White House Staffer Fired for Tweeting Under Fake Name

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Photo Credit: west.mA White House national security official was fired last week after being caught as the mystery Tweeter who has been tormenting the foreign policy community with insulting comments and revealing internal Obama administration information for over two years.

Jofi Joseph, a director in the non-proliferation section of the National Security Staff at the White House, has been surreptitiously tweeting under the moniker @natsecwonk, a Twitter feed famous inside Washington policy circles since it began in February, 2011 until it was shut down last week. Two administration officials confirmed that the mystery tweeter was Joseph, who has also worked at the State Department and on Capitol Hill for Senators Bob Casey (D-PA) and Joe Biden. Until recently, he was part of the administration’s team working on negotiations with Iran.

During his time tweeting under the @natsecwonk name, Joseph openly criticized the policies of his White House bosses and often insulted their intellect and appearance. At different times, he insulted or criticized several top White House and State Department officials, including former National Security Advisor Tom Donilon, Deputy National Security Advisor Ben Rhodes, Secretary of State John Kerry, and many many others.

The Daily Beast saved a long record of @natsecwonk’s tweets prior to the shutting down of his Twitter feed.

“I’m a fan of Obama, but his continuing reliance and dependence upon a vacuous cipher like Valerie Jarrett concerns me,” he once tweeted.

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Post Office $5.6 Billion Default Raises Urgency of Reforms

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Photo Credit: APWith Congress and the media focused on the government shutdown and how to avoid default on the national debt, little attention was directed toward the U.S. Postal Service which earlier this month defaulted on a required $5.6 billion payment for the healthcare of its future retirees.

The third default on the down-payment in just over a year underscores the necessity of much-needed reforms for the beleaguered Postal Service.

Rep. Darrell Issa of California told Newsmax that without “the freedom to realign its infrastructure and operations in line with the changing way Americans use mail, the agency will remain insolvent.”

“Prolonged insolvency of USPS will result in a massive taxpayer bailout and ongoing subsidy, or a sudden disruption in mail service, or both,” the California Republican said.

Just days before the default, USPS Board of Governors Chairman Mickey Barnett announced an increase in the price of stamps beginning in 2014, which he said was the result of USPS’ “precarious financial condition” and the “uncertain path toward enactment of postal reform legislation.”

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Ex-Secret Service Agent Charges ‘Pattern’ of Drunkenness by Traveling Obama Aides

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Photo Credit: Washington Examiner A former Secret Service agent who spent three years at President Obama’s side is claiming in a new book that White House staff regularly got drunk at “wheels-up” parties overseas, acting just as badly as agents fired for their involvement in a foreign booze-and-prostitution scandal last year.

Dan Bongino, who quit the service in 2011 to run as a Republican in the Maryland Senate race, charged that he witnessed Obama staffers boozing at parties in foreign nations after Air Force One was “wheels up” and the president headed for home. The parties bring together U.S. and foreign staff involved in presidential trips.

“The only bad behavior I ever witnessed at these events was by intoxicated White House staff,” wrote Bongino, who expressed dismay at how the agents fired in the Colombian sex scandal were treated by the president.

“I felt the president’s harsh words were inappropriate,” he said of Obama’s comments about the 2012 scandal involving agents advancing an Obama trip to Cartagena. “He failed to acknowledge that this was a pattern of behavior that was not uncommon among his own staff members within the White House.”

In the upcoming “Life Inside the Bubble,” provided in advance to Secrets, the 12-year agent added: “I assure you, if the same level of investigative scrutiny was applied to the White House staff members conducting advance work as was applied to the Secret Service, the results would not be flattering.”

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Obama Dumps Green Energy Billions on “Moderate Muslim” Country that Stones Adulterers

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Photo Credit: FrontPageMagWhen Obama invited the tyrannical Sultan of Brunei to sit beneath the portrait of George Washington, it’s a wonder the painting didn’t fall off the wall.

Obama laughingly said that the Sultan had gone through “nine presidents”, which is what happens when you don’t do elections and praised the “160 years of friendship between the United States and Brunei.”

Meanwhile Obama’s pivot to Asia consisted of dumping billions on “moderate” Muslim countries like genocidal Indonesia and tyrannical Brunei for… what else… Green Energy.

Obama, in partnership with Sultan Haji Hassanal Bolkiah of Brunei and President of the Republic of Indonesia Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, today proposed the U.S.-Asia Pacific Comprehensive Partnership for a Sustainable Energy Future.

The United States will provide up to $6 billion to support the Partnership.

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Harry Reid: Obamacare First Step to Single-Payer System

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Photo Credit: APAs the nation enters the third week of the Obamacare health exchange implementation, it’s worth taking a second look at some interesting comments made in August by one of the chief architects of the law.

In short, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., never really thought the exchanges would work.

He just sees the Affordable Care Act as the first step to a fully government-run health care system, something that could be easier to achieve after the glitch-riddled, problematic opening of the federal health insurance exchanges this month.

During an appearance on a Las Vegas PBS program in August, Reid said he sees a national single-payer health system as the natural next step for health care in America. Reid said the nation had to “work its way past” insurance-based health care, according to a recap provided by the Las Vegas Sun newspaper.

“What we’ve done with Obamacare is have a step in the right direction, but we’re far from having something that’s going to work forever,” Reid said.

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Palin: Disloyal, Corrupt GOP Establishment Colluding with Obama

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Photo Credit: Reuters/LandovFormer Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin may have taken another step toward seeking the 2016 Republican Presidential nomination with a combative op-ed on Breitbart.

Recalling that she had once beaten crooked Republican politicians in Alaska – who’d brazenly tagged themselves “the Corrupt Bastards Club” – Palin rhetorically asked: “Doesn’t it seem like [today] we have a Corrupt Bastards Club in D.C.? On steroids?”

Disloyal Republicans are enabling President Barack Obama to march the country toward socialism while denouncing Sens. Ted Cruz, Mike Lee and tea party-aligned House members who have been trying to defund Obamacare, Palin charged.

Establishment GOP politicians failed to use the power of the purse to halt Obamacare’s implementation. Instead, “they balked, waved the white flag, and joined the lapdog media in trashing the good guys who fought for us,” Palin wrote.

She challenged the Republican establishment to unite behind conservative grassroots efforts to block Obamacare before it is too late.

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CBS’s Dickerson: White House Risks ‘Credibility Death Spiral’ Over ‘Total Fiasco’ of ObamaCare Site (+video)

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Photo Credit: newsbusters.orgJohn Dickerson could not have been more blunt on Monday’s CBS This Morning about the political damage HealthCare.gov’s well-established technical difficulties is already causing President Obama: “It’s been far worse than a glitch. It’s been a total fiasco, as Senator McCain said. And the problem here is that the administration could get into, sort of, a credibility death spiral.”

The liberal political director, who is usually an Obama apologist, also surprisingly acknowledged that conservatives were right in their longstanding criticisms of ObamaCare: [MP3 audio available here; video below the jump]

JOHN DICKERSON:

There has always been charges from the right that the President’s health care promises didn’t turn out to be true. But then, some of those charges turned out to have some merit. The President said, if you had your own health care plan and if you were satisfied with it, you’d be able to keep it. Well, that didn’t quite turn out to be true.

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Obama: Your Call is Important to Us (+video)

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By Carrie Budoff Brown.

President Barack Obama delivered an Obamacare speech Monday that sounded a lot like hold music.

With a staunch defense of the law and a hint of outrage over its problems, Obama sought to buy time with Congress, potential customers and the public while his administration rushes to fix HealthCare.gov, the beleaguered website that threatens the viability of his signature domestic achievement.

But as congressional oversight committees circle, he has to hope that improvements to the website ramp up more quickly than do the calls for suspending or delaying enrollment.

“There’s no sugarcoating it. The website has been too slow,” Obama said in the White House Rose Garden. “People have been getting stuck during the application process. And I think it’s fair to say that nobody’s more frustrated by that than I am. Precisely because the product is good, I want the cash registers to work, I want the checkout lines to be smooth, so I want people to be able to get this great product.

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Photo Credit: APDems caught in Obamacare uproar

By Jonathan Allen and Jennifer Haberkorn.

It’s not the GOP that President Barack Obama has to worry about in defending his botched health care rollout, it’s fellow Democrats.

They voted for the law, sang its praises for three-plus years and still believe in the promise of health care reform. But now they face a conundrum: stay in lock step with Obama and risk their credibility as advocates for the law’s benefits or publicly criticize the administration for its recent problems — especially a failure to more quickly acknowledge, and rectify, the major malfunction of its Internet marketplace.

It’s a particularly vexing question for Democrats worried about their party’s chances in the 2014 midterm elections, and, increasingly, they’re opting for the latter strategy.

“What has happened is unacceptable in terms of the glitches,” House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi said on ABC’s “This Week.” “They were overwhelmed to begin with. There is much that needs to be done to correct the situation.” It was the second time in a week that Pelosi had gone public with her dismay over the implementation of a law that she carried to enactment by winning tough votes on the House floor in 2009 and ’10.

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Miss World: ‘I’m Against Abortion,’ ‘Against Divorce’ and ‘Sex is For Marriage’ (+video)

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Photo Credit: APTwenty-three-year-old Megan Lynn Young, who was recently crowned Miss World 2013 at the Miss World Pageant, said she is pro-life, does not use contraceptives, opposes divorce, and thinks the way to avoid unwanted sex is to “just say no.”

Miss Young was born in Virginia to a Filipino mother and an American father. She lives in the Philippines and represented that nation at the Miss World Pageant held in Bali, Indonesia on Sept. 28.

In an interview on the Filipino news show ANC Headstart, as first reported by LifeSite News on Oct. 14, host Karen Davila asked Young about a controversial reproductive health (RH) law currently in limbo in the courts in the Philippines and related topics.

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Hobby Lobby Appeals to Supreme Court to Stop Obama Admin From Forcing it to Obey HHS Mandate

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Photo Credit: Getty ImagesChristian craft store Hobby Lobby today filed papers with the Supreme Court asking it to take it case against the Obama administration, which is attempting to make it comply with the HHS mandate that compels religious companies to pay for birth control and abortion-causing drugs for their employees.

In July, a federal court granted Hobby Lobby a preliminary injunction against the HHS abortion-drug mandate. The injunction prevented the Obama administration from enforcing the mandate against the Christian company, but the Obama administration appealed that ruling recently. The government’s appeal makes it highly likely that the Supreme Court will decide the issue in the upcoming term.

The Obama administration submitted papers in September and Hobby Lobby filed its own papers today.

Hobby Lobby asked the U.S. Supreme Court to review its case and decide whether the Green family will be required to provide and pay for life-terminating drugs and devices in violation of their religious beliefs, according to an email from its attorneys to LifeNews.

“Hobby Lobby’s case raises important questions about who can enjoy religious freedom,” said Kyle Duncan, general counsel of the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty and lead lawyer for Hobby Lobby. “Right now, some courts recognize the rights of business owners like the Green family, and others do not. Religious freedom is too important to be left to chance. The Supreme Court should take this case and protect religious freedom for the Green family and Hobby Lobby.”

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