Ted Cruz to Renounce Canadian Citizenship: ‘Nothing Against Canada, but I’m an American’

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Photo Credit: AP

Photo Credit: AP

By Jason Howerton.

Less than 24 hours after the Dallas Morning News reported that he likely maintains dual citizenship to the U.S. and Canada, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) announced Monday evening that he will renounce his Canadian citizenship.

“Now the Dallas Morning News says that I may technically have dual citizenship. Assuming that is true, then sure, I will renounce any Canadian citizenship. Nothing against Canada, but I’m an American by birth and as a U.S. senator; I believe I should be only an American,” Cruz said in a statement.

Several legal experts apparently determined that Cruz remains a Canadian citizen because his mother gave birth to him in the country and he never renounced it…

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Photo Credit: Dallas News

Photo Credit: Dallas News

Dual citizenship may pose problem if Ted Cruz seeks presidency

By Todd Gillman.

Born in Canada to an American mother, Ted Cruz became an instant U.S. citizen. But under Canadian law, he also became a citizen of that country the moment he was born.

Unless the Texas Republican senator formally renounces that citizenship, he will remain a citizen of both countries, legal experts say.

That means he could assert the right to vote in Canada or even run for Parliament. On a lunch break from the U.S. Senate, he could head to the nearby embassy — the one flying a bright red maple leaf flag — pull out his Calgary, Alberta, birth certificate and obtain a passport.

“He’s a Canadian,” said Toronto lawyer Stephen Green, past chairman of the Canadian Bar Association’s Citizenship and Immigration Section.

The circumstances of Cruz’s birth have fueled a simmering debate over his eligibility to run for president. Knowingly or not, dual citizenship is an apparent if inconvenient truth for the tea party firebrand, who shows every sign he’s angling for the White House.

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Senator Says Obama Administration Secretly Suspended Military Aid to Egypt

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Photo Credit: AP

Photo Credit: AP

The U.S. government has decided privately to act as if the military takeover of Egypt was a coup, temporarily suspending most forms of military aid, despite deciding not to announce publicly a coup determination one way or the other, according to a leading U.S. senator.

In the latest example of its poorly understood Egypt policy, the Obama administration has decided to temporarily suspend the disbursement of most direct military aid, the delivery of weapons to the Egyptian military, and some forms of economic aid to the Egyptian government while it conducts a broad review of the relationship. The administration won’t publicly acknowledge all aspects of the aid suspension and maintains its rhetorical line that no official coup determination has been made, but behind the scenes, extensive measures to treat the military takeover of Egypt last month as a coup are being implemented on a temporary basis.

The office of Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-VT), the head of the Appropriations State and Foreign Operations Subcommittee, told The Daily Beast on Monday that military aid to Egypt has been temporarily cut off.

“[Senator Leahy’s] understanding is that aid to the Egyptian military has been halted, as required by law,” said David Carle, a spokesman for Leahy.

The administration’s public message is that $585 million of promised aid to the Egyptian military in fiscal 2013 is not officially on hold, as technically it is not due until Sept. 30, the end of the fiscal year, and no final decisions have been made.

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$2,001,093,000,000: Fed’s Ownership of U.S. Debt Breaks $2T for First Time

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BEN BERNANKE(CNSNews.com) – The Federal Reserve’s holdings of publicly traded U.S. Treasury securities—federal government debt—pushed above $2 trillion for the first time last week, hitting approximately $2,001,093,000,000 as of Aug. 14, according to the Fed’s latest weekly accounting.

The Fed’s accounting for the previous week showed that it had owned approximately $1,993,375,000,000 in U.S. Treasury securities as of Aug. 7.

Back on Dec. 31, 2008, before the Fed began its strategy of “Quantitative Easing,” the Fed owned only $475.9 billion in U.S. Treasury securities. Since then, the Fed’s holdings of U.S. government debt have more than quadrupled.

Launched in 2009, the Fed’s Quantitative Easing (QE) efforts have attempted to stimulate the economy.

“Under QE,” explains a February 2013 Congressional Research Service report, “the Fed attempts to lower long-term Treasury and MBS [mortgage-backed security] yields directly through purchases that drive down their yields, in the hope that lower Treasury and MBS yields will indirectly filter through to reductions in other private long-term yields. (Lower Treasury yields do not directly stimulate economic activity—they are only stimulative if other yields fall as a result.) This could occur because Treasury securities are considered a ‘benchmark’ against which other private securities are priced, so that other securities are automatically repriced when Treasuries are repriced (although the change is unlikely to be one-to-one).”

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How Obama is Deliberately Crippling U.S. Economy

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Photo Credit: WND

Photo Credit: WND

Ever since Barack Obama was elected president in 2008, Americans have heard a lot about “progressivism,” Saul Alinsky’s “Rules for Radicals” and the “Cloward-Piven Strategy” of orchestrated chaos – basically, intentionally causing an existing system to break down in order to “rescue” it by instituting a new system. In other words, a “fundamental transformation.”

Conservatives believe this is Obama’s playbook, while liberals dismiss it as rightwing paranoia. But consider Obama’s economic policies with this paradigm in mind.

For any economy to function properly depends on the availability of capital and credit, raw materials, manufacturing capacity and production, and labor. To intentionally cripple an economy, one or more of these elements would have to be controlled or withheld.

American leaders have been overloading the economy with debt to pay for goodies promised to the populace since long before Obama, but the first big push for outright misallocation of capital (something strongly promoted by progressives) started with the Community Reinvestment Act of 1977, signed by Jimmy Carter. After all, the two principal economic engines driving the U.S. economy were automobiles and housing. The Act forced banks to misdirect their investment capital to areas and individuals that previously did not merit credit because of the high risks involved.

Thus, in place of 30-year mortgage loans that in the 1960s had fairly strict standards and required 20 percent down, we ended up with “liar loans” and 0 percent down, all with the support of Fannie Mae and the blessings of progressive officialdom. At the peak of the housing bubble in 2007, there were roughly 450 trillion dollars’ worth of derivatives and mortgage junk bonds floating in the world markets, while the combined total of GDP of all world economies was estimated at only 57 trillion dollars! Once the housing bubble burst, it almost took the developed capitalist countries down for the duration, and we are still suffering from the after-effects of this blowup.

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Al Jazeera America Promises a More Sober Look at the News

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Photo Credit: Suzanne DeChillo

Photo Credit: Suzanne DeChillo

Fourteen hours of straight news every day. Hard-hitting documentaries. Correspondents in oft-overlooked corners of the country. And fewer commercials than any other news channel.

It sounds like something a journalism professor would imagine. In actuality, it is Al Jazeera America, the culmination of a long-held dream among the leaders of Qatar, the Middle Eastern emirate that already reaches most of the rest of the world with its Arabic- and English-language news channels. The new channel, created specifically for consumers in the United States, will join cable and satellite lineups on Tuesday afternoon.

Al Jazeera America is the most ambitious American television news venture since Rupert Murdoch and Roger Ailes started the Fox News Channel in 1996. It faces some of the same obstacles that Fox eventually glided over — including blanket skepticism about whether distributors, advertisers and viewers will give it a chance. But that is where the parallels to other channels end, because Al Jazeera America is going against the grain of seemingly every trend in television news.

“Viewers will see a news channel unlike the others, as our programming proves Al Jazeera America will air fact-based, unbiased and in-depth news,” said Ehab Al Shihabi, the channel’s acting chief executive, on a news conference call last week. He was explicit about what will be different, saying, “There will be less opinion, less yelling and fewer celebrity sightings.”

Mr. Al Shihabi and other Al Jazeera representatives say proprietary research supports their assertions that American viewers want a PBS-like news channel 24 hours a day. Originally the new channel was going to have an international bent; now its overseers emphasize how much American news it will cover and how many domestic bureaus it will have, which some see as an effort to appease skeptics.

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Egyptian Christians Return to Worship in Church Destroyed by Muslim Brotherhood

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Coptic ChristiansCopts whose church was one of dozens destroyed by Muslim Brotherhood supporters have returned to the charred house of worship, with their pastor vowing the violence suffered by his flock will make them “better Christians.”

“This will learn us to be better Christians,” said Pastor Sameh Ibrahim of a torched congregation in Minya, the capital of Minya Governorate in Upper Egypt, where some 14 churches were reportedly attacked in recent days.

Across Egypt, at least 60 churches have been targeted, along with Christian schools, homes,businesses and even an orphanage, according to conservative estimates. In the areas of Minya, Beni Suef, Fayoum and Assiut, Christian homes and businesses have received leaflets warning them to leave or face reprisals by Islamists, Christians said.

Christian homes and businesses in Minya have reportedly been marked with black X’s to single them out for attack.

Another pastor in the area shares his concerns. “We live in our church, so when someone attacks out congregation, it’s as if our house is being attacked,” said Pastor John Amin of the Meni Mazar church in published remarks.

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Renegade Drone Crashes Into Groom’s Head Before Wedding (+video)

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wedding_droneIt’s hard enough to orchestrate a glitch-free wedding–and now, it appears brides and grooms may have to worry about camera drones plowing into their domes prior to the big day, too.

A photographer at a wedding recently attached a camera to a quadcopter in order to capture some video of a bride and groom being lovey-dovey in a field before their wedding. But his DIY drone ended up hitting the groom in the head. The photog, YouTube user WeddingMan123, wrote of the 47-second video showing the incident:

“This was shot using a DJI phantom and a gopro camera. This was two days before the wedding at their bridal shoot.”

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Study: NY Welfare Recipients Eligible for More in Benefits than Teachers Earn

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Photo Credit: Breitbart

Photo Credit: Breitbart

A new study finds that a New York mother of two is eligible for $38,004 in welfare benefits–a sum more than the annual salary of a New York entry-level school teacher.

The study, conducted by the CATO Institute, says in many states welfare pays better than work. Topping the list of wage-equivalent benefits for a mother and two children was Hawaii at $60,590. Idaho came in last with $11,150.

The study found that 33 states and the District of Columbia offer welfare benefits that pay recipients more than an $8-an-hour job would. Twelve states and the District of Columbia offer welfare packages that pay better than a $15-an-hour job does.

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Unpublished CRS Memo: Obama Administration Has Missed Half Of Obamacare’s Legally Imposed Implementation Deadlines

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Cong Library - Main Reading RoomIn recent months, President Obama and his subordinates have waived or delayed a number of Obamacare’s notable features, such as the law’s employer mandate, and its procedures for protecting taxpayers from fraud and identity theft.

Earlier this month, in that context, I obtained a heretofore-unpublished memorandum from the Congressional Research Service. The CRS, Congress’ non-partisan in-house think tank, compiled 82 deadlines that the Affordable Care Act mandates upon the first three years of its own implementation. Remarkably, it turns out that the White House has missed half of the deadlines legally required by the ACA. And some of those deadlines remain unmet to this day.

The new CRS memo, dated June 5, 2013, is an addendum to a series of previous reports in which the agency examined missed deadlines during the law’s first two years. The CRS excluded from its analysis deadlines that don’t reflect on the administration’s competence; for example, as states expand Medicaid, the federal spending associated with those expansions occurs more or less automatically. Deadlines that the law imposes on non-federal government actors, like state governments and private companies, were also excluded.

41 out of 82 deadlines missed by the administration.

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Regulation Nation: Obama Expands Regulatory State

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Photo Credit: AP

Photo Credit: AP

President Obama has overseen a dramatic expansion of the regulatory state that will outlast his time in the White House.

The reach of the executive branch has advanced steadily on his watch, further solidifying the power of bureaucrats who churn out regulations that touch nearly every aspect of American life and business.

Experts debate whether federal rule-making has accelerated under Obama, but few dispute that Washington, for better or worse, is reaching deeper than ever before into the workings of society.

“It would be difficult for anyone to pretend that this isn’t a high-water mark in terms of regulation,” said Douglas Holtz-Eakin, a former director of the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office who now heads the American Action Forum.

Obama famously signaled his intent to use the machinery of government to further his policy goals after the 2010 elections, declaring: “Where Congress won’t act, I will.”

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