• IRS targets non-profits perceived to be critical of the government

    In the wake of the Supreme Court’s Citizens United ruling, the number of groups applying to the IRS for a tax-exempt status has more than doubled. The IRS inspector general, doing an audit of agency documents relating to such applications, discovered the agency was paying extra attention to  groups with the words “tea party” or “patriot” in their names, and to groups which appeared to be critical of the government. Senator Susan Collins (R-Maine) called the situation “absolutely chilling.”

  • The two sides in the gun control debate are gearing up for Round 2

    A few weeks ago, when the Senate was considering legislation to expand background checks for gun buyers and other gun-control measures, gun-rights advocate successfully organized and campaigned at the grass-root level, exerting pressure on enough wavering Senators, including four Democrats from Red stated who face re-election in 2014. Now, as the Senate majority leader is getting set to introduce the gun-control measures again, supporters of gun control legislation are trying to emulate the grass-root mobilization performance of gun-rights advocates.

  • Lawmakers want Benghazi ARB examined

    The Department of State appointed an Accountability Review Board (ARB), headed by Ambassador Thomas Pickering and Adm. Mike Mullen, to look into the Department’s performance before and during the Benghazi attack. The ABR submitted its conclusions in mid-December 2012. The ARB offered unsparing criticism of different aspects the State Department’s decision making in the months before the attack regarding the security of the Benghazi compound, but it did not find anything rising to the level of criminality or gross negligence in the department’s policies toward security in Benghazi. The chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee wants the State Department’s Inspector General to examine the way the Benghazi ARB conducted its investigation.

  • Pro-Assad group attacks Turkish border town, killing 46

    A Turkish group affiliated with a Syrian Alawite militia and operating on orders of Syrian intelligence, carried out a suicide attack Saturday in the Turkish city of Reyhanli, killing forty-six people. More than fifty people are still being treated in local hospitals. Reyhanli is an entry point for refugees fleeing violence in Syria. The attack will increase pressure on Turkey to become more involved in the Syrian conflict.

  • Lawmakers defeat Sen. Cruz’s amendment because of its cost

    Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), saying the Gang of Eight’s immigration overhaul draft does not provide DHS with sufficient incentives to bolster border security, offers an amendment which would substantially increase border security funding. Fellow GOP lawmakers say the price tag — $30-$40 billion – is too high, and defeat the amendment.

  • Pennsylvania emergency professionals receive WMD training

    The Center for Domestic Preparedness (CDP) in Alabama hosted more than a hundred emergency professionals from the Pennsylvania South Central Mountains Regional Task Force’s Health and Medical Committee for in-depth response-to-WMD training.

  • Sen. Rubio slams Heritage Foundation report on cost of immigration reform

    Senator Marco Rubio(R-Florida) wasted little time attacking a report by the Heritage Foundation which estimated that new immigration overhaul legislation, of which Rubio is one of the authors, would cost taxpayers $6.3 trillion over fifty years. “The Heritage Foundation is] the only group that’s looked at [immigration reform] and reached the conclusion they’ve reached. Everybody else who has analyzed immigration reform understands that if you do it, and we do it right, it will be a net positive for our economy. Their argument is based on a single premise, which I think is flawed,” Rubio added. “That is these people are disproportionately poor because they have no education and they will be poor for the rest of their lives in the U.S. Quite frankly, that’s not the immigration experience in the U.S. That’s certainly not my family’s experience in the U.S.”

  • Co-author of Heritage report: Hispanic immigrants have lower IQ than white Americans

    In a 2009 public policy doctoral dissertation, the co-author of the Heritage Foundation immigration report wrote that Hispanic immigrants are less intelligent than white Americans. “Immigrants living in the U.S. today do not have the same level of cognitive ability as natives,” Jason Richwine, a senior policy analyst at Heritage, wrote. “No one knows whether Hispanics will ever reach I.Q. parity with whites, but the prediction that new Hispanic immigrants will have low-I.Q. children and grandchildren is difficult to argue against.”

  • Senators debate border security measurement methodology

    The immigration reform bill contains $4 billion for border security. The problem is that no one is quite sure how to measure border security, how do we decide that the border is secure, and who would make that decision.

  • U.S. considering revamping wiretap laws

    The White House is reviewing an FBI plan to overhaul surveillance laws in order to make it easier for law enforcement officials to wiretap citizens using the Internet to communicate rather than phone services.

  • Hezbollah increases role as protector of the Assad regime

    With the anti-regime uprising in Syria evolving into a full-fledged ethnic conflict between the Alawite minority and the Sunni majority, the Assad regime relies more and more on Shi’a allies – Iran, Hezbollah, and the al-Maliki government in Iraq — to stay in power. Over the last three months, Hezbollah has been playing a growing, and more open, role in shoring up the regime.

  • Illnesses in U.S. on the rise as a result of decline in foreign food inspections

    More Americans get sick every year as a result of food-borne pathogens. The reason: inspections at foreign food factories shipping food and food ingredients to the United States have declined in recent years, and border inspections of food coming into the country could be next to be reduced. Experts say this decline in inspections is especially worrisome since Americans consume more imported food – or food made with imported ingredients – every year, and foreign food production and processing facilities often do not meet U.S. sanitation and hygiene standards.

  • Canadian company provides software to U.S. intelligence agencies

    A Canadian company has spent the last few years locking up contracts to provide security software to U.S. federal agencies such as the NSA, CIA, and FBI. The company moved from the United States to Canada because the Canadian government gives tax credits for high-tech companies coming to Canada, and Canadian government agencies help the company break into new markets by sponsoring his company in international conferences. It was in one of these conferences that he once met “some NSA folks.”

  • U.S.: China orchestrating broad cyberattack campaign against U.S.

    The Obama administration accused China’s military of orchestrating a campaign of cyberattacks against American government computer systems and defense contractors for the purpose of identifying “military capabilities that could be exploited during a crisis.” Cyber experts estimate that about 90 percent of all cyberattacks in the United States originate in China, but these estimates have typically been offered by private-sector experts. The Pentagon’s annual report to Congress, released Monday, is the first government document specifically and explicitly to assert that the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) is behind a sustained, systematic campaign of cyberattacks on the United States in an effort to gain a strategic advantage over the United States. The report also pointedly notes that Chinese investments in U.S. companies aim to help this cyberattacks campaign.

  • GOP opponents of the immigration bill gearing up for a campaign to kill it

    Republicans opposed to the bi-partisan Senate immigration bill are getting set to launch a campaign to defeat the bill, as the Senate Judiciary Committee begins a review on the bill Thursday. The committee is expected to spend at least three weeks on the bill, with GOP lawmakers opposing the bill ready to offer hundreds of amendments — some in an effort to make the bill more acceptable to them, others in an effort to kill it.