Solid Majority of Americans Say UN Doing a Poor Job

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More Americans believe the U.N. is doing a poor rather than good job in trying to solve the problems it has had to face, by 57% to 35%. This rating is slightly worse than a year ago, when 50% said the U.N. was doing a poor job, and thus continues a decade-long trend of low public confidence in the U.N.

These results come from the Feb. 6-9 Gallup World Affairs Poll. The U.N. has been struggling to help bring the bloody, three-year Syrian civil war to a close, with the most recent U.N.-sponsored peace talks in Geneva widely seen as a failure, to the point that the U.N. envoy for Syria, Lakhdar Brahimi, publicly apologized to the Syrian people that the peace conference did not yield any progress.

With such intractable conflicts as Syria dogging the U.N., it may not be surprising that many Americans would consider the international body — originally proposed by U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt and established with strong U.S. support — ineffective. However, Americans’ negative evaluation of the U.N.’s functioning is nothing new. After the U.S. failed to win U.N. support for the invasion of Iraq in March 2003, the percentage of Americans who said the U.N. was doing a good job fell 13 points to 37%, and hit a nadir of 26% in 2009. It has failed to climb above 40% since then.

Prior to the Iraq war, Americans’ reviews of the international body waxed and waned. Opinions were generally positive in the 1950s and 1960s — not long after the institution was created — before falling off in the 1970s, a decade marked by continued war in Vietnam, a war between Israel and several Arab nations, and OPEC’s oil embargo of the U.S. American attitudes became more positive in the early 1990s, when the U.N. Security Council maintained a unified front against Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait.

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Biden: I Would Run Against Hillary (+video)

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Photo Credit: Chip SomodevillaVice President Biden made it clear Tuesday he’s open to running against Hillary Clinton in a 2016 Democratic presidential primary.

Speaking on ABC’s “The View,” Biden pushed back when co-host Barbara Walters claimed he had said he would not enter the next race for the White House if the former secretary of State did.

“No, I haven’t” said that, Biden told Walters. He added later that “whether [Clinton] runs or not will not affect my decision.”

The 2016 questions came as Biden sought to promote ObamaCare’s marketplaces with the show’s heavily female audience.

The White House is urging mothers to tell their kids to sign up for health plans before March 31, when open enrollment ends for 2014.

Read more this story HERE.

Drought Leaves California Farmers Choosing Which Crops Get Water and Which Wither

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Photo Credit: GETTY IMAGESA federal agency’s recent announcement that the California’s Central Valley will get zero percent water allocation this year was devastating for farmers already dealing with the worst drought seen in decades.

One of the world’s most productive agricultural regions, the enormous valley is reeling after the driest year in more than a century. But last week, the Department of Interior’s Bureau of Reclamation, which supplies water to a third of the irrigated farmland in California through a 500-mile network of canals and tunnel, said it won’t be able to deliver any of the water sought by farmers.

“It goes beyond devastation, you’re going to see farms that have been in business 30 and 40 years, they do not have any water, they are out of business,” said Dennis Falaschi, general manager of the Panoche Water District.

The drought, combined with continued protections for endangered species, has forced farmers to find alternatives. Most farmers have already switched to drip irrigation, which is much more efficient than the flood irrigation technique used when water was plentiful. But it still may not be enough, as farmers are now choosing which crops to water – and which to let wither.

“This farm’s been here for over 90 years and we recognize that Mother Nature throws a drought occasionally and so we made the decision not to plant more than a third of this farm,” says Mike Stearns, a Central Valley Farmer.

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Wayne Allyn Root: Obama’s ‘Voter ID’ Scam is Busted!

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Photo Credit: The Blaze Folks, we are being scammed. Democrats are winning elections through what appears to be massive voter fraud.

There is a saying, “He with the gold rules.” Well, whoever wins elections has the gold. The winner has the power to change everything – so they rule. It doesn’t matter if the win was by a small margin, or if the win was by committing fraud. Winning is everything.

Many citizens may not realize most national elections are won by a sliver of votes in only a few, key battleground states. Change the vote totals by a small bit in a few states and Mitt Romney is the president: Ohio, Florida, Virginia, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, Wisconsin, Iowa, Pennsylvania.

Why did Obama and Democrats win by just a sliver in those few battleground states? In 2012 it was a powerful one-two punch, both of which I believe were out and out voter fraud.

First, Obama used the IRS as his personal mafia thug enforcers to persecute, intimidate and destroy his political opposition – ranging from Tea Parties, to conservative fundraising organizations, to top GOP donors, to high-profile outspoken critics in the media (like myself).

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CNN’s Rampage Against Ted Nugent Leads to Disastrous Ratings (+video)

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Photo Credit: AFPBy John Nolte.

CNN is a cable news network in its death throes. As ratings return to near-historic lows, CNN chief Jeff Zucker is obviously making terrible decisions while in panic-mode. Just-released ratings show that CNN’s stupid, wildly hypocritical and hysterical rampage against Ted Nugent last week led to a disastrous Friday.

Narratives are all about momentum. You want to build interest as the viewer wonders where the story will go. Across almost every one of its shows, CNN’s stable of mostly left-wing anchors — especially Wolf Blitzer, Carol Costello, and Ashleigh Banfield — drove the phony Nugent story using every trick in the book. This story defined CNN last week and it can now go down as yet another dismal failure. I’ll explain why after the numbers:

Total Friday viewership at CNN averaged a paltry 254,000 viewers with only 70,000 in the 25-54 age group. Despite all the energy poured into CNN’s phony outrage over Nugent, this is actually down a little from last week. Zucker and his tribe didn’t make public fools of themselves for a full week in the hopes holding on to the dismal ratings from the prior week. The idea was to stoke an increase in ratings through ginned up national outrage.

In the 25-54 demo, here is how catastrophic Friday was for specific CNN programs:

New Day 77k
Wolf Blitzer 52k
Crossfire 25k-
Wolf Blitzer 49k
Erin Burnett 58k
Anderson Cooper 83k

Read more this story HERE.

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Photo Credit: CNNWatch: Ted Nugent Annoys CNN Host by Taking Credit for Getting Piers Morgan’s ‘A** Thrown Out’, Blasting Her Colleagues

By Jason Howerton.

Conservative rocker and NRA board member Ted Nugent took some credit for getting Piers Morgan’s CNN show cancelled during an interview with one of the network’s other anchors, Erin Burnett. His comments came after Burnett asked him if his apology for calling President Barack Obama a “sub-human mongrel” was sincere.

Nugent insisted his apology was serious and also defended himself against claims that his comments were racist in nature.

“We call bad people who are destroying our neighborhoods mongrels,” Nugent said, later adding, “I don’t have a racist bone in my body!”

Read more this story HERE.

Shear Panic: Plane Bird Strike Caught On-Camera

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Photo Credit: Fox News A terrifying moment for a pilot was caught on tape as a bird slammed into his plane and shattered the windshield.

Rob Weber said he had his 1986 Piper Saratoga on autopilot in clear, calm weather this weekend whether when it suddenly struck the bird.

Read more this story HERE.

Obama Mourns Passing of Harold Ramis, Not Shirley Temple Black

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Photo Credit: AP Photo/Jason DeCrowThere are many things to criticize President Obama for — I won’t even list them since you know what they are — but give him credit when he issues a statement about a famous citizen who has passed.

Obama on Tuesday released a statement regarding the death of Harold Ramis, the actor, writer and director who was responsible for such classics as “Ghostbusters” and “Caddyshack.”

“Michelle and I were saddened to hear of the passing of Harold Ramis, one of America’s greatest satirists, and like so many other comedic geniuses, a proud product of Chicago’s Second City,” Obama said.

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Governors Erupt in Partisan Dispute at White House

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Photo Credit: AP Photo/Charles DharapakThe nation’s governors emerged from a meeting with President Barack Obama on Monday claiming harmony, only to immediately break into an on-camera partisan feud in front of the West Wing.

Louisiana Republican Gov. Bobby Jindal lashed out first, saying if Obama were serious about growing the economy he would approve the Keystone XL pipeline project and take other executive actions.

Instead, Jindal said, Obama “seems to be waving the white flag of surrender” on the economy by focusing on raising the federal minimum wage to $10.10, up from $7.25. “The Obama economy is now the minimum wage economy. I think we can do better than that,” Jindal said.

Jindal’s statements were the kind that Republicans often make on television appearances or at partisan events, but don’t usually come from potential presidential candidates standing yards from the Oval Office. Other governors had been instead expressing wide agreement and appreciation for the president’s time. As Jindal spoke, some of his colleagues began shaking their heads, and Hawaii Democratic Gov. Neil Abercrombie began audibly mumbling to others around him.

Connecticut Democratic Gov. Dannel Malloy took over the microphone from Jindal and responded sharply, “Wait a second, until a few moments ago we were going down a pretty cooperative road. So let me just say that we don’t all agree that moving Canadian oil through the United States is necessarily the best thing for the United States economy.”

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Heating Up: Climate Change Advocates Try to Silence Krauthammer

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Photo Credit: Fox News Charles Krauthammer says it right up front in his Washington Post column: “I’m not a global warming believer. I’m not a global warming denier.”

He does, however, challenge the notion that the science on climate change is settled and says those who insist otherwise are engaged in “a crude attempt to silence critics and delegitimize debate.”

How ironic, then, that some environmental activists launched a petition urging the Post not to publish Krauthammer’s column on Friday.

Their response to opinions they disagree with is to suppress the speech.

Brad Johnson (@ClimateBrad), the editor of HillHeat.com and a former Think Progress staffer, boasted on Twitter that 110,000 people had urged the newspaper “to stop publishing climate lies” like the Krauthammer piece.

Read more this story HERE.

Apple’s Security Breach Should Scare You More Than Target’s Did

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Photo Credit: ShutterstockApple’s security protocol breach is nearly as bad as handing your credit card straight to a hacker rather than making them steal the information through the magnetic stripe readers.

The flaw in Apple’s iOs and OS X platforms essentially allows a hacker to get in between the initial verification “handshake” connection between the user and the destination server, enabling the adversary to masquerade as a trusted endpoint. This means the connection which is supposed to be encrypted between you and your bank, email server, healthcare provider and more is open to attack.

Security experts across the web recommend updating iPhones and iPads with the available iOS patches now, and using browsers other than Safari for OS X systems without an available Apple fix.

Usually to achieve encrypted web traffic, a handshake is accomplished through a Secure Sockets Layer — SSL for short — or more recently, Transport Layer Security, or TLS; both are Internet protocols that provide a secure channel between two machines operating over the Internet or an internal network.

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