New York Fires Auditor Who Found Misuse of Sandy Recovery Funds

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No good deed goes unpunished in New York: the state has abruptly cut off a contract with the independent auditor who found that the state had been wasting federal money meant to be spent on Hurricane Sandy recovery efforts.

Thomas Sadowski, the fired consultant, told the Times Union that he was escorted out of the building when he visited the New York Office of Emergency Management shortly after he filed his report on November 17.

The state hired Sadowski for his extensive experience in emergency procurement management with the federal government. The certified public accountant also did similar work for 10 years at the U.S. Department of Interior’s Inspector General’s office. Sadowski also trained the U.S. Forest Service, Alaska Fire Service, National Interagency Fire Center, Colorado Wildfire Academy, and other government agencies.

“I didn’t believe I did anything to be escorted off the premises,” Sadowski told the Times Union. “I wasn’t trying to get back at anybody or get anybody in trouble.” But Sadowski said he believed he was fired for finding the waste. “I was relieved of my duties because I identified these problems,” he said.

In his report, Sadowski found that the state was buying equipment it didn’t need but had wanted for other purposes, had bought equipment that cannot be tracked, and even lost some equipment bought.

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Poll: Future for U.S.? 42% Say Nation Will Collapse; Some See Dictator Soon

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One in seven Americans believes that the nation eventually will be ruled by a dictator, and another one in five says it eventually will break up into several sovereign regions, according to a new poll reflecting the dark shadow the country is facing.

More than one in four respondents believe the United States likely will collapse not just in their lifetime, but in the next decade, meaning the successor to Barack Obama would be unable to finish a second term.

Others believe a new “democracy” will arise from the ashes of the current republican form of government.

The results are from a telephone poll conducted for WND by the public-opinion research and media consulting company Wenzel Strategies. It was taken Jan. 9-12 and carries a margin of error of plus or minus 3.22 percentage points.

Asked to speculate on what would happen to the U.S. after a hypothetical failure of the current government, a plurality said they think some new sort of democracy would emerge.

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Rank and File Tell GOP Leaders to Keep Sequester, Shutdown ‘On the Table’

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photo credit: donkeyhotey

WILLIAMSBURG, VA. — GOP leaders on Thursday heard from rank-and-file members in a closed-door session, with many urging sequester cuts or a government shutdown to take effect in hopes of forcing the White House into accepting spending cuts.

Those options are “very much on the table,” veteran Rep. Tom Cole (R-Okla.) told reporters on Thursday, from Virginia, where House GOP lawmakers are meeting for their annual retreat.

According to several sources, during the members-only brainstorming session, Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) and House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.) delivered “concise” remarks before opening the microphones to member feedback.

Despite recent internal House GOP squabbles over the handling of the “fiscal cliff” negotiations and a handful of defections against Boehner in the vote for Speaker, GOP lawmakers are looking to present a unified front ahead of crucial budget battles.

One lawmaker who was in the room said that members who spoke had been “polite.”

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Surprise: Government Report Concludes Food Stamp Program Isn’t Spending Enough

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(Reuters) – A report by a panel of experts released on Thursday questioned whether the federal government’s food stamp program adequately provides for healthy diets for the more than 47 million low-income people who rely on the benefit.

The report by the National Academy of Sciences found that the aid for families to pay for groceries, officially called the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, does not account for many barriers to finding affordable, nutritious food by inner-city shoppers.

Panelists for the academy, an independent group of scientists who advise the federal government, also said benefits lag behind the increasing cost of food and the program penalizes beneficiaries with jobs.

The U.S. Agriculture Department, which administers the aid program, sought the report to help it determine the best way to assess whether food stamps benefits are adequate for recipients to have access to a healthy diet.

“We will thoroughly review the analysis and recommendations contained in this report and use them to help set our agenda for future program research,” USDA said in a statement.

Read more from this story HERE.

Sen. Rand Paul to Propose Bill to ‘Nullify’ Obama’s Executive Orders on Gun Control

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Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) has announced he will propose a bill to “nullify” any of President Obama’s executive orders on gun control that give the appearance that the president is writing new legislation.

Paul released his plan, called the Separation of Powers Restoration and Second Amendment Protection Act 2013, on Wednesday. The document, which he plans to introduce early next week, has several purposes.

The bill intends to condemn the use of executive orders which undermine the powers reserved for Congress under the Constitution. It specifically mentions Article I of the Constitution which states, “All legislative powers herein granted shall be vested in a Congress of the United States.”

Paul’s proposed legislation also declares “null and void” any executive order that “infringes on the powers and duties of the Congress under Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution and the Second Amendment.”

The bill also intends to prohibit funding for an “Executive Order Restricting [the] 2nd Amendment.”

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Obama Bypasses Congress, Attempts to Force Companies to Reveal Political Donations to SEC

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The Obama administration is attempting to bypass Congress and force publicly-traded companies to reveal their political donations through regulation.

The Securities and Exchange Commission’s Division of Corporate Finance has begun the steps necessary to create a regulation that would in many ways mirror the DISCLOSE Act — a bill Senate Democrats have failed to pass through Congress.

Created in reaction to the 2010 Citizens United Supreme Court ruling that said corporations and unions could not have limits placed on their political expenditures, the Senate bill would require political organizations to publicly name their donors and the amounts they give.

The SEC regulation would do the reverse — force companies to disclose the political groups they support — and have a similar effect.

“The Division [of Corporate Finance] is considering whether to recommend that the Commission issue a proposed rule to require that public companies provide disclosure to shareholders regarding the use of corporate resources for political activities,” reads the proposal, as reported to the president’s Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs.

Read more from this story HERE.

Rush Limbaugh: Obama ‘Wants People to Snap’

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PALM BEACH, Fla. – President Obama’s newly announced gun-control initiatives are intended as “revenge” against many Americans, as he’s pushing them “to snap,” claims top-rated radio host Rush Limbaugh.

“I think he wants people to snap. I think Obama is challenging everybody’s sanity,” Limbaugh said on his show Wednesday afternoon. “Obama [is] literally pushing people to snap, attacking the very sanity of the country.”

Obama announced a sweeping set of directives he intends will cut down on Americans’ access to guns, setting the stage for a constitutional battle with states where lawmakers already are openly defying the latest power grab by the White House.

His plan would demand federal access to the details every time an uncle sells a .22 to a nephew, would ban some weapons outright through a limit on ammunition capacity, would waive medical privacy laws in some cases so individuals can be reported, and others.

Coming on the heels of a recent birth-control mandate, Limbaugh noted, “All of this is so in our face. Everything that people hold dear is under assault. Deliberately making people upset. This is not what presidents do.”

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Congressman: Obamacare, WH Gun Control ‘Intertwining’

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Rep. Tim Huelskamp (R-KS) expressed concerns about the “intertwining” of President Barack Obama’s gun control push and his 2009 healthcare overhaul legislation Obamacare in a Wednesday evening statement.

Huelskamp worries that the administration will coordinate controversial parts of Obamacare that may invade patient privacy with the president’s new strident gun control efforts.

“The intertwining of ObamaCare and President Obama’s new anti-gun agenda raises serious concerns,” Huelskamp said. “With earlier and on-going efforts by the Obama Administration to invade personal liberties by collecting sensitive patient data, we should now be concerned that the Administration wants to reassure providers that they can ask – and record information – about patients’ gun ownership and storage of firearms.

“It seems that there is no end to the Administration’s efforts to conduct citizen surveillance in the exam room,” the Congressman warned.

One part of the president’s 23-point gun control proposal advocates that the government act to “preserve the rights of health care providers to protect their patients and communities from gun violence.”

Read more from this story HERE.

Hoax: Heartbreaking Story of Notre Dame Linebacker Manti Te’o’s Dead Girlfriend, the Most Inspirational Story of the College Football Season

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Notre Dame’s Manti Te’o, the stories said, played this season under a terrible burden. A Mormon linebacker who led his Catholic school’s football program back to glory, Te’o was whipsawed between personal tragedies along the way. In the span of six hours in September, as Sports Illustrated told it, Te’o learned first of the death of his grandmother, Annette Santiago, and then of the death of his girlfriend, Lennay Kekua.

Kekua, 22 years old, had been in a serious car accident in California, and then had been diagnosed with leukemia. SI’s Pete Thamel described how Te’o would phone her in her hospital room and stay on the line with her as he slept through the night. “Her relatives told him that at her lowest points, as she fought to emerge from a coma, her breathing rate would increase at the sound of his voice,” Thamel wrote.

Upon receiving the news of the two deaths, Te’o went out and led the Fighting Irish to a 20-3 upset of Michigan State, racking up 12 tackles. It was heartbreaking and inspirational. Te’o would appear on ESPN’s College GameDay to talk about the letters Kekua had written him during her illness. He would send a heartfelt letter to the parents of a sick child, discussing his experience with disease and grief. The South Bend Tribune wrote an article describing the young couple’s fairytale meeting—she, a Stanford student; he, a Notre Dame star—after a football game outside Palo Alto.

Did you enjoy the uplifiting story, the tale of a man who responded to adversity by becoming one of the top players of the game? If so, stop reading.

Manti Te’o did lose his grandmother this past fall. Annette Santiago died on Sept. 11, 2012, at the age of 72, according to Social Security Administration records in Nexis. But there is no SSA record there of the death of Lennay Marie Kekua, that day or any other. Her passing, recounted so many times in the national media, produces no obituary or funeral announcement in Nexis, and no mention in the Stanford student newspaper.

Read more from this story HERE.

Anonymous Likens Obama Gun Control Policy to Hitler (+video)

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Hacktivist group Anonymous has now spoken out against President Barack Obama’s intentions to enact wider gun control in the U.S.

In a 15-minute YouTube video, which first appeared on the social network two weeks ago, Anonymous criticized the Obama administration’s leveraging of violent gun crime to achieve its goal to control guns.

“Throughout history, authoritarian governments have used gun violence as an excuse to take people’s firearms and control their population,” said Anonymous.

“This is exactly what Adolf Hitler did to disarm the German people and look at the atrocities his administration did. Obama has been working hard to try and ban all semi-automatic weapons and shot guns while at the same time increasing the weapons and firepower that police and government agencies have.”

The video, which continued on to list various violent crimes and criticize the lack of media attention drawn to those instances, has since been replicated and posted on a number of other user accounts in recent days in anticipation over Obama’s executive actions for greater gun control.

Read more from this story HERE.