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Navy veteran, 100, cheered for standing up to protesters at medal ceremony Published January 05, 2015 FoxNews.com A 100-year-old U.S. Navy veteran drew cheers from a crowd in Oregon Saturday after telling protesters shouting "hands-up, don't shoot!" to stop interrupting his medal ceremony and to “show a little respect.” Dario Raschio was at Portland Community College's Southeast Campus to be honored by Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Oregon, at a public town hall meeting. But shortly after Wyden began speaking, more than 100 demonstrators in the back of the room started shouting, The Oregonian reports. After 15 minutes of chanting against the...

House Democrats blocked legislation on Thursday that would have permanently extended three tax credits for charitable giving, ending an effort to give nonprofits a last-minute victory. The bill got a strong majority in the House, with 275 members voting for it, including 47 Democrats. But the measure fell eight votes short of the two-thirds majority it needed to pass, with 149 Democrats voting against it after House Democratic leaders whipped against it and President Obama threatened a veto. The vote ends a last-ditch effort by the nonprofit sector to get three of its priorities into law for good, after a...

The Talk Shows March 30th, 2014 Guests to be interviewed today on major television talk shows: FOX NEWS SUNDAY (Fox Network): Sens. Angus King, I-Maine; John Barrasso, R-Wyo.; Rep. Mike Rogers, R-Mich.MEET THE PRESS (NBC): Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore.; Michael Leiter, former White House adviser on counterterrorism.FACE THE NATION (CBS): NCAA President Mark Emmert; Michael Hayden, former head of the CIA and the National Security Agency; Michael Morrell, former deputy CIA director and member of NSA Surveillance Review Group; Cmdr. William J. Marks, U.S. Navy 7th Fleet, which is involved in the search for the missing Malaysian Airlines jet.THIS WEEK...

Eighty-five of 100 U.S. senators voted to renew the president’s power to indefinitely detain Americans, denying them of their fundamental right to due process.On December 19, by a vote of 84-15 (Senator Bill Nelson, Democrat of Florida, did not vote), the Senate sent the Fiscal Year 2014 version of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) to President Obama’s desk. Although an overwhelming majority of Republicans and Democrats signed off on the evisceration of the Bill of Rights, a small coalition of Independents, Republicans, and Democrats refused to accede to such a devastation deprivation of rights. A list of the lawmakers...

A pair of civil-liberties Democrats whom the White House tried to appease in a closed-door meeting warned today that fresh reports of thousands of privacy violations by the National Security Agency are just the “tip of a larger iceberg.” On Thursday, the Washington Post published its report of a May 2012 audit leaked by former contractor Edward Snowden that found 2,776 violations over the previous year of executive orders and Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act provisions governing spying on Americans or foreign targets in the U.S. These included both computer and operator errors. Sens. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) and Mark Udall (D-Colo.)...

Key lawmakers told Puerto Rico's governor on Thursday that it's time for the island to choose between statehood and independence. Gov. Alejandro García Padilla has been fighting to retain the island's status as a U.S. territory without voting rights, arguing that it provides the economically troubled island with an advantageous tax status. Leaders of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, which has jurisdiction over U.S. territories and insular possessions, said that's unacceptable. “After 115 years, it is clearly time for Puerto Rico to determine what political path it will take,” said committee Chairman Ron Wyden (D-Ore.). “The current status...

Since this spring’s blink-and-you-missed-it debate over reauthorization of several controversial provisions of the Patriot Act, Senators Ron Wyden (D-OR) and Mark Udall (D-CO) have been complaining to anyone who’d listen about a “Secret Patriot Act“—an interpretation of one of the law’s provisions by the classified Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court granting surveillance powers exceeding those an ordinary person would understand to be conferred from the text of the statute itself. As I argued at the time, there is an enormous amount of strong circumstantial evidence suggesting that this referred to a “sensitive collection program” involving cell phone location tracking—potentially on a...

It’s no surprise that many Hollywood actors and actresses are on the left side of the aisle. But what is a surprise -- and a nice one at that -- is to see some of them stand by their ideology even when many liberals on Capitol Hill will not. Last Wednesday, while many Democrats on Capitol Hill stood silent on a big civil liberties issue, one major celebrity went on twitter to chastise some of his ideological allies. On an issue that they are both passionate about, the liberal actor John Cusack -- the star of films like “Being...

Neither Congress nor the White House has proved itself capable of reaching a decision on how to begin trimming the $16.5 trillion national debt with which these two institutions have saddled the American taxpayers. They even have been unable to come up with a reasonable measure to avoid the so-called “fiscal cliff” they themselves constructed months ago. Yet, when it comes to expanding the power of the government to spy on American citizens without warrants, both the House and the Senate last week fairly tripped over themselves in a rush to pass legislation doing just that; with President Obama...

We remember Granny. She's the helpless old lady in a wheelchair that Paul Ryan, or somebody who was supposed to look like him, pushed over the cliff. That's the way an Obama campaign commercial attempted to demonstrate the heartlessness of the mean ol' Republicans. But a funny thing happened on the way to November. When Mitt Romney chose Paul Ryan as his running mate, a lot of people put that video on rewind. Granny turned out to be alive and well, capable of looking at things for herself, seeing things as they really are, and she's alarmed at what she...

Senate Democrats blocked a resolution introduced by Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) calling for Attorney General Eric Holder to introduce an outside special counsel to investigate a number of recent military and intelligence leaks. McCain introduced a resolution Tuesday expressing the Senate's support for Holder to appoint a special prosecutor. But Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) objected after McCain asked for unanimous consent that the Senate proceed to consideration of his resolution.

For more than two years, a handful of Democrats on the Senate intelligence committee have warned that the government is secretly interpreting its surveillance powers under the Patriot Act in a way that would be alarming if the public — or even others in Congress — knew about it.

In a move the technology sector will surely see as a victory, a controversial antipiracy bill being debated in Congress will no longer include a provision that would require ISPs to block access to overseas Web sites accused of piracy. Rep. Chairman Lamar Smith (R-Texas), one of the biggest backers of the Stop Online Piracy Act, today said he plans to remove the Domain Name System or DNS-blocking provision. "After consultation with industry groups across the country," Smith said in a statement released by his office, "I feel we should remove DNS-blocking from the Stop Online Piracy Act so that...

There are many reasons to be grateful for the introduction of the Medicare “premium support” plan by Democratic senator Ron Wyden and Republican House Budget Committee chairman Paul Ryan. In some respects, it represents an improvement over the design of previous versions of premium support. Whereas the original Ryan plan offered seniors a subsidy based on a predetermined formula, the Wyden-Ryan plan relies on competitive bidding for setting the government’s contribution rate. Competitive bidding has the potential to cut costs even more than a predetermined index, because an index tends to lock in today’s wasteful spending. Of course, Wyden-Ryan also...

This one's really off the radar. Wind farms, along with solar power and other alternative energy sources, are supposed to produce the energy of tomorrow. Evidence indicates that their countless whirring fan blades produce something else: "blank spots" that distort radar readings. Now government agencies that depend on radar -- such as the Department of Defense and the National Weather Service -- are spending millions in a scramble to preserve their detection capabilities. A four-star Air Force general recently spelled out the problem to Dave Beloite, the director of the Department of Defense’s Energy Siting Clearinghouse. "Look there’s a radar...

Democratic Sen. John Kerry (Mass.) will introduce bipartisan legislation later this week to create a federal infrastructure bank to fund major projects around the nation, an aide told The Hill. Kerry has at least one Republican senator backing the initiative — the American Infrastructure Financing Authority — that will initially cost about $10 billion and provide loans and loan guarantees for large, much-needed infrastructure projects.

Following on from news of the third phase of ‘piracy’ and counterfeit related domain seizures in 7 months, US Senator Ron Wyden has asked the director of Homeland Security’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to clarify some of the most pressing questions. If the domain seizures are to continue, the Obama administration has to be more open about the need for them and the process involved, he argues. Earlier this week we broke the news that US authorities had started a third round of domain seizures. This time, it turned out that the actions were aimed at sports streaming sites....

Most Democrats have come to understand that they can't run on ObamaCare, but few have the temerity of Ron Wyden. The Oregon Senator is the first to break with the policy underpinnings of the bill he voted for. Last week Mr. Wyden sent a letter to Oregon health authority director Bruce Goldberg, encouraging the state to seek a waiver from certain ObamaCare rules so it can "come up with innovative solutions that the Federal government has never had the flexibility or will to implement." One little-known provision of the bill allows states to opt out of the "requirement that individuals...

The American people are now finally beginning to realize the fact that "Democrat" actually stands for "Demonic bureaucrat," rather than having anything whatsoever to do with "democracy." Let me quickly set a beautiful recent illustration for you: Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick had just been asked by an interviewer about the Glenn Beck 8/28 "Restoring Honor" rally at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C. He was asked, "Are you troubled that it was there when it was and where it was?" And Democrat Deval Patrick, the author of the "Just Words" speech that Obama pirated with such stunning success that it...

Town hall meeting - Sen. Ron Wyden takes heat for Congress not bringing the troops home Although few senators can match U.S. Sen. Ron Wyden's long record opposing the war in Iraq, it didn't protect him from being thoroughly roasted Tuesday by angry anti-war activists at a town hall meeting in Portland. The noontime event at Portland State University attracted more than 300 people, many of whom charged that the Oregon Democrat hasn't done enough to end the war. The senator was also repeatedly verbally flayed for not supporting the impeachment of President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney. "Do...