We could literally report dailystories about how law-abiding citizens prevent crime and protect themselves and others with firearms. But in order to prevent it from becoming too monotonous, we try to avoid doing that. That doesn’t mean that it isn’t a good idea to remind ourselves about it occasionally. When two intruders broke into an Indiana man’s house recently to rob him, he pulled a gun and stopped them where they stood.
From 14 News (NBC):
An Evansville man who held two home invasion suspects at gunpoint until police arrived shared his story with 14 News.
It happened about 10:30 on Wednesday night in the 1,000 block of Idlewild Drive.
22-year-old Paul Lukac and 24-year-old Justin Henschen are accused of breaking into John and Matt Fugate’s home, but those two suspects had no idea what was waiting for them.
A threat on his family, turned the soft-spoken Matt Fugate, into an armed protector.
Matt was behind his bedroom door when out of nowhere, he says two men kicked in the front door of his Idlewild Drive home.
“I raced for the gun vault and had my gun in my hand in 5-seconds and then answered the door,” says Matt.
His brother John’s 911 call explains what happened next.
“I just had somebody kick down my door, and my brother has him at gunpoint on the floor,” John tells the 911-operator.
Matt says the suspects were surprised and with no other options didn’t move until police arrived. For two-long-minutes, Matt’s pistol stayed locked on his targets loaded and at the ready.
Remember, Diane Feinstein and other Democrats would love to take this man’s right to protect himself away. And just because supporters of the second amendment won the most recent battle against the gun grabbers, the left never gives up. Ever. We have to make sure that we stay vigilant. The right to protect ourselves and our property is perhaps the most basic right we have.
Over the past several days, a number of reports have come out that indicate that the Tsarnaev brothers weren’t exactly “lone wolves” in the Boston Marathon bombings.
First up, the FBI seems to believe that the brothers would have needed additional training to build the bombs, despite the fact that a basic recipe for pressure cooker bombs can be found on the internet in the Al Qaeda Inspire magazine.
from Wall Street Journal:
A Federal Bureau of Investigation analysis of the bombs used in the Boston Marathon attacks has concluded that makers of the devices had some knowledge beyond the step-by-step recipes already described by the surviving suspect in the attack.
Dzhokhar Tsarnaev has told interrogators that he and his brother used bomb-making instructions found in Inspire, an online al Qaeda magazine, according to federal officials. His brother, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, the other accused bomber, was killed during a gunfight with police in Watertown, Mass.
The FBI’s bomb experts analyzed remnants of both bombs that exploded on April 15 near the marathon’s finish line, as well as additional explosive devices that authorities said were recovered after the encounter with the suspects early on April 19.
Their early conclusion is that the bomb makers likely had additional training or expertise, in part because they deviated from two recipes in Inspire, according to a report prepared by the Terrorist Explosive Device Analytical Center and law-enforcement officials briefed on the investigation.
Another aspect of the brothers’ bomb making that seems incomplete is testing. There have been no reports that the brothers tested any of their bomb designes prior to the detonations at the marathon.
In addition to the bombs, the investigators have doubts that the marathon day blasts could have been as tightly coordinated and timed without a third person in the line of sight of both blasts.
“I hear a lot of definitive statements out there that it was just these two men and it’s over, but I will tell you I hear these briefings every day, and I don’t think this is over. There are clearly more persons of interest, and they’re not 100 percent sure if there aren’t other explosives.”
The mother of the Boston Marathon bombing suspects had been added to a federal terrorism database about 18 months before the attack, government officials said Thursday.
Two government officials said the CIA had Zubeidat Tsarnaeva’s name added along with that of her son Tamerlan Tsarnaev after Russia contacted the agency in 2011 with concerns that the two were religious militants about to travel to Russia. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly about the case.
Zubeidat Tsarnaeva is currently in Dagestan and was not present at the Boston Marathon, so she is clearly not the “line of sight” suspect. The FBI is reportedly looking into whether or not Tsarnaeva may have played a major role in radicalizing her sons. I do find it disturbing that both she and Tamerlan were flagged at the same time, yet the FBI failed to keep track of them. However, should she attempt to return to the United States, she would likely be arrested regardless of her connection to Tamerlan and Dzhokhar because of another charge against her: shoplifting.
The bottom line is this: the press and much of the American people seem ready to close the book on the Boston Marathon bombing, but there are still a lot of answered questions. The investigation is clearly far from over.
This week, the US State department issued a list of those unjustly imprisoned in Iran because of their religion in an effort to highlight the human rights violations of Iran. Inexplicably, they have left Pastor Abedini off that list.
from Washington Examiner:
State Department officials assembled a “virtual embassy” to Iran that spotlights the country’s human rights abuses, but they left at least one person off the list of people “unjustly imprisoned” in that country — and he happens to be a United States citizen.
“Our Virtual Embassy Tehran page has a Faces of Iran site that highlights the cases of dozens of individuals imprisoned in Iran for their political or religious beliefs, their status as a journalist, human rights or women’s defender, their role as a student activist, or for simply exercising their universal human right to speak freely,” department spokesman Patrick Ventrell told reporters today. “So we call on the Government of Iran to protect this fundamental human right for all its citizens and to support press freedom by releasing journalists unjustly imprisoned for their work.”
Absent from the list: Pastor Saeed Abedini, an American citizen (his wife and children live in Idaho), who is suffering from internal bleeding due to beatings suffered in prison. His jailers say they won’t give him medical treatment for two months. The Iranian authorities accuse him of waging a “soft war” against the Islamic Republic by trying to covert people to Christianity, according to his wife’s attorneys at the American Center for Law and Justice.
It seems charges against the original ricin suspect have been dropped and the FBI is now focused on this man, Everett Dutschke. He was arrested in the early hours of the morning.
from AP:
The FBI says a Mississippi man whose home and business were searched as part of an investigation into poisoned letters sent to the president and others has been arrested in the case.
FBI spokeswoman Deborah Madden says 41-year-old Everett Dutschke was arrested Saturday at his Tupelo home in connection with the letters, which allegedly contained ricin.
The medical condition of Boston bombing suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev has improved enough for him to be moved out of the hospital to a prison medical center.
from Reuters:
The surviving suspect in last week’s Boston Marathon bombing was moved to a prison medical center outside Boston on Friday, while the body of his older brother who died in a shootout with police remained unclaimed, officials said.
Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, a 19-year-old ethnic Chechen charged with the bombing that killed three people and wounded 264, was moved from the hospital where he was kept under guard since he was arrested, badly wounded, a week ago, the U.S. Marshals Service said.
Republican Rep. Jason Chaffetz said Thursday that the Department of Homeland Security is using roughly 1,000 rounds of ammunition more per person than the U.S. Army, as he and other lawmakers sharply questioned DHS officials on their “massive” bullet buys.
“It is entirely … inexplicable why the Department of Homeland Security needs so much ammunition,” Chaffetz, R-Utah, said at a hearing.
The hearing itself was unusual, as questions about the department’s ammunition purchases until recently had bubbled largely under the radar — on blogs and in the occasional news article. But as the Department of Homeland Security found itself publicly defending the purchases, lawmakers gradually showed more interest in the issue.
Democratic Rep. John Tierney, D-Mass., at the opening of the hearing, ridiculed the concerns as “conspiracy theories” which have “no place” in the committee room.
But Republicans said the purchases raise “serious” questions about waste and accountability.
Chaffetz, who chairs one of the House oversight subcommittees holding the hearing Thursday, revealed that the department currently has more than 260 million rounds in stock. He said the department bought more than 103 million rounds in 2012 and used 116 million that same year — among roughly 70,000 agents.
Comparing that with the small-arms purchases procured by the U.S. Army, he said the DHS is churning through between 1,300 and 1,600 rounds per officer, while the U.S. Army goes through roughly 350 rounds per soldier.
He noted that is “roughly 1,000 rounds more per person.”
I won’t get into conjecture about the reasoning for such absurdly large quantities of ammunition. I will say, however, that it raises some serious alarm bells from from both a fiscal and a government accountability standpoint.
Canada’s Oil Minister Joe Oliver had some strong words for President Obama today. He warned that failure to approve the Keystone Pipeline would ”would represent a serious reversal” in the energy relationship between the United States and Canada. He also noted that failure to approve Keystone XL would not do one iota of good for the environment.
from IBD:
As the EPA snipes at the State Department’s approval, Canada’s natural resource minister says failure to approve the pipeline would seriously jeopardize our energy relationship and do nothing to save the earth.
Joe Oliver, not amused by the continued delays in perhaps the most shovel-ready project since the pyramids, said Wednesday that rejection by the U.S. of the proposed Keystone XL pipeline “would represent a serious reversal in our long-standing energy relationship.”
This critical energy infrastructure project is also perhaps the most studied and approved. After a reroute at the behest of environmentalists allegedly concerned about the sensitive Ogallala Aquifer, it received approval from the state of Nebraska.
The U.S. State Department, which must approve or deny the project because it crosses an international boundary, recently released its second Keystone XL supplemental environmental impact statement, which represents the project’s fourth environmental review.
It found the pipeline would not accelerate global greenhouse gas emissions or significantly harm natural habitat along its route.
Almost immediately, the Environmental Protection Agency, the sock puppet of the environmental movement, objected to the State Department’s draft review, saying it included “insufficient information on environmental issues.” The EPA said State used an outdated “energy-economic modeling effort” in its analysis that concluded tar sands oil would find its way to market without Keystone.
Of course, considering the economic impact of mindless environmentalism is completely foreign to the EPA. But it is not a concept foreign to Joe Oliver.
“Make no mistake,” he said in a speech at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, “Canadian resource development and export, including from the oil sands, will continue, Keystone or no Keystone.”
Oliver is exactly right too. Obama’s failure to approve Keystone would simply represent a change of hands, from ours to China’s. Canada has made it very clear that they will take their business elsewhere.
Obama’s energy policy has been completely irresponsible. The United States currently has the ability to completely eliminate its intake of oil from the Middle East, but President Obama has fought these advancements at every turn.
There is oil new exploration currently happening in North Dakota, on private land, away from the jurisdiction of the Obama administration. North Dakota currently has a 3.3% unemployment rate. Meanwhile, the national unemployment rate continues to hover around 8% nationally (if you take the most favorable stat), and Obama is unwilling to engage in any economic or energy policy that would improve that situation.
It’s no secret that President Obama is the most radical, pro-abortion liberal to hold office in the White House. Today, he became the first sitting President ever to address the nation’s largest abortion mill, Planned Parenthood.
In his speech, he vowed to preserve the tax funding that Planned Parenthood receives.
Here’s the video:
The official White House edit of the video (above) doesn’t include Obama’s introduction telling the wildly enthusiastic crowd that they were “making him blush.”
Yes, that is Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger. I guess Obama is willing to overlook the racism at Planned Parenthood’s core because of his mutual disregard for the innocent lives they take.
UPDATE: This post originally had a photo of Sanger speaking to the Klu Klux Klan. While Sanger did in fact speak to the KKK in 1926, the photo itself appears to be a fake. I have updated the post with a video containing some of Sanger’s most racist quotes.
The Family Research Council has released the security camera footage of the event, and it’s pretty incredible. It shows building manager Leo Johnson tackle the shooter after being shot in the arm. Despite his injury, Johnson managed to wrestle the gun away from Corkins and prevent further casualties.
Here’s the video:
This event didn’t get much press coverage because it was likely too difficult to frame this guy as a “violent tea party member.” Nope, it was self-admitted left-wing terror, and the media doesn’t really care to talk about it.
This is how bad things have gotten. Here in the US, the press is all bent out of shape trying to find a motive for the Boston Marathon bombing other than Islamic jihad.
Over in France, an Iranian man just slashed the throat of a rabbi and his son, yelling “Allahu Akbar.” Investigators are searching for a possible motive.
from Washington Post:
The rabbi, who is in his late 40s, was recovering from surgery for a neck injury and his 18-year-old son sustained lesser injuries in the attack north of a touristic shopping area near Paris’ gilded Opera Garnier, according to police and judicial officials and Richard Prasquier, who heads CRIF, France’s largest umbrella organization of Jewish groups.
The assailant was of Iranian origin, and an official investigation was underway to determine a possible motive, Prasquier said. The attacker, now in police custody, had escaped from a psychiatric hospital near southeastern Lyon last week, said a police official on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak publicly about the matter.
Agnes Thibault-Lecuivre, a spokeswoman for the Paris prosecutor’s office, said the two victims had been wearing Jewish skullcaps, and the attacker was detained after a chase through the synagogue. The Simon Wiesenthal Center, which monitors anti-Semitic incidents worldwide, said in a statement that the assailant screamed “Allah-u-Akbar” — or “God is great” — during the attack.
Ladies and gentlemen, we cannot allow ourselves to be so foolish. I point to this story in France because the same exact thing is happening here in the united states with Dzhokhar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev.
How long are we going to play this politically correct game? The Tsarnaev brothers made it clear: they were willing to die for Islam. Hunting around for another, less uncomfortable motive is not only ridiculous…it’s dangerous because it ignores the threat that’s right before our nose.
The Obama administration is actively promoting the SNAP food assistance programs to non-US citizens. A memo obtained by Judicial Watch, addressed to the Mexican embassy, actually details in Spanish that food stamp recipients do not need to divulge their citizenship status when applying for food stamps.
from Judicial Watch:
Judicial Watch today released documents detailing how the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) is working with the Mexican government to promote participation by illegal aliens in the U.S. food stamp program.
The promotion of the food stamp program, now known as “SNAP” (Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program), includes a Spanish-language flyer provided to the Mexican Embassy by the USDA with a statement advising Mexicans in the U.S. that they do not need to declare their immigration status in order to receive financial assistance. Emphasized in bold and underlined, the statement reads, “You need not divulge information regarding your immigration status in seeking this benefit for your children.”
The documents came in response to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request made to USDA on July 20, 2012. The FOIA request sought: “Any and all records of communication relating to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) to Mexican Americans, Mexican nationals, and migrant communities, including but not limited to, communications with the Mexican government.”
The documents obtained by Judicial Watch show that USDA officials are working closely with their counterparts at the Mexican Embassy to widely broaden the SNAP program in the Mexican immigrant community, with no effort to restrict aid to, identify, or apprehend illegal immigrants who may be on the food stamp rolls.
Here’s a copy of the email and memo obtained by Judicial Watch:
This amounts to a massive abuse of the system by the Obama administration. President Obama is thumbing his nose at the taxpayer while bringing non-citizen, non-taxpayers onto the welfare dole.
What kind of arrogant jerk uses the dedication ceremony of of former President’s library as a stump speech for his political agenda? Why someone like President Obama, of course.
Seven years ago, President Bush restarted an important conversation by speaking with the American people about our history as a nation of laws and a nation of immigrants,” said Obama. “And even though comprehensive immigration reform has taken a little longer than any of us expected, I am hopeful that this year, with the help of Speaker Boehner, and some of the senators and members of Congress who are here today, that we bring it home for our families, our economy, our security, and for this incredible country that we love. And if we do that it will be in large part thanks to the hard work of President George W. Bush.
Good grief. Can we please stop with the “we don’t know the bombers’ motivation” garbage? Here’s the Tsarnaev’s mother (and known shoplifter) telling CNN “I don’t care if my youngest son is killed. I don’t care if I am killed. I will say, ‘Allahu Akbar!’”
Tamerlan Tsarnaev apparently called his mother the night of the big police chase.
from IBD:
Tamerlan Tsarnaev, the 26-year-old alleged perpetrator of the Boston Marathon bombings, told his mother that police were trailing him and his co-conspirator, his 19-year-old brother Dzhokhar.
“‘The police, they have started shooting at us, they are chasing us,’” Zubeidat Tsarnaeva told ABC News her son said to her.
Some of the doomed Tsarnaev’s last words to his mother were “Mama, I love you.”
Apparently, Tamerlan and Dzhokhar shared their mother’s willingness to become martyrs for their violent religion. In 2011, he sent text messages to his family from Russia indicating that he was ready to die for Islam.
from Fox News:
The mother of Boston Marathon bomber Tamerlan Tsarnaev knew as early as 2011 that her son had been radicalized and sent text messages to family in Russia suggesting he was willing to die for Islam, the FBI told lawmakers this week according to two officials with knowledge of the Capitol Hill briefing.
Ah, the tolerant left. Remember the far-left gunman, Floyd Lee Corkins II, who attempted to go on a shooting spree inside the Family Research Council? If not, it’s not your fault. Much like the Gosnell trial, the media really really didn’t want to report on it. And while the attack was fortunately thwarted by a security officer, the shooter readily admitted that he did it because of the group’s socially conservative political leanings—primarily its stance on gay “marriage.”
Well now a new FBI video has been released showing, on camera, Corkins admitting that he did it because of the liberal group, Southern Poverty Law Center’s infamous and ironically named “hate map”, a map containing the location of several conservative organizations the SPLC labeled “hate groups.”
Here’s the video:
I, personally, believe that people are responsible for their own actions. If someone gets incensed enough to go (or attempt to go) on a shooting spree, they’re either evil or crazy. This doesn’t mean that every person with whom they agree politically is also evil or crazy. Just them. But if the left can somehow blame Sarah Palin for the shooting of Gabby Giffords (by an apolitical crazed lunatic), I suppose it would be OK for the right to blame the SPLC for this shooting, right?
Isn’t this just like the government? Now that Obamacare is starting to show itself for just how terrible it is, the Politico is reporting that lawmakers want out. No, not to get everyone out. They just want to be exempt from it, themselves.
From Politico:
Congressional leaders in both parties are engaged in high-level, confidential talks about exempting lawmakers and Capitol Hill aides from the insurance exchanges they are mandated to join as part of President Barack Obama’s health care overhaul, sources in both parties said.
The talks — which involve Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.), House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio), the Obama administration and other top lawmakers — are extraordinarily sensitive, with both sides acutely aware of the potential for political fallout from giving carve-outs from the hugely controversial law to 535 lawmakers and thousands of their aides. Discussions have stretched out for months, sources said.
A source close to the talks says: “Everyone has to hold hands on this and jump, or nothing is going to get done.”
Yet if Capitol Hill leaders move forward with the plan, they risk being dubbed hypocrites by their political rivals and the American public. By removing themselves from a key Obamacare component, lawmakers and aides would be held to a different standard than the people who put them in office.
This is truly unbelievable. The Republicans I understand. To their credit, no Republican voted for this miserable legislation (although I wish they’d try a little harder to repeal it). But Democrats? You voted for it! If it was such a great law, why would you want to be exempt? And if it’s not such a great law, why did you vote for it? The only rational explanation of this is that this law was never about helping anyone. It was about power. It was about government control. Those on the right have been ridiculed for leveling that accusation. But if lawmakers go through with this, I defy anyone to come up with a different explanation.
This law must be repealed.
UPDATE: Speaker John Boehner is putting the kibosh on this idea:
