Obama’s Brother Linked to Muslim Brotherhood

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Photo Credit: WND

Photo Credit: WND

President Obama’s half-brother in Kenya could cause the White House more headaches over new evidence linking him to the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and establishing that controversial IRS supervisor Lois Lerner signed his tax-exempt approval letter.

Malik Obama’s oversight of the Muslim Brotherhood’s international investments is one reason for the Obama administration’s support of the Muslim Brotherhood, according to an Egyptian report citing the vice president of the Supreme Constitutional Court of Egypt, Tehani al-Gebali.

In a news report on Egyptian television of a Gebali speech, translated by researcher Walid Shoebat, a former Palestinian Liberation Organization operative, Gebali said she would like “to inform the American people that their president’s brother Obama is one of the architects of the major investments of the Muslim Brotherhood.”

“We will carry out the law, and the Americans will not stop us,” she said. “We need to open the files and begin court sessions.

“The Obama administration cannot stop us; they know that they supported terrorism,” she continued. “We will open the files so these nations are exposed, to show how they collaborated with [the terrorists]. It is for this reason that the American administration fights us.”

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NSA Collected Non-Terrorism-Related Emails (+video)

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Photo Credit: AP

Photo Credit: AP

By Reid J. Epstein.

The National Security Agency began improperly collecting Americans’ electronic communications that had no connection to terrorism in 2008, but the government didn’t learn of the problem until 2011, senior administration officials said Wednesday.

Director of National Intelligence James Clapper will release three documents that reveal the extent of the error, posting them on a new tumblr page.

The NSA revealed the improper collection of emails to the FISA court in 2011, which demanded a halt to the practice. The officials said the problem was technological and not malicious.

Congress, the administration officials said, knew when it authorized the surveillance programs in 2008 that some Americans would inadvertently have their communications intercepted.

Read more from this story HERE.

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Photo Credit: WND

Photo Credit: WND

NSA ‘Goes After Man who Mocked Agency’

By Joe Kovacs.

The National Security Agency, the secretive federal department under fire for spying on U.S. citizens, is now accused of crushing the free-speech rights of a businessman clowning around about the NSA.

LibertyManiacs.com, a company that markets “freedom products for liberty lovers,” says the NSA is using a claim of copyright infringement to stop it from selling T-shirts and other products making fun of the Big Brother agency.

“Two months ago the NSA’s lawyers came after our parodies of the rogue agency and forced our host to take them down,” the company said Friday on its Facebook page.

At issue is use of the NSA logo, which was partially altered by LibertyManiacs owner Dan McCall. He kept the name of the agency and most of the artwork intact, but changed the bottom portion from “United States of America” to the laugh-inspiring “Peeping while you’re sleeping.”

Underneath the doctored logo is the phrase “The NSA, the only part of government that actually listens.”

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NSA collected thousands of emails from Americans, rebuked by court

By Fox News.

The National Security Agency was rebuked by a secret court in 2011 for collecting thousands of emails and other online details from Americans with no ties to terrorism, according to court opinions which were declassified for the first time on Wednesday.

The Office of the Director of National Intelligence took the unusual step of declassifying more than 100 pages of documents, amid the escalating public debate about government surveillance programs. The release comes several days after a report showed that the NSA had violated privacy rules and overstepped its authority thousands of times.

Some of those incidents were minor, but the documents released Wednesday detail major compliance problems.

In 2011, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court was notified of a problem involving “upstream collection,” which is the collection of Internet traffic outside of the service providers. The NSA was collecting bundled email communications under a provision which focuses on foreign Internet traffic. The NSA, though, was not effectively segregating all the traffic from Americans.

The court rebuked the NSA for the violation.

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UPS Drops Health Insurance for Employee Spouses, Blames Obamacare

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Photo Credit: zyphbear

Photo Credit: zyphbear

United Parcel Service, the nation’s largest package delivery company, plans to drop health insurance coverage for thousands of employees’ spouses in a cost-cutting move it blames partially on President Obama’s health care law.

Of 33,000 spouses on UPS’s plan, about 15,000 are eligible for health coverage through their own employers and won’t be covered by the company beginning next year, according to a memo to employees published by Kaiser Health News.

Since the Affordable Care Act requires employers to provide affordable coverage, the shipping giant says those 15,000 spouses should be covered by their own employer “just as UPS has a responsibility to offer coverage to you, our employee,” the memo said. “Limiting plan eligibility is one way to manage ongoing health care costs.”

UPS said the coverage shift is “consistent with the way many large employers are responding to the costs associated with the health-care reform legislation.”

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Gallup: Unemployment Rate Jumps from 7.7% to 8.9% in 30 Days

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Photo Credit: Reuters

Photo Credit: Reuters

By John Nolte.

Outside of the federal government’s Bureau of Labor statistics, the Gallup polling organization also tracks the nation’s unemployment rate. While the BLS and Gallup findings might not always perfectly align, the trends almost always do and the small statistical differences just haven’t been worthy of note. But now Gallup is showing a sizable 30 day jump in the unemployment rate, from 7.7% on July 21 to 8.9% today.

This is an 18-month high.

Read more from this story HERE.

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Photo Credit: AP

Photo Credit: AP

Number of Long-Term Unemployed ‘Unprecedented’ Under Obama

By Bill McMorris.

The economy has seen an “unprecedented” number of long-term unemployed under the Obama administration, according to a liberal think tank, and economists say plans pursued by Democrats in Washington are unlikely to curb the problem.

Nearly 5 million workers are classified as long-term unemployed, while 900,000 more have stopped looking for work altogether, according to a new series of reports issued by the Urban Institute.

Three percent of the labor force has been out of work for more than six months, an improvement of only one percentage point since unemployment spiked in October 2009, according to the study.

“That long-term unemployment would rise during a recession is not at all surprising, but the extent of the increase and its persistently high level since the start of the recovery are both troubling and unprecedented,” the report states. “The U.S. economy is now well into its fourth year of recovery, the unemployment rate is below 8 percent, yet the long-term share of unemployment is still near 40 percent.”

The center-left think tank said that those startling figures are unlikely to change unless the United States can achieve dramatic job growth, rather than the middling 2 percent overall economic growth figures the Obama administration has averaged.

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Rush Limbaugh Eviscerates Media: Thrill Kill of White Athlete is ‘Trayvon Martin in Reverse, Only Worse’

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Photo Credit: AP

Photo Credit: AP

Conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh went after the mainstream media over its shallow coverage of the racial details in the Oklahoma shooting of student Chris Lane “for the fun of it.” On his radio show Wednesday, he said the case is like “Trayvon Martin in reverse, only worse.”

“This is nowhere near self-defense…this was cold-blooded, first-degree, recreational, for the fun of it because they were bored, murder,” Limbaugh said.

As TheBlaze previously reported, Lane, a 22-year-old Australian student and baseball player, was shot by three teenagers who were reportedly bored. Two of the suspects are black and one is white.

James Edwards, 15, and Chancey Luna, 16, were reportedly charged with first degree murder and face life in prison if convicted. They are being held without bond. Michael Jones, 17, was reportedly charged with using a vehicle to facilitate the discharge of a weapon and accessory after the fact of murder in the first degree.

“No matter where you look in the media, it’s not a racial event. This is the epitome of media irresponsibility,” Limbaugh reflected. “This is a classic illustration of just what role the mainstream media is playing in the destruction of American culture and society.”

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Levin: Republican Party Stands for Mush (+video)

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Photo Credit: YouTube

Photo Credit: YouTube

Mark Levin: “The issue is ‘are you going to have a civil war that’s going to hurt the Republican Party.’ The issue is ‘What’s right for America?’…I want a 1980 a 1984 those were the administrations I served under where I saw a conservative Republican president who knew what he was doing, who took on the establishment. And the Republican Party after he left lurched back to its neo-statist roots…. So what the hell are the Republicans going to run on? …

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Boehner Super-PAC Aides Push Senate Amnesty Bill

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Photo Credit: Business Insider

Photo Credit: Business Insider

Senior GOP aides of a super PAC linked to Speaker John Boehner are lobbying House Republicans to pass the Senate “Gang of Eight” immigration bill, legislation that Boehner has said he will not bring to the House floor.

The lobbying effort is coming under the umbrella of the American Action Network, a nonprofit 501(c)(4) “action tank” led by former senator Norm Coleman, which is touting the “major positive economic impact” of the Senate bill in e-mails sent to individual House Republican offices.

AAN is housed in the same office as the Congressional Leadership Fund, a super PAC associated with Boehner, and the two organizations share senior aides, including Brian O. Walsh, the president of both organizations, and Dan Conston, the spokesman for both.

Boehner spoke at a fundraiser for CLN earlier this summer and also headlined the organization’s inaugural event. The group’s website has posted links to numerous news stories that refer to the group as “Boehner’s” super PAC.

The AAN’s e-mail, sent to GOP offices, touts the number of jobs the group estimates the Senate bill would create for the congressional district and state of that office. The group also released an embeddable “widget” that allows users to find out how many jobs the Senate bill would create in the district of their representative.

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Corker: Lawmakers Learn More about NSA from Newspaper than Briefings

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Photo Credit: Wikimedia Commons

Photo Credit: Wikimedia Commons

Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.) is demanding a new round of briefings on U.S. domestic surveillance operations.

In a blistering critique of past briefings, Corker argued lawmakers learning more on the front page of the newspaper than behind closed doors with security officials.

In a Wednesday letter to the White House, Corker said briefings by Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, National Security Agency (NSA) chief Gen. Keith Alexander and others have not provided a full account of U.S. surveillance.

Briefings have “generally been limited to simply discussing the facts underlying specific public disclosures” of domestic surveillance operations, he said.

“As a result, members of Congress regularly read new revelations on the front pages of various newspapers,” Corker wrote.

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Al Gore Explains Why he’s Optimistic about Stopping Global Warming

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Photo Credit: Recyclebank

Photo Credit: Recyclebank

Ezra Klein: In 2005, when “An Inconvenient Truth” came out, I remember that the hope was we could keep the carbon load in the atmosphere to 350 parts per million, and the fear was we would hit 400ppm. Now we’ve hit 400ppm and people are hoping to avoid 450ppm. This seems to be getting out of hand, and fast.

Al Gore: We have already crossed the 400 parts per million mark. We crossed it earlier this year. The question now is how high it will go before we begin bending the curve. But in spite of the continued released of 90 million tons of global warming pollution every day into the atmosphere, as if it’s an open sewer, we are now seeing the approach of a global political tipping point.

The appearance of more extreme and more frequent weather events has had a very profound impact on public opinion in countries throughout the world. You mentioned my movie back in the day. The single most common criticism from skeptics when the film came out focused on the animation showing ocean water flowing into the World Trade Center memorial site. Skeptics called that demagogic and absurd and irresponsible. It happened last October 29th, years ahead of schedule, and the impact of that and many, many other similar events here and around the world has really begun to create a profound shift.

A second factor is the sharp and unexpectedly steep decrease in prices for electricity produced from wind and solar and the demand destruction for fossil fuel energy from new efficiency improvements. The difference between 32 degrees fahrenheit and 33 degrees fahrenheit seems larger than just one degree. It’s the difference between water and ice. And by analogy there’s a similar difference between renewable electricity that’s more expensive than electricity from coal and renewable electricity that’s less expensive. And in quite a few countries in the world and some parts of the United States we’ve crossed that threshold and in the next few years we’re going to see that crossed in nations and regions containing most of the world’s population.

Another way to think about this is that back when mobile telephones first appeared, the market projections for how quickly they would increase market share turned out to be not just wrong but way wrong. This is a point made by Dave Roberts at Grist, but the projections made 5-10 years ago for the installation of solar and wind technologies were, similarly, not just wrong but way wrong. We’ve seen a dramatic increase that’s far more rapid than anybody projected and it’s accelerating — not just in the United States but even more rapidly in developing countries.

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Syria’s Darkest Hour: Hundreds of Children’s Bodies Piled High After Nerve Gas Attack Near Damascus Leaves up to 1,300 Dead (+video)

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Photo Credit: Reuters

Photo Credit: Reuters

The world has looked on in horror as graphic images emerged showing the aftermath of a dawn poison gas attack in the suburbs of Damascus that wiped out 1,300 people as they lay sleeping in their beds.

Syrian activists accuse President Bashar al-Assad’s forces of launching the nerve gas attack in what would be by far the worst reported use of poison gas in the two-year-old civil war.

Activists said rockets with chemical agents hit the Damascus suburbs of Ain Tarma, Zamalka and Jobar before dawn…

The accounts could not be verified independently and were denied by Syrian state television, which said they were disseminated deliberately to distract a team of United Nations chemical weapons experts that arrived three days ago.

Syria’s Information Minister called the activists’ claim a ‘disillusioned and fabricated one whose objective is to deviate and mislead’ the UN mission. Al Jazeera’s Nisreen El-Shamayleh, reporting from neighbouring Jordan, said there were videos allegedly showing both children and adults in field hospitals, some of them suffocating, coughing and sweating.

(Video: CAUTION Graphic Content)

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