After House Democrats Arrested At Immigration Rally, White House Pressures GOP (+video)

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Photo Credit: inquisitr.comBy The Inquisitr

After House Democrats were arrested Tuesday at a rally to support an immigration overhaul, the White House turned up the pressure even more on Republicans who stand in the way of reform.

The Democrats arrested were part of a march in Washington on the National Mall to urge Congress to take action on immigration.

Immigration reform has been stuck in Congress after a reform bill drafted by the bipartisan Gang of Eight passed the Senate in June. The bill would create a pathway toward citizenship for illegal immigrants while also increasing border security. It would also increase the number of visas for skilled labor.

While it has support in the Senate, the Republican-controlled House remains a more difficult landscape. Conservatives have characterized the bill as “amnesty” for illegal immigrants, and its passage seems unlikely.

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Photo Credit: DREW ANGERER/GETTY House Democrats arrested during immigration protest

By CBS News

Several members of Congress were arrested after participating in an immigration “sit-in” on Capitol Hill demanding that House Republicans act to pass immigration reform.

Reps. John Lewis, D-Ga.; Keith Ellison, D-Minn.;. Charles Rangel, D-N.Y.; Jan Schakowsky, D-Ill.; and Luis Gutierrez, D-Ill., were among the lawmakers arrested by the Capitol Police for blocking a street near the Capitol.

The representatives are calling on Congress, particularly Republicans, to push immigration legislation forward. The Senate has passed a bill that includes amped up border security. House Democrats have unveiled a plan with a path to citizenship for the estimated 11 million immigrants living in the U.S. illegally. But it’s unclear if the GOP-led House will ever pass legislation.

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Jon Stewart Grills Health Secretary Kathleen Sebelius on Obamacare and Accuses her of Lying to Him (+videos)

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Photo Credit: Comedy Central Jon Stewart has been attacking the Republicans all week over the government shutdown but he took aim at a member of his own party on Monday night.

Kathleen Sebelius, the Secretary of Health and Human Services, was probably expecting a soft-ball interview about the roll out of President Obama’s signature health care plan but instead she was left backpedalling to try to recover from his pointed criticisms.

The Comedy Central host started by poking fun at how long the online marketplace takes to load, saying that it was comparable to the amount of time it would take to download all of the movies ever created.

After going for the easy laugh, things turned much more serious when he brought up a ‘legitimate criticism’ that Republicans have made.

Businesses with more than 50 full time employees have been given a delay so that they don’t have to provide health insurance for their employees for another year, whereas individuals have to sign up by December 15 or face a fine.


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Titanic Obamacare Hits Iceberg of Reality

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Photo Credit: A Train/flickrThe first reviews are in, and so, far, Obamacare is a lot like “new” Coke. Few product roll-outs in history have had more problems.

Even some of its strongest supporters are the most scathing critics of the way Obamcare has been introduced to the public.

When President Obama and Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius compared the Obamacare website problems to a glitch in an Apple product roll-out, Washington Post columnist Ezra Kelin responded, “But the Obama administration doesn’t have a basically working product that would be improved by a software update. They have a website that almost nobody has been able to successfully use.

“If Apple launched a major new product that functioned as badly as Obamacare’s online insurance marketplace, the tech world would be calling for (Apple CEO) Tim Cook’s head.”

Klein’s column was titled “Obamacare’s website is really bad.”

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Sowell: Inarticulate Republicans

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Photo Credit: National Review If the continued existence of mathematics depended on the ability of the Republicans to defend the proposition that two plus two equals four, it would probably mean the end of mathematics and of all the things that require mathematics.

The Republican speaker of the House of Representatives, John Boehner, epitomized what has been wrong with the Republicans for decades when he emerged from a White House meeting last Wednesday, went over to the assembled microphones, briefly expressed his disgust with the Democrats’ intransigence, and walked on away.

We are in the midst of a national crisis, immediately affecting millions of Americans and potentially affecting the kind of country this will become if Obamacare goes into effect — and yet, with multiple television-network cameras focused on Speaker Boehner as he emerged from the White House, he couldn’t be bothered to prepare a statement that would help clarify a confused situation, full of fallacies and lies.

Boehner is not unique in having a blind spot when it comes to recognizing the importance of articulation and the need to put some serious time and effort into presenting your case in a way that people outside the Beltway would understand. On the contrary, he has been all too typical of Republican leaders in recent decades.

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Obama to Nominate Janet Yellen as Federal Reserve Chairman

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Photo Credit: AP/Eugene HoshikoPresident Obama will announce Janet Yellen as his nominee to replace Ben Bernanke as chairman of the Federal Reserve system on Wednesday afternoon, White House officials said Tuesday evening.

The 67-year old Yellen, the current vice chairman of the Fed, would become the first female leader of the central bank.

Yellen has been viewed as the favorite for the job since former Obama economic adviser Larry Summers withdrew his name from consideration in September.

Previously, Summers’ candidacy had drawn an unusual amount of attention to the nomination process, which usually is a relatively muted affair. He was forced to exit when a number of Democratic senators, including members of the Senate Banking Committee that approves Fed nominations, announced that they would not support him.

Yellen is expected to face a much easier path to confirmation. A number of Democrats took the unusual step of endorsing her for the post as an alternative to Summers when he was rumored to be Obama’s preferred pick.

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Why America Wants Drones That Can Kill Without Humans

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Photo Credit: defenseone.comScientists, engineers and policymakers are all figuring out ways drones can be used better and more smartly, more precise and less damaging to civilians, with longer range and better staying power. One method under development is by increasing autonomy on the drone itself.

Eventually, drones may have the technical ability to make even lethal decisions autonomously: to respond to a programmed set of inputs, select a target and fire their weapons without a human reviewing or checking the result. Yet the idea of the U.S. military deploying a lethal autonomous robot, or LAR, is sparking controversy. Though autonomy might address some of the current downsides of how drones are used, they introduce new downsides policymakers are only just learning to grapple with.

The basic conceit behind a LAR is that it can outperform and outthink a human operator. “If a drone’s system is sophisticated enough, it could be less emotional, more selective and able to provide force in a way that achieves a tactical objective with the least harm,” said Purdue University Professor Samuel Liles. “A lethal autonomous robot can aim better, target better, select better, and in general be a better asset with the linked ISR [intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance] packages it can run.”

Though the pace for drone strikes has slowed down — only 21 have struck Pakistan in 2013, versus 122 in 2010 according to the New America Foundation — unmanned vehicles remain a staple of the American counterinsurgency toolkit. But drones have built-in vulnerabilities that military planners still have not yet grappled with. Last year, for example, an aerospace engineer told the House Homeland Security Committee that with some inexpensive equipment he could hack into a drone and hijack it to perform some rogue purpose.

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Republicans Didn’t Sabotage Health Exchanges, Obama Did

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Photo Credit: Ken James/BloombergFor the first week that the federal health-care exchanges were running … well, crawling … the Obama administration claimed that no one could get through because of overwhelming pent-up demand. Essentially it spent a week arguing that no one could have predicted that, in a country of 300 million people, 2.4 percent of those people might stop by sometime in the first seven days to check out the administration’s signature legislative achievement.

We can now dismiss that theory, because the administration has: “Six days into the launch of insurance marketplaces created by the new health-care law, the federal government acknowledged for the first time Sunday it needed to fix design and software problems that have kept customers from applying online for coverage.”

Presumably, it would not have given that interview if its efforts to fix the systems had been successful this weekend. The Hill reports that the system will go offline again late tonight for more repairs.

So prepare yourself for the next theory: This is the fault of Republicans. Had Republicans created state exchanges as they were supposed to, agreed to the Medicaid expansion and provided more funding, the reasoning goes, everything would be going swimmingly.

I blame the Republicans for a lot of things, from their support for atrocious farm policies to the counterproductive showdown theater that is: 1. Wreaking havoc on everything from government data websites to the Smithsonian; 2. Not saving any money, because we just agreed to pay furloughed workers; 3. Not noticeably advancing the cause of repealing Obamacare; and 4. Grinding down the public’s opinion of the Republican Party from a stump to a hole.

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Justice Scalia: ‘I Even Believe in the Devil’

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Photo Credit: AP/Jessica Hill,Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia said he believes in the Devil as a living entity, “a real person,” and that the Devil is “smart” and “successful” in today’s world by convincing people to not believe in him or in God.
The topic came up in an interview with New York Magazine’s Jennifer Senior, which was published on Oct. 6.

“Hey, come on, that’s standard Catholic doctrine,” said Scalia, who is Catholic. “Every Catholic believes that…”

When asked by Senior, “Isn’t it frightening to believe in the Devil?” the Supreme Court justice said, “You’re looking at me as though I’m weird. My God! Are you so out of touch with most of America, most of which believes in the Devil? I mean, Jesus Christ believed in the Devil! It’s in the Gospels. You travel in circles that are so, so removed from mainstream America that you are appalled that anybody would believe in the Devil! Most of mankind has believed in the Devil, for all of history. Many more intelligent people than you or me have believed in the Devil.”

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John McCain Slams GOP’s ‘False Premise’ of Repealing Obamacare

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Photo Credit: AP/Susan WalshInfuriated that the government shutdown has delayed the payment of death benefits to the families of fallen American soldiers, Sen. John McCain railed against the “false premise” offered by some of his fellow Republicans that it is possible to repeal the Affordable Care Act.

“To somehow think that we were going to repeal Obamacare, which would have required 67 Republican votes [in the Senate] was a false premise, and I think we did the American people a great disservice by convincing them somehow we could,” McCain, R-Ariz., said. “We started out with a false premise on this side of the aisle.”

The 67-vote margin is what Senate Republicans would need to overturn a presidential veto of any measure that delayed or derailed Obamacare — an unlikely achievement given that Democrats run the Senate and White House and Republicans hold just 46 of the Senate’s 100 seats.

McCain, a former Navy pilot who spent nearly six years as a prisoner of war in Vietnam, passionately criticized Congress for its failure to negotiate a compromise that would end a government shutdown that on Tuesday was entering its second week.

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AFL-CIO Teacher Union Head Randi Weingarten: ‘Women Actually Have to Work to Feed Their Families’

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Photo Credit: CNSNews.com/Penny StarrRandi Weingarten, feminist, lesbian and head of the American Federation of Teachers AFL-CIO labor union, said at a press conference Tuesday that the poor economy in the U.S. and lower wages for females is forcing women to work.

“We have a war in this country, and it happens when you are in sometimes the worst of the economic issues,” Weingarten said at the Feminist Majority’s Women, Money, and Power Summit in Washington, D.C. “We have huge income inequality where women actually have to work to feed their families.

“Forget about taking a vacation,” Weingarten said. “But just to put shelter up and to feed families.”

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