For months, the U.S. State Department has stood behind its former boss Hillary Clinton as she has repeatedly said she did not send or receive classified information on her unsecured, private email account, a practice the government forbids.
While the department is now stamping a few dozen of the publicly released emails as “Classified,” it stresses this is not evidence of rule-breaking. Those stamps are new, it says, and do not mean the information was classified when Clinton, the Democratic frontrunner in the 2016 presidential election, first sent or received it.
But the details included in those “Classified” stamps — which include a string of dates, letters and numbers describing the nature of the classification — appear to undermine this account, a Reuters examination of the emails and the relevant regulations has found.
Former National Security Agency (NSA) Director Michael Hayden said on Wednesday that Hillary Clinton should not have used a single account for all her emails as secretary of State.
“It’s stupid and dangerous,” Hayden, who led the CIA during George W. Bush’s presidency, said during an appearance on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.”
Hayden said that “you put a really juicy target out there” by combining official and unofficial exchanges on the same email account, as Clinton did.
He said doing so puts the secretary and nation’s secrets at risk, and questioned its legality, noting that government accounts provide a certain level of security.
Gov. Chris Christie’s office says recent actions by credit-rating agencies confirm his view that the cost of New Jersey’s state’s pension system is a long-term issue. (Associated Press) Read more
Christie comes out swinging at N.J. teachers’ union in N.H. Just as soon as Gov. Chris Christie took a seat on stage at an education summit in New Hampshireon Wednesday, he came out swinging against New Jersey’s largest teachers union. (Matt Arco, NJ.com) Read more
The shoe is on the other foot and the Mexicans from the State of Sonora, Mexico do not like it. Can you believe the nerve of these people? It’s almost funny.
The State of Sonora is angry at the influx of Mexicans into Mexico!!!
Nine state legislators from the Mexican State of Sonora traveled to Tucson to complain about Arizona’s new employer crackdown on illegals from Mexico.
It seems that many Mexican illegals are returning to their hometowns and the officials in the Sonora state government are ticked off.
In January 2008, a delegation of nine legislators from Sonora (the Mexican state immediately south of Arizona) came to Tucson to express concerns that Arizona’s recently enacted Legal Arizona Workers Act (an employer sanctioned law which imposed penalties on employers who knowingly hired persons lacking documentation of their status to legally work in the United States) would have a “devastating” effect on Sonora. After a press conference held at the offices of Project PPEP a day prior to the delegation’s meeting with Hispanic legislators, the Tucson Citizen reported the Sonoran representatives posing questions such as the following:
At a news conference, the Sonoran legislators said that Sonora — Arizona’s southern neighbor, made up of mostly small towns — cannot handle the demand for housing, jobs and schools it will face as illegal Mexican workers [in Tucson] return to their hometowns without jobs or money.
They want to tell [Arizona legislators] how the law will affect Mexican families on both sides of the border.
“How can they pass a law like this?” asked Mexican Rep. Leticia Amparano Gamez, who represents Nogales.
“There is not one person living in Sonora who does not have a friend or relative working in Arizona,” she said in Spanish.
“Mexico is not prepared for this, for the tremendous problems it will face as more and more Mexicans working in Arizona and sending money to their families return to hometowns in Sonora without jobs,” she said.
Amparano said the Mexican legislators are already asking the federal government of Mexico for help for Sonora.
NATIONAL STEVEN ERTELT AUG 19, 2015 | 9:27AM WASHINGTON, DC
The organization that has released six videos exposing the scandal of Planned Parenthood selling aborted babies and their body parts has released a new undercover video today with another shocking discovery. This latest video catches the nation’s biggest abortion business harvesting the brain of an aborted baby who was still alive.
The video (SHOWN BELOW) features Holly O’Donnell, a licensed phlebotomist who unsuspectingly took a job as a “procurement technician” at the fetal tissue company and biotech start-up StemExpress in late 2012. That’s the company that acts as a middleman and purchases the body parts of aborted babies from Planned Parenthood to sell to research universities and other places. StemExpress was partnered with Planned Parenthood up until last week, when it quietly announced it ended its relationship with the abortion corporation.
The new video includes O’Donnell’s eyewitness narrative of the daily practice of fetal body parts harvesting in Planned Parenthood abortion clinics. She tells the harrowing story of harvesting an intact brain from a late-term male unborn baby whose heart was still beating after the abortion.
O’Donnell describes the harvesting, or “procurement,” of organs from a nearly intact late-term baby aborted at Planned Parenthood Mar Monte’s Alameda clinic in San Jose, California.
DID BLACK LIVES MATTER ORGANIZER SHAUN KING MISLEAD OPRAH WINFREY BY PRETENDING TO BE BIRACIAL?
by MILO YIANNOPOULOS19 Aug 20154,510
An investigative blogger has accused Shaun King, a key figure in the Black Lives Matter movement, of misleading media icon Oprah Winfrey by pretending to be biracial in order to qualify for an “Oprah scholarship” to historically black Morehouse College. The blogger says King is white and has been lying about his ethnicity for years.
King is a high-profile campaigner against “police brutality” and “justice correspondent” for the liberal Daily Kos website who told Rebel magazine in 2012 that he was biracial, with the magazine reporting that he is the “son of a Caucasian mother and an African-American father.” He has also described himself as “mixed with a black family” on Twitter.
King has been lionised by the press, praised as hero of civil rights and social activism. He has written extensively about a childhood in which he was terrorised by “decades old racial tensions.” He claims to have been “the focus of constant abuse of the resident rednecks of my school.”
Yet, in recent weeks, rumours have been circulating about his ethnicity. A 1995 police incident report lists Shaun King’s ethnicity as white. And blogger Vicki Pate, who has been assembling forensic accounts of Shaun King’s background and family tree on her blog, “Re-NewsIt!,” has published her findings.
She claims that King is entirely white and says a birth certificate, which Breitbart has since independently acquired from the Kentucky Office of Vital Statistics, names a white man as his father.
King’s case echoes that of Rachel Dolezal, a civil rights activist from Washington who claimed to be biracial while in fact being of caucasian origin. Dolezal continues to insist she “identifies as black,” despite her parents revealing that she is entirely white.
If Pate is right, Shaun King, who often uses black and white photographs of himself online rather than colour images, may have misled African-American hero Winfrey by applying for and accepting an Oprah Scholarship to the historically black Morehouse College. Oprah Scholarships are given exclusively to black men.
In his Daily Kos diary, King refers to himself as a “brother,” writing: “Oprah Winfrey paid my way through Morehouse. The leadership scholarship that I received from her is why I have a college degree today. Five hundred other brothers have the exact same story.”
Shaun King’s biography has attracted the attention of bloggers and journalists thanks to several bizarre inconsistencies in his public claims. He often struggles when asked to recall basic facts about his own life. For instance, in August 2014, King wrote on Twitter that he was father to three “black girls,” while, six months earlier, he claimed to be father to four.
It is of course possible that a family tragedy is responsible for the inconsistency, but the unexplained change in biographical details is not a one-off. In October 2009, King claimed to have endured four spinal surgeries. By February 2010, the number of surgeries had shrunk to three. There is also some confusion about when an alleged car crash may or may not have happened.
As it turns out, these explosive new racial allegations are just the latest in a string of controversies surrounding Shaun King: on July 21, a conservative blog reported that his account of a “brutal, racially-motivated beating” in 1995, which at least two reports have described as “Kentucky’s first hate crime,” did not match up with a police report from the case.
Clinton pulls plug on testy presser over server questions
August 18, 2015, 06:22 pm
By Ben Kamisar
Hillary Clinton dismissed the controversy surrounding her private email server and defended her conduct as legal during a press conference Tuesday in Las Vegas.
A visibly aggravated Clinton repeatedly insisted that she had done nothing wrong and seemed frustrated by questions about the issue.
“What I did was legally permitted, number one, first and foremost,” the Democratic presidential candidate said in response to a question from Fox News reporter Ed Henry. “We turned over everything that was work-related, every single thing.”
She added that in “retrospect,” it had not turned out to be convenient to have the private server during her years as secretary of State.
“I regret that this has become a cause celebre. But that does not change the facts, and no matter what anybody tries to say, the facts are stubborn,” she said.
“I know there is a certain level of anxiety or interest in this, but the facts are the facts.”
Asked if the server, which has been turned over to the Department of Justice, had been wiped clean, Clinton initially shrugged and later joked: “Like with a cloth or something?”
Donald Trump is steamrolling the competition in the fight for the Republican presidential nomination.
On Tuesday, a second national poll conducted in the wake of the first GOP debate found Trump with a double-digit lead over the next closest contender.
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Trump is not just attacking his rivals, he’s seeking to embarrass them, and he’s having fun doing it.
The businessman and reality TV star is also shaping the policy discussion, forcing other contenders to weigh-in on the far-right proposals in his immigration plan.
When Trump’s rise first began to register in the polls in early July, his ascendance was met with mild bemusement and the near-universal belief among Republicans that the he was a temporary, media-driven phenomenon likely to burn out by the end of summer.
Now, Republicans wonder how far he can go.
“Can he win? He sure can win,” said former Iowa Republican Party political director Craig Robinson. “He’s running roughshod over the rest of this field because the other candidates have allowed him to. This is a high stakes poker game and you have a guy playing aggressively, owning the table and dictating how everyone else moves.”
Two new national polls show Trump increasing his lead over the GOP field.
A Fox News survey released over the weekend showed Trump with a more than two-to-one lead nationally over Ben Carson, who placed a distant second.
Meanwhile, a CNN/ORC survey released Tuesday showed Trump’s lead spiking to double-digits after the same survey from late July showed him leading Jeb Bush by only 3 points. He has had double-digit leads in nine of 13 national polls since mid-July.
In Iowa and New Hampshire, Trump has led in every poll since late July.
Democratic White House front-runner used Platte River Networks of Denver, Colorado, to maintain her controversial ‘home brew’ server Up to 60 emails with classified material have been found in a sample of those she did not delete – meaning there could be many more Now Daily Mail Online reveals new questions over security of her emails when Platte River was involved in maintaining server ‘Mom and pop’ firm used converted residential apartment and had its own servers in a bathroom closet Links between ‘local’ IT company and Clinton remain unclear but its VP of sales and marketing, who was sued for ‘fraud’ is said to be ‘big Democrat’
By HUGO DANIEL IN DENVER, COLORADO, FOR DAILYMAIL.COM
PUBLISHED: 08:12 EST, 18 August 2015 | UPDATED: 12:03 EST, 18 August 2015
The IT company Hilary Clinton chose to maintain her private email account was run from a loft apartment and its servers were housed in the bathroom closet, Daily Mail Online can reveal.
Daily Mail Online tracked down ex-employees of Platte River Networks in Denver, Colorado, who revealed the outfit’s strong links to the Democratic Party but expressed shock that the 2016 presidential candidate chose the small private company for such a sensitive job.
One, Tera Dadiotis, called it ‘a mom and pop shop’ which was an excellent place to work, but hardly seemed likely to be used to secure state secrets. And Tom Welch, who helped found the company, confirmed the servers were in a bathroom closet.
It can also be disclosed that the small number of employees who were aware of the Clinton contract were told to keep it secret.
The way in which Clinton came to contract a company described as a ‘mom and pop’ operation remains unclear.
However Daily Mail Online has established a series of connections between the firm and the Democratic Party.
Veteran Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward on Monday compared the email controversy engulfing Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton to the downfall of President Richard Nixon.
On MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” Woodward, who through his reporting helped break open the Watergate scandal, said it’s at least suspicious that Clinton’s emails from her tenure as secretary of state were wiped away from a server she owned privately.
“Follow the trail here,” Woodward said. “There are all these emails. Well, they were sent to someone or someone sent them to her. So, if things have been erased here, there’s a way to go back to these emails or who received them from Hillary Clinton. So, you’ve got a massive amount of data in a way, reminds me of the Nixon tapes: Thousands of hours of secretly recorded conversations that Nixon thought were exclusively his.”
News broke earlier this year that Clinton relied on a private email address and server, rather than a government-owned one, when she served at the State Department. Subsequent reports said that she received classified and top secret information through that system. Federal officials have since taken Clinton’s server and are continuing an investigation into whether its security was compromised.
IMMIGRATION REFORM THAT WILL MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN
The three core principles of Donald J. Trump’s immigration plan
When politicians talk about “immigration reform” they mean: amnesty, cheap labor and open borders. The Schumer-Rubio immigration bill was nothing more than a giveaway to the corporate patrons who run both parties.
Real immigration reform puts the needs of working people first – not wealthy globetrotting donors. We are the only country in the world whose immigration system puts the needs of other nations ahead of our own. That must change. Here are the three core principles of real immigration reform:
1. A nation without borders is not a nation. There must be a wall across the southern border.
2. A nation without laws is not a nation. Laws passed in accordance with our Constitutional system of government must be enforced.
3. A nation that does not serve its own citizens is not a nation. Any immigration plan must improve jobs, wages and security for all Americans.
Make Mexico Pay For The Wall
For many years, Mexico’s leaders have been taking advantage of the United States by using illegal immigration to export the crime and poverty in their own country (as well as in other Latin American countries). They have even published pamphletson how to illegally immigrate to the United States. The costs for the United States have been extraordinary: U.S. taxpayers have been asked to pick up hundreds of billions in healthcare costs, housing costs, education costs, welfare costs, etc. Indeed, the annual cost of free tax credits alone paid to illegal immigrants quadrupled to $4.2 billion in 2011. The effects on jobseekers have also been disastrous, and black Americans have been particularly harmed.
The impact in terms of crime has been tragic. In recent weeks, the headlines have been covered with cases of criminals who crossed our border illegally only to go on to commit horrific crimes against Americans. Most recently, an illegal immigrant from Mexico, with a long arrest record, is charged with breaking into a 64 year-old women’s home, crushing her skull and eye sockets with a hammer, raping her, and murdering her. The Police Chief in Santa Maria says the “blood trail” leads straight to Washington.
In 2011, the Government Accountability Office found that there were a shocking 3 million arrests attached to the incarcerated alien population, including tens of thousands of violent beatings, rapes and murders.
Meanwhile, Mexico continues to make billions on not only our bad trade deals but also relies heavily on the billions of dollars in remittances sent from illegal immigrants in the United States back to Mexico ($22 billion in 2013 alone).
In short, the Mexican government has taken the United States to the cleaners. They are responsible for this problem, and they must help pay to clean it up.
The cost of building a permanent border wall pales mightily in comparison to what American taxpayers spend every single year on dealing with the fallout of illegal immigration on their communities, schools and unemployment offices.
Mexico must pay for the wall and, until they do, the United States will, among other things: impound all remittance payments derived from illegal wages; increase fees on all temporary visas issued to Mexican CEOs and diplomats (and if necessary cancel them); increase fees on all border crossing cards – of which we issue about 1 million to Mexican nationals each year (a major source of visa overstays); increase fees on all NAFTA worker visas from Mexico (another major source of overstays); and increase fees at ports of entry to the United States from Mexico [Tariffs and foreign aid cuts are also options]. We will not be taken advantage of anymore.
Defend The Laws And Constitution Of The United States
America will only be great as long as America remains a nation of laws that lives according to the Constitution. No one is above the law. The following steps will return to the American people the safety of their laws, which politicians have stolen from them:
Triple the number of ICE officers. As the President of the ICE Officers’ Council explained in Congressional testimony: “Only approximately 5,000 officers and agents within ICE perform the lion’s share of ICE’s immigration mission…Compare that to the Los Angeles Police Department at approximately 10,000 officers. Approximately 5,000 officers in ICE cover 50 states, Puerto Rico and Guam, and are attempting to enforce immigration law against 11 million illegal aliens already in the interior of the United States. Since 9-11, the U.S. Border Patrol has tripled in size, while ICE’s immigration enforcement arm, Enforcement and Removal Operations (ERO), has remained at relatively the same size.” This will be funded by accepting the recommendation of the Inspector General for Tax Administration and eliminating tax credit payments to illegal immigrants.
Nationwide e-verify. This simple measure will protect jobs for unemployed Americans.
Mandatory return of all criminal aliens. The Obama Administration has released 76,000 aliens from its custody with criminal convictions since 2013 alone. All criminal aliens must be returned to their home countries, a process which can be aided by canceling any visas to foreign countries which will not accept their own criminals, and making it a separate and additional crime to commit an offense while here illegally.
Detention—not catch-and-release. Illegal aliens apprehended crossing the border must be detained until they are sent home, no more catch-and-release.
Defund sanctuary cities. Cut-off federal grants to any city which refuses to cooperate with federal law enforcement.
Enhanced penalties for overstaying a visa. Millions of people come to the United States on temporary visas but refuse to leave, without consequence. This is a threat to national security. Individuals who refuse to leave at the time their visa expires should be subject to criminal penalties; this will also help give local jurisdictions the power to hold visa overstays until federal authorities arrive. Completion of a visa tracking system – required by law but blocked by lobbyists – will be necessary as well.
Cooperate with local gang task forces. ICE officers should accompany local police departments conducting raids of violent street gangs like MS-13 and the 18th street gang, which have terrorized the country. All illegal aliens in gangs should be apprehended and deported. Again, quoting Chris Crane: “ICE Officers and Agents are forced to apply the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) Directive, not to children in schools, but to adult inmates in jails. If an illegal-alien inmate simply claims eligibility, ICE is forced to release the alien back into the community. This includes serious criminals who have committed felonies, who have assaulted officers, and who prey on children…ICE officers should be required to place detainers on every illegal alien they encounter in jails and prisons, since these aliens not only violated immigration laws, but then went on to engage in activities that led to their arrest by police; ICE officers should be required to issue Notices to Appear to all illegal aliens with criminal convictions, DUI convictions, or a gang affiliation; ICE should be working with any state or local drug or gang task force that asks for such assistance.”
End birthright citizenship. This remains the biggest magnet for illegal immigration. By a 2:1 margin, voters say it’s the wrong policy, including Harry Reid who said “no sane country” would give automatic citizenship to the children of illegal immigrants.
Put American Workers First
Decades of disastrous trade deals and immigration policies have destroyed our middle class. Today, nearly 40% of black teenagers are unemployed. Nearly 30% of Hispanic teenagers are unemployed. For black Americans without high school diplomas, the bottom has fallen out: more than 70% were employed in 1960, compared to less than 40% in 2000. Across the economy, the percentage of adults in the labor force has collapsed to a level not experienced in generations. As CBS news wrote in a piece entitled “America’s incredible shrinking middle class”: “If the middle-class is the economic backbone of America, then the country is developing osteoporosis.”
The influx of foreign workers holds down salaries, keeps unemployment high, and makes it difficult for poor and working class Americans – including immigrants themselves and their children – to earn a middle class wage. Nearly half of all immigrants and their US-born children currently live in or near poverty, including more than 60 percent of Hispanic immigrants. Every year, we voluntarily admit another 2 million new immigrants, guest workers, refugees, and dependents, growing our existing all-time historic record population of 42 million immigrants. We need to control the admission of new low-earning workers in order to: help wages grow, get teenagers back to work, aid minorities’ rise into the middle class, help schools and communities falling behind, and to ensure our immigrant members of the national family become part of the American dream.
Additionally, we need to stop giving legal immigrant visas to people bent on causing us harm. From the 9/11 hijackers, to the Boston Bombers, and many others, our immigration system is being used to attack us. The President of the immigration caseworkers union declared in a statement on ISIS: “We’ve become the visa clearinghouse for the world.”
Here are some additional specific policy proposals for long-term reform:
Increase prevailing wage for H-1Bs. We graduate two times more Americans with STEM degrees each year than find STEM jobs, yet as much as two-thirds of entry-level hiring for IT jobs is accomplished through the H-1B program. More than half of H-1B visas are issued for the program’s lowest allowable wage level, and more than eighty percent for its bottom two. Raising the prevailing wage paid to H-1Bs will force companies to give these coveted entry-level jobs to the existing domestic pool of unemployed native and immigrant workers in the U.S., instead of flying in cheaper workers from overseas. This will improve the number of black, Hispanic and female workers in Silicon Valley who have been passed over in favor of the H-1B program. Mark Zuckerberg’s personal Senator, Marco Rubio, has a bill to triple H-1Bs that would decimate women and minorities.
Requirement to hire American workers first. Too many visas, like the H-1B, have no such requirement. In the year 2015, with 92 million Americans outside the workforce and incomes collapsing, we need to companies to hire from the domestic pool of unemployed. Petitions for workers should be mailed to the unemployment office, not USCIS.
End welfare abuse. Applicants for entry to the United States should be required to certify that they can pay for their own housing, healthcare and other needs before coming to the U.S.
Jobs program for inner city youth. The J-1 visa jobs program for foreign youth will be terminated and replaced with a resume bank for inner city youth provided to all corporate subscribers to the J-1 visa program.
Refugee program for American children. Increase standards for the admission of refugees and asylum-seekers to crack down on abuses. Use the monies saved on expensive refugee programs to help place American children without parents in safer homes and communities, and to improve community safety in high crime neighborhoods in the United States.
Immigration moderation. Before any new green cards are issued to foreign workers abroad, there will be a pause where employers will have to hire from the domestic pool of unemployed immigrant and native workers. This will help reverse women’s plummeting workplace participation rate, grow wages, and allow record immigration levels to subside to more moderate historical averages.
By JULIA ANGWIN, CHARLIE SAVAGE, JEFF LARSON, HENRIK MOLTKE, LAURA POITRAS and JAMES RISEN AUG. 15, 2015
The National Security Agency’s ability to spy on vast quantities of Internet traffic passing through the United States has relied on its extraordinary, decades-long partnership with a single company: the telecom giant AT&T.
While it has been long known that American telecommunications companies worked closely with the spy agency, newly disclosed N.S.A. documents show that the relationship with AT&T has been considered unique and especially productive. One document described it as “highly collaborative,” while another lauded the company’s “extreme willingness to help.”
AT&T’s cooperation has involved a broad range of classified activities, according to the documents, which date from 2003 to 2013. AT&T has given the N.S.A. access, through several methods covered under different legal rules, to billions of emails as they have flowed across its domestic networks. It provided technical assistance in carrying out a secret court order permitting the wiretapping of all Internet communications at the United Nations headquarters, a customer of AT&T.
Dr. Ben Carson spoke with Eric Bolling on The O’Reilly Factor about his recent controversial statements about how Planned Parenthood clinics are strategically placed in order to control the African American population. Carson began the discussion by reiterating his position that Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger was a eugenist who was “was not enamored of black people.”
As Bolling asked him about abortion rates in black communities, Carson responded by saying it was a matter of deciding whether those black lives matter as much.
“The number one cause of death for black people is abortion, and I wonder if maybe some people might at some point become concerned about that and ask, why is that happening,” Carson said. He went on to continue his point about Sanger’s alleged eugenics leanings, saying that if Parenthood employees learned about her, they’d be less keen to defend their practices:
The two “top secret” emails under review from former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s private server include discussion of an article about a U.S. drone operation, the Associated Press reported Friday.
While the U.S. drone program has been widely reported on, the article references classified information and a Clinton adviser follows up “in a way that could possibly be inferred as confirmation,” the AP said, citing intelligence officials.
Officials offered the AP different accounts of the second email, saying it could improperly acknowledge classified information or merely show that different individuals separately got the same information.
Clinton, now a Democratic presidential candidate, earlier this week said her aides were handing over her private email server and a backup thumb drive to the Justice Department.
That news came hours after Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) sent a memo to a handful of lawmakers confirming that the Office of the Inspector General of the Intelligence Community found four “highly classified” emails out of a batch of 40.
AUGUST 14, 2015 LAST UPDATED: FRIDAY, AUGUST 14, 2015, 12:31 AM
BY MATTHEW SCHNEIDER
STAFF WRITER |
THE RIDGEWOOD NEWS
The Ridgewood Guild is giving residents an opportunity to take in cultural programs, free of charge, on several evenings throughout the summer.
One such program is Music in the Night, a live music performance hosted by the Guild each Friday.
The event, which takes place primarily outside Guild businesses, features musicians of all sorts, “from soloists to five-piece groups and in between,” according to the organization’s president, Tony Damiano.
The performers also range in age, with 11-year-old Jake Thistle being the youngest thus far, Damiano said. Many students from Ridgewood High School also grace the stage.
