Army Sgt. Salvatore Giunta is the first living soldier to be awarded the Medal of Honor since the Vietnam War. The following are images from the ceremony, his service in Afghanistan and his family life. 

**Written by Doug Powers

This week DHS Director Janet Napolitano visited Indianapolis to secure the perimeter of Lucas Oil Stadium. Even the food vendors, now referred to in DHS circles as the elite “Meal Team Six,” have been trained to assist in the counterterrorism effort:

Despite acknowledging there are “no credible or specific threats” to the safety of the 2012 Super Bowl in Indianapolis on Sunday, the TSA is training thousands of fast food sellers and other vendors to spot terrorists under the “First Observer” program.

“TSA said over 8,000 stadium vendors, parking lot attendants, shuttle bus drivers, and other transportation professionals received the agency’s First Observer training for detecting and assessing indicators and planning tactics of potential terrorist activities,” reports Government Security News.

At last year’s Super Bowl they tried having local restaurant maître d’s ask patrons waiting to be seated, “terrorist or non-terrorist?” Unfortunately, nobody fell for it.

If “First Observer” turns out to be a success, the Joe Biden can koozie vendors at Bank of America Stadium working the final day of the DNC Convention will be similarly trained.

So if you’re at the Super Bowl, make sure to let J-Nap know if you spot anything out-of-the-ordinary.

**Written by Doug Powers

Twitter @ThePowersThatBe

By BOB CHRISTIE, Associated Press – The Republic

PHOENIX — The Republican who nearly ousted Rep. Gabrielle Giffords in 2010 has officially joined the race to replace her.

Jesse Kelly came within 4,200 votes of defeating the Democrat during the year the tea party led the GOP to a House of Representatives takeover. He vowed to run again but stopped campaigning after Giffords was shot in January 2011.

Kelly resurfaced within days of Giffords’ Jan. 22 announcement that she would resign to focus on her recovery, filing paperwork with the Federal Election Commission, updating his campaign web site and sending out press releases.

On Friday, he formally announced he was entering the race again at a press conference in Tucson, promising a positive campaign that would focus on lower taxes, a strong economy and more jobs.

Kelly joins fellow Republicans Dave Sitton and state Sen. Frank Antenori in the special April 17 GOP primary in Giffords’ 8th District. The winner goes on to a special June 12 general election.

Sitton announced his campaign on Thursday, saying he would push for job creation, fiscal discipline, real health care reform and border security. When he announced on Jan. 27, Antenori touted his record in cutting budgets, cutting spending and the size of government, according to the Arizona Republic.

To read more, visit:  http://www.therepublic.com/view/story/8c5ce2036dd1409081fc85ac63e75132/AZ–Giffords-Seat-Kelly/

A drop in the unemployment rate is always good economic news, but those of all political stripes say .. it's not as good as it looks.

By Amy Gardner and David Fahrenthold, The Washington Post

LAS VEGAS — In 2010, as the tea party rose to prominence, the movement splintered in Nevada and helped nominate Republican Sharron Angle in one of the most closely watched Senate races in the country.

Angle lost to Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (D) in the general election. But even after that disappointment, the state’s powerful tea party movement is no more united in this year’s GOP presidential nominating contest.

Just as last time, influential conservative leaders are all over the map. Chuck Muth, a prominent operative, is working for a group that supports former House speaker Newt Gingrich. An army of local tea party activists is supporting Rep. Ron Paul (Tex.). And Angle has endorsed Rick Santorum, former Senator from Pennsylvania.

As a result, Mitt Romney is far ahead in the polls and not nearly as vulnerable as he would be if his opponents were less divided. Within the tea party, there is little support for Romney, the front-runner whose moderate record as Massachusetts governor has fueled an “anyone-but-Romney” movement among some Republicans. But there is also little unity about whom to support in his place.

To read more, visit:  http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/unity-eludes-nevada-tea-party-in-gop-presidential-race/2012/02/02/gIQArS9hlQ_story.html

By Brian Womack – Bloomberg.com

Google Inc. (GOOG), whose chairman has served as an adviser to President Barack Obama, is a sponsor of this month’s Conservative Political Action Conference, co-hosted by the Tea Party.

Google is one of nine main sponsors, alongside the National Rifle Association and the Heritage Foundation, according to the conference’s website. Republican presidential candidates Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich are slated to speak at the three-day event, which starts in Washington on Feb. 9. Google is the only business listed among the primary sponsors.

The company says it will have a presence at both Republican and Democratic events during this year’s election season, including each party’s convention. Google also had a role in the Iowa caucus last month. The CPAC event was attractive because half the attendees are under 25 and heavy users of technology, Google said yesterday in an e-mailed statement.

“This event is a great opportunity for us to showcase Google.com/elections and tools like Google+, which we hope will be used by every candidate and campaign,” the Mountain View, California-based company said.

To read more, visit:  http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-02-03/google-sponsoring-conservative-political-conference-co-hosted-by-tea-party.html

Pressure is building on Google. On Friday, the European Union asked Google to the delay the rollout of its new privacy policy, scheduled for March 1, until the E.U. can work out whether it is in line with Europe's data protection laws. 

With election season in full swing, the Labor Department reports are bound to serve as a political football every month until November, and with his administration under fire on the campaign trail for slow economic growth despite stimulus funding and other measures, Obama is eager for some good news.

Washington Post report is the first to use such a specific timeframe, after Fox News previously reported concerns from former members of Obama's national security team that a unilateral strike from Israel could occur sometime in 2012.

Proposed legislation in the state of Ohio would ban the purchase of lions, bears, gorillas and other exotic animals, but it also would allow current owners of such animals to keep the pets if they meet strict new requirements.

The Air Force says it will cut the service by nearly 10,000 active, National Guard and Reserve airmen next year, as part of a broad move to downsize and shift capabilities around the country to be better prepared for wars of the future.

Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich showed no interest in going easy on each other heading into Saturday's Nevada caucuses, despite polls that show the former Massachusetts governor well ahead in the contest. 

If it’s Friday, it’s another White House dump day. Cue the dump truck horn: Doot! Doot! Doot!

While Obama sycophants are busy trumpeting deceptive jobs numbers, the administration is quietly moving forward with job-killing Obamacare regs and taxes. The IRS today released rules to impose the $20 billion Obamacare medical device tax scheduled to take effect next year.

At a time when the White House is touting its government initiatives to champion “innovation,” the Obamacare innovation tax on medical device/diagnostic manufacturers will kill an estimated 43,000 jobs.

The very job creators President Obama purports to support are balking at the tax regs and have called for repeal. The Advanced Medical Technology Association, America’s leading association for med tech manufacturers, blasts the new rules:

“[The proposed IRS regulations] highlights the need for prompt action by Congress and the Administration to repeal this anti-competitive, job-killing tax,” Stephen J. Ubl, AdvaMed president and CEO said in a statement.

“Failure to repeal the device tax flies in the face of the President’s comments during the State of the Union about the need to reform our tax system to make our nation more competitive in the world market, a view shared by members of Congress from both parties,” Ubl went on to explain, adding that “the tax will create a number of complex administrative and technical burdens that must be addressed.”

I’ve reported before on how the medical device tax has already resulted in operational and job cutbacks in Massachusetts, home to many medical innovators.

Fewer jobs. Fewer entrepreneurs. Fewer medical advances.

Winning the future…by killing it.

Reclusive Taliban leader Mullah Mohammed Omar wrote to President Obama last year indicating an interest in talks key to ending the war in Afghanistan, current and former U.S. officials told The Associated Press. 

A four-year blueprint for aviation programs that hastens the transition to a new air traffic control system based on GPS technology was given final approval by the House on Friday despite last-minute objections from organized labor. 

The head of a beleaguered federal program charged with securing dangerous chemicals vowed Friday to swiftly address a mountain of problems that were exposed in a recent internal report, as lawmakers grilled the official over everything from staffing to red tape. 

Susan G. Komen for the Cure on Friday announced it was reversing its decision to end grants to Planned Parenthood, after facing mounting pressure from pro-choice lawmakers and accusations that the breast cancer awareness organization had bowed to political influences. 

Jim Moran, racist pig
by Michelle Malkin
Creators Syndicate
Copyright 2012

Congressman Jim Moran is an old white Democrat from Virginia who thinks he can judge whether we minority conservatives are acting sufficiently non-white enough. Moran’s an inveterate bully, a brawler, a crook and a bigot. And not one of his civility-preaching liberal colleagues has the courage to call him out.

Responding on cable news to GOP Rep. Allen West’s blunt criticisms of President Obama this week, Moran derided the retired U.S. Army colonel, who is black, as “not representative of the African-American community.” Moran then launched into the kind of tired race-traitor tirade I’ve heard from progressives of pallor for more than 20 years.

How dare we “people of color” stray from the left’s ideological plantation? If we choose personal responsibility over entitlement, capitalism over statism or self-determination over identity politics, presumptuous white liberals appoint themselves spokespeople for our forefathers and deciders of our true destinies.

To wit: Lt. Col. West “just seems clueless now that he has climbed aboard ship,” Moran fumed. “He’s climbed this ladder of opportunity that was constructed by so many of his ancestors’ sweat, sacrifice, blood, you know, they did everything they could for his generation to be successful. But now that he’s climbed on board ship, instead of reaching down and steadying the ladder, he wants to push it off.”

West, his father, his mother and his brother all dedicated their lives to military service; four consecutive generations of his family served in the U.S. armed forces. As a freshman congressman, West’s message has been a compelling agenda of self-empowerment. For this, he is savaged by a House colleague as a racial saboteur?

But Moran was just warming up. Next, he contrasted conservative West with big-government savior Barack Obama, who he said acted in proper accordance with his ancestors “by reducing college tuition and training our workers, trying to get a decent job for everybody” and leaving a “constructive legacy.”

Er, how’s the savior’s near double-digit unemployment, record food stamp enrollment, re-inflation of the housing and higher-education bubbles, and massive redistribution of wealth from the working class to the Wall Street bundler class working out for you?

Moran hailed Obama as “our Lion King” and compared his Republican detractors to the “hyenas in the background trying to cause trouble” for the White House. This bumbling chief of political correctness apparently is unaware that those hyenas in the Disney movie have been criticized for perpetuating negative stereotypes about blacks and Hispanics. Dog-whistle politics, anyone?

Do Moran’s constituents in Virginia’s 8th district support his incessant race-baiting? Last year, he accused Tea Party activists of racism for sweeping out entrenched Democrats in the November 2010 midterm elections. It “happened for the same reason the Civil War happened in the United States. It happened because the Southern states, the slaveholding states, didn’t want to see a president who was opposed to slavery,” he ranted to Arabic-language television network Alhurra. “(A) lot of people in the United States don’t want to be governed by an African-American, particularly one who is liberal, who wants to spend money and who wants to reach out to include everyone in our society.”

Yet, only two short years before, this hopelessly racist nation put Obama in the Oval Office with a landslide victory. Logic never was the demagogue’s strong suit.

The aptly named Moran, an 11-term incumbent, continues to be rewarded by voters for his extravagant spending habits, self-dealing and diarrhea of the mouth. As I’ve reported previously:

– While on the Alexandria (Va.) City Council, he was charged with casting a vote that helped a developer friend win a bid for a lucrative plot of public land. A special prosecutor concluded that Moran had violated the state’s conflict-of-interest law. He sobbed as he pleaded no contest to a felony charge of vote-peddling. He received a year’s probation for a reduced conflict-of-interest misdemeanor charge and was forced to resign.

– In 1995, he had to be subdued by Capitol Hill police when he threw a punch at California Republican Rep. Randy Cunningham on the House floor. After the incident, Moran blamed “talk radio” for creating a hostile environment in Washington. That same year, he screamed “I’ll break your nose” at Indiana Republican Rep. Dan Burton during a hearing.

– In 2002, Moran revealed in financial disclosure statements that he accepted a $50,000 loan in January 2001 from an “old friend,” billionaire America Online co-founder James Kimsey. The congressman claims to have paid the business mogul back at 15 percent interest over three months, and his spokesman emphasized the loan came with no accompanying quid pro quo.

– Kimsey’s gift came on the heels of Moran’s disclosure that he had received another Big Business-tied loan: $25,000 from “old friend” Terry Lierman, a drug industry lobbyist representing Schering-Plough. After getting that unsecured loan at a lower-than-market interest rate, Moran co-sponsored a bill that would extend the patent on Schering-Plough’s allergy medicine Claritin — and prevent generic drug manufacturers from offering inexpensive alternatives.

Liberal busybodies are an annoyance. Liberal race-card abusers who lambaste patriotic minority conservatives to cover their own dirty deeds make my brown skin crawl.

President Obama and first lady Michelle Obama will host the British prime minister and his wife for an official visit and state dinner in March. 

One of Washington's top trade groups for adult beverages is seeking to put on ice a provision within a House transportation bill that would require states to mandate ignition interlock devices for convicted drunk drivers.