APOPKA, Fla. – Customers and workers dealt with an unwelcome intruder at a Walmart in Central Florida.
A 6-foot gator slithered up to the Apopka store’s entryway Sunday morning and stayed there, causing the automatic doors to open and close.
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Photo Credit: Daily Caller If you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor under Obamacare — if you both belong to the same race.
Obamacare’s spectacular flop of a rollout distracts from its crude calculus that encourages the allocation of healthcare resources along racial lines and a doctor-patient system splintered into ethnicities.
While the 2010 Patient Protecion and Affordable Care Act’s language on diversity sounds innocuous, a review of the frankly separatist thinking of the law’s ardent supporters indicates Obamacare is aiming for a health care system that puts political correctness above the struggle against illness and death.
A 2009 report by the Center for American Progress (CAP) examining the House and Senate bill eventually signed by President Barack Obama advocates pairing patients and doctors of the same race, a goal toward which the law channels taxpayer dollars.
“Research suggests that health care providers’ diagnostic and treatment decisions, as well as their feelings about patients, are influenced by patients’ race or ethnicity,” the CAP report reads. “Several studies have shown that racial concordance is substantially and positively related to patient satisfaction.”
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Photo Credit: IsraelinUSAThe United States should not ease sanctions against Iran until it can prove that Iran has fully dismantled its nuclear program, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Sunday.
The warning comes amid reports that the Obama administration is considering offering Iran a chance to recover frozen assets overseas in exchange for steps to scale back its nuclear program.
“The question is not of hope,” Netanyahu said on “Meet the Press” on NBC. “The question is of actual results.”
“I think the pressure has to be maintained on Iran, even increased on Iran, until it actually stops its nuclear program,” he added. “You don’t want to go through halfway measures.”
Netanyahu compared Iran’s nuclear program to chemical weapons stockpiles in Syria, which President Bashar Assad has pledged to eliminate.
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Photo Credit: CNN Screen Shot By Noah Rothman.
Texas Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) appeared on CNN’s State of the Union on Sunday morning where reporter Dana Bash questioned him about the efficacy of his position on the government shutdown over the Affordable Care Act. Cruz said that those Republicans who want to implement the ACA and hasten its collapse are misguided.
Bash asked Cruz if he believed that Health and Human Services Sec. Kathleen Sibelius should resign. Cruz replied that he believed she should. Bash questioned him about the politics of that. She asked, if Sebelius is such a liability for the Obama administration, whether Republicans benefit more from her remaining in her position.
“There are Republican gray beards that make the point, ‘Let’s let this collapse,’” he said.
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Cruz: I don’t work for party bosses
By Lucy Mccalmont.
Sen. Ted Cruz says he’s not bothered by the tensions and anger from his Republican colleagues over his strategy to defund Obamacare, saying he doesn’t work for “party bosses.”
“Not remotely, because the people I work for are the women and men and men you just saw. I work for 26 million Texans. That’s my job to fight for them. I don’t work for the party bosses in Washington. I work for the people of Texas and I fight for them,” Cruz said in an interview aired Sunday on CNN’s “State of the Union.”
The freshman Republican from Texas also took a shot at his Republican colleagues, whom he said would commented “very differently” if cameras were inside their closed-door meetings.
“You know what was very interesting about some of those closed-door discussions? What I said in those closed-door discussions, I would’ve said the exact same thing if CNN”s camera was sitting in the room. What I say privately to my colleagues is the same thing I say publicly,” Cruz said.
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Photo Credit: Getty Images Google engineering director and futurist Ray Kurzweil believes we are close to realizing everlasting life and is dead-set on getting us there.
The inventor and noted author believes the key to such a scientific breakthrough is a system of ‘bridges’ that enable the body to move from strength to strength over time.
The youthful 65-year-old currently takes 150 supplements a day, which he argues if the first bridge.
The idea is to build enough bridges to ensure the body holds out long enough for life-lengthening technology to come into its own.
He has likened the biology of the body to computer software and believes we are all ‘out of date’.
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Photo Credit: SpiegelThe NSA has been systematically eavesdropping on the Mexican government for years. It hacked into the president’s public email account and gained deep insight into policymaking and the political system. The news is likely to hurt ties between the US and Mexico.
The National Security Agency (NSA) has a division for particularly difficult missions. Called “Tailored Access Operations” (TAO), this department devises special methods for special targets.
That category includes surveillance of neighboring Mexico, and in May 2010, the division reported its mission accomplished. A report classified as “top secret” said: “TAO successfully exploited a key mail server in the Mexican Presidencia domain within the Mexican Presidential network to gain first-ever access to President Felipe Calderon’s public email account.”
According to the NSA, this email domain was also used by cabinet members, and contained “diplomatic, economic and leadership communications which continue to provide insight into Mexico’s political system and internal stability.” The president’s office, the NSA reported, was now “a lucrative source.”
This operation, dubbed “Flatliquid,” is described in a document leaked by whistleblower Edward Snowden, which SPIEGEL has now had the opportunity to analyze. The case is likely to cause further strain on relations between Mexico and the United States, which have been tense since Brazilian television network TV Globo revealed in September that the NSA monitored then-presidential candidate Enrique Peña Nieto and others around him in the summer of 2012. Peña Nieto, now Mexico’s president, summoned the US ambassador in the wake of that news, but confined his reaction to demanding an investigation into the matter.
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Photo Credit: Daily Caller The high-stakes overhaul of the nation’s immigration laws faces a little-noticed obstacle — the reluctance of many GOP legislators to accept the political trade offered by President Barack Obama and his fellow progressives.
“We’re split all over the place,” Alabama Republican Rep. Mo Brooks told The Daily Caller.
It’s a fight that combines Obama’s progressives with chicken processors and software moguls, pitting them against about 200 GOP legislators, who are looking for ways to not anger any employers, or any of their donors or all-important voters.
Democrats pushing the Senate’s complex bill would quickly earn boost their voting bloc to the tune of 11 million amnestied illegals, plus 22 million new immigrants that would be welcomed by 2023. The potential gain for GOP legislators? They could provide their business allies with immediate access to the 33 million immigrant workers and customers, plus up to two million temporary guest-workers per year.
But most GOP legislators are balking at the trade, partly because the GOP’s own voters strongly oppose the import of more workers during an extended recession.
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Photo Credit: Reuters/Robert GalbraithRetired schoolteacher Donald Hovasse signed up for Twitter about a year ago at the urging of his daughter. He lost interest after trying the service a few times and finding lots of celebrities but few of his friends using the online social network.
“I didn’t really get the point of it at all,” said the Las Vegas resident. “Most of them were people I wasn’t interested in hearing what they had to say anyway.” He said, however, that he does check Facebook every day to see what his friends are up to.
Hovasse’s experience highlights a risk for investors as Twitter Inc marches towards this year’s most anticipated initial public offering in the United States, expected to begin trading on the New York Stock Exchange in mid-November.
According to a Reuters/Ipsos poll, 36 percent of 1,067 people who have joined Twitter say they do not use it, and 7 percent say they have shut their account. The online survey, conducted October 11 to 18, has a credibility interval, a measure of its accuracy, of plus or minus 3.4 percentage points.
In comparison, only 7 percent of 2,449 Facebook members report not using the online social network, and 5 percent say they have shut down their account. The results have a credibility interval of 2.3 percent.
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Photo Credit: Sue Ogrocki/APOklahoma Senator Jim Inhofe, recovering from a recent quadruple bypass, is now using the heart surgery in his attacks on Obamacare.
After going in for a routine colonoscopy, doctors found Inhofe’s arteries were so clogged he barely made it onto the operating table, he said in comments airing on journalist Aaron Klein’s WABC radio show tonight.
The 79-year-old suggested that if he had been in a part of the world with “socialized medicine like Obama is trying to impose upon America,” the operation never would have happened.
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Photo Credit: APSouthern playwright Tennessee Williams left us with this observation:
The only thing worse than a liar is a liar that’s also a hypocrite.
It is universally accepted that hypocrites are a special kind of liar, deserving of a special kind of contempt. With this in mind, read the following:
The fact that we are here today to debate raising America’s debt limit is a sign of leadership failure. It’s a sign that the US Government can’t pay its own bills. It’s a sign that we now depend on ongoing financial assistance from foreign countries to finance our Government’s reckless fiscal policies. Increasing America’s debt weakens us domestically and internationally. Leadership means that “the buck stops here.” Instead, Washington today is shifting the burden of bad choices onto the backs of our children and grandchildren. America has a debt problem and a failure of leadership. Americans deserve better.
Now, one might be inclined to think this quote might be the recent utterance of a Ted Cruz, Mike Lee, Rand Paul, or some other extremist conservative. But actually, these are the words of Barack Obama in 2006, criticizing the Bush administration for increasing America’s debt and raising the debt limit in response.
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