Obama: ‘I’m Not Budging’

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Photo Credit: Daily Caller President Barack Obama tried Tuesday to sway the public’s jaundiced view of the budget crisis with a mishmash of economic threats, campaign-style attacks on Republicans, repeated offers of budget talks and numerous promises to reject any compromise.

“I’m not budging when it comes to the full faith and credit of the United States…I think people understand that,” Obama told reporters in the White House’s press office.

The threat came shortly after he suggested he’d be willing to accept a budget deal that would require the GOP to abandon its Obamacare reforms in exchange for subsequent chats with him about ways to improve the effectiveness of his health-sector takeover.

During the hour-long press conference and speaking in a low, calm voice, Obama slammed the GOP as deadbeats and extremists, as kidnappers, as unserious and insincere. He portrayed them as opposed to health care and as threatening to drop a “nuclear bomb” on the nation’s economy, while repeatedly also praising himself as willing to compromise and negotiate.

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‘Gestapo Tactics’ Meet Seniors at Yellowstone

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By Fox News

A Massachusetts woman says she and fellow tour-group members were locked under armed guard inside a Yellowstone National Park hotel during a visit to the park at the start of the government slimdown.

Pat Vaillancourt told the Newburyport News newspaper the incident unfolded Oct. 1 when they were already inside the park and a ranger would not let them off the tour bus to photograph roaming bison.

The group — roughly 40 senior citizens from around the world — was allowed to return to the Old Faithful Inn to spend a second night at the hotel, but some with limited English skills thought they were under arrest, she said.


Vaillancourt told the newspaper the two-and-a-half hour ride leaving Yellowstone wasn’t much better because tour members couldn’t make a scheduled comfort stop at a dude ranch because the owner was told he would have his license revoked for accommodating the group.

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By John Macone – Newburyport Daily News

Pat Vaillancourt was one of thousands of people who found themselves in a national park as the federal government shutdown went into effect on Oct. 1. For many hours her tour group, which included senior citizen visitors from Japan, Australia, Canada and the United States, were locked in a Yellowstone National Park hotel under armed guard….

“We’ve become a country of fear, guns and control,” said Vaillancourt, who grew up in Lawrence. “It was like they brought out the armed forces. Nobody was saying, ‘we’re sorry,’ it was all like — ” as she clenched her fist and banged it against her forearm….

[After park rangers prevented the group from stopping to take pictures of bison], the seniors quickly filed back onboard and the bus went to the Old Faithful Inn, the park’s premier lodge located adjacent to the park’s most famous site, Old Faithful geyser. That was as close as they could get to the famous site — barricades were erected around Old Faithful, and the seniors were locked inside the hotel, where armed rangers stayed at the door…

The bus trip made headlines in [the town of] Livingston [near the park entrance], where the local newspaper Livingston Enterprise interviewed the tour guide, Gordon Hodgson, who accused the park service of “Gestapo tactics.” He added, “The national parks belong to the people…This isn’t right…”

“My father took a lot of crap from the Japanese,” [as a prisoner of war Vaillancourt] recalled, her eyes welling with tears. “Every day they made him bow to the Japanese flag. But he stood up to them. “He always said to stand up for what you believe in, and don’t let them push you around,” she said, adding she was sad to see “fear, guns and control” turned on citizens in her own country.

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Senators Murkowski, McCain and Kirk Signal Willingness to Work with Dems to Raise the Debt Ceiling Without Conditions

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The United States government is expected to hit the debt ceiling in less than two weeks, and Senate Democrats have said they’re ready to raise it with a “clean” bill to avoid default on the national debt. Reports that Senate Republicans would consider supporting such a bill began to roll in on Monday.

Sens. Mark Kirk (R-Ill.), John McCain (R-Ariz.) and Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) have all floated the idea of voting for a clean debt limit increase, according to reports by Politico, ABC News and Public Radio International.

Though these Republicans seem willing to meet Democrats in the middle, House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) has made clear that the House won’t budge.

Earlier this year, Senator Murkowski stated that she did not believe the debt ceiling should be used as political leverage in seeking to obtain spending cuts from the Obama Administration and Senate Democrats.

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Boehner Dismisses Obama’s Call for Republicans ‘Unconditional Surrender’

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Photo Credit: Fox News ScreenshotHouse Speaker John Boehner dismissed President Obama’s position on the fiscal crisis as “not sustainable” Tuesday, only hours after Obama held a non-press conference to say he was willing to compromise but not negotiate.

“What the president said today was, if there’s unconditional surrender by Republicans, he’ll sit down and talk with us. That’s not the way our government works,” Boehner said.

The speaker said he wants conversations about spending cuts to start “now,” not “next week” or “next month.”

It’s unclear how Republicans will navigate Obama’s stance going forward, with the country in week two of the partial government shutdown. Their demand is that they get some concessions — like spending cuts — in exchange for passing a spending bill and raising the debt ceiling.

Boehner’s appeal on Tuesday was for Democrats to simply come to the negotiating table.

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After House Democrats Arrested At Immigration Rally, White House Pressures GOP (+video)

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Photo Credit: inquisitr.comBy The Inquisitr

After House Democrats were arrested Tuesday at a rally to support an immigration overhaul, the White House turned up the pressure even more on Republicans who stand in the way of reform.

The Democrats arrested were part of a march in Washington on the National Mall to urge Congress to take action on immigration.

Immigration reform has been stuck in Congress after a reform bill drafted by the bipartisan Gang of Eight passed the Senate in June. The bill would create a pathway toward citizenship for illegal immigrants while also increasing border security. It would also increase the number of visas for skilled labor.

While it has support in the Senate, the Republican-controlled House remains a more difficult landscape. Conservatives have characterized the bill as “amnesty” for illegal immigrants, and its passage seems unlikely.

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Photo Credit: DREW ANGERER/GETTY House Democrats arrested during immigration protest

By CBS News

Several members of Congress were arrested after participating in an immigration “sit-in” on Capitol Hill demanding that House Republicans act to pass immigration reform.

Reps. John Lewis, D-Ga.; Keith Ellison, D-Minn.;. Charles Rangel, D-N.Y.; Jan Schakowsky, D-Ill.; and Luis Gutierrez, D-Ill., were among the lawmakers arrested by the Capitol Police for blocking a street near the Capitol.

The representatives are calling on Congress, particularly Republicans, to push immigration legislation forward. The Senate has passed a bill that includes amped up border security. House Democrats have unveiled a plan with a path to citizenship for the estimated 11 million immigrants living in the U.S. illegally. But it’s unclear if the GOP-led House will ever pass legislation.

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Jon Stewart Grills Health Secretary Kathleen Sebelius on Obamacare and Accuses her of Lying to Him (+videos)

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Photo Credit: Comedy Central Jon Stewart has been attacking the Republicans all week over the government shutdown but he took aim at a member of his own party on Monday night.

Kathleen Sebelius, the Secretary of Health and Human Services, was probably expecting a soft-ball interview about the roll out of President Obama’s signature health care plan but instead she was left backpedalling to try to recover from his pointed criticisms.

The Comedy Central host started by poking fun at how long the online marketplace takes to load, saying that it was comparable to the amount of time it would take to download all of the movies ever created.

After going for the easy laugh, things turned much more serious when he brought up a ‘legitimate criticism’ that Republicans have made.

Businesses with more than 50 full time employees have been given a delay so that they don’t have to provide health insurance for their employees for another year, whereas individuals have to sign up by December 15 or face a fine.


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Titanic Obamacare Hits Iceberg of Reality

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Photo Credit: A Train/flickrThe first reviews are in, and so, far, Obamacare is a lot like “new” Coke. Few product roll-outs in history have had more problems.

Even some of its strongest supporters are the most scathing critics of the way Obamcare has been introduced to the public.

When President Obama and Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius compared the Obamacare website problems to a glitch in an Apple product roll-out, Washington Post columnist Ezra Kelin responded, “But the Obama administration doesn’t have a basically working product that would be improved by a software update. They have a website that almost nobody has been able to successfully use.

“If Apple launched a major new product that functioned as badly as Obamacare’s online insurance marketplace, the tech world would be calling for (Apple CEO) Tim Cook’s head.”

Klein’s column was titled “Obamacare’s website is really bad.”

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Sowell: Inarticulate Republicans

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Photo Credit: National Review If the continued existence of mathematics depended on the ability of the Republicans to defend the proposition that two plus two equals four, it would probably mean the end of mathematics and of all the things that require mathematics.

The Republican speaker of the House of Representatives, John Boehner, epitomized what has been wrong with the Republicans for decades when he emerged from a White House meeting last Wednesday, went over to the assembled microphones, briefly expressed his disgust with the Democrats’ intransigence, and walked on away.

We are in the midst of a national crisis, immediately affecting millions of Americans and potentially affecting the kind of country this will become if Obamacare goes into effect — and yet, with multiple television-network cameras focused on Speaker Boehner as he emerged from the White House, he couldn’t be bothered to prepare a statement that would help clarify a confused situation, full of fallacies and lies.

Boehner is not unique in having a blind spot when it comes to recognizing the importance of articulation and the need to put some serious time and effort into presenting your case in a way that people outside the Beltway would understand. On the contrary, he has been all too typical of Republican leaders in recent decades.

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Obama to Nominate Janet Yellen as Federal Reserve Chairman

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Photo Credit: AP/Eugene HoshikoPresident Obama will announce Janet Yellen as his nominee to replace Ben Bernanke as chairman of the Federal Reserve system on Wednesday afternoon, White House officials said Tuesday evening.

The 67-year old Yellen, the current vice chairman of the Fed, would become the first female leader of the central bank.

Yellen has been viewed as the favorite for the job since former Obama economic adviser Larry Summers withdrew his name from consideration in September.

Previously, Summers’ candidacy had drawn an unusual amount of attention to the nomination process, which usually is a relatively muted affair. He was forced to exit when a number of Democratic senators, including members of the Senate Banking Committee that approves Fed nominations, announced that they would not support him.

Yellen is expected to face a much easier path to confirmation. A number of Democrats took the unusual step of endorsing her for the post as an alternative to Summers when he was rumored to be Obama’s preferred pick.

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Why America Wants Drones That Can Kill Without Humans

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Photo Credit: defenseone.comScientists, engineers and policymakers are all figuring out ways drones can be used better and more smartly, more precise and less damaging to civilians, with longer range and better staying power. One method under development is by increasing autonomy on the drone itself.

Eventually, drones may have the technical ability to make even lethal decisions autonomously: to respond to a programmed set of inputs, select a target and fire their weapons without a human reviewing or checking the result. Yet the idea of the U.S. military deploying a lethal autonomous robot, or LAR, is sparking controversy. Though autonomy might address some of the current downsides of how drones are used, they introduce new downsides policymakers are only just learning to grapple with.

The basic conceit behind a LAR is that it can outperform and outthink a human operator. “If a drone’s system is sophisticated enough, it could be less emotional, more selective and able to provide force in a way that achieves a tactical objective with the least harm,” said Purdue University Professor Samuel Liles. “A lethal autonomous robot can aim better, target better, select better, and in general be a better asset with the linked ISR [intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance] packages it can run.”

Though the pace for drone strikes has slowed down — only 21 have struck Pakistan in 2013, versus 122 in 2010 according to the New America Foundation — unmanned vehicles remain a staple of the American counterinsurgency toolkit. But drones have built-in vulnerabilities that military planners still have not yet grappled with. Last year, for example, an aerospace engineer told the House Homeland Security Committee that with some inexpensive equipment he could hack into a drone and hijack it to perform some rogue purpose.

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