Mark Levin to Receive Inaugural Citizens United ‘Andrew Breitbart’ Defender of the First Amendment Award’ at CPAC

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Photo Credit: Mark Taylor/flickrConservative talk radio host Mark Levin will be honored with the inaugural “Andrew Breitbart Defender of the First Amendment Award” at this year’s CPAC on Thursday, March 6.

Breitbart News Editor-in-Chief Alex Marlow will introduce Citizens United President David Bossie, who will present the award to Levin along with Breitbart News President and CEO Larry Solov and Breitbart News Executive Chairman Stephen K. Bannon.

“Mark Levin fearlessly and passionately stands up for conservatives and everyday Americans whose voices the mainstream press often tries to marginalize or silence,” Solov said. “And like Andrew Breitbart, Levin has a way of cutting through the mainstream press’s filter with his words and is never afraid to have arrows slung at him by the institutional left on the front lines of the fight.”

It will mark Levin’s only appearance at this year’s conference. The ceremony will take place in the CPAC Theater in the Chesapeake conference rooms that Citizens United will sponsor.

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ObamaCare Restaurant Menu Mandate Creating Headaches

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Photo Credit: Fox News Tucked deep in the Affordable Care Act is language requiring all restaurants with at least 20 locations to list nutritional information alongside each and every item on their menu.

That edict is now creating headaches for small business owners across the country, particularly pizza chains.

Take Domino’s. There are 34 million different pizza combinations available at the chain, when all crusts and cheeses and toppings are factored in.

Now imagine walking into a Domino’s and navigating a menu board with 34 million different options on it.

Executives say figuring out the small print will be a big burden.

Read more this story HERE.

Poll: 66 Percent of Americans Want Continued Benghazi Investigation

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Photo Credit: Reuters Published in The Washington Times, the poll shows strong American support–across the political spectrum–for such an investigation.

The poll asked: “Should Congress continue to investigate the Obama administration’s handling of the terrorist attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya that resulted in the deaths of four Americans?”

Read more this story HERE.

Holder Promotes Lawlessness to State AG’s: You Don’t Have to Enforce Laws You Disagree With

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Photo Credit: TownHallAttorney General Eric Holder is taking the lawless attitude of the Obama administration and passing it down to state attorneys general. Yesterday during an interview with The New York Times, Holder said state attorneys general do not have to enforce laws they disagree with, specifically when it comes to the issue of gay marriage.

It is highly unusual for the United States attorney general to advise his state counterparts on how and when to refuse to defend state laws. But Mr. Holder said when laws touch on core constitutional issues like equal protection, an attorney general should apply the highest level of scrutiny before reaching a decision on whether to defend it. He said the decision should never be political or based on policy objections.

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As Obama’s Approval Rating Slips, Democrats are Avoiding Him

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Photo Credit: JACQUELYN MARTIN/AP
When President Obama goes abroad, world leaders come to meet him. When Obama travels at home these days, members of his own party often avoid him.

When Obama speaks Wednesday in St. Paul, Minn., on the economy, Sen. Al Franken (D-Minn.) “hopes he can join the President,” a spokesman for the former funnyman said. “But it’s uncertain if his schedule will allow for travel since the Senate is in session.”

“Maybe out of an abundance of caution Franken is hesitating to be in the state,” said prominent political handicapper Stuart Rothenberg.

Minnesota is a liberal state by national standards. But a poll this month by the state’s Star Tribune newspaper found Obama’s approval rating there had for the first time turned negative. Half of Gopher State respondents disapproved of Obama’s performance while 43% approved, his worst marks since his election.

Nationally, Democrats hold 55 Senate seats to Republicans’ 45. But most contested Senate races feature Democratic incumbents running states Obama didn’t carry.

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Solid Majority of Americans Say UN Doing a Poor Job

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More Americans believe the U.N. is doing a poor rather than good job in trying to solve the problems it has had to face, by 57% to 35%. This rating is slightly worse than a year ago, when 50% said the U.N. was doing a poor job, and thus continues a decade-long trend of low public confidence in the U.N.

These results come from the Feb. 6-9 Gallup World Affairs Poll. The U.N. has been struggling to help bring the bloody, three-year Syrian civil war to a close, with the most recent U.N.-sponsored peace talks in Geneva widely seen as a failure, to the point that the U.N. envoy for Syria, Lakhdar Brahimi, publicly apologized to the Syrian people that the peace conference did not yield any progress.

With such intractable conflicts as Syria dogging the U.N., it may not be surprising that many Americans would consider the international body — originally proposed by U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt and established with strong U.S. support — ineffective. However, Americans’ negative evaluation of the U.N.’s functioning is nothing new. After the U.S. failed to win U.N. support for the invasion of Iraq in March 2003, the percentage of Americans who said the U.N. was doing a good job fell 13 points to 37%, and hit a nadir of 26% in 2009. It has failed to climb above 40% since then.

Prior to the Iraq war, Americans’ reviews of the international body waxed and waned. Opinions were generally positive in the 1950s and 1960s — not long after the institution was created — before falling off in the 1970s, a decade marked by continued war in Vietnam, a war between Israel and several Arab nations, and OPEC’s oil embargo of the U.S. American attitudes became more positive in the early 1990s, when the U.N. Security Council maintained a unified front against Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait.

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Drought Leaves California Farmers Choosing Which Crops Get Water and Which Wither

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Photo Credit: GETTY IMAGESA federal agency’s recent announcement that the California’s Central Valley will get zero percent water allocation this year was devastating for farmers already dealing with the worst drought seen in decades.

One of the world’s most productive agricultural regions, the enormous valley is reeling after the driest year in more than a century. But last week, the Department of Interior’s Bureau of Reclamation, which supplies water to a third of the irrigated farmland in California through a 500-mile network of canals and tunnel, said it won’t be able to deliver any of the water sought by farmers.

“It goes beyond devastation, you’re going to see farms that have been in business 30 and 40 years, they do not have any water, they are out of business,” said Dennis Falaschi, general manager of the Panoche Water District.

The drought, combined with continued protections for endangered species, has forced farmers to find alternatives. Most farmers have already switched to drip irrigation, which is much more efficient than the flood irrigation technique used when water was plentiful. But it still may not be enough, as farmers are now choosing which crops to water – and which to let wither.

“This farm’s been here for over 90 years and we recognize that Mother Nature throws a drought occasionally and so we made the decision not to plant more than a third of this farm,” says Mike Stearns, a Central Valley Farmer.

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CNN’s Rampage Against Ted Nugent Leads to Disastrous Ratings (+video)

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Photo Credit: AFPBy John Nolte.

CNN is a cable news network in its death throes. As ratings return to near-historic lows, CNN chief Jeff Zucker is obviously making terrible decisions while in panic-mode. Just-released ratings show that CNN’s stupid, wildly hypocritical and hysterical rampage against Ted Nugent last week led to a disastrous Friday.

Narratives are all about momentum. You want to build interest as the viewer wonders where the story will go. Across almost every one of its shows, CNN’s stable of mostly left-wing anchors — especially Wolf Blitzer, Carol Costello, and Ashleigh Banfield — drove the phony Nugent story using every trick in the book. This story defined CNN last week and it can now go down as yet another dismal failure. I’ll explain why after the numbers:

Total Friday viewership at CNN averaged a paltry 254,000 viewers with only 70,000 in the 25-54 age group. Despite all the energy poured into CNN’s phony outrage over Nugent, this is actually down a little from last week. Zucker and his tribe didn’t make public fools of themselves for a full week in the hopes holding on to the dismal ratings from the prior week. The idea was to stoke an increase in ratings through ginned up national outrage.

In the 25-54 demo, here is how catastrophic Friday was for specific CNN programs:

New Day 77k
Wolf Blitzer 52k
Crossfire 25k-
Wolf Blitzer 49k
Erin Burnett 58k
Anderson Cooper 83k

Read more this story HERE.

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Photo Credit: CNNWatch: Ted Nugent Annoys CNN Host by Taking Credit for Getting Piers Morgan’s ‘A** Thrown Out’, Blasting Her Colleagues

By Jason Howerton.

Conservative rocker and NRA board member Ted Nugent took some credit for getting Piers Morgan’s CNN show cancelled during an interview with one of the network’s other anchors, Erin Burnett. His comments came after Burnett asked him if his apology for calling President Barack Obama a “sub-human mongrel” was sincere.

Nugent insisted his apology was serious and also defended himself against claims that his comments were racist in nature.

“We call bad people who are destroying our neighborhoods mongrels,” Nugent said, later adding, “I don’t have a racist bone in my body!”

Read more this story HERE.

Obama Mourns Passing of Harold Ramis, Not Shirley Temple Black

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Photo Credit: AP Photo/Jason DeCrowThere are many things to criticize President Obama for — I won’t even list them since you know what they are — but give him credit when he issues a statement about a famous citizen who has passed.

Obama on Tuesday released a statement regarding the death of Harold Ramis, the actor, writer and director who was responsible for such classics as “Ghostbusters” and “Caddyshack.”

“Michelle and I were saddened to hear of the passing of Harold Ramis, one of America’s greatest satirists, and like so many other comedic geniuses, a proud product of Chicago’s Second City,” Obama said.

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Governors Erupt in Partisan Dispute at White House

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Photo Credit: AP Photo/Charles DharapakThe nation’s governors emerged from a meeting with President Barack Obama on Monday claiming harmony, only to immediately break into an on-camera partisan feud in front of the West Wing.

Louisiana Republican Gov. Bobby Jindal lashed out first, saying if Obama were serious about growing the economy he would approve the Keystone XL pipeline project and take other executive actions.

Instead, Jindal said, Obama “seems to be waving the white flag of surrender” on the economy by focusing on raising the federal minimum wage to $10.10, up from $7.25. “The Obama economy is now the minimum wage economy. I think we can do better than that,” Jindal said.

Jindal’s statements were the kind that Republicans often make on television appearances or at partisan events, but don’t usually come from potential presidential candidates standing yards from the Oval Office. Other governors had been instead expressing wide agreement and appreciation for the president’s time. As Jindal spoke, some of his colleagues began shaking their heads, and Hawaii Democratic Gov. Neil Abercrombie began audibly mumbling to others around him.

Connecticut Democratic Gov. Dannel Malloy took over the microphone from Jindal and responded sharply, “Wait a second, until a few moments ago we were going down a pretty cooperative road. So let me just say that we don’t all agree that moving Canadian oil through the United States is necessarily the best thing for the United States economy.”

Read more this story HERE.