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The Department of Health and Human Services released nearly 1,300 pages of new regulations related to the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) at 4:15 Thursday, just as the nation was beginning their Independence Day holiday weekend. The regulations deal with payment rates to doctors and hospitals. How doctors get paid by HHS through the new, overreaching Obamacare guidelines has been an item of concern for the American Medical Association, a key supporter of the health care law. As Philip Klein at the Washington Examiner points out, the practice of dumping potentially controversial regulations on the eve of a major holiday has...

**SNIP** We can now see these toxic forces converging in the purposeful sabotage of our southern border. The Sinaloa cartel is the biggest drug cartel in Chicago, and it received weapons from our DOJ during the “Fast and Furious” smuggling program. Valerie Jarrett met with “immigration activists” (like La Raza) in the weeks before the assault on our border. Iran’s terrorist arm Hezb'allah has agents colluding with drug mafias and people smuggling all over South America. Breaking down our southern borders serves all three. **SNIP** But it took Obama to betray Egypt’s Mubarak, the single greatest pillar of peace in...

**SNIP** U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson, in an interview with MSNBC, said he found television images of that demonstration "very disturbing" to watch. "Because of the recent influx of kids and families crossing the border in the Rio Grande sector, our processing capability (there) is full and we've had to go to other places in the Southwest simply to process these people," Johnson said. "So when someone interrupts the ability of the border patrol to process a migrant, you're preventing us from conducting basic health screening and the basic background checks on who these people are," he said.

More than 52,000 unaccompanied children have crossed the U.S.-Mexico border since October. Here's a look at why it's happening and how authorities and communities are coping: When did the crisis start? The Department of Homeland Security said the uptick in unaccompanied minors crossing the border began last year but accelerated in the last few months. Since October, more than 52,000 children traveling without an adult were caught entering the United States through Mexico — double the number of the previous year and triple the number in 2011. **SNIP** How do they get to the U.S.? They travel by bus, train,...

The White House has admitted that President Barack Obama has no announced plans to visit overcrowded border-area detention facilities holding tens of thousands of illegal immigrant children when he flies into Texas next week to raise money for Democrats. Obama’s excuse is that he is “well aware” of the escalating disaster involving thousands of human beings on the long border between the United States and Mexico, reports the Daily Mail. “The president has a very good sense of what’s happening at the border,” said press secretary Josh Earnest at Friday’s press briefing. “He’s getting regular updates from his officials who’ve...

**SNIP** Drug-resistant tuberculosis also appears to have spread, with several counties in southern Texas reporting twice the usual average number of cases. TB is a disease that needs to be carefully monitored and screened for, a prospect that is not possible under the current circumstances. Dengue fever, a potentially deadly mosquito-borne disease that causes fatigue, pain in the bones and muscles, and fever, and infects close to 100 million people worldwide every year, has been detected this year in southern Texas for the first time since 2005. Illegal immigrants, possibly from Mexico, are a likely source. If infected mosquitoes begin...

The Illinois Supreme Court ruled today that subsidized health care premiums for retired state employees are protected under the Illinois Constitution, signaling potential trouble for an overhaul of pension benefits that’s also being challenged in court. Today’s ruling also could affect the city of Chicago’s ongoing phase-out of retiree health insurance subsidies, a program Mayor Rahm Emanuel was counting on to save millions of dollars a year, as well as legislation recently approved to modify the pension plans of city workers and laborers. The 6-1 decision centers around a 2012 law that allowed the state to charge retired workers for...

HOUSTON - Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl, who was a prisoner of war in Afghanistan for five years, has been allowed to venture off the Texas military base where he is receiving care as part of his "reintegration process" into society, a U.S. Army spokeswoman said Wednesday. Bergdahl has been allowed to go, with supervision, to a grocery store, restaurants, shopping centers and a library as part of the process of getting him comfortable with being out in public, Army spokeswoman Arwen Consaul said. **SNIP** He has not commented publicly on the circumstances of his disappearance, and the Army has made no...

The Department of Health and Human Services has agreed to allow members of Congress to go on a managed tour of a Texas facility that houses immigrant children, amid congressional criticism that the government is trying to keep members out of these facilities. But HHS has set several ground rules that members will have to follow if they attend. **SNIP** “No recording devices will be allowed (We may ask you to leave your cellphone in your vehicle),” the email said. “No questions will be allowed during the tour, but questions will be addressed right after the tour,” it continued. “No...

Florida Gators fans who own the football team’s 2014 wall calendar received a surprise Tuesday when they turned the page from June to July. That’s because Aaron Hernandez is Mr. July. So how does an alleged murderer end up gracing the month of July in a football calendar? First of all, the Gators say they weren’t in charge of the calendar’s distribution, as it’s a licensed product from Turner Licensing. They also say the approval process for the calendar was during the spring of 2013 — a few months prior to Hernandez’s June arrest for the alleged murder of Odin...

WASHINGTON -- The World War II Memorial in Washington may soon have a new prayer inscription added, disappointing secularists and rights groups who had opposed the measure based on opposition to religion displayed in public spaces. President Barack Obama signed a law Monday calling for the fountain memorial to display the text of a national prayer given by Franklin D. Roosevelt during the D-Day invasion of Europe in 1944, which unleashed fierce fighting and eventually led to the end of the war. "With Thy blessing, we shall prevail over the unholy forces of our enemy. Help us to conquer the...

Politicians have always touted their support for military veterans back home. The willingness to expend federal dollars to provide the best care possible is popular across the partisan spectrum and is rarely cause for controversy. But the issue has been turned on its head in recent months, with the fallout from the Veterans Affairs scandal prompting even the Obama administration to admit a “corrosive culture” at the VA affecting facilities across the country. It’s also invited criticism of vulnerable House and Senate Democrats from Republican candidates and outside groups. For Republican challengers and operatives, the VA scandal offers a striking...

A Denver woman has been arrested while attempting to go to Syria to engage in violent jihad, according to court documents made public late Wednesday. Shannon Maureen Conley, born in 1996, was arrested April 8th at Denver International Airport trying to board a flight to Istanbul, Turkey, via Germany, according to a criminal complaint filed in U.S. District Court in Colorado. From there, federal prosecutors say, she was headed to Adana, Turkey, and hoped to meet someone known to her as “Y.M.” who wanted to marry her and help her join up with terrorists in Syria. A federal official said...

SPOKANE, Wash. (AP) — Workers are preparing to enter one of the most dangerous rooms on the Hanford Nuclear Reservation — the site of a 1976 blast that exposed a technician to a massive dose of radiation, leading to him being nicknamed the "Atomic Man." Harold McCluskey was working in the room when a chemical reaction caused a glass glove box to explode. He was exposed to the highest dose of radiation from the chemical element americium ever recorded — 500 times the occupational standard. Hanford, located in central Washington state, made plutonium for nuclear weapons for decades. The room...

It appears that our government is working hard for the citizens. Unfortunately, they’re not the citizens of the United States. Fox News’ Todd Starnes reports shocking allegations that a government-contracted security force is threatening to arrest medical personnel at Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio, Texas, if they reveal information about the rampant disease among the illegal migrants at the facility. Nonetheless, several of these workers have decided to come forward, fearing the contagion risk posed to Americans. Starnes has kept their identities secret, as they could be subject to persecution.

The federal Obamacare marketplace was unable to verify nearly 3 million irregularities in the applications for enrollment, according to a new audit by the Health and Human Services (HHS) Office of the Inspector General (OIG). The audit, released Tuesday, found that the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) resolved less than one percent of so-called “inconsistencies” related to the citizenship and residency status of Obamacare sign ups. “The Federal marketplace was not able to resolve inconsistencies related to: citizenship, status as a national, lawful presence, residency, family size, annual household income, and whether the applicant was eligible for minimum...

ATLANTA | Federal investigators are probing a whistleblower's allegations that applications for veterans seeking health care benefits may have been improperly purged from the VA's Health Eligibility Center in suburban Atlanta. Eligibility Center program specialist Scott Davis told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution that health benefit applications for more than 10,000 veterans may have been improperly purged from the Health Eligibility Center's national data system in DeKalb County. The center doesn't process all applications, but helps manage the national enrollment computer system and offers enrollment guidance for VA hospitals across the country.

Democrats are putting the Supreme Court in their cross hairs, using its decision against ObamaCare’s contraception mandate to rally their base ahead of the midterm elections. Within hours of the high court’s decision that closely held companies cannot be compelled to offer contraception coverage as part of their employee health plans, Democrats were trying to raise cash and rally voters to their side. Strategists said the issue of women’s reproductive health could play well in elections across the country, helping the party in contests that could largely be won and lost on turnout. “It could play in almost all of...

NEW YORK (AP) — A state lawmaker pleaded guilty Friday to federal charges in a deal that requires her to resign from office, admitting that she obtained legal residency and ultimately citizenship through a sham marriage and then lied to bankruptcy authorities years later to erase $30,000 of debt. Assemblywoman Gabriela Rosa, 47, told U.S. District Judge Denise Cote that she "falsely got married" to a U.S. citizen and referred to it as a real marriage when she became a citizen in 2005. **SNIP** Although the two false statements charges carry a combined potential penalty of 10 years in prison,...

**SNIP** But the worst of the SLA’s crimes came on April 21, 1975. That’s when Kilgore and three comrades, all wearing ski masks, rushed the Crocker National Bank in the Sacramento suburb of Carmichael, ordering customers to get down and clerks to turn over money. One SLA member, Emily Harris, fatally shot Myrna Lee Opsahl, who was depositing funds for her church. (Harris, though claiming in court that it was an accident, had dismissed her victim as “a bourgeois pig,” Hearst said.) Opsahl wasn’t the only fatality that day, Dey noted: “Court documents allege that during the robbery, Kilgore’s girlfriend...