Senior Aide to Sen. Barbara Boxer Charged for Child Porn

Imagine that a prominent Republican Senator's senior aid was charged with distributing and receiving child pornography.

It would be page one in the news for at least a week.

It comes, then, as no great surprise that The Washington Post today buried on page A-5 news that a senior aide to Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) was fired from his post last week after he was charged with distributing and receiving child pornography.

Jeffrey P. Rosato, an aide to Boxer and a senior policy adviser on the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, was arrested last Friday, the same day he was fired from Boxer's office, and charged with one count each of receipt and distribution of child pornography. He appeared in U.S. District Court in Alexandria on Wednesday and was released on his own recognizance, but he is forbidden to have access to children or computers.

According to an FBI affidavit, an unnamed person "distributed more than 600 files containing graphic images and movies of child pornography to an undercover detective that [the person] believed was a 13-year-old boy" over the course of more than 15 online chats during a three-week period in January. In that person's computer, the FBI found information suggesting the person had exchanged pornography with Rosato.

Read it.

Economic Depression Deepens in the Obamanation: Jobless Claims Surge, Trade Deficit Narrows

The Associated Press today reports applications for unemployment benefits soared to the highest level since just after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks while the trade deficit shrank more than expected as demand for imports plunged, further evidence of the struggling U.S. economy.

The Labor Department reported Thursday that jobless claims shot up by 32,000 last week to a seasonally adjusted 516,000, the highest total in seven years. The tally was much higher than analysts expected and a further indication of how much the labor market is deteriorating amid the shrinking economy. The government reported last week that the unemployment rate surged to a 14-year high of 6.5 percent in October.

Meanwhile, the Commerce Department said the trade deficit declined by a bigger-than-expected amount in September, falling by 4.4 percent to $56.5 billion as imports experienced a record plunge.

These reports highlight the deep mismanagement of the economy for the last two years by the Democrat controlled Congress and materializes investors' fears of the impending financial meltdown caused by a ballooning, high-tax, over-reaching Obama administration.

Don't be fooled by lawmakers' complaints about the economic disaster being a Bush administration creation. Democrats in Congress forced banks to make bad mortgages. Congress foolishly granted Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson unlimited power to pretty much do what he wanted to do with bailout funds. The fault lays with Congress alone.

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New Questions About Obama's Selective Service Registration

In a recent column, conservative commentator Debbie Schlussel asks if President-elect Barack Obama committed a federal crime in September of this year by falsifying his Selective Service Registration. Or did he never actually register for the draft and, instead, did friends of his in the Chicago federal records center, which maintains the official copy of his alleged Selective Service registration commit the crime for him?

It's either one or the other, as indicated by the release of Barack Obama's official Selective Service registration for the draft. A friend of mine, who is a retired federal agent, spent almost a year trying to obtain this document through a Freedom of Information Act request, and, after much stonewalling, finally received it and released it to me.

But the release of Obama's draft registration and an accompanying document, posted below, raises more questions than it answers. And it shows many signs of fraud, not to mention putting the lie to Obama's claim that he registered for the draft in June 1979, before it was required by law.

Read it (with pictures).

Wire: Iran Test-Fires New Missile Near Iraq Border

Iran has test-fired a new type of missile during war games near the Iraqi border, state television said Tuesday, after warning the United States it would respond to any violation of Iranian airspace Reuters reported Tuesday.

The English-language Press TV said the Iranian-made missile, named as the Samen, was successfully tested Monday by the elite Revolutionary Guards in the western border city of Marivan.

They also tested artillery and rocket launchers, Press TV said on its website.

Iran has said it would respond to any attack on its territory by targeting U.S. interests and Washington's ally Israel, as well as closing the Strait of Hormuz, a vital route for world oil supplies.

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Wire: Iraqi, Taliban Militants Demand Obama Pull Troops Out

An Iraqi insurgent coalition and the Taliban warned U.S. President-elect Barack Obama to withdraw U.S. forces from Iraq and Afghanistan or face more resistance, U.S. monitoring groups reported on Thursday according to a Reuters article.

"There is neither sadness nor happiness among the Taliban groups over the election of Barack Obama as U.S. president," Qari Mohammad Yousuf, a spokesman for the Taliban in Afghanistan, said in statements monitored by the Middle East Media Research Institute, or MEMRI.

"They (the United States and its allies) have started the fighting and they should bring an end to it by pulling out troops. If it was not done, Afghans will show strong resistance to every foreign occupation," he said.

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