Obama’s Interior Secretary Threatens Colorado Springs Reporter: ‘I’ll Punch You Out’

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Last week, during an Election Day event supporting President Barack Obama in Fountain, Colo., U.S. Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar threatened a local reporter following a seemingly routine interview.

“If you set me up like this again, I’ll punch you out,” Salazar told Colorado Springs Gazette reporter Dave Phillips.

In an email to TheBlaze, U.S. Department of Interior spokesman Blake Androff confirmed that the altercation occurred. “The secretary regrets the exchange,” he wrote. The official did not provide any additional details.

Salazar had just finished answering questions about his policies for managing America’s wild horse population when the alleged incident occurred. Ginger Kathrens, executive director of the Cloud Foundation, was standing just feet away from Phillips when Salazar lost his temper.

“I was standing 3 feet away from Dave,” Kathrens told TheBlaze. “And when I turned, he kind of spat that at him and I thought, ‘Oh my God’…It was unbelievable.”

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Now What? White House ‘Secede’ Petitions Reach 660,000 Signatures, 50-State Participation

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Less than a week after a New Orleans suburbanite petitioned the White House to allow Louisiana to secede from the United States, petitions from seven states have collected enough signatures to trigger a promised review from the Obama administration.

By midnight Tuesday, more than 660,000 digital signatures appeared on 69 separate secession petitions covering all 50 states, according to a Daily Caller analysis of requests lodged with the White House’s “We the People” online petition system.

A petition from Vermont, where talk of secession is a regular feature of political life, was the final entry.

Petitions from Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, North Carolina, Tennessee and Texas residents have accrued at least 25,000 signatures, the number the Obama administration says it will reward with a staff review of online proposals.

The Texas petition leads all others by a wide margin. Shortly before midnight Tuesday, it had attracted more than 92,400 signatures. But a spokesperson for Gov. Rick Perry said Tuesday afternoon that he does not support the idea of his state striking out on its own.

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Israel Under Siege

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Islamic militants fired more than 110 rockets and mortars into Israeli territory over the past four days in attacks that injured eight Israelis, according to a report issued by the Israeli Defense Forces Strategic Division.

The unprovoked attacks have been dispersed throughout the Jewish state’s southern territory and have forced more than a million civilians into bomb shelters. One soldier has been critically injured in the barrage.

The Israel Project says that 898 rockets have fallen on Israel thus far in 2012—over 200 more than hit Israel in the entirety of 2011.

The Obama administration has yet to issue a statement about the attacks. Ambassador to Israel Dan Shapiro recently expressed sympathy via Twitter to those affected by the near-constant assault.

The most recent barrage comes on the heels of a three-month calm between Israel and Palestinian terrorists in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank.

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Allen West Digs In

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Florida Rep. Allen West has never been one to back down from a brawl — and he’s not starting now.

The freshman tea party favorite is refusing to concede his hard-fought reelection campaign, despite vote tallies showing him trailing his Democratic challenger, 29-year-old construction company executive Patrick Murphy, by nearly 2,000 votes. While Murphy has declared victory, West and his advisers are threatening to wage a protracted legal battle – raising the prospect that the high-profile race will drag on for days, if not weeks, longer.

As of Monday afternoon, Murphy had accumulated 166,223 votes to West’s 164,316, according to the Associated Press, which has yet to call the race. The vote tally encompasses 100 percent of the precincts in the Treasure Coast district. Murphy holds a 50.3 percent to 49.7 percent lead over West, just outside the 0.5 percent margin that would automatically trigger a recount under Florida law.

On Saturday, Florida election officials completed an unofficial certification of the contest. An official count is expected to come Friday, when about 150 overseas ballots will be included in the total.

West’s legal advisers have homed in on the vote count in St. Lucie, one of three counties that comprise the newly-drawn 18th District seat. They argue that some ballots that were cast early there were accidentally counted twice. Murphy received 54 percent of the votes cast in the Democratic-oriented county. West won majorities in the district’s two other counties, Martin and Palm Beach.

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Ohioans’ Food Stamp Aid To Be Reduced

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photo credit: USDAgovOhio families receiving food stamps could get an unwelcome surprise come January: $50 less every month in assistance.

For the 869,000 households enrolled in the program for the poorest Ohioans, that could amount to about $520 million annually out of the grocery budgets.

Because of the way the federal government calculates utility expenses for people receiving the benefit, a mild winter nationwide last year, and a lower price for natural gas, many families could experience a significant cut in aid, those familiar with the program say.

Recipients should get a letter from the state Department of Job and Family Services this month explaining the change, said Ben Johnson, a spokesman for the agency.

Meanwhile, food banks and others that distribute food assistance are bracing for increased demand.

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House to Defy Ozone Treaty, Allow Sale of Asthma Inhalers

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photo credit: net_efektThe [U.S.]House is looking to pass legislation this week that would legalize the sale of 1 million asthma inhalers, which were banned from drugstore shelves this year in order to comply with an international air quality treaty.

Republicans are expected to call up H.R. 6190, the Asthma Inhalers Relief Act, on Tuesday. The bill would allow the sale of about 1 million remaining Primatene Mist inhalers, despite a ban on the sale of this product since the end of 2011.

Primatene Mist had been used by asthma sufferers for decades, but it was banned under the Montreal Protocol on Substances that Deplete the Ozone Layer, and also the Clean Air Act. Supporters of the ban have said Primatene Mist contains chlorofluorocarbons that deplete the ozone layer, as well as a drug, epinephrine, that is now seen by some doctors as less effective against asthma.

But supporters of the product say people still rely on Primatene Mist for asthma attacks, and that the ban takes away the only effective over-the-counter product for people with asthma.

The House Energy and Commerce Committee approved the bill by voice vote in August and said passage would allow the remaining 1 million inhalers to be sold.

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Mark Levin to Karl Rove: “Get the Hell Off the Stage”

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On his Monday radio program, talk show host Mark Levin, author of “Ameritopia: The Unmaking of America,” rejected the notion that the Republican Party should become more moderate to win over voters and blasted several commentators who suggested otherwise.

Levin added that the so-called Republican “consultant class” — including MSNBC analyst and former John McCain adviser Steve Schmidt — should be required to disclose how much they’re being paid before they’re allowed to try to steer the party.

“This consultant class, ladies and gentlemen, is very, very dangerous,” Levin said. “And all this money you contribute to the campaigns — they’re pocketing a fortune. And the Republican Party, they’re not only pulling the Republican Party in the wrong direction, they’re losing campaigns.”…

“And I hear Rove today going on, ‘We got to do this better,’ ‘I got to do this,’ ‘Got to this,’” Levin continued. “Get the hell off the stage already, will you pal? You’re a hanger-on. I don’t say this with any personal contempt. It’s just, enough is enough. We need fresh faces in politicians. We talk about them all the time — Ted Cruz and Rand Paul and Mike Lee and Marco Rubio, and so forth. Well, we need fresh faces who are advising these people too. And I’ll be honest, some fresh faces on Fox wouldn’t hurt. It’s time for Rove to go. I can’t take it anymore.”

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Obama Holds Record for Four Largest Deficits in U.S. History

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In this corner, the challenger, representing the responsible adult who tries to balance his checkbook every month and to save money for his/her children so their future will be safe: The American Taxpayer!

And in this corner, the undefeated champion, representing the height of fiscal irresponsibility, the man who has presided over an unbelievable, unprecedented four straight years of the highest four national deficits in U.S. history; the man who will assure your children that their future has been stolen by their parents, the President of your United States: Barack Obama!

Okay, you two, come out fighting. And no low blows.

Yup, Barack Obama has now given us four years of deficits that were $1.4 trillion, 1.3 trillion, 1.3 trillion, and 1.1 trillion. There have never been deficits remotely approaching these; the last year of George W. Bush’s tenure, the deficit was less than half of a trillion dollars.

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It Grows: Protesters from Forty-seven States Now Petitioning White House to ‘Secede’

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Conservatives have voted more than 375,000 times since Election Day to pick up their marbles and go home. That’s how many virtual signatures appeared Monday night, as clocks in Washington, D.C. chimed midnight, on petitions asking President Barack Obama’s administration to allow 47 of the 50 U.S. states to secede from the country.

A petition from an Arlington, Texas man, launched Nov. 9 via the Obama White House website’s “We the People” tool, had more than 58,000 signatures. That’s more than twice the 25,000 it had Monday morning, a number required to trigger an automatic White House review, according to the administration’s own published rules.

A similar petition from a Louisiana native crossed the 25,000 threshold as Monday drew to a close on the East Coast.

Launched Nov. 7, the day after Obama won re-election, the Pelican State’s spark set off an Internet-driven cascade of disaffected tea partiers and other conservatives looking — as one petition organizer told The Daily Caller via a “direct message” on Twitter — “just to do something, anything, to show we’re not going away quietly.”

It’s not clear whether, or to what extent, individuals are signing more than one petition. The White House’s online rules do not prohibit Americans from signing a petition that would not affect states where they live.

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Petraeus Mistress Claimed Benghazi Annex Held Jihadist Prisoners

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The Central Intelligence Agency denied charges Sunday that its annex in Benghazi, Libya secretly held a few jihadi prisoners until it was destroyed in the Sept. 11, 2012 attack. Paula Broadwell, the girlfriend then-CIA chief Gen. David Petraeus, made that claim during an Oct. 26 speech in Denver, Colo.

“I don’t know if a lot of you have heard this, but the CIA annex had actually had taken a couple of Libyan militia members prisoner. And they think that the attack on the consulate was an effort to try to get these prisoners back,” Broadwell declared during the speech, at the University of Denver.

“That’s still being vetted,” she added.

The CIA’s denial came just hours after Arutz Sheva, an Israeli news outlet, first published a partial transcript of Broadwell’s speech. By midnight Sunday, intelligence reporters with both The Daily Beast and The Washington Post were reporting and tweeting, respectively, that the CIA said her claim was false.

An agency spokesperson told The Daily Beast that “[t]he CIA has not had detention authority since January 2009, when Executive Order 13491 was issued. Any suggestion that the Agency is still in the detention business is uninformed and baseless.”

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