Rand Paul Threatens to Hold Yellen Nomination: Source (+video)

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Photo Credit: Getty ImagesSen. Rand Paul is threatening to put a hold on the nomination of Janet Yellen to chair the Federal Reserve, a source close to the Kentucky Republican said Friday.

Paul is insisting on a vote on his Fed transparency bill, and has informed Senate leadership of his intentions, the source said.

“As part of Senate consideration of the Janet Yellen nomination to be Chair of the Federal Reserve, I will request a vote on my bipartisan Federal Reserve Transparency Act, S. 209. The American people deserve transparency from the federal reserve and the federal government as a whole,” Paul said in a statement following the reports.

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How Washington is Killing the Economy

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Photo Credit: APThe latest round of fiscal drama has sputtered to a temporary close, but the routine crises have one clear victim: the U.S. economy, which is once again losing altitude. And for the third year in a row, Washington gets much of the blame.

There’s not much hope for a quick turnaround.

The most recent slowdown — highlighted by poor job growth, softening corporate earnings and decimated confidence — comes just as Republicans and Democrats prepare to square off in a fresh fight over the federal budget with another potential shutdown looming in January and a renewed debt ceiling crisis possible in February.

Washington’s drag on the economy now springs from a multiplying array of sources, including the constant threat of devastating fiscal crisis, the blunt nature of the sequester spending cuts, the troubled roll-out of Obamacare and the now deeply strained relations with key economic allies over clandestine surveillance allegations.

Taken together, Washington’s toxic politics and poorly executed policies have all but ensured that fourth quarter growth comes in soft after forecasters initially predicted a strong close to the year. And they mean that 2014, which initially looked like a possible breakout year for the U.S. economy, now seems like it will be a dreary rerun of 2013 featuring sluggish growth, modest job creation and stagnant wages.

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Democrats’ United Front Cracks

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Photo Credit: APThe great Democratic unity of 2013 held for five-and-a-half days.

For weeks leading up to the shutdown — and over the 16 days it dragged on — President Barack Obama did the unthinkable: he held every Democrat in the House and Senate together. There weren’t any defectors. There wasn’t even anyone running to reporters to question his strategy. The man who’d disappointed them so many times was suddenly exciting them, with his newly apparent backbone and successful resistance to Republicans. They were rushing to do whatever they could to stand by him, next to him, with him.

Like any fad, that’s gone the way of trucker hats and the macarena.

The problems with the Obamacare website have transformed the president from a man who seemed to have gotten a sudden infusion of political capital to a man who’s been pushed back on his heels. He was firm, and he was setting the agenda. Now he’s back to trying to beating back the latest frame Republicans have forced on him, inadvertently providing evidence to support the doubts they’ve been trying to sow from the beginning. He spent last week against the backdrop of a shutdown that made people appreciate all the things government can do for them. Now he has a website which shows how little it can.

And Democrats have scattered, raising the question of whether the president will be able to preserve any of the new cohesion he inspired earlier in the month, or whether the rift is going to widen again.

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Obama the Avatar

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Photo Credit: National Review Discussing the Obamacare disaster in the Rose Garden on Monday, President Obama led with a phrase to which we have become accustomed: “Nobody,” the president emoted, “is madder than me” about this mess.

Along with “let me be clear” and “make no mistake,” this is a favorite construction. Obama, you see, is more concerned for and correct about everything than everybody else at all times. “Nobody shares the frustrations of the American people more than I do,” he told WABC earlier this month; “nobody is more frustrated” than he about the IRS scandal; “no person,” the president affirmed during the election, “is more interested” in “seeing this economy growing strong.”

The line is contagious. In January, while trying pathetically to sell gun control, “Shotgun” Joe Biden informed the press that “nobody” was “more committed to acting on this moral obligation we have than the president of the United States.” “Nobody is more interested,” either, “in finding out exactly what happened” in Benghazi,” “more upset” about “the oil spill in the Gulf, or “more offended about the anti-gay and -lesbian legislation that you’ve been seeing in Russia.”

Even when he’s not interested he’s interested. “The bottom line,” Obama instructed NASA after cancelling the Constellation program, “is that nobody is more committed to manned spaceflight, to human exploration of space, than I am.”

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Paul Ryan Co-Writing Bill Legalizing America’s Illegal Immigrants

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Photo Credit: AFPHouse Budget Committee chairman Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) is writing a bill that would grant legal status to America’s at least 11 million illegal immigrants, The New York Times reports.

“Republican Representatives Paul D. Ryan of Wisconsin and Mario Diaz-Balart of Florida have been working on legislation that includes a process by which immigrants here illegally could ‘get right with the law’ and eventually become citizens,” the Times’ Eric Lipton and Ashley Parker wrote on Friday in a piece about immigration reform.

While the Times reported here, and Politico reported on Friday morning, that the Speaker and other House GOP leadership figures are privately saying they do not expect a vote on immigration measures this year, publicly they say they want to hold a vote on something on the floor of the House.

Technically, there are only 19 legislative days left in 2013’s calendar for the House, so doing so would be difficult. But it appears, according to liberal blogger Greg Sargent, that the public appearance of immigration reform being “dead” may be a coordinated leak system from the House GOP leadership in order to distract conservatives.

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Former Guantanamo Detainee Was on Ground in Benghazi During Terror Attack, Source Says

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Photo Credit: Fox News A former Guantanamo Bay detainee with Al Qaeda ties was in Benghazi the night of the Sept. 11 attack, according to a source on the ground in Libya.

The source told Fox News that ex-detainee Sufian bin Qumu, who is suspected of running camps in eastern Libya where some of the assailants trained, is also a “respected member” of Ansar al-Sharia — one of the Islamist groups identified in State Department email traffic two hours after the attack.

Two sources familiar with the investigation, when asked about bin Qumu’s whereabouts the night of the attack, did not dispute the claim he was in Benghazi.

While it is not clear whether bin Qumu was directing the assault, his security file from Guantanamo may be revealing. Having already trained in Usama bin Laden’s camps, in 1998 bin Qumu joined the Taliban in Pakistan and “communicated with likely extremist elements via radio during this period indicating a position of leadership,” the file shows.

Fox News’ ongoing reporting on the attack has shown that at least four key Benghazi suspects have ties to the Al Qaeda senior leadership in Pakistan. They include bin Qumu and Muhammad Jamal, whose network is also suspected of training jihadists for the attack. Jamal was held, and later released by, Egyptian authorities. Earlier this month, the State Department’s terrorist designation for Jamal and his network cites letters he exchanged with Al Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri, where Jamal asked for money and explained the scope of his training camps, which included Libya and the Sinai.

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A Government of Secrecy and Fear

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Photo Credit: APEvery American who values the rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, every American who enjoys the right to be different and the right to be left alone, and every American who believes that the government works for us and we don’t work for the government should thank Edward Snowden for his courageous and heroic revelations of the National Security Agency’s gargantuan spying operations. Without Snowden’s revelations, we would be ignorant children to a paternalistic government and completely in the dark about what the government sees of us and knows about us. And we would not know that it has stolen our freedoms.

When I saw Snowden’s initial revelation — a two-page order signed by a federal judge on the FISA court — I knew immediately that Snowden had a copy of a genuine top-secret document that even the judge who signed it did not have. The NSA reluctantly acknowledged that the document was genuine and claimed that all its snooping on the 113,000,000 Verizon customers covered by that order was lawful because it had been authorized by that federal judge. The NSA also claims that as a result of its spying, it has kept us safe.

I reject the argument that the government is empowered to take our liberties — here, the right to privacy — by majority vote or by secret fiat as part of an involuntary collective bargain that it needs to monitor us in private in order to protect us in public. The government’s job is to keep us free and safe. If it keeps us safe but not free, it is not doing its job.

Since the revelations about Verizon, we have learned that the NSA has captured and stored in its Utah computers the emails, texts, telephone conversations, utility bills, bank statements, credit card statements and digital phone books of everyone in America for the past two and a half years. It also has captured hundreds of millions of phone records in Brazil, France, Germany and Mexico — all U.S. allies — and it has shared much of the seized raw American data with intelligence agencies in Great Britain and Israel. Its agents have spied on their girlfriends and boyfriends literally thousands of times, and they have combed the collected raw data and selectively revealed some of it to law enforcement. All of this directly contradicts the Constitution.

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Angry Sun Spits Two Million-mph Tongues of Fire

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Photo Credit: Fox News The sun erupted with two of the strongest solar flares it can unleash Friday, just days after blasting an intense solar storm at Earth.

The sun fired off a flare that registered at X1.7 on the space weather scale at 4:01 a.m. EDT (0801 GMT) Friday, then followed with an X.2-class event at 11:07 a.m. EDT (1507 GMT). NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory captured video of the X1.7 solar flare, which came after several smaller sun storms over the last few days.

Both powerful flares erupted from a new sunspot cluster called Region 1882 and sparked temporary radio blackouts, officials with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Space Weather Prediction Center (SWPC) said in an update. But neither eruption is likely to spark major geomagnetic storms in Earth’s magnetic field, they added. [Solar Max: Sun Storm Photos of 2013]

Astronomers classify solar flares into three categories — C, M and X — with C being the weakest and X the strongest. When aimed directly at Earth, X-class sun eruptions can interfere with satellite-based communications and navigation systems and also endanger astronauts in orbit.

That does not appear to be the case with today’s X-class flares, according to an SWPC update, though officials are awaiting additional imagery of the events to see if they were associated with a massive explosion of super-hot plasma — known as a coronal mass ejection, or CME — that can hurl solar material into space at more than 1 million mph.

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Israel Issues Warning on Report on Iran Bomb: Necessary Uranium Month Away

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Photo Credit: ATTA KENARE AFP/Getty ImagesA new report that says Iran may need as little as a month to produce enough uranium for a nuclear bomb is further evidence for why Israel will take military action before that happens, an Israeli defense official said Friday.

“We have made it crystal clear – in all possible forums, that Israel will not stand by and watch Iran develop weaponry that will put us, the entire Middle East and eventually the world, under an Iranian umbrella of terror,” Danny Danon, Israel’s deputy defense minister told USA TODAY.

Iran is developing and installing new and advanced centrifuges that enable Iran to enrich even low-enriched uranium to weapons grade uranium needed for nuclear weapons within weeks, Danon said.

“This speedy enrichment capability will make timely detection and effective response to an Iranian nuclear breakout increasingly difficult,” he said.

“Breakout” refers to the time needed to convert low-enriched uranium to weapons-grade uranium. On Thursday, the Institute for Science and International Security issued a report stating that Iran could reach that breakout in as little as one month based in part on Iran’s own revelations about its nuclear program.

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The Fall of Barack

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Photo Credit: APBarack Obama is on schedule to leave office, widely acknowledged as America’s worst president. Somewhere, Jimmy Carter is smiling.

Everything Barry has touched in four years and three quarters has turned to dog excrement. He has the reverse Midas touch, although there is always plenty of gold for friends, associates and cronies.

Take ObamaCare, for instance — the ACA is a metaphor for the entire Obama presidency. Despite polls showing that 85% of Americans were happy with their health insurance, Barry insisted that there was a healthcare “crisis.” Then, never the hardest worker, he allowed Nancy Pelosi and her minions, along with Harry Reid and his minions, to write a 2,000-plus-page monstrosity of a bill, including every liberal fantasy wish from the last half-century.

Afterward, the “I won” president, through bribes and legislative trickery, shoved the Affordable Care Act down the throat of America, on a strictly partisan vote and before anyone even knew what was in it.

As Nancy Pelosi famously said, “We have to pass the bill so you can find out what’s in it.”

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