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Report: How Obama’s Justice Department Selectively Blocks Mergers By Republican CEOs

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Photo Credit: Forbes

Photo Credit: Forbes

Like all mergers, the proposed $45.2 billion Comcast CMCSA +1.5% merger with Time Warner Cable TWC +1%—the largest and second largest cable providers in the nation—has its advocates and critics. There are certainly important questions about what impact the merger would have on consumers—but there are equally significant issues associated with the highly politicized approval process.

The Obama Department of Justice, led by Eric Holder, must review the merger and decide whether to approve or block it. Unfortunately, the Obama Administration and Justice Department have a long track record of pushing the rule of law aside and making decisions based on politics. Will the proposed Comcast merger with Time Warner Cable receive the scrutiny it deserves, or simply be fast-tracked for approval based on politics?

Let’s look at some history—which is detailed in a new Frontiers of Freedom report. In 2009, the Obama Administration gave Solyndra, a failing California solar panel firm, a $536 million “loan.” Shortly thereafter, Solyndra was fully bankrupt. Prior to the loan, Solyndra executives and board members gave generously to Barack Obama, including Tulsa oil billionaire and Obama bundler George Kaiser, one of Solyndra’s main investors.

UnitedHealth Group is expecting higher earnings thanks to ObamaCare. After United supported passing the plan, one of its subsidiaries, Quality Software Services, Inc. won a contract of $90 million for the rollout of Healthcare.gov. UnitedHealth’s Executive Vice President Anthony Welters and his wife are significant Obama donors and bundlers. The Administration did not perceive any conflict of interest in providing the nation’s largest health insurer with the keys to Healthcare.gov.

If money buys favors from the Obama Administration, a lack of it produces the opposite.

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President Obama, Vladimir Putin Talk Ukraine Unrest

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Photo Credit: AP

Photo Credit: AP

President Barack Obama and Russian President Vladimir Putin spoke by telephone Monday but appeared to do little to narrow or obscure the wide gulf between the U.S. and Russian governments over the continuing unrest in Ukraine.

A Russian foreign ministry statement about the leaders’ phone call described a situation in Ukraine starkly different from the picture painted by U.S. officials and Western news outlets.

U.S. officials have accused Russian-backed paramilitaries and militia forces of taking over government buildings in eastern Ukraine, less than two months after Russian troops and well-armed fighters with few visible insignia staged similar takeovers in the Crimea region.

However, the Russian statement referred to “southeastern regions” of Ukraine being “engulfed by mass protests against the policies of the current authorities in Kiev.”

Russia effectively annexed Crimea last month after a referendum there in which voters reportedly backed such a move by overwhelming numbers. The vote was not recognized by most world powers.

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Barack Obama Lets NSA Keep Some Internet Security Flaws Secret

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Photo Credit: AFP

Photo Credit: AFP

Stepping into a heated debate within the nation’s intelligence agencies, President Barack Obama has decided that when the National Security Agency discovers major flaws in Internet security, it should – in most circumstances – reveal them to assure that they will be fixed, rather than keep mum so that the flaws can be used in espionage or cyberattacks, senior administration officials said Saturday.

But Obama carved a broad exception for “a clear national security or law enforcement need,” the officials said, a loophole that is likely to allow the NSA to continue to exploit security flaws both to crack encryption on the Internet and to design cyberweapons.

The White House has never publicly detailed Obama’s decision, which he made in January as he began a three-month review of recommendations by a presidential advisory committee on what to do in response to recent disclosures about the National Security Agency.

But elements of the decision became evident Friday, when the White House denied that it had any prior knowledge of the Heartbleed bug, a newly known hole in Internet security that sent Americans scrambling last week to change their online passwords. The White House statement said that when such flaws are discovered, there is now a “bias” in the government to share that knowledge with computer and software manufacturers so a remedy can be created and distributed to industry and consumers.

Caitlin Hayden, the spokeswoman for the National Security Council, said the review of the recommendations was now complete, and it had resulted in a “reinvigorated” process to weigh the value of disclosure when a security flaw is discovered, against the value of keeping the discovery secret for later use by the intelligence community.

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White House: Nah, We Don’t Want to Meet With Victims of Fort Hood

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Photo Credit: AP

Photo Credit: AP

Sgt. Alonzo Lunsford was shot 7 times by Nidal Hasan in the 2009 mass shooting at Fort Hood. He and other survivors wanted to have a conversation with President Obama presumably to let him know firsthand of their experience with violence at the military base.

Speaking to a victim of a tragedy in order to better understand how it could have been prevented with some more common sense solutions seems like something the president would be interested in, right?

Chief of Staff Dennis McDonough wrote: “We forwarded your letter to the Departments of Justice and Defense, who are leading the government’s efforts to ensure the victims of the 2009 shooting receive the justice and benefits they deserve. Unfortunately, we were unable to meet your specific request for a meeting with the president.”


ABC US News | ABC Business News

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Ted Cruz: Impeach Eric Holder for ‘Defying Congress and the Rule of Law’

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Photo Credit: CNN

Photo Credit: CNN

Sen. Ted Cruz said Attorney General Eric Holder ought to be impeached if he doesn’t take tough action against former IRS official Lois Lerner, who’s been tied to the agency’s targeting-of-tea-partyers scandal.

During a talk with Sean Hannity on the host’s radio show on Thursday, Mr. Cruz called Mr. Holder the “most partisan attorney general the country has ever had,” and said that he should be impeached for “defying Congress and the rule of law,” Breitbart reported.

For example: Mr. Holder has not indicted anybody in the eight months after the inspector general found that the IRS has indeed wrongfully targeted conservative and tea party groups, Mr. Cruz said.

That’s just not acceptable, Mr. Cruz added.

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WATCH: Obama Revives Birther Controversy to Rally Supporters

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Photo Credit: SAUL LOEB / AFP / Getty

Photo Credit: SAUL LOEB / AFP / Getty

By Andrew Johnson.

Democrats are reaching deep in to their bag of tricks ahead of this fall’s midterms. While Harry Reid has spent the past month railing against the Koch brothers, President Obama resorted to taking on birtherism on Friday.

While speaking at Al Sharpton’s National Action Network conference in New York, he revisited the controversy surrounding his birth certificate while discussing the various types of identification residents can provide ahead of voting.

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Sen. Sessions: ‘Deliberate Plan by President’ to Collapse U.S. Law Enforcement System (+video)

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Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) said today that Americans need to stand up to “a deliberate plan by the president of the United States” to collapse the nation’s law enforcement system regarding illegal immigration.

In a Senate speech, Sessions said:

“Our law enforcement system is in a state of collapse, and it’s a deliberate plan by the president of the United States, and it’s wrong. And, people need to be aware of it and need to stand up to it and I believe the American people are beginning to do so.”

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Washington Post Gives Obama 2 Pinocchios On 77¢ Gender Pay Gap Lie, But He Should Have Gotten Many More!

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Photo Credit: IJ Review

Photo Credit: IJ Review

The ‘Fact Checker’ at the Washington Post isn’t terribly objective, which is why it only gave two “pinocchios” (a rating for how bad a lie is) to the Obama administration for it’s perpetual hoisting upon the American public of the 77¢ gender pay gap. Even so, it’s much more honest than many other liberal outlets who perpetuate the misleading claim:

Few experts dispute that there is a wage gap, but differences in the life choices of men and women — such as women tending to leave the workforce when they have children — make it difficult to make simple comparisons.

…Economists at the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis surveyed economic literature and concluded that “research suggests that the actual gender wage gap (when female workers are compared with male workers who have similar characteristics) is much lower than the raw wage gap.” They cited one survey, prepared in 2009 for the Labor Department, which concluded that when such differences are accounted for, much of the hourly wage gap dwindled, to about 5 cents on the dollar.

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IRS Employees Accused of Donning Pro-Obama Gear, Urging Callers to Vote for Him

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Photo Credit: REUTERS

Photo Credit: REUTERS

IRS workers in several offices have been openly supporting President Obama, including by donning pro-Obama paraphernalia and urging callers to reelect the president in 2012, according to allegations contained in a new government watchdog report.

A report by the U.S. Office of Special Counsel, released Wednesday, cited accusations that workers at a Dallas IRS office may have violated federal law by wearing pro-Obama items like shirts, stickers and buttons. The Hatch Act forbids Executive Branch workers from engaging in partisan political activity.

The report comes as two House committees move to take action against former IRS official Lois Lerner regarding the agency’s targeting of conservative groups.

The report, further fueling allegations of bias at the agency, claimed that several accusations were made against the Dallas office claiming pro-Obama gear was “commonplace” there. Employees allegedly wore Obama shirts, buttons and stickers to work and had Obama screensavers on their IRS computers.

The report said it was unclear whether this activity happened before or after the 2012 election, but an advisory was issued to Dallas employees that such activity was prohibited.

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Benghazi Cover-Up Was More to Protect Hillary than Obama

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Photo Credit: Bebeto Matthews / AP

Photo Credit: Bebeto Matthews / AP

By Ernest Istook.

A deeply politicized CIA acted more to protect the secretary of state than the president when it falsified its Benghazi talking points, according to Halle Dale, the Heritage Foundation’s senior fellow for public diplomacy.

At this week’s extraordinary public hearing by the House Select Committee on Intelligence, former CIA Deputy Director Michael Morell acknowledged being the ultimate editor of the CIA’s infamous talking points memo about the murders of four Americans, including the U.S. ambassador, in Benghazi, Libya, on Sept. 11, 2012.

The memo’s false claims became the Obama administration’s official version, broadcast by former U.N. Ambassador Susan E. Rice on national television as she spread the false message that the deaths resulted from a protest gone bad rather than a terrorist attack.

As a guest on my talk radio show Thursday on The Washington Times Radio Network, Ms. Dale said: “What we learned … is that the CIA is a deeply politicized agency.”

And protecting Hillary Clinton seemed a higher priority than protecting Barack Obama.

Read more from this story HERE.

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LIGNET Got Benghazi Right; Why Didn’t the CIA?

By Fred Fleitz.

In May 2011, I was asked by Christopher Ruddy, Newsmax Media’s President and CEO, to start a commercial intelligence analysis and forecasting service. It was an exciting project and a great opportunity after 25 years working in the national security field.

This project became known as the Langley Intelligence Group Network (LIGNET). Working with other intelligence and national security experts, we launched this project in the fall of 2011. LIGNET produces analysis in the style of the President’s Daily Brief, the classified memo that the U.S. Intelligence Community brings to the president every morning containing analysis of major security issues affecting this country.

Of the over 2,400 analyses we’ve posted since the launch of LIGNET, our work on one subject stands out: the September 2012 terrorist attacks on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi.

I’m compelled to speak out about this after watching the testimony of former CIA acting Director Michael Morell before the House Intelligence Committee this week. Morell is in hot water because of controversial CIA-drafted talking points that said the attacks on the Benghazi consulate were the result of demonstrations over an anti-Muslim video and not a terrorist attack. These talking points, which were coordinated through several government agencies, were submitted to the White House and Congress on Sept. 15, 2012.

The talking points were politically convenient for the Obama administration in the run-up to the 2012 presidential election and were used by U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice to deny that the attacks on the consulate were related to terrorism during five Sunday morning talk show appearances on Sept. 16, 2012.

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