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Obama’s Discrimination Agency Sued for Religious Bigotry

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Photo Credit: WND

The government agency charged with investigating discrimination in the workplace is itself facing a discrimination lawsuit by a worker claiming he was forced to violate his religious beliefs.

Greg Somers, an investigator for the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, has filed a lawsuit over an agency policy requiring employees to investigate and prosecute claims against employers based on allegations of “sexual orientation.”

However, claims of discrimination based on “sexual orientation” have no basis in federal law.

In 2011, the EEOC, under the Obama administration, issued a policy directive requiring that claims of discrimination on the basis of lesbian, “gay,” bisexual or transgender status be processed as gender discrimination.

Shortly after the memo was issued, Somers requested a religious exemption from being forced to investigate LGBT claims, arguing it violated his sincerely held religious belief that homosexuality, along with adultery and other sexual practices, is a personal choice. Towards the end of last year, after working its way through the federal administrative process, Somers was told his request had been denied.

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New Documents Reveal Obama Administration ‘Cooking The Books’ To Achieve Record Deportation Numbers

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Photo Credit: Daily Caller

Internal documents obtained by the House Judiciary Committee show that the Obama administration has been “cooking the books” in order to reach their “record” number of deported illegal immigrants, chairman Rep. Lamar Smith said Friday.

Based on the internal U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) documents, the number of removals are actually down, the opposite of what the administration has been claiming.

According to the committee’s review, in 2011 officials at the Department of Homeland Security began including the number of individuals removed through the Alien Transfer Exit Program (ATEP) in its annual removal numbers. ATEP is a program which moves apprehended illegal immigrants to another point along the border.

The committee chair claims that counting those individuals as removals is misleading because there are no repercussions for illegal immigrants who are deported through the program, and they can simply try to re-enter.

“It is dishonest to count illegal immigrants apprehended by the Border Patrol along the border as ICE removals,” Smith explained in a statement. “And these ‘removals’ from the Border Patrol program do not subject the illegal immigrant to any penalties or bars for returning to the U.S. This means a single illegal immigrant can show up at the border and be removed numerous times in a single year — and counted each time as a removal.”

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Obama Refusing to Explain DHS’s 1.6 Billion-Round Ammo Buildup

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Photo Credit: WND

Members of Congress are demanding the Obama administration explain why it is stockpiling a huge arsenal of ammunition and weapons.

The Department of Homeland Security bought more than 1.6 billion rounds of ammunition over the last year, as well as thousands of armored vehicles. Rep. Timothy Huelscamp, R-Kan., wants to know what DHS plans to do with all that firepower, but he can’t get an answer.

A reporter for We Are Change asked Huelscamp at the Conservative Political Action Conference last week why DHS needs weapons of war. “They have no answer for that question. They refuse to answer to answer that,” Huelscamp said.

“I’ve got a list of questions of various agencies about multiple things. Far from being the most transparent administration in the world, they are the most closed-nature, opaque and they refuse to let us know what is going on, so I don’t have an answer for that. And multiple members of Congress are asking those questions,” he added.

Huelscamp said he plans to apply pressure to get an answer: “It comes down to during the budget process, during the appropriations process, are we willing to hold DHS’s feet to the fire? We’re going to find out. I say we don’t fund them ’til we get an answer.”

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Global Persecution Of Christians Ignored By Obama Admin (+video)

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Photo Credit: breitbart

Nina Shea, Director of the Center for Religious Freedom and a Hudson Institute Fellow, told Breitbart’s “Uninvited” panel at CPAC on Saturday that “religious persecution is the gravest human rights crisis of our day.” She added that “Christians are as a group the most persecuted, out of sheer numbers, across the world. This means they are being killed, tortured, imprisoned and eradicated …sent into exile for their beliefs.”

“This is happening in three types of countries,” she said. “Those with a remnant Communist country, like North Korea and China, some nationalist countries like Burma and Eritrea, and then in the Muslim world …where Islamism is on the rise.” In those Muslim countries, she said, “persecution . . . is intensifying, and it is spreading.

The crisis of global persecution of Christians has been largely ignored by the mainstream media. Ms. Shea told Breitbart News in an exclusive interview on Tuesday that “since A.M. Rosenthal at the New York Times passed away [in 2006], this issue has not been covered at the level it deserves, so I was very happy that Breitbart gave me the opportunity on the panel to promote the issue of global persecution of Christians.” Rosenthal, the former executive editor and columnist at the Times from 1977 to 1999, wrote dozens of columns on the problem of global Christian persecution in the 1990s.

Ms. Shea pointed to several recent examples of violent persecution of Christians in the Muslim world. “Last week alone,” she said, “we saw in Libya a Coptic Christian from Egypt tortured to death. Fifty of his co-religionists were imprisoned and some are still there.”

Ms. Shea’s complete remarks to “The Uninvited” panel can be seen in this video clip:

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Judge: Feds Can’t Make Domino’s Founder Offer Birth Control

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Photo Credit: Getty Images

A federal judge has blocked the Obama administration from requiring Domino’s Pizza founder Tom Monaghan to provide mandatory contraception coverage to his employees under the federal health care law.

The devout Roman Catholic says he considers contraception “gravely immoral” practice. His lawsuit also lists as a plaintiff his Domino’s Farms, an office park outside Ann Arbor.

On Thursday, U.S. District Judge Lawrence Zatkoff granted a preliminary injunction against enforcement of the law against Monaghan and Domino’s Farms.

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Sen. Graham Claims Benghazi Survivors ‘Told To Be Quiet’ By Administration (+video)

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Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham, in an extensive interview with Fox News, alleged that the injured survivors of the Benghazi terror attack have been “told to be quiet” and feel they can’t come forward to tell their stories — as he urged the House to subpoena the administration for details if necessary.

The South Carolina senator said he’s “had contact” with some of the survivors, calling their story “chilling.” He told Fox News that “the bottom line is they feel that they can’t come forth, they’ve been told to be quiet.”

The White House is denying any attempt to exert pressure on the surviving victims. “I’m sure that the White House is not preventing anyone from speaking,” White House Press Secretary Jay Carney said, when asked about the survivors.

But Graham said he thinks the administration is “trying to cover it up,” citing the valuable information the survivors hold.

“The best evidence of what happened in Benghazi is not a bunch of politicians in Washington trying to cover their political ass,” Graham said. “This is the people who lived through the debacle, and I’m going to do all I can to get them before the Congress and American people.”

Watch video here:

https://youtu.be/1KPU-_uS5k8

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ICE Chief Acknowledges More Than 2,000 Illegal Immigrants Released, Including Drunken Drivers

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Photo Credit: AP

The top U.S. immigration enforcement official acknowledged Thursday that the Obama administration has in fact released thousands of illegal immigrants from local jails over the last month despite prior claims that the release was only in the hundreds.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement Director John Morton, at a House appropriations subcommittee hearing, said the agency released a total of 2,228 illegal immigrants from local jails “throughout the country” between Feb. 9 and March 1 for “solely budgetary reasons.”

For the first time, he explained the kinds of detainees that were sprung from local jails — he said they included detainees held on theft charges, financial criminals and drunken drivers.

“In some cases, multiple DUIs,” Morton acknowledged. He also said 10 individuals labeled as “Level 1” offenders — the most serious classification — were released, but that four have since been brought back into custody. That category can include assault cases but Morton said the detainees were mostly in for financial offenses. Morton stressed that the releases were made on a case-by-case basis and not “willy-nilly.”

“There are no mass releases of dangerous criminals under way or any plan for the future,” he said. But the subcommittee chairman, Rep. John Carter, R-Texas, claimed the detainees could still pose a “risk” and questioned why ICE didn’t seek additional authority to move around its budgeted money.

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Obama Administration Plans To Cut Medicare Advantage Reimbursements

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Photo Credit: AP

The Obama administration is planning new cuts to Medicare, a federal regulatory filing reveals, cuts that could mean higher premiums or seniors losing their coverage altogether.

The new cuts come in the form of a planned reduction in the reimbursement rates the government pays to insurance companies that operate Medicare Advantage plans, which are services administered by private for-profit or non-profit providers that offer additional services than can be found in traditional Medicare.

In a Feb. 15 regulatory filing, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) announced the surprised rate cuts of 2.3 percent – meaning it would pay health care providers 2.3 percent less for providing services to patients.

CMS said it was cutting payments because it foresaw the overall costs of the Medicare Advantage program shrinking by 3.2 percent, despite the fact that health care costs – the driver of all federal health care program costs – are only rising.

Medicare Advantage is like traditional Medicare except that its plans are administered by insurance companies, who are paid a per-enrollee reimbursement fee by the government. If insurance companies can provide care to seniors at less than what the government pays them for it, they make a profit.

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U.S. to Let Spy Agencies Scour Americans’ Private Financial Records

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The Obama administration is drawing up plans to give all U.S. spy agencies full access to a massive database that contains financial data on American citizens and others who bank in the country, according to a Treasury Department document seen by Reuters.

The proposed plan represents a major step by U.S. intelligence agencies to spot and track down terrorist networks and crime syndicates by bringing together financial databanks, criminal records and military intelligence. The plan, which legal experts say is permissible under U.S. law, is nonetheless likely to trigger intense criticism from privacy advocates.

Financial institutions that operate in the United States are required by law to file reports of “suspicious customer activity,” such as large money transfers or unusually structured bank accounts, to Treasury’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN). The Federal Bureau of Investigation already has full access to the database. However, intelligence agencies, such as the Central Intelligence Agency and the National Security Agency, currently have to make case-by-case requests for information to FinCEN.

The Treasury plan would give spy agencies the ability to analyze more raw financial data than they have ever had before, helping them look for patterns that could reveal attack plots or criminal schemes.

The planning document, dated March 4, shows that the proposal is still in its early stages of development, and it is not known when implementation might begin.

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Israeli Chief Of Staff: Syria ‘Could Blow Up At Any Moment’

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Photo Credit: Front Page Mag

One doesn’t know what to make of murky reports this week about the U.S., Britain, and France training a small force of purportedly moderate Syrian rebels in Jordan—especially with the Obama administration taking the official line that it does not directly aid the Syrian opposition.

If there was ever a time to build a coherent, more or less trustworthy, genuinely moderate Syrian opposition to replace the Assad regime—and it is a questionable proposition—that time would appear to have passed, as the Syrian chaos worsens and the radicals gain strength by the day.

How badly the situation has deteriorated was evident from a report in Israel Hayom on Monday that “Syrian rebels…near the border with Israel threatened…to fight to regain the Golan Heights from Israel following the toppling of Syrian President Bashar Assad.”

The report includes a video in which a “rebel fighter” in the Syrian part of the Golan—just across from the Israeli part—declares:

These lands are blessed and the despicable Assad family promised to liberate them, but for 40 years the Syrian army did not fire a single bullet. We will open a military campaign against Israel. We will fire the bullets that Assad did not and we will liberate the Golan.

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