Feds, cops: Tsarnaev brothers not ID’d until after shootout

Federal authorities and local cops are vehemently denying that they knew the identities of alleged Boston Marathon bombers Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev before releasing their images to the public, in response to a pointed letter from an Iowa senator that questions whether the FBI had a bead on the terror suspects before their desperate and deadly attempt to flee.

“To be absolutely clear: No one was surveilling the Tsarnaevs and they were not identified until after the shootout,” the FBI, Boston police and Massachusetts State Police said in a joint statement this afternoon, in reference to the wild April 19 gunfight that left Tamerlan Tsarnaev, 26, dead. “Any claims to the contrary are false.”

Iowa Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley asked FBI Director James Comey Jr. in a letter what feds did to attempt to ID the Tsarnaevs before publishing their photos, and why FBI agents were spotted conducting surveillance near Central Square on April 18 — just hours before authorities say the brothers ambushed and murdered MIT campus cop Sean Collier. The letter also notes that the Joint Terrorism Task Force, which has been chided for failure to share information with local authorities in the past, never told Cambridge cops about the surveillance operation. Grassley is the ranking member on the Senate Judiciary Committee.

Authorities said the Joint Terrorism Task Force “was at M.I.T., located in Cambridge, MA, on April 18, 2013, on a matter unrelated to the Tsarnaev brothers.”

Grassley’s letter also asks whether the FBI, whose Joint Terrorism Task Force investigated Tamerlan Tsarnaev in 2011, ever attempted to recruit the brothers as informants or sources. Authorities said today they did not.

“The Tsarnaev brothers were never sources for the FBI nor did the FBI attempt to recruit them as source,” the statement said.

Grassley’s office says he has not received a response from the FBI.

Via: Boston Herald....

Continue Reading.....

Tea Party Undeterred, Targets Moderate GOP for Ouster

Angry about their defeat this week in the budget standoff over Obamacare, tea party groups and supporters have launched into a heavy fundraising campaign and are stepping up efforts to field conservative challengers in next year's primaries against moderate Republicans who voted to end the government shutdown.

In Mississippi, state Sen. Chris McDaniel announced his plans Thursday to go after long-serving Sen. Thad Cochran in the 2014 GOP primary. He immediately drew the endorsements of three big tea party and conservative groups, according to The Washington Times. 

Cochran was pointed to as example of a moderate Republican who should be defeated to make room for much more conservative GOP members who would be less willing to compromise with Democrats. 

Urgent: Should the House Have Agreed to Debt Deal? Vote Here 

Daniel Horowitz, deputy political director of the Madison Project, which raises money for conservative candidates, issued a statement in support of McDaniel and other tea party challengers to moderate Republican senators who not only voted to end the shutdown but vowed not to let it happen again. 

“Our country can’t afford any more bad votes that stem from old friends and back-room deals,” Horowitz said, according to the Times. "And as witnessed from the recent budget battle against Obamacare, we cannot win against Democrats if we don’t grow our conservative bench in the Senate.”

Horowitz's comments were echoed by two of the nation's biggest tea party groups who accused lawmakers in both parties of "selling out" out the nation by not holding the line on spending and refusing to defund Obamacare. In email fundraising letters to members, the Tea Party Express and the Tea Party Patriots were particularly hard on Republicans who voted with Democrats to end the shutdown. 

Via: Newsmax

Continue Reading.....

Right the First Time - Judge Richard Posner’s mistaken change of heart on voter ID

The Left’s well-oiled propaganda machine is in overdrive again. Partisan law professors and the liberal media are trumpeting Judge Richard Posner’s “admission” that he regrets the majority opinion he wrote upholding Indiana’s voter-ID law.

Posner wrote the opinion in 2007 for the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals. It was affirmed the following year in a Supreme Court opinion penned by liberal justice John Paul Stevens.

What has the Left atingle now, however, is Posner’s new book, Reflections on Judging, in which he writes:

I plead guilty to having written the majority opinion (affirmed by the Supreme Court) upholding Indiana’s requirement that prospective voters prove their identity with a photo ID — a law now widely regarded as a means of voter suppression rather than fraud prevention.

In an interview with the Huffington Post, Posner said that he now thinks that the dissenting judge in his case was right and that “if the lawyers had provided us with a lot of information about the abuse of voter identification laws, this case would have been decided differently.”

Richard Posner is a well-known jurist and a prolific author. The question, however, is whether he made a mistake back in 2007 or whether he is making one now.

I vote for the latter. Posner apparently has been reading the press releases of voter-ID opponents like the Brennan Center and the NAACP Legal Defense Fund and mistaken them for “widely regarded” evidence that voter-ID laws are abusive.

In the Huffington Post interview, Posner said that the Seventh Circuit “did not have enough information.” This, he maintains, illustrates a basic problem: that as “judges and lawyers, we don’t know enough about the subject matters that we regulate.” 

Via: NRO
Continue Reading.....

More Enroll for Mars Trip Than for ObamaCare Exchange

The hits just keep on coming with Obamacare enrollee tales of disaster, with the latest joke that more people have actually completed an online application to journey to Mars than successfully signed into the White House’s websites for health reform exchanges.

The Daily Mail reported that Twitter exploded on Thursday after it was revealed that 202,586 individuals had successfully signed up for the Mars One colony project to populate the red planet as soon as the technology becomes available. By comparison, the analytics firm Compete.com found that only 36,000 have registered for Obamacare via the official government site, Healthcare.gov.

The Department of Health and Human Services said that number is wrong — that 51,000 have actually signed up, The Daily Mail reported. But no matter: Both numbers are still low when looked at through the lens of projections.

The Associated Press reported earlier this week that a HHS memo indicated that the government had actually set a goal of signing up 500,000 individuals per month, starting with Oct. 1.

The glitches over Obamacare enrollment are becoming quite an embarrassment for the White House.

Among the latest, as reported by The Daily Mail: Only 712 people in Vermont have been able to successfully enroll in the state exchange — despite the state spending about $9 million of taxpayer dollars to promote the online site. 

Via: Fox News

Continue Reading....

Pelosi: No Reason to Delay Obamacare If Healthcare.gov Still Isn't Working in December

At a Thursday afternoon press conference, House minority leader Nancy Pelosi was asked by THE WEEKLY STANDARD if Obamacare should be delayed in whole or in part if healthcare.gov still isn't working in November or December.

"No, no," Pelosi replied. "It has nothing to do with the programmatic part. It's about technology." 

But some experts have warned that if the technology isn't working weeks or months from now, Obamacare's federal insurance exchange could be thrown into a "death spiral." To function, the exchange needs enough young and healthy people to sign up, and if the healthcare.gov website isn't working, the people most likely to take theadditional time and effort to sign up will be old and sick. 

On Thursday, Pelosi dismissed concerns about the continued failure of healthcare.gov causing a health insurance "death spiral," saying, "No, no, I don't think so."

It isn't entirely clear how long the administration has to fix the website without causing serious problems. "For now, the failure [of healthcare.gov] has mostly been a PR nightmare for the administration. But it has the potential to cascade into a crisis for real people if challenges continue too long," Politico reported Wednesday. "Some industry officials point to Nov. 1 as a potential test for the system. That’s the day when the federal exchange is due to transfer thousands of Medicaid applications to state agencies."

Via: Weekly Standard

Continue Reading....

[VIDEO] CNN REPORTER CALLS OUT COLLEAGUE ON THE AIR FOR ANTI-TEA PARTY RHETORIC

CNN’s Jim Acosta called out one of his colleagues on the air Thursday for referring to members of the Tea Party as “radicals.”

The admonishment came during a larger discussion about the partial government shutdown and who is to blame for the 16-day halt in federal activity.

“The sort of Tea Party radicals, if you like, who kicked all of this off, they electorally are safe. They’re not going to lose their seats because of redistricting and the like,” CNN anchor Michael Holmes said. “They’re more about ideology than pragmatism or bipartisanship. What chance they’re going to change their minds at all when we get to January and it’s talk time again?”

Acosta, CNN’s senior White House correspondent, wasn’t exactly thrilled with Holmes’ characterization of the Tea Party.

“Well, Michael, I mean, first of all, let’s be careful about using the term ‘radical,’ because a lot of those folks feel like they’re standing on principle today, even though they didn’t come out on top in this,” Acosta said.

Via: The Blaze

Continue Reading.....

Matthews Takes Break from Calling Opponents Racist to Lecture America on Civility

Okay, that headline is a little misleading. MSNBC host Chris Matthews never really took a break from calling his opponents racists and paranoids while engaging on a media blitz promoting his book about civility and amity in politics.

Matthews is presently touring the media universe and recalling the history which he was privileged to witness and record in his new book, Tip and the Gipper: When Politics Worked. The theory is that politics in the nation’s capital used to end at 6 o’clock when bitter partisan rivals would drop their disagreements and have a friendly scotch together. 

That era of comity, Matthews submits, is gone. Exploring this theme in The Boston Globe on Friday, Matthews cites the wisdom of former House Speaker Tip O’Neill’s chief counsel, Kirk O’Donnell, to explain why Washington worked in the 1980s but fails so spectacularly today.

“It was Kirk who not only taught me the rules of politics, but, just as important, that there are rules,” Matthews writes. “I believe Speaker O’Neill and President [Ronald] Reagan honored that truism to a T.”

When I first met the conservative hero — he had come to Capitol Hill to give an early State of the Union — I tried breaking the ice. “Welcome to the room where we plot against you,” I offered. “Oh no,” Reagan countered. “It’s after six. The speaker told me that here in Washington we’re all friends after six.”

“Critics can say what they will to diminish the importance of that sentiment,” Matthews continues. “I believe it masks a far deeper value. It said that after all the fighting, all the battling of left and right here in this country, we’re in this thing together. In the end what matters is the system of self-government itself. It’s what gives us the chance to make things better.”

This is an important sentiment and Matthews is correct that it has faded from relevance in recent years. Many on the grassroots right and left, and some in Washington like Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX), have no apparent need for what they denigrate as the “professional wrestling” aspect of politics.

In this sense, Matthews is right; the period in which politics was characterized by pugnacity on the legislature floor but concord when the cameras were off is slipping away. However, Matthews is probably the single worst person to remind the public of this fact, considering all he has done in the past several years to exacerbate tensions, smear his political foes, and dishonestly delegitimize their ideas.

Via: Mediate.com

Continue Reading.....

SOROS-FUNDED GROUP PLANS 'FLY-IN' TO PUSH HOUSE REPUBLICANS ON AMNESTY

The George Soros-funded National Immigration Forum (NIF) is organizing a “fly-in” of what it calls conservatives from across the country aimed at lobbying House Republicans for an amnesty bill.

According to USA Today’s immigration beat writer Alan Gomez, NIF is planning to organize the fly in with the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg’s FWD.us, and New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s Partnership for a New American Economy.

“The fly-in is being organized not by conservative groups, but organizations that have focused on legalizing millions of people who are in the U.S. illegally and changing the legal immigration system to bring in more foreign workers,” Gomez wrote on Monday. He noted that the 300 activists for an immigration grand bargain were looking to make what he described as a “conservative pitch” for amnesty.

Gomez noted NIF’s Executive Director, Ali Noorani, who “has advocated for changes in immigration law to help legal and undocumented immigrants for three decades," claimed "the broad collection coming to Washington represents 'the conservative base of the Republican Party.'"

The event will take place on Oct. 28, coinciding with President Barack Obama’s and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s renewed push against House Speaker John Boehner for amnesty. Now that Obama, Reid, and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi are publicly pushing for amnesty after many mainstream media outlets declared it dead earlier this year, Soros’ groups are trying to make it appear as though conservatives support immigration legislation like the Senate-passed “Gang of Eight” bill. Ultimately, the left’s goal is to get the House to pass a series of piecemeal immigration bills and then combine them with the Senate bill in a conference committe

Via: Breitbart

Continue Reading.....

Video Montage: HHS Chief Kathleen Sebelius Repeatedly Vows Obamacare Website Will Be Working On October 1st…

Via: Washington Examiner

Continue Reading.....

Why Energy Boomtowns Are a Nightmare for Law Enforcement

In 2005, the Williston Police Department in Williston, North Dakota, received 3,796 calls for service. By 2009, the number of yearly calls had almost doubled, to 6,089. In 2011, the most recent year for which data is available, the Williston P.D. received 15,954 calls for service. 

Williston is in the Bakken region of North Dakota, whose oil and gas reserves have attracted thousands of out-of-state oil workers. And Williston hasn't even seen the worst of it. The police department in nearby Watford City received 41 service calls in 2006. In 2011 they received 3,938. That's life in an energy boomtown. 

"Policing the Patch," a new study issued by the Department of Criminal Justice & Political Science at North Dakota State University, sheds new light on the problems faced in these boomtowns. Between October 2012 and March 2013, professor Carol A. Archbold and her team interviewed 101 law enforcement officers from eight agencies about how the in-migration of oil workers to the Bakken region has changed the way they do their jobs. The team's findings tell us a lot about the problems created when cities and towns grow at an explosive rate. 

The issues officers shared with Archbold ranged from a dramatic increase in alcohol-related violence ("Ninety percent of the problems we deal with involve alcohol," one officer said), to an inability to balance emergency calls with proactive community policing ("I used to know people. I used to know their vehicles. I no longer know people or their vehicles," said another officer.) Here are some of the biggest problems police shared with Archbold. 

Via: Atlantic Cities

Continue Reading.....

Homeland Security Secretary nominee Jeh Johnson is loyal to the [Constitution] Obama

Here’s the guy Obama is expected to nominate to replace Janet Napolitano. He’s talking about being in NYC on 9/11:

“When that bright and beautiful day, a day something like this, was shattered by the largest terrorist attack on our homeland in history, I wandered the streets of New York that day and wonderered, and asked, ‘What can I do?’ Since then, I have tried to devote myself to answering that question. I love this country. I care about the safety of our people. I believe in public service. And I remain loyal to you, Mr. President.”

He remains loyal to Barack Obama? What happened to supporting and defending the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic, and bearing true faith and allegiance to the same? Isn’t that how it’s supposed to go?

Via: Daily Caller

Continue Reading.....

De Blasio Will Continue Bloomberg’s Soda Cup Fight

After his mayoral campaign sent vague signals yesterday about whether he would maintain Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s legal effort to restrict soda cup sizes at restaurants, Bill de Blasio vowed to do precisely that this afternoon.

“I think the mayor is right and I would continue the legal process. We have to, of course, look at the specifics with our own lawyers to handle the mechanics, but there’s no question I want to see this rule go through,” the front-running candidate told reporters at a rally with Chinese-American supporters.

Yesterday, Mr. de Blasio’s spokesman, Dan Levitan, told The New York Times the candidate would “review the status of the city’s litigation” if elected.

Mr. Bloomberg’s proposed ban on sugary drinks larger than 16 ounces was struck down by a lower court earlier this year, following an intense lobbying effort from the soda industry, small business owners and some elected officials. The Bloomberg administration, however, appealed the decision to the state’s highest court, which agreed to hear the appeal yesterday.

Mr. de Blasio concurred with the mayor that the ban would help combat childhood obesity in particular.

“Right now it’s hard to be a parent in New York City. I have two teenagers, I’m surviving the experience, and Chirlane and I spent a lot of time working to make sure Chiara and Dante are healthy. That means encouraging nutrition, that means encouraging exercise. But, you know, it takes a lot of energy to keep on top kids and make sure they do the right thing,” Mr. de Blasio said. “Unfortunately, as parents, it feels like every day we’re fighting an enemy and that is the growing availability of bigger and bigger sugary drinks.”

Via: Politicker

Continue Reading.....

Video montage: Kathleen Sebelius vows working Obamacare website on Oct. 1

Click here to view Video!!

As the Obamacare website launch deadline approached, Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius vowed that it would be up and running by Oct. 1.

Via: Washington Examiner

Uninsured Americans Still Unfamiliar With Health Exchanges

Seven in 10 not familiar with exchanges, unchanged since September

PRINCETON, NJ -- Although federal and state health insurance exchanges opened on Oct. 1, 71% of Americans who lack health insurance -- the primary target group for the exchanges -- say they are "not too familiar" or "not familiar at all" with them, little changed from last month. At the same time, 28% of uninsured Americans say they are very or somewhat familiar with the exchanges, up slightly from 25% last month.

The exchanges are online insurance marketplaces that allow eligible Americans to find health insurance plans, as required by the 2010 Affordable Care Act. Many Americans have had difficulty signing up for insurance at the exchanges since they opened, due to heavy traffic on the websites and technical glitches plaguing them. It is unclear how many Americans have signed up for insurance since the exchanges opened; the Obama administration has not yet released enrollment figures.

Via: Gallup

Continue Reading.....

Two weeks in, Obamacare website still broken

The Obamacare enrollment website remains badly broken despite two weeks of intensive round-the-clock efforts at repairs.

HHS isn’t making any predictions about how long it will take to fix it — or rebuild it. But advocates, lobbyists and industry officials are talking about it as a months-long repair effort.
How many months is an open question — and one with big consequences for the massive effort to enroll 7 million people in the new insurance exchanges and millions more in Medicaid by the end of March. People trying to switch from their current insurance into subsidized exchange plans could also face gaps.

A two-month delay, for instance, would be a different scenario than five or six months, particularly since people can face penalties if they don’t apply by mid-February.

(PHOTOS: 25 unforgettable Obamacare quotes)

In the meantime, few people can get through the enrollment process online. According to some analysts like Millward Brown Digital, thousands of consumers have stopped trying, at least for now.

At a summit of health care advocacy groups at the Newseum on Tuesday, the audience was asked how many had successfully made it through HealthCare.gov even far enough to browse the selection of health plans. Only two out of about 70 people raised their hands.

The administration hasn’t said much about the nature of the technical problems. Officials initially described them as the kind of “glitches” that inevitably occur in a tech launch, and attributed them to the high interest in new health coverage options that drove unexpectedly high traffic to HealthCare.gov.

Via: Politico
Continue Reading.....

Dana Milbank: Now, lead from the front

Let us hear no more about President Obama leading from behind.

Since a White House adviser uttered that phrase to the New Yorker’s Ryan Lizza in 2011 to describe Obama’s leadership in Libya, “leading from behind” has become a favorite refrain of Republicans trying to portray Obama as weak.

Rep. Darrell Issa (Calif.) detected “a policy of leading from behind, of indecision” in Syria. Sen. Ted Cruz (Tex.) said Obama’s “strategy of leading from behind meant [Moammar] Gaddafi’s weapons stockpiles went unsecured.” Sen. Dan Coats (Ind.) said Obama’s insistence on higher taxes was more evidence that “the president continues to lead from behind.” Rep. Doc Hastings (Wash.) even said that “the American people have been waiting for the Obama administration to stop leading from behind” — and to hurry up approval of the Keystone XL pipeline.

But the last use of the phrase I could find in the congressional record was on Oct. 2, at the start of the shutdown, when. Sen. John Barrasso (Wyo.) said Obama had been “once again attempting to lead from behind in a crisis.”

They aren’t saying that now.

Obama got out in front of the shutdown and debt-ceiling standoff. He took a firm position — no negotiating — and he made his case to the country vigorously and repeatedly. Republicans miscalculated, assuming Obama would again give in. The result was the sort of decisive victory rarely seen in Washington skirmishes.

Via: Washington Post

Continue Reading....