TSA Misses Hatchet, Grenade, Knives & Body Bags on Passenger Bound for US

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Yongda Huang Harris arrived at LAX wearing a bulletproof vest and flame-resistant pants, having checked in a suitcase full of weapons.

The 28-year-old was on a stopover on a trip from Japan en route to Boston, and had an array of suspicious items in his luggage.

They included a smoke grenade, knives, body bags, a hatchet, a collapsible baton, a biohazard suit, a gas mask, billy clubs, handcuffs, leg irons and a device to repel dogs.

The alarm was raised when U.S. Customs and Border Protection officers noticed he was wearing a bulletproof vest under his trench coat, along with flame-retardant pants and knee pads.

But no such red flags had been waved when Harris boarded in Japan.

Read more from this story HERE.

Liberal Blog Goes After Obama’s Mysterious Muslim Mega-Donor

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There are only a few dozen Americans who have given at least $1 million to super PACs this election cycle, and Kareem Ahmed is one of them. If you manage to talk to him, he’ll tell you a lot. He’ll tell you all about a class of pharmaceuticals, called compound drugs, which he is in the business of promoting, and which have been the subject of a contentious debate in California, where he lives and works. He’ll tell you to read ProPublica’s reporting about Big Pharma. He’ll tell you House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi is his best friend. He’ll tell you about his dream to someday take the proceeds of his business and build the largest non-profit children’s hospital in the world in Southern California’s Inland Empire. He’ll tell you how he fixed Democratic political strategist Paul Begala’s leg. He’ll tell you how much he loves President Barack Obama, whom he has met on a number of occasions.

He told me several times that he thought I’d been hired by Republicans, insurance companies, or his competition to destroy him.

“I really want to educate you, Eric, I really do,” Ahmed said in an interview over the phone in late August. “Because, you know what, because I’m prepared. My law firms are ready to go, and I’ve got PR firms retained already. They’re waiting for your article.”

Why?

“Because the message I got from you, Eric, was, you have been hired by either the Republicans or by the competition, or somebody, just out to destroy me, without even knowing the facts,” he said. “So what would you do if you were in my shoes? So I’ve got the White House on notice. I’ve got everybody on notice. That all right, I can’t wait until this thing comes out, and we’re going to go after your publication, you, and whatever, and if there’s anything that’s defamatory, that’s not factual, oh yeah, I’m ready. We’re waiting. My employees are watching. My law firms are watching. I mean, they are watching you. Like, every move.”

Read more from this story HERE.

World’s Richest Man Gets Richer Supplying Obamaphones to Poor

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A Mexican telecom mogul who holds the title of world’s richest man, and one of President Obama’s top donors are both getting even richer from the U.S. government program that supplies so-called “Obamaphones” to the poor.

Carlos Slim, who has an estimated net worth of $70 billion, owns a controlling stake in TracFone, which makes $10 per phone for each device it provides to poor Americans. The company, whose president and CEO is Frederick “F.J.” Pollak, also makes money from extra minutes and data plans it sells to subscribers who get phones and service through the government’s Lifeline program. The program, which began in the mid-1980s, has exploded in the past four years after being expanded from supplying landlines to the poor to providing cellular phones.

The phones came into the national spotlight after a viral video surfaced on YouTube in which a Cleveland, Ohio, woman praised the president, saying he needed to be re-elected because he gives out free phones.

“Everybody in Cleveland, every minority, got an Obama phone. Keep Obama as president. He gave us a phone. He gonna do more,” the woman said in the video.

Slim’s Movil America owns TracFone and recently snapped up service provider Simple Mobile for $100 million. TracFones and Simple Mobile service are huge players in the Lifeline program through the company’s “SafeLink Wireless” brand. TracFone had 3.8 million subscribers through the federal program as of late 2011.

Read more from this story HERE.

The Vice Presidential Debate: Someone Was Missing

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Hold it, I’m confused. I watched all of the vice presidential debate last night, and someone did not show up. Vice President Joe Biden was there—how could one miss him, with all the grinning, grunting, interrupting, and sneering. But where was the Ayn Rand-worshiping, rape-redefining, fanatically exercising zealot who wants to throw grandmothers off of cliffs and whose budget plan is, according to the president, “thinly veiled Social Darwinism” that is “antithetical to our entire history as a land of opportunity and upward mobility”? That Paul Ryan was nowhere to be found.

What America saw instead was a young and likable and knowledgeable conservative worried about the current trajectory of fiscal, monetary, foreign, and social policy. Where Biden harrumphed, Ryan calmly litigated President Obama’s failed record. Twice in eight days, the caricatures against which President Barack Obama and Biden are purporting to run have been exposed as grotesque exaggerations. The liberal attempt to frighten America with the illusory specter of an extremist Republican ticket dissolved on first contact with, well, the actual ticket. The reality principle asserted itself once again. We have an open race.

Perceptions matter. Why did 67 million people watch the first debate? One reason may have been that Americans, open to an alternative to the incumbent, wanted to know who the Republican nominee actually was. They only had vague knowledge of Mitt Romney going into the Denver bout—and their impression was not favorable.

What they knew was largely limited to the messages of $217 million in negative advertising from Obama and his allies: Romney was rich, secretive, out of touch, paying little in taxes, hiding his tax returns, stashing money in the Cayman Islands, singing out of tune, shipping jobs overseas with little thought of the lives he affected, dismissing out of hand 47 percent of the country, in favor of raising middle-class taxes and health-care costs for seniors, and waging a “war on women” with Todd Akin to “turn back the clock” on women’s rights.

The stories told about Romney in the media were no more flattering. Casual consumers of the news would have learned that the former governor of Massachusetts once bullied a child at his prep school; had catered to the most extreme wing of his party in pursuit of the GOP nomination; had insulted the highly sensitive and excitable Brits on the eve of the London Olympics; was gaffe-prone; had jumped the gun in his response to the attacks in Benghazi and Cairo; was either micro-managing or had little control over his campaign; was changing strategy on the fly; and was such a hopeless loser that the election basically was over. Obama had it in the bag. How could he not? Romney was trash—wealthy, radical, belligerent refuse.

Read more from this story HERE.

Florida Adopts Racist Educational Standards Even Though Race Classifications are “Nonsense”

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Florida sets education standards based on race, ethnicity

By Caroline May. New education standards approved this week in Florida set goals for public school student performance based on race and ethnicity — with lower benchmarks for African-American, Native American, and Hispanic students, and higher ones for white and Asian-American students.

“We need a strong plan to support our dynamic education system,” State Board Chairman Gary Chartrand said in a statement announcing the approval of the state’s strategic plan for public schools and state colleges through 2018, which includes the new race-based benchmarks.

“I am confident that these strategies and goals will put Florida on a path toward raising student achievement, improving educator quality, and expanding school choice,” he added.

According to the plan, Pre-K through grade 12 students will be assessed with their racial subgroups in mind “to reduce the achievement gap.”

By 2018, 90 percent of Asian students, 88 percent of white students, 81 percent of Hispanic students, 82 percent of Native American students and 74 percent of African-American students are expected to be at-or-above grade level reading standards. Read more from this story HERE.

Race: the Single Most Overrated Scientific Myth

By Gregory Oatis. Look, isn’t it time we dispensed with all the “race” nonsense, once and for all?

The fact is, categorizing humanity by “race” as has been happening for all these centuries is simply not a scientifically valid proposition. There is just one race of people on this planet, the human race.

Skin color defines a person about as much as hair color, eye color, or the length of the second toe on the right foot.

It’s a scientific fact that skin color cannot be discerned through DNA testing. If you doubt me, check it out.

And skin color is not even useful as a predictor of chromosomal similarity.

For example, if you pick 50 Americans at random and analyze their DNA, the two most similar sets are as likely to be those of a Ukrainian-American and an African-American as they are two African-Americans. Read more from this story HERE.

Obama’s Classmate Tells PBS that Young Barry Called Himself an Indonesian prince & Kenyan royalty

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In a June 2012 PBS interview on Frontline that is just now hitting the blogosphere, Kristen Caldwell, a U.S. citizen who attended school with Obama in Indonesia, claims that young Obama called himself “alternatively … an Indonesian prince or Kenyan royalty”:

Frontline: So what do we know about Obama and his background? He wasn’t rich. Would he have needed help? How did he fit into this —

Caldwell: My understanding is that Barry — and that’s what we called him, so I’m not meaning to be disrespectful, but I’m going likely to refer to him as Barry for the most part. My understanding is that Barry was on a scholarship. And a lot of times if you’re on scholarship you had to do some work at the school. You worked in the snack bar.

My father told me — and I didn’t know it at the time — that Barry did some work at the tennis courts. We all did work at the tennis courts, those of us who hung out there. So it wasn’t unusual when the tennis pro would ask me, “Go and walk courts 1 and 2,” and that sort of thing, because he would ask any of us to do that. So I wasn’t aware of that.

When I first met Barry, when he showed up I think it was the summer before fifth grade, he was hanging out at the tennis courts. And at the time that was the very Wimbledon-like, where everyone had to wear white clothes and white tennis shoes. Very careful about the soles of the shoes because you didn’t want to scuff up the courts, mark them up.

So yeah, I can picture him as this slightly — “chubby” is too strong, but rounded, short little guy, Barry Obama. And he told us that his father was an Indonesian king and that he was a prince, and after he finished school he was going to go back, and he would be a ruler in Indonesia. And I absolutely believed him.

I understand that he told his fifth-grade class that he was Kenyan royalty, but I never heard that story until years later. My sister and I remember very clearly that he was an Indonesian prince and that he would be going back there. So there was some reference to where he had come from, and the understanding was his family was there.

Read more from the interview HERE.

Newly Confident Romney Moves to the Political Center in Risky Move that May Alienate Conservatives

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Mitt Romney has taken a more centrist stance on the campaign trail recently, a move that coincides with the GOP nominee giving speeches that are more personal in nature and showing a new-found confidence to voters.

Confusion over Romney’s stance on abortion, which the candidate clarified during a stop at an Ohio restaurant — joined recent moves on immigration, financial reform, tax policies and healthcare toward the center, a more natural habitat for the former Massachusetts governor.

The move to the middle has had a twofold effect for Romney: first, it puts President Obama on his heels by thwarting planned attack lines designed to make Romney’s policies look unreasonable and far-right, and second, it gives the Republican nominee more leash than he had during the GOP primary, where questioning conservative dogma could have proven fatal to Romney’s campaign.

And it’s a message that has appeal to independent and swing voters who could decide the election.

But it also has its dangers, leaving Romney open to charges of flip-flopping. Democrats have already begun previewing attack lines that could show up in Romney’s next debate with Obama.

The GOP nominee, however, appears much more comfortable in this role.

Read more from this story HERE.

New Photo’s From Obama’s College Years Include Photo of Ring that WND Alleges Reads “There is no God but Allah”

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The New Yorker blog features new photos that verify my take on what our 44th president acted and looked like as a sophomore at Occidental College. Readers will note the real Obama, the young revolutionary extremist with a soft spot for Islam, that I got to know as a participant in Occidental’s radical student politics.

Most shockingly, the photos show Obama wearing a band on his left ring finger that WND alleges reads “there is no God but Allah.”

The photo I find to be most historically significant is the one that shows details from the anti-apartheid rally of February 18, 1981, the rally that debuted Obama’s famous first skit in Obama’s Dreams from My Father. In contrast to Obama’s story, the banner above the event proclaims the somewhat more complex cause of “Affirmative Action & Divestiture NOW.” The photo features many of the real life figures who would become composite characters in Obama’s autobiography. These include my white ex-girlfriend, Caroline Boss, the radical student leader who improbably lent her grandmother’s name – and much of her scintillating personality – to the big-boned, black “Regina” character.

For the record, I view these photos from the perspective of an accident victim looking at a long ago car wreck.

Read more from this story HERE.

Obama Wrong Again: the Private Sector is Suffering; Government Employment Fares Far Better

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President Barack Obama famously blamed the bad economy on a struggling public sector, but a new Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) report shows that the issuance of pink slips has slowed among government workers while jumping across much of private industry.

In August, nearly 1.8 million private sector employees were laid off—up nearly 300,000 from July and nearly 100,000 from August 2011. Those layoffs came just two months after Obama proclaimed that “the private sector is doing fine” and attributed struggling job creation to government layoffs.

“The private sector is doing fine. Where we’re seeing weaknesses in our economy have to do with state and local government,” he said in June. “If Republicans want to be helpful, if they really want to move forward and put people back to work, what they should be thinking about is how do we help state and local governments and how do we help the construction industry?”

The latest BLS numbers tell a different story. Federal employees saw decreased job loss over the year, while layoffs at the state and local level grew by about 2 percent—less than half the 4.4 percent layoff increase experienced by the private sector.

Read more from this story HERE.

Unbelievable: Obama Was Guest at VP Debate Moderator’s Wedding, Appointed Husband to Head FCC

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President Barack Obama was a guest at the 1991 wedding of ABC senior foreign correspondent and vice presidential debate moderator Martha Raddatz, The Daily Caller has learned. Obama and groom Julius Genachowski, whom Obama would later tap to head the Federal Communications Commission, were Harvard Law School classmates at the time and members of the Harvard Law Review.

After TheDC made preliminary inquiries Monday to confirm Obama’s attendance at the wedding, ABC leaked a pre-emptive statement to liberal-leaning news outlets including Politico and The Daily Beast Tuesday, revealing what may have been internal network pressure felt just days before Raddatz was scheduled to moderate the one and only vice-presidential debate Thursday night.

Both Politico and The Daily Beast jumped to ABC and Raddatz’s defense. The Huffington Post, another liberal news outlet, joined them shortly thereafter, while calling “unusual” ABC’s attempt to kill the story before it gained wide circulation.

Genachowski — called “Jay” at the time of his wedding, sources told TheDC — and Raddatz would go on to have a son together before their divorce in 1997. They have both since remarried to other people.

A source who attended the 1991 wedding told TheDC that Obama was also a guest there, and remembered that a man by the name of “Barry Obama” was among the guests dancing at the reception.

Read more from this story HERE.