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In congressional testimony on January 20, the nation’s top intelligence official, Dennis Blair, acknowledged that the U.S. government mishandled the interrogation of Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the Nigerian terrorist who tried to blow up a plane over Detroit on Christmas Day. Specifically, Blair was not happy that Abdulmutallab was charged as a common criminal and read his rights, rather than being questioned by the elite interrogation unit announced by President Obama as a replacement for the CIA teams used by the Bush administration. “I’d been a part of the deliberations which established this high-value interrogation unit [HIG],” Blair explained at a...

Sibley had subpoena from the National Archives the “Arrival Records” for August 1 through August 10, 1961, of all passengers arriving in Honolulu, Hawaii to see if records existed that Obama and his mother arrived in Hawaii during that time frame. What NARA produced were two microfilm spools of the arrival records for July 28 through August 1, 1961 and August 8 through August 12, 1961. As detailed in the Emergency Motion, the original date on the box of “August 7” has been altered by “white-out” and a new date of “August 1” had been written on the box. Proof...

Africa boasts more cellphone users than all of North America The silver lining of being a developing continent is that you can skip entire stages of technological progress, like going directly from no phones to cellphones without suffering through land lines in between. Africa, for example, now has more mobile subscribers than the United States or Europe, and that means big things for African economies. Like we've mentioned before, beyond its wild growth, the African cellular telecommunications market is a hotbed of innovation. Areas like telemedicine and cellphone-based money-transfer schemes don't just make life easier, they help people live healthier...

At Freedom Firearms in Fort Wayne, Indiana there is hardly anything left in the store. Managing partner Angie Freeland told CNBC sales have "gone through the roof". With little left to sell, she will probably close for what is typically her busiest day of the year, December 24. "It started on Monday with the AR-15s going out the door," she said. "Once those were gone they were buying anything with a high capacity magazine." The rush to buy guns comes in the wake of last Friday's massacre in Newtown, CT. Twenty year old Adam Lanza shot twenty children between the...

Natalie's letter, written to President Barack Obama and read by Anderson Cooper on air, voiced her clear and thoughtful belief that guns did not belong in the hands of most civilians: My name is Natalie Barden and I wanted to tell the president that only police officers and the military should get guns. If people want to do it as a sport than they could go to a shooting range and the guns would not be able to leave there.

So Obama has found three staffers in the State Department who don't have the political clout to save themselves: The A.P., quoting an unidentified administration official, said Eric Boswell, the assistant secretary of state for diplomatic security, and Charlene Lamb, the deputy assistant secretary responsible for embassy security, had resigned. The third person, who was not identified, was an official with the department’s Bureau of Near East Affairs, The A.P. said. The buck stops here.....oh wait. This follows on the heels of the "official accountability report" on the Benghazi attack in which they took the State Department to task but...

Governor Palin goes On the Record with Greta Van Susteren.

And so the reckoning begins. Only hours after a special task force concluded on Wednesday that “systemic failures and leadership and management deficiencies” may have contributed to the deaths of Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans in Benghazi, Libya, the State Department’s security chief resigned and three other officials were relieved of their duties. What was lacking in the report, however, was any sense of who was responsible farther up the chain. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton’s Accountability Review Board—chaired by retired Ambassador Thomas R. Pickering and vice chaired by another national-security heavyweight, former Joint Chiefs Chairman Michael...

President Barack Obama's job approval rating has risen to 56%, by two percentage points his highest three-day reading since October 2009. Although the president's job approval rating has been in the 50% range for much of the time since his re-election, the new high point this week coincides with the aftermath of the Dec. 14 mass school shootings in Newtown, Conn. The 56% average is for Monday through Wednesday, Dec. 17-19. Obama's job approval had reached 54% during the week prior to the Newtown shootings, but had dropped to 51% from Dec. 11-13, the three days just prior to Dec....

WASHINGTON (AP) - Spurred by a horrific elementary school shooting, President Barack Obama vowed to send Congress new policy proposals for reducing gun violence by January. "This time, the words need to lead to action," Obama said Wednesday. He tasked Vice President Joe Biden with leading an administration-wide effort to create the new recommendations and pledged to push for their implementation without delay. The president, who exerted little political capital on gun control despite a series of mass shootings in his first term, bristled at suggestions that he had been silent on the issue during his first four years in...

Tibet activists lobbying US members of Congress to to sign congressmen McGovern/Wolf letter to President Obama to make Tibet a top piority. Dharamshala, December 20: A letter to U.S. President Barack Obama urging him to exercise greater international leadership in improving the human rights situation in Tibet has received a large bi-partisan support from the US Congress. As of Wednesday, 56 members of Congress have signed the Wolf-McGovern letter “strongly urging” President Obama “to make Tibet one of your top priorities for U.S. advocacy” and nominate a Secretary of State who will “champion” the Tibet issue. “It is critical that...

There is a different sort of racialist derangement spreading in the country — and it is getting ugly.Here is actor Jamie Foxx joking recently about his new movie role: “I kill all the white people in the movie. How great is that?” Reverse white and black in the relevant ways and even a comedian would hear national outrage. Instead, his hip Saturday Night Live audience even gave Foxx applause.Race-obsessed comedian Chris Rock tweeted on the Fourth of July, “Happy white peoples [sic] independence day . . . ”Actor Samuel L. Jackson, in a recent interview, sounded about as unapologetically reactionary as you can...

Tragedies often bring out the best in people. Responding to a tweet by author Joyce Carol Oates, actress Marg Helgenberger said "one can only hope" that members of the NRA get shot, Twitchy reported Tuesday. "If sizable numbers of NRA members become gun-victims themselves, maybe hope for legislation of firearms," Oates tweeted Friday. "@JoyceCarolOates One can only hope, but sadly I don't think anything would change," the CSI star tweeted in response. This wasn't taken particularly well: "@MargHelgen @JoyceCarolOates are you encouraging violence against those who dare disagree with you?" asked "Jeremy Avery." "Congrats for becoming yet another clueless, VIOLENT,...

FOX News White House correspondent Ed Henry asked Carney if the four State Department officials that resigned yesterday were “taking the fall” for President Obama and Hillary Clinton even though they repeatedly said that the “buck” stopped with them. “I’m not sure what you are suggesting, Carney replied. “There were some individuals that did a lot of reporting that turned out to be entirely false, based on the paragraph I just read, Ed.” Carney added testily, ” The facts in the report are the facts.”

Newtown resident Natalie Barden, 10, has already faced more in her short life than many of us could imagine — burying little brother Daniel Barden yesterday, one of the 20 victims of a horrific school shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary. Natalie Barden’s little brother wanted to be a firefighter, and in Daniel’s honor, scores of uniformed firemen lined the streets in a sober procession to guard the tiny casket at his funeral Wednesday. Parents Mark and Jackie Barden described their son in a statement, saying: “Words really cannot express what a special boy Daniel was. Such a light. Always smiling,...

Let's all rejoice! The Treasury Department is finally beginning to unload the taxpayers' stake in General Motors after a three and a half year stint of government involvement in the company. While the decision to get taxpayers out of the private sector is the correct one, the move is hardly a cure-all for what ails GM. And despite reports to the contrary, this does not bring closure to all groups that were involved in the unprecedented intrusion of government into the private sector that saw politically-powerful groups like the UAW receive favorable treatment over other classes. Let's start by reviewing...

PHOENIX -- A couple of days after breathing new life into the conspiracy theory that Barack Obama is not eligible to be president, the chairman of the Arizona Republican Party says he's not running for another term. The announcement is a surprise as Tom Morrissey had publicly said he would seek a second two-year term during the GOP's annual organizational meeting next month. Morrissey said Wednesday it was a tough decision but he is stepping down because of health reasons. On Monday, Morrissey and a pair of other Republicans questioned the authenticity of Obama's certificate, rekindling a long debunked theory....

During his press conference today, called to announce his new gun control task force, President Obama invoked the Newtown massacre to apply pressure on congressional Republicans in the fiscal cliff standoff. OBAMA: If this past week has done anything it should give us some perspective. I-I-I-If there’s one thing we should have, after this week, it should be a sense of perspective about what’s important. And I would like to think that members of that caucus would say to themselves “You know what, I disagree with the president on some things. We wish the other guy had won. We’re...

The number of young black men who cast a vote for the Republican presidential candidate in 2012 tripled that of 2008. Hearing this statistic, one commenter quipped, “Is this one of those situations where three times nothing is still nothing?” No. “Nearly 20 percent of black males under 30 voted for Romney, more than three times what McCain got.” That according to Ann Coulter, who gets her information from Pew Research.How? Why? Is there a growing number of young black conservatives?Those stand as worthy questions. Answering them properly would require follow-up polling. Any number of factors could have informed...

I see we’ve returned to what somebody called the “smartest man in the room” swagger. This “eat your peas” scold was last heard during the fiscal cliff talks 2011(snip) Butt yesterday’s presser completed Big Guy’s on the job growth curve: from whiny baby, to petulant child, through cocky adolescence, before emerging in tact as the peevish, hubristic adult he is today. All the while staying true to his community organizer roots. And when asked where he’s been on gun control for the last 4 years by that uppity ABC reporter, Big Guy really put him in his place: “I don’t...