Senior Adviser: Obama Will Take Executive Action On Immigration after Summer

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Photo Credit: Michael Bonfigli / The Christian Science Monitor

Photo Credit: Michael Bonfigli / The Christian Science Monitor

President Obama will go ahead with a “very significant” executive action on immigration after the summer – a move that may well trigger impeachment proceedings against him, senior Obama adviser Dan Pfeiffer told reporters at a Monitor breakfast Friday.

“The president acting on immigration reform will certainly up the likelihood that [Republicans] would contemplate impeachment at some point,” said Mr. Pfeiffer, who has been at the Obama White House since its inception.

A lot of people in Washington laughed off Sarah Palin’s call to impeach the president for executive overreach, Pfeiffer said, but “I would not discount that possibility.” Polling shows strong support for the idea among the GOP base, he said, adding that House Speaker John Boehner (R) of Ohio has opened the door to the possibility with his lawsuit against Obama.

Speaker Boehner has flatly denied an interest in impeachment, saying, “I disagree” with those who support it. Next week, the GOP-controlled House is expected to pass a resolution to sue the president for executive overreach on the Affordable Care Act, or “Obamacare.”

“This is a fundraising exercise for Democrats,” said Boehner spokesman Michael Steel in an e-mail response to Pfeiffer’s impeachment comments. “It is telling, and sad, that a senior White House official is focused on political games, rather than helping these kids and securing the border.”

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Facebook Page Publishing Identities of French Jews to Encourage Attackers; 15 Men Assault a Jew in Paris Suburb After Confirming Photo

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Photo Credit: Screenshot / Facebook

Photo Credit: Screenshot / Facebook

A violent mob of more than a dozen men in France assaulted a Jew at his home in a Paris suburb after confirming that his photograph had been published by a French Facebook page identifying Jews to be targeted for physical intimidation, The Union of Jewish Students of France, the UEJF, said in a statement on Friday.

The Facebook page, ‘Jeunes Révolutionnaires Français’, JRF, or ‘Young French Revolutionaries’, posted the names and photos of 32 Jews. The assault on one of those listed took place on Thursday night in Bobigny, Seine-Saint-Denis, a Paris suburb. The assailants were armed with iron bars.

On the ‘Secret Tel Aviv’ Facebook page, Daniel Cohen called the group anti-Semitic, and exhorted Facebook users to report the JRF page to site administrators for removal.

On Facebook, Cohen wrote, “An anti-Semitic page is publishing names and pictures of French Jews in order to target them physically! A few have already been attacked at their homes, one last night by 15 people on one Jewish guy. We need to remove this page!”

The JRF captioned its page with the photos of the Jews to be targeted, “Smile, you’re caught! JRF watches! # AntiLDJ,” referring to the LDJ, the French initials of the Jewish Defense League, an organization created to teach Jews how to defend themselves from anti-Semitic attacks.

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Maybe Democrats Should Have Read Obamacare Before They Passed It

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Photo Credit: TownHall

Photo Credit: TownHall

First, a fact. Obamacare’s legislative text reads that tax subsidies administered by the IRS to help Americans pay for health insurance they are federally mandated to purchase reads that those tax subsidies will only apply to people who purchase coverage from insurance exchanges “established by the State.” An exchange “established by the State” refers to state-run health insurance exchanges, established in ACA section 1311, as opposed to federally-run exchanges, established in ACA section 1321. The legislative language is pretty clear.

What ACA proponents want to say is that this just amounts to a “drafting error.” Congress, of course, intended for the subsidies to apply to the exchanges run by the federal government; they just made a mistake.

It seems odd that we’d be able to divine the “intent” of the general will of 535 people, but some have now fallen back to asking if there was even a single legislator who thought that tax subsidies wouldn’t apply to federal exchanges.

This is a good question, because it’s unlikely that any legislator thought that would have been a good idea. But this gets to the heart of the problem with ACA: many legislators didn’t know what they were crafting and voting on.

In the era of ACA’s crafting, Republicans repeatedly brought up the point that legislators couldn’t read the bill, because the legislative text hadn’t been written. The Senate Finance Committee voted on what’s called “conceptual langauge,” but did anticipate that some states would not set up their own exchanges. Democrats also insisted that the “conceptual language” was enough to actually understand and vote on the law.

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WATCH: Eleanor Holmes Norton says 'You Don't Have a Right to Know' What's Going On In Government

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Photo Credit: YouTube

Photo Credit: YouTube

Eleanor Holmes Norton, the non-voting congressional delegate for the District of Columbia, angrily sputtered during a congressional hearing Friday that the White House should not be held up to scrutiny, saying that there was no right to know what it was doing behind closed doors.

“You don’t have a right to know everything in a separation-of-powers government, my friend. That is the difference between a parliamentary government and a separation-of-powers government,” Norton said during a House Oversight and Government Reform Committee hearing.

It was, to put mildly, a significant departure from the more traditional liberal stance that openness and transparency are must to prevent abuses of power by government officials. Instead the leading advocate for statehood for the District of Columbia literally argued that even the congressional committee charged with oversight shouldn’t be asking questions in the first place.

She made the comments while protesting the committee’s Republican majority for voting to ignore a claim by the White House that David Simas, director of it’s Office of Political Strategy and Outreach, was immune to a congressional subpoena to testify. Republicans believe the office is being used a political campaign operation, a violation of federal election law.

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First, Pelosi Said Illegal Kids Should Be Treated Like ‘Baby Jesus.’ Then She One-Upped Herself

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Photo Credit: IJ Review

Photo Credit: IJ Review

Earlier this week, Nancy Pelosi suggested that illegal children entering the country should be treated like “baby Jesus,” who was himself “a refugee” trying to be freed “from violence.”

Friday, the Minority Leader one-upped herself. (This is no easy task, mind you.)

As tweeted by Franchesca Chambers, political reporter at @DailyMailUS, and grabbed by Weasel Zippers:

pelosi2

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87% of Babies With Cystic Fibrosis are Aborted, But We Could Never Kill This Bundle of Joy

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Photo Credit: LifeNews

Photo Credit: LifeNews

A medical exam room is where most parents are presented with “their options” regarding life. It’s where they are overwhelmed with the unpleasant diagnoses that their unborn child has a life threatening genetic disorder. And, it’s where they are first presented with the challenges and trials that will mark their child’s entire time on earth.

But, it’s also where God’s blessings are revealed.

Our daughter, Porter Louise Vought, was born in February of this year with cystic fibrosis (CF) – a genetic disorder that affects an individual’s lungs and digestive organs. When a healthy individual catches a common cold their lungs fight off the sickness and eventually return to normal health. Individuals with CF can’t fight illness as well and in turn their lungs become scarred and riddled with irreversible damage that only increases with age. Often times this leads to lung and organ transplants and, eventually, a fatal lung disease with the average life expectancy in the early 40s.

There are currently only 30,000 individuals in the United States with CF. In recent years as prenatal testing has become a regular practice the number of babies being born with CF has decreased. According to a specific Kaiser Permanente report, 87% of babies who were diagnosed with cystic fibrosis were tragically aborted.

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Earthquakes Occur in 4 Parts of Alaska

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Photo Credit: Arthur Chapman

Photo Credit: Arthur Chapman

Seismologists in Alaska say earthquakes have jolted four different parts of the state in the last 12 hours.

A magnitude-5.9 quake was among several that occurred around the same location early Friday in southeast Alaska. The U.S. Geological Survey says people in Juneau, about 100 miles east, felt light shaking.

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Obama Administration Knew Islamic State Was Growing But Did Little To Counter It

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Photo Credit: JACQUELYN MARTIN / AP

Photo Credit: JACQUELYN MARTIN / AP

Like the rest of the world, the U.S. government appeared to have been taken aback last month when Mosul, Iraq’s second largest city, fell to an offensive by jihadis of the Islamic State that triggered the collapse of five Iraqi army divisions and carried the extremists to the threshold of Baghdad.

A review of the record shows, however, that the Obama administration wasn’t surprised at all.

In congressional testimony as far back as November, U.S. diplomats and intelligence officials made clear that the United States had been closely tracking the al Qaida spinoff since 2012, when it enlarged its operations from Iraq to civil war-torn Syria, seized an oil-rich province there and signed up thousands of foreign fighters who’d infiltrated Syria through NATO ally Turkey.

The testimony, which received little news media attention at the time, also showed that Obama administration officials were well aware of the group’s declared intention to turn its Syrian sanctuary into a springboard from which it would send men and materiel back into Iraq and unleash waves of suicide bombings there. And they knew that the Iraqi security forces couldn’t handle it.

The group’s operations “are calculated, coordinated and part of a strategic campaign led by its Syria-based leader, Abu Bakr al Baghadi,” Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Brett McGurk told a House committee on Feb. 5, four months before fighting broke out in Mosul. “The campaign has a stated objective to cause the collapse of the Iraqi state and carve out a zone of governing control in western regions of Iraq and Syria.”

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Sullivan SuperPAC Funded by His Ohio Family, Run by Karl Rove Associate, Goes Negative

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Memorial Day 13Joe Miller sounded off today on the latest Sullivan scheme to smear his primary opponents. Sullivan has long claimed to be a uniter who would not engage in mudslinging. However, his surrogates have begun the assault.

“The latest coming from Team Sullivan should surprise no one,” said Miller campaign spokesman Randy DeSoto. “Dan Sullivan is proving to be just another dishonest establishment politician who takes credit for other folks’ work, talks a big game, and delivers only empty promises.”

The ad features a young woman from Anchorage saying, “Joe Miller troubles me,” a clear attempt to build on Lisa Murkowski’s smear campaign from 2010. It then proceeds to accuse a second establishment candidate in the race, Mead Treadwell, of “attacking Dan Sullivan.”

The Sullivan SuperPAC, Alaska’s Energy, America’s Values, is largely funded by Sullivan’s own family from Ohio, and run by Art Hackney, a longtime associate of Karl Rove. While the latest FEC report is not yet posted, information currently available reveals that almost half of its funding comes from just two individuals: Tom and Frank Sullivan. Frank, Dan’s brother, sits on the Board of Directors of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce (a pro-amnesty, anti-tea party organization). Sullivan money combined with funds from another large donor from Connecticut named Donald Miller comprises more than eighty percent of the funding for this faux “local PAC,” as it is described by local blogger Amanda Coyne.

Joe Miller stated, “This is just business as usual for the Republican establishment. This is what they do. If they can’t stand on issues and arguments, they seek to smear the competition. Alaskans deserve an honest debate about the issues facing our great state, and the country, not more sleazy smear campaigns from the likes of Karl Rove and his friends.”

Congresswoman Sees 'Threat' In Constitution

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Photo Credit: AFP

Photo Credit: AFP

The head of a gun-rights organization is delivering a lesson on the Constitution to a member of Congress who claimed his statements on the Second Amendment constituted a threat against her.

“Allow me to explain the obvious,” Larry Pratt, executive director of Gun Owners of America, wrote in an open letter to Rep. Carolyn Maloney, D-N.Y.

“I have never encouraged, or even suggested, that anyone harm anyone. Rather, my speech was designed to educate citizens, and politicians, that it is the fact that Americans are armed that allows them to resist efforts to be dominated, intimidated, or controlled by politicians.”

His letter came after Maloney reported him to Capitol Police and the House Sergeant-at-Arms because of his statements in a recent interview with Rolling Stone.

In the interview, she alleged, “Mr. Pratt is actively encouraging his members to threaten violent action against members of Congress.”

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