Super Bowl Champ Baltimore Ravens Getting Paid $130,000 to Promote Obamacare (+video)

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Photo Credit: AP/Charlie RiedelDespite a decision by the NFL to ignore the administration’s pleas to promote Obamacare, the Super Bowl champion Baltimore Ravens have decided to go all in — in exchange for a $130,000 contract, according to documents unearthed by a public watchdog group.

Judicial Watch told Secrets that the team was recruited by Maryland state officials to help it sell Obamacare, the new health care insurance program that has run into mammoth computer and bureaucratic troubles in its first three weeks.

The state previously announced its plans but the size of the check was not released. Judicial Watch received a copy of the agreement between the 2013 football champs and the Maryland Health Benefit Exchange.

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Where is Our Amnesty?

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Photo Credit: APNow that Obama thinks he has successfully remade the American economy and permanently transformed the relationship between the citizen and government, he is working on restructuring society itself. He plans to move on from Obamacare to immigration deform.

Conservatives must ensure that the focus remains on Obamacare. No immigration-related legislation. Period. The idea that we can craft a positive bill with Obama in the White House, irrespective of your view on the issue, is absurd.

However, there is one thing we can learn from the immigration debate. Almost every supposed precondition for amnesty and the pathway to citizenship under the Senate bill is subject to suspension for humanitarian purposes, to ensure family unity, the public interest, or personal hardship.

So given that so many of us will lose jobs, suffer from reduced income, lose our health insurance and access to doctor, pay unaffordable premiums, and lose our self-respect, where is our amnesty? Where is our waiver for purposed of hardship, family unity, and humanitarian concerns?

Are we less valuable than illegal immigrants? Evidently so. To make matters worse, illegal immigrants are still receiving $4.2 billion in refundable tax credits from the same IRS that is taxing our health insurance.

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Craigslist Makes Turning Food Stamps Into Cash a SNAP

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Photo Credit: Fox NewsFood stamp recipients are turning the government handouts into quick cash with ads on Craigslist, despite efforts to stem fraud.

The federally-funded grocery assistance coupons — which are issued by states in the form of debit cards under the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) — are being sold on the online bulletin board as well as auction sites like eBay. FoxNews.com found several offerings at Craigslist sites around the country, where the sellers offered the welfare benefits at large discounts from face value.

“If you need food. This is not a gimmick or game,” read one posting from Philadelphia. “Please let me know, I have food stamps for sale….. Serious Replies only!!!”

“I have $500 worth and it costs $350 cash. No I will not do half!” read another posting from the Atlanta area. “I don’t need to sell. If you would like to get an extra $150 to $175 in grocery and pay no taxes and can see the benefit that you will still be saving then email me or call me and we can arrange the whole deal as soon as you like.”

Those who are desperately hungry are also taking to the website, offering cash for the stamps.

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Media Matters Snagged in Benghazi Deceit

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Photo Credit: WNDIn their new e-book, “The Benghazi Hoax,” Media Matters for America executives David Brock and Ari Rabin-Havt dispute the claim that highly trained Special Forces were available and could have been deployed in time to make a difference in the Sept. 11, 2012, attack on the U.S. mission in Benghazi, Libya.

The authors, however, fail to inform readers that Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, conceded highly trained Special Forces were stationed just a few hours away from Benghazi on the night of the attack but were not told to deploy to Libya, as WND was first to report.

Brock and Rabin-Ravt also did not raise the many questions prompted by Dempsey’s testimony, including an admission to the highly unusual move of changing command of the Special Forces in the middle of the Benghazi attack.

Instead, Brock and Rabin-Ravt attempt to refute an exclusive Fox News interview aired April 30 in which a special government operator, speaking on condition of anonymity, contradicted claims by the Obama administration and a State Department review that there wasn’t enough time for military forces to deploy the night of the attack.

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Russian Spy Agency Seeks To Expand NSA-Style Internet Surveillance

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Photo Credit: The Guardian Russian authorities are moving to expand surveillance of the Internet by requiring service providers to store all traffic temporarily and make it available to the top domestic intelligence agency.

Under an order drafted by the Communications Ministry, providers would have to install equipment that would record and save all Internet traffic for at least 12 hours and grant the security services exclusive access to the data.

President Vladimir Putin has tightened his grip over Russia since his election to a third term in March 2012 amid a wave of opposition protests, and security is being stepped up further before the Winter Olympics in Sochi.

The draft order, made public on Monday, is likely to deepen concerns over tighter surveillance of the Internet, where debate is much freer than in Russia’s conventional media and which security officials have said should be better controlled.

Russia drew global attention concerning a similar spying program in the United States and Britain after granting former U.S. intelligence agency contractor Edward Snowden temporary asylum.

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CIA Drone Strikes Could Encourage Use by Hostile States, Lawyer Warns

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Photo Credit: Mike Theiler/EPAHuman rights lawyers have warned that alleged illegal drone attacks by the US in Pakistan and Yemen risk encouraging their use by other states in the region.

Andrea Prasow, a counter-terrorism lawyer with Human Rights Watch, said a new report with Amnesty International into evidence of strikes against civilians showed breaches of international conventions that could be exploited by hostile countries using similar technology.

“The failure to abide by international law sets a dangerous precedent for other countries,” Prasow told reporters at the launch of the report.

On Monday, Iranian media reported that authorities in Tehran had reverse-engineered a captured US drone and made a series of copies.

Naureen Shah of Amnesty echoed the growing concern in legal circles that indiscriminate US strikes will make it harder to restrain such countries in future.

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White House Staffer Fired for Tweeting Under Fake Name

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Photo Credit: west.mA White House national security official was fired last week after being caught as the mystery Tweeter who has been tormenting the foreign policy community with insulting comments and revealing internal Obama administration information for over two years.

Jofi Joseph, a director in the non-proliferation section of the National Security Staff at the White House, has been surreptitiously tweeting under the moniker @natsecwonk, a Twitter feed famous inside Washington policy circles since it began in February, 2011 until it was shut down last week. Two administration officials confirmed that the mystery tweeter was Joseph, who has also worked at the State Department and on Capitol Hill for Senators Bob Casey (D-PA) and Joe Biden. Until recently, he was part of the administration’s team working on negotiations with Iran.

During his time tweeting under the @natsecwonk name, Joseph openly criticized the policies of his White House bosses and often insulted their intellect and appearance. At different times, he insulted or criticized several top White House and State Department officials, including former National Security Advisor Tom Donilon, Deputy National Security Advisor Ben Rhodes, Secretary of State John Kerry, and many many others.

The Daily Beast saved a long record of @natsecwonk’s tweets prior to the shutting down of his Twitter feed.

“I’m a fan of Obama, but his continuing reliance and dependence upon a vacuous cipher like Valerie Jarrett concerns me,” he once tweeted.

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Post Office $5.6 Billion Default Raises Urgency of Reforms

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Photo Credit: APWith Congress and the media focused on the government shutdown and how to avoid default on the national debt, little attention was directed toward the U.S. Postal Service which earlier this month defaulted on a required $5.6 billion payment for the healthcare of its future retirees.

The third default on the down-payment in just over a year underscores the necessity of much-needed reforms for the beleaguered Postal Service.

Rep. Darrell Issa of California told Newsmax that without “the freedom to realign its infrastructure and operations in line with the changing way Americans use mail, the agency will remain insolvent.”

“Prolonged insolvency of USPS will result in a massive taxpayer bailout and ongoing subsidy, or a sudden disruption in mail service, or both,” the California Republican said.

Just days before the default, USPS Board of Governors Chairman Mickey Barnett announced an increase in the price of stamps beginning in 2014, which he said was the result of USPS’ “precarious financial condition” and the “uncertain path toward enactment of postal reform legislation.”

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Ex-Secret Service Agent Charges ‘Pattern’ of Drunkenness by Traveling Obama Aides

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Photo Credit: Washington Examiner A former Secret Service agent who spent three years at President Obama’s side is claiming in a new book that White House staff regularly got drunk at “wheels-up” parties overseas, acting just as badly as agents fired for their involvement in a foreign booze-and-prostitution scandal last year.

Dan Bongino, who quit the service in 2011 to run as a Republican in the Maryland Senate race, charged that he witnessed Obama staffers boozing at parties in foreign nations after Air Force One was “wheels up” and the president headed for home. The parties bring together U.S. and foreign staff involved in presidential trips.

“The only bad behavior I ever witnessed at these events was by intoxicated White House staff,” wrote Bongino, who expressed dismay at how the agents fired in the Colombian sex scandal were treated by the president.

“I felt the president’s harsh words were inappropriate,” he said of Obama’s comments about the 2012 scandal involving agents advancing an Obama trip to Cartagena. “He failed to acknowledge that this was a pattern of behavior that was not uncommon among his own staff members within the White House.”

In the upcoming “Life Inside the Bubble,” provided in advance to Secrets, the 12-year agent added: “I assure you, if the same level of investigative scrutiny was applied to the White House staff members conducting advance work as was applied to the Secret Service, the results would not be flattering.”

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Obama Dumps Green Energy Billions on “Moderate Muslim” Country that Stones Adulterers

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Photo Credit: FrontPageMagWhen Obama invited the tyrannical Sultan of Brunei to sit beneath the portrait of George Washington, it’s a wonder the painting didn’t fall off the wall.

Obama laughingly said that the Sultan had gone through “nine presidents”, which is what happens when you don’t do elections and praised the “160 years of friendship between the United States and Brunei.”

Meanwhile Obama’s pivot to Asia consisted of dumping billions on “moderate” Muslim countries like genocidal Indonesia and tyrannical Brunei for… what else… Green Energy.

Obama, in partnership with Sultan Haji Hassanal Bolkiah of Brunei and President of the Republic of Indonesia Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, today proposed the U.S.-Asia Pacific Comprehensive Partnership for a Sustainable Energy Future.

The United States will provide up to $6 billion to support the Partnership.

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