UK Teenager Banned From America For Life Over Obscene Obama Email

Source: MYFOXDC

A British teenager who sent an email to the White House calling President Obama an obscenity was banned from America for life, The Sun reported Monday.

The FBI asked local cops to tell college student Luke Angel, 17, his drunken insult was “unacceptable.”

Angel said he fired off a single email criticizing the U.S. government after seeing a TV program about the 9/11 attacks.

He said, “I don’t remember exactly what I wrote as I was drunk. But I think I called Barack Obama a p***k. It was silly — the sort of thing you do when you’re a teenager and have had a few.”

Angel, of Bedford, in central England, said it was “a bit extreme” for the FBI to act. “The police came and took my picture and told me I was banned from America forever. I don’t really care but my parents aren’t very happy.”

A Bedford Police spokesman confirmed they had spoken to Angel about the email. Officers will take no criminal action.

Joanne Ferreira, of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, said there are about 60 reasons a person can be barred from visiting America.

She said, “We are prohibited from discussing specific cases.”

41 Obama White House aides owe the IRS $831,000 in back taxes

Source: LA Times

Over the years a lot of suspicion has built up across the country about Washington and its population of opportunistic transients coming to see themselves as a special kind of person, somehow above average working Americans who don’t labor down in that monument-strewn former swamp.

Well, finally, an end to all those undocumented doubts. Thanks to some diligent digging by the Washington Post, those suspicions can at last be put to rest.

They’re correct. Accurate. Dead-on. Laser-guided. On target. Bingo-bango. As clear as it’s always seemed to those Americans who don’t feel special entitlements and do meet their government obligations.

We now know that federal employees across the nation owe fully $1 billion in back taxes to the Internal Revenue Service.

As in, 1,000 times one million dollars. All this political jabber about giving middle-class …

… Americans a tax cut. Thousands of feds have been giving themselves one all along — unofficially. And these tax scofflaws include more than three dozen folks who work for the president with that newly decorated Oval Office.

The Post’s T.W. Farnum did some research and found that out of the total sum, just 638 workers on Capitol Hill owe the IRS $9.3 million in back taxes. As in, overdue. The IRS gets stiffed by the legislative body that controls its budget. How Washington works.

Now, back taxes have been a problem for the Obama-Biden administration. You may recall early on that Tom Daschle was the president’s top pick to run the Health and Human Services Department. But it turned out the former Democratic senator, who was un-elected from South Dakota in 2004, owed something like $120,000 to the IRS for things from his subsequent benefactor that he just forgot to pay taxes on. You know how that is. $120G’s here or there. So he dropped out.

And then we learned this guy Timothy Geithner owed something like $42,000 in back taxes and penalties to the IRS, which is one of the agencies that he’d be in charge of as secretary of the Treasury. The fine fellow who’s supposed to know about handling everyone else’s money. In the end this was excused by Washington’s bipartisan CYA culture as one of those inadvertent accidental oversights that somehow never seem to happen on the side of paying too much taxes.

And under Geithner’s expert guidance the U.S. economy has been, well, wow! Just look at it.

Privacy laws prevent release of individual tax delinquents’ names. But we do know that as of the end of 2009, 41 people inside Obama’s very own White House owe the government they’re allegedly running a total of $831,055 in back taxes. That would cover a lot of special chocolate desserts in the White House Mess.

In the House of Representatives, 421 people owe a total $6,524,892. In the Senate, 217 owe $2,774,836. In the IRS’ parent department, Treasury, 1,204 owe $7,670,814. At the Labor Department, where Secretary Hilda Solis’ husband had some back-tax problems before her confirmation, 463 owe $7,481,463. Eighty-one workers for the Federal Reserve System’s board of governors owe $1,076,733.

Over at the Justice Department, which is so busy enforcing other laws and suing Arizona, 1,971 employees still owe $14,350,152 in overdue taxes.

Then, we come to the Department of Homeland Security, which is run by Janet Napolitano, the former governor of Arizona who preferred to call terrorist acts “man-caused disasters.” Homeland Security is keeping all of us safe by ensuring that a Dutch tourist is aboard every inbound international flight to thwart any would-be bomber with explosives in his underpants.

Within that department, there reside 4,856 people who owe the tax agency a whopping total of $37,012,174.

And they’re checking our pockets for metal and coins?

Senate Takes Up 'Emergency' War Bill Despite Obama Pledge to End Practice

Source: FoxNews

A year after President Obama pledged to end the practice of funding the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq with “emergency” spending bills, the Senate is taking up a $60 billion request that would do exactly that.

The spending bill, which includes $33 billion for the two wars in addition to disaster relief funds and aid for Haiti, is running headlong into concern from war-weary Democrats and deficit-conscious Republicans.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has called the bill a “heavy lift” in her chamber. But the Senate, which is taking up the request first, could be the scene of a spending stand-off between Democrats and Republicans.

Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., plans to offer an amendment requiring Congress to offset the cost of the package with spending cuts elsewhere. He slammed the administration for continuing to use the “emergency” supplemental to fund the wars — by designating the spending bill as “emergency,” Congress avoids having to find a way to pay for it.

“The last day war funding was unforeseen was September 10, 2001,” the first-term senator said in a written statement. “This legislation is designed to bail out career politicians who want to avoid the hard work of prioritizing spending.”

The Bush administration routinely used supplemental spending bills to fund the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Obama criticized the practice as a candidate and when he came into office pledged to keep war funding within the traditional budget request.

“For seven years, we have been a nation at war. No longer will we hide its price,” he said in his February 2009 address to a joint session of Congress.

When Obama requested $83 billion in additional funding last spring for the wars, he said he would draw the line there.

“This is the last planned war supplemental,” he wrote in April 2009 to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, calling for “an honest, more accurate and fiscally responsible estimate of federal spending” after years of “budget gimmicks and wasteful spending.”

But while Congress provided $130 billion for Iraq and Afghanistan at the end of last year as part of the traditional budget process, Obama this year came back to Capitol Hill for the additional $33 billion — mostly to cover the cost of sending 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan.

“The irony certainly isn’t lost on us,” a Senate GOP aide told FoxNews.com. “Obviously they stuck with that pledge about as well as they stuck with most the other pledges they made.”

But the aide said pending the consideration of the Coburn amendment, “the process for the supplemental could move relatively expeditiously.”

The aide said House Democrats could pose a bigger hurdle. House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer said earlier this month that it would be easier to get the legislation passed in the House if it were approved by the Senate first since that would limit a back-and-forth debate.

The bill includes money for the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, aid for Haiti earthquake relief and money for flood relief in Rhode Island and Tennessee.

The White House Office of Management and Budget defended the package in a statement Monday, calling the funding “essential” and urging Congress to act quickly to approve it.

“The administration looks forward to working with the Congress to further refine the bill as the legislative process moves forward and to meet these urgent and essential needs,” the statement said.

Senate Appropriations Chairman Daniel Inouye, D-Hawaii, also defended the package after his committee unanimously approved it earlier this month.

“This bill is neither a bailout nor a stimulus. Instead it is the minimum necessary to meet emergency requirements and the cost of war,” he said. “We recognize that many on both sides of the aisle believe we simply shouldn’t spend more, but I say to you the nation still has legitimate needs and a responsibility to act.”

Swine Flu Outbreak Coincided With Obama's Trip To Mexico

By Thomas Black

April 25 (Bloomberg) — Mexican President Felipe Calderon declared an emergency in his country’s swine flu outbreak, giving him powers to order quarantines and suspend public events.

Authorities have canceled school at all levels in Mexico City and the state of Mexico until further notice, and the government has shut most public and government activities in the area. The emergency decree, published today in the state gazette, gives the president authority to take more action.

“The federal government under my charge will not hesitate a moment to take all, all the measures necessary to respond with efficiency and opportunity to this respiratory epidemic,” Calderon said today during a speech to inaugurate a hospital in the southern state of Oaxaca.

At least 20 deaths in Mexico from the disease are confirmed, Health Minister Jose Cordova said yesterday. The strain is a variant of H1N1 swine influenza that has also sickened at least eight people in California and Texas. As many as 68 deaths may be attributed to the virus in Mexico, and about 1,000 people in the Mexico City area are showing symptoms of the illness, Cordoba said.

Obama’s Visit

The first case was seen in Mexico on April 13. The outbreak coincided with the President Barack Obama’s trip to Mexico City on April 16. Obama was received at Mexico’s anthropology museum in Mexico City by Felipe Solis, a distinguished archeologist who died the following day from symptoms similar to flu, Reforma newspaper reported. The newspaper didn’t confirm if Solis had swine flu or not.

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