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Eric Holder a Convert on State’s Rights?

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Photo Credit: WND

Photo Credit: WND

The 10th Amendment long has been a favorite of more conservative- and libertarian-leaning Americans for limiting the power of the federal government with respect to the states.

The amendment particularly has been invoked by opponents of President Obama’s many moves to expand the federal government’s reach, including in health care and state law enforcement.

So when Obama’s attorney general, Eric Holder, invoked the 10th Amendment in the Justice Department’s decision to not challenge state lawmakers in Colorado and Washington who challenged federal statutes by passing laws legalizing possession of marijuana, a Colorado congressman wanted to know the extent of Holder’s conversion.

“The real question is, ‘Does this mean that states now have the right to pre-empt federal law under the 10th Amendment?’” wrote Rep. Cory Gardner, R-Colo., in a letter to Holder.

The letter came after Holder confirmed publicly that the Department of Justice, which repeatedly has said that states cannot deviate from federal law, would defer to Colorado and Washington state laws regarding marijuana.

Read more from this story HERE.

U.S. Mulls the Future of Military Aid to Egypt

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Photo Credit: Reuters

Photo Credit: Reuters

The U.S. government faces billions of dollars in potential costs if it decides to cancel foreign military aid to Egypt, a senior Pentagon official told Reuters on Wednesday.

Richard Genaille, deputy director of the Pentagon’s Defense Security Cooperation Agency, said he hoped the Obama administration reached a decision soon on whether to continue $1.23 billion in U.S. military assistance to Egypt, given the large number of weapons shipments in the pipeline.

“We’re kind of antsy about that,” Genaille said after a speech at the ComDef industry conference in Washington. “There’s a whole bunch of contracts out there. The bills keep coming in and we’ve got to be able to pay them somehow otherwise we go in default.”

Washington is reviewing the U.S. military aid to Egypt and an additional $241 million in economic aid after the country’s military ousted the Muslim Brotherhood-backed government on July 3 and then cracked down on protesters last month.

Washington has already halted deliveries of four F-16 fighters built by Lockheed Martin Corp, and must decide soon on several other large weapons shipments, according to U.S. government officials. Some smaller items covered by the foreign military assistance have been allowed to proceed.

Read more from this story HERE.

Obama Gives Pay Raise to Federal Workers. Union Complains

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Photo Credit: breitbart

Photo Credit: breitbart

President Barack Obama issued an executive order on Friday to end a three-year freeze on federal pay scales and give federal workers a one percent pay raise.

Union boss J. David Cox Sr., head of the American Federation of Government Employees, called Obama’s pay raise “inadequate” and “pitiful” but a step in the right direction.

“Although the 1 percent is a pitiful amount that doesn’t begin to compensate for the furloughs and three years of frozen pay, it is a welcome development,” said Cox. “To call this raise inadequate is an understatement, but it is good news all the same.”

Read more from this story HERE.

Feds Forced Churches to Get Baptism Permits

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Photo Credit: Fox News

Photo Credit: Fox News

For as far back as anyone can remember, Missouri Baptists have gathered on river banks for Sunday afternoon baptisms.

The preacher leads the new believers into the water, draped in white robes as a choir sings, “Shall We Gather at the River.”

It’s the way it’s been done for generations – baptizing in creeks, lakes, and rivers “in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit.”

But now the long-cherished tradition of “taking the plunge” has been drawn into a controversy with the federal government.

The National Park Service began enforcing a policy recently that required churches to obtain special use permits in order to baptize in public waters. As part of the same permit process, the NPS also mandated that churches give the Park Service 48 hours advance notice of pending baptisms.

Read more from this story HERE.

U.S. Spy Network’s Successes, Failures and Objectives Detailed in ‘Black Budget’ Summary

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Budget DeficitBy Barton Gellman and Greg Miller.

U.S. spy agencies have built an intelligence-gathering colossus since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, but remain unable to provide critical information to the president on a range of national security threats, according to the government’s top-secret budget.

The $52.6 billion “black budget” for fiscal 2013, obtained by The Washington Post from former ­intelligence contractor Edward Snowden, maps a bureaucratic and operational landscape that has never been subject to public scrutiny. Although the government has annually released its overall level of intelligence spending since 2007, it has not divulged how it uses the money or how it performs against the goals set by the president and Congress.

The 178-page budget summary for the National Intelligence Program details the successes, failures and objectives of the 16 spy agencies that make up the U.S. intelligence community, which has 107,035 employees.

The summary describes cutting-edge technologies, agent recruiting and ongoing operations. The Post is withholding some information after consultation with U.S. officials who expressed concerns about the risk to intelligence sources and methods. Sensitive details are so pervasive in the documents that The Post is publishing only summary tables and charts online.

“The United States has made a considerable investment in the Intelligence Community since the terror attacks of 9/11, a time which includes wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Arab Spring, the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction technology, and asymmetric threats in such areas as cyber-warfare,” Director of National Intelligence James R. Clapper Jr. wrote in response to inquiries from The Post.

Read more from this story HERE.

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Photo Credit: Danita Delimont/Getty/Gallo Images

Photo Credit: Danita Delimont/Getty/Gallo Images

US intelligence spending has doubled since 9/11, top secret budget reveals

By Ewen MacAskill and Jonathan Watts.

US spending on intelligence has doubled since 9/11, with the National Security Agency and the CIA taking the biggest share, according to the top secret budget leaked by the former NSA contractor Edward Snowden.

Details of the $52.6bn request for 2013 by America’s 16 spy agencies were revealed by the Washington Post on Thursday.

The NSA has requested $10.45bn from Congress, while the CIA is asking for $14.7bn. The NSA has long been regarded as the most productive of the spy agencies, so the higher spending by the CIA is one of the biggest surprises in the four-volume, 1,452-page budget.

The Congressional Budget Justification for the National Intelligence Program, dubbed the “black budget”, offers insights into new projects as well as the successes and failures of the spy agencies. It outlines the countries they have successfully infiltrated and those where they are struggling, primarily North Korea.

Ironically, in view of Snowden’s revelations, part of the budget is is dedicated to stopping whistleblowers. Among the $3.7bn counterintelligence section of the budget is an item dedicated to detecting insider threats “who seeks to exploit their authorized access to sensitive information to harm US interests.”

Read more from this story HERE.

Obama: Feds Will Define What a Good College Is, Punish and Reward Accordingly (+video)

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Photo Credit: AP

Photo Credit: AP

Speaking at the University of Buffalo, President Barack Obama today unveiled an ambitious new plan for the federal government to create a national rating system that will define what a good college is and financially reward or punish colleges depending on how they rank in the government’s system.

He said he intends to have the rating system in placed by the fall of 2015 and intends to work with Congress to enact legislation linking federal aid to colleges to the rating system.

As outlined by Obama, this rating system would look at essentially materialistic and financial characteristics of a college as opposed to intellectual and moral ones.

For example, as the president described it, the rating system will not measure how many of a school’s graduates go on to become exemplary and virtuous in the conduct of their personal and public lives, but it will measure things such as “how many students graduate on time,” “how well do those graduates do in the work force,” whether the college is “helping students from all kinds of backgrounds succeed,” and “how successful colleges are at enrolling and graduating students who are on Pell Grants.”

Federal Pell Grants are gifts of cash–not loans–that the federal government gives to some students, but not others. They are not based on academic merit but on whether a student’s income and his or her parents’ income is low enough to qualify the family as what the Department of Education calls “low-income.”

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Feds are Building a Detective Squad to Target Consumers and Companies that Don’t Follow Obamacare’s Rules

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Photo Credit: AP

Photo Credit: AP

More than 1,600 new employees hired by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Resources in the aftermath of Obamacare’s passage include just two described as ‘consumer safety’ officers, but 86 tasked with ‘criminal investigating’ – indicating that the agency is building an army of detectives to sleuth out violations of a law that many in Congress who supported it still find confusing.

On the day President Obama signed the Affordable Care Act into law in 2010, HHS received authority from the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) to make as many as 1,814 new hires under an emergency ‘Direct Hiring Authority’ order.

The Obama administration ordered that employment expansion despite a government-wide hiring freeze.

A total of 1,684 of those positions were filled. An analysis by MailOnline shows that at 2010 federal government salary rates, the new employees’ salaries alone cost the U.S. at least $138.8 million every year.

Had the agency filled all its available jobs, that cost would have been a minimum of $159 million.

Read more from this story HERE.

Rising State Anger Against Feds Results in Dozens of Nullification Efforts Across US

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Photo Credit: APInfuriated by what they see as the long arm of Washington reaching into their business, states are increasingly telling the feds: Keep out!

Bills that would negate a variety of federal laws have popped up this year in the vast majority of states – with the amount of anti-federal legislation sharply on the rise during the Obama administration, according to experts.

The “nullification” trend in recent years has largely focused on three areas: gun control; health care; and national standards for driver’s licenses. It’s touched off fierce fights within the states, and between the states and the feds, as well as raising questions and court battles about whether any of it is legal.

In at least 37 states legislation has been introduced that in some way guts federal gun regulations, according to the Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence. The bills were signed into law this spring in two states, Kansas and Alaska, and in two more lawmakers hope to override a governor’s veto. Twenty states since 2010 have passed laws that either opt out of or challenge mandatory parts of Obamacare, the National Conference of State Legislatures says. And half the states have OK’d measures aimed knocking back the Real ID Act of 2005, which dictates Washington’s requirements for issuing driver’s licenses.

…In fact, the state-level anger at the nation’s capital has reached such a fever pitch that many of the bills do not even address specific federal laws, but rather amount to what is in effect “preemptive” nullification, wiping out, for instance, any federal law that may exist in the future that the states determine violates gun rights. The flurry of such efforts was spurred by fear on the part of states that in the wake of the tragic shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary in Newtown, Conn., that Congress would pass restrictive gun control legislation.

Read more from this story HERE.

States Say “No” to Ludicrous Federal Rule That Employers Can’t Check into New Hires’ Criminal Backgrounds

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Photo Credit: APAttorneys general across the country are fighting back against new Obama administration guidelines on businesses using criminal background checks for job applicants and two federal lawsuits that followed, calling both “a quintessential example of gross federal overreach.”

The nine attorneys general sent the letter Wednesday to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, which in April 2012 voted in favor of the new guidelines that warn such checks can discriminate against African-Americans because they being are arrested at a disproportionate rate compared to the rest of the U.S. population.

Fifteen months after issuing the guidelines — which included the recommendation that businesses eliminate such policies — the commission filed lawsuits against discount retailer Dollar General and a BMW facility in South Carolina for alleged civil rights violations.

“We believe that these lawsuits and your application of the law, as articulated through your enforcement guidance, are misguided and a quintessential example of gross federal overreach,” the attorneys general wrote in a nine-page letter to EEOC Chairman Jacqueline Berrien and the agency’s four commissioners.

The June 11 suits allege Dollar General violated the civil rights of two applicants. In the one case, the applicant alleged she was denied employment even though a felony conviction was incorrectly attributed to her.

Read more from this story HERE.

Courageous CEO Discloses that the Secret FISA Court Ordered His ISP to Install Black Box to Copy Data

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Photo Credit: FlickrIn the wake of the Snowden revelations, this courageous CEO of a small Internet Service Provider (ISP) in Utah decided to go public with what one of the US’s secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Courts ordered him to do. The CEO is outraged over this apparent violation of the Bill of Rights. Here’s part of his statement:

[The federal agents] came in and showed me papers. It was a court order from the FISC (Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court) for the intercept, with the agent’s name… and the court’s information. I think it was three or four pages of text. They wouldn’t let met me copy them. They let me take notes in regards to technical aspects of what they wanted to do…

It was open ended. I called six months into it and said, “How long is this going to go on?” and they said, “I don’t know.” I went on for nine months. If it were still there, I would have probably smashed it by now. There have been no [related] arrests that I have heard of…

These programs that violate the Bill of Rights can continue because people can’t go out and say, “This is my experience, this is what happened to me, and I don’t think it is right”…

We run a Tor node, in some ways as an affirmation of our belief that there are legitimate reasons for being anonymous on the internet. That is where the majority of requests come in from these days. Some illegal traffic comes in through Tor node and we get a federal request through the FBI or DOJ (Department of Justice). I respond to them and say that this is a Tor node [and therefore inaccessible, even to the ISP]; that is usually the end of it. They realize what that is, and it is a dead end.

I am in a little bit of a different situation than large companies. I don’t have a board of directors to answer to. A number of [larger] companies are getting paid for the information. If you go establish a tap on Google’s network, they will charge X amount per month. Usually the government pays it. It isn’t worth it to me to do that kind of wholesale monitoring at any price, and lot of companies disagree with that, because it is a financial issue for them. [They say] if it is worth this much profit, let’s go for it. The return for standing up for people’s constitutional rights and privacy is much greater and more satisfying.