Report: DHS spends $600,000 to buy $100,000 homes

The Homeland Security Department spent $600,000 apiece to build houses in Arizona that would have gone for less than $100,000, according to a report in the Arizona Republic that’s raising questions in Congress.

“This type of spending is irresponsible as our nation faces significant budget deficits and the men and women in the Border Patrol face cuts in overtime that are essential to their mission,” Rep. Ron Barber, the Arizona Democrat in whose district the homes were built, said in a statement Friday.

The Republic said Homeland Security built 21 homes and bought 20 other mobile homes for $15 million. 

Comparable homes go for between $70,000 and $100,000, the paper said. The homes were built to be rented to border agents and officers.

Homeland Security officials repeatedly refused to answer the newspaper’s questions about the project, the Republic said.

Mr. Barber is the ranking Democrat on the House Homeland Security Committee’s oversight panel, and said he will use that role to get to the bottom of the spending.

Via: Washington TImes

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Pediatrician Fears Obamacare Will Diminish Care

When pediatrician Dr. Rosemary Fernandez Stein and her husband set out to start up a pediatric group in 1999, their goal was to provide outstanding medical service to underserved populations in Burlington, N.C.—primarily Hispanic patients who often had limited access to care.

Back then, some of the biggest concerns were keeping overhead and health care costs low, malpractice insurance, and having enough supplies for patient use. Today, Obamacare is high on Dr. Stein’s mind.

“I keep worrying about what will happen to our long-term disabled patients who are in pediatrics,” says Dr. Stein, who co-owns International Family Clinic. With an influx of 15 million Americans expected to enroll in Medicaid through the health law, Dr. Stein worries available resources could be limited for her patients.

On an average day, the practice sees about 75 to 80 patients, with 75 percent of them receiving their health coverage from Medicaid, the federal-state public health program. “It could limit the options I have for a patient with Down syndrome that also has terrible heart defects.”

Another big stressor is the diminishing choices doctors have when serving Medicaid patients. “With Medicaid and many insurers we accept, we have to get authorization for using medication that is stronger or better,” Stein says. “This requirement for extra work in filling out paperwork, doing it online, or calling an authorization center is going to push a lot of doctors to change their habits. And I don’t think that will always be in the best interest of the patients.”

Via: The Foundry

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Barack the Lawgiver By Charles Krauthammer

Obama sees the Constitution’s separation of powers as a quaint anachronism. 

As a reaction to the crack epidemic of the 1980s, many federal drug laws carry strict mandatory sentences. This has stirred unease in Congress and sparked a bipartisan effort to revise and relax some of the more draconian laws.

Traditionally — meaning before Barack Obama — that’s how laws were changed: We have a problem, we hold hearings, we find some new arrangement, which is ratified by Congress and signed by the president.

That was then. On Monday, Attorney General Eric Holder, a liberal in a hurry, ordered all U.S. attorneys to simply stop charging nonviolent, non-gang-related drug defendants with crimes that, while fitting the offense, carry mandatory sentences. Find some lesser, non-triggering charge. How might you do that? Withhold evidence — e.g., about the amount of dope involved.

In other words, evade the law, by deceiving the court if necessary. “If the companies that I represent in federal criminal cases” did that, said former deputy attorney general George Terwilliger, “they could be charged with a felony.”

But such niceties must not stand in the way of an administration’s agenda. Indeed, the very next day, it was revealed that the administration had unilaterally waived Obamacare’s cap on a patient’s annual out-of-pocket expenses — a one-year exemption for selected health insurers that is nowhere permitted in the law. It was simply decreed by an obscure Labor Department regulation.

Which followed a presidentially directed 70-plus percent subsidy for the insurance premiums paid by congressmen and their personal staffs — under a law that denies subsidies for anyone that well-off.

Via: National Review

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EPA Head: ‘The Challenge Today Is Just To Stop Arguing About’ Climate Change

WE ALL KNOW YOU ARE TRYING TO  SELL A NON -EXISTANT ARGUMENT

DES MOINES, Iowa (AP) — The newly appointed administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency said Thursday the only way to confront climate-change challenges and environmental problems facing agriculture is for farmers and government agencies to work together.

Gina McCarthy, EPA administrator for three weeks, said she accepted Iowa Gov. Terry Branstad’s invitation to the Iowa State Fair to celebrate steps Iowa is taking to control the runoff of farm fertilizer and manure.

Her brief speech was positive and repeatedly stressed the theme of collaboration. She declined to take questions from reporters and left the Iowa Farm Bureau building on the state fairgrounds after posing for a few photos without further comment.

“The challenge today is just to stop arguing about the problem and really start driving solutions,” she said in the speech.

She said President Barack Obama will continue to speak out about climate change and ways to deal with its impact — including the possibility of more frequent droughts and floods, problems Iowa farmers are familiar with.

She promised that by the end of her tenure at the EPA, the relationship between the agency and the agriculture community will be more productive and trusting.

Via: CBS DC

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Egyptian blood runs as supporters march in 'Friday of anger'

Violent and bloody protests continued to rage throughout Egypt Friday, as Muslim Brotherhood backers clashed with fellow Muslims, security forces and  Christians in what was designated a "Day of Rage."

As night fell, rioters ignored a curfew and called for protests to continue into next week. Coptic churches were set ablaze, security forces and backers of ousted President Mohammad Morsi exchanged gunfire and the day's death toll swelled past 60. The figure was well below the two-day toll of 638 for Wednesday and Thursday, but observers saw no signs of hope the bloodshed would end anytime soon.

"We call on the Egyptian people and national forces to protest daily until the coup ends," the Muslim Brotherhood said in a statement in reference to the army's overthrow of Morsi last month, according to a Reuters report.

"We call on the Egyptian people and national forces to protest daily until the coup ends."

- Muslim Brotherhood statement

Twenty-four members of the Egyptian police force have been killed since late Thursday night across the country, a security official told Reuters Friday, bringing the number of police killed in political violence to 67 since Wednesday.

Heavy gunfire rang out throughout Cairo as Muslim Brotherhood supporters clashed with vigilante residents in the fiercest street battles to engulf the capital since the country's Arab Spring uprising. 

Via: Fox News

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Media Mash: Bozell, Hannity Slam MSNBC for Still Insisting Boston Bombers Were Not Islamists

One day before the one-year anniversary of Floyd Lee Corkins's failed terror attack on the Family Research Council -- he was inspired by a "hate map" by the Southern Poverty Law Center -- MSNBC brought on SPLC's Mark Potok to mislead viewers about the nature of the April 15 Boston Marathon bombing, insisting that the Tsarnaev brothers were not motivated by radical Islamic ideology so much as by right-leaning conspiracy theorist websites that investigators found in Tamerlan Tsarnaev's search history.

"This isn't the first time MSNBC has done this," NewsBusters publisher Brent Bozell reminded Fox News Channel host Sean Hannity during Hannity's August 15 "Media Mash" segment. Indeed, it was Hardball host Chris Matthews who on the day of the attack theorized that it was a homegrown right-wing terrorist responsible for the bombing because it occurred on Tax Day, Bozell noted. What's more, the Media Research Center founder added

Look at the group that they cite who give the quote. The Southern Poverty Law Center. Talk about a hate group. This is a group that has branded as a hate group, a Christian group for professing Christianity, the Family Research [Council].

Dzhokhar Tsarnaev admitted that he and his brother planted the bombs to retaliate for deaths of Muslims in Iraq and Afghanistan. But that is of no consequence to MSNBC, which insists on distorting the news to fit its preferred narratives.

Also discussed during the Media Mash segment was the liberal media's outrage at a new voter ID law in North Carolina which requires a valid government-issued photo ID to vote:

Look the reason 75 percent of the public supports this is because it's common sense. The only thing that you're doing is you're safeguarding free elections. You're preventing fraud. The only thing that's being repressed is people who are cheating. So anybody who talks about voter repression, understand, they are supporting people who would cheat.

Via: Newsbusters

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Sen. Feinstein Threatens Press Freedom

Senator Dianne Feinstein has had a busy year. She kicked off 2013 by leading the charge against “assault weapons,” Nerf guns with extra plastic glued on. When the California Democrat’s gun control amendment decisively failed, she turned to defending extra-judicial targeted killing of American citizens with drone aircraft. Then Edward Snowden pushed intelligence officials into the spotlight without their usual kabuki stage makeup.

Right on cue, the self-styled “chairman” of the intelligence committee threw herself into tireless apologetics. The NSA’s indiscriminate collection of telephone metadata is of dubious utility and faces dubious oversight from the hamstrung Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. Yet Feinstein, a senior member of the judiciary committee as well, insists the agency does nothing illegal. They have nothing to hide, so please stop asking what they are hiding. Now, after taking shots at the Second, Fourth, and Fifth Amendments, she has set her sights on the First. When it comes to the Bill of Rights, never say Di.

A notable act of White House damage control this spring was the championing of a journalist shield law President Obama previously opposed. It would purportedly strengthen American press freedom, protecting journalists from being forced to disclose confidential sources by subpoena or court order. A common thread running through the Obama’s scandals is suppression of dissent. The current administration brags about prosecuting six leakers under the 1917 Espionage Act, twice as many as all previous administrations combined. Adams, Wilson, FDR, and Nixon had their own methods, to be sure, but President Obama’s crackdown on puts him in such company.

Via: American Spectator

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Napolitano on Young Illegal Aliens: ‘American in Every Way But a Piece of Paper’

(CNSNews.com) – In a blog posted on the Department of Homeland Security website, Secretary Janet Napolitano said the illegal aliens who were brought to the United States as children are “American in every way but a piece of paper.”

Napolitano wrote the blog to mark the one-year anniversary of President Barack Obama’s executive order that put hundreds of thousands of young illegal aliens in a “deferred action” category that allows them to stay in the United States.

Obama’s “initiative” was a way to “ensure that we are using our immigration enforcement resources most effectively, based on common sense priorities that focus first on those that pose threats to our communities,” Napolitanowrote.

“Because of the action we have undertaken through the DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals) process, thousands of hardworking young people who are American in every way but a piece of paper now have the ability to continue their educations and contribute to their communities,” Napolitano wrote.

“In just its first year, over 500,000 individuals have requested Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals and after a thorough review of each of those cases, including a background check, 430,000 requests have already been approved, with others still under review.

Via: CNS News

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Hannity Panel Explodes Over 9/11 Million Muslim March: ‘The Audacity is Beyond Words!’

Thursday night on Fox, Sean Hannity tore into the “Million Muslim March” planned for the 12th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks next month in Washington. Hannity welcomed the march’s organizer MD Rabbi Alam on the show to defend his group’s plans, asking him, “You want to turn this into a day about anti-Islamic bigotry?”

“We’re standing this day to show America that we Muslim, we denounce terrorism,” Alam said before Hannity cut him off, saying that sentiment contradicts the statement put out by the group, which claims Muslims continue to be “victimized by being made the villains.”

Anti-Islamic activist Brigitte Gabriel helped Hannity take up the other side of the argument, condemning the group for “crying victim” rather than standing up against terrorism. Instead of saying “we rebuke anybody who blows up civilians in the name of Jihad,” Gabriel said, “they are gathering together and crying victim. The audacity is beyond words!”

When Alam said Muslims have felt “villain-ized and victimized” since 9/11, Hannity shot back, asking, “Hasn’t America bent over backwards to distinguish between Islam and radical Islamists? If anything, I think this country has bent over backwards and then some to make that distinction.”

Gabriel picked up where Hannity left off, saying of Alam, “He’s talking about bigotry. What bigotry? Our president went out of his way to even change the words out of our counterterrorism training manuals to take out every reference to Islamic radicalism, Islamic Jihadism, because we do not want to offend the Muslims. We are the victims here, the Americans. And we are offended that people like them have not yet stood up and condemned radicalism.”

Watch video below, via Fox News:

Via: Mediaite.com

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