BREAKING: RETIRED FOUR-STAR ADMIRAL BLOWS WHISTLE ON NEW BENGHAZI EVIDENCE.

Verne Strickland USA DOT COM May 17, 2013

A lot has been said and written, but this promises to break the case wide open!

Ambassador Stevens carried through the streets of Benghazi for 5 hours while US media alleged he was being helped to the hospital? More Obama White House lies!

By Doc Vega POLITISITE.Com

There have been many theories and accusations about the Benghazi fiasco that not only cost Ambassador J. Christian Stevens his life, but the lives of his staff and one Navy Seal body-guard as well. This action which led to a complete conflagration of terrorist attacks against US diplomatic buildings throughout the Middle East and North Africa still remains largely uninvestigated by the government, unprosecuted by AG Eric Holder’s Depart of Justice, and refuses to bring the guilty parties to justice while many know the truth and are not coming forward. Even though President Obama is implicated in this oversees tragedy still the truth has not emerged.
That has all changed. Finally, an authoritative figure with the proper credentials has stepped up to the plate to tell the true story of what did happen without the lies and cover-ups that have so far kept those guilty of murder from standing trial. The admission on the part of this man will likely blow the Benghazi scandal wide open and lead to arrests if we can get our legal system to act as it should. That, however, is a big if.

Related: Read Letter: Special Ops Vets Demand Benghazi Congressional Investigation
The story as it truly unfolded
According to a report from the Washington Times, retired 4 Star Admiral James Lyons reveals the entire plot that led to the deaths of Americans in Libya that could have been prevented, who gave the orders, and why events took place as they tragically did. Admiral James Lyons is probably the highest ranking figure ever to intervene in a federal government criminal case, and testify. Thanks to this man’s dedication to his country and the truth, we will finally know the truth and who was responsible.
In his words Lyons says that the attack on Benghazi was a bungled kidnapping attempt to be perpetrated upon Ambassador Stevens. This was to appear to be a hostage exchange for a terrorist prisoner who was to be released in trade for a supposedly captured US ambassador. The trade would have been for Omar Abdel Rahman an international prisoner, known as the Blind Sheikh.
This apparent abduction by terrorists of our ambassador and then negotiated trade for the Blind Sheikh would have been the “October Surprise” that would have elevated President Obama’s flagging popularity and boosted his approval ratings for a re-election. A dramatic prisoner exchange that saved our ambassador’s life However, something went horribly wrong. A cunning and illegal bit of treachery by the Obama White House turned into something entirely different. Obama’s October surprise turned into a carnage orchestrated by the White House itself as the President, Leon Panetta, and CIA Director, David Petraeus watched via a UAV real-time feed as a 7 hour attack on the Benghazi Embassy raged. Reportedly, stand down orders were given several times to different units within striking distance.
A plot of pure deception
With what should have been only a staged kidnapping of Ambassador J. Christian Stevens, instead, Navy Seals Tyrone Woods and Glen Doherty refused a stand down order and began doing their job of protecting the ambassador using force. Immediately the well-trained Seals began inflicting heavy casualties upon the terrorists who thought they were merely in a cake walk to abduct Ambassador Stevens without mishap. As a result of the plan going awry, a massive attack arose from the anger of the terrorists who felt they had been betrayed by President Obama. In the aftermath of the battle which saw Navy Seal Glen Doherty was killed after the embassy had been overrun along with the ambassador’s staff. Ambassador Steven’s whose body showed up 5 hours later at a Benghazi hospital supposedly overcome by smoke as the initial press reports indicated was, in fact, raped, tortured, and dragged around Benghazi in retaliation for the botched Obama White House plan.
Obama hands over Libya to Al Qaeda
Was this just a freak occurrence that belies the true nature of dealings in Libya with American diplomatic efforts, just one glitch in normal standard operating procedure? No, according to former Admiral Lyons and many others such as Glen Beck, who have all uncovered evidence that lead to much more sinister deeds being undertaken. Evidence of a working relationship between the US and its alleged terrorist enemies had already delivered Libya to the Al Qaeda terrorist organization through infiltration of the government, media, and general society prior to the rebellion against Muammar Gaddafi that toppled the dictator last year. That the US has worked with Al Qaeda awarding them security contracts for all US embassies and consulates as well as border protection has instead allowed Libya to become a haven for numerous terrorist operators who have automatic access to Libya’s territory to carry out their training. All this with the support and blessing of the Obama administration. This is not only unthinkable, but beyond excuse or rationalization. There should already be indictments for many in the state department, in the DOJ, all the way up to the oval office, yet, so far nothing has been done.
Treason plain and simple
It goes even farther than that. Evidence indicates that Ambassador Stevens was being used as an arms dealer to supply Jihadists in the region to support yet another uprising in Syria. Just prior to the murder of our ambassador, he was trying to locate guns that had been walked across Libya’s border to other countries just as the ATF had done in operation Fast and Furious on the border of Mexico. These are not the actions of inexperience or bad intelligence. They are the actions of traitorous intention. President Obama will, no doubt, be linked to these deaths and operations if Congress will only act, and do its duty in prosecuting a treasonous president who is endangering national security.
There is no where else for a Congressional investigation to turn other than naming the conspirators, determining when officials knew, and assembling the evidence that murder was committed on behalf of the White House to silence those who knew and could testify. Through out the Obama presidency over the last four years the administration has master minded operations that have caused numerous controversies and crises.
When will the GOP take action?
The Republicans have missed opportunities to discredit the President, to impeach Obama in the wake of waging war against Libya without Congressional approval, and allowed executive privilege to  quash subpoenaed demands for evidence on Fast and Furious never released by AG Eric Holder. John Boehner, Speaker of the House, has refused to exercise initiative whenever the GOP could have used much-needed momentum to stem the tide against the incessant assaults against state’s rights, constitutional rights, and the traditional institutions of America. Will the recent damning evidence now uncovered over the Benghazi fiasco thanks to Admiral James Lyons be implemented to convict the President of potential high treason, or will we see yet another case of criminal acts ignored and hidden at the expense of the American people? If you bother to take interest and act as a responsible citizens contact your congressman and demand action!

Post Published: 17 January 2013
Author: DocVega
Found in section: Benghazi, U.S. Politics, White House
Tags: Admiral Lyons, Al Qaeda, Ambassador Stevens, ATF, Barack Obama, Benghazi, benghazi attack, Eric Holder, Fast and Furious, Gaddafi, Glen Doherty, jihadists, libya, Obama, Obama treason over Benghazi, Omar Abdel Rahman, Steven, Tyrone Woods, United States, US helps terrorists overthrow Libya

Mike Huckabee: Obama's Most Insidious Plan -- Pricing Health Insurance Beyond the Means of Americans

From Bob Turlington:

verne, I don't know if you see mike's info, but you really need to see this. read it carefully and shout it from the rooftops. this disaster will take our country off the face of the earth. don't worry about medicare, Medicaid, and social security we won't be around long enough to see them come to completion.

MIKE HUCKABEE: Death By Insurance Premium

 

 
Brace yourself for sticker shock -- at your insurance agent’s office… The House Energy and Commerce Committee has released a report, based on internal documents from 17 insurance giants, including Aetna, Blue Cross and Kaiser. 

They estimate that when Obamacare kicks in next year, the average individual health insurance policy will go up in cost by 100 percent. For instance, the cost to a new customer of an individual policy is expected to nearly double, from about $1900 a year to over $3700. But that’s just the average. Some people will see price spikes of over 400 percent. 

The reason is that millions of uninsured people, many with expensive preexisting conditions, are being added to the insurance pool. At the same time, the government is mandating one-size-fits-all coverage that pays for every condition, from pregnancy to drug rehab, even if the buyer doesn’t want or need it. 

Gosh, if only someone had been able to predict that when you vastly increase covered medical services, it makes insurance more expensive, not cheaper. Unfortunately, that would require a tiny smidgeon of common sense. And this bill came out of Washington. 

Mike Huckabee is the former Governor of Arkansas, 2008 presidential candidate, a NY Times best-selling author, radio and television show host. http://www.MikeHuckabee.com/

Terrorists Are Disappearing from Obama’s Terrorist Witness Protection Program

 

Verne Strickland USA DOT COM May 16, 2013

Posted on May 16, 2013 by Tim Brown

Did you know the Obama administration has a witness protection program for known or suspected terrorists? You didn’t? Well, now you do. On top of that it might interest you to know that they not only have such a program, but they have lost two or more of these known or suspected terrorists. Thanks to the numerous scandals the White House is immersed in, many people won’t even hear about this.
First, according to the Associated Press:

The Justice Department failed to provide the names of some terrorists in the witness protection program to the center that maintains the government’s watch list used to keep dangerous people off airline flights, the department’s inspector general said in a report Thursday.
As a result of the department’s failure to properly share information, some in the witness protection program who were on the “no-fly” list were allowed to travel on commercial flights, the federal watchdog said.
“It was possible for known or suspected terrorists to fly on commercial airplanes in or over the United States and evade one of the government’s primary means of identifying and tracking terrorists’ movements and actions,” the report said.
To help protect witnesses from the people and organizations against whom they testify, the U.S. Marshals Service provides cooperating witnesses with new names and identities.
“We found that the department was not authorizing the disclosure to the Terrorist Screening Center of the new identities provided to known or suspects terrorists” in the federal Witness Security Program, known officially as WitSec.

Jake Tapper dropped the bombshell:

The U.S. Marshals Service lost two former participants in the federal Witness Security Program “identified as known or suspected terrorists,” states the public summary of an interim Justice Department Inspector General’s report obtained by CNN.
The Marshals Service has concluded that “one individual was and the other individual was believed to be residing outside of the United States,” according to the summary.
The report notes that while in the middle of an audit of the WITSEC program, also referred to as “WitSec,” the IG notified the Justice Department of national security vulnerabilities, and the IG’s office “developed the interim report to help ensure that the Department promptly and sufficiently addressed the deficiencies we found.”
After its audit, the IG’s office reported “the Department did not definitively know how many known or suspected terrorists were admitted into the WITSEC program,” among other “significant issues concerning national security.”
As of March 2013, the Justice Department was reviewing more than 18,000 Witness Protection Program case files to determine whether more known or suspected terrorists have been admitted to the program, the summary notes. As such, the number of terrorists lost or unaccounted for “may not be complete and may continue to evolve.”

You can read the entire summary here.

Well isn’t that nice? Now we have at least two known or suspected terrorists that have knowledge of how our witness protection system works on the loose. We can safely assume that those details of how that system works has been compromised.
House Judiciary Committee Chairman Bob Goodlatte (R-Va.) immediately announced plans to hold a hearing on the report’s findings, which he called a “gross mismanagement” that “jeopardizes American lives and cannot be tolerated.”
“This lack of interagency information sharing appears to be systemic,” he continued. “We witnessed similar interagency sharing problems leading up to last month’s bombings in Boston,” he said.
“We cannot afford for history to repeat itself again,” he added. “The administration needs to better facilitate interagency information sharing so that we can better thwart future terrorist attacks.”
Senator Charles Grassley (R-IA) issued a statement saying, “It appears the administration is trying to limit distribution to avoid embarrassment about how bad some of the details are, rather than to legitimately protect identities.”
“If government officials had kept track of the people in the Witness Security Program like they are trying to keep track of the people reviewing this report, we wouldn’t have to read such bad news,” he said.
Not only are we talking criminal activity in the Obama administration, but utter national security incompetence as well as simple governing incompetence. However, it gets better or worse depending on your perspective.
The same AP story indicates that the DOJ did not update the Terrorist Screening Center with the names of the lost terrorists. The TSC is that watch list that is supposed to be used to keep known or suspected terrorists off commercial airline flights. According to the inspector general’s office, some who were in the witness protection program who were also on the no-fly list were allowed to board commercial flights.
It’s obvious that we have not only incompetence at governing, but I believe targeted criminal activity from the Obama administration. What I mean is that they have no idea on how to actually govern anything, but they know exactly what they are doing in committing crimes against the people of the United States. When is America going to have enough?
Tim Brown is the Editor of Freedom Outpost and a regular contributor to The D.C. Clothesline.
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Hiring Better Teachers May Be Racist, Say Bad Teachers . . .

Edumacation is hard, said one great scholar.

 Verne Strickland USA DOT COM  May 16, 2013

 

 May 15, 2013 By Daniel Greenfield FRONT PAGE MAG


Edumacation is hard, one great scholar said. And he was probably right. But it’s not hard because Algebra is hard or because learning the names of all the state capitols is hard. It’s hard because a dysfunctional leftist educational bureaucracy that exists to…
1. Protect the right of incompetent teachers to teach
2. Promote political correctness
3. Steal as much money as possible
…makes it hard.
And so we come to the difficult question. Should schools hire better teachers or would that be racist? The answer is, Yes, No, Maybe, Probably, and I’m Going to Sue.

Slowly but surely, a growing number of states are eyeing policies to select academically stronger individuals for their teaching programs as one avenue to improve the quality of new teachers.

Academically stronger individuals is the politically correct way of saying, “Teachers who can both read and write.” Their counterparts are the Differently Academically Abled who dominate the Chicago school system.

Underneath the attention such plans are attracting, though, run deep-seated fears about their potential consequences–particularly whether they will result in a K-12 workforce with fewer black and Latino teachers.

On nearly all the measures states are considering, from GPAs to licensure-test scores, minority candidates tend to have weaker scores than their white counterparts.

Wait… but we support education… but not racism… but what if our support for getting better teachers for minority students leads to lower rates of minority teachers… it’s a racism paradox.

“When you’re working with instruments like SAT, ACT, GPA, which all have significant limitations, you have a responsibility to think about what the unintended consequences are,” said Mary Brabeck, the dean of New York University’s Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development.

Mary, quite contrary, is talking about the consequences for teachers, not for students, because who really cares about them?

Proponents of the idea of raising teacher-preparation entry standards point to the practices of countries such as Finland, Singapore, and South Korea, which recruit superior academic candidates.

And all three countries are as multicultural as Seattle. No one is ever going to accuse a South Korean test of being racist.

The potential impact on candidates of color is more stark. Scores on the ACT from 2012 show that the mean score of African-American and Hispanic teachers, at 19 and 17, respectively, falls below the national mean score of 21, the score set as a goal in some proposals.
Basic-skills tests, such as those in the Educational Testing Services’ Praxis I series, also pose more challenges for some groups. According to ETS data collected from 2005 to 2009, black candidates scored about a standard deviation lower on such tests and Hispanic candidates by between a third and a half of a standard deviation lower.

Sorry South Korea, you win this one. Our teachers will go on enriching our diversity with their stupidity. Because having qualified teachers would have a disproportionate impact on unqualified teachers.

“Ratcheting up the bar will reduce the supply of minority teachers because of the general achievement gap that still leaves minorities with lower academic achievement–which is the problem we are trying to solve.”

So we can’t improve minority test scores without better teachers but we can’t get better teachers without higher standards and we can’t get better teachers because our school system is broken and we can’t fix our school system because we can’t get better teachers because that would be racist.

Filed Under: The Point Tagged With: Education, race card

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About Daniel Greenfield

Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is a New York writer focusing on radical Islam. He is completing a book on the international challenges America faces in the 21st century.

HATING AMERICA . . . If your kids aren't coming by it naturally . . . send 'em to school!

Verne Strickland USA DOT COM  May 15, 2013

 

By Walter E. Williams / TOWNHALL

Brothers Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, who are accused of setting the bombs that exploded at the Boston Marathon, attended the University of Massachusetts. Maybe they hated our nation before college, but if you want lessons on hating America, college attendance might be a good start. Let's look at it. "We need to think very, very clearly about who the enemy is. The enemy is the United States of America and everyone who supports it." That's taught to University of Hawaii students by Professor Haunani-Kay Trask. Richard Falk, professor emeritus at Princeton University and the U.N. Human Rights Council's Palestine monitor, explained the Boston bombings by saying, "The American global domination project is bound to generate all kinds of resistance in the post-colonial world." Professor Falk has also stated that President George W. Bush ordered the destruction of the twin towers.
University of Southern California professor Darry Sragow preaches hate to his students in his regulation of elections and political finance class, recently telling them that Republicans are stupid, racist losers and that they are angry old white people. A few years ago, Rod Swanson, a UCLA economics professor, told his class, "The United States of America, backed by facts, is the greediest and most selfish country in the world." Penn State University professor Matt Jordan compared supporters of the voter ID laws to the Ku Klux Klan. Professor Sharon Sweet, an algebra teacher at Brevard Community College, told her students to sign a pledge that read, "I pledge to vote for President Obama and Democrats up and down the ticket." Fortunately, the college's trustees fired her.
University of Rhode Island history professor Erik Loomis tweeted, "I want (National Rifle Association executive vice president) Wayne LaPierre's head on a stick." He asked, "Can (we) define NRA membership as dues contributing to a terrorist organization?" Here's a sample of how Professor Loomis frequently expresses himself: "Motherf---ing f---heads f---ing f---." Then there's Georgetown law professor Louis Michael Seidman, who explained our national problems by saying, "But almost no one blames the culprit: our insistence on obedience to the Constitution, with all its archaic, idiosyncratic and downright evil provisions." Professor Seidman worked for The Public Defender Service for the District of Columbia. When he was sworn in as an officer of the court, I wonder what constitution he swore to uphold and defend.
Parents don't have to wait for college admission for their youngsters to receive America-hating lessons. Scott Compton, an English teacher at Chapin High School in Chapin, S.C., was put on administrative leave after he allegedly threw an American flag on the floor and stomped on it in front of his students. He has chosen to resign.
An Advanced Placement world geography teacher at Lumberton High School in Texas encouraged students to dress in Islamic clothing and instructed them to refer to the 9/11 hijackers not as terrorists but as "freedom fighters." They were also told to stop referring to the Holocaust as genocide. John Valastro, the superintendent of the Lumberton Independent School District, told Fox News that the teacher did absolutely nothing wrong.
In McAllen, Texas, teachers tried to force a teenager to sing the Mexican national anthem and recite Mexico's pledge of allegiance. The teen refused, saying it was against her beliefs as an American. She was thrown out of the class and given a failing grade for that day's assignment. Her father has filed a lawsuit on behalf of his daughter against the McAllen Independent School District.
Investor's Business Daily ran a story that shows student indoctrination is official union policy: "A New Low From The California Federation Of Teachers: Urine Indoctrination" (12/5/12). The union's website has a cartoon narrated by leftist Hollywood actor Ed Asner. In tones used when reading to children, Asner says: "(Rich people) love their money more than anything in the whole world. ... Over time, rich people decided they weren't rich enough, so they came up with ways to get richer." The cartoon finishes its class warfare message by graphically depicting "the rich" urinating on the poor.
These people running our education system are destroying the minds and values of our young people, and we allow them to do it.
Walter E. Williams is a professor of economics at George Mason University. To find out more about Walter E. Williams and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at www.creators.com.
COPYRIGHT 2013 CREATORS.COM

Recommend this article

Gen. David Petraeus, former CIA director forced to resign after a sex scandal, is mad and intent on getting even. Benghazi meets President Obama.

Verne Strickland / USA DOT COM / May 13, 2013

WaTimes: 'Watch out for Petraeus in Benghazi scandal'... 'White House is Terrified'...

May 13, 2013

AP

Joseph Curl WT & Drudge

By their second term “inside the bubble,” presidents have completely lost touch with reality: Aides and confidants conspire to keep the chief executive insulated from the real world — the bad news, the worse press coverage. They think it’s their job, and lounging on the Oval Office couches, they nod along with the president’s every musing.
But this presidency has taken OOCS (Oval Office Couch Syndrome) to new heights. Mr. Obama has only a few trusted aides, and occasional leaks from the West Wing show a paranoid president suspicious of nearly everyone around him. Supremely confident, convinced by the fawning minions at his feet that he is untouchable, the president dismisses all controversy as partisan attacks by an overzealous opposition. A pliant press corps of stenographers follows in lockstep.
Not surprisingly, every president in the past 60 years has had a major scandal in Term 2: Dwight Eisenhower had the U-2 “incident”; Richard Nixon had Watergate; Ronald Reagan had Iran-Contra; Bill Clinton had Monica (literally); George W. Bush had Katrina (and let’s not forget those WMDs that never turned up); and now, this president has Benghazi.
Make no mistake: Benghazi is a major scandal. Benghazi is a scandal before, during and after the terrorist attack that left four Americas dead, including an ambassador.
For months before, there were warnings about weak security at the U.S. Consulate in Libya; no one paid attention. During the attack, when Americans were begging for help, the White House ignored their pleas, sent no help.
And after? That’s when the Obama scandal falls into the predictable second-term pattern his predecessors all learned the very hard way. Faced with a crisis, the Obama White House panicked. “We can’t have a terrorist strike two months before Election Day, so … let’s not have a terrorist strike two months before Election Day.” Cue the Cover-Up.
So little is known about what happened in Benghazi: Where was the commander in chief that night? No pictures from the Situation Room this time. Why didn’t the Pentagon authorize a quick-response team to swoop in? Members of the military say they were ready — burning — to go. The call came in: Stand down. Let them die. There were dozens of witnesses to the attack that night: Where are they? What do they know? What really happened that night?
And who forced the heavy-handed redactions of those infamous “talking points,” the ones that sent Mr. Obama’s ambassador to the United Nations onto the Sunday talk shows to declare that the attack was just the culmination of a spontaneous protest over an anti-Islam video posted on YouTube?
Carnival barker Jay Carney looked almost ashen Friday as he took the podium to face a suddenly invigorated press corps. Of course, the public briefing came after a private session with “reporters who matter,” a sure sign the White House is in full hunker-down mode — and, more precisely, terrified.
“Again,” one newly curious reporter asked, “what role did the White House play, not just in making but in directing changes that took place to these?”
“Well,” the carney said, “thank you for that question. The way to look at this, I think, is to start from that week and understand that in the wake of the attacks in Benghazi, an effort was underway to find out what happened, who was responsible. In response to a request from the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence to the CIA, the CIA began a process of developing points that could be used in public by members of Congress, by members of that committee. And that process, as is always the case — again, led by the CIA — involved input from a variety of …”
Enough. You get the point: Full Spin Cycle.
Speaking for the White House, the flack said the CIA was fully to blame for the talking points. Fully. “That is what was generated by the intelligence community, by the CIA,” he said.
For the record, this is what the CIA “generated”:
“Since April, there have been at least five other attacks against foreign interests in Benghazi by unidentified assailants.” That line was stricken: Everything was fine there — fine fine fine.
And: “We do know that Islamic extremists with ties to Al Qaeda participated in the attack.” That line, too, was deleted by … someone. Instead, this was inserted: “There are indications that extremists participated in the violent demonstrations.”
Despite protestations by the White House, this scandal is just beginning. And the White House has picked a very bad scapegoat: the Central Intelligence Agency. The CIA follows RFK’s edict: “Don’t get mad, get even.” And when the CIA gets even, it isn’t pretty.
With the White House putting all blame on the agency, expect push back this week — nuclear push back. Gen. David H. Petraeus, the former director forced to resign after a sex scandal, is a dangerous man to the Obama administration. Mad and intent on getting even, he’s already talking, telling one reporter the talking points were “useless” and that he preferred not to use them at all. The floodgates will open this week, and by the end of business Friday, the scandal will be full blown.
A warning to those West Wing sycophants suffering from acute OOCS: Don’t walk down any dark alleys.

• Joseph Curl covered the White House and politics for a decade for The Washington Times and is now editor of the Drudge Report. He can be reached at josephcurl@gmail.com and @josephcurl.

 by Taboola

From the Web

North Carolina is a battleground state. Right now, Republicans are winning the battle.

Verne Strickland / USA DOT COM / May 13, 2013

GOP, Koch brothers find there’s nothing finer than Carolina

Cash from groups like the Kochs has helped the state GOP build a robust network. | AP Photos

By TARINI PARTI | 5/11/13 3:14 PM EDT 

 

The GOP lost big nationally in 2012, but may have found the key to future success in one southern state.

Cash from groups backed by the Koch brothers and others helped North Carolina Republicans build a robust conservative infrastructure and fundraising network, leading to the GOP winning both the governor’s mansion and the state legislature in the same year for the first time since Reconstruction.

That takeover didn’t come overnight, but it caught Democrats by surprise, especially since Barack Obama carried the state in 2008 and lost only by 2 percentage points last year.

The hope, say conservatives, is to replicate their successes elsewhere. 

 

“Getting dramatic economic change at the federal level is very difficult,” said Tim Phillips, president of the Koch-backed Americans for Prosperity. “A few years ago, the idea we had was to create model states. North Carolina was a great opportunity to do that – more so than any other state in the region. If you could turn around a state like that, you could get real reform.”

Since November, change has come quickly.

Gov. Pat McCrory appointed a Koch ally and major Republican donor, Art Pope, as the state’s budget director.

(Also on POLITICO: Dems learn money isn't everything)

In the legislature, Republicans are expected to pass an overhaul of the state’s tax code, the public education system and election laws, including a controversial voter ID bill. The state House on Monday voted to allow concealed weapons on college campuses, at sporting events and in businesses that serve alcohol.

Several other measures, such as one that would establish Christianity as the official state religion, are not expected to pass but have made national headlines in recent weeks.

And last month, Pope proposed eliminating public financing for judicial races, and McCrory canned members of the State Board of Elections just as the board announced an investigation into contributions made to governor’s campaign.

Democrats are still trying to figure out what happened.

“I’ll do anything for an hour with David Axelrod and for him to tell us what do to,” said Martin Nesbitt, a top Democrat in the state Senate.

(Also on POLITICO: Democratic strategist: Party 'in decline')

There’s fear on the left that the outside cash and gerrymandered districts means the bad news isn’t over. Sen. Kay Hagan, won on the coattails of Obama’s 2008 win but is considered vulnerable next year. Rep. Mike McIntyre, who was re-elected by fewer than 600 votes last year, is also a top Republican target.

The Republican establishment has taken notice. McCrory gave the Republican weekly radio address last Saturday and Karl Rove is scheduled to speak at the state GOP convention next month in Charlotte. (A Rove spokesman declined to elaborate on the speech.)

Read more about:

• Republicans,
• North Carolina,
• Elections,
• Fundraising,
• Mike McIntyre,
• Kay Hagan,
• Koch Brothers

Scott Pelley, CBS News Anchor, Says Boston Terror Bombing 'Low Point' in Coverage.

Verne Strickland / USA DOT COM

CBS Anchor Scolds: ‘We’re Getting the Big Stories Wrong Over and Over Again’

May. 11, 2013 5:15pm Madeleine Morgenstern 

 

Getty Images

CBS News anchor Scott Pelley on Friday scolded the news media for what he said has been “a bad few months for journalism.”

“Our house is on fire,” Pelley told an audience at Quinnipiac University in Connecticut. “These have been a bad few months for journalism. We’re getting the big stories wrong over and over again.”

“Let me take the first arrow,” he continued. “During our coverage of Newtown, I sat on my set and I reported that Nancy Lanza was a teacher at the school. And that her son had attacked her classroom. It’s a hell of a story, but it was dead wrong. Now I was the managing editor, I made the decision to go ahead with that and I did, and that’s what I said, and I was absolutely wrong. So let me just take the first arrow here.”

Pelley was accepting the university’s Fred Friendly First Amendment Award, named after the former CBS News president. He said that in an age where more information is available to more people than ever before, “never has more bad information been available” either.

He called last month’s Boston terror attack a particularly low point for many in the industry.

“Our nation was attacked by terrorists,” Pelley said. “I cannot think of a time when the public that we serve needs accurate, timely information more than in those moments when our country is under attack.”

CNN was widely maligned for being the first to incorrectly report that authorities had a suspect in custody, as was The New York Post for publishing photos of two men it incorrectly said were being sought by police.

“That fire that started on the Internet spread to our more established newsrooms,” Pelley said. “In a world where everyone is a publisher, no one is an editor. And that is the danger we face today.”

​Watch Pelley’s full remarks below, starting at the 10:15 mark.

(h/t Weekly Standard)