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Gohmert: Fast and Furious Proves Gun Control Should Start with Administration

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Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-Texas) said Tuesday that if the President Obama wants to impose new restrictions on gun ownership, he should start with his own administration, given how it handled the Fast and Furious gun-walking operation.

“[W]e have a president who makes speeches and an attorney general that makes speeches about how they’re going to go after illegal gun sales, and yet there is blood on the hands of people in this administration, and we can’t even find out who they are,” Gohmert said on the House floor Tuesday night.

Gohmert referenced the Fast and Furious operation indirectly, by noting that the Obama administration instructed gun dealers to sell guns to illegally, and promised to track those guns as they made their way to criminals. Some of the guns that were “walked” were eventually found where U.S. Border Agent Brian Terry was killed in 2010.

“The guns were not followed,” he said. “They made their way into criminals’ hands, as was intended, but they weren’t followed.”

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Obama Recruits Children to Push Gun Bans: Will Act On His Own, Prod Congress (+video)

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Acting just a month after the Connecticut school shootings, President Obama will unveil a sweeping package of gun controls Wednesday and will challenge Congress to ban high-capacity magazines and military-style semi-automatic rifles involved in recent shooting rampages.

Mr. Obama, who will make his announcement surrounded by children who wrote letters to him about gun violence, is expected to propose some moves he can take on his own. He also will demand that Congress break a decades-long refusal and enact the first new controls on firearms and ammunition since the early 1990s.

States are acting already.

New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo on Tuesday signed into law the strictest gun-control measures in the country, which will ban assault weapons, restrict ammunition and move to prevent the mentally ill from obtaining firearms . . .

Similar proposals are likely to meet stiff resistance on Capitol Hill, where the Senate’s top Democrat has said the ban on semi-automatic “assault weapons” has little chance of passing. Lawmakers have jealously guarded their powers when it comes to action on gun regulations.

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Trump: If GOP Doesn’t Hold Firm ‘Country Will Go To Hell’

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It’s fair to say that Donald Trump hasn’t exactly been impressed with the GOP’s competence at the negotiating table. In a tweet sent out after Congressional Republicans and President Barack Obama averted the fiscal cliff, the author of The Art of the Deal and Time to Get Tough noted that Republicans may well be the “worst negotiators in history.”

Human Events caught up with Trump and asked him if he had any advice for the GOP moving forward.

When Republicans and Barack Obama came to an agreement on the fiscal cliff, you claimed that the Republicans might be the worst negotiators in history. Is this due to having the wrong people in place, or do they lack leverage to get it done?

Well, I like John Boehner very much and I respect him very much, so I don’t understand the reasoning behind the last negotiation. Republicans were in an incredibly strong position. They got nothing and they gave up their most powerful card. Republicans just didn’t seem to have the ability to deal with this issue.

[Trump Tweet] “Obama and the Democrats are laughing at the deal they just made…the Republicans got nothing!”

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Fitch May Downgrade U.S. Credit Rating

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LONDON (AP) — The United States could lose its top credit rating for the second time from a leading credit agency if there’s a delay in raising the country’s debt ceiling, Fitch Ratings warned Tuesday.

Congress has to increase the country’s debt limit, which effectively rules how much debt the U.S. can have, by March 1 or face a potential default. There are fears that the debate will deteriorate into the squabbling and political brinkmanship that marked the last effort to raise the ceiling in the summer of 2011. The U.S. Treasury Department warned then that it had nearly reached a point where it would be unable “to meet our commitments securely.”

If Fitch does move to downgrade the US, it will join Standard & Poor’s, which was so concerned by the dysfunctional 2011 debate that it stripped the U.S. of its triple A rating for the first time in the country’s history. Another major ratings agency, Moody’s, also has a negative view on the U.S. outlook.

“The pressure on the U.S. rating, if anything, is increasing,” David Riley, managing director of Fitch Ratings’ global sovereigns division said at a London conference. “We thought the 2011 crisis was a one-off event …. if we have a repeat we will place the U.S. rating under review.”

If that happens, Riley said there was “a material risk” of the rating coming down.

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Former Obama Staff Complain Of Cold Inaugural Shoulder

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WASHINGTON — In a sour footnote to President Barack Obama’s sweeping electoral victory last November, many of his campaign staffers have been shut out of the inaugural festivities, more than a dozen of them complained to BuzzFeed Monday.

“We worked our butts off, and I’m going to watch it on TV instead of being there,” said one former staffer. “It’s a huge bummer.”

Former staffers — who spoke to BuzzFeed on the condition of anonymity to preserve their relationships, and possible jobs, in Obama’s second term — say they have grown frustrated by what they see as inadequate communication from the Presidential Inaugural Committee, the group responsible for the inaugural balls, and in particular by its restrictions on access to the official events.

“I didn’t hear anything from PIC until a little more than a week ago,” said another staffer. “They knew this was happening. Instead of giving us details [of what we could attend] on November 7th, we found out so late that it would cost me $2,000 to go to Washington for a weekend as opposed to $1,000 or less if I booked two months ago.”

More than 35,000 attendees are expected at Obama’s consolidated formal Inaugural Ball Monday night, which replaces nearly a dozen separate balls. Many staffers complain that after the hard work of getting Obama re-elected they still couldn’t snag tickets to the event — only a small number were made available to staffers. PIC outsourced the ticketing to Ticketmaster, whose system bungled the public distribution earlier this month.

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Biden: W.H. Readies 19 Executive Actions On Gun Control

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The White House has identified 19 executive actions for President Barack Obama to move unilaterally on gun control, Vice President Joe Biden told a group of House Democrats on Monday, the administration’s first definitive statements about its response to last month’s mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School.

Later this week, Obama will formally announce his proposals to reduce gun violence, which are expected to include renewal of the assault weapons ban, universal background checks and prohibition of high-capacity magazine clips. But Biden, who has been leading Obama’s task force on the response, spent two hours briefing a small group of sympathetic House Democrats on the road ahead in the latest White House outreach to invested groups.

The focus on executive orders is the result of the White House and other Democrats acknowledging the political difficulty of enacting any new gun legislation, a topic Biden did not address in Monday’s meeting.

The executive actions could include giving the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention authority to conduct national research on guns, more aggressive enforcement of existing gun laws and pushing for wider sharing of existing gun databases among federal and state agencies, members of Congress in the meeting said.

“It was all focusing on enforcing existing law, administering things like improving the background database, things like that that do not involve a change in the law but enforcing and making sure that the present law is administered as well as possible,” said Rep. Bobby Scott (D-Va.).

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Military Retirees Not Near Bases to Lose TRICARE Prime Oct. 1

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photo credit: 99th rsc pao

The military’s managed-care option — TRICARE Prime — will be ended Oct. 1 for retirees, their family members and for military survivors who reside more than 40 miles from a military treatment facility or from a base closure site, TRICARE Management Activity announced Wednesday.

Most of these 171,400 beneficiaries will need to shift health coverage from Prime to TRICARE Standard, the military’s fee-for-service health insurance option. For beneficiaries who use more than preventive health care during the year, the shift will mean higher out-of-pocket costs.

Defense officials expect the move to save the health care system up to $55 million a year.

The rollback in number of Prime service areas will not impact active duty members or their families living far a military base for tours as recruiters or in other remote assignments. Their health insurance through the separate TRICARE Prime Remote program will not change.

But grown children of members or of retirees who elected coverage under TRICARE Young Adult insurance will, like retirees, lose access to managed care providers under Prime if they reside more than 40 miles from a base.

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The Tyranny of Solutions

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Sinclair Lewis was so 20th Century.

Progressives have effectively burnt the cross and the flag already. Thus, old-style patriotism and religiosity can’t even win elections in heartland states- just ask Senators Akin and Mourdoch.

No, that’s not where the threat festers. When tyranny comes to America, it will be advanced by earnest public officials, enforcing intrusive rules declared necessary to stamp out social problems and purify us of bad consumer choices. The oppression generally will be applauded by elites and educated people. Whether or not it prevails and becomes the new normal depends on the rest of us, our outrage, and the effectiveness and staying power of our response.

But, those folks who are anxiously monitoring Washington and a president who ill-conceals that, to him, the Constitution presents more of an obstacle than a genius bulwark for freedom, might be missing an important point. Yes, Washington is out of control. For liberty to prevail, it must be confronted, restrained, and redirected. But, so too, our local authorities and institutions can trample our liberties, our privacy, and our domestic tranquility.

Law students learn an aphorism about the development of law: Hard cases make bad law. An incident or two last year in my home state of Colorado illustrate the point: hard circumstances invite bad decisions and establish bad precedents. Citizens can be almost powerless to respond.

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Itchin’ for a Fight: Senators Express Disapproval of Obama Judicial Nominees

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President Barack Obama last week re-nominated 33 individuals to federal benches, several of whom faced stiff resistance when originally nominated.

The judicial nominations come as the president faces stiff confirmation battles for some of his cabinet nominations, including over secretary of defense nominee Chuck Hagel.

The judicial nominations have raised concerns among court-watchers of increased judicial activism and maneuvering for potential Supreme Court vacancies.

“He wants to appoint judges based on their empathy rather than based on their commitment to the law,” said Carrie Severino, chief counsel for the Judicial Crisis Network, a judicial watchdog group.

Severino highlighted Caitlin Halligan’s nomination to the District of Columbia Circuit Court of Appeals. Citing her stated positions on affirmative action, gun rights, gay rights, and environmental issues, Severino said Halligan “has staked out a position that is well left of the American people.”

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Diversity Training Obama-Style: USDA Sessions Included Participants Chanting ‘Our Forefathers Were Illegal Immigrants’

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A U.S. Department of Agriculture official has confirmed some of the government’s “diversity training” – including participants banging on tables and chanting, “Our forefathers were illegal immigrants!” – was “not in line” with USDA guidelines.

Breitbart reported last year the USDA paid a Chicago-based diversity training and consulting firm $200,000 to hold a series of “Diversity Training Workshops” around the country.

According to a press statement issued by the Department of Agriculture, the workshops were designed to “foster overall diversity awareness.”

Documents obtained by the watchdog groupJudicial Watch, however, revealed the seminars required participants to chant, “Our forefathers were illegal immigrants!” and encouraged the attendees to bang on the tables while chanting the phrase.

Souder, Betances and Associates was given the USDA contract to conduct the training seminars.

Read more from this story HERE.