Poll: Less than 3 Percent of Federal Workers Want to Join Obamacare

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Photo Credit: Daily CallerBy Patrick Howley

Less than 3 percent of U.S. federal workers want to give up their current health plans and join Obamacare, according to a new poll.

92.3 percent of federal workers think that they should continue with their current health insurance program, the Federal Employees Health Benefits Program (FEHBP), while just 2.8 percent think they should be required to join Obamacare exchanges and 4.9 percent are not sure, according to an August survey conducted by FedSmith.com, a website for federal employees.

“There is apparently little debate among the federal workforce. Federal employees do not want to be part of the new system… Employees who are already retired have a much stronger negative reaction to being moved to a new system,” FedSmith.com noted.

Though congressmen and congressional staffers have to enroll in Obamacare exchanges, most federal employees insured under FEHBP will not be forced to switch to Obamacare exchanges when the law is fully implemented in 2014. But a recent proposed bill by Michigan Republican Rep. Dave Camp to force federal workers out of FEHBP and into Obamacare generated a lot of concern among federal workers.

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ObamaCare cap on out-of-pocket costs delayed, Sen. Paul calls move ‘illegal’

By Fox News

A report that another provision of ObamaCare — one that would cap out-of-pocket health care costs — was being delayed brought a defiant challenge Tuesday from a top Senate Republican, accusing the president of “illegal and unconstitutional” acts in changing laws without congressional approval.

“The president doesn’t get to write legislation, and it’s illegal and unconstitutional for him to try and change legislation by himself,” Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., told Fox News.

The New York Times first reported on Tuesday that the administration is giving some insurers and employers a one-year grace period to adhere to the limit, which otherwise would have capped individual costs at $6,350 a year. The full requirement will go into effect in 2015, rather than 2014. The change means some employers — namely, those with more than one benefit provider — could use plans with higher limits or no limit at all on out-of-pocket costs during that period.

The grace period apparently was granted earlier this year, though was buried in reams of regulatory material and was not publicly reported until now. Department of Labor guidelines published in February had addressed the delay.

The confirmation comes weeks after the administration announced it was delaying a key insurance mandate — the requirement on mid-sized and large businesses to provide coverage to full-time workers. The mandate, and the cap on costs, were both delayed for one year, in a move officials claimed was meant to give businesses more time to prepare.

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Ground Swell: OFA Gets Zero Attendance for Climate Change Rally

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Photo Credit: APNot a single person showed up at the Georgetown waterfront Tuesday for a climate change agenda event put on by Organizing for Action, the shadowy nonprofit advocacy group born out of President Obama’s 2012 campaign, the NRCC wrote in its blog.

The event page for the “Climate Change Day of Action Rally” disappeared after rainy weather appeared to drive away whatever people planned to attend. The embarrassing showing follows the news that only one volunteer stayed for an OFA Obamacare event in Centreville, Va., last week to work the phones.

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Sinai Missiles Fall on Israeli City as Desert Jihadists Wage War on Two Fronts

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Photo Credit: APA missile attack on Israel’s popular Red Sea resort of Eilat Tuesday morning prompted deployment of the military’s vaunted Iron Dome defense – and has raised new fears Egypt’s army can’t contain the violence in the increasingly lawless Sinai Peninsula.

Although no one was killed and one of the three missiles was intercepted, the attack is viewed as a significant escalation in the activity of Islamist terror groups in Sinai, many of whom are affiliated with Al Qaeda. Under the recently deposed Egyptian President Mohammed Morsi, security in Sinai deteriorated, allowing groups such as Ansar Bayt al-Maqdis – which claimed responsibility for the Eilat attack – to flourish. They have been targeting the provisional Egyptian government, but now could be taking on Israel, too.

“This was a response to the latest crimes by the Jews, who used a drone to attack and kill four of our fighters in Sinai,” read a statement in Arabic from Ansar Bayt al-Maqdis. “The attack sowed fear among the criminal Jews, who were forced into underground bomb shelters.”

The jihadist group’s claim that an Israeli drone strike was responsible for the death of four of their fighters drew no comment from Israel. Ahmed Mohammad Ali, a spokesman for Egypt’s military, which has been trying to root out terror groups in the vast peninsula, denied that Israeli drones had been used for attacks in the area, which lies at Israel’s southern border and across the Suez Canal from the rest of Egypt. But he noted Egypt’s army has been active in the area.

“Since Saturday night, 25 terrorists have been killed or injured by the Egyptian Army, and ammunition supply depots had been destroyed,” Ali said.

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Snowden: NSA Targeted Journalists Critical of Government after 9/11

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Photo Credit: Daily Mail By Jonathan Easley

Leaker Edward Snowden accused the National Security Agency of targeting reporters who wrote critically about the government after the 9/11 attacks and warned it was “unforgivably reckless” for journalists to use unencrypted email messages when discussing sensitive matters.

Snowden said in an interview with the New York Times Magazine published Tuesday that he came to trust Laura Poitras, the documentary filmmaker who, along with Guardian reporter Glenn Greenwald, helped report his disclosure of secret surveillance programs, because she herself had been targeted by the NSA.

“Laura and [Guardian reporter] Glenn [Greenwald] are among the few who reported fearlessly on controversial topics throughout this period, even in the face of withering personal criticism, and resulted in Laura specifically becoming targeted by the very programs involved in the recent disclosures,” Snowden said for the article, a profile of Poitras.

Snowden didn’t detail how Poitras was targeted by the NSA surveillance programs he disclosed, but suggested the agency tracked her emails and cautioned other journalists that they could be under surveillance.

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‘It cost the public dearly’: Snowden says media have failed as government watchdogs in his first interview since NSA leaks

By Joshua Gardner

In his first interview since he outed himself as the source of leaked NSA documents, Edward Snowden said the media has given the government a free pass to grow unchecked power ever since the attacks of September 11.

‘[It] ended up costing the public dearly,’ the 30-year-old newly minted Russia resident told the New York Times in a QandA published Tuesday.
Snowden’s interview focused on journalists and the media, which he said need to wake up to the realities of surveillance. ‘Any unencrypted message sent over the Internet is being delivered to every intelligence service in the world,’ he said.

Snowden’s QandA was, of course, done through encrypted emails. Laura Poitras, the documentary filmmaker who helped Snowden spill his secrets, served as intermediary, having won the former NSA contractor’s trust months ago.

‘Laura was more suspicious of me than I was of her, and I’m famously paranoid,’ Snowden told Times reporter Peter Maass.

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Energy Manipulation

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Why is it that natural gas sells in the U.S. for $3.94 per 1,000 cubic feet and in Europe and Japan for $11.60 and $17, respectively? Part of the answer is our huge supply. With high-tech methods of extraction and with discovery of vast gas-rich shale deposits, estimated reserves are about 2.4 quadrillion cubic feet. That translates into more than a 100-year supply of natural gas at current usage rates. What partially explains the high European and Japanese prices is the fact that global natural gas markets are not integrated. Washington has stringent export restrictions on natural gas.

Naturally, the next question is: Why are there natural gas export restrictions? Just follow the money. According to OpenSecrets.org, The Dow Chemical Co. “posted record lobbying expenditures last year, spending nearly $12 million, and is on pace to eclipse that number this year.” The company has spent hundreds of thousands of dollars contributing to the political campaigns of congressmen who support export restrictions. Natural gas is a raw material for Dow. It benefits financially from cheap gas prices, which it fears would rise if Congress were to lift export restrictions. Dow argues, “Continuing optimism for U.S. manufacturing is founded on the prospect of an adequate, reliable and reasonably priced supply of natural gas.” Of course, Dow and other big users of natural gas get support from environmentalists, who are anti-drilling and anticipate that export restrictions will serve their ends.

Big natural gas users and environmentalists have foreign allies, suggested by the statement of Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, who told Saudi Arabia’s oil minister, Ali al-Naimi, that rising American shale gas production is “an inevitable threat.” Nigeria’s oil minister, Diezani Alison-Madueke, agrees, saying that U.S. shale oil is a “grave concern.” In light of these foreign “concerns” about U.S. energy production, one wonders whether foreign countries have given financial aid to U.S. politicians, environmentalists and other groups that are waging war against domestic oil and natural gas drilling. It would surely be in their interests to do everything in their power to keep the West dependent on OPEC nations for oil and gas.

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Documents Show Secret Service Kept Tab of Swartz

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Photo Credit: APU.S. Secret Service documents show that the agency played a key role in the investigation of free-information activist Aaron Swartz and watched his case closely until he committed suicide.

Swartz died in New York City in January as he faced trial on charges he hacked into a Massachusetts Institute of Technology archive of scholarly articles with the aim of making the information freely available.

The documents, released under the Freedom of Information Act, show the Secret Service field office in Boston secured documents and electronic devices seized during a search of Swartz’s home and research office at Harvard University.

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Burp: On Vineyard, Obama Lunches on Fried Shrimp, Fried Oysters, Onion Rings, French Fries

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Photo Credit: bostinno.It’s only been three days, but President Obama has quickly settled into the vacation diet on Martha’s Vineyard. But don’t tell the first lady.

During a rainy day on Tuesday, he traveled to Nancy’s in scenic Oak Bluffs for a fried lunch. According to the pool report: “POTUS’s food order at Nancy’s was fried shrimp, fried oysters, onion rings and french fries.”

Obviously not on the lunch trip was first lady Michelle Obama, the first family’s fitness buff.

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John Kerry: ‘This Little Thing Called the Internet … Makes It Much Harder to Govern’

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Photo Credit: APSpeaking to State Department personnel at the U.S. Embassy in Brasilia, Brazil, on Tuesday, Secretary of State John Kerry said that “this little thing called the Internet … makes it much harder to govern.”

He also said that “ever since the end of the Cold War, forces have been unleashed that were tamped down for centuries by dictators.”

“I’m a student of history, and I love to go back and read a particularly great book like [Henry] Kissinger’s book about diplomacy where you think about the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and the balance of power and how difficult it was for countries to advance their interests and years and years of wars,” Kerry said to a gathering of State Department employees and their families.

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White House Insists James Clapper Will Not Lead NSA Surveillance Review

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Photo Credit: EPABy Ewen MacAskill

The White House has moved to dampen controversy over the role of the director of national intelligence James Clapper in a panel reviewing NSA surveillance, insisting that he would neither lead it nor choose the members.

Statements by Barack Obama and Clapper on Monday night were widely interpreted as the director of national intelligence being placed in charge of the inquiry, which the president had announced on Friday would be “independent”.

The apparent involvement of Clapper, who has admitted lying to Congress over NSA surveillance of US citizens, provoked a backlash, with critics accusing the president of putting a fox in charge of the hen house.

But the White House national security council insisted on Tuesday that Clapper’s role would be more limited.

“The panel members are being selected by the White House, in consultation with the intelligence community,” national security council spokeswoman Caitlin Hayden said.

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Photo Credit: APIntelligence committee withheld key file before critical NSA vote, Amash claims

By Spencer Ackerman

A leader of the US congressional insurrection against the National Security Agency’s bulk surveillance programs has accused his colleagues of withholding a key document from the House of Representatives before a critical surveillance vote.

Justin Amash, the Michigan Republican whose effort to defund the NSA’s mass phone-records collection exposed deep congressional discomfort with domestic spying, said the House intelligence committee never allowed legislators outside the panel to see a 2011 document that described the surveillance in vague terms.

The document, a classified summary of the bulk phone records collection effort justified under Section 215 of the Patriot Act, was declassified by the Obama administration in late July.

The Justice Department and intelligence agencies prepared it for Congress before a 2011 vote to reauthorize the Patriot Act, and left it for the intelligence committees in Congress to make the document available to their colleagues.

“It is not acceptable for the intelligence committee, or any other committee, to withhold critically important information pertaining to a program prior to the vote,” Amash told the Guardian.

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Dzhokhar Tsarnaev Friends Plead Not Guilty to Obstruction of Justice

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Photo Credit: APTwo college friends of the surviving Boston Marathon bombing suspect pleaded not guilty Tuesday to allegations they conspired to obstruct justice by agreeing to destroy and conceal some of their friend’s belongings as he evaded authorities.

Dias Kadyrbayev and Azamat Tazhayakov, both nationals of Kazakhstan who shared an apartment in New Bedford, Massachusetts, became friends with bombing suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev when they all started school at University of Massachusetts-Dartmouth in 2011.

Tsarnaev is accused of setting off two bombs near the race’s finish line that killed three and wounded hundreds on 15 April. He has pleaded not guilty. Authorities say he was working with his older brother, who died during the manhunt for the suspects days later.

On April 18, Tsarnaev’s friends took his laptop from his dorm room, along with a backpack that had fireworks with explosive powder and a jar of petroleum jelly, federal authorities alleged in an indictment last week.

They say Kadyrbayev had gotten a text from Tsarnaev suggesting that he could go to his dorm room and “take what’s there.” The indictment also alleged that Kadyrbayev later put the backpack with the fireworks and jelly in a trash bin outside the New Bedford apartment after Tazhayakov agreed.

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