Virginia Moves to Make Card-Check Unconstitutional

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AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka

(CNSNews.com) – Virginia is moving towards making card-check – the controversial union proposal to replace secret-ballot elections with simple card-signing petitions – unconstitutional in the state.

The effort is led by State Sen. Bryce Reeves (R-Spotsylvania) who said that “no citizen” should be denied the ability to vote by secret ballot.

“It’s really a simple bill,” Reeves told CNSNews.com in an interview Thursday. “It’s there to improve voter integrity and privacy. I personally believe that no citizen should be forced to reveal how they voted in any election be it federal, state, local, or even a union election.”

The proposed amendment would add a section to Virginia’s Bill of Rights guaranteeing the right to a secret ballot election in all cases, even in the case of a union election.

The proposal is intended to block so-called card check legislation that failed to pass Congress two years ago. That bill, which remains a Democratic and union priority, would have allowed unions to organize a workplace simply by getting a majority of workers to sign union cards, avoiding the need for a secret-ballot election where both the union and the business owners can compete for workers’ votes.

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Obama Administration’s ‘Deferred Action’ Program Halts 102,000 Deportations

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photo credit: z2amiller

The administration has issued stays of deportation for 102,965 illegal immigrants under President Obama’s new non-deportation policy, officials announced Friday.

Another 157,151 applications are still under review under the policy, officially known as Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, which grants a tentative legal status to illegal immigrants who qualify — though it does not grant them a path to citizenship.

U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, the Homeland Security branch that administers the program, said 12,014 applications were rejected off the bat, while as many as 177,000 more applications are having their biometric data taken before entering the final review.

Mr. Obama announced the policy in June, saying he would no longer deport illegal immigrants who were brought to the U.S. as children as long as they haven’t committed any major crimes.

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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.”

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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