Democrats Throw In Towel On Assault Weapons Ban

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Photo Credit: Washington Examiner

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., has significantly weakened gun control legislation, stripping a provision that would have banned assault-style weapons and high-capacity gun clips.

The move will make it easier for the Senate to pass a milder gun control bill that deals mostly with controlling who can purchase a gun. It also spares red-state Senate Democrats running in 2014 from having to vote on a bill that could cost them re-election.

“An assault weapons ban was always a poison bill that was great for the White House to talk about but politically damaging for those vulnerable Democrats representing red states to support,” Ron Bonjean, a Republican political strategist and former House and Senate leadership aide, told The Washington Examiner.

The Senate will vote on a gun control bill measure in April, but it won’t include a proposal authored by Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., that would have made it illegal to purchase military-style assault weapons and gun clips that can hold more than 10 rounds.

Feinstein announced the provision in the weeks following the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting, standing with shooting victims and law enforcement agents near a wall displaying some of the 157 assault-style weapons she hoped to make illegal. Feinstein’s measure cleared the Senate Judiciary Committee last week with the support of the panel’s Democratic majority, but no Republicans voted for it. Beyond the committee, some Democrats from pro-gun states were against it.

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Cyprus Rejects Bailout Deal Leaving Eurozone Facing Fresh Crisis

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Photo Credit: Filip Singer

The Cypriot parliament has thrown out a controversial plan to skim €5.8bn (£5bn) from savers’ bank accounts, in a move that risks plunging the eurozone into a fresh crisis and heightens expectations that the cash-strapped country will seek a funding lifeline from Russia.

Cyprus has just 24 hours to find a solution to its funding gap before its banks are due to reopen following the dramatic no vote on Tuesday night, which failed to support a hastily renegotiated change to the original deal.

Late on Tuesday night the eurozone governments said that despite the vote Cyprus would still need to raise the €5.8 bn – a third of the €17bn bailout.

With the crisis escalating, an RAF flight carrying €1m in low-denomination notes landed in Cyprus to provide cash for 3,000 British service personnel based on the Mediterranean island. The banks have been shut since Friday and electronic transactions halted, although cash machines are still working and the Ministry of Defence said the euros were being flown in as “contingency measure”.

About 2,000 of the military staff, typically posted to the island for 18 or 24 months, have their salaries paid into local accounts. The MoD said it was “approaching personnel to ask if they want their March, and future months’ salaries paid into UK bank accounts, rather than Cypriot accounts”.

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Barack Obama’s Surveillance Society (+video)

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Photo Credit: YouTube

After 9/11, Barack Obama and his leftist base were livid that George W. Bush under the Patriot Act was engaged in warrantless wiretapping of Americans’ phone calls and email. We all remember them foaming at the mouth, marching in the streets with their idiotic swastikas and photos of Bush as Hitler.

The Left, proclaiming Barack Obama lord and savior, are eerily quiet now that Obama has taken Bush’s Patriot Act to an unimaginable, Orwellian level.

Obama has embraced Total Information Awareness—TIA for short—which refers to the government’s ability to compile a massive, searchable database, comprised of every type of electronic communication and information imaginable. We’re not just talking about phone calls and emails anymore. Barry Obama has already been compiling literally billions of phone and email records since ascending the throne. Now he’s out for bigger fish.

In September, the National Security Agency will open a one million square foot mega-database facility, built by an army of ten thousand construction workers. Located in Bluffdale, Utah—an area known more for polygamists than Orwellian databases—the Utah Data Center will store information in the yottabytes. A yottabyte—10 with 24 zeros after it—makes a terabyte look like small potatoes. It will take 200 megawatts—enough to power 200,000 homes—to feed this behemoth and will use an air conditioning system larger than what was used for the World Trade Centers—combined. So much for “Green” energy.

What kind of data is Big Brother Obama gathering?

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US Flies Nuclear-Capable B-52 Bombers Over South Korea Amid Rising Tensions With North Korea

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Photo Credit: AP

The United States is flying nuclear-capable B-52 bombers on training missions over South Korea to highlight Washington’s commitment to defend an ally amid rising tensions with North Korea, Pentagon officials said Monday.

Pentagon press secretary George Little said one B-52 flew over South Korea on March 8, and the deputy defense secretary, Ashton Carter, said during a visit to Seoul that another bomber mission is scheduled for Tuesday.

B-52 bombers are capable of launching nuclear-armed cruise missiles, but Little said those participating in the Korean exercise are not armed with nuclear weapons.

The use of Air Force warplanes as part of an annual U.S.-South Korean military exercise called Foal Eagle is not unusual. But the Pentagon used the occasion to draw attention to the role B-52 bombers play as part of an American nuclear “umbrella” over South Korea and Japan — both of which feel threatened by North Korea’s development of nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles.

“We’re deeply concerned about North Korean behavior and rhetoric,” Little told reporters.

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Making Crime Pay: Norwegian TV Station Reveals EU Paying Salaries To Imprisoned Palestinians

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Photo Credit: AP

A Norwegian public television investigation that found taxpayer-funded developmental aid to the Palestinian Authority is being funneled to convicted terrorists in Israeli prisons has ignited controversy in Norway and could be the tipping point for the European Union’s reconsideration of aid, according to an activist group.

The PA is using foreign aid to pay salaries as high as $3,111 per month to imprisoned terrorists, according to the in-depth report by the NRK, a Norwegian public broadcasting station. The salaries reportedly start at around $400 per month and increase with length of prison time.

The PA has maintained the payments are actually “social welfare” for the families of terrorists, not rewards for murderers of Israeli citizens. But Norwegian Foreign Minister Espen Barth Eide acknowledged last week that the PA mischaracterized the payments.

“It is unfortunate that the incorrect information obtained from the Palestinian Authority was communicated to the Parliament,” said Eide. Members of the Norwegian parliament have called for a reconsideration of funding, and are investigating the issue.

Palestinian Media Watch, an Israeli-based activist organization that helped uncover the payments, said the Norwegian government’s response to the controversy could influence policy for the entire E.U. Norway chairs the Ad Hoc Liaison Committee, which coordinates Palestinian developmental aid policy. Other participants include the E.U., the U.S., and the United Nations.

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Hussein In Jerusalem

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Photo Credit: Muhammad غفّاري

No, not the Mufti al-Husseini of Jerusalem, but Obama. Close enough.

Why is Obama going to Israel? The Muslim Brotherhood advocate in the White House has refused to speak to the Knesset. He caved to Muslim threats and supremacist demands and is not going to the Temple Mount with an Israeli escort. And an Obama administration official has said that Obama will not bring any new Middle East peace plan with him, because he doesn’t think the Israelis are interested in peace. Not the “Palestinians” with their calls for blood and genocide, but the Israelis.

So what is he doing there? He is going on the offensive against Israel, and he is doing it from Israel. Expect the notorious leftist Israel press to applaud Obama’s land confiscation policy.

And Obama is not going over there empty-handed. He brings a cash infusion of 500 million smackers for the jihadists, aka the Palestinian Authority. No money for White House tours or military tuition – but half a billion for the terror statelet and billions and F16s to the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt.

Yet the more he prostrates himself before the Palestinian jihadists, the more contempt they have for him. I wonder how much this will cost the American taxpayers, not to mention Israeli blood and land … and 3G technology. No joke: Muslims in Bethlehem were burning pictures of Obama and protesting, among other things, the absence of 3G communications technology.

And the Times of Israel reported that Israeli Knesset member Nachman Shai “called on students to skip U.S. President Barack Obama’s planned speech to the Israeli public, scheduled for Thursday night, citing the White House’s exclusion of Ariel University from a program to allow students to attend the Jerusalem address.”

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Nobody’s Property Is Safe When Bailouts Begin

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Photo Credit: Petros Giannakouris

Imagine checking your bank statement one day only to discover that someone had just taken 10 percent out of your savings account without your permission.

You’d be pretty upset, wouldn’t you? So were many citizens of Cyprus, whose government announced last Friday it would be assessing a 9.9 percent “stability levy” on all deposits of more than $100,000 and a 6.75 percent levy on deposits less than that. Cypriots quickly deduced that the government was seizing their property to bail out their nation’s banks and immediately tried to withdrawal their funds. To prevent them, the government of Cyprus has declared a bank holiday that has been extended through at least Wednesday.

The Cyprus crisis began last spring when the face value of Greek debt was cut after that government was bailed out last spring. Cyprus banks, which have longstanding cultural ties with Greece, carried substantial exposure and lost billions. Cyprus Popular Bank alone had $3.4 billion in Greek government debt, whose value was reduced to $2.5 billion. Cyprus was forced to nationalize that bank last November, and things haven’t gotten any better since.

Like the rest of the European Union, Cyprus has been mired in recession since 2011. Its government has been seeking a bailout from its EU partners since last June. But EU member nations, especially Germany, are tired of bailing out their spendthrift neighbors, especially ones like Cyprus, where the banking sector was recently measured to be eight times as large as the entire Cypriot economy.

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TSA Agents ‘Humiliated’ Marine Who Lost Both Legs To An IED

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Photo Credit: Jim Urquhart

Transportation Security Administration officers “humiliated” a Marine who lost both legs to an Improvised Explosive Device by requiring the wheelchair-bound Marine to stand and walk. They also had him remove both his prosthetic legs, according to a letter from Rep. Duncan Hunter (R-California).

In his complaint to TSA Administrator John Pistole, Hunter described the Marine as being “humiliated” by the TSA’s actions, based on accounts of the incident last week in Phoenix, Arizona.

“The individual escorting this Marine asked the TSA officer which of the two checkpoints to enter and received the response, ‘either one,’ only to be told moments later they should have entered a different way. As a result, a TSA officer asked the Marine to stand and walk to an alternate area, despite the fact that he physically could not stand or walk on his own,” Hunter explained in his letter.

“With numerous TSA officers sitting and unwilling to assist, an officer then made him remove his legs, then put them back on,” Hunter continued, “only to advance to a secondary screening location where he was asked again to stand, with extraordinary difficulty, while his wheelchair was examined for explosives.”

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Tea Partiers Express Concern Over RNC ‘Autopsy’ Report

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After the Republican National Committee released its “autopsy” report highlighting the path forward for the GOP on Monday, conservatives blasted the RNC for proposing changes they feel would blunt the ability of grassroots conservatives to beat establishment candidates at the presidential level.

The report proposes shortening the primary calendar for the next presidential cycle and holding a series of regional primaries that would be a series of “super primaries.” Critics claim it is heavy on process, metrics, and outreach to celebrities and minorities while being short on conservative substance—which, they fear, would ensure more Mitt Romneys are nominated over insurgent Tea Party and grassroots candidates like Ted Cruz.

Brent Bozell, chairman of ForAmerica, said there was not much that excited him about the report and accused the Republican establishment of being “obsessed with identifying problems and solutions from the top-down instead of from the bottom-up.”

“It’s the exact same thing as (GOP strategist) Karl Rove saying they’re going to pick candidates. That ensures that establishment candidates are the only ones with a chance,” Bozell told The Hill.

Jenny Beth Martin of Tea Party Patriots said the RNC fails to understand that Republicans lost because they “failed to promote our principles,” and the party does not need to wait on the “RNC to promote our winning principles at places like CPAC, and across the country.”

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CNN Asked Rand Paul About Abortion Exceptions: This Is How He Answered (+video)

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Photo Credit: Getty Images

Republican Senator Rand Paul boldly declared last week when he introduced the Life at Conception Act that “human life begins at the moment of conception, and therefore is entitled to legal protection.”

However, during an interview on Tuesday with CNN’s Wolf Blitzer, the Kentucky senator seemed to soften his tone when asked about abortion in cases of rape, incest, or when the life of the mother is at risk.

“Just to be precise, if you believe life begins at conception, which I suspect you do, you would have no exceptions for rape, incest, the life of the mother. Is that right?” Blitzer asked.

“What I would say is that there are thousands of exceptions. I’m a physician and every individual case is going to be different,” Sen. Paul responded. “Everything is going to be particular to that individual case and what is going on that mother and the medical circumstances of that mother.”

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