Alleged ISIS Photo Controversy Engulfs Sen. John McCain

Photo Credit: BreitbartSen. John McCain (R-AZ) and his aides swear the Syrian “rebels” he was pictured last year with weren’t ISIS members or supporters, and the mainstream media is by and large buying the 2008 GOP presidential nominee’s story.

Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) has endured brutal criticism—media fact checkers, reporters, and political figures have shredded him—for questioning just who McCain posed with.

But a closer look at the situation tells perhaps a different story than McCain’s office or the mainstream media have pushed.

The criticism of McCain centers around how the Arizona senator met with Syrian rebel leaders in May 2013 when he visited the country. McCain posed for photographs with those people, and since then rumors have sprouted up across the Internet that he met with ISIS or some other terrorist kidnappers or nefarious forces.

“The people in the pictures with Senator McCain in Syria included General Salim Idris, then-Chief of Staff of the Supreme Military Command of the Free Syrian Army (FSA), Mouaz Moustafa, the Executive Director of the DC-based Syrian Emergency Task Force (which supports the moderate opposition and helped arrange some of the trip), and fighters and commanders from the Northern Storm Brigade, a FSA-aligned group,” McCain’s spokesman Brian Rogers told Breitbart News.

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Al Gore: Climate Skepticism Will Haunt Republicans in 2016

Photo Credit: SAUL LOEB / AFP / GettyAl Gore says Republicans seeking the White House in 2016 are in a bind on climate change.

Asked if it would hurt the GOP nominee to be a climate skeptic or advocate against taking action on global warming, Gore replied: “Oh, yes. Definitely.”

“In a general election? At the national level, where moderate voters hold the balance? It would be extremely harmful to a Republican candidate,” Gore told National Journal in an interview Wednesday.

But Gore doubts that a “pro-climate” Republican can get the GOP nod, because “carbon polluters and anti-government extremists control many of the state primaries, if not most.”

Gore’s comments arrive as potential 2016 Republican White House candidates are beginning to stake out turf on climate change and energy.

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Mayor: New High School Won't be Named After President Obama

Mayor Rahm Emanuel backed off Thursday from naming a new elite high school after President Barack Obama amid ongoing criticism from African-Americans who felt the honor inappropriate for a school slated for a wealthy, predominantly white part of the Near North Side.

Instead of naming the new school after his former boss, the mayor indicated he would consider other names for the selective enrollment high school set to be built near the site of the former Cabrini-Green public housing project just northwest of downtown.

“Over the last few months, my team has listened to questions and concerns from the community, ranging from location of the building to the naming of the school. We take that community input seriously, which is why – as we CONTINUE to look for a thoughtful way to honor President Obama – we will look for other possible names for this future school,” Emanuel said in a statement.

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Hell Freezes Over: Limbaugh Unloads on Republicans

Photo Credit: WNDListeners have been asking Rush Limbaugh why he hasn’t devoted much airtime to election-related polls or analyzing the Republican Party’s chances of triumphing in the next election.

Thursday, Limbaugh addressed these questions, explaining that he “is not gonna talk about something if I have to do it perfunctorily, if I’m not into it and don’t care about [it].”

And if he can’t get excited about “the nuts and bolts of the election,” he explained, it’s because he doesn’t know “what the Republican Party message is” anymore.

Polls show that Obama and the Democrats are less popular than they’ve been in years, but at the same time, Limbaugh noted, these polls don’t exactly foreshadow an upcoming Republican landslide, either.

Limbaugh tried to explain why.

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Florida Shooting: Man Kills Six Grandchildren and Daughter in Murder-Suicide

Photo Credit: HANDOUT / REUTERS A grandfather shot and killed his daughter and six grandchildren at his Florida home on Thursday before turning his gun on himself, law enforcement officials in Florida said.

The children’s ages ranged from three months to 10 years, Gilchrist County sheriff Robert Schultz said at a press conference in Bell, a small town in central Florida about 30 miles west of Gainesville.

Schultz named the killer as Don C Spirit, 51, a town resident who called 911 at about 4pm making threats against his family and himself. He was alive when the first sheriff’s deputy arrived at the house, Schultz said, but killed himself soon after.

The Orlando Sentinel reported that in 2001 a man named Don C Spirit accidentally shot and killed his eight-year-old son Kyle with a high powered rifle in a hunting accident. Florida Department of Corrections records show he was released from jail in 2006 after serving three years for firearms offences relating to that incident.

At the press conference on Thursday, Schultz said there was an interaction between Spirit and the deputy, but that it was believed the seven victims were already dead by the time the officer arrived.

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Hundreds, More than a Thousand, Sleep Outside NYC’s Main Apple Store for iPhone 6

Photo Credit: Showbiz 411If you’d told me this story I wouldn’t have believed it. But on Thursday night, walking from a screening of “Bhopal: A Prayer for Rain” to dinner at Todd English’s Food Hall in the Plaza Hotel, we were gobsmacked. More than a thousand people are lined up, with sleeping bags, for the 8am release of the NEW IPHONE 6. The line goes from Madison Avenue and 59th St. to Fifth Avenue in front of the tony Cipriani restaurant, then jumps onto the plaza in front of FAO Schwarz, next to Apple.

Along the 59th St. queue, it is mostly Asians. There are some Europeans, and no Americans from what we could tell. In some cases there were whole families. No one could adequately explain what the heck they were doing sleeping outside on a Manhattan street. The IPHONE 6 is not very different than the iPhone 6. It’s certainly not different enough to do this.

We surmised that most of the people were buying more than one iPhone, with the expectation of selling a few for big bucks. Especially overseas. One young man from Belgium could not say why he wanted the 6, since he already had the 5. “I just want it,” he said.

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More than 1,000 ObamaCare Plans Include Taxpayer-Funded Abortion Coverage

Photo Credit: ReutersThe Government Accountability Office (GAO), the non-partisan government watchdog, has issued a new report that identifies 1,036 Obamacare plans that cover abortion on demand at the expense of taxpayers through subsidies, a fact that confirms the provision in the health reform law requiring individuals to pay separately for abortion coverage is being widely ignored.

As FoxNews.com reports, Republican lawmakers say the “bombshell” finding demonstrates the Obama administration misled the American people when it insisted that under Obamacare, abortions would not be paid for with federal funds.

According to a press release by the pro-life Susan B. Anthony List (SBA-List), the GAO discovered that nearly all of the insurance issuers sampled are not itemizing the required separate abortion surcharge on their bills, again confirming that the Obama administration is ignoring the law’s abortion accounting gimmick.

The GAO report also reveals that disclosure of abortion coverage in plans is inconsistent, a claim that has been made by both pro-life and pro-abortion individuals and suggests that coverage transparency is lacking.

“The report directly contradicts President Obama’s 2009 promise that ‘under our plan, no federal dollars will be used to fund abortions’ and his claim of being ‘the most transparent administration in history,’” states SBA-List.

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England's Latest Muslim "Sex Pest" Escapes Jail Due to "Good Character"

Photo Credit: BreitbartA Muslim man from Rotherham who pleaded guilty to sexually assaulting a teenager on a train has escaped a jail sentence thanks to “previous good character”, despite the judge saying that the offence merited a custodial sentence.

The defendant, Raja Hussain, attempted to excuse his actions by explaining that he was suffering from poor mental health, including depression with psychotic features, hallucinations and delusional beliefs at the time of the assault, the Express has reported.

Hussain, 39, was arrested in Rotherham 24 hours after following an 18 year old University of Sheffield student, onto a train and touching her. The teenager first spotted Hussain grinning at her in a train station waiting room. The two then boarded a train, where Hussain sat opposite her and continued leering.

The passengers were then asked to change trains due to a problem, and when they moved to the second train, he sat down beside her. He immediately began to look at pornography on his phone in a manner designed to ensure the student could see the images, an action which was described as “intimidating”.

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House Approves Obama’s Iraq-Syria Military Strategy Amid Skepticism

Photo Credit: WND The House on Wednesday approved President Obama’s plan to train and equip moderate Syrian rebels to counter the growing threat of the Islamic State organization, even though lawmakers in both parties remain deeply skeptical about its chances for success.

The vote placed Congress one step closer to authorizing the third significant U.S. military operation in Iraq in the past quarter century, and it put lawmakers on record approving U.S. engagement in the years-long Syrian civil war. It delivered Obama much-needed domestic political support as he seeks an international coalition to combat the growing threat of Islamist terrorism in the Middle East.

But the tally — 273 to 156 — also revealed widespread misgivings in both parties about the plan’s chances of success, even among lawmakers who voted in favor of it.

Obama’s proposal was opposed by more than 40 percent of Democrats, many of whom are concerned that new U.S. military operations in the Middle East could fester for several years with no clear strategy or definition of success.

Republicans provided the lion’s share of support, but many are worried that Obama’s plans are too limited. One top GOP leader suggested that Congress could give the president blanket military authority, even if Obama doesn’t want it, when lawmakers hold a much broader debate after the November elections about the fight against Islamist militants.

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Legislation Introduced to Eliminate ATF

Photo Credit: TownHall Republican Congressman Jim Sensenbrenner has introduced legislation to eliminate the Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, a federal law enforcement agency with 5000 employees. If passed, the legislation would dissolve the duties of ATF to the FBI and DEA. From the legislation:

To abolish the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives, transfer.

its functions relating to the Federal firearms, explosives, and arson laws, violent crime, and domestic terrorism to the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and transfer its functions relating to the Federal alcohol and tobacco smuggling laws to the Drug Enforcement Administration, and for other purposes.

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