would actually fully fund our current level of spending. But if we indulged some “static scoring” and assumed a static tax base, what would a zero-deficit, soak-the-rich taxation scheme look like at current spending levels?

For example, what would a 100% income tax on all those who earn over $10 million amount to? I’m not taking about a wimpy marginal rate, where one might tax only those dollars of income over $10 million (leaving the taxpayer $10 million). No, I’m saying you find all those who made more than $10 million and take every last penny — an absolute tax of 100%.

Using 2009 data, the IRS says that 8,274 tax returns were filed with incomes over $10 million. The total amount of income on those returns was $240.1 billion.

Our federal government alone is spending more than $10 billion a day. Thus, a 100% confiscation of all income of those making more than $10 million would amount to less than 24 days of federal spending.

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