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Judicial Watch: Obama Admin Collecting Financial Data From Private Citizens Without Warrants

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Photo Credit: ezola

Photo Credit: ezola

Well, we almost made it through a whole week without a new Obama Regime scandal, but the good folks at Judicial Watch never rest, and they announced today that they’ve obtained records from the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) exposing that millions of dollars have been spent by the agency on the warrantless collection and analysis of Americans’ financial transactions.

The full extent of the CFPB personal financial data collection program is revealed in a document obtained by Judicial Watch entitled “INDEFINITE-DELIVERY INDEFINITY-QUANTITY (IDIQ) STATEMENT OF WORK.” According to the IDIQ document’s stated Objective: “The CFPB seeks to acquire and maintain a nationally representative panel of credit information on consumers for use in a wide range of policy research projects… The panel shall be a random sample of consumer credit files obtains from a national database of credit files.”

To accomplish this objective, the CFPB describes the scope of the program accordingly:

The panel shall include 5 million consumers, and joint borrowers, co-signers, and authorized users [emphasis added]. The initial panel shall contain 10 years of historical data on a quarterly basis [emphasis added]…

Read more from this story HERE.

Radical Muslim Preacher Whose Organization Supports Killing US Soldiers Met at White House this Month

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Photo Credit: Daily Caller

Photo Credit: Daily Caller

An Islamic scholar who serves as vice president of an organization that supports the terrorist group Hamas and whose president sanctioned the killing of American soldiers in Iraq met with senior Obama administration officials at the White House earlier this month.

In a posting on his website, brought to The Daily Caller’s attention by the Investigative Project on Terrorism, Shaykh Abdullah Bin Bayyah revealed that he met at the White House on June 13 with Gayle Smith, senior director of the National Security Council, and Rashad Hussain, President Obama’s special envoy Organization of the Islamic Conference, among other officials.

The posting also initially stated that the “national security adviser” was at the meeting, without naming him directly, though that part of the post was removed shortly after TheDC contacted the White House to see if National Security Adviser Tom Donilon was in fact at the meeting. According to the Investigative Project on Terrorism, the Arabic version of the post was also changed to say that the deputy national security adviser attended, not the national security adviser.

Among the topics the post says Bin Bayyah addressed at the meeting was how to “lift the injustices from vulnerable peoples such as the Syrian people, the Palestinians, and the Muslims in Myanmar” and for the U.S. to do more to aid the Syrian revolution.

Read more from this story HERE.

Obama Admin. Tells Egyptian Christians to not Protest Muslim Brotherhood

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Photo Credit: FrontPagemag

Photo Credit: FrontPagemag

As Egyptians of all factions prepare to demonstrate in mass against the Muslim Brotherhood and President Morsi’s rule on June 30, the latter has been trying to reduce their numbers, which some predict will be in the millions and eclipse the Tahrir protests that earlier ousted Mubarak. Among other influential Egyptians, Morsi recently called on Coptic Christian Pope Tawadros II to urge his flock, Egypt’s millions of Christians, not to join the June 30 protests.

While that may be expected, more troubling is that the U.S. ambassador to Egypt is also trying to prevent Egyptians from protesting—including the Copts. The June 18th edition of Sadi al-Balad reports that lawyer Ramses Naggar, the Coptic Church’s legal counsel, said that during Patterson’s June 17 meeting with Pope Tawadros, she “asked him to urge the Copts not to participate” in the demonstrations against Morsi and the Brotherhood.

The Pope politely informed her that his spiritual authority over the Copts does not extend to political matters.

Regardless, many Egyptian activists are condemning Patterson for flagrantly behaving like the Muslim Brotherhood’s stooge. Leading opposition activist Shady el-Ghazali Harb said Patterson showed “blatant bias” in favor of Morsi and the Brotherhood, adding that her remarks had earned the U.S. administration “the enmity of the Egyptian people.” Coptic activists like George Ishaq openly told Patterson to “shut up and mind your own business.” And Christian business tycoon Naguib Sawiris—no stranger to Islamist hostility—posted a message on his Twitter account addressed to the ambassador saying “Bless us with your silence.”

Indeed, the U.S. ambassador’s position as the Brotherhood’s lackey is disturbing—and revealing—on several levels. First, all throughout the Middle East, the U.S. has been supporting anyone and everyone opposing their leaders—in Libya against Gaddafi, in Egypt itself against 30-year U.S. ally Mubarak, and now in Syria against Assad. In all these cases, the U.S. has presented its support in the name of the human rights and freedoms of the people against dictatorial leaders.

Read more from this story HERE.

From Benghazi to Nuclear Terrorism

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iran_nukeFormer Director of Central Intelligence James Woolsey just published an article in the Wall Street Journal documenting how the U.S. has become so vulnerable to international terrorism that even the ridiculous government of North Korea could now detonate a small nuclear weapon above the American homeland.

“North Korea needs only one ICBM capable of delivering a single nuclear warhead in order to pose an existential threat to the U.S.,” wrote Woolsey, along with co-author Peter Pry, executive director of the Task Force on National and Homeland Security. “The Congressional Electromagnetic Pulse Commission, the Congressional Strategic Posture Commission and several other U.S. government studies have established that detonating a nuclear weapon high above any part of the U.S. mainland would generate a catastrophic electromagnetic pulse.”

This one explosion – something North Korea is actually capable of causing – would constitute an EMP attack that would, in the words of our former CIA chief, “collapse the electric grid and other infrastructure that depends on it – communications, transportation, banking and finance, food and water – necessary to sustain modern civilization and the lives of 300 million Americans.”

Another well-informed analysis, just published in the Weekly Standard, confirms that by mid-2014, the fanatically anti-American terrorist government of Iran will likely be able to enrich uranium to weapons-grade plutonium too rapidly for the U.S. to stop it militarily. When an insane and metastatic regime – one obsessed with destruction of (first) the “Little Satan,” Israel, and (later) the “Great Satan,” America – has a nuclear arsenal, we will be living in a very different and dark world indeed.

Read more from this story HERE.

Obama Admin. Plan Guts Oil Shale Development, Reduces by Two-Thirds Federal Lands Previously Approved (+video)

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Photo Credit: Fox News

Photo Credit: Fox News

Controversy is heating up over an administration plan to drastically reduce the amount of federal lands available for oil shale development in the American West.

The Bush administration had set aside 1.3 million acres for oil shale and tar sands development in Colorado, Utah and Wyoming. The new Bureau of Land Management plan cuts that amount by two-thirds, down to 700,000 acres, a decision that has prompted industry outrage.

“What they basically did was make it so that nobody is going to want to spend money going after oil shale on federal government lands,” said Dan Kish, Senior Vice President of Institute for Energy Research.

Read more from this story HERE.

Farm Bill Comes to Stunning Defeat in House

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Photo Credit: Breitbart

Photo Credit: Breitbart

While Americans have been understandably focused on important issues such as the Immigration Bill and the Obama administration scandals, on Thursday, by a vote of 195-234, the House defeated the nearly $1 trillion farm subsidy and food stamp bill–known collectively as “The Farm Bill,” in a searing rebuke to House leadership.

The Wall Street Journal refers to the shocking defeat of the farm legislation as a “revolt,” and describes how the House’s more conservative members who believed the bill spends too much money, including Paul Ryan and Jeb Hensarling, joined with Democrats who said the bill did not offer enough in entitlements to bring the legislation to its knees.

The WSJ states that the reason for the surprising defeat of the House farm bill was its “mind-boggling price tag–$740 billion for food stamps and $200 billion for farm payments” and other freebies. The taxpayer-funded farm payment subsidies have been shown to find their way into the pockets of wealthy farm owners, agribusiness lobbyists, and even members of Congress who vote on the bill.

While conservatives note that food stamps have grown to an $80 billion per year program, up by about 70% in less than five years, Democrats called the $2 billion in cuts and the addition of a work requirement in the legislation too severe.

Read more from this story HERE.

Obama Admin. Attempting to Ban as Racist Criminal Background Checks For New Hires

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Photo Credit: brettneilson

Are criminal background checks racist? That’s the startling new legal theory that the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission unveiled this week in lawsuits against employers. It’s another example of how President Obama’s appointees are using regulation to achieve policy goals they can’t get through Congress.

On Tuesday the EEOC accused retailer Dollar General DG -0.04% and a U.S. unit of German car maker BMW BMW.XE +1.26% of violating the 1964 Civil Rights Act by using criminal checks as part of their employment decisions. The logic? Blacks have higher conviction rates than whites, and therefore criminal checks discriminate against blacks.

The EEOC alleges that BMW discriminated against blacks because it screened contractors in South Carolina for convictions for “Murder, Assault & Battery, Rape, Child Abuse, Spousal Abuse (Domestic Violence), Manufacturing of Drugs, Distribution of Drugs, [and] Weapons Violations,” and more blacks than whites are convicted of those crimes.

The suit says 70 black BMW contractors and 18 non-black contractors had criminal convictions, and the company declined to hire them. The suit seeks redress, such as hiring the plaintiffs, back pay, legal costs and more, but only for the black contractors.

In its Dollar General suit, the agency says that 10% of blacks and 7% of non-black applicants failed the retailer’s criminal screening. The EEOC calls that three-percentage-point difference a “gross disparity” that is “statistically significant” enough to qualify as discrimination.

Read more from this story HERE.

Sarah Palin on Fertility and the Syrian Civil War

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Photo Credit: Reuters

Former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin criticized the Obama administration’s decision to supply weapons to the rebels in the civil war in Syria today, arguing that the U.S. should “Let Allah sort it out” until there is a stronger leader in the White House.

“Militarily, where is our commander in chief? We’re talking now more new interventions. I say until we know what we’re doing, until we have a commander in chief who knows what he’s doing, well, let these radical Islamic countries who aren’t even respecting basic human rights, where both sides are slaughtering each other as they scream over an arbitrary red line, ‘Allah Akbar,’ I say until we have someone who knows what they’re doing, I say let Allah sort it out,” Palin said at the Faith and Freedom Coalition Conference…

Palin, speaking at the conclusion of the three-day Faith and Freedom Coalition Conference, also took a swipe at another speaker at the conservative forum, former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, who argued Friday that one of the reasons to support the Senate’s immigration reform plan is because “Immigrants are more fertile.”

“I think it’s kind of dangerous territory, territory to want to debate this whole one race’s fertility rate over another, and I say this from someone who’s kind of fertile herself,” Palin said. “I don’t think that’s where we want to go in deciding how will we incentivize the hardworking responsible families who want to live in the light, follow the law, become Americans, versus those whose very first act on our soil is to break the law? There are different ways that we can debate this.”

Read more from this story HERE.

Hillary Clinton’s Legacy of Scandal (+video)

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By Jeffrey T. Brown. In the midst of the eruption of near-daily scandals involving the Obama administration, let us not forget that until just a few months ago, Hillary Clinton was the most significant persona within that administration besides the president himself. Let us not also forget that notwithstanding the scandal-grenades going off all around us, Mrs. Clinton diligently plans her run for the presidency, even while several of those scandals are obviously and entirely her responsibility, exposing the State Department during her tenure as an utter sewer of corruption, cronyism, and fatal incompetence.

For as long as Hillary Clinton has been on the national scene, she has left a path of destruction and wreckage in her wake that is both impressive and terrible to behold. She is a testament to the extent of damage that can be done by one person determined to conquer everything before her in the quest for unlimited power and self-gratification. The only prize left to her in American politics is the presidency, which she has always felt is hers by right. Indeed, she would have attained it were it not for the upstart community organizer, a fellow admirer of Saul Alinsky, who spoke in volumes but said nothing.

While such determination comes at a staggering cost, we should remind ourselves that the bill is never paid by Mrs. Clinton or her equally arrogant husband. It is paid by the country. Before we ask yet again for the check, perhaps we should remind ourselves of exactly who this woman is who will soon attempt to seduce the country, and her history as the object of an absurd and undeserved degree of national affection.

Before accompanying her husband to the White House as our first co-president, Mrs. Clinton was working hard on becoming the person we now know her to be. As with her husband, the goal has always been the attainment of power masquerading as public service. Setting an example for the Obamas to emulate, the Clintons put self-absorption and personal victory before all else. The Clintons have always served themselves, and nothing else.

Do you recall the slime that was Whitewater, in which the Clintons dissembled and lied while their former business partners went to jail? Do you remember Mrs. Clinton earning $100,000 in profit in 1979 on a $1,000 investment over the course of only 9 months in volatile cattle futures, about which she knew nothing, thanks to help from a highly placed Tyson Foods connection? Tyson profited handsomely in Arkansas, with state loans and appointments. We are to believe that Clinton studied the Wall Street Journal to achieve a feat against which the odds were one in 250 million. Do you recall the Rose Law Firm billing records that magically appeared in Mrs. Clinton’s White House office, years after they had been subpoenaed? Or the death of Vince Foster under rather extraordinary and inexplicable circumstances, and the lies and cover-up that followed? Do you recall that while testifying before congressional investigators as first lady, she answered “I don’t know” or “I don’t remember” 250 times? Read more from this story HERE.

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Chelsea Clinton endorses mom: We need a woman in the White House

By Paul Bedard. Former first daughter Chelsea Clinton says it’s time for a woman in the Oval Office, music to her mom Hillary Clinton’s ears.

In a wide-ranging interview on MSNBC’s “NOW with Alex Wagner” Clinton was asked about getting a woman elected president, as her mother tried to do in 2008 and is expected to in 2016.

Read more from this story HERE.

President Obama Got By With a Little Help From His Friends at DOJ, IRS, MSM and Now Even the NSA?

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Photo Credit: Irish Central

As America gets assaulted with one scandal after another surrounding the Obama administration, there is speculation more is to come….And that speculation adds fuel to a bonfire of suspicion that this administration would stop at nothing to win its’ re-election.

The 2012 presidential election was really not decided on a national level, it was always about who could take the edge in the deciding 9 swing/battleground states.

According to polls leading up to the election, the race was razor thin between Mitt Romney and Barack Obama in many of those important states.

Hindsight is 20/20 and if the public knew in November 2012, what it knows today, would the election results have been different?

A characteristic lack of curiosity by the main stream media into any malfeasance by the Obama administration helped the President. This lack of curiosity helped quell outrage by the American public just prior to the election, as our Libyan Ambassador was killed. The cover story and the cover up by the administration to hide the magnitude of failure in foreign policy should have been a major campaign issue. But this news was suppressed with the aid and abetting of the major media.

Perhaps there is an easy answer when you see the inbreeding between the White House and influential members of the main stream media….The connections are astounding. Read the full story here in the Washington Post.

Suppose the latest scandal of IRS targeting of conservative organizations and individual donors had been exposed back in 2010-2011 and brought to a halt? As more gets revealed on this scandal it seems this was a deliberate attempt to suppress a major segment of opposition to the Obama campaign.

How much of a difference did it make in organizing voter turn out and support for the Romney campaign? Romney received 2-3 million votes less than McCain did in 2008. Perhaps if the TEA Party and other conservative groups weren’t being bullied by the federal government, they could have at least boosted voter turnout and matched voter numbers of 2008. See conservative vote was suppressed.

Many states prior to the 2012 elections had been trying to clean up their voter rolls as well as help stop vote fraud by requiring picture ID in order to vote. This was in response to widespread suspicion and reports of tainted elections due to vote fraud. But the Justice Department under Eric Holder, fought these safeguards tooth and nail and filed suit to delay any changes. Did not having strengthened voter ID laws and other safeguards have an effect on the election? Did precincts in heavily Democrat areas reporting 140% voter turnout help sway the outcome See Holder blocks Voter ID at every turn.

The recent revelation of how the NSA has collected and stored email and phone communications of millions of Americans is disturbing. Especially when coupled with the knowledge of how this administration has used the IRS and other government agencies to target political foes.

Would it be too much of a stretch to think the administration wouldn’t tap into this massive data base to help get itself elected?

From today’s World Net Daily: According to U.S. Rep. Maxine Waters, D-Calif , Barack Obama now holds a database “no one has ever seen before in life” that has “information about everything on every individual.” It’s a fact Obamas election team had use of massive amounts of data that gave them an edge in the election.

It’s disturbing to know Waters made her statement back in February of 2012 long before the election and long before we were aware of this administrations abuse of power.

Any of the above factors individually, could have helped tip the election in Obamas favor in just a few of the close battleground states. But if you add them all together, it makes it an unbeatable combination.

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Ed Farnan is the conservative columnist at IrishCentral, where he has been writing on the need for energy independence, strong self defense, secure borders, 2nd amendment, smaller government and many other issues. His articles appear in many publications throughout the USA and world. He has been a guest on Fox News and a regular guest on radio stations in the US and Europe.