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A federal judge in Newark has thrown out a lawsuit against the New York Police Department for spying on New Jersey Muslims, saying if anyone was at fault, it was the Associated Press for telling people about it. In his ruling Thursday, U.S. District Court Judge William J. Martini simultaneously demonstrated the willingness of the judiciary to give law enforcement alarming latitude in the name of fighting terror, greenlighted the targeting of Muslims based solely on their religious beliefs, and blamed the media for upsetting people by telling them what their government was doing. The NYPD’s clandestine spying on daily...

(GENEVA) — Top diplomats from the United States, European Union, Russia and Ukraine reached agreement Thursday on immediate steps to ease the crisis in Ukraine. The agreement, reached after seven hours of negotiation in Geneva, requires all sides to refrain from violence, intimidation or provocative actions. It calls for the disarming of all illegally armed groups and for control of buildings seized by pro-Russian separatists during the protests to be turned back over to authorities. It also gives amnesty to protesters who comply with the demands, except those found guilty of committing capital crimes. Monitors with the Organization of Security...

A federal appeals court on Tuesday upheld the Environmental Protection Agency's first emission standards for mercury and other hazardous air pollutants from coal- and oil-fired power plants. In its ruling, the court rejected state and industry challenges to rules designed to clean up chromium, arsenic, acid gases, nickel, cadmium as well as mercury and other dangerous toxins. The EPA’s determination in 2000 that regulating emission standards is appropriate and necessary, and the agency’s reaffirmation of that determination in 2012, “are amply supported by EPA’s findings regarding the health effects of mercury exposure,” said the court. Congress did not specify what...

Latinos and immigration activists are warning of political peril for President Barack Obama and Democrats in the fall election unless the president acts boldly and soon to curb deportations and allow more immigrants to remain legally in the U.S. Many activists say Obama has been slow to grasp the emotions building within the Latino community as deportations near the 2 million mark for his administration and hopes for immigration legislation fade. With House Republicans unlikely to act on an overhaul, executive action by Obama is increasingly the activists’ only hope.“There is tremendous anger among core constituencies of the president and...

Two former associates of Gov. Chris Christie do not have to hand over documents to a legislative committee investigating the traffic jam scandal engulfing the governor, a New Jersey judge ruled Wednesday. Former Christie loyalists Bridget Kelly and Bill Stepien had been fighting subpoenas calling for them to turn over documents regarding the plot to create traffic jams in Fort Lee to retaliate against the town’s Democratic mayor. The legislative panel asked for the court’s help in getting the two to comply with the subpoenas. Calling the decision one involving “complicated and untested jurisdictional issues,” Judge Mary Jacobson expressed reservations...

A New Democratic Poll Is Warning Of Midterm Disaster For Democrats

Federal agents were searching for child pornography when they seized computers from former state Rep. Keith Farnham’s home and offices this month, according to a search warrant released to The Associated Press on Saturday. The search warrant released by the Illinois House shows authorities were seeking any evidence of the “possession, receipt, or distribution of child pornography” and documents “in any format and medium concerning minors visually depicted while engaged in sexually explicit conduct” from computers in Farnham’s Elgin home and office as well as his Springfield office. They also sought other computer equipment and cellphones, information about anyone contacted...

LOS ANGELES (AP) — Bob Thomas, the longtime Associated Press writer and dean of Hollywood reporters who covered a record 66 Oscar ceremonies, reported on the biggest stars, from Clark Gable to Tom Cruise, and filed AP's bulletin that Robert F. Kennedy had been shot, died Friday. He was 92. Thomas, a last link to Hollywood's studio age who retired in 2010, died of age-related illnesses at his longtime Encino, Calif., home, his daughter Janet Thomas said. A room filled with his interview subjects would have made for the most glittering of ceremonies: Elizabeth Taylor and Marilyn Monroe, Katharine Hepburn...

Moving cautiously to repair his image, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie is maintaining a low profile this weekend as the nation’s governors gather in Washington. Republican officials have been eager to change the subject as Democrats link Christie’s troubles to vulnerable GOP governors in a challenging election season. The usually outspoken Christie is scheduled to attend just one public event over the three-day annual meeting. He avoided a media-sponsored forum on Friday, wasn’t granting interviews, won’t attend a White House dinner and was skipping a news conference hosted by the Republican Governors Association, an organization he heads. …

Though it’s been well documented that opposition forces in Syria are mostly run by Islamic terrorists—mainly Al Qaeda—Congress has secretly approved U.S. weapons flow to what officials describe as “moderate” Syrian rebel factions. The problem with this is that there are no “moderate” rebel forces in Syria, according to a number of reputable news reports, both domestic and international. In fact, the New York Times published a piece last spring that confirms Islamist rebels—including the most extreme groups in the notorious Al Nusra Front, an Al Qaeda-aligned force—are running the show in Syria. “The Islamist character of the opposition reflects...

I paused a bit before putting this post up because the last thing an AP reporter needs is some guy on the right telling him he did a good job. I suspect that it's not a resume enhancer. That said, there are two reasons not to to ignore Terence Chea's coverage of the Saturday's Walk for Life West Coast in San Francisco. The first is how it contrasts with Brett Zongker's dismissive and incomplete coverage of the far larger DC March for Life the previous Wednesday. For starters, Chea appropriately described the San Francisco march as "massive"; Zongker's story covering...

Leaders from Latin America and the Caribbean began arriving in Cuba on Sunday for a summit of a fledgling regional bloc that was conceived as a force for integration and a counterbalance to their most powerful neighbor, the United States. The Community of Latin American and Caribbean States, or CELAC for its initials in Spanish, was formed in 2011 and comprises every nation in the Western Hemisphere except the U.S. and Canada. By Sunday, Presidents Cristina Fernandez of Argentina, Evo Morales of Bolivia and Dilma Rousseff of Brazil and several foreign ministers were already in Havana for the meeting. […]...

On Friday, the Supreme Court issued a one-paragraph order in Little Sisters of the Poor et al v. Sebeluis et al. It told the Sisters that for the case to continue with no enforcement of the Affordable Care Act's contraception mandate, they need only to inform the government in writing "that they are non-profit organizations that hold themselves out as religious and have religious objections to providing coverage for contraceptive services." That's easy, because that's what they are, and that's their position. As a result, the government has been "enjoined from enforcing against the applicants the challenged provisions of the...

So it's come to this. During the past week, the Associated Press reported today, "Federal health officials," meaning "the Obama administration," began "urging" (i.e., "telling") counselors and navigators around the country to stop using paper applications for Obamacare coverage, "because of concerns those applications would not be processed in time." It seems that either Team Obama or AP (my money is on AP) doesn't mind risking criticism for waiting to let this news out until a weather- and sports-dominated Saturday. It's apparently okay to keep those who don't know any better, i.e., those who went to the trouble of printing...

Dan from Squirrel Hill's Blog Obama administration says “Don’t believe what you’ve heard” from the following news sources On October 25, 2013, regarding the various criticisms of Obamacare, Health and Human Services secretary Kathleen Sebelius said:“Don’t believe what you’ve heard.”In other words, the Obama administration says we shouldn’t believe the Washington Post, the New York Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, Associated Press, Reuters, CNN, MSNBC, ABC, CBS, NBC, PBS, NPR, Politico, the Wall St. Journal, the Christian Science Monitor, Investor’s Business Daily, Forbes, the BBC, Huffington Post, the Nation, Mother Jones, or New Republic.

Administration officials say about 476,000 health insurance applications have been filed through federal and state exchanges, the most detailed measure yet of the problem-plagued rollout of President Barack Obama's signature legislation. However, the officials continue to refuse to say how many people have actually enrolled in the insurance markets. Without enrollment figures, it's unclear whether the program is on track to reach the 7 million people projecting by the Congressional Budget Office to gain coverage during the six-month sign-up period. Obama's advisers say the president has been frustrated by the flawed rollout. During one of his daily health care briefings...

Talk about burying the lede. Seven paragraphs into a report it headlines “Poll: GOP Gets The Blame In Shutdown,” which purports to show how lopsidedly an angry public has come down against Republicans over the so-called shutdown of the government, the Associated Press grudginly drops this little detail: Most Americans disapprove of the way Obama is handling his job, the poll suggests, with 53 percent unhappy with his performance and 37 percent approving of it. In fact, the spin notwithstanding, the poll is full of bad news for the administration.

The head of one of the largest Pentecostal denominations in North America has denied a news report that the practice of speaking in tongues has been declining among Pentecostal churches. Dr. George O. Wood, general superintendent of the Assemblies of God, told The Christian Post that a recent Associated Press story on the decline of speaking in tongues was "totally inaccurate." "The practice of speaking in tongues is very integral to who we are. It was one of the generating factors 99 years ago in our being formed and it's still the encouragement for every believer to speak in tongues,"...

The amount of surprise that has greeted President Obama’s decision to get congressional consent to wage war in Syria underscores the problem with US foreign policy, not to mention our mainstream media machine. Americans somehow think it is standard operating procedure for the Commander-in-Chief to bypass a quaint little place called Congress (Population 535) along the road to war. Perhaps this way of thinking is due to the general atmosphere of fear and loathing now gripping the crotch of the Heartland like a TSA officer. Or maybe it’s just that we’ve come to believe the president has the right to...

In his Saturday Playbook email, Politico’s Mike Allen defended GOP establishment Senators like Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, Lindsey Graham, Lamar Alexander and others facing Tea Party challengers as up against nothing more than an “expensive headache” they will defeat. Allen, a denizen of D.C. political establishment, highlighted two news stories to make his point: One from the New York Times, and the other from the Associated Press. The New York Times’ Jennifer Steinhauser reported with Jonathan Weisman on the front page of the Gray Lady on Saturday that “[d]espite their careful efforts, some of the best-known and most influential Republicans...