Californians’ Support for Death Penalty Goes Against Trend

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Even as Californians voted to maintain the death penalty, the nation’s support for capital punishment continued to wane in 2012, with relatively few states performing executions.

Only nine states executed inmates in 2012, and three-fourths of the executions occurred in Texas, Arizona, Oklahoma and Mississippi, according to the Death Penalty Information Center, a monitoring group critical of capital punishment. Connecticut became the fifth state in five years to abolish capital punishment.

California, whose voters rejected a November ballot measure to repeal the death penalty, is not expected to resume executions for three years, according to Chief Justice Tani Cantil-Sakauye. Litigation has blocked executions in California for nearly seven years.

Despite its unused execution chamber, California’s death row, already the largest in the nation, continued to swell in 2012. Fourteen inmates were added, mostly from Los Angeles and Riverside counties.

Nationally, there were fewer than 80 new death sentences, the second-lowest number since the death penalty was reinstated in 1976, the center said.

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Obama Vows to Make Gun Control Priority, Put ‘Full Weight’ Behind Efforts

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President Obama on Sunday said he would make gun control a priority in his new term, pledging to put his “full weight” behind passing new restrictions on firearms in 2013.

“I’m going to be putting forward a package and I’m going to be putting my full weight behind it,” Obama said in an interview aired on NBC’s “Meet the Press.” “I’m going to be making an argument to the American people about why this is important and why we have to do everything we can to make sure that something like what happened at Sandy Hook Elementary does not happen again.”

In the wake of the Dec. 14 mass shooting at a Newtown, Conn., school, the president has launched a White House task force led by Vice President Biden to present proposals in January to help stem gun violence. Obama has said that he would seek a broad approach to the problem addressing the role of violence in entertainment and measures to improve mental healthcare.

But he has also called on Congress to move quickly to reinstate the federal assault weapons ban and a ban on the sale of high-capacity magazines.

Obama on Sunday repeated those calls and said he would meet with lawmakers on both sides of the aisles to see action.

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Hillary Clinton, Not Seen for Weeks, Now Reportedly Hospitalized with Blood Clot

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WASHINGTON (AP) — Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton is under observation at a New York hospital after being treated for a blood clot stemming from the concussion she sustained earlier this month.

Clinton’s doctors discovered the clot Sunday while performing a follow-up exam, her spokesman, Philippe Reines, said. He would not elaborate on the location of the clot but said Clinton was being treated with anti-coagulants and would remain at New York-Presbyterian Hospital for at least the next 48 hours so doctors can monitor the medication.

“Her doctors will continue to assess her condition, including other issues associated with her concussion,” Reines said in a statement. “They will determine if any further action is required.”

Clinton, 65, fell and suffered a concussion while at home alone in mid-December as she recovered from a stomach virus that left her severely dehydrated. The concussion was diagnosed Dec. 13 and Clinton was forced to cancel a trip to North Africa and the Middle East that had been planned for the next week.

The seriousness of a blood clot “depends on where it is,” said Dr. Gholam Motamedi, a neurologist at Georgetown University Medical Center who was not involved in Clinton’s care.

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Allen West: Obama in ‘Fantasy World’ in Cliff Talks

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President Barack Obama is living in a “fantasy world” with the proposals he has put forward to solve the fiscal cliff, Florida Rep. Allen West charged on Thursday.

“What the president is proposing is not pragmatic whatsoever and it really is a reflection of him, I suppose, living in some type of fantasy world,” West, a favorite of the Tea Party Patriots, told Fox News.

The president has proposed raising taxes on those earning $250,000 a year in his plan to prevent the automatic triggering of tax increases and deep spending cuts scheduled for Jan. 2.

“We’re telling the American people that they have to tighten their bootstraps, but we don’t seem to want to do that in Washington . . .”

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NY Paper to Publish Additional Gun Owners’ Names, Addresses

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The New York newspaper that drew criticism for publishing the names and addresses of hundreds of legal gun permit holders is doubling down by publishing the personal information of even more law-abiding gun owners.

To great criticism, the Journal News published an interactive map showing the names and addresses of the legal gun owners in Westchester and Rockland counties just before Christmas.

Now the paper has announced it will next publish the names and addresses of permit-holders in Putnam County with an eye toward eventually politicizing the names and addresses of every gun owner in the state.

The Journal News has defended its controversial violation of the privacy of New York’s legal gun owners by claiming that since the records are open to the public to find in government archives, they should be allowed to publish all the names and addresses.

New York State Senator Greg Ball slammed the Journal News, saying that the paper is treating law-abiding citizens like “sex offenders.”

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NYPD: Metal Thieves Plundering Areas Hardest Hit By Hurricane Sandy (+video)

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NEW YORK— Those who live in the Breezy Point section of Queens are picking through their burned out homes one more time, before the city takes a major step in the area’s recovery.

Mari Ellen Mack was moved to tears Friday after finding her late father’s framed NYPD badge in what’s left of her home.

“To think of my father right now, now that’s upsetting, but it’s crazy at the same time. It’s still intact,” Mack told CBS 2’s Wendy Gillette.

She said she’s trying to find anything she can before next week.

The city will bulldoze what’s left of the homes that burned after the New Year. That’s why Mack went to the home again to see if she could find any mementos.

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Oliver Stone: ‘US Has Become An Orwellian State’

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Americans are living in an Orwellian state argue Academy Award-winning director Oliver Stone and historian Peter Kuznick, as they sit down with RT* to discuss US foreign policy and the Obama administration’s disregard for the rule of law.

Both argue that Obama is a wolf in sheep’s clothing and that people have forgiven him a lot because of the “nightmare of the Bush presidency that preceded him.”

“He has taken all the Bush changes he basically put them into the establishment, he has codified them,” Stone told RT. “It is an Orwellian state. It might not be oppressive on the surface, but there is no place to hide. Some part of you is going to end up in the database somewhere.”

According to Kuznick, American citizens live in a fish tank where their government intercepts more than 1.7 billion messages a day. “That is email, telephone calls, other forms of communication.”

RT’s Abby Martin in the program Breaking the Set discusses the Showtime film series and book titled The Untold History of the United States co-authored by Oliver Stone and Peter Kuznick.

Read more from this story HERE. *Please note that the source story is from RT News. RT News originates from Russia and has alleged connections to the Russian government.

Hobby Lobby: Go Ahead and Fine Us, We Won’t Comply With ‘Morning-After’ Mandate

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WASHINGTON (TheBlaze/AP) — An attorney for Hobby Lobby Stores said Thursday that the arts and crafts chain plans to defy a federal mandate requiring it to offer employees health coverage that includes access to the morning-after pill, despite risking potential fines of up to $1.3 million per day.

Hobby Lobby and religious book-seller Mardel Inc., which are owned by the same conservative Christian family, are suing to block part of the federal health care law that requires employee health-care plans to provide insurance coverage for the morning-after pill and similar emergency contraception pills.

The companies claim the mandate violates the religious beliefs of their owners. They say the morning-after pill is tantamount to abortion because it can prevent a fertilized egg from becoming implanted in a woman’s womb.

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Obama Issues Executive Order Raising Pay for Federal Workers, Including VP and Congress

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President Barack Obama issued an executive order to end the pay freeze on federal employees, in effect giving some federal workers a raise. One federal worker now to receive a pay increase is Vice President Joe Biden.

According to disclosure forms, Biden made a cool $225,521 last year. After the pay increase, he’ll now make $231,900 per year.

Members of Congress, from the House and Senate, also will receive a little bump, as their annual salary will go from $174,000 to 174,900. Leadership in Congress, including the speaker of the House, will likewise get an increase . . .

“A new executive order has been issued providing for a new pay schedule beginning ‘on the first day of the first applicable pay period beginning after March 27, 2013,'” reports FedSmith.com. “The pay raise will generally be about 1/2 of 1%.”

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Obama Administration Redefines ‘Dangerous’ Illegal Aliens

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The US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) used the Friday before Christmas to release official word that ICE was once again narrowing its definition of who it considers a dangerous individual.

This latest change involves the process of ICE detainers, a topic addressed routinely at Front Page Magazine. ICE detainers are holds, up to two business days, that ICE places on prisoners in municipal prison. These prisoners would otherwise be let go, but because ICE wants to detain them for immigration violations, they continue being held for ICE to pick them up and process them itself. According to a memo dated December 21, 2012, ICE changed its definition of priority to receive such a detainer to someone with three misdemeanor convictions, from one misdemeanor previously.

The pertinent portion of the memo states that “[t]hree or more prior misdemeanor convictions” not including minor traffic misdemeanors or other relatively minor misdemeanors unless the convictions “reflect a clear and continuing danger to others or disregard for the law.” It should be noted that an individual still only needs to be suspected or convicted of any felony in order to warrant an ICE detainer.

This most recent memo augments policy from the most famous memo, now referred to as the Morton Memo, referring to the long-time Director of ICE, John Morton. In that memo, which was released on June 17, 2011, ICE directed all field agents to prioritize dangerous individuals, which the memo defined using an assortment of prior criminal activity. That memo only asked for one misdemeanor conviction. As such, simply being in the country illegally was no longer an ICE investigative priority.

From there, future directives required that a suspect be convicted of a crime before they were a priority for being held in detention. There are only 32,400 beds in all ICE facilities, even though there are roughly 300,000 individuals in the immigration system at any given time. This means that ICE can only hold about one in nine people that it puts in the system.

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