Alaska Natives Lobby Obama Admin. Against Oil Development in NPR-A

Native Alaskans have teamed up with environmental forces to urge the Obama administration to stick with a conservative management plan for the National Petroleum Reserve, despite oil industry protests that the proposal would block energy development in lands specifically reserved for extracting fossil fuels.

Joseph Sagviyuaq Sage, a whaling captain from Barrow, Alaska, and Lillian Stone, a teacher from Anaktuvuk Pass, are set to meet with Senate staffers and Deputy Interior Secretary David Hayes while in Washington, D.C. this week. The pair are collaborating with the Alaska Wilderness League to make the case that some areas in the 23-million acre reserve should be off limits to oil development.

The push comes as the administration nears a final decision on how to balance energy production and conservation in the 89-year-old reserve in northwest Alaska. In August, the Interior Department unveiled its “preferred” management plan, which would allow oil and gas development in 11.8 million acres of the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska while blocking the activity in other areas that are home to caribou herds and polar bears.

The Interior Department’s Bureau of Land Management appears likely to make a final decision on whether to adopt its preferred approach sometime after the Nov. 6 presidential election.

Stone said she wanted policymakers in the nation’s capital to know “we are real people and we are directly impacted by any activity that goes on within NPR-A.” Oil drilling in the reserve threaten the caribou that roam the land, Stone said, as well as the Alaska Natives who hunt the animal for food and clothing.

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Insecure Obama, Insecure World

The United States has had good presidents and bad, but it has never had a leader who came to a debate on national security with so much insecurity. It was a small petty man who sat on the other side of the screen, alternately smirking and scowling, grinding his teeth and launching attack after attack instead of finally taking the opportunity to set the record straight with the American people.

Barack Obama came to the debate with a roster of prepared speeches, few of them about foreign affairs and most of them about the economy. Even while his Secretary of Defense has given an unprecedented order to top military officials to stonewall the congressional investigation into Benghazigate, even as it has become known that his administration watched four Americans be murdered in real time and did not lift a finger to save their lives, talking points prepared by highly paid speechwriters fell out of his mouth assuring the American people that everything was going well. There was nothing wrong except for a few non-optimal bumps in the road made up of dead Americans.

Anyone listening to Obama would have to conclude, like Voltaire’s Pangloss, that we truly live in the best of all possible worlds. During the Bush administration, liberal pols like Obama liked to claim that they were part of the reality-based community. But as Calvin of “Calvin and Hobbes” said, “I’m not in denial. I’m just very selective about the reality I accept.” Obama would appear to have joined Calvin’s selective reality community.

Instead of discussing foreign affairs and national security, the Contender-in-Chief did his best to divert the debate with a talking point that he called “Nation Building at Home.” “Nation Building” is usually a term reserved for the reconstruction of backward or broken nations. That Obama insisted on applying it to the United States was telling, but even more telling was that his big idea for the debate was not only a distraction but a call to repeat the same disastrous stimulus and shovel-ready project boondoggles that had dug the country 16 trillion dollars into debt.

Obama’s idea of a foreign policy agenda is to borrow trillions of dollars from China to invest in green energy and teachers unions while calling it nation building. Left unasked was the question of what nation would we be building—America or China?

Read more from this story HERE.

More Problems for Obama: Irreligious Americans Less Likely to Vote

A new poll released on Monday from Public Religion Research Institute finds that Americans who are unaffiliated in their religious views or who are less religious are less likely to head to the polls this election season. If the findings from this survey hold true, it could spell troubling news for the Obama campaign since voters who are less religious are more likely to support the president.

Americans who identify themselves as religiously unaffiliated are the fastest growing segment in America’s religious landscape. The annual PRRI survey found that 19 percent of Americans consider themselves part of this group. However, only 7 percent say they were raised in a religiously unaffiliated household.

Interestingly, President Obama, who has said he is a Christian, has a substantial lead among the religiously unaffiliated with 73 percent of those polled, while only 23 percent of that group say they support Mitt Romney, who is Mormon.

Americans who are affiliated to a religious group are much more likely to vote than those unaffiliated to a particular religion by a margin of 73 to 61 percent. For this reason, President Obama could be losing votes if the religiously unaffiliated choose not to vote in large numbers.

“The majority of Americans who are now religiously unaffiliated were raised in a particular faith,” said Daniel Cox, PRRI Research Director and report co-author. “Their reasons for leaving vary widely, ranging from a rejection of the teachings of their childhood faith or a fading belief in God, to antipathy toward organized religion, to negative personal experiences with religion or life experiences generally.”

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ER Doctor: Obamacare Death Panels Are Here

Today while working my shift in the emergency room, an old lady was brought in very sick and in fact near death. I did my usual workup and evaluation and attempted to administer life saving treatment. It was my plan to admit this woman to the hospital. I found out a little later that this same woman had been a patient here just slightly more than 2 weeks ago with a DIFFERENT DIAGNOSIS. I was told that if this woman was admitted, the hospital would not be paid.

The new Medicare rule now is that if the same Medicare patient is re-admitted to the hospital within 30 days, the hospital will not be paid. When they first started this nonsense they said this only applied to patients with the same diagnosis. Now they have “expanded” the rule to include re-admissions for any reason. So if you’re in the hospital for pneumonia, and 3 weeks later, you break your leg…….too bad. Medicare will not pay the hospital to fix your leg.

A little later a man was brought in by ambulance, very sick, in pain, and near death. I did my usual evaluation and treatment, doing my best to ease pain and stabilize this man’s illness. He needed to be admitted. To my chagrin I found out that he had been treated for the SAME problem at a DIFFERENT HOSPITAL about 10 days prior. If I admitted this man, our hospital would be paid nothing. I admitted the man.

My friends I am caught in a terrible position. I could have given treatment to both of these people and sent them out. There is no doubt that both of them would have died. Oh, I could also be sued for malpractice, but nobody cares about that. That’s why we have insurance, right?

My other choice is to admit the person, knowing full well that the hospital will have to absorb the cost of care without hope of remuneration.

Read more from this story HERE.

Clinton Has Apparently Researched What Countries He Can Now Run For President In

Former President Bill Clinton talked about his eligibility to serve as the leader of both Ireland and France in an exchange with CNN host Pierce Morgan last month.

Morgan, who is from Great Britain said, “We’re trying to change the rules in Britain, actually, because if you can’t be president again here, we’d quite like you to be prime minister in our country. Are you available if it comes to — I get this through?”

Clinton did not answer specifically on Britain during his Sept. 30 appearance on the program.

“There are only two countries I’m eligible to run for the leadership position is if I move to Ireland and buy a house, I can — I can run for president of Ireland, because of my Irish heritage,” Clinton said. “And because I was born in Arkansas, which is part of the Louisiana Purchase, any person anywhere in the world that was born in a place that ever was part of the French empire, if you move to — if you live in France for six months and speak French, you can run for president.”

Clinton said he was popular in France, but had doubts that popularity would hold up.

Read more from this story HERE.

Justice Kagan: I’m Probably a Supreme Court Justice Because I’m a Woman

Justice Elena Kagan said she was “not sure” if President Barack Obama would have nominated her to the Supreme Court if she had not been a woman.

During a talk before law students on Friday at the University of Tennessee Law School, Kagan said, “And to tell you the truth, there were also things that I got because I was a woman. I mean I’m not sure I’d be sitting here.”

“I’m not sure that I would’ve been President Obama’s nominee if I weren’t a woman,” she said. “And if he wasn’t as committed as he was to ensuring that there was diversity on the Supreme Court.”

“So, mostly what I think when I think about this question is how far we’ve come and how much I owe — and all the women who have come after me owe– to people like Justice Ginsburg and Justice O’Connor,” she said.

Kagan was initially asked by Dean of Tennessee Law School Doug Blaze, “It’s been a remarkable career, and you’ve been quite a pioneer along the way. [The] first woman to be Dean of the Harvard Law School, first woman solicitor general of the United States. You’re now the fourth woman to serve on the United States Supreme Court and one of three presently serving.”

Read more from this story HERE.

Video: Navy Seal – “I believe in American Exceptionalism; Sometimes We Die Because We Love this Country”

If you haven’t seen this political ad from Special Operations for America, you should take thirty seconds to watch it.

It’s been up for over a month and has received a million views and for good reason: it reflects why our soldiers serve, fight and die for this country.

And it reminds patriotic Americans of an inexplicable scene from Obama’s disastrous presidency where he bowed to a Saudi ruler but then denied doing it, despite the pictures to the contrary.

Here’s the video:

Video: Obama’s Foreign Policy Disasters-He’s In Way Over His Head

In this exceptional three minute video, Obama’s failed foreign policy is brought into sharp relief. If you have any question about Obama’s failures with al Qaeda and Libya, you must watch this video.

Romney could have taken some talking points from this mini-documentary in last night’s debate.

The producer, Secure America Now, states that:

America was attacked on September 11th, 2012 by Al Qaeda at our consulate in Libya. Our consulate was burned and four Americans including our ambassador were murdered. President Obama and his administration denied it was a terrorist attack for weeks.

Since then, Americans have learned that Obama and his administration knew it was an act of terror all along and chose to tell the public it was because of a Youtube video protest. It’s time for Obama to tell the truth on Libya. We can’t afford more apologies, excuses, and weakness.

New Head of NY Times Protected Child Molesting Colleague from Investigative Documentary While Head of BBC? (+video)

In another case of apparent media malpractice, the New York Times recently hired the former Director of the BBC, Mark Thompson, to take over as CEO starting next month. Shortly after the announcement of his hire, a story broke in the UK concerning Mr. Thompson’s long-time BBC colleague, Sir Jimmy Savile, alleging that he had been suspected of the sexual abuse of children for decades, including the 15 years that he worked at the BBC with Mr. Thompson.

For thirty years, ending in the mid-90’s, Savile was a wildly popular host of a number of children’s and teen shows in Britain. He had been knighted by Queen Elizabeth.

The current controversy erupted just a little over two weeks ago when BBC’s competitor, Britain’s commercial broadcast channel ITV, aired a documentary on numerous allegations against of sexual molestation of minors by Savile. Some of the horrendous sexual assaults allegedly occurred while Savile was employed by BBC, on BBC property.

The problem with Thompson is that, while Thompson was in charge of BBC, BBC’s program Newsnight conducted its own investigation into Savile’s sexual abuse of children, but never broadcast the report. Thompson claims that he never directed that the investigative report not be broadcast and, in fact, asserts that he didn’t even know that the sordid allegations against Savile had been made.

A major BBC actor said two days ago that Thompson’s denials that he didn’t know about the sex abuse allegations against Savile are false: ‘You worked at the BBC and you don’t know anything about it? Don’t be ridiculous. That is absolute nonsense.”

Creating more pressure on Thompson, the UK Daily Mail reported yesterday that on a Sunday program, “the BBC ‘censored’ a series of emails that indicated senior executives were involved in the decision to axe a Newsnight investigation into Savile.”

The director of BBC’s Newsnight asserts that Thompson had nothing to do with the decision not to air the investigative report but that, instead, Savile’s death in December 2011 convinced the BBC not to air anything as Savile was no longer alive to defend himself.

The Sydney Morning Herald Reported that there are now a “staggering number of victims in Savile inquiry.” The alleged victims were not only involved with the BBC but also came from children’s homes and hospitals. The fact that institutions were allegedly involved in Savile’s child rapes lead some to believe that his actions could not have possibly occurred without the knowledge and/or cooperation of various British authorities.

Here’s the ITV documentary on the alleged abuse by Savile:

Elton John Throws $3+ Million Decadent Bash for ‘Husband’ in Las Vegas, LA

It will be the most over-the-top party of the year — a lavish four-day affair in Los Angeles and Las Vegas, with hot and cold running A-listers and a line-up of performers that could sell out Wembley several times over. At its center will be Sir Elton John, and his consort, David Furnish, who turns 50 on Thursday.

Sir Elton met David Furnish, then an unknown young Canadian advertising executive, in 1993. A friend of Furnish’s had brought him to a dinner party Sir Elton was having at his house in Windsor.

‘As soon as he came through the door, he was the shyest and the most handsome and the sweetest, and he was intelligent and he had a great career,’ said Elton. ‘So the next morning, I thought, “It’s a Sunday morning, he’s been to a party, what is the earliest time I can call him?” And I called him at eleven, and said, “Would you like to have dinner tonight?”’

They had a civil ceremony in 2005.

Sir Elton has said that Furnish ‘saved’ him; when they met the star was a recovering cocaine addict and bulimic and felt that he was inherently unlovable. They send each other love letters every Saturday, and call every morning and evening if they are apart. Furnish runs Rocket Pictures, which recently produced the animated film Gnomeo & Juliet. He is also a hit on London’s social scene, celebrated for his good manners and stock of dynamite gossip.