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Gov’t Out-of-Control: FBI Tracked, Followed Fox Reporter, Got Parent’s Phone Records, Too

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Newly uncovered court documents reveal the Justice Department seized records of several Fox News phone lines as part of a leak investigation — even listing a number that, according to one source, matches the home phone number of a reporter’s parents.

The seizure was ordered in addition to a court-approved search warrant for Fox News correspondent James Rosen’s personal emails. In the affidavit seeking that warrant, an FBI agent called Rosen a likely criminal “co-conspirator,” citing a wartime law called the Espionage Act.

Rosen was not charged, but his movements and conversations were tracked. A source close to the leak investigation confirmed to Fox News that the government obtained phone records for several numbers that match Fox News numbers out of the Washington bureau.

Further, the source confirmed to Fox News that one number listed matched the number for Rosen’s parents in Staten Island.

Rosen’s father, attorney Myron Rosen, told FoxNews.com he found the records seizure to be “downright ludicrous.”

Read more from this story HERE.

Sebelius Preaches to the World Health Organization: “Access to Health Care … is a Right”

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Photo Credit: The New American Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius (shown) told the World Health Assembly (WHA) on Monday that “universal health coverage” is a “right” and that it is the responsibility of “national governments” to achieve this goal.

Speaking at a plenary session of the World Health Organization’s (WHO) governing body in Geneva, Switzerland, Sebelius said, “One goal that is particularly essential to health and development … is universal health coverage. Advancing the health of our nations is a fundamental commitment we make to all our people. As President Obama recently reminded us, access to health care is ‘not some earned privilege — it is a right.’’” (Emphasis in original.)

In other words, everyone is entitled to healthcare whether he can pay for it or not. This clearly is not a right in the sense of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” — rights that every person can exercise without imposing on others. Instead, it is a government-granted privilege whereby some individuals are permitted to plunder others — and where the victims of this theft are penalized by the government for resisting.

It is clear that this is the kind of “right” that Sebelius has in mind.

Read more from this story HERE.

Yes, the Obama Administration’s Actions Amount to Tyranny

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What the Obama Administration has done with the IRS is nothing short of tyranny.

Let’s begin by stating the obvious. If government were a business, and subject to economic realities and the consequences of its ignoring them, it would have been liquidated long ago — its remaining assets of value would have been reclaimed by its creditors and shareholders (both of which are the American taxpayer), and its market share of consumers (also the American taxpayer, and those they are gracious enough to financially support) would be sought by other, more efficient businesses.

But let’s pretend for a moment that it is a business. And let’s pretend that this business had engaged not only in unethical practices, but illegal practices, completely betraying the trust of its shareholders and customers and and disavowing the very foundational principles upon which its business is predicated.

The IRS, an agency under the control of this government that Obama assures youngsters is no threat to liberty whatsoever, has done exactly that. They have apologized for selectively harassing, excessively scrutinizing, and denying benefits to conservative groups these last years.

Of particular note, the Treasury Department’s inspector general J. Russell George disclosed on Friday that the Obama administration officials were well aware of his auditing the IRS for its political screening policies in June 2012. Convenient as the IRS’s targeting of Democrats’ enemies was, the Obama administration chose not to reveal any of this knowledge to the public in the 2012 election year, yet it now feigns shock and indignation at the prospect that the IRS could have acted irresponsibly and illegally…

Obama is reasonably implicated in this crime, and this crime is nothing short of tyranny.

Read more from this story HERE.

Lawmakers to Investigate EPA FOIA Scandal

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Photo Credit: dantekgeekRepublican lawmakers are launching an investigation into claims that the Environmental Protection Agency, while giving preferential treatment to environmental groups, made it harder for conservative groups to obtain government records.

“According to documents obtained by the Committees, EPA readily granted FOIA fee waivers for environmental allies, effectively subsidizing them, while denying fee waivers and making the FOIA process more difficult for states and conservative groups,” wrote Republican lawmakers, including Rep. Darrell Issa and Sens. David Vitter, Chuck Grassley and Jim Inhofe in a letter to the EPA.

Citing a report by The Daily Caller News Foundation, Republicans are asking the EPA to hand over all Freedom of Information Act fee waiver requests, responses to requests, and FOIA officer training materials since the beginning of the Obama administration.

Read more from this story HERE.

Pakistani Doctor Who Helped Get Bin Laden Was Denied US Asylum By Obama Admin.

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Photo Credit: Fox NewsThe jailed doctor who helped the U.S. track down Osama bin Laden was convicted by a tribal court on bogus charges, according to a classified Pakistani government report.

Portions of the voluminous 357-page Abbottobad Commission Report, which has yet to be made public and were obtained exclusively by Fox News, acknowledge Dr. Shakil Afridi’s conviction last year by a government-sponsored Jirga has undermined Pakistan’s credibility. The report calls for Afridi to be given a new trial.

The report also claims Afridi joined the CIA search for Bin Laden five years ago, while he was staying in the U.S. with a cousin. According to the report, Afridi applied for asylum after a terrorist group, Lashkar-e-Islam, stepped up its operations in Pakistan’s lawless tribal belt.

Afridi was reportedly kidnapped by the group in 2008 and released after his family paid a $10,000 ransom. After helping the CIA pinpoint the terror mastermind just prior to the 2011 raid in which Navy SEALs killed Bin laden, Afridi was arrested and convicted by the tribal court of colluding with Lashkar-e-Islam.

The State Department declined to comment on the report’s claims that Afridi had applied for asylum while staying in the U.S.

Read more from this story HERE.

France’s Hollande Seeks Formation of Single European Government

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Photo Credit: APFrench President Francois Hollande called on Thursday for an economic government in the eurozone that would have its own budget, the right to issue debt, a harmonized tax system, and a full-time president.

Speaking at a news conference marking his first year in office, a day after economic data showed France had slipped back into recession, the Socialist leader said he sought to create a full political European Union (EU) within two years.

His proposals seemed likely to encounter stiff resistance from Germany, Europe’s leading power, which opposes mutualizing debt among European states and is reluctant to give the eurozone its own secretariat or create new divisions in the EU, of which 10 countries are not in the 17-nation single currency.

It also comes as Britain’s government faces growing domestic pressure to hold a referendum on leaving the bloc.

“My initiative has four points that I am putting to our partners. The first is to create an economic government with the eurozone countries which would meet every month with a real president appointed for a long period and who would be devoted to this task,” Hollande said.

Read more from this story HERE.

President Obama Is Not Doing His Job

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Photo Credit: White House FlickrGovernment is bad for personal freedom. That argument is premised upon the truism that everything government does interferes with freedom because it either prohibits or compels. Everything it owns it has taken from others. Much of what it says is divorced from the truth. President Obama, like President George W. Bush, has argued that his first job is to keep America safe, and if he impairs personal freedom in the process, that is a small price to pay for safety. Many of my colleagues in the media on the left and right have bought this argument, notwithstanding its fallacies.

Until now.

This past week, we learned that the IRS has targeted for additional scrutiny the tax exemption applications of groups with whose messages it disagrees. We also learned that the Department of Justice obtained the personal telephone records of hundreds of reporters and editors employed by the Associated Press without a search warrant issued by a judge. And during this past week we learned that the White House, the Department of State and the CIA all engaged in a conspiracy of disinformation so that the official version of events of what caused the murders of four Americans at our consulate in Benghazi, Libya, would not impair Obama’s re-election campaign in 2012.

The common threads in all of this government secrecy and lying are a general rejection of government’s moral obligation to tell the truth, a disturbing yet brazen willingness to evade and avoid the restrictions the Constitution has deliberately built around government, and a glib admission that the government can do as it pleases so long as it can politically get away with it.

The Constitution’s Equal Protection Clause requires that the government treat all similarly situated entities in a similar manner. The Constitution’s First Amendment prohibits the government from using the speech and expressive activities of persons in America as a basis for the disparate treatment of them.

Read more from this story HERE.

After IRS, Benghazi, Should I Trust Government?

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Photo Credit: AFPBlogger and professor Daniel Drezner tweeted over the weekend: “So, in all, this has been a pretty crappy week for people who dislike conspiracy theories.” Well, yes.

The week started out with President Obama disparaging those who worried about tyranny as conspiracy theorists, and telling college students to reject them:

“Still, you’ll hear voices that incessantly warn of government as nothing more than some separate, sinister entity that’s the root of all our problems, even as they do their best to gum up the works; or that tyranny always lurks just around the corner. You should reject these voices. Because what they suggest is that our brave, creative, unique experiment in self-rule is just a sham with which we can’t be trusted.”

The rest of the week consisted of scandal after scandal, suggesting that maybe our government is . . . a sham with which Obama, at least, can’t be trusted.

Generating the most bipartisan outrage were the revelations that IRS agents went after Tea Party groups for political reasons. And — despite repeated denials to Congress — it turns out that senior IRS officials knew as far back as 2011. As the editors of The Washington Post commented:

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Innis Blasts Media’s ‘Vile, Unfair’ Tea Party Stereotype

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Photo Credit: GettyAn activist with a tea party organization tore into the media in attendance at a Capitol Hill news conference Thursday, blaming the media in part for the recent Obama administration scandals because they weren’t tougher on the president.

“I want all of you to ask the question to yourself, what did you do to help create this environment where the IRS, an agent of government, can operate with such impunity?” Niger Innis, the chief strategist of TheTeaParty.net, said during a press conference with lawmakers about the IRS’ targeting of conservative groups.

Innis said today’s political environment is different than during Watergate because “40 years ago the press actually had an adversarial relationship with the chief executive, Dick Nixon.”

Innis, who is also a spokesman for the Congress on Racial Equality and son of legendary civil rights leader Roy Innis, said things have changed since those days.

Read more from this story HERE.

A Brief History of Slimy Dem Snoops and Dumpster Divers

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Photo Credit: Town HallIt’s always the “low-level” peon’s fault, isn’t it? When Democrats get caught red-handed abusing government powers and bullying their political enemies small and large, nobody at the top knows nuttin’. The buck stops … in the janitors closet or something.

Here’s what I know: While they pretend to champion privacy rights, top left-wing operatives have routinely ransacked and plundered through the private documents and personal records of conservative groups, business owners and public figures. Through it all, those on the right standing against government tyranny have refused to stand down.

During the Clinton years, senior IRS official Paul Breslan revealed that the administration’s auditors specifically targeted conservative critics. On the hit list: Judicial Watch, Paula Jones and Gennifer Flowers, the National Rifle Association, The National Review, The American Spectator, Freedom Alliance, National Center for Public Policy Research, Citizens Against Government Waste, Concerned Women for America, and the San Diego Chapter of Christian Coalition.

Steven Miller, one of the Clinton IRS agents who helped conduct those witch hunts in the 1990s, is currently the head of the Obama IRS department that has now admitted it discriminated against tea party groups. Jackboot history repeats itself.

In 1997, far-left Congressman Jim McDermott obtained and leaked an illegally taped phone call involving House GOP leaders to The Atlanta Journal-Constitution and The New York Times. Far from a low-level underling, McDermott was the top Democrat on the House Ethics Committee at the time. Ohio GOP Rep. John Boehner won a $1 million civil lawsuit against McDermott. McDermott’s leak was condemned by U.S. District Court Judge Thomas Hogan as “willful and knowing misconduct (that) rises to the level of malice in this case.”

Read more from this story HERE.