Obama Says Americans are Better Off Now than When He Came into Office

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Photo Credit: Irish Government – Pool/Getty ImagesSure, he can say that. After all, isn’t it better to kick back and relax at home rather than have to go to work? Daytime TV can be quite stimulating.

And with wages stagnant over his terms of office, you might ask who needs more money? Not I.

National debt? Who cares? Medicare and Social Security ready to implode? Not my problem.

All in all, helluva job, Barry.

The Hill:

President Obama said Americans were “better off now than when I came into office,” during a fundraiser Monday night outside of Washington.

Obama also slammed congressional Republicans for their focus on the terror attack in Benghazi and the implementation of ObamaCare.

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And Then There Were Nine: Albuquerque VA Accused of Wait List Manipulation, Destroying Evidence

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Photo Credit: WNDObama Briefed on VA Problems as Far Back as 2005

By Aaron Klein.

Documentation and testimony reviewed by WND reveals that as far back as 2005, Barack Obama, as a U.S. senator, was briefed on dangerously long wait times for returning veterans to receive health treatment.

Obama was a member of the Senate Veterans Affairs Committee. On numerous occasions he publicly chastised President George W. Bush about the wait times, treatment shortages and lack of funding to the Veterans Administration’s medical programs.

On June 28, 2005, for example, Obama complained at a hearing on the VA medical care budget that “somehow it seems that we’re willing to trot in front of flags and take photographs with soldiers, but when it comes to the appropriations process, we’re not there.”

Obama said he heard from veterans of a problem with receiving treatment.

“One final question that I’ve got, specific to some of the issues that I’m hearing back in Illinois,” he told the Senate. “I’ve heard some constituents complaining that veterans’ clinics have been reducing hours. Is there any association – if that’s the case, is that one strategy to handle the shortfall? Are we reducing hours as a way of handling the shortfall?”

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Photo Credit: TownHall Number Nine: Albuquerque VA Accused of Wait List Manipulation, Destroying Evidence

By Guy Benson.

These “isolated cases” (Sec. Shinseki) that may or may not be indicative of a larger problem (Jay Carney) certainly are piling up. The latest is out of New Mexico, via The Daily Beast:

Add Albuquerque, New Mexico’s to the growing list of VA hospitals accused of keeping secret waiting lists to hide delays for veterans seeking medical care. And it may already be too late to get to the truth and find out what harm, if any, was done to veterans there—VA officials are already destroying records to cover their tracks, a whistleblower inside the hospital tells The Daily Beast…“The ‘secret wait list’ for patient appointments is being either moved or was destroyed after what happened in Phoenix,” according to a doctor who works at the Albuquerque VA hospital and spoke exclusively with The Daily Beast. “Right now,” the doctor said, “there is an eight-month waiting list for patients to get ultrasounds of their hearts. Some patients have died before they got their studies. It is unknown why they died, some for cardiac reasons, some for other reasons.” There’s no proof yet that veterans died while waiting for treatment, like what allegedly happened in Phoenix. But the doctor says it’s quite possible that some veterans would still be alive if they hadn’t been pushed through a record-keeping trap door that buried their requests for medical care.

Can you imagine how shocked the president must have been when someone forwarded him the link to this story? This quote makes it sound as if the VA’s book-cooking scheme was a relatively open secret:

When another of the doctor’s colleagues, a physician in a managerial position at the Albuquerque VA, saw the initial story about secret wait lists break he heard him say, “I always knew that Phoenix was better than us at playing the numbers game.”

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CNN President Jeff Zucker: ‘We’re Not Going To Be Shamed’ Into Covering Benghazi

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Photo Credit: Daily Caller CNN President Jeff Zucker declared his network would “not going to be shamed” into covering Benghazi and other stories without “real news value” at an awards dinner Monday.

Capital New York reports that Zucker explained CNN’s post-plane plans during an interview at the Deadline Club’s annual dinner on Monday night.

“I don’t think there’s any question about our commitment to breaking news, as evidenced by all the questions about the plane,” Zucker told The New York Times’ Bill Carter.

“So we’re still there whenever that happens,” he continued, “but we’re going to supplement that with some different kind of storytelling.”

What kind of stories? “Climate change is one of those stories that deserves more attention, that we all talk about,” he explained — though he lamented the fact that “when we do do those stories, there does tend to be a tremendous amount of lack of interest on the audience’s part.”

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Spending on Healthcare.gov to Break $1 Billion Mark

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Photo Credit: APFederal spending on the Obamacare website healthcare.gov, a source of tremendous frustration for the public and embarrassment for the White House, will soon cross the $1 billion mark as the administration continues to fix glitches and make it an IT gem, according to congressional testimony.

Sylvia Mathews Burwell, nominated to replace outgoing Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, said in answers to questions from Sen. Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn., that spending has already reached $834 million and another $200 million has been budgeted for fiscal 2015.

Asked by Alexander, the top Republican on the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP) Committee, to tally the costs of the Obamacare marketplace website where policies are purchased, Burwell said in written answers…

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Top Obama Aide: ‘Many More Executive Actions to Come’…(+video)

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Photo Credit: Standard CompliantThe White House will be “picking up the pace on executive actions,” as Congress focuses its efforts on the newly formed select committee investigating Benghazi, senior Obama adviser Dan Pfeiffer declared Tuesday.

In an op-ed for The Huffington Post, Pfeiffer argued that congressional Republicans are not interested in engaging on the economy, instead spending time “obsessively trying to repeal the Affordable Care Act” and “ginning up politically motivated investigations.”

“Given this dynamic, President Obama has only one option — use every ounce of his authority to unilaterally improve economic security,” Pfeiffer said.

“Next week, as congressional Republicans spend their energy on yet another partisan investigation, we’ll be picking up the pace on the executive actions to help the economy,” Pfeiffer added.

The White House has dismissed the select committee investigating the terrorist attacks in Benghazi, Libya, announced earlier this month by Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) as redundant and politically motivated. Republicans have argued that the special panel was necessary after the release of a previously undisclosed email from White House deputy national security adviser Ben Rhodes showing involvement in drafting then-U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice’s infamous talking points.

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‘Impeach Obama’ Movement Gains Speed with New Book on ‘Lawlessness’ (+video)

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The underground effort by some conservatives to impeach President Obama for picking and choosing which laws to enforce is about to shift into a higher gear with a new book from a noted terrorism prosecutor detailing seven impeachable offenses on topics ranging from immigration to Obamacare.

In Faithless Execution, Andrew C. McCarthy makes the legal case to dump the president, but also hopes to build the political will in Congress and the nation to take the unusual move last used against former President Bill Clinton following the Monica Lewinsky affair.

“You have to make the public case that the president has to be removed,” said McCarthy. “I’m trying to make it,” he said.

McCarthy, a terrorism expert who prosecuted the so-called “blind sheik,” Omar Abdel Rahman, for the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, charged that Obama and his administration are destroying the Constitution by ignoring some laws, using the Internal Revenue Service to harass conservative groups and making changes to Obamacare that don’t appear legal.

“The victims are people who care if America is the America of the Constitution,” he said at a small briefing about his book due for release June 3. Amazon is already selling it.

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D’Souza: I Was ‘Stupid’ but Prosecution Was Selective

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By Greg Richter.

Conservative scholar and filmmaker Dinesh D’Souza says it was “wrong” and “stupid” of him to use friends to contribute more to a political campaign than allowed by law. But he still insists selective prosecution was involved.

D’Souza pleaded guilty Tuesday to federal election fraud charges, and could face prison time. He admitted to reimbursing two associates $10,000 each for money they gave to the campaign of New York U.S. Senate candidate Wendy Long, a Republican running for the seat once held by Hillary Clinton.

D’Souza told Fox News Channel’s “The Kelly File” on Tuesday night that he had no intent to defraud and never denied making the reimbursements.

“That was wrong,” D’Souza said. “It’s an end-around campaign finance law. I acknowledge responsibility, and I did admit doing that from the beginning.”

Long’s campaign was flailing and he wanted to help her, D’Souza said. “I just chose the wrong and stupid way to do it. I shouldn’t have done it.”

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Photo Credit: TownHall Dinesh D’Souza Pleads Guilty to Violating Campaign Finance Law

By Katie Pavlich.

Author and conservative filmmaker Dinesh D’Souza plead guilty this morning to one count on federal charges detailed in an indictment accusing him of violating campaign finance laws and making false statements. D’Souza admitted in front of the U.S. District Court, Southern District of New York, that he did in fact ask two people to make contributions in their name and later reimbursed them, knowing it was not proper under the law. D’Souza submitted a plea deal on May 19 and the charge of making false statements was dropped. Judge Richard Berman accepted his guilty plea today and set a sentencing date for September 23, 2014. The government argued attorneys would be able to prove beyond a reasonable doubt the defendant, D’Souza, is guilty. There will be no trial by jury in this case.

“Guilty your honor,” D’Souza said, adding that he deeply regrets his actions.

“The plea is now accepted and Mr. D’Souza is now guilty under the indictment,” Berman replied.

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Espionage in a Post-Privacy Society

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Photo Credit: ShutterstockWe will soon have to live in a world with no such thing as privacy and no such thing as secrecy, says Richard Aldrich, speaking at PINC 15 in Amsterdam. “We will be living in a transparent society, it will be a bit like living in a nudist colony.”

Aldrich is a historian specialising in espionage and has recently published a book about GCHQ, but it is the future of espionage that he is interested in right now. We’re used to the idea that secret intelligence agencies spy on us, but over the last ten years the big intelligence gatherers have become airlines, banks, internet providers and Tesco — all of which have more information about us than GCHQ and the NSA put together.

“These organisations are becoming cleverer and cleverer. Cleverer than the CIA; cleverer than the KGB.” By studying everything he has bought over the last five years, a company could predict with about 90 percent accuracy how Aldrich will vote in the upcoming European elections — something he claims he doesn’t even know himself. He claims he has about 11 percent of his supposedly secret vote left.

Citizens too though are increasingly becoming intelligence gatherers. By studying the reaction of the blogosphere to the Boston Marathon bombings — which led to a mob forming outside the house of someone wrongly identified as the bomber from crowdsourced photos posted on Reddit– we can understand how dangerous this can be. “Espionage is even scarier when it’s controlled by you guys,” Aldrich tells the audience.

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U.S. Utility’s Control System Was Hacked, Says Homeland Security

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Photo Credit: Donkey HoteyA sophisticated hacking group recently attacked a U.S. public utility and compromised its control system network, but there was no evidence that the utility’s operations were affected, according to the Department of Homeland Security.

DHS did not identify the utility in a report that was issued this week by the agency’s Industrial Control Systems Cyber Emergency Response Team, or ICS-CERT.

“While unauthorized access was identified, ICS-CERT was able to work with the affected entity to put in place mitigation strategies and ensure the security of their control systems before there was any impact to operations,” a DHS official told Reuters on Tuesday.

Such cyber attacks are rarely disclosed by ICS-CERT, which typically keeps details about its investigations secret to encourage businesses to share information with the government. Companies are often reluctant to go public about attacks to avoid potentially negative publicity.

ICS-CERT said in the report posted on its website that investigators had determined the utility had likely been the victim of previous intrusions. It did not elaborate.

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Wild Wyoming Cloud Wows Weatherwatchers

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Photo Credit: BasehuntersA phenomenal shot of a massive cloud Sunday near Clareton, Wyo., has been making the rounds on social media today.

The photo was taken by the Basehunters storm chasers group, who are “committed to capturing the most unique and close-up tornado footage on the market,” according to their Facebook page. It shows the rotating updraft of a supercell thunderstorm over eastern Wyoming, according to Weather Channel meteorologist Jon Erdman.

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