Hillary Clinton Heckled on Benghazi During Award Ceremony

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Photo Credit: Matt Rourke

Photo Credit: Matt Rourke

Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton fielded hecklers who hounded her on Benghazi at the tail end of an award acceptance speech she delivered at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia on Tuesday evening.

Mrs. Clinton was accepting the 2013 Liberty Medal, an honor to recognize her career in public service and advocacy for women’s rights, CBS reported. She told the crowd of hundreds of the U.S. need to balance national security with human rights issues in Syria, and called for American politicians to cross party aisles and strike a chord of unity.

“When we fail to make progress on the challenges facing our people at home, our standing in the world suffers,” she said, Breitbart.com reported.

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Sen. Lee: GOP Scheme to Both Defund AND Fund Obamacare ‘Disgraceful’ (+audio)

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photo credit: gage skidmore

photo credit: gage skidmore

In an interview on the nationally syndicated Mark Levin Show yesterday, Senator Mike Lee (R-Utah) slammed the Republican-led initiative to simultaneously propose legislation to fund and defund Obamacare.

Lee rhetorically asked Levin, “With Republicans like these, who needs Democrats?”

Lee explained that Republican leadership in the House of Representatives is putting forward two different legislative proposals in one single vote.

One would defund Obamacare. The other would be a continuing resolution that would fund everything in government, including Obamacare.

This would allow House Republicans to vote both to fund and defund the president’s signature health law simultaneously, according to Lee.

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Tea Party Increasingly Unhappy with GOP Leadership

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Photo Credit: Pew Research

Photo Credit: Pew Research

As lawmakers return for what promises to be a busy fall session, GOP congressional leaders face mounting disapproval among Tea Party Republicans. Just 27% of Republicans and GOP leaners who agree with the Tea Party approve of the job Republican leaders in Congress are doing, compared with 71% who disapprove.

The job rating of GOP leaders among Tea Party Republicans has fallen 15 points since February, from 42% to 27%. Disapproval has risen from 54% to 71% over this period. There has been no similar decline among Republicans who do not agree with the Tea Party. Currently, 42% of non-Tea Party Republicans and Republican leaners approve of how GOP leaders in Congress are handling their job, which is little changed over the past year.

This internal dissent contributes to the lower job ratings Republican leaders receive from the public when compared with Democratic congressional leaders. The latest national survey by the Pew Research Center, conducted Sept. 4-8 among 1,506 adults, finds that just 24% of the public approves of Republican leaders’ job performance, while somewhat more (33%) approve of the job of Democratic congressional leaders.

This modest advantage for Democratic leaders stems from the substantially more positive job ratings they receive from their own base: 57% of Democrats and Democratic leaners approve of how Democratic congressional leaders are handling their job. That compares with just 36% of Republicans and Republican leaners who approve of the job their party leaders are doing. Democratic and Republican leaders get similarly low job ratings from members of the opposition party.

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Iraq War Vet, now Democratic Congresswoman Strongly Opposes Military Strikes Against Syria

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Picture Tulsi GabbardDemocratic congresswoman and Iraq War veteran Rep. Tulsi Gabbard of Hawaii stated her opposition earlier this week to punitive military strikes against Syria, underscoring the Obama Administration’s struggle in trying to rally even members of his own party to back the use of force.

After participating in public and private sessions on Capitol Hill, Gabbard stated a U.S. military strike would be a serious mistake.

“As a soldier, I understand that before taking any military action, our nation must have a clear tactical objective, a realistic strategy, the necessary resources to execute that strategy, including the support of the American people, and an exit plan,” Gabbard said in a statement. “The proposed military action against Syria fails to meet any of these criteria.”

Gabbard, who served near Baghdad for a year and was a medical operations specialist, is a member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee.

The congresswoman joins other Democrats from Obama’s native state, including Sen. Brian Schatz and Rep. Colleen Hanabusa, in opposing aggressive U.S. military intervention in the Syrian civil war.

Rep. Gabbard explains her opposition to Greta Van Susteran “On the Record.”

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Trader Joe’s To Drop Health Coverage For Part-Time Workers Under Obamacare (+video)

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Photo Credit: goodiesfirst

Photo Credit: goodiesfirst

After extending health care coverage to many of its part-time employees for years, Trader Joe’s has told workers who log fewer than 30 hours a week that they will need to find insurance on the Obamacare exchanges next year, according to a confidential memo from the grocer’s chief executive.

In the memo to staff dated Aug. 30, Trader Joe’s CEO Dan Bane said the company will cut part-timers a check for $500 in January and help guide them toward finding a new plan under the Affordable Care Act. The company will continue to offer health coverage to workers who carry 30 hours or more on average.

The law mandates that companies with 50 employees or more offer coverage to such full-time employees, though the Obama administration has chosen to delay that rule for a year.

Trader Joe’s has won kudos for offering its health care, dental and vision plans to part-time workers at a reasonable price — a rarity in an industry known for low pay and scant benefits. But with low-wage workers eligible for tax subsidies to buy health insurance next year, the company has apparently calculated that offering medical coverage to part-timers who work 18 hours or more is no longer worth the cost.

“Depending on income you may earn outside of Trader Joe’s” — i.e., another job — “we believe that with the $500 from Trader Joe’s and the tax credits available under the ACA, many of you should be able to obtain health care coverage at very little if any net cost to you,” Bane wrote in the memo.


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NSA Shares Raw Data on Americans with Israeli Spy Agency

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Photo Credit: AP

Photo Credit: AP

The Obama administration shares with Israeli intelligence the vast data dumps the National Security Agency vacuums up from the Internet without removing private information about Americans, even though Israel is one of the nations that spy most aggressively on the United States, according to leaked documents.

A copy of a top-secret deal inked in 2009 between the NSA and the Israeli Signals-intelligence National Unit (ISNU) was provided by NSA leaker Edward J. Snowden to the Guardian newspaper, which posted it Wednesday.

It reveals that the NSA “routinely” passed to its Israeli counterpart “raw” signals intelligence, referred to as “Sigint,” including the vast swathes of digital data traffic that the agency gathers under secret court authority from U.S. Internet providers.

So sensitive is this data that even before being disseminated to other U.S. agencies, the NSA has to subject it to a court-mandated process called minimization, under which the names of any Americans are removed unless they are essential for foreign intelligence interest.

But the U.S.-Israeli agreement states that the data shared with Israel “includes, but is not limited to, unevaluated and unminimized transcripts, gists, facsimiles, telex, voice and Digital Network Intelligence metadata and content.”

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Arctic Sea Ice Up 60 Percent in 2013

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Photo Credit: NASA Goddard Photo and Video

Photo Credit: NASA Goddard Photo and Video

An unusually cold Arctic summer has resulted in almost a million more square miles of ocean covered with ice compared to the same time last year, bucking predictions that global warming would result in the disappearance of the ice cap by 2013.

According to the MailOnline, Arctic sea ice averaged 2.35 million square miles in August 2013 compared to the low point of 1.32 million square miles recorded in September 2012.

“We are already in a cooling trend, which I think will continue for the next 15 years at least. There is no doubt the warming of the 1980s and 1990s has stopped,” Anastasios Tsonis of the University of Wisconsin told the Mail.

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Study: Obamacare has Been Amended or Delayed 19 Times

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Photo Credit: Manuel Balce Ceneta

Photo Credit: Manuel Balce Ceneta

President Obama has already signed 14 laws that amend, rescind or otherwise change parts of his health care law, and he’s taken five independent steps to delay the Affordable Care Act on his own, according to a new report from the Congressional Research Service, released Wednesday.

The release comes as congressional Republicans are pushing for a halt or outright repeal of the whole law, and as Mr. Obama and his allies decry that as a waste of time and an effort to undermine his signature political achievement.

CRS, in the report to Sen. Tom Coburn, said all sides have already agreed to 14 laws that changed parts of Obamacare, though they were usually minor changes or clarifications.

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Russia ‘to Renew Offer to Supply S-300s to Iran’

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Photo Credit: France 24

Photo Credit: France 24

Russian President Vladimir Putin will offer to supply Iran S-300 air defence missile systems as well as build a second reactor at the Bushehr nuclear plant, the Kommersant business daily reported Wednesday.

Putin will renew an old offer to supply Iran with five of the sophisticated ground-to-air missile systems at a meeting with Iranian President Hassan Rowhani on Friday, Kommersant said, quoting a souce close to the Kremlin.

Putin is set to meet Rowhani at a summit of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation held in Kyrgyzstan on Friday.

Russia in 2007 signed a contract to deliver five of the advanced ground-to-air weapons — which can take out aircraft or guided missiles — to Iran at a cost of $800 million.

In 2010, then-president Dmitry Medvedev cancelled the contract after coming under strong US and Israeli pressure not to go ahead with the sale of the weapons system, drawing vehement protests from Tehran.

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Nun Reveals Rebel Atrocities in Syria

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Photo Credit: WND

Photo Credit: WND

Everyone in Syria, but especially its Christian population, is endangered by the growing surge of violence and atrocities perpetrated by the rebels who are challenging President Bashar al-Assad, according to a Catholic nun who has served community members in Syria for more than two decades.

Multiple reports have recently confirmed that the rebel forces opposing Assad are increasingly populated with hardcore Islamists, including groups with close ties to al-Qaida.

Among the areas of Syria that have unfortunately found themselves in the Islamist rebels’ bull’s-eye has been the longtime – think thousands of years – city of Maaloula, where residents still speak Aramaic, the language of Jesus.

Mother Agnes Mariam el-Salib, the mother superior of St. James Monastery in Qara and who previously has served as a source of information for WND, describes the horrors to which she was witness. One was the threat from Islamists that Christians of Maaloula would be beheaded if they did not convert to Islam.

In a question-and-answer interview with RT recently, she voiced doubt about the validity of rebel statements protesting a gas attack near Damascus just days ago, and expressed outrage at the “massacre” of civilians by members of Jabhat al-Nusra, the most influential of the rebel groups fighting Assad.

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