What is Boehner’s Secret Immigration Plan?

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Photo Credit: AP Photo/J. Scott ApplewhiteWhat did House Speaker John Boehner really mean on Thursday when he announced that the GOP will back a multi-stage amnesty for 12 million illegals, and increase the flow of foreign workers into the country?

The various GOP legislators and advocates can’t tell if Boehner is faking solidarity with the GOP’s immigration-boosting business donors, or is moving slowly to muffle voters’ worries about competition for jobs and wages.

So they’re looking for clues to what Boehner will do next. They’re checking his statements and demeanor, his quips, claps and shrugs, to find out if he really want to push the unpopular bill though the House.

They’re also trying to gauge the willingness of GOP legislators to go through a painful process that would split the GOP base before November, distract the media and voters from Obamacare, and perhaps leave the Democrats in control of the Senate after the November election.

They’s also working to cajole, pressure, spin and lobby to drag Boehner over to their side.

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Brave 6-Year-Old Asks For Help in Store Bathroom After Being Kidnapped (+video)

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Photo Credit: KHOUU11 TEXASA Texas man suspected of kidnapping a 6-year-old girl was arrested soon after the tiny victim bravely called for help in a store bathroom — when he was spotted in a hospital, where his wife gave birth to their child, police said.

Joaquin Ramos, 23 — who allegedly snatched little Kelly Tellez from outside her Houston home — was collared after relatives told police he was with his wife at Memorial Hermann Hospital with their baby on Thursday, according to KHOU-TV…

The terrifying ordeal began after the victim and her mother pulled into a garage near their Wirt Road apartment, police said. As the mother unloaded groceries from the vehicle, Kelly stepped outside to look at the ice frozen to a fence next to the garage, police said.

Suddenly, a man grabbed the little girl and forced her into his Jeep Cherokee. The panicked mother saw the struggle but couldn’t run to the vehicle before it sped away, according to KTRK-TV.

About an hour later, Ramos pulled into a parking lot at the Memorial City Mall and said he needed to use a restroom. He took the victim into a Target, where he told the girl to use the bathroom, the news station reported.

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Congressman: We Can Defeat Executive Order Amnesty

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Photo Credit: WNDThe Democrat plan to give amnesty to millions of illegal aliens in the U.S. can be thwarted, despite apparent wavering by House Republican leadership, contends a Texas congressman.

In an interview with Michael Savage on his “Savage Nation” nationally syndicated show Friday, Rep. John Culberson, R-Texas, insisted, furthermore, that if President Obama tries to advance amnesty or any other initiative through illegal executive orders, he can be stopped, because the House holds the purse strings and can cut off funding for actions that can’t be justified legally.

“The power of the purse is the secret to this guy – the most illegal, unlawful president in American history,” said Culberson, who had just returned from a GOP retreat in Cambridge, Md., where House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, distributed a two-page list of broad principles on immigration.

Seven months after the Senate passed a bipartisan bill with a “path to citizenship,” House Republican leaders Thursday said for the first time they would be open to allowing illegal aliens to live and work legally in the U.S. but would not offer a “special path” to citizenship.

That step in the direction of the Senate plan has many border-security-first advocates, including Savage, worried.

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Bill Maher Makes Country Music Awards Shooting Joke

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Photo Credit: APTaking a swipe at conservatives on gun control, liberal comic Bill Maher joked that a mass shooting should take place at the Country Music Awards.

“Now that liberals have forwarded their agenda by inserting a mass gay wedding into the Grammys, conservatives must match them tit-for-tat by having a mass shooting at the Country Music Awards,” Maher said Friday during his HBO program, “Real Time with Bill Maher.”

Maher’s joke follows the mass weddings performed during the Grammys this past Sunday, in which both same-sex and heterosexual couples were married. Conducted as musician Macklemore and Ryan Lewis sang “Same Love,” it was widely viewed as a call for marriage equality.

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Confessions Of An Ex-TSA Agent

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Photo Credit: Politico Once, in 2008, I had to confiscate a bottle of alcohol from a group of Marines coming home from Afghanistan. It was celebration champagne intended for one of the men in the group—a young, decorated soldier. He was in a wheelchair, both legs lost to an I.E.D., and it fell to me to tell this kid who would never walk again that his homecoming champagne had to be taken away in the name of national security.

There I was, an aspiring satire writer, earnestly acting on orders straight out of Catch-22.

I quickly discovered I was working for an agency whose morale was among the lowest in the U.S. government. In private, most TSA officers I talked to told me they felt the agency’s day-to-day operations represented an abuse of public trust and funds.

Charges of racial profiling by the TSA made headlines every few months, and working from behind the scenes we knew what was prompting those claims. Until 2010 (not long after the TSA standard operating procedure manual was accidentially leaked to the public), all TSA officers worked with a secret list printed on small slips of paper that many of us taped to the back of our TSA badges for easy reference: the Selectee Passport List. It consisted of 12 nations that automatically triggered enhanced passenger screening. The training department drilled us on the selectee countries so regularly that I had memorized them, like a little poem:

Syria, Algeria, Afghanistan
Iraq, Iran, Yemen
and Cuba,
Lebanon-Libya, Somalia-Sudan
People’s Republic of North Korea.

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Activists: Syrian Forces Launch New Aleppo Strikes

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Photo Credit: YahooSyrian military helicopters dropped barrels packed with explosives in the government’s latest air raids on rebel-held areas of the northern city of Aleppo on Saturday, killing at least 23 people including a family trapped in a burning car, activists said.

In neighboring Lebanon, a car bomb blew up near a gas station in a Shiite town, killing at least three people, in the latest attack linked to the war in neighboring Syria.

Footage on al-Manar television, associated with the Shiite group Hezbollah, showed a bright orange blaze as black silhouettes of people ran by the gas station in the northeastern town of Hermel that lies near the Syrian border. Blasts could be heard in the background. The Lebanese Red Cross said another 18 people were wounded. The organization initially reported that four people were killed, but later revised the number downwards.

The large blast occurred near a school for impoverished and orphaned children. None were injured, officials said.

It was the latest in a series of attacks targeting Lebanon’s Shiite community, as Syria’s violence causes neighboring Lebanon’s sectarian tensions to escalate into outright violence.

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Dylan Farrow: Woody Allen Sexually Assaulted Me

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Photo Credit: APDylan Farrow renewed molestation allegations against Woody Allen, claiming the movie director sexually assaulted her when she was 7 after he and actress Mia Farrow adopted her.

In an open-letter to The New York Times posted online Saturday, Dylan Farrow made her first public comments about the 1992 incident. In a letter to op-ed columnist Nicholas Kristof, she said she was moved to speak out because of Hollywood’s continued embrace of Allen.

“That he got away with what he did to me haunted me as I grew up,” wrote Farrow. “I was stricken with guilt that I had allowed him to be near other little girls.”

The New York Times reported that Allen declined comment. Also, representatives for Allen and for former partner Mia Farrow also did not immediately return requests for comment Saturday from The Associated Press. Allen has long maintained his innocence.

In the letter, Dylan Farrow claims that in 1992 at the family’s Connecticut home, Allen led her to a “dim, closet-like attic” and “then he sexually assaulted me.” Farrow didn’t specify Allen’s actions, but described other abusive behavior.

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Report: Man Sues IRS For Tripping On Phone Wire In Their Office And Is Awarded $862,000

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Photo Credit: Opposing News A 66-year-old New York man was awarded a generous payout after suing the IRS for a fall at their Long Island office nearly six years ago.

According to William Berroyer, back in 2008, he went to an IRS office in Hauppauge for an audit and to figure out a plan to pay the $60,000 that he owed them. While at the office, Berroyer claims he tripped over a telephone wire and severely injured himself.

“I really can’t say whether I hit it with my shoulder, hand or elbow, but I broke my fall on the cabinet,” said Berroyer in his testimony.

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Bernanke Leaves Fed with Record Balance Sheet

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Photo Credit: AP Photo/Pablo Martinez MonsivaisRetiring Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke, who was replaced by Janet Yellen as of today, is leaving the Federal Reserve with an unprecedented $4,102,138,000,000 in total assets on its balance sheet, up 391 percent from the $834,663,000,000 in total assets the Fed showed on its balance sheet when Bernanke took over as chairman in February 2006.

Much of the increase in the Fed’s assets has come in the form of U.S. Treasury securities and Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae mortgage-backed securities that the Fed purchased over the last five years in its attempts to stimulate the economy.

As of Feb. 1, 2006, when Bernanke took over as chairman, the Fed’s balance sheet indicated it owned $748,840,000,000 in U.S. Treasury securities. At that time, the balance sheet listed no mortgage-backed securities. As of Jan. 29, 2013, the balance sheet indicated the Fed owned $2,243,176,000,000 in U.S. Treasury securities and $1,532,224,000,000 in mortgage-backed securities.

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Krauthammer: How to Debunk the ‘War on Women’

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Photo Credit: Screenshot What is it about women that causes leading Republicans to grow clumsy, if not stupid? When even savvy, fluent, attractively populist Mike Huckabee stumbles, you know you’ve got trouble. Having already thrown away eminently winnable Senate seats in Missouri and Indiana because of moronic talk about rape, the GOP might have learned. You’d think.

Huckabee wasn’t quite as egregious, just puzzling and a bit weird. Trying to make a point about Obamacare mandating free contraceptives, he inexplicably began speculating that the reason behind the freebie was the Democrats’ belief that women need the federal government to protect them from their own libidos.

Bizarre. I can think of no Democrat who has ever said that, nor any liberal who even thinks that. Such a theory, when offered by a conservative, is quite unfortunately self-revealing.

In any case, why go wandering into the psychology of female sexuality in the first place? It’s ridiculous. This is politics. Stick to policy. And there’s a good policy question to be asked about the contraceptive mandate (even apart from its challenge to religious freedom). It’s about priorities. By what moral logic does the state provide one woman with co-pay-free contraceptives while denying the same subvention to another woman when she urgently needs antibiotics for her sick child?

The same principle of sticking to policy and forswearing amateur psychology should apply to every so-called women’s issue. Take abortion, which is the subtext of about 90 percent of the alleged “war on women,” the charge being that those terrible conservative men are denying women control of their reproductive health.

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