Polls Show Increasing Majority of Americans Oppose HHS Abortion Mandate

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Photo Credit: APAs Obama administration supporters struggle to cast religious opponents of Obamacare’s HHS Mandate as waging a war on women ahead of the Supreme Court deciding that controversy next year, polls show Americans support the rights of conscience for business owners who do not want to be complicit in abortion due to their religious faith.

With the Obama White House’s approval, Secretary Kathleen Sebelius at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) issued a regulation interpreting the Affordable Care Act’s requirement that employer policies cover “preventive care” to include birth control and abortion-related services. Religious organizations and business owners object to this regulation as a violation of their rights of faith-based conscience, and the Supreme Court will decide the issue early next year in two cases consolidated under the name Sebelius v. Hobby Lobby Stores.


Two new polls reveal growing opposition to the mandate. First is a WPA poll of 801 likely voters commissioned by the Family Research Council and Alliance Defending Freedom, showing that 59 percent of likely voters oppose the mandate, while only 35 percent support the mandate. Second is a Rasmussen poll of 1,000 likely voters, showing 51 percent opposition to the mandate with 38 percent supporting.

The higher number showcasing the unpopularity of this Obamacare regulation in the first poll could be revealing. The wording of the Rasmussen question (the second poll) is: “Should businesses be required by law to provide health insurance that covers all government-approved contraceptives for women without co-payments or other charges to the patient?”

The wording in the Wilson Research (WPA) poll asks essentially the same question, but adds the information that insurance plans must “includ[e] drugs that can destroy a human embryo.” This is because some drugs required by the mandate prevent a human embryo from implanting in the uterus up to 10 days after an egg is fertilized, thereby resulting in its death.

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Obama Claims Health Care Problems don’t Reflect on his Management Style (+video)

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Photo Credit: APPresident Barack Obama said Thursday that problems with the Obamacare rollout don’t mean he needs to change his White House management style.

Instead, the health care mess is indicative of broader problems with the federal bureaucracy that he hasn’t been able to solve, Obama told Chris Matthews during an MSNBC interview.

“The challenge, I think, that we have going forward is not so much my personal management style or particular issues around White House organization,” Obama said. “It actually has to do with what I referred to earlier, which is we have these big agencies, some of which are outdated, some of which are not designed properly.”

Obama said “it was obvious that we needed additional controls in place” before Affordable Care Act enrollment began Oct. 1. Yet he said none of those controls center around the structure and style of his White House.

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Nelson Mandela Dies at Age 95

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Photo Credit: Fox News National leaders and ordinary citizens around the world joined Thursday in mourning Nelson Mandela, who spent 27 years as a prisoner in South Africa for opposing apartheid, then emerged to become his country’s first black president, winner of the Nobel Peace Prize and an enduring symbol of integrity, principle and resilience.

Mandela died “peacefully” Thursday night at 95 at his home in Johannesburg, surrounded by family, according to South African President Jacob Zuma.

Zuma, dressed in black, announced Mandela’s death in a nationally televised address, saying ” Our nation has lost its greatest son. Our people have lost a father. Although we knew that this day would come, nothing can diminish our sense of a profound and enduring loss.”

Mandela had spent almost three months in a Pretoria hospital after being admitted in June with a recurring lung infection.

Zuma said the man considered by many as the father of his nation would be accorded a full state funeral.

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What You Might Not Have Known About Nelson Mandela

By AP News

The world knows Nelson Mandela as a man who forever changed the course of modern history and who will surely continue to leave his mark long after his death Thursday at the age of 95.

You may know that he spent 27 years in prison, that he led South Africa out of apartheid and that he served as his nation’s first black president.

But did you know about the role of rugby in his legacy? His musings on Valentine’s Day? The lessons he taught sympathetic prison guards during his time behind bars?

Here are some details from Mandela’s life that you might not have known.

FATHER OF THE NATION

Nelson Mandela’s place as South Africa’s premier hero is so secure that the central bank released new banknotes in 2012 showing his face. Busts and statues in his likeness dot the country and buildings, squares and other places are named after him. At Soweto’s Regina Mundi Catholic church, a center of protests and funeral services for activists during the apartheid years, there is a stained glass image of Mandela with arms raised. South African Airways even emblazoned his silhouetted image on planes.

VALENTINE’S DAY

A $1.25 million project to digitally preserve a record of Mandela’s life went online last year at https://archive.nelsonmandela.org. The project by Google and Mandela’s archivists gives researchers — and anyone else — access to hundreds of documents, photographs and videos. In one 1995 note, written in lines of neat handwriting in blue ink, Mandela muses on Valentine’s day. It appears to be a draft of a letter to a young admirer, in which Mandela said his rural upbringing by illiterate parents left him “colossally ignorant” about simple things like a holiday devoted to romance.

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White House Admits Fabricating Story about Obama Meeting his Kenyan Uncle

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Photo Credit: AP/MetroWest Daily News, Allan JungThe White House on Thursday admitted fabricating an earlier claim that President Obama had never met his Kenyan uncle, Onyango “Omar” Obama.

Approximately 3 years ago, as Uncle Omar was fighting deportation following a DUI charge, the White House asserted to The Boston Globe without any apparent qualification that Onyango Obama “has never met his famous nephew.”

That statement was untrue.

Uncle Omar testified at an immigration hearing earlier this week that the younger Obama had briefly lived with him for several weeks in the 1970s.

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Abortion Rates Fall to Their Lowest Points in Over 30 Years

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Photo Credit: LifeNews The CDC expanded on its figures it released last week showing that abortions dropped another three percent in 2010 and are down 8 percent over the last two years. The new report shows the abortion rate has fallen to its lowest point in over 30 years.

The new report said: “The abortion rate was the lowest recorded during the 1976–2009 period and has dropped almost continuously since 1980. The abortion rate in 2009 (18.5) was 32% lower than in 1990 (27.4). The 2009 abortion rate for teenagers (16.6 per 1,000) was less than one-half the rate in 1991 (37.4) and 1990 (40.3).”

Among pregnant unmarried women, the abortion rate fell from 47.7 per 1,000 in 1990 to 28.9 per 1,000 in 2009. Among pregnant married women, the abortion rate fell from 10.6 per 1,000 to 6.1 per 1,000 over the same time. Combined, the rate fell about a third and is the lowest since 1976 — just three years after the Supreme Court allowed virtually unlimited abortions in Roe v. Wade..

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Saudis Turn to Russia in Move to Re-Balance Mideast

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Photo Credit: WND Saudi Arabia is proposing a sweeping deal to Russia that solidifies Moscow’s position in the Middle East and Persian Gulf largely at the expense of the United States, according to informed Egyptian security officials.

The deal incorporates increased Russian involvement in Egypt, Syria and the Persian Gulf, and even involves a Saudi guarantee to aid against terror plots targeting the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, Russia.

The Egyptian officials said the deal seeks to replace the U.S. with Russia as the major weapons dealer to Egypt.

However, the weapons sales to Cairo are only the tip of the potential re-balancing iceberg that follows a major fallout with the Saudis after President Obama’s outreach efforts to Iran.

The Saudis asked for the removal of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad while Riyadh would help establish a permanent central Russian role in the future of Syria, with a military presence in the country, the officials said.

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Report: NSA Tracks Billions Of Cellphones Daily

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Photo credit: from_koThe National Security Agency tracks the locations of nearly 5 billion cellphones every day overseas, including those belonging to Americans abroad, The Washington Post reported Wednesday.

The NSA inadvertently gathers the location records of “tens of millions of Americans who travel abroad” annually, along with the billions of other records it collects by tapping into worldwide mobile network cables, the newspaper said in a report on its website.

Such data means the NSA can track the movements of almost any cellphone around the world, and map the relationships of the cellphone user. The Post said a powerful analytic computer program called CO-TRAVELER crunches the data of billions of unsuspecting people, building patterns of relationships between them by where their phones go. That can reveal a previously unknown terrorist suspect, in guilt by cellphone-location association, for instance.

As the NSA doesn’t know which part of the data it might need, the agency keeps up to 27 terabytes, or more than double the text content of the Library of Congress’ print collection, the Post said. A 2012 internal NSA document said the volumes of data from the location program were “outpacing our ability to ingest, process and store” it, the newspaper said.

The program is detailed in documents given to the newspaper by former NSA systems analyst Edward Snowden. The Post also quotes unidentified NSA officials, saying they spoke with the permission of their agency.

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Liberal Legal Expert Testifies to Congress: Obama Has Become Danger to Constitution (+videos)

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Photo Credit: Chip Somodevilla/Getty ImagesA noted liberal Georgetown University law professor who represented members of Congress in a lawsuit over the Libyan war, represented workers at the secret Area 51 military base and served as counsel on national security cases says Barack Obama is a danger to the U.S. Constitution.

The comments from Jonathan Turley came during a House Judiciary Committee hearing Wednesday.

Chairman Rep. Bob Goodlatte, R-Va., asked him: “Professor Turley, the Constitution, the system of separated powers is not simply about stopping one branch of government from usurping another. It’s about protecting the liberty of Americans from the dangers of concentrated government power. How does the president’s unilateral modification of act[s] of Congress affect both the balance of power between the political branches and the liberty interests of the American people?”

Turley replied: “Thank you, Mr. Chairman. The danger is quite severe. The problem with what the president is doing is that he’s not simply posing a danger to the constitutional system. He’s becoming the very danger the Constitution was designed to avoid. That is the concentration of power.”

Turley explained that the “Newtonian orbit that the three branches exist in is a delicate one but it is designed to prevent this type of concentration.”


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FBI Lists Southern Poverty Law Center As ‘Resource’ for Hate Crimes (+video)

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Photo Credit: Web screenshotThe Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) says listing the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) as a resource on its “Hate Crimes” website page and linking to the organization is “not an endorsement” of the group or its research materials on hate crimes.

“The Resource link to SPLC is for informational purposes and not an endorsement of the organization or the information on their website,” an FBI spokesman told CNSNews.com.

On the FBI’s “Hate Crimes” page, it gives a general description of hate crimes and then includes a section headlined “In Depth,” which includes a prominent sub-head, “Resources.” Listed there under the Resources with a hyperlink is “Southern Poverty Law Center.”

CNSNews.com asked about the link to the SPLC because the man convicted of domestic terrorism this year for the shooting attack at the Family Research Council (FRC) told FBI investigators that he targeted the FRC after finding their name on the SPLC’s own “Hate Map,” where the pro-family and Christian organization is labeled as “anti-gay.”

“I find it incredible that a federal agency charged with protecting the American people allows itself to be connected to a group that was certified in court as the source that inspired an act of terrorism,” Lt. Gen Jerry Boykin, executive vice president of FRC, told CNSNews.com.

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Newtown Massacre Recordings Reveal Calm, Anguish and Gunshots (+audio)

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Photo Credit: APA teacher calmly explains she has been shot in the foot. Another woman, sounding anguished, pleads for help. A custodian relays information from officers at the scene to a police operator.

There is also the booming echo of gunshots.

Officials in Newtown, Connecticut, on Wednesday released audio recordings of emergency 911 phone calls from the Connecticut school shooting that killed 20 children and six educators almost a year ago, revealing raw emotion in the voice of the callers.

The audio files may be the final pieces of evidence released about the tragedy that rocked the United States on December 14, 2012, when gunman Adam Lanza, 20, shot dead his mother at home and then went to Sandy Hook Elementary school, where he massacred 26 people before killing himself.

“They’re still running, they’re still shooting,” pleaded one woman, sounding increasingly distraught over the course of the 24-second call. In the final seconds, she grows more insistent, pleading with the 911 operator for help.

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