Black-Clad Hezbollah Now Fighting Rebels for Assad in Syria

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Photo Credit: Lynsey Addario Lebanon — Near Damascus, Hezbollah fighters are defending the shrine of Sayida Zeinab, revered by Shiite Muslims, from encroaching Sunni rebels. To the north, they are not just part of a Syrian government drive to take back the strategic town of Qusair, rebels say, they are leading it.

On Tuesday, Syrian opposition activists reported that rebels had killed 15 Hezbollah fighters in Qusair. But they also said the rebels were besieged in the town and in danger of losing it, after black-clad Hezbollah fighters swept them from surrounding villages.

Recruited and trained to battle Israel and defend Lebanon, Hezbollah’s Lebanese Shiite guerrillas are pushing more and more deeply into a very different fight: in neighboring Syria, against fellow Arab Muslims trying to topple President Bashar al-Assad. Their leaders have made it increasingly clear that Mr. Assad’s war is their war, too.

Though Hezbollah has never been militarily stronger — it has more than replenished the weapons and fighters it lost in its brief war with Israel in 2006 — it finds itself in an unaccustomed situation. It is struggling to preserve credibility at home and fend off an array of new challenges abroad as it fights what it sees as a battle to preserve Mr. Assad’s rule, and the crucial arms pipeline he provides.

Its chief patron, Iran, is suffering under sanctions over its nuclear program. Its members have been jailed on charges of helping to kill Israeli tourists in Bulgaria, as Europe considers joining the United States in labeling it a terrorist organization. It is facing heightened sectarian talk from its rivals in Lebanon — all while trying to keep its focus on its primary enemy, Israel.

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Delaware: 11th State to Legalize Gay Marriage

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Photo Credit: joseanavasBy a slim margin, a divided Delaware state Senate voted Tuesday to make their state the 11th in the nation to allow same-sex marriage.

The Senate’s 12-9 vote sends the bill to Democratic Gov. Jack Markell, who supports the measure and planned to sign it later in the day. It would go into effect July 1. “I think this is the right thing for Delaware,” the governor said after the vote, while posing for pictures with supporters outside his legislative office. “It took an incredible team effort.”

Gay rights activists and their supporters in the chamber erupted in cheers and applause following the Senate vote. Delaware’s same-sex marriage bill was introduced in the Democrat-controlled legislature last month, barely a year after the state began recognizing same-sex civil unions. The bill won passage two weeks ago in the state House on a 23-18 vote.

While it doesn’t give same-sex couples any more rights or benefits under Delaware law than those they have in civil unions, supporters argued same-sex couples deserve the dignity and respect of married couples. They also noted that if the U.S. Supreme Court strikes down the Defense of Marriage Act, which bars married gay couples from receiving federal benefits, civil unions would not provide protections or tax benefits under federal law to same-sex couples in Delaware.

Opponents, including scores of conservative religious leaders from across the state, argued same-sex marriage redefines and destroys a centuries-old institution that is a building block of society.

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The Mass Exodus of Christians From the Muslim World

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Photo Credit: APA mass exodus of Christians is currently underway. Millions of Christians are being displaced from one end of the Islamic world to the other.

We are reliving the true history of how the Islamic world, much of which prior to the Islamic conquests was almost entirely Christian, came into being.

The U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom recently said: “The flight of Christians out of the region is unprecedented and it’s increasing year by year.” In our lifetime alone “Christians might disappear altogether from Iraq, Afghanistan, and Egypt.”

Ongoing reports from the Islamic world certainly support this conclusion: Iraq was the earliest indicator of the fate awaiting Christians once Islamic forces are liberated from the grip of dictators.

In 2003, Iraq’s Christian population was at least one million. Today fewer than 400,000 remain—the result of an anti-Christian campaign that began with the U.S. occupation of Iraq, when countless Christian churches were bombed and countless Christians killed, including by crucifixion and beheading.

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Hospital Prices No Longer Secret As New Data Reveals Bewildering System, Staggering Cost Differences

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Photo Credit: Getty Images When a patient arrives at Bayonne Hospital Center in New Jersey requiring treatment for the respiratory ailment known as COPD, or chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, she faces an official price tag of $99,690.

Less than 30 miles away in the Bronx, N.Y., the Lincoln Medical and Mental Health Center charges only $7,044 for the same treatment, according to a massive federal database of national health care costs made public on Wednesday.

Americans have long become accustomed to bewilderment and anxiety when confronting health care bills. The new database underscores why, revealing the perplexing assortment of prices for medical care, with the details of bills seemingly untethered to any graspable principle.

Even within the same metropolitan area, hospitals charge prices that differ by staggering degrees for the same procedures. People without health insurance pay vastly higher costs for care when less expensive options are often available nearby. Virtually everyone who seeks health care winds up paying inflated prices in one form or another as these stark disparities in price sow inefficiencies throughout the market.

While this basic picture has emerged as the consensus reality among health care experts, their evidence has been primarily anecdotal. Hospitals have protected their price lists — documents known as charge masters — as closely guarded secrets.

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Huckabee, Bolton: Obama Will Be Ousted Over Benghazi

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photo credit: gage skidmoreBy Jonathan Easley. Former Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee said on his radio show Monday that President Obama “will not fill out his full term” because he was complicit in a “cover-up” surrounding the attack that killed Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three other Americans in Libya.

“I believe that before it’s all over, this president will not fill out his full term,” Huckabee said. “I know that puts me on a limb, but this is not minor.”

“When a president lies to the American people and is part of a cover-up, he cannot continue to govern,” he added. “And as the facts come out, I think we’re going to see something startling. And before it’s over, I don’t think this president will finish his term unless somehow they can delay it in Congress past the next three and a half years.”

Some Republicans have maintained that the administration has not been forthcoming in the circumstances surrounding the attack, pointing to U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Susan Rice, who went on Sunday news shows and argued the attacks were a spontaneous reaction to an offensive video. The administration later admitted Rice’s claim was made with insufficient intelligence, and labeled the event an act of terror.

On Monday, House Republicans released portions of an interview with State Department whistle-blower Gregory Hicks, who took over as the top U.S. diplomat in Libya after Stevens was killed.Read more from this story HERE.

John Bolton: Benghazi Could Topple Administration

By Bill Hoffmann. The mushrooming Benghazi scandal could potentially lead to the unraveling of the administration of President Barack Obama, says John Bolton, former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations.

“This could be a hinge point for the Obama administration. It’s that serious for them,” Bolton told “The Steve Malzberg Show” on Newsmax TV.

Bolton made his remarks as Congress prepares on Wednesday to interview at least three witnesses about the Sept. 11, 2012, attack on the U.S. Embassy in Benghazi, Libya.

One witness, Greg Hicks — the embassy’s No. 2 official — has said everybody knew the bloodbath, which ended in the deaths of Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans, was a terrorist attack.

This despite the White House initially claiming it was an impromptu protest against a blasphemous YouTube video. Read more from this story HERE.

Mark Levin: Feds Not Focused on Criminals, They’re Focused on “We the People”

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Photo Credit: Daily Caller At the National Rifle Association Convention in Houston on Friday, conservative talker Mark Levin told attendees that the Bill or Rights were “under attack” from progressives in Washington, D.C.

“The forces that are gathering now in Washington and in the states to destroy our Second Amendment right are ominous,” Levin the author of “Ameritopia: The Unmaking of America,” said. “They’re not focused on criminals. They’re not focused on mass murderers. They’re focused on ‘we the people.’ The fact of the matter is these are very, very perilous times. The federal government is becoming increasingly powerful. The Bill of Rights are under attack — unless you’re a mass murder or a terrorist, in which place they kick in and are strongly defended. What I’m talking about are law-biding citizens.”

“That’s who I care about, citizens who work hard, pay their taxes and want to defend their families and want to go hunting and want to have target practice. Or they have guns that sit in their closet for 30 years, and they never touch,” he said. “What do I care what they do with their weapons as long as they’re law-biding? And this is the point.”

“I hear it often said, ‘You don’t need this type of firearm,’ ‘You don’t need this amount of ammunition,’” he said. “Well, wait a minute — who gets to decide that? We get to decide that. It’s not a bill of needs — it’s a bill of rights. The Second Amendment is included. As a matter of fact, there would be no Constitution but for the Bill of Rights.”

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World’s First 3D Printable Gun Successfully Fired

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Touted as the world’s first 3D printable gun, Defense Distributed posted a YouTube video this past weekend of the successful firing of the weapon.

When Restoring Liberty posted the story of printable high capacity magazines, a number of readers doubted that it was possible to print a chamber or barrel capable of withstanding the pressures of modern cartridges. But Defense Distributed’s “Liberator” apparently did.

Here’s a video of the successful discharge:

What follows are pictures from Defense Distributed’s webpage of the component parts of the firearm:

The mission statement of Defense Distributed is to “defend the civil liberty of popular access to arms as guaranteed by the United States Constitution and affirmed by the United States Supreme Court, through facilitating global access to, and the collaborative production of, information and knowledge related to the 3D printing of arms; and to publish and distribute, at no cost to the public, such information and knowledge in promotion of the public interest.”

Photo credit: Defense Distributed

Inhofe: Obama Admin. Buying So Much Ammo It’s Dried Up Civilian Supply (+video)

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Photo Credit: APOn Aaron Klein’s weekend show on New York City’s WABC radio, Oklahoma Republican Sen. James Inhofe accused the Obama administration of buying up ammunition at an unprecedented level to bypass the Second Amendment so gun-owners “can’t even buy ammunition because government is purchasing so much.”

“Let’s make sure that your audience out there is aware, Aaron, that our president, Obama, has been doing everything he could to stop the private ownership of guns in America,” Inhofe said. “You know that, everyone knows that. And yet he’s been voted down in a big way by a large majority. And so my feeling is that he’s doing this to buy up [ammunition] so that we can’t buy: Honest, law-abiding citizens here in the United States, like my son, can’t even buy ammunition because government is purchasing so much.”

Inhofe explained to Klein he is working to introduce the Ammunition Management for More Obtainability (AMMO) bill that will limit “non-defense, armed federal agencies to pre-Obama levels of ammunition.”

Read more from this story HERE.

Benghazi Witnesses: Obama Admin. Let Americans Die for Politics

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Photo Credit: AFP/Getty ImagesBy Oren Dorell. Testimony from three State Department “whistleblowers” scheduled to appear at a hearing on Capitol Hill on Wednesday will show that politics played a role from the start in the government’s handling of the Sept. 11 attack on the U.S. mission in Benghazi, Libya, a Republican lawmaker says.

The hearing will explore why the State Department never activated its Foreign Emergency Support Team, a unit made up of security and intelligence professionals who specialize in responding to crises, said Rep. Jason Chaffetz, R-Utah.

Chaffetz believes the reason is that activating the team, whose members have connections to the CIA and the military, would have labeled the attack “a terrorist activity,” which then-secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton’s State Department did not want to do.

“They didn’t want the political label of a terrorist attack,” said Chaffetz, who heads the national security subcommittee of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, which is holding Wednesday’s hearing.

“Early on in this fight these people made a critical bad decision in that they did not activate these people simply because they were afraid it would be labeled as terrorism. It was pure politics.” Read more from this story HERE.

Benghazi Whistle-Blower Witnesses are “Terrified” of State Department

By Cheryl K. Chumley. Rep. Jason Chaffetz said the witnesses who are due to testify on Benghazi, Libya, on Wednesday have been intimidated by the Obama administration to such degree that they’re terrified.

“There are people who want to testify that have been suppressed,” he said, during a Fox News appearance on Sunday. “They’re scared to death of what the State Department is doing with them.” Read more from this story HERE.

Armed Citizen Project To Hand Out Free Guns In Crime-Wracked Chicago

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Photo Credit: Opposing Views The Armed Citizen Project (ACP) has the objective of giving every law-abiding citizen in America a free shotgun. The organization has already made waves in Texas – next on its list is the violence-plagued city of Chicago.

Kyle Coplen, founder of the ACP, explained: “It’s our hypothesis that criminals do not want to die in your hallway. We think that society should use that fear to deter crime.”

To that end, the ACP targets citizens in high-crime and medium-crime areas. They give homeowners and single women shotguns and free training with the hopes that the guns will lead to safer neighborhoods.

Supporters of the ACP feel that a shotgun in every home will make criminals think twice about committing a crime. Critics fear that adding guns to crime-wracked neighborhoods will only add more fuel to the fire. Some of the recipients could easily turn around and sell the free guns on eBay or on a street corner in order to make a quick buck.

Read more from this story HERE.