U.S. Senator Cruz Blocks Confirmation of New FCC Chairman

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Photo Credit: REUTERS/Jonathan ErnstRepublican Senator Ted Cruz, a conservative whose defiant stand against Obamacare helped prompt the U.S. government shutdown, has blocked the Senate from voting on the nomination of Tom Wheeler to be Federal Communications Commission chairman.

The Senate was scheduled to vote on Wheeler, a Democrat and telecom industry veteran, late on Wednesday. Cruz held up the vote over questions about the FCC’s power to enforce disclosures of who sponsors political television advertising.

“The Senator is holding the nominee until he gets answers to his questions regarding Mr. Wheeler’s views on whether the FCC has the authority or intent to implement the requirements of the failed Congressional DISCLOSE Act,” said Cruz spokesman Sean Rushton, referring to a failed bill meant to step up political disclosures.

“Mr. Wheeler had previously declined to give specific answers, but as he’s now expressed his readiness to revisit the Senator’s questions, the Senator hopes to communicate with him soon,” Rushton said.

If Wheeler cannot resolve Cruz’s concerns, Senate Democrats could force a vote on the nomination. Majority Leader Harry Reid would decided whether to take that action.

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McConnell: No More Shutdowns Over Obamacare

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Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell made it clear on Thursday that repealing Obamacare would never be used by Republicans again to bring the federal government to a halt.

“One of my favorite old Kentucky sayings is there’s no education in the second kick of a mule,” McConnell told The Hill. “The first kick of a mule was when we shut the government down in the mid-1990s — and the second kick was over the last 16 days.”

“There will not be a government shutdown,” the Kentucky Republican added.

The Obamacare strategy was pushed by several young congressional Republicans backed by the tea party — including freshman Sen. Ted Cruz, who spoke against the healthcare plan for more than 21 hours on the Senate floor last month — which led to a 16-day partial shutdown of the government and jeopardized the nation’s borrowing authority.

“I think we have fully now acquainted our new members with what a losing strategy that is,” McConnell told The Hill.

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House Panel on Benghazi Eyes White House Document, Panetta Testimony

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Photo Credit: Fox News As they wrap up their 13-month probe into the terrorist attacks in Benghazi that killed four Americans, congressional investigators have zeroed in on a press release issued the day before the murders by White House Press Secretary Jay Carney.

They also are seeking fresh testimony from former Defense Secretary Leon Panetta.

Staffers with the House Armed Services Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations told Fox News they have reached the preliminary conclusion – as the Obama administration has long maintained – that no military rescue or remedy was feasible on the night of September 11, 2012, when U.S. Ambassador to Libya Chris Stevens and three other Americans died amid an eight-hour assault by terrorists on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi and a nearby annex.

However, House investigators have also determined that the reason no military forces could be rallied to intervene in Benghazi is because U.S. military assets were poorly postured amid the turmoil of that period, as the eleventh anniversary of the September 11, 2001 attacks approached.

“My job was to look at the days and the weeks and the months and the years leading up to that day, and ask the question: Why weren’t we prepared, and who is responsible?” said Rep. Martha Roby, R-Ala., chair of the HASC subcommittee. “If the White House is projecting that we were safe, the White House has to take responsibility of our lack of preparedness.”

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Gov. Christie Pokes Fun at Booker’s Senate Victory (+video)

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Photo Credit: Julio Cortez, APLeave it to New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie to make his congratulatory wishes to Sen.-elect Cory Booker a poke in the ribs.

A day after Booker beat Republican Steve Lonegan in a special U.S. Senate election, Christie playfully complimented the Democrat’s victory by getting in a joke about Booker’s favorite football team, the winless New York Giants.

“I’m happy for the mayor today and his victory last night,” Christie said, appearing with Booker and other officials at a groundbreaking for a supermarket. “It was the first win for the Giants all year. Little did Tom Coughlin (the team’s coach) know he’d have to rely on a washed-up tight end from Stanford. Desperate times call for desperate measures, don’t they, Cory?”

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Snowden Says He Took No Secret Files to Russia

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Photo Credit: WikiLeaks, via Associated PressEdward J. Snowden, the former National Security Agency contractor, said in an extensive interview this month that he did not take any secret N.S.A. documents with him to Russia when he fled there in June, assuring that Russian intelligence officials could not get access to them.

Mr. Snowden said he gave all of the classified documents he had obtained to journalists he met in Hong Kong, before flying to Moscow, and did not keep any copies for himself. He did not take the files to Russia “because it wouldn’t serve the public interest,” he said.

“What would be the unique value of personally carrying another copy of the materials onward?” he added.

He also asserted that he was able to protect the documents from China’s spies because he was familiar with that nation’s intelligence abilities, saying that as an N.S.A. contractor he had targeted Chinese operations and had taught a course on Chinese cybercounterintelligence.

“There’s a zero percent chance the Russians or Chinese have received any documents,” he said.

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GOP-Leadership-Backed CR Funds Reg Forcing Christians to Act Against Faith

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Photo Credit: APThe continuing resolution Congress approved last night with the help of the Republican leaders in both the House and Senate funds and permits implementation of an Obamacare regulation that forces Christians to act against their faith by forcing them to buy and/or provide insurance coverage for abortion-inducing drugs and devices.

An earlier version of the CR that the Republican-controlled House passed on Sept. 29 had included language that would have at least “delayed” the regulation’s impact on religious liberty until Jan. 1, 2015.

That language said that until then the administration could not force employers, insurers or individuals to buy or provide insurance coverage for an item or service if they had “moral or religious objections” to it.

However, the Republican House leadership only stood by that position for one day. In the version of the CR they pushed through the House on Sept. 30, they removed the one-year “delay” in forcing Christians to act against their faith.

The final CR permits the administration to begin forcing Christians to act against their faith as soon as they have to buy or provide an Obamacare-compliant insurance plan.

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Obama to Nominate Jeh Johnson, Former Pentagon Official, as Next DHS Secretary

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Photo Credit: Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of StaffPresident Obama will nominate Jeh Johnson, formerly the Pentagon’s top lawyer and a key figure in the administration’s debate over the legality of drone use, to head the Department of Homeland Security, according to White House officials.

The official announcement will take place Friday at the White House. Johnson, if confirmed by the Senate, would succeed Janet Napolitano, who announced she was leaving the Cabinet post in July.

As the former Defense Department general counsel, Johnson was responsible for the legal work at the nation’s largest bureaucracy. His job placed him at the center of some of Obama’s most important national security decisions, from the practice of targeted killings beyond America’s defined battlefields to the intervention in Libya.

“The president is selecting Johnson because he is one the most highly qualified and respected national security leaders,” said a senior administration official, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss the nomination before its announcement. “During his tenure at the Department of Defense, he was known for his sound judgment and counsel.”

The official added that Johnson was “responsible for the prior legal review and approval of every military operation approved by the president and secretary of defense” during Obama’s first term.

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Obama Romneyizes the Republicans

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Photo Credit: Chad Crowe One of the more compelling finds in the opinion-polling swamps is that most people would like to see the entire Congress replaced. A more modest proposal: Let’s replace all the Republicans in Congress with their children or grandchildren. Bring in the 15-year-olds. How could it get worse?

From the House to the Senate, the Republicans look dazed and confused. Three weeks ago, Ted Cruz stood in the Senate chamber for nearly a day, looking like a hero. Today, with the GOP brand in a vertical dive, he looks like a Bozo balloon.

What do children know that the Republicans in Congress don’t know? The kids know, because it is the mother’s milk of their battery-powered lives, that if you don’t recognize shifts in the mighty flows of information, you will be swept aside, abandoned. You will be BlackBerry. BB.T +0.24%

For all the changes in information delivery, not much ever changes for the GOP’s messaging skills.

Wind back to the 2012 presidential election. Recall how after it was over, the GOP promised that it would duplicate the incredible modern messaging machine the Obama team created across every available new-information platform. That delivery system was why across four years Barack Obama kept hammering “the 1%” and “the wealthiest.” He was feeding the machine that was emailing, texting and tweeting this propaganda to targeted audiences.

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Obamacare Troubleshooters Faint from Exhaustion

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Photo Credit: WNDPresident Obama and the Democrats may have won the fight to keep Obamacare funding intact, but the president’s signature health-care takeover is self-destructing as even Healthcare.gov contractors say they are falling ill and “fainting in conference calls” because they can’t keep up with demand to fix the program’s glitches.

News of Obamacare’s imploding launch went from bad to worse Thursday:

Soaring cost: The cost of the Healthcare.gov online insurance website soared from $93.7 million to $292 million since April as the Obama administration began pouring money into the project following concerns it was in trouble. According to Reuters, “Henry Chao, deputy chief information officer at the lead Obamacare agency, said at an insurance-industry meeting that he was ‘pretty nervous’ about the exchanges being ready by October 1, adding, ‘let’s just make sure it’s not a Third-World experience.’” Now the House Energy and Commerce Committee is investigating the technical problems and contractors who received hundreds of millions of dollars to create it.

Copyright violation: The Obamacare website has reportedly violated licensing agreements for copyrighted software. The website failed to comply with the user agreement when it removed copyright notices from the software. The company says it will pursue action against the Department of Health and Human Services.

Minimal testing: The site wasn’t even tested until less than a week before its launch. A person with direct knowledge of the procedures told the Washington Examiner, “Normally a system this size would need 4-6 months of testing and performance tuning, not 4-6 days.”

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Americans Must Suffer

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Photo Credit: American Thinker Watching Barack Obama and his shutdown shenanigan theatre, I discovered I have something in common with our inchoate president — we both want Americans to suffer.

As a sociopathic solipsist, Obama is incapable of feeling anyone’s pain, and because of this, his goal has been to make this shutdown as agonizing as possible.

Ted Cruz, an honorable man with conviction, thought he could force ObamaCare concessions from the administration using the continuing resolution as a cudgel. Boehner thought the debt ceiling offered better opportunities. They decided on the infamous “defund strategy.”

Yet, once you dare to stare down the bully, you must stare down the bully. Republicans picked a fight and in a fight, one must fight. Now, the Republicans feel they cannot walk away from this confrontation with nothing.

Their strategy had a fatal flaw. For the Cruz maneuver to have succeeded, Barack Obama and the Democrats had to fear the shutdown. This was obviously not the case. They, in fact, welcomed it, and have done everything in their power to make it as painful as possible.

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