Lawsuit: EPA Senior Officials Using Secret Email Accounts to Hide Communications From FOIA Requests

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Environmental Protection Agency officials are keeping mum today about a potential landmine of a lawsuit that claims senior executives there have used secret email accounts to conduct public business without being subject to the Freedom of Information Act.

The suit was filed last week by the Competitive Enterprise Institute’s senior fellow, Christopher C. Horner, Hans Bader, CEI’s counsel for special projects, and Sam Kazman, the conservative think tank’s general counsel.

Ih the suit, CEI asks the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia to order EPA to produce “certain records pertaining to ‘secondary,’ non-public email accounts for EPA administrators, the existence of which accounts Plaintiff discovered in an Agency document obtained under a previous FOIA request.”

EPA Head, Lisa JacksonAccording to the CEI suit, the internal EPA memo, which was referenced in a Government Accountability Office report in 2008, described the secondary accounts as known only to “few EPA staff members, usually only high-level senior staff.”

Many such officials would be either presidential appointees or politically appointed members of the federal civil service system’s Senior Executive Service. The agency’s current boss, Administrator Lisa Jackson, was appointed by President Obama.

Read more from this story HERE.

Kitchen Aid Appliances Sends Out Insulting Tweet About Obama During Debates

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The home appliance brand KitchenAid apologized Wednesday evening for a political tweet sent out from its official account during the presidential debate.

The tweet has been removed but at least a dozen retweets of the post showed it read, “Obamas gma even knew it was going 2 b bad! ‘She died 3 days b4 he became president.'”

The company apologized in a later post from the same account.

“Deepest apologies for an irresponsible tweet that is in no way a representation of the brand’s opinion,” the tweet read in part.

The original post would have been in reference to a comment President Barack Obama made during the debate as he spoke about the importance of programs such as Medicare and Social Security.

Read more from this story HERE.

Obama Admin. Arguing It’s Legal To Track Citizens’ Every Movement Without A Warrant

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The Obama administration told federal judges in New Orleans yesterday that warrantless tracking of the location of Americans’ mobile devices is perfectly legal.

Federal prosecutors are planning to argue that they should be able to obtain stored records revealing the minute-by-minute movements of mobile users over a 60-day period — in this case, T-Mobile and MetroPCS customers — without having to ask a judge to approve a warrant first.

The case highlights how valuable location data is for police, especially when it’s tied to devices that millions of people carry with them almost all the time. Records kept by wireless carriers can hint at or reveal medical treatments, political associations, religious convictions, and even whether someone is cheating on his or her spouse.

“It’s at a point now where the public awareness about this specific issue is growing,” says Hanni Fakhoury, a staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation who will be arguing the pro-privacy side before the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals this morning.

Today’s oral arguments are remarkably timely: on Sunday, California Gov. Jerry Brown, a Democrat, vetoed (PDF) a bill that would have required law enforcement to obtain location warrants. And last week, Rep. Zoe Lofgren, a Democrat representing Silicon Valley, introduced pro-warrant federal legislation.

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Biden Gaffe: Says Middle-class “Buried” Last Four Years (+video)

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by Patricia Zengerle. U.S. Vice President Joe Biden told a campaign rally on Tuesday that the middle class has been buried for the past four years, just longer than President Barack Obama’s time in the White House.

Republicans immediately seized on what they termed a “stunning admission” by Biden as evidence that Obama’s policies have been bad for the economy, the day before Obama and his Republican challenger Mitt Romney meet in their first presidential debate.

Discussing what the Obama campaign contends are Romney’s plans to raise taxes on most Americans to fund tax cuts for the wealthy, Biden made his comment in an emotional speech to a crowd in Charlotte, North Carolina.

“This is deadly earnest. How they can justify … raising taxes on the middle class that has been buried the last four years? How in the Lord’s name can they justify raising their taxes and these tax cuts?” he asked.

“We’ve seen this movie before – massive tax cuts for the wealthy, eliminating restrictions on Wall Street, let the banks write their own rules. We know where it ends. It ends in the catastrophe of the middle class and the Great Recession of 2008. Folks, we cannot go back to that. The president and I have a different way forward,” Biden said. Read more from this story HERE.

Watch video of Biden sternly lecturing his audience:

Lowering Debate Expectations: “I’ve Barely Prepared for This Debate. Gonna Wing It!” – Mitt Romney

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“While Mitt Romney has done 20 debates in the last year, [Obama] has not done one in four years, so there’s a challenge in that regard.”—Obama campaign spokesperson Jen Psaki, Sept. 17

“President Obama is the most gifted speaker in modern political history, so it is hard to imagine anyone outscoring him in debate points.”—Romney campaign spokesperson Andrea Saul, Sept. 20

“Mitt Romney I think has an advantage, because he’s been through 20 of these debates in the primaries over the last year. He even bragged that he was declared the winner in 16 of those debates.”—Obama campaign adviser Robert Gibbs, Sept. 23

“The president is obviously a very eloquent, gifted speaker—he’ll do just fine. I’ve, you know, I’ve never been in a presidential debate like this and it will be a new experience.”—Mitt Romney, Sept. 25

“Mitt Romney, in his experience in business, is extremely well-prepared for the process of fielding ideas on the fly and, you know, responding to them off the cuff. Whereas the President has, for the last four years, he’s been—you know, sometimes the only voice in the room, and I don’t know that he’s faced an adversary as strong as Romney during daily briefings.”—Obama campaign spokesperson Jen Psaki, Oct. 1, 6:45 p.m.

Read more from this story HERE.

Pennsylvania Judge Approves New Voter ID Law – but Blocks it From Going Into Effect Until After Election (+video)

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By Angela Couloumbis. Pennsylvania voters who go to the polls without photo identification will be able to vote in next month’s presidential election after all.

They won’t even have to fill out provisional ballots.

So ruled a Commonwealth Court judge Tuesday in the closely-watched legal battle over Pennsylvania’s controversial voter ID law. Judge Robert E. Simpson Jr. upheld the law – but blocked it from taking full effect until after the Nov. 6 election.

In essence, the rules remain as they were during the law’s so-called “soft roll-out” in the April primary: voters will be asked for the photo ID required by the new law, but if they don’t have it, they can still vote.

Whether Simpson’s ruling is the last word was not yet clear. Corbett administration officials said Tuesday through spokesmen that they had not yet decided whether to mount an appeal. Read more from this story HERE.

Here’s a short clip of the Pennsylvania House Republican Leader Mike Turzai saying that the Voter ID law was going to allow Romney to win his state (he was roundly criticized for this comment):

GOP likely to keep control of U.S. House in November

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Democrats need to gain 25 seats this year to regain control of the House of Representatives from the Republicans. The prospects are dim.

Even a strong showing by President Barack Obama would be unlikely to swing the House to the Democrats and return the majority they lost two years ago. Redistricting, in effect in most places for the first time since the 2010 census, is helping Republicans. So are problems faced by Democratic moderates in conservative and Southern states.

Then there’s history. The last time a previously elected president seeking re-election saw his party pick up more than 25 seats was in 1892, according to research from the Rothenberg Political Report – and that president, Benjamin Harrison, lost.

“It’s possible, but not likely” Democrats will get a majority, said Nathan Gonzales, a political analyst at nonpartisan Rothenberg.

Republicans now control 240 House seats. The Democrats hold 190. Five seats are vacant. Rothenberg projects anywhere from a nine-seat Democratic gain next month to a one-seat Republican pickup. The nonpartisan Cook Political Report projects Democrats could pick up as many as eight, or Republicans could score a net gain of two.

Read more from this story HERE.

Hey Joe Biden! The GM Volt is Dead and Al Qaeda is Alive

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Joe Biden’s premature victory cry of “GM is alive and Bin Laden is dead,” rings pretty hollow these days. If that’s all he and President Obama have to hang their hat on after 4 years of “hope and change,” it is a pitiful campaign slogan.

A similar, premature proclamation hung around George Bush’s neck when he declared “victory” in Iraq, when in reality there were still bloody years ahead.

Heralded by the 2009 Obama apology tour speech in Cairo, this week was a shock to Joe and his boss Barack Obama, as their naive “re-set” of foreign policy shattered in violence. Our Ambassador in Libya was killed and our embassies all over the Islamic world were under siege by angry mobs.

The knee jerk reaction from the shocked Obama administration was to blame the violence on spontaneous reaction to a cheesy video on the internet that poked fun of the Islamic religion. But facts lead to the conclusion that at least the Libyan embassy attack was pre-planned and under the influence of Al Qaeda … Ominously for the Obama/Biden narrative, killing Osama Bin Laden, didn’t mean the end of Al Qaeda and the huge wave of anti American violence showed the last 4 years of Obama diplomacy hadn’t changed hearts and minds in the Islamic world.

But buried under the blizzard of foreign policy failure, another tassled shoe was about to drop. It was learned the heavily govt. subsidized Chevy Volt, built by the heavily govt. subsidized General Motors has had disastrous sales. In spite of huge tax credits and the Obama administration trying to artificially inflate sales by forcing the defense Dept to buy Volts…few in the general public are buying them. Forbes Magazine said there are enough scams here to satisfy a Chicago politician.

The Volt was the poster child of the Obama administration, an example of “how to” in leading the way for billions of govt dollars doled out to “renewable energy” schemes. Almost all of these green energy schemes, including subsidizing, solar companies and electric car manufacturing, have proven to be an utter failure.

Last week General Motors stated they wanted the Obama administration to sell its share of stock it owns in their company, the image of being known as Government Motors is hurting business.

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Obama’s DoD at Work: Military Absentee Ballot Requests Drop by Over 90% in Some States

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Requests from military voters for absentee ballots have dropped significantly since 2008, according to newly released statistics, prompting claims that the Department of Defense is dragging its feet in enacting a law meant to boost military voting.

The drop in the battleground states of Virginia and Ohio is among the most pronounced. According to statistics released Monday by The Military Voter Protection Project, the number of absentee ballot requests by both military members and other overseas voters in the two states has dropped 70 percent since 2008.

Virginia had nearly 42,000 total requests in 2008, compared with a little more than 12,000 this year, according to the MVP Project. Ohio had more than 32,000 in 2008, compared with 9,700 this year. The number of military voters specifically — as opposed to military and overseas voters — was not broken down in the latest set of statistics, but military-only numbers released by the MVP Project in August documented a similar drop-off in applications.

At the time, military ballot requests in Virginia were down 92 percent. Several other states showed a precipitous drop since 2008, including Alabama, North Carolina and Florida.

Read more from this story HERE.

Did Muslim Terrorists Commission the “Innocence of Muslims” Video?

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With every new bit of information surfacing about the “Innocence of Muslims” movie trailer and its shady producer, it is looking more and more like the movie was part of an Islamist provocation, in which the film was produced to provide a pretext for widespread attacks against our embassies throughout the Middle East. It comes complete with cover story and perfect dupes. Let’s review.

On September 11, 2012, around 9:30 p.m. Libya time, the American consulate in Benghazi came under sustained attack from heavily armed Jihadists, ultimately resulting in the deaths of U.S. Ambassador Christopher Stevens, computer technician Sean Smith, and U.S. Navy SEALs Glenn Dougherty and Tyrone Woods, who attempted their rescue. Earlier that afternoon, Egyptian Muslims attacked the U.S. Embassy in Cairo, pulling down the American flag. Subsequent protests saw violence in Tunisia, Yemen and elsewhere throughout the Muslim world.

As details emerged it became clear that the Benghazi raid was a premeditated, carefully planned attack by heavily armed Jihadists, coordinated with radicals in Egypt and other Mideast countries, and timed for the anniversary of 9-11, 2001. Libyan leaders confirmed as much shortly thereafter. Meanwhile, until September 27th the Obama administration was implausibly still insisting that the attacks were inspired by the movie. Now, more than two weeks after the attack, they are finally admitting they knew the truth within 24 hours.

Why did they stick to their story for so long, when it was clear that this idiotic film had nothing to do with the attack? Or did it?

Early news reports claimed that an anti-Muslim movie sparked the violence. This could not have legitimately been the cause of spontaneous riots. That evening, some 15 hours after the Egyptian protests began, the “Innocence of Muslims” YouTube trailer, posted way back in July, had garnered only 1,000 views. It should have been viral by then, but it is doubtful that many Muslims had even heard of the film. Furthermore, the quality and dialogue was so poor that it was laughable. Even imputing the lowest intelligence quotient to fanatic Islamist viewers, it is impossible to imagine anyone getting worked up over this joke of a film. The complete film debuted in June, according to the L.A. Times, at “a run-down theater on a seedy stretch of Hollywood Boulevard,” though fewer than 10 people were there to see it. Others question whether the full-length version actually exists. No copy has turned up since the story broke earlier this month.

Read more from this story HERE.