Russian Minister: We May Respond with Nukes to US Global Strike Program

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Russia May Answer Conventional Attack With Nukes

By VLADIMIR ISACHENKOV, Associated Press.

Russia reserves the right to use nuclear weapons in response to a conventional strike and sees them as a “great equalizer” reducing the likelihood of aggression, a senior Russian official said Wednesday.

While Russia amended its military doctrine years ago to allow for the possibility of using nuclear weapons first in retaliation to a non-nuclear attack, the statement by Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Rogozin reflected Moscow’s concern about prospective U.S. conventional weapons.

Weapons that have been developed in the United States under the so-called “prompt global strike” program would be capable of striking targets anywhere in the world in as little as an hour with deadly precision. Russia, which has lagged far behind in developing such weapons, has described them as destabilizing.

Without naming the U.S., Rogozin told lawmakers in comments carried by Russian news agencies said that those who “experiment with non-nuclear strategic weapons” should remember that “if we come under attack, we will undoubtedly use nuclear weapons in certain situations to defend our territory and state interests.”

He said that it should discourage any potential aggressor.

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Photo Credit: RIA Novosti/Sergei Kazak

Photo Credit: RIA Novosti/Sergei Kazak

Russia Warns of Nuclear Response to US Global Strike Program

By RIA Novosti.

A senior government minister warned Wednesday that Russia could retaliate with a nuclear strike if a new US military strategy threatened its security.

Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Rogozin said that Russia was “preparing a response” to plans by the United States to develop a new fast-strike weapons platform capable of hitting high-priority targets around the globe.

He told the State Duma that the development of a global strike program was “the most important new strategy being developed by the United States today.”

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Palin: Read My Lipstick- No New Taxes

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Photo Credit: Breitbart

Photo Credit: Breitbart

No one can argue with the fact that Paul Ryan’s compromise budget bill raises taxes and increases spending. Show me one Republican who got elected on that platform. Spare America the Orwellian word games. If the government is taking money out of your pocket to fund its growing Big Brother operations, it’s a tax. Whether money is taken from you via your phone bill, your airline ticket, or your income, it’s a tax. If politicians can’t be honest about this, it’s time to go home.

The TEA Party’s very acronym stands for “Taxed Enough Already.” We sent these politicians to Congress in an historic landslide election in 2010 with a mandate to stop the runaway spending train bankrupting our nation, not to wave to it from the station or – heaven forbid – increase its speed. And yet, here we are still pretending that there are no real world consequences to running up near trillion dollar deficits year after year with no end in sight.

So, where does this leave us? We can sit back and accept the increased spending “Compromised Plan” with increases in taxes and spending, or we can charge ahead to at least preserve the very modest Sequester cuts American workers already fought for. If we go with the first option, we simply kick the can down the road yet again and wait for the inevitable real world consequences of bankruptcy (see Detroit for an example of what’s in store). Or we can go with the second option and probably get clobbered by the media (so what’s new?!).

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Uh oh: Only 5-15% of enrollees have paid their first month of premiums in some ObamaCare plans

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Photo Credit: AFP

Photo Credit: AFP

A good way to tell whether a media outlet is serious about ObamaCare reporting is to see if they cover this bombshell as a corollary to the new enrollment data. If 365,000 have “signed up” but only one-tenth of them, say, have paid their first month of premiums to activate their new coverage, how many people are really “enrolled” in ObamaCare plans right now?

Last week an insurer in Indiana told CNN that one of their plans had received payment from only 20 percent of people who signed up so far. According to Charles Ornstein’s sources, that insurer was doing relatively well.

“There is also a lot of worrying going on over people making payments,” industry consultant Robert Laszewski wrote in an email. “One client reports only 15% have paid so far. It is still too early to know for sure what this means but we should expect some enrollment slippage come the payment due date.”

Another consultant Kip Piper, agreed. “So far I’m hearing from health plans that around 5% and 10% of consumers who have made it through the data transfer gauntlet have paid first month’s premium and therefore truly enrolled,” he wrote me…

Blue Shield of California said it has sent out thousands of payment request letters…

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With Parachutes Tangled, Army’s Golden Knights Make Split-Second Decision to Save Life

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Photo Credit: U.S. ARMY FILE PHOTO

Photo Credit: U.S. ARMY FILE PHOTO

Everything was wrong.

Two members of the Golden Knights parachute team were tangled together, plummeting to Earth at 65 mph with little chance of survival.

One of them, Sgt. David Echeverry, was being strangled by a parachute cord. He knew that he and his teammate, Staff Sgt. Christopher Clark, couldn’t survive if they remained entwined. So in his last moments of consciousness, he pulled his release cord, hoping to give his partner a chance.

His last thoughts, he said, were of his wife, Rachel, and his two children – 3-year-old Jacob and 16-month-old Elijah.

A few seconds later, when Echeverry thought he should have been dead, he came to – and found himself dangling from Clark, who held onto Echeverry’s lines with all of his strength.

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Pope Attacks Mega-Salaries and Wealth Gap in Peace Message

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Photo Credit; REUTERS/GIAMPIERO SPOSITO

Photo Credit; REUTERS/GIAMPIERO SPOSITO

Pope Francis said in the first peace message of his pontificate that huge salaries and bonuses are symptoms of an economy based on greed and inequality and called again for nations to narrow the wealth gap.

In his message for the Roman Catholic Church’s World Day of Peace, marked around the world on January 1, he also called for sharing of wealth and for nations to shrink the gap between rich and poor, more of whom are getting only “crumbs”.

“The grave financial and economic crises of the present time … have pushed man to seek satisfaction, happiness and security in consumption and earnings out of all proportion to the principles of a sound economy,” he said.

“The succession of economic crises should lead to a timely rethinking of our models of economic development and to a change in lifestyles,” he said.

Francis, who was named Time magazine’s Person of the Year on Wednesday, has urged his own Church to be more fair, frugal and less pompous and to be closer to the poor and suffering.

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Mike Lee Authors Bill to Protect Religious Liberties of Churches That Uphold Traditional Marriage

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Photo Credit: Getty Images

Photo Credit: Getty Images

Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) plans to introduce a bill Wednesday that would prevent the Obama administration from pressuring churches into recognizing gay marriage.

It is concerning that we have people in this administration who think that religious liberties are just not that big of a deal,” Lee said in an interview with the Washington Examiner Tuesday.

Despite President Obama’s recent promise to respect religious freedom, Lee worries the White House may try to work around that promise by revoking the tax-exempt status of churches that recognize traditional marriage.

“We need not just statements, but we need legislation to protect religious liberty from this kind of potential threat,” he said in the interview.

Lee’s “Marriage and Religious Freedom Act” is meant to prevent federal officials from revoking churches’ and other nonprofits groups’ of their tax-exempt statuses over their support for traditional marriage.

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Health Director who Approved Obama Birth Certificate Dies in Plane Crash (+video)

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Photo Credit: NBC

Photo Credit: NBC

The health director who approved the release of President Obama’s birth certificate has died in a plane crash, Hawaiian officials said Thursday.

Loretta Fuddy died after the Cessna Grand Caravan aircraft she was travelling on went down shortly after leaving Kalaupapa Airport at around 3:15 p.m. local time (10:15 a.m. ET) on Wednesday.

The other eight people on board were rescued, Richard Schuman, president of Makani Kai Air, told NBC News early Thursday, adding that that there was no indication as to why the plane had crashed.

Fuddy hit the headlines two years ago when she approved a waiver request allowing Obama to access certified copies of his birth certificate, signed by the delivery doctor, Obama’s mother and the local registrar. His mother, then 18, signed her name (Stanley) Ann Dunham Obama.

So-called “birthers” opposed to Obama including real estate mogul Donald Trump had long questioned why Obama hadn’t ensured the long form was released.

Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

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Obama’s Popularity Slide has Made his Coalition Dangerously Shallower

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Photo Credit: Chip Somodevilla/Getty

Photo Credit: Chip Somodevilla/Getty

“[T]he entire concept of realignments/permanent alignments, which underlay much of the misbegotten analysis of the 2008 elections, is bankrupt and should be abandoned.”

So wrote RealClearPolitics’ Sean Trende in his 2012 book, The Lost Majority. One of the book’s main theses was that “the permanent majority” — that great white whale hunted and claimed by both parties over the last decade (and long before that) — is an unsustainable illusion in the long run.

Few pundits heeded Trende’s warning after the 2012 election. The editors of The Week made an argument typical of the moment when they wrote that Obama’s coalition of “white liberals, blacks, Latinos, younger voters, blue-collar workers, and moderate women … has lots of room to grow, whereas Mitt Romney’s core base — much older and whiter — is doomed to shrink.”

The flaw in this thinking lies in the nature of Obama’s coalition. As Trende notes (writing of the 2008 election), Obama’s coalition is actually a narrower one than Bill Clinton had, but its much deeper margins of victory among its constituent groups amply made up for that, delivering Obama two majority victories.

Obama obtained his decisive yet modest four-point victory margin in 2012 by running up unusually large (and in some cases historic) margins among Hispanics (44 points), blacks (87 points), moderates (15 points), the young (23 points), the poor (28 points), women (11 points) and those who never attend church (28 points). Not all Democratic candidates — even strong ones — can replicate many of these results.

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North Korea Executes Kim Jong Un’s Uncle

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Photo Credit: AP/XINHUA

Photo Credit: AP/XINHUA

North Korea announced Thursday it had executed the uncle of leader Kim Jong Un, declaring him a traitor who tried to overthrow the state.

The announcement came only days after Pyongyang announced through state media that Jang Song Thaek — long considered the country’s No. 2 power — had been removed from all his posts because of allegations of corruption, drug use, gambling, womanizing and leading a “dissolute and depraved life.”

State news agency KCNA said a tribunal examined Jang’s crimes, including “attempting to overthrow the state by all sorts of intrigues and despicable methods with a wild ambition to grab the supreme power of our party and state.”

The report called him “a traitor to the nation” and “worse than a dog.”

National Security Council spokesman Patrick Ventrell said that there was no reason to doubt the report of Jang’s death and if true, it illustrated North Korea’s “extreme brutality.”

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Officials: Air Strike Kills 15 Civilians in Yemen by Mistake

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Photo Credit: AP

Photo Credit: AP

Fifteen people on their way to a wedding in Yemen were killed in an air strike after their party was mistaken for an al Qaeda convoy, local security officials said on Thursday.

The officials did not identify the plane in the strike in central al-Bayda province, but tribal and local media sources said that it was a drone.

“An air strike missed its target and hit a wedding car convoy, ten people were killed immediately and another five who were injured died after being admitted to the hospital,” one security official said.

Five more people were injured, the officials said.

The United States has stepped up drone strikes as part of a campaign against Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), regarded by Washington as the most active wing of the militant network.

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