Pro-Gay Marriage Ads Feature Obama, Bush, Cheney, Powell (+video)

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Photo Credit: Daily Caller The Gay Marriage advocacy partnership Respect for Marriage Coalition launched a $1 million national advertising campaign featuring a bipartisan group of political heavyweights pushing for gay marriage Wednesday.

The campaign features past statements from President Barack Obama, former first lady Laura Bush, former Vice President Dick Cheney and former Secretary of Defense Colin Powell all voicing their support for same-sex couples to wed.

Respect for Marriage Coalition’s message is set to appear in the coalition’s nationwide television, print — including full-page ads in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The Washington Post — and online ads.

The ads rely on past clips of interviews and speeches from Obama, Bush, Cheney and Powell.

The organization uses a clip of Bush on CNN saying, “When couples are committed to each other and love each other then they ought to have the same sort of rights that everyone has” and Powell, also on CNN, saying, “Allowing them to live together with the protection of law, it seems to me is the way we should be moving in this country.”

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Coal Industry Regulations Were A Laughing Matter to the EPA

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Photo Credit: AP Lisa Jackson recently left her job as EPA administrator amid an investigation into her use of alias email accounts. She apparently used those secret accounts to shield official agency business from Freedom of Information Act requests.

In one of those emails, recently obtained by a free-market think tank, an EPA employee mocked proposed coal ash regulations, joking that Jackson “knows which landfill’s leaching, She knows which pond might break, She knows they all lack liners, Close ’em down, for goodness sake!”

The Competitive Enterprise Institute says it has now received thousands of heavily redacted emails sent by or to Jackson and her email alias, Richard Windsor.

(CEI sued the EPA to force compliance with its FOIA requests related to the EPA’s coal policies. The second batch of emails was released three hours after most federal offices had closed on Feb. 15 for the holiday weekend.)

According to CEI, “nearly 95 percent of the correspondence from the administrator and more than 80 percent of the email sent to ‘Richard Windsor’ – excluding news stories available to the public – were redacted (blacked out), despite claims by President Obama his was the most transparent administration ever.”

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Obama’s Special Thirst for Control (+audio)

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Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli led the fight against Obamacare in federal court, and he says he is bringing the same fidelity to the Constitution in his bid to become the next governor of the Commonwealth.

Cuccinelli is also author of the new book “The Last Line of Defense: The New Fight for American Liberty. He told WND a presidential administration striving for more power is typical in both parties, but he believes the Obama team has a special thirst for control.

“What makes this unique, frankly, is the brazenness and frequency of this administration’s willingness to break the law and to trample the Constitution,” Cuccinelli said. “Just last month they lost the constitutional case that came straight from the president about his supposed recess appointments. He claimed the right to essentially declare when the Senate was in recess, which is an egregious violation of the separation of powers, and the court found so unanimously and they threw out his appointment.”

Cuccinelli said his own state is also the victim of federal overreach, a claim that was also validated in a recent federal court ruling involving the Environmental Protection Agency, or EPA.

“We beat the EPA in Virginia, which I refer to as the Employment Prevention Agency because they’re so good at that, with Fairfax County as our co-plaintiff,” Cuiccinelli said. “It is a very partisan, Democrat board of supervisors, and yet they joined me as the co-plaintiff in that suit because they knew that the federal government had broken the law in how it was attempting to regulate water just like it would regulate a pollutant. It sounds crazy and it is, which is probably part of why we won so convincingly. That was worth over $300 million to the people of Virginia.”

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Missouri House Bill Makes Proposing Gun Control Illegal

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Photo Credit: CBS St. Louis A Missouri lawmaker is proposing to send colleagues to prison for introducing gun control legislation — a plan that even its sponsor acknowledges has no chance of passage but nonetheless highlights the increasingly strident tone of gun measures in Missouri’s generally pro-gun Legislature.

Rep. Mike Leara said Tuesday that he considers his bill a statement of principle. It would make lawmakers guilty of a felony punishable by up to four years in prison if they introduce legislation restricting gun rights.

“I have no illusions about the bill making it through the legislative process, but I want it to be clear that the Missouri House will stand in defense of the people’s constitutional right to keep and bear arms,” Leara, a Republican from suburban St. Louis, said in a written statement. He declined further comment.

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Documents: Hagel Staffers Met With ‘Front Group’ For Iranian Regime

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Photo Credit: APDocuments obtained by The Daily Caller show that staffers for then-Sen. Chuck Hagel met repeatedly with a controversial pro-Iran lobby group, and some met with the organization’s president.

Hagel is President Barack Obama’s choice to be the next secretary of defense. Arizona Sen. John McCain and other Republicans have conceded that a vote — and likely confirmation — will take place during the week of Feb. 25.

Iranian state-run media have referred to the National Iranian-American Council (NIAC) since at least 2006 as “Iran’s lobby” in the U.S.

It portrays itself in the media as an independent group of Iranian expatriates. But Sam Nunberg, director of the Legal Project at the Middle East Forum project, describes the NIAC as an Iranian “front group.”

And documents released during the discovery phase of a defamation lawsuit NIAC filed against Seid Hassan Daioleslam, editor of the Iranian American Forum and one of the regime’s most public critics, include correspondence with Mohammed Javad Zaif, then Iran’s permanent representative to the United Nations.

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McCain Defends Immigration Plan To Angry Residents

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Arizona took center stage in the national immigration debate Tuesday as Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano toured the state’s border with Mexico and Sen. John McCain defended his proposed immigration overhaul to an angry crowd in suburban Phoenix.

The presence of the top officials is the latest sign that Arizona will play a prominent role in the immigration debate as President Barack Obama looks to make it a signature issue of his second term.

Napolitano toured the border near Nogales with the highest-ranking official at U.S. Customs and Border Protection, the incoming chairman of the Senate’s homeland security committee and an Arizona congressman. Napolitano, Arizona’s former governor, said afterward that comprehensive immigration reform will strengthen the nation’s border against criminals and other threats.

Also Tuesday, McCain hosted two town hall meetings in Arizona, during which he defended his immigration plan to upset residents concerned about border security. A bipartisan group of senators — including Arizona Republicans McCain and Jeff Flake — want assurances on border security as Congress weighs what could be the biggest changes to immigration law in nearly 30 years. Arizona is the only state with both of its senators working on immigration reform in Congress, a sign of the state’s widely debated border security issues.

Immigration activists and elected officials say it’s only natural for Arizona to continue to take the forefront in the national conversation on immigration after years of internal debate on the topic.

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Gen. John Allen To Retire, Won’t Seek NATO Post

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Photo Credit: APGen. John Allen is retiring from the military instead of enduring what likely would have been a messy Senate confirmation process to be NATO supreme commander.

The general, who previously served as top commander in Afghanistan, was on track for the prestigious NATO post until his name surfaced in the adultery scandal that toppled former CIA chief David Petraeus.

Gen. Allen was officially cleared of misconduct by the Pentagon in January after a probe into his exchange of e-mails with a socialite in Tampa, Fla., who had clashed with Paula Broadwell, Mr. Petraeus’s biographer and mistress. But it was likely the incident would be revived in any congressional confirmation hearing.

In a statement Tuesday, President Obama said Gen. Allen cited health issues within his family in making his decision to take his name out of consideration for the role of supreme allied commander in Europe.

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Did Obama Supporter Vote 6 Times In 2012? Ohio Poll Worker Target Of Investigation (+video)

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Photo Credit: Fox NewsThe Obama/Biden lawn sign remains proudly planted in front of Melowese Richardson’s Cincinnati home, three months after the presidential election. It seems that President Obama has an especially ardent supporter in the veteran Ohio poll worker.

Richardson told a local television station this month that she voted twice last November. She cast an absentee ballot and then voted at the polls as well.

“Yes, I voted twice,” Richardson told WCPO-TV. “I, after registering thousands of people, certainly wanted my vote to count, so I voted. I voted at the polls.”

Authorities also are investigating if she voted in the names of four other people, too, for a total of six votes in the 2012 presidential election.

“I’ll fight it for Mr. Obama and for Mr. Obama’s right to sit as president of the United States,” Richardson vowed when asked about the voter fraud investigation that is now under way.

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Meet The Rand Paul Super Pac Founder Who Wants To Purge ‘Statists, Do-Gooders, Planners And Neoconservatives’

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Photo Credit: Gage Skidmore The 2016 election cycle may be years away, and the Republican party may still be reeling from the aftershocks of 2012, but some of Rand Paul’s supporters aren’t waiting any longer to press their case for his presidential candidacy.

Even though Paul hasn’t officially declared his intention to run for president, and won’t for at least a year, a fledgling pro-Rand Paul super PAC is aggressively pushing for the Kentucky senator to lead a revolution within the GOP, calling for the expulsion of what they call “statists, do-gooders, planners, and neoconservatives.”

This new super PAC, called Human Action PAC, describes its mission in the starkest possible terms:

It is an open secret that those in the establishment have no loyalty to the scolds, the bigots, the defenders of the gerontocracy and the people for whom “big government for me, but not for thee” is a rallying cry. In fact, their leaders seem to acknowledge, deep down, that those people are killing the Republican party.
To those leaders looking for a way to excise that cancer, we offer a candidate who can purge those people’s ideas while still holding onto the mantle of principle.

Senator Paul’s office has not commented on these claims.

Human Action PAC, which launched its Web site officially this Monday but has been live for several months, has raised a little over $1,000 and lists more than $8,000 in debt, according to OpenSecrets.org, and their first FEC filing. The organization first began spending money on December 31, 2012, when they spent just over $3,000 to support Rand Paul for President, according to the same FEC filing.

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Tea Party Favorite Confirms Interest in McConnell’s Seat

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photo credit: Donkey HoteyMatt Bevin, a potential Tea Party challenger to Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), confirmed on Tuesday that he has met with groups in Kentucky about launching a Senate bid, but has not made a final decision.

“As a point of clarification, Matt has made no final decision with respect to this race. He has, however, met in recent weeks with various individuals and groups who have expressed their frustration with their current representation in Washington DC and have encouraged him to consider entering the race,” reads an email sent “on behalf of Matt Bevin” by Amy Lowe.

Lowe is listed as operations manager at Waycross Partners, the investment firm at which Bevin is an adviser.

“These meetings, together with the recent reaction to the possibility of a primary race, have served to reaffirm the general sense of political disenchantment among many voters in Kentucky that has been widely reflected in recent articles and polls,” she wrote.

The Hill reported Monday that Bevin had been in touch with local Tea Party leaders about potentially launching a bid.

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