Photo Credit: NewsBusters
“I hope you’ve quit smoking,” he said to Kiai, according to a CNN report…
The audio is fuzzy, but Obama can be heard admitting: “No, no no I haven’t…in six years. That’s ‘cause I’m scared of my wife.”
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Photo Credit: free patriot
Perhaps you think we are taking this out of context. Perhaps, perhaps not. The Christian Science Monitor puts this in a way that involves the founding fathers, so let us look at two right quick. Benjamin Franklin was a writer, an inventor, and a scholar. Thomas Payne was a seamstress. Both owned a printing press. Benjamin Franklin’s “Poor Richards Almanac” is still quoted today. Thomas Payne edited a magazine and his pamphlets that were self published called “Common Sense” were some of the most provocative writings that stirred and built a nation. So would we say that this sounds shady enough that they would be saying Benjamin Franklin is protected by the government, but Thomas Payne wouldn’t be?
By today’s definition, you could also associate with his government connections, Benjamin Franklin with the established media sources and Thomas Payne with writing for online media. Without one of them history would never have been the same. Could you honestly say that both of these distinguished gentlemen were not deserving of the title of “Journalist”? But this is in fact what Dianne Feinstein has attempted to do.
The first version of a media shield law that handily made it through the Senate Judiciary Committee on Thursday defined for the first time what constitutes a “real reporter” deserving of extra protection versus what Sen Feinstein called a “17-year-old blogger” who she said doesn’t deserve a legal shield. One question that could be asked of that is that she covered a teen bullying case for the media, and knowing that the kid that was bullied would get beat up if she tells who it is, isn’t she deserving of the protection in order to keep that kid safe?
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On Sunday, Chris Wallace, the host of Fox News Sunday, said that Republicans in Washington were savaging Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) behind Cruz’s back before Cruz’s appearance on the program to discuss defunding Obamacare.
In an appearance on Washington D.C.’s Fox 5 to preview his Sunday show, Wallace said, “I will tell you I have never in my time in Washington seen a party so upset with one of its own members.”
He said he had been flooded with opposition research on Cruz–from Republicans. Later on Fox News Sunday, Wallace said these “top Republicans” gave him “unsolicited research and questions” to “hammer” Cruz…
In an exclusive op-ed for Breitbart News on Saturday, former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, who has also been savaged by establishment Republicans, urged Cruz to stay strong in the face of inevitable attacks from fellow Republicans and suggested they compare “shiv marks” the next time they meet.
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Photo Credit: Iranian Ministry of Defense
Mr. Netanyahu is scheduled to address the General Assembly next Tuesday, a week after President Obama and Iran’s new president, Hassan Rouhani, are to speak at the United Nations.
But the Israeli government, clearly rattled by the sudden talk of a diplomatic opening, offered a preview Sunday of Mr. Netanyahu’s hard-edged message, in which he will set the terms for what would be acceptable to Israel in any agreement concerning Iran’s nuclear ambitions.
“A bad agreement is worse than no agreement at all,” the Israeli official said, reading a statement from the prime minister’s office that he said reflected Mr. Netanyahu’s remarks.
President Rouhani, in advance of his arrival in New York this week, has signaled a willingness to negotiate. The Obama administration, while professing wariness, is clearly intrigued by the possibility of resolving a problem that has bedeviled President Obama as long as he has been in office. And that, in turn, has deeply unsettled the Israelis.
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Photo Credit: AP
Since the beginning of September 2008, in fact, the Fed’s ownership of Treasury securities and MBSs has increased seven fold.
As of the close of business Thursday, the Fed said, it owned approximately $2,052,055,000,000 in U.S. Treasury securities and approximately $1,339,771,000,000 in mortgage-backed securities—for a combined total of about $3,391,826,000,000 in Treasury securities and MBSs.
The U.S. Treasury divides the U.S. government debt into two parts: debt held by the public, which includes publicly traded Treasury securities such as Treasury bills, notes and bonds, and intra-governmental debt, which is money the Treasury has borrowed out of the Social Security trust fund and other government trust funds and then used to pay current expenses.
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Photo Credit: RedState
The whole of House Republican Leadership thinks you are stupid. They have passed a bill that they know will be changed by Harry Reid before it goes back to the House in a few days. The smoking gun will happen when Boehner allows a Senate passed government funding measure to come up in the House minus the provision defunding ObamaCare. You wait and see.
Also, know that Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell is in on this too. He is going to stand with Senators Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and Mike Lee (R-Utah) to save his Senate seat, but he knows that he has the power to stop this scheme.
Here is how both Republican and Democrats in leadership are trying to fool you. The House passed a Continuing Resolution, a measure to fund the government for two and one half months, with two things attached. A measure to defund ObamaCare and another to reorder the debt payment priorities of the United States government to allow the federal government to operate if the debt limit forbids anymore federal borrowing. These amendments were grouped in a way making it very easy for the Senate to delete this provision. And that was by design.
After the House passed the resolution, they had a big fake rally to make believe they were happy that they were funding the government while defunding ObamaCare. Yet Republicans in the House think we are stupid. Representatives like Peter King (R-NY) and Tom Cole (R-Oklahoma) either went on TV or yelled at Tea Party minded constituents to tell them why the House could not pass a budget bill that defunds ObamaCare, yet they did it. These moderates only supported the House effort because they knew it was without teeth and an effort to make believe they are fighting ObamaCare.
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Photo Credit: AP
Among the dozen gun-control bills sitting on California Gov. Jerry Brown’s desk are measures that would outlaw lead ammunition for hunting as well as common types of hunting rifles under the umbrella of an assault-weapons ban. Taken together, the measures go far beyond the efforts that have inspired a sharp backlash and political battles in states such as Connecticut and Colorado.
To put the lead bill in context, about 95 percent of all ammunition sold in California contains lead. The alternative is metal bullets, some of which can pierce police armor and are banned by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms. Critics say the bill would effectively end hunting as a sport in California.
“If California outlaws lead bullets, the federal government already outlaws everything else, so there’s nothing left for hunters to use,” said California Assemblyman Brian Jones, a Republican from Santee. “It basically outlaws hunting.”
Mr. Brown has yet to say whether he will sign any or all of the gun bills, but the effort has already sparked a backlash against the Democratic-sponsored bills by one of the party’s chief constituencies: labor unions. A half-dozen California labor leaders have formed a coalition urging the governor to veto Assembly Bill 711, the lead-ammunition ban, citing the loss of manufacturing and supply-chain jobs as well as recreational opportunities.
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Photo Credit: aflcio
In 2010 while fighting for her political life after losing the Republican primary to Joe Miller, Sen. Lisa Murkowski had her legal counsel send letters to Alaska television stations warning them that they were putting their Federal Communications Commission licenses at risk by running ads against her that were paid for by the Tea Party Express.
Murkowski’s counsel claimed the ads constituted “false advertising” and the stations could lose their FCC license by continuing to run them. Of course, Murkowski’s lawyers knew (or should know) full well that as a public figure, her chance of proving slander or libel were virtually nil and the stations were in no danger of losing their broadcast licenses.
But that didn’t stop them from trying to put the arm on Alaska media stations — “nice FCC license you have there, be a shame if something happened to it” — and thankfully no one pulled the ads based on the Murkowski campaign threats…
So here we are again almost three years to the day later, and Sen. Mark Begich had his lawyers at Perkins Coie in Washington, D.C., fire off a letter to Alaska TV stations Sept. 5 demanding they “immediately” stop running ads sponsored by the American Energy Alliance accusing Begich of wanting you to believe “a carbon tax is a good idea.”
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Photo Credit: DBerry2006
[The geologist] said there’s a 37 percent chance the Big One will happen in the next 50 years…
A big quake will cause liquefaction, in which the ground, if saturated with water, will “turn to pudding,” causing hardware, such as sewer systems, septic lines and gas tanks, to rise up out of the earth…
Electrical power would be down from one to three months until transformers and the electrical grid get going again, she says…
Partial quakes happen on an average of every 240 years. The last one was in 1700, so it’s been 213 years. Quakes of the entire length of the zone come every 500 to 600 years and governments should expect those to be 9.0 or more on the Richter scale — tremendously devastating.
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For the first time, an assessment report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) will be widely judged more for what it says about the IPCC than for what it says about the climate. Its 2007 predecessor bombed during the 2009 Copenhagen climate conference as a number of errors came to light. “The mistakes all appear to have gone in the direction of making it seem like climate change is more serious by overstating the impact,” Bob Watson, a former IPCC chairman, conceded. “That is worrying.”
The IPCC fifth assessment report is being published in the run-up to the Paris climate conference in 2015, when the governments of the world are meant to do what they signally failed to do at Copenhagen: agree. Advertised as summaries of scientific knowledge, IPCC reports — note that the “I” stands for “intergovernmental” — are subject to review by governments and by scientists, many of them employed by governments, making the reports politico-scientific documents.
Their function is to serve as canonical texts for global-warming orthodoxy, providing an updated climate-change catechism for its followers. Writing in the Times of London last week, the current chief scientific adviser to the British government and his three predecessors stated that the IPCC will present “even greater confidence” that the climate is warming as a result of human activities. Only, as the rest of the world knows, observed temperatures haven’t risen for at least a decade and a half.
Climate scientist Judith Curry of Georgia Tech has described the IPCC’s position as “incomprehensible.” The IPCC has increased its confidence in attributing the cause of global warming to greenhouse gases when there has been less warming and more greenhouse gases.
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