Rush Limbaugh: What is Real Courage? Benghazi Whistle-Blowers

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I could easily not say this and avoid a lot of trouble, but I’m gonna go ahead and say it. We’re losing our language. Words mean things. The way we’re defining “courage” is kind of curious to me. A pro basketball player announcing that he likes to have sex with other men, in my book, in a comparative sense, is not courageous, when compared, say, to a whistleblower trying to set the record straight about what happened in Benghazi.

Now, that’s courage because that’s taking on the oppressive power structure of this entire country. There are people, there are whistleblowers, there are people who are trying to blow the whistle on what happened in Benghazi. We still don’t have the answers. We have a dead ambassador and three other Americans and there has yet to be a satisfactory explanation. How in the world did this happen? All we’ve been told is that some renegade filmmaker, who’s now in jail, ginned up a lot of anger and that caused it. We know that’s not true.

Now, when you’re trying to blow the whistle on an administration, that, to me, is courage. To the audio sound bites. Last night on Fox Special Report, their correspondent, Adam Housley, interviewed an unidentified special operator — face was blacked out, voice changed for the interview — about the attack on the consulate in Benghazi. And during the interview the special operator said this about the attack:

I know for a fact that C-110, the UCOM SIF, was doing a training exercise not in the region of northern Africa, but in Europe, and they had the ability to react and respond. We had the ability to load out, get on birds, and fly there at a minimum stage. C-110 had the ability to be there, in my opinion, in four to six hours from their European theater to react.

Now, this is courage.

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The Disappearing American Father: 60% of Women Who Give Birth in their 20’s are Unmarried

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Photo Credit: Leon FishmanMore than six out of 10 women who give birth in their early 20s are unmarried, the Census Bureau said Wednesday in a report that shows sharp discrepancies in single mothers related to income, education and race.

Census demographers said that single motherhood, while on a steady uptick since the 1940s, has accelerated in recent years. The birth rate for unmarried women in 2007 was up 80 percent in the almost three decades since 1980, the report said. But in the previous five years alone, between 2002 and 2007, it was up 20 percent.

Echoing the findings of many academic studies, the Census Bureau report said women with college degrees and higher household incomes are far less likely to be single mothers than are women who have lower household incomes and less education.

Overall, 36 percent of all births in the United States were to unmarried mothers in 2011…

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Pentagon Confirms that Christian Soldiers who Share their Faith may be Court-Martialed

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Religious liberty groups have grave concerns after they learned the Pentagon is vetting its guide on religious tolerance with a group that compared Christian evangelism to “rape” and advocated that military personnel who proselytize should be court martialed.

The Military Religious Freedom Foundation is calling on the Air Force to enforce a regulation that they believe calls for the court martial of any service member caught proselytizing.

President Mikey Weinstein and others from his organization met privately with Pentagon officials on April 23. He said U.S. troops who proselytize are guilty of sedition and treason and should be punished – by the hundreds if necessary – to stave off what he called a “tidal wave of fundamentalists.”

“Someone needs to be punished for this,” Weinstein told Fox News. “Until the Air Force or Army or Navy or Marine Corps punishes a member of the military for unconstitutional religious proselytizing and oppression, we will never have the ability to stop this horrible, horrendous, dehumanizing behavior.”

Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council, told Fox News he was stunned that the Pentagon would be taking counsel and advice from the Military Religious Freedom Foundation.

Read more from this story, including the Pentagon’s confirmation to Fox News that Christian soldiers who proselytize violate military regulations, HERE.

To sign a petition opposed to this outrageous policy, click HERE.

Feminism May be Dead: 72 Percent of Americans say They’re not ‘Feminists’

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Photo Credit: The Washington TimesIt is likely disappointing news for old school bra-burners and Gloria Steinham-inspired activists.

“Has feminist become a dirty word?”demands a new Economist/YouGov Poll released Wednesday.

“Feminism is a mixed bag in the eyes of most Americans. Overall, 28 percent consider themselves to be feminists, 72 percent do not,” the findings report.

Among women, 38 percent consider themselves feminists. And men do not appear to be very liberated these days either: 18 percent “accept the label” for themselves, the poll reports.

“Democratic and Republicans women see the word differently: 48 percent of Democratic women but just 14 percent of Republican women would label themselves feminist,” the survey says.

Read more from this story HERE.

Mayor Bloomberg Launches Vegetarian-Only Public School

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Photo Credit: APBlocked by the courts from banning big sodas in the Big Apple, Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s administration has zeroed in on another target in a quest for healthier lifestyles: Meat.

Public School 244 in the Flushing section of New York’s Queens borough has gone vegan — the first public school in the nation to serve only vegetarian meals for breakfast and lunch.

Cafeteria workers at Active Learning Elementary School have switched out poultry for black beans, tofu and falafel. And the New York Daily News reported the elementary eaters actually like it.

“This is so good,” said 9-year-old Marian Satti of a black bean and cheddar cheese quesadilla served at Tuesday’s lunch, the Daily News said. “I’m enjoying that it didn’t have a lot of salt in it.”

School heads — led by Chancellor Dennis Walcott, a self-claimed fitness guru — tout the healthier eating as pro-kid. Healthy kids make happy students, administrators said in the Daily News report.

Read more from this story HERE.

IRS Now Using Technology to Track All Credit Card Transactions

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Photo Credit: US NewsThe Internal Revenue Service relies on technology more than ever to sniff out tax cheats using robo-audits and data mining—but so far it has caught lot of minnows, and big fish are still eluding detection.

Even as millions of people’s accounts are screened online and matched against their digital files elsewhere, the IRS’s data-detection tools come nowhere close to collecting the $400 billion in tax dodges estimated to take place each year. The area in which its robo-audits have had the most impact is on tax returns for low-income taxpayers who try to claim the Earned Income Tax Credit. In total, fraudulent claims totaled $2 billion, just 0.01 percent of the total of individual taxes. The EITC was the biggest single compliance problem cited.

That amount is expected to rise in the tax year ahead as the IRS extends the use of data mining to include the personal data of millions more taxpayers. Its sophisticated data-matching and pattern-recognition technology, largely developed by IBM over the past decade, will reach up the income ladder to include more middle-income and small-business filers who itemize deductions, although it is unlikely to have any impact on the complicated filings of high-net-worth taxpayers in the top 5 percent of income earnings, say tax experts who have studied the IRS plans.

“Real time” audits of electronic tax returns. The IRS’s next phase in high-tech tax collection will be to create a “real-time” check of tax returns to “match them to third party information,” said U.S. Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration J. Russell George in testimony before Congress. Starting this year, the IRS tools will be able to track all credit card transactions, for starters. The agency has also instructed agents on using online sources such as social media and e-commerce sites including eBay, as well as the rich data generated by mobile devices. In one controversial disclosure in April, the ACLU showed documents in which the IRS general counsel said the agency could look at emails without warrants, but the IRS has said it will not use this power.

Read more from this story HERE.

The U.S. Has Much, Much More Gas and Oil Than We Thought

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Photo Credit: APThe United States has double the amount of oil and three times the amount of natural gas than previously thought, stored deep under the states of North Dakota, South Dakota, and Montana, according to new data the Obama administration released Tuesday.

In announcing the new data in a conference call, Interior Secretary Sally Jewell also said the administration will release within weeks draft rules to regulate hydraulic fracturing, technology that has come under scrutiny for its environmental impact but that is essential to developing all of this energy.

“These world-class formations contain even more energy-resource potential than previously understood, which is important information as we continue to reduce our nation’s dependence on foreign sources of oil,” Jewell said in a statement.

The formations, called Bakken and Three Forks, span much of western North Dakota, the northern tip of South Dakota and the northeastern tip of Montana. The last time the United States Geological Survey assessed this area for its oil and gas reserves was in 2008. But that assessment did not include the Three Forks formation, which explains the substantial increase in the estimates. USGS estimates that these two formations together hold 7.4 billion barrels of undiscovered—but technically recoverable—oil and 6.7 trillion cubic feet of natural gas.

Read more from this story HERE.

Man Grabs Shotgun From Armed Robber in New Orleans (+video)

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Photo Credit: YouTubeWhen a robber armed with a shotgun pointed his weapon in the face of a man in New Orleans at 5am on Saturday morning, he probably was not expecting to be disarmed in a matter of seconds.

CCTV footage released by the local authorities shows the man walking down a street near the French Quarter at about 5am on Saturday morning. He is followed by an armed robber who cocks his weapon as he approaches.

Watch video here:

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Study: Desperate for Attention, White House Reporters Abandon Tough Questions of Obama

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Photo Credit: Pete SouzaA groundbreaking new study of White House press conferences over the past 23 years reveals that the events are in a death spiral, especially under President Obama. Reporters, desperate to keep the press conferences alive, have switched to asking easy questions in a bid to coax the president to host more of them, the study says.

Noting that the days when reporters like Sam Donaldson and Helen Thomas pestered President Reagan are long gone, the study in the authoritative journal American Politics Research said that adversarial questions have become rare as presidents have rebelled at them.

“The press want to encourage presidents to hold more of these direct exchanges to benefit their own reputations and media’s prestige,” said the study provided to Secrets. “The press will be less adversarial in these rare meetings to encourage more of them.”

The trend started with former President Clinton as he, former President George W. Bush and Obama curtailed press conferences and especially cut back on solo meetings with the press. Joint press conferences generally feature the president with a foreign leader and are considered easier to handle, said the study. In his first term, Obama held 38 joint and 27 solo press conferences, according to the study.

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President Obama’s Second Term Shaping up as a Train Wreck

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Photo Credit: APSuccessful presidential second terms have been hard to come by since the end of World War II. Dwight Eisenhower signed the 1957 Civil Rights Act and dispatched federal troops to escort black students to public schools in Little Rock, Ark., but then came Sputnik and the 1958 recession. Richard Nixon resigned in the wake of Watergate early in his second term, Ronald Reagan was distracted by Iran-Contra, Bill Clinton was impeached by the House of Representatives, and George W. Bush was preoccupied by the economic collapse of 2007 and the Great Recession that followed.

So perhaps no one should be surprised that President Obama’s prospects for his second term took a beating in April. Between the growing consensus that implementing Obamacare is a “train wreck” and confirmation that his administration is preventing Benghazi massacre survivors and whistle-blowers from testifying before Congress about what really happened in Libya, the outlines of a second-term collapse could take shape in the next several weeks.

A portent of trouble ahead came early in April when Time magazine’s Joe Klein, normally a reliable Obama enthusiast, warned that “we are now seeing weekly examples of this administration’s inability to govern.” Then the Obamacare train wreck meme flashed across the headlines when Sen. Max Baucus, one of the health reform law’s chief sponsors, told Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius that “I just see a huge train wreck coming down. You and I have discussed this many times, and I don’t see any results yet.” Despite Baucus’ subsequent efforts to walk back his comments, the “train wreck” quickly became a staple of political conversation across the ideological and media spectrum, fueled by growing evidence that health insurance premiums for millions of Americans will soon skyrocket because of Obamacare.

Read more from this story HERE.