Obama: Won’t Negotiate ‘With a Gun At My Head’

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Photo Credit: APBy Jake Sherman, John Bresnahan, Burgess Everett and Jonathan Allen.

President Barack Obama told House Democrats on Wednesday that he would negotiate with Republicans but “not with a gun at my head,” according to one lawmaker who attended a caucus-wide meeting at the White House.

As he has before, Obama said he was open to short-term agreements to open the government and raise the debt ceiling if that’s what it took to help Republicans out of what he described as a political box, the lawmaker said.

After the meeting, House Democratic leaders suggested that they would accept short-term deals on both matters.

“All we want is a short-term CR because we think the number is unacceptable,” House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said, using shorthand for a continuing resolution that would fund the government for as little as a few weeks at current levels.

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Photo Credit: CHARLES DHARAPAK/APObama Apologizes for Shutdown – but Says it’s Other Guy’s Fault

By Anita Kumar and William Douglas.

President Barack Obama apologized to the American people Tuesday for the bitter fiscal impasse that’s shut down parts of the federal government, but he continued to blame Republicans for it.

“I know the American people are tired of it,” Obama said at a White House news conference. “I apologize that you have to go through this stuff every three months, it seems like. And Lord knows I’m tired of it.”

The president again urged Republicans in the House of Representatives to pass bills immediately to reopen the government and increase the nation’s borrowing limit, even while continuing to call them irresponsible hostage takers.

An hour later, House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, scolded Obama for his remarks, saying the president must negotiate before they pass the bills.

Boehner said Congress and the White House had negotiated on government funding and the debt limit dozens of times over the years, resulting in “significant policy changes that would in fact reduce spending and put us on a saner fiscal path.”

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Obama Seen as Chicken Little on Default

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Photo Credit: IshronaA growing number of economists and politicians say President Obama is just factually wrong when he claims the United States is risking default by not raising the debt celing.

They also say Obama is mistaken in claiming that failure to raise the debt ceiling would be a disaster, or as he put it, “insane, catastrophic, chaos.”

One famous economist even goes so far as to portray the president’s dire warnings as outright dangerous and irresponsible. CNBC’s Lawrence Kudlow accused the president of threatening “to pull the whole system down for (his) own gain.”

No default

Obama has repeatedly insisted that not raising the debt ceiling would mean the United States could not pay the bills it has already accumulated – the payments Congress has already authorized – and would result in a default.

Not true, wrote Jeffrey Dorfman in Forbes. The University of Georgia economics professor explained, “Reaching the debt ceiling does not mean that the government will default on the outstanding government debt. In fact, the U.S. Constitution forbids defaulting on the debt (14th Amendment, Section 4), so the government is not allowed to default even if it wanted to.”

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Immigration Agents Rip House Lawmakers Push for Amnesty

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U.S. Immigration Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) agents have expressed strong concerns over House Judiciary Committee chairman Rep. Bob Goodlatte (R-VA) and other Representatives pushing for immigration legislation that would legalize the status of America’s at least 11 million illegal immigrants.

In a public statement that will be released Thursday morning but has been provided exclusively to Breitbart News ahead of its public release, USCIS Council president Kenneth Palinkas warned that Goodlatte (pictured), House Budget Committee chairman Rep. Paul Ryan (R-VA), House Majority Leader Rep. Eric Cantor (R-VA), and Rep. Luis Gutierrez (D-IL) seem to be following the same pathway that Senate “Gang of Eight” members did, regarding how they are working on immigration legislation.

“At every step, this administration places obstacles and roadblocks in front of our adjudication officers in their attempts to protect our nation’s security and the American taxpayer,” Palinkas said. “I documented these abuses on more than one occasion with the authors of Schumer-Rubio-Corker-Hoeven [S. 744] only to have them ignored.

“I worry the House may be following a similar path. Media reports reveal that Chairman Bob Goodlatte, Chairman Paul Ryan, Congressman Luis Gutierrez, and Majority Leader Eric Cantor are working to advance proposals to open citizenship benefits to the majority of those here illegally, in combination with proposals to expand visa programs.”

Palinkas warned, too, that any group of “step-by-step” House immigration bills may be used as a tool by congressional leaders to get to a conference committee, at which point they would be combined with the Senate bill and sent to the president for his signature, and illegal immigrants would start getting amnesty. That is exactly what House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, Gang of Eight members Sens. Bob Menendez (D-NJ) and Chuck Schumer (D-NY), Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, and some Republicans have said they want to do.

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Obama’s Negative Polling Worse than Clinton’s in 1995 Shutdown

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Photo Credit: Breitbart Gallup released a poll last week showing President Barack Obama’s negative polling among Americans during the current government shutdown is substantially worse in comparison to the numbers the last Democratic president, Bill Clinton, had during his administration’s shutdown in 1995.

According to Gallup:

A majority of Americans, 57%, say they now view President Obama more negatively as a result of the shutdown, while 28% see him more positively. By contrast, during the December 1995 shutdown, 49% of Americans viewed Clinton more negatively and 35% more positively. Clinton’s overall approval rating would tumble to 42% by the end of the 1995-96 shutdown, but rebounded later in 1996.

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Alaska Slams Feds for Keeping Hunters off Land

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Photo Credit: Alex SlitzAlaska lawmakers accused the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service of violating federal law by shutting down hunting on its lands during the government shutdown, saying a 1980 law guarantees state residents must have access to the land.

“It seems that agencies are working harder to keep people off federal lands than they have ever worked before to get them to visit federal lands,” said Sen. Lisa Murkowski, Alaska Republican, who questioned the Obama administration’s decisions during the week-old shutdown.

The National Park Service has faced scorching criticism for closing not just parks, but even parking lots and drives that don’t require continual monitoring or upkeep. Other federal land management agencies also are facing criticism.

A tour guide who had a group at Yellowstone National Park accused the Park Service of “Gestapo tactics” in trying to prevent visitors from viewing any of the sites, saying that while they were allowed to remain at the lodge in the park, they were not allowed to do much else — including walk on the boardwalk paths outside the lodge or visit the park’s geysers.

And when he took the tour bus with his group along the road and stopped to photograph bison, he said, a ranger drove up behind them and told them they could be charged with trespassing.

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NYC Motorcycle Road Rage Incident May Have Ruined a Large Investigation (+video)

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Photo Credit: Modern RelicsThere were two more arrests in the biker road rage case in New York. One suspect is an undercover police detective, and has been charged in the attack. He is allegedly seen on video hitting and kicking an SUV, before the driver, Alexian Lien, was attacked.

CBS News senior correspondent John Miller, a former deputy commissioner with the New York Police Department, said on “CBS This Morning”: “This is a story that starts out as not such a good day (for the NYPD) because they had a detective on the scene who was undercover, who took no action to intervene, and then waited four days to come forward and say, ‘I was there.’ That got worse (on Tuesday) when they reviewed the videotapes they received this week from other sources other than the YouTube video we first saw, and they see their own detective allegedly banging out the back window of the SUV during the incidents that led up to the man being dragged from the car. So that really changed the calculus from, was this a departmental matter to a criminal matter.”

Turning to the police detective’s undercover status, Miller said not breaking cover is one of the officer’s primary jobs, but added, “that doesn’t mean that you can’t get in the middle and say, ‘Hey guys, break it up,’ or ‘let’s stop this.’ You don’t have to jump out and say, ‘I am a secret police officer’. ”

However, the officer was not only not intervening, he was allegedly part of the melee.

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Roadside Inn Reopens After Feds Tried to Shut It Down Over Budget Impasse

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Photo Credit: PISGAH INN The owner of a privately run inn along the Blue Ridge Parkway in North Carolina is back in business five days after the federal government forced him to close as a byproduct of the D.C. slimdown.

Bruce O’Connell, owner of the Pisgah Inn, told FoxNews.com on Tuesday he was “hopeful” that his business would reopen — and by Wednesday, it had.

A posting on the company’s Facebook page said the inn was reopening at 5 p.m. Suggesting an agreement was reached with the feds, the post thanked the National Park Service “for working with us through all of this mess.” An employee also confirmed to FoxNews.com that the inn was re-opening.

O’Connell was among a growing group of business owners who argued that the federal government was needlessly choking off their ability to earn a living, and were fighting back. O’Connell had been vocal about looking into his legal options following the forced closing.

Congress’s inability to come to a compromise on bills that would have kept the government fully funded forced the inn, which is in a leased building on federal land, to shut down last Thursday.

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Jerry Brown Signs Bill Permitting Non-Physician Abortions in California

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Photo Credit: Rose Palmisano, Orange County RegisterCalifornia on Wednesday became the only state in the nation this year to increase access to abortions, as Gov. Jerry Brown signed a bill allowing more medical professionals to perform abortions.

AB154 by Assemblywoman Toni Atkins, D-San Diego, would let nurse practitioners, certified nurse-midwives and physician assistants with special training perform abortion by aspiration — in which the uterus’ contents are suctioned out — which is the most common kind of first-trimester abortion. The Assembly passed the bill on a 50-25 vote in May, and the state Senate passed it on a 50-25 vote in August, with most Democrats and no Republicans voting for it.

“California is moving in a different direction than the rest of the country. So far this year we have seen 68 abortion restrictions become law, and California is the only state to make real progress to protect abortion rights,” said Elizabeth Nash, state issues manager for the Guttmacher Institute, a reproductive-rights research group.

“This is just a common sense measure,” she said. “The state recognizes that abortion is not always available when needed and that advanced practice clinicians are well-placed to provide those services.”

But Brian Johnston, executive director of the California ProLife Council, said the bill “isn’t about helping women so much as about promoting abortion.”

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Democrats to America: We Own the Government!

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Photo Credit: APIn the current fight over the government shutdown, Republicans are simply representing the views of the American people.

Americans didn’t ask for Obamacare, they don’t want it, but now their insurance premiums are going through the roof, their doctors aren’t accepting it, and their employers are moving them into part-time work — or firing them — to avoid the law’s mandates.

Contrary to Obama’s promises, it turns out: You can’t keep your doctor, you can’t keep your insurance — you can’t even keep your job. In other words, it’s a typical government program, but this one wrecks your health care.

Also, the president did raise taxes on the middle class in defiance of his well-worn campaign promise not to. Indeed, Obamacare is the largest tax hike in U.S. history.

Among the other changes effected by this law are:

— Obamacare will allow insurers to charge 50 percent higher premiums for smokers, but prohibits insurers from increasing premiums for those with HIV/AIDS.

Read more from this story HERE.

NSA Reforms Threatened by ‘Business-as-Usual Brigade’, Ron Wyden Warns

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Photo Credit: Win McNamee/GettyThe Democratic senator leading congressional efforts to rein in the National Security Agency warned on Wednesday that senior intelligence and administration officials will attempt to block any meaningful change while publicly speaking the language of reform.

Ron Wyden, a member of the Senate intelligence committee, told a conference on the NSA and privacy at the Cato Institute in Washington that the reform campaign was at a pivotal moment, with the Senate and the House of Representatives to examine new surveillance legislation over the next few weeks.

But, Wyden said, the American public should not be fooled by what he called the “business-as-usual brigade” – made up of intelligence officials, their supporters in Congress, thinktanks and the media.

They will “try mightily to fog up the surveillance debate and convince Congress and the public that the real problem here is not overly intrusive, constitutionally flawed domestic surveillance, but sensationalistic media reporting”, Wyden said. “Their endgame is ensuring that any surveillance reforms are only skin deep.”

The Oregon senator is a part of a bipartisan Senate group who unveiled the first comprehensive surveillance reform bill two weeks ago. It would end the NSA’s bulk collection of phone records, first revealed by the Guardian in June, change the secret court that oversees the agency’s foreign intelligence programs and close the loophole that allows analysts to review Americans’ communications without a warrant.

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