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May 22, 2013 Video: Lerner takes the Fifth — or did she? Ed Morrissey Via Andrew Johnson at NRO, Lois Lerner’s decision to take the Fifth came as no surprise. What did come as a surprise was that Lerner actually started off by, er, testifying on her own behalf. Surprisingly, Lerner accepted Darrell Issa’s invitation to deliver an opening statement under oath, and then testified to the provenance of a transcript of her deposition to the Inspector General. Only at that point did Lerner plead the Fifth:VIDEOThat poses a big question as to whether Lerner waived her Fifth Amendment rights...

Bridgeport, CT – Today, a widely-anticipated lawsuit was filed in U.S. District Court in Connecticut, challenging the constitutionality of the new firearms law that was passed hastily by the Connecticut legislature in response to the tragic shooting in Newtown by a disturbed individual. The lawsuit seeks immediate injunctive relief and a ruling declaring the new law unconstitutional under the Second Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. It alleges that Connecticut’s new firearms law is not only unconstitutional but dangerous, since it makes both citizens and law enforcement less safe by depriving citizens of firearms that are in common use throughout the...

A recent military report on sexual assault in the military shocked many in Washington and around the nation, but a leading expert on military personnel revealed the prevalence of men assaulting other men is one of the major headlines in this study.[snip] Women are identified as the attacker in just two percent of all assaults, meaning most men who suffer assault are targeted by other men.

After the IRS revealed it had wrongly targeted hundreds of conservative and Tea Party groups, the agency claimed that the misconduct was limited to "low-level employees" in its Cincinnati office. Yesterday, the attorney for Lois Lerner, the head of the IRS’s tax-exempt organizations division, told the House Oversight Committee she would invoke her Fifth Amendment rights, making that explanation much less credible. Now the local Cincinnati Fox affiliate, FOX19, has done some digging and uncovered information suggesting that top officials at the IRS weren't too far removed from the six low-level employees identified as making unjustified inquiries. Fox19 has not...

The US Attorney for the District of Columbia, Ronald C. Machen - the man responsible for the aggressive surveillance and phone record scrutiny at Fox News - is also a big donor to the Obama Campaigns. At the time of his appointment, the Washington Post wrote a profile on Machen including this tidbit: Over the years, he has donated $4,350 to Obama's campaigns. He gave $250 to Obama's U.S. Senate campaign in 2003, a year before Obama, then an Illinois state senator, emerged on the nation's political radar, according to campaign finance records.

As Tea Party groups stage successful rallies at Internal Revenue Service offices nationwide, one California organization is staging a frontal assault on this government behemoth. One of the largest and most active Tea Party groups in the nation is filing the first of what is expected to be many lawsuits against the government for allegedly singling out conservative organizations. The NorCal Tea Party Patriots, based in northern California, claim the IRS violated its rights when it either held up or rejected its applications for tax-exempt status…. The NorCal lawsuit was filed Monday in the U.S. District Court of Cincinnati. The...

Schoolchildren in the northern Spanish region of Asturias will no longer be able to call Christmas by its name now that a new law passed by the local education ministry prohibits the use of “religious” terms in the classroom when referring to the December and spring holidays. Teachers and pupils in Asturias classrooms will now have to refer to Christmas as “winter holidays” and Easter as “second term holidays”. The region’s socialist-led government

Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel is exempting around 500 civilian sexual assault prevention personnel from this year’s mandatory furloughs, a senior defense official told POLITICO, in a bid to show the Pentagon is serious about cracking down on sexual assault in the ranks. Hagel is expected to make the announcement on Wednesday. His move comes after a rash of arrests and investigations into service members accused of sexual misconduct and a summit of top military leaders at the White House last week, when President Barack Obama called the problem “dangerous to our national security.” Hagel has ordered most of the...

The White House Counsel’s office advised senior Obama officials to keep quiet about the attack in Benghazi during the weeks preceding last year’s November presidential election, according to two administration sources. BuzzFeed has learned that key members of President Obama’s national security team, including deputy national security advisor Ben Rhodes, pushed to release a comprehensive timeline of events documenting the attack that would also synthesize the views of the various government agencies into one report. The CIA also wanted the White House to put out such a timeline, according to sources with knowledge of the situation.

ARMED DHS GUARDS greeted St. Louis Tea Party protesters at the Town and Country IRS office on Tuesday. Around 300 protesters turned out anyway. DHS parked their vehicles right outside the IRS office just in case the Tea Party protesters got crazy and violent. But the DHS intimidation was not isolated to St. Louis. In Los Angeles DHS put a chopper in the air and told Tea Party protesters they could not be on federal property. They had to move away from the building. This report came from a Tea Party protester in California. Many of our 300 tea party...

Rioters took to the streets of a Stockholm neighborhood on Sunday, torching cars and throwing stones at police. Officers reportedly called residents “monkeys” and other derogatory terms as they protested against a recent police shooting. Between 60 to 100 people – most of them young men – took part in the riots which began around 10pm local time in the Stockholm district of Husby. Police turned up at the scene after a car was set on fire. Upon arrival, officers were met with stone-throwing protesters, Police Chief Daniel Mattsson said, as quoted by The Wall Street Journal. One policeman was...

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When Webster Groves High School purchased solar panels to put on the roof of the school, no one told them they could catch on fire! The fire department was called on Saturday to put out the flames ... Plumes of black smoke could be seen coming from the roof at Webster Groves High School Saturday. Firefighters say solar panels caught fire around 2:00pm. Nearby residents noticed the smoke and called the fire department. The panels are above the new science wing.

The Asturian government has decided to do its bit to help eradicate Spain’s Christian cultural roots. The regional government’s education minister, Doña Ana González Rodríguez, sent a circular round to all schools under her jurisdiction, asking them to remove the terms “Christmas” and “Holy Week” from the school calendar. Mrs. Gonzalez wants all references to Christianity to be replaced with equivalents such as “winter holidays” and “end of second term holidays” that are acceptable to everyone, including non Christians. There’s just one problem though. The decision was taken without consulting the schools in question or the parents. Naturally, the Observatory...

An Oklahoma man captured on video what appears to be the formation of Monday's deadly tornado. The incredible footage, posted to YouTube, shows a swirling funnel cloud forming over a field near Newcastle, Okla. The man, identified as Charles Cook, shot the cell phone video from a parking lot while sitting in his car.

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Tuesday afternoon, using her Twitter feed, BuzzFeed staffer Aswini Anburajan lashed out at Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) for not being left-wing enough when it comes to immigration. Anbuarajan not only knocked the Senator's chances at becoming president due to his stand on "immig and benefits;" she attacked Cruz racially, declaring him a LINO, or Latin In Name Only.

Illegal immigrants seeking a reprieve under an election-year program implemented by the Obama administration are being approved at a rate of over 99 percent -- a situation that has the immigration officer union raising concerns about fraud and security risks. The program in question is called Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, which allows some illegal immigrants who came to the U.S. as children to seek tentative legal status. It was the administration's answer to the "Dream Act," a bill Congress drafted but did not approve. The union representing thousands of employees in U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, which processes these...

Twice they say is a pattern. Or a charm. And there isn’t much charm in using government agencies to conduct an illegal war against the opposition. Perhaps no other IRS official is more intimately associated with the tax agency’s growing scandal than Lois Lerner, director of the IRS’s Exempt Organizations Division. Since admitting the IRS harassed hundreds of conservative and Tea Party groups for over two years, Lerner has been criticized for a number of untruths—including the revelation that she apparently lied about planting a question at an American Bar Association conference where she first publicly acknowledged IRS misconduct. Prior...

Lois Lerner, the IRS official who headed the tax-exempt division when the targeting of tea-party groups took place, plans to invoke her Fifth Amendment right to refuse to answer questions before Congress on Wednesday. But Republican Rep. Darrell Issa, the chairman of the House oversight committee where Lerner was to appear, has issued a subpoena to Lerner anyway. The subpoena was delivered after the committee received the letter from Lerner's attorney, a committee aide said. Her attorney, William Taylor, said in a letter obtained by National Journal, that Lerner had "not committed any crime or made any misrepresentation" but that...

Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell (Ky.) on Tuesday said he would not try to block immigration reform from reaching the floor despite the opposition of some conservative leaders. The green light from McConnell is a promising development for the 800-plus-page bill from the Gang of Eight that was unveiled at the beginning of the month. While McConnell stopped short of pledging his support for the legislation, he praised the Gang of Eight’s work and said he is “hopeful” of passing a comprehensive immigration fix through the Senate. “The status quo is not good, the current situation is not good,” McConnell...

The former U.S. Attorney for Arizona could be disbarred, after an investigation found he lied to the Justice Department about his role in trying to discredit the federal whistle-blower who exposed the botched gun-running scheme known as Fast and Furious. An Office of Inspector General report showed that Dennis Burke -- the former chief of staff for Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano appointed as U.S. Attorney for Arizona by President Obama in September 2009 -- lied when asked if he leaked sensitive documents to the press meant to undermine the credibility of ATF whistle-blower John Dodson. The IG report also...

Nearly four months ago, Oklahoma Senators Tom Coburn and James Inhofe both voted against H.R.152, the Disaster Relief Appropriations Act that eventually sent $50.5 billion in relief to victims of Hurricane Sandy. And in the flurry of last night's devastation in Moore, Oklahoma. it was impossible not to forget that fact, knowing the federal government would soon rally to the cause. Part of that reason was because of the social media aspect to the storm—like the Boston Bombings and like Hurricane Sand —information on Monday's storm was quickly dispensed through mediums like Twitter and Facebook. But with that came tweets...

Kenya said Tuesday it was "fine" with US President Barack Obama avoiding the country on an Africa tour next month, rejecting reports it was due to upcoming crimes against humanity trials of its leaders. Obama will leave on a first African tour in late June, visiting Senegal, Tanzania and South Africa, but his itinerary bypasses Kenya, where his father was born. "America, just like Kenya, is an independent country and its president has the democratic right to visit wherever he wants," Kenyan government spokesman Muthui Kariuki told AFP. "Kenya is moving on with its development agenda and we continue to...

The Rasmussen Reports daily Presidential Tracking Poll for Tuesday shows that 47% of Likely U.S. Voters approve of President Obama's job performance. Fifty-two percent (52%) now disapprove. Today’s figures include 26% who Strongly Approve of the way Obama is performing as president and 40% who Strongly Disapprove. This gives him a Presidential Approval Index rating of -14 (see trends). This is only the third day in the past six months that Strong Disapproval of the president has reached 40%. The other two days were May 2 and 3. . .

BISHKEK, Kyrgyzstan, May 20 (UPI) -- Searchers found flight recorders from a U.S. military plane that crashed in Kyrgyzstan May 3, the Kyrgyz Transport and Communication Ministry said Monday. A ministry spokesman said the recorders were found in debris at the crash site and turned over to U.S. officials for analysis, RIA Novosti reported. The Boeing KC-135 refueling tanker with a three-member crew crashed into a gorge about 36 miles west of Bishkek soon after taking off from the U.S. Transit Center at Bishkek's international airport.

As you can see in the Google Maps image above, the airfield (located about 300 miles from Qingdao, the homeport of China's first aircraft carrier, the Liaoning) is freshly built and the northern end of the runway features a fake carrier flight deck that appears to be used to practice carrier landings (there are clear skid marks on the landing area). The southern end of the runway features two "ski-jump" ramps that are likely used by pilots to rehearse taking off from Liaoning's bow-mounted ramp. (Notice how only one of these ramps is complete in the imagery above while the...

May 21, 2013 New whistleblowers coming forward on Benghazi? Ed Morrissey At the end of the Benghazi hearing in the House Oversight Committee almost two weeks ago,chair Darrell Issa welcomed anyone else with knowledge of what happened before, during, and after the terrorist attack on the consulate to come forward and testify. According to PJ Media founder Roger L. Simon, that may happen soon. Two former diplomats told Simon that their colleagues have specific knowledge, but need legal protection before they can tell more of the story — and there is more to tell: According to the diplomats, what these...

The Department of Defense confirms to NBC 5 Investigates that accused Fort Hood shooter Major Nidal Hasan has now been paid more than $278,000 since the Nov. 5, 2009 shooting that left 13 dead 32 injured. The Army said under the Military Code of Justice, Hasan’s salary cannot be suspended unless he is proven guilty.

Vermont Gov. Peter Shumlin (D) signed into law what Compassion & Choices, a group that advocates suicide, calls a "breakthrough" moment. In doing so, Shumlin approved a law that, according to the advocacy group, supposedly “will let dying, mentally competent people determine when they have endured enough suffering and empowers them to end their lives with dignity. Specifically, it will provide criminal, civil and professional protections for physicians who prescribe medication to mentally competent, terminally ill patients that they can ingest to achieve a peaceful death.” Vermont is the first state to approve such a law legislatively. "Vermonters who face...

President Obama believed that opposition to his healthcare reform law would fade after the 2010 election, according to former Sen. Olympia Snowe (R-Maine). Obama courted Snowe’s support in an attempt to make the bill bipartisan. He assured her GOP opposition to the law would be short-lived, she said. “He thought the opposition to it would lessen after the [2010] election. I said, ‘It’s just the beginning.’ I said, ‘It’s going to grow because I can tell you it’s not going to go away and it’s going to get worse,’” Snowe said in a radio interview moderated by Julie Mason, host...

Signs of waning evangelical power in the nation’s culture wars and in Republican policy — and some unexpected challenges for GOP candidates — loom as the 103-year-old Boy Scouts of America gears up for a definitive vote this week on whether to welcome openly gay youths into the organization’s ranks. If the BSA delegates gathering just outside Dallas vote to admit gays, it will reinforce the growing notion that evangelical Protestants and their conservative Catholic allies no longer can muster their troops as they once did, in such battles as state referendums over same-sex marriage and the 1996 enactment of...

Just wondering. It ought to be something. What did Rahm Emmanuel say?

At the entrance to this village in Hezbollah’s Bekaa Valley heartland, under a sign welcoming visitors to “The Citadel of Resistance,” workers on Monday hoisted a freshly printed banner honoring a young man described as one of Hezbollah’s latest martyrs — killed in battle not with Israel, the foe the group’s guerrillas train to fight, but with Syrian rebels. Down the road, another dead fighter’s uncle, Fayez Shukor, welcomed mourners under a tent overlooking the valley as the sun set on a day that had seen Hezbollah’s death toll rise to unexpected heights as the group joined Syrian forces trying...

Peter Weller on Star Trek, Getting His Ph.D., and Defending J.J. Abrams by Bilge Ebiri If you saw Star Trek Into Darkness this weekend and couldn't quite place Peter Weller, the actor playing Starfleet Admiral Marcus, allow us to refresh your memory: Weller starred in two of the biggest cult films of the eighties, Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai and RoboCop, as well as in David Cronenberg’s adaptation of William S. Burroughs's The Naked Lunch. He's also had supporting parts on 24, Dexter, Fringe, and House. And if that weren’t enough, the man is currently finishing up a Ph.D. in art...

Saratoga Springs Mayor Mia Love has declared she wants another shot at the congressional seat occupied by Democrat Jim Matheson. The announcement that she wanted a rematch came during an afternoon speech Saturday to several thousand delegates at the Utah Republican Party’s annual organizing convention. “You and I have some unfinished business with Jim Matheson,” Love said during her speech, which was met with loud cheers and resounding applause.

A dramatic rupture in Mexico’s main opposition political party has aired the group’s dirty laundry and also could trip up President Enrique Peña Nieto’s ambitious agenda of reform. The political fireworks riveted Mexicans on Monday, dominating airwaves and social media as leaders of the National Action Party, or PAN, bickered openly. On one level, citizens were viewing another chapter in the agony of a party that ruled for the last 12 years but has been corroded by infighting and a bitter power struggle. Also at stake, potentially, was the ease with which Peña Nieto has been getting legislation through a...

As a major tea party group plans protests Tuesday at Internal Revenue Service offices across the country, a new national poll indicates that the IRS controversy has given the four-year-old movement a shot in the arm. The week-and-a-half-old controversy, which involves the IRS targeting of tea party and other conservative groups which were seeking tax exempt status, has dominated headlines and put the White House on the defensive. And according to a CNN/ORC International survey released Monday, it's also boosted the favorable rating for the tea party movement. Thirty-seven percent of people questioned said they see the tea party in...

Employers are increasingly recognizing they may be able to avoid certain penalties under the federal health law by offering very limited plans that can lack key benefits such as hospital coverage. Benefits advisers and insurance brokers—bucking a commonly held expectation that the law would broadly enrich benefits—are pitching these low-benefit plans around the country. They cover minimal requirements such as preventive services, but often little more. Some of the plans wouldn't cover surgery, X-rays or prenatal care at all. Others will be paired with limited packages to cover additional services, for instance, $100 a day for a hospital visit. Federal...

North Koreans holding Chinese boat for ransom By William Wan, Published: May 20 BEIJING — Armed North Koreans are holding a Chinese fishing boat and its crew for ransom despite the protests of Chinese officials, the boat’s owner said Monday. The boat’s seizure — which occurred early this month but was revealed by Chinese officials only Sunday night — is the latest dust-up between North Korea and China, which Pyongyang has long relied on to prop up its economy and defend it from international censure efforts by the United States and others.

The European Union on Monday denied a report in the Israeli media that it was delaying a decision to label products from Jewish communities in Judea, Samaria and eastern Jerusalem, AFP reported. On Sunday, the Haaretz newspaper reported that the EU had delayed labelling the products to the end of June at the request of the United States. "Contrary to what was recently reported in the Israeli media, work on the effective enforcement of EU legislation with regard to the labelling of settlement products has not been delayed. Nor has the EU been asked to postpone such work," a statement...

Dr. Yehuda David, who was sued for libel by the father of Muhammad al-Dura – and eventually won his case – expressed great satisfaction at the issuing of a report by a special report by a government panel that revisited the infamous incident, in which IDF soldiers were accused of killing the 12 year old Arab boy at the start of the second intifada. The committee determined that not only were the allegations – and a report by French television purporting to show IDF soldiers shooting and killing the boy – a lie, but that the al-Dura is not even...

The head of the National Treasury Employee Union (NTEU), which represents employees of the Internal Revenue Service, met with President Barack Obama in the White House one day before the manager of the IRS’s “Technical Unit” suggested establishing a “Sensitive Case Report” for the tax-exempt status applications of Tea Party groups, according to data from the official White House visitor log and the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration. The White House visitor log shows that NTEU President Colleen Kelley met with Obama--“POTUS,” President of the United States--on March 31, 2010. The Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration report on...

Fun from MSNBC’s early afternoon “news” bloc of programming via Noah Rothman. The logic is ironclad and inexorable: Doug Shulman, appointed IRS commissioner by Bush in March 2008, was so fiercely loyal to his Beltway Republican masters that he decided to risk his career to kneecap conservative insurgents’ nonprofits in 2010 … even though Bush had left office more than a year before and the GOP establishment he represented was widely loathed by pretty much everyone in America. Oh, and even though (again per Rothman) Shulman himself has donated to the DNC in the past. Say it with me, guys:...

Riots" and "Stockholm" are two concepts that rarely pair up. But on Monday, angry masked youths in a suburb of the Swedish capital took to the streets to set fire to cars, toss rocks at police and ignite a parking garage. The disturbance was believed to be set off by the fatal shooting by police earlier this month of a 69-year-old man who allegedly attacked them with a machete. Authorities said at least 100 cars were damaged, and the fire in the garage forced an evacuation of an apartment building. About 50 residents were sheltered temporarily in buses. Police said...

A Washington state man who impregnated a 12 year-old girl forced her to have an abortion at a Planned Parenthood clinic in order to cover up his sexual assault on the girl. The Bellingham Herald reports that Luis Gonzalez-Jose, 31, of Everson, Washington must serve a sentence of six years in jail, then leave the United States, after raping the young girl in her home while her mother was in the shower, according to documents filed in Whatcom County Superior Court. Gonzalez-Jose brought the girl to a Planned Parenthood clinic in August of 2012, where she falsely told staff employed...

White House chief of staff Denis McDonough and other senior presidential advisers knew in late April that an upcoming report was likely to find that IRS employees had inappropriately targeted conservative political groups. That disclosure on Monday expanded the known circle of top officials who were aware of the audit beyond those identified earlier by the White House. The White House says McDonough and the other advisers did not tell President Barack Obama about the impending report, leaving him to learn the results from news reports later. The White House defended the decision to keep the president in the dark,...

To mark the International Day Against Homophobia and Transphobia (IDAHO), the U.S. Embassy in Tallinn on May 17 will display the rainbow flag on the Embassy building at Kentmanni 20, Tallinn. IDAHO is an annual event celebrated internationally to counter homophobia and raise awareness of the human rights discrimination faced by Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender (LGBT) individuals. “Flying the flag,” Ambassador Levine said, “is a simple statement of our support for the LGBT community and its struggle for equal rights.” Noting the substantial progress being made, Ambassador Levine added that much of the world has come to understand that...

May 20, 2013 (LifeSiteNews.com) - Under President Obama, “justice” is anything but blind. Neither is it deaf. In fact, based on recent revelations, it appears to be watching your every move and listening to your every word. Still, if you happen to be a federal employee, now it’s even listening for your silence. The only thing this Obama White House seems to generate is scandal. Well, here’s yet another to add to the growing list. In addition to the Benghazi cover-up, IRS targeting of political dissenters and the illegal seizure of media phone records, whistleblowers within DOJ have contacted Liberty...

The “charity” run by President Barack Obama’s half-brother that was fast-tracked for IRS tax-exempt status is based at a Virginia UPS store, according to its website.The organization’s IRS filings list another Virginia address that is actually a drug rehab center where the foundation does not appear ever to have been based.The Barack H. Obama Foundation is run by Abon’go “Roy” Malik Obama, the half-brother of Barack Obama.As first reported by The Daily Caller, the foundation was speedily approved for IRS exemption by Lois Lerner, the IRS senior official at the center of the targeting of conservative organizations that have waited...