Egyptians are convinced Obama is backing the Muslim Brotherhood

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Photo Credit: Getty Images

Photo Credit: Getty Images

By Jay Newton-Small

There seems to be something of a disconnect between who Egyptians think America is supporting, and who America actually is supporting in Cairo. In the U.S., story after story has been written about how the Obama Administration has bent over backwards not to call this latest change in government a “coup” and has been relatively muted in its reaction to the deaths of so many civilians – upwards of 1,000 in the last week alone.

Yet Egyptians remain convinced that President Obama is backing the Muslim Brotherhood and deposed President Mohamed Morsi. At a lunch at the Egyptian Ambassador’s residence on Thursday, Dr. Mohamed Abou El-Ghar, head of the Egyptian Social Democratic Party, bluntly warned a small gathering of journalists and policy wonks that he fears, “America is losing Egypt…There is a very strong perception that they are supporting the Muslim Brotherhood and they are against other parties,” he said.

The perception began even before the Egyptians elected Morsi, Abou el-Ghar said, when Senator John McCain, an Arizona Republican and 2008 GOP presidential nominee, met with members of the Muslin Brotherhood in February 2012 but not representatives from competing parties. The headlines were: U.S. Warms to the Muslim Brotherhood. It was furthered when U.S. Ambassador to Egypt Anne Patterson criticized Egypt’s military for interfering in July when opponents deposed Morsi. That view has become more widespread since, with the Pentagon’s decision to defer delivery of F-16 fighter jets to Egypt and the Administration’s review of aid to Cairo.

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Photo Credit: Bryan Denton

Photo Credit: Bryan Denton

As Egyptians Ignore Curfew, Talk of a U.S.-Brotherhood Conspiracy

By Rod Nordland

The sounds made lately by curfew violators here are mostly not shouts or gunshots, but the clacking of dice on wooden backgammon boards, the clicking of dominoes on cafe tables crowded with hookahs and grumbling fueled by years of upheaval.

When the conversation turns to politics, the predominant topic is a surprise to American ears: the conspiracy between the United States and the Muslim Brotherhood to destroy Egypt.

However crackpot that view may sound, it is widespread among supporters of the military, which ousted the Muslim Brotherhood’s elected president, Mohamed Morsi, last month.

For journalists who ventured out Saturday night in violation of the curfew, the biggest danger was not from police officers and soldiers at checkpoints, but from angry men with a chip on their shoulders and a grudge against Al Jazeera, the Western press and America.

The “people’s committees,” which sprung up in Egyptian neighborhoods as a counterweight to the Muslim Brotherhood, in theory were disbanded last week. But that did not stop self-appointed guardians in the Zaki Street market of the Maadi neighborhood from repeatedly demanding identity documents, letters of permission and, especially, proof of not being affiliated with Al Jazeera, the pan-Arab news network, which is reviled because it is owned by Qatar, a strong supporter of the Muslim Brotherhood.

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FAA OKs Drones Over Alaska Oil Area

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drones_The FAA has cleared the way for unmanned aircraft, or drones, to fly for the Alaskan oil industry.

The Petroleum News reports approval for two remote-controlled aircraft to fly over the Arctic Ocean is an aviation milestone.

ConocoPhillips requested permission for the drone flights. But the company says it’s not quite ready to put them to use.

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Razor Sales Dropping Precipitously as World Embraces the “Scruffy Look”

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Photo Credit: Getty Images

Photo Credit: Getty Images

Blame George Clooney, Brad Pitt, David Beckham and the rest of the facial hair-loving celebs. Blame hipster girls fawning over bearded musicians. Blame the modern caveman movement with its paleo diet and DIY ethos.

Whatever you blame, there’s no doubt that scruffy faces — and full-on beards — have been making a comeback. So much so that North American razor sales are way down, and an increasing number of British men are getting — wait for it — facial hair transplants.

Procter & Gamble, which owns shaving giant Gillette, recently announced that its razor sales are falling in developed markets. Energizer’s Schick razor has also taken a recent hit, with sales dropping 10 percent in the last year. Market research firm Euromonitor International predicts that in 2013, shaving products are expected to lose their dominance in the larger male grooming market for the first time ever.

“The vogue for stubble, the relative non-hairiness of Chinese men, growing acceptance of the unshaven look in the workplace and, most importantly, the ever increasing cost of shaving have all been damaging to men’s shaving and Gillette alike,” Nicole Tyrimou, an analyst at Euromonitor International, wrote recently. “Over the medium to long term, the desire for an unshaven look is expected to continue, especially in Western Europe where increasing unemployment coupled with stubble being in vogue will continue to damage growth of razors and blades.”

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State Dept. Corruption: Egyptian Gov’t Claims Evidence that U.S. Bribed Muslim Brotherhood Officials

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Photo Credit: WND

Photo Credit: WND

A question apparently being raised in next week’s trial in Cairo of Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood leaders facing criminal charges is this: Was the Obama administration paying bribes as large as $850,000 a year to the Morsi government that were distributed by top ministerial level officials to Muslim Brotherhood leaders, with the direct involvement of the U.S. Embassy in Cairo?

WND is in possession of an official document from inside the Morsi government that lends credibility to a report published in Arabic by an Egyptian newspaper in Cairo that lists the charges brought by the current military-controlled government against Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood leaders.

As seen above, WND has obtained official records from the deposed Morsi government in Egypt, with signatures, documenting monthly “gifts” paid to Muslim Brotherhood leaders in Egypt by the former prime minister and foreign minister of Qatar, Hamad bin Jassim bin Jabor Al Thani.

The document was seized from Egyptian government offices in Cairo when the Morsi government was deposed by the military July 3.

As translated by former PLO member and native Arabic-speaker Walid Shoebat, the monthly “gifts” listed in the document amount to bribes paid by the Morsi government to leading Muslim Brotherhood members in Egypt, including an annual payment of $750,000 to $850,000 in U.S. dollars.

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Obama: Assault Weapon Industry’s No. 1 Customer, Buys 600,000 AK-47 Magazines

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Photo Credit: Washington Examiner

Photo Credit: Washington Examiner

There he goes again. President Obama’s anti-gun administration, which recently pushed legislation banning assault weapons and large ammo magazines, is proving again that it is the industry’s No. 1 customer.

On the heels of major purchases of AR-15-styled weapons for agencies like the IRS and millions of bullets used by assault-weapons and similar semi-automatic arms owned by federal forces, the Army has just announced that it is buying nearly 600,000 high capacity AK-47 Kalashnikov rifle magazines.

The gun is popular among collectors and target shooters, and was the weapon of choice used by this week’s Georgia school shooter. But while fans of the gun help keep small weapon accessory companies in business, the Army’s purchase is a major boost for an industry the president and his grassroots campaign, Organizing for Action, has spent the summer attacking.

It’s just one purchase in a string of AK-47 equipment buys from the Feds.

Army officials told Secrets that the 30-round magazines, which would be banned under Obama’s gun control proposals, are going to Afghanistan. But unlike the Pentagon’s controversial purchase of Russian helicopters for Afghan special forces, the Soviet-Russian-styled AK-47 magazines are likely to be purchased from an American firm.

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NSA Officers Spy on Love Interests

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Photo Credit: Reuters

Photo Credit: Reuters

National Security Agency officers on several occasions have channeled their agency’s enormous eavesdropping power to spy on love interests, U.S. officials said.

The practice isn’t frequent — one official estimated a handful of cases in the last decade — but it’s common enough to garner its own spycraft label: LOVEINT.

Spy agencies often refer to their various types of intelligence collection with the suffix of “INT,” such as “SIGINT” for collecting signals intelligence, or communications; and “HUMINT” for human intelligence, or spying.

The “LOVEINT” examples constitute most episodes of willful misconduct by NSA employees, officials said.

In the wake of revelations last week that NSA had violated privacy rules on nearly 3,000 occasions in a one-year period, NSA Chief Compliance Officer John DeLong emphasized in a conference call with reporters last week that those errors were unintentional. He did say that there have been “a couple” of willful violations in the past decade. He said he didn’t have the exact figures at the moment.

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Obamacare’s Hierarchy of Privilege

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Photo Credit: National Review

Photo Credit: National Review

On his radio show the other day, Hugh Hewitt caught me by surprise and asked me about running for the United States Senate from New Hampshire. My various consultants, pollsters, PACs, and exploratory committees haven’t fine-tuned every detail of my platform just yet, but I can say this without a doubt: I will not vote for any “comprehensive” bill, whether on immigration, health care, or anything else.

“Comprehensive” today is a euphemism for interminably long, poorly drafted, and entirely unread — not just by the people’s representatives but by our robed rulers, too (how many of those Supreme Court justices actually plowed through every page of Obamacare when its “constitutionality” came before them?). The 1862 Homestead Act, which is genuinely comprehensive, is two handwritten pages in clear English. “The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act” is 500 times as long, is not about patients or care, and neither protects the former nor makes the latter affordable.

So what is it about? On Wednesday, the Nevada AFL-CIO passed a resolution declaring that “the unintended consequences of the ACA will lead to the destruction of the 40-hour work week.” That’s quite an accomplishment for a “health” “care” “reform” law. But the poor old union heavies who so supported Obamacare are now reduced to bleating that they should be entitled to the same opt-outs secured by big business and congressional staffers. It’s a very strange law whose only defining characteristic is that no one who favors it wants to be bound by it.

Meanwhile, on the very same day as the AFL-CIO was predicting the death of the 40-hour week, the University of Virginia announced plans to boot working spouses off its health plan beginning January 1 because the Affordable Care Act has made it unaffordable: It’s projected to add $7.3 million dollars to the university’s bill in 2014 alone.

As Nancy Pelosi famously said, “We have to pass the bill so that you can find out what’s in it.” But the problem with “comprehensive” legislation is that, when everything’s in it, nothing’s in it. The Affordable Care Act means whatever President Obama says it means on any particular day of the week. Whether it applies to you this year, next year, or not at all depends on the whim of the sovereign, and whether your CEO golfs with him on Martha’s Vineyard. A few weeks back, the president unilaterally suspended the law’s employer mandate. Under the U.S. Constitution, he doesn’t have the power to do this, but judging from the American people’s massive shrug of indifference he might as well unilaterally suspend the Constitution, too. Obamacare is not a law, in the sense that all persons are equal before it, but a hierarchy of privilege; for example, senators value their emir-sized entourages and don’t want them to quit, so it is necessary to provide the flunkies who negotiated and drafted the Affordable Care Act an exemption from the legislation they imposed on the citizenry. Once again, the opt-out is not legal. As the Wall Street Journal trenchantly observed, “OPM has no authority to pay for insurance plans that lack FEHBP contracts, nor does the Affordable Care Act permit either exchange contributions or a unilateral bump in Congressional pay in return for less overall compensation.”

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EPA Employee Stole $886K from the Agency

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epa employee stoleAn Environmental Protection Agency employee knowingly stole more than $886,000 from the agency, according to a criminal filing from the Department of Justice.

The alleged fraud occurred in the EPA’s Office of Air and Radiation under the nose of former administrator Gina McCarthy, who now heads up the entire agency.

“There appears to be corruption to the umpteenth degree,” said Louisiana Republican Sen. David Vitter. “I think it’s appalling that Administrator McCarthy and former acting Administrator Bob Perciasepe could claim that sequester is depriving the agency of important resources when in fact their own employees are stealing from the government.”

EPA employee John Beale, who worked in the air office, stole $886,186 from the agency between 2000 and 2013. According to the criminal filing, Beale had stolen agency funds through salary, benefits, and certain bonuses that Beale “had not earned by providing employment services to the EPA.”

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Pat Buchanan: ‘Whites Are the Only Group That You Can Discriminate Against Legally in America Now’ (+video)

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Photo Credit: Noel Sheppard

Photo Credit: Noel Sheppard

Syndicated columnist Pat Buchanan made a statement Friday guaranteed to make liberal media members’ heads spin.

During a discussion about Affirmative Action on PBS’s McLaughlin Group, Buchanan said, “Whites are the only group that you can discriminate against legally in America now” (video follows with transcript and commentary):

…MICHELLE BERNARD: Here’s a question I have. One of the things I always say because I think you can measure diversity in a lot of ways, but I think there’s an argument to be said that the greatest Affirmative Action program that there is in the country is being born white. There is a natural assumption when you are applying to institutions of higher education that you are excellent or you are more superb than others.

BUCHANAN: With due respect, whites are the only group that you can discriminate against legally in America now.

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Father Arrested after Punching Firefighter and Assaulting Nurse Who Were Trying to Save his Son’s Life

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Photo Credit: gwire

Photo Credit: gwire

A Dallas man faces felony assault charges after punching a firefighter and assaulting a nurse who were trying to save the life of his one-year-old son.

The son, whose name has not been released, suffered from an undisclosed medical condition and trouble breathing. The child, who lived on Preakness Lane in West Oak Cliff, was under 24-hour nursing care, police said.

At around 8:15 a.m. Saturday, the child began struggling with his breathing. The nurse on duty, Lisa Decatur, tried to help, police said, but was assaulted by the father. Decatur then called 911 and two firefighters responded to the scene.

One firefighter, Michael Barrett, attempted to intervene, but was punched in the face by the father and knocked unconscious. The other firefighter radioed for help and police soon responded. The father was then handcuffed, allowing rescuers to perform CPR on the child.

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