Retired Generals Establish Commission to Look Into Obama Administration’s Actions

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Photo Credit: WND After one of them called for the “forced resignations” of President Obama and congressional leaders in response to multiple grievances, including the alleged political purge of hundreds of senior military officers, two retired U.S. generals are creating a citizens’ commission to scrutinize Obama administration actions on national security and economic issues.

“America’s Provisional Leadership Council” will look at major concerns, as outlined by Army Gen. Paul E. Vallely and Air Force Brig. Gen. Charles Jones, in an eight-point paper titled “The Americans Project.”

Vallely told WND he sees The Americans Project as a “citizens’ commission” of prominent Americans to provide advice to legislative and executive branches of government.

America’s leaders, he said, will be “held to high standards of performance to solve the nation’s problems of governing. We will scrutinize and provide guidance to federally elected officials on behalf of the citizens.”

The Americans Project, Vallely added, is a “movement, not a new party necessarily. We want candidates to run as Americans first before being a Democrat, Republican or Independent.”

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Bachmann: Israel ‘May Have to Save World’ From Armageddon

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Photo Credit: WND It was a warning on the perils of appeasement reminiscent of Churchill.

Rep. Michele Bachmann, R-Minn., cut straight to the heart of the matter when WND asked her what the nuclear deal with Iran will mean.

“The major nations of the world have chosen to fail to thwart Iran from gaining a nuclear weapon. It is a blunder of such great proportion, history will record it’s folly,” she ruefully predicted.

The congresswoman had an equally dire assessment when asked: Did the deal mean Israel would now have no option but to launch a preemptive strike on Iran to stop it from acquiring nuclear weapons?

Israel may have ‘to save the world’

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Obama’s Overhaul of Spy Programs So Far Cloaked in More Secrecy

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Photo Credit: TISH WELLS — McClatchyPresident Barack Obama has faced withering criticism around the globe for his secret spying programs. How has he responded? With more secrecy.

Obama has been gradually tweaking his vast government surveillance policies. But he is not disclosing those changes to the public. Has he stopped spying on friendly world leaders? He won’t say. Has he stopped eavesdropping on the United Nations, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund? He won’t say.

Even the report by the group Obama created to review and recommend changes to his surveillance programs has been kept secret.

Critics note that this comes after he famously promised the most open administration in history.

“They seem to have reverted to a much more traditional model of secrecy except when it’s politically advantageous,” said Steven Aftergood, who directs the Federation of American Scientists Project on Government Secrecy, and is an expert on – and prominent critic of – government secrecy. “That’s normal but not consistent with their pledge.”

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Video: Sharks Swim Just Feet Away from Surfers

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Photo Credit: Jay Dohner/YouTubeIt’s not exactly beach season in Southern California.

But even with small surf to feast on surfers are enjoying glassy waves on recent sunny mornings. And ocean temps relatively warm for this time of year.

The folks in the water off El Porto in Manhattan Beach have company:

Sharks.

A local paddle boarder, Jay Dohner, grabbed his GoPro camera after seeing the creatures swimming off El Porto.

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Gallup Poll: 69 Percent Of Americans Satisfied With Personal Health Care Plan

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A majority of Americans are happy with their current healthcare plan.

A new Gallup poll finds that 69 percent of Americans rate their personal coverage as excellent or good, but only 32 percent say the same about health care coverage in the country.

“Americans’ ratings of their own healthcare coverage have remained remarkably steady over the past decade — and always much higher than their ratings of the nation’s coverage,” the poll states.

Fifty-nine percent of those polled said they are generally satisfied with what they pay for their own health care coverage, while only 24 percent are satisfied with the cost of health insurance more generally across the U.S.

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America Is One Step Closer to a One-Party Tyranny

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Photo Credit: ctj71081November 21, 2013, may be another date that will live in infamy. Instead of conventional bombs and aerial torpedoes exploding at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, the “nuclear option” went off in the U.S. Senate at Washington, D.C.

By a 52-48 vote, the Senate voted to change the institution’s regulations related to the filibuster, thereby emasculating a political minority’s ability to thwart, or at least delay, majoritarian dictatorship. A Senate minority can no longer thwart the president’s nominations of judges to lesser federal courts or of executive department officials.

Although the filibuster can still be used in cases of nominations for the Supreme Court and of substantive legislation, the Senate’s historic power of “advise and consent” has been narrowed to just “consent” in many, perhaps most, cases. The Senate, once said to be the world’s greatest deliberative body, has been reduced to the president’s rubber stamp. Furthermore, if the Senate’s rules — originally written by Thomas Jefferson — can be changed at the majority leader’s whim, what is to prevent them being altered again, even to the point of eliminating the filibuster, which used to be called “the soul of the Senate”?

If Harry Reid’s assault on representative government, which was probably an attempt to distract public opinion from ObamaCare, remains in place, American politics will be forever changed…for the worse.

To comprehend the severity of the damage Reid and his minions have done, we need to explore the nature of representative government.

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Huckabee: ‘DC Makes the Toronto Mayor Look Perfectly Normal’ (+video)

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Photo Credit: AP File/Jacquelyn MartinDuring the opening segment of his show “Huckabee” on Fox News Channel, former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee said Sunday that he was “fed up” with the “total disconnect” between Washington, D.C., and the rest of the country, adding that “D.C. makes the Toronto mayor look perfectly normal.”

“Like most Americans, I’m just fed up with the total disconnect that the political class in Washington has with the working class of the rest of the America. D.C. makes the Toronto mayor look perfectly normal,” Huckabee said, referring to Toronto Mayor Rob Ford, who admitted to smoking crack.

The Toronto City Council voted last week to strip Ford of most of his authority, moving most of his staff and budget to his deputy mayor.

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House GOP Leader Sets a Record with Third Birth While Serving in Congress

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A member of the House Republican leadership has set a new record, giving birth to a third child while serving in Congress.

Aides to Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers, who is the communications director for the House Republican Conference, gave birth to Brynn Catherinem, who weighed in at 7 lbs 6 oz., at 6:19 a.m. Sunday.

“McMorris Rodgers is the first to give birth three times while serving in Congress,” an aide said on Monday.

The lawmaker, who represents Washington state’s Fifth Congressional District, is also mom to Cole, born in 2007, and Grace, born in 2010.

“She looks forward to continuing her duties as House Republican Conference Chair and running again for re-election next year,” the aide said.

McMorris Rodgers posted a photo of her and the baby on Instagram.

“Nothing compares to the miracle of bringing a new life into the world,” McMorris Rodgers wrote on the social site. “She’s beautiful and seems to be taking it all in stride. Our hearts are full.”

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Presidential Nominations are Still No Slam Dunks

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Photo Credit: John Shinkle/POLITICOSenate Democrats will return to a new Washington next month — one in which Republicans can’t rely on the filibuster to block President Barack Obama’s nominations.

But don’t expect Obama’s picks to sail smoothly through the chamber.

Democrats must still find a modicum of compromise with the GOP if they want to swiftly approve Obama’s team. That’s because the filibuster remains in place as a delay tactic, requiring the Senate to burn hours of floor time unless the two parties can agree to speed up procedural votes.

It’s an important calculation for Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.), who hopes to push through six key Obama nominations in December. Given the time constraints of a December work period, which will last just a few days, he’s going to need help from the GOP to yield time and allow votes to happen more quickly.

A single Republican can easily reject a deal to quickly process nominations. If GOP senators decide to follow that strategy, several of Obama’s nominees could be in limbo until early next year.

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Obama Chose Dishonor, ‘A Total and Unmitigated Defeat’

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Photo Credit: REUTERS/Larry DowningPresident Obama had to choose between dishonor and war and he chose dishonor. Now we will have war. He has dishonored U.S. allies in the Middle East, including Israel and the Persian Gulf states, by abandoning their security concerns regarding a nuclear Iran by believing that appeasing Iran is the only way to avoid war.

These words are those of Churchill after the Munich Agreement was signed when Britain and France believed that handing Czechoslovakia to Hitler was the only way to save the world from another war. It is regarded as the shameful culmination of the Allies refusal to confront Nazi aggression and gave Hitler what he wanted in exchange for his verbal promise of “peace in our time” as Chamberlain called it.

After the Munich Agreement, Churchill gave a speech in the House of Commons on the future consequences to Europe and the world of the agreement which he called “total and unmitigated defeat”. Following the Geneva Agreement, these warnings ring as true now as they did then.

We cannot consider the abandonment of U.S. allies only in the light of what happened the last few weeks. This agreement in Geneva is the culmination of five years of uninterrupted retreat of U.S. power in the Middle East under Obama. For five years the president has been betraying Israel, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE while accommodating enemies and tyrants like Syria’s Assad, Iran’s Khamenei, and Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood. Five years of eager searching for any perceived moderate leader in Iran, ending with Obama’s naïve conviction that he has found one in the smiling new Iranian president Hassan Rouhani despite the fact that past evidence proves that Rouhani has been a liar and a cheat in previous negotiations with the West about suspending uranium enrichment.

Let us be clear. This agreement is a total U.S. defeat and Iranian victory. It is the first step toward a new U.S. policy of containment of Iran’s nuclear program. Despite desperate propaganda by Obama, in reality the U.S. and the West have given the Iranians the implied right to contnue enrichment when it agreed to let Iran continue enriching its uranium to 3.5%. The Iranians will be able to maintain their nuclear program and continue to enrich uranium while the Americans and their allies loosen their economic noose around Iran and allow it to have access to at least 10 billion dollars of assets which can be used to continue financing terrorist activities in Syria, Lebanon, Gaza, and Iraq as well as to sustain the mullah’s tyrannical regime. Moreover, once the sanctions are loosened and the Europeans and China resume making money from Iran, it is unrealistic to believe they will be reinstated.

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