Harry Reid Puts Off Vote on Jobless Benefits, Negotiations with GOP Continue

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Photo Credit: Washington Examiner

Photo Credit: Washington Examiner

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., on Monday delayed a key procedural vote on legislation to extend unemployment benefits for 1.3 million Americans as Democrats and Republicans continued negotiations on a bipartisan accord.

The measure to aid the long-term jobless still needs about a half-dozen Republican votes to clear a 60-vote threshold and advance to a final vote. But Republicans are withholding those votes to pressure Reid to allow votes on Republican amendments to the bill, a demand Reid on Friday hinted he could accept.

Sen. Dean Heller, R-Nev., the chief Republican negotiator, confirmed that progress was being made toward a bipartisan agreement on the extension. Heller said any agreement would have to allow votes on GOP amendments and offset the cost with budget cuts.

“There are multiple issues here and that’s why the negotiations are taking so long,” Heller told reporters Monday evening. “I’m pretty optimistic.”

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Obama Admin Goes to Court Seeking to Deport German Homeschoolers In U.S. Under Political Asylum

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Photo Credit: national Review

Photo Credit: national Review

Ronald Reagan electrified the world when he demanded that the Berlin Wall be torn down. Barack Obama is helping to build a new one, even as the German government begins rounding up members of a despised religious minority.

The Romeike family was granted asylum in the United States because the German government was intent on wresting away the children and putting the parents in cages for the crime of homeschooling their children, which is verboten in Germany, a legacy of the country’s totalitarian past. The Obama administration, which in other notable areas of immigration law has enacted a policy of “discretion” regarding deportations, took the Romeike family to court to have its asylum protections revoked, and succeeded in doing so. The family has appealed to the Supreme Court, which has ordered the Obama administration to respond to the Romeikes’ petition, but the administration has so far refused to do so.

As the Romeikes’ story unfolds, another German family is being held in the country against their will, also for the crime of homeschooling their children — or intending to do so, at least. The Wunderlich family had their children kidnapped by the German government — the agents of which came crashing through their door with battering rams — as retaliation for their homeschooling. They complied with the government’s demands regarding their children’s education and, understandably enough, began the process of relocating to France, where attitudes toward family life are more civilized. The Germans responded by refusing to reinstate their custody of their children, with a judge determining that the desire to homeschool presents an “endangerment” to the children.

That is the environment into which the Obama administration intends to send the Romeike family.

Why?

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Bailing Out Health Insurers and Helping Obamacare

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Photo Credit: Weekly Standard

Photo Credit: Weekly Standard

Robert Laszewski—a prominent consultant to health insurance companies—recently wrote in a remarkably candid blog post that, while Obamacare is almost certain to cause insurance costs to skyrocket even higher than it already has, “insurers won’t be losing a lot of sleep over it.” How can this be? Because insurance companies won’t bear the cost of their own losses—at least not more than about a quarter of them. The other three-quarters will be borne by American taxpayers.

For some reason, President Obama hasn’t talked about this particular feature of his signature legislation. Indeed, it’s bad enough that Obamacare is projected by the Congressional Budget Office to funnel $1,071,000,000,000.00 (that’s $1.071 trillion) over the next decade (2014 to 2023) from American taxpayers, through Washington, to health insurance companies. It’s even worse that Obamacare is trying to coerce Americans into buying those same insurers’ product (although there are escape routes). It’s almost unbelievable that it will also subsidize those same insurers’ losses.

But that’s exactly what it will do—unless Republicans take action. As Laszewski explains, Obamacare contains a “Reinsurance Program that caps big claim costs for insurers (individual plans only).” He writes that “in 2014, 80% of individual costs between $45,000 and $250,000 are paid by the government [read: by taxpayers], for example.”

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Report: NSA’s Fourth Amendment Violations Have Zero Impact on Terrorism

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Photo Credit: Bill Clark/CQ Roll Call via Getty Images

Photo Credit: Bill Clark/CQ Roll Call via Getty Images

A public policy group says a review of U.S. terrorist arrests shows the government’s collection of bulk phone records does little to prevent terrorism, adding fuel to a debate over whether the spy program should be ended.

The nonprofit New America Foundation, based in Washington, analyzed cases involving 225 people recruited by al-Qaeda or other terrorist groups and charged in the U.S. since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. The majority of cases started with traditional techniques, such as use of “informants, tips from local communities, and targeted intelligence operations,” according to a report today from the group, which has been critical of the NSA spy programs.

“Our investigation found that bulk collection of American phone metadata has had no discernible impact on preventing acts of terrorism and only the most marginal of impacts on preventing terrorist-related activity, such as fundraising for a terrorist group,” Peter Bergen, director of the foundation’s national security program, said in a statement.

The National Security Agency’s collection and use of bulk phone records, such as numbers dialed and call durations, is one of several surveillance programs exposed by former government contractor Edward Snowden. The disclosures have prompted calls both domestically and overseas for the U.S. to discontinue or alter the programs.

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The Benghazi Transcripts: US Military Woefully Unprepared for Attack, Documents Show

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Photo Credit: Fox News

Photo Credit: Fox News

Hundreds of pages of declassified transcripts from the U.S. military’s top commanders present a picture of a woefully ill-postured military force whose assets were not in a position to quickly respond to the Benghazi terror attack — or other hot spots across Africa and the Middle East.

The 450 pages of newly declassified transcripts detail testimony from secret, closed hearings last year before Congress. They provide fresh insight into the military’s decision-making that night from the very commanders who staged the rescue efforts, including the top commander in Africa at the time Gen. Carter Ham.

Among other details, they reveal gaps in the military’s positioning of assets around the world.

For example, no attack aircraft were placed on high alert on Sept. 11, and the closest F-16 fighter planes to any of the trouble spots in North Africa were in Aviano, Italy. None were armed, and the closest air refuellers were positioned 10 hours away at a base in Great Britain.

No Defense Department AC-130 gunships were within a 10-hour flight to Libya, according to committee members who heard commanders’ testimony over the past 15 months. And the commander’s in-extremis force, which included a unit of 23 special operators who are used at the commander’s discretion, were training in Croatia that day. They did not make it to a staging base in Sigonella, Italy, for another 19 hours after the attack began, according to committee members.

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Officers Acquitted in Homeless Man’s Death

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Photo Credit: AP/BRUCE CHAMBERS

Photo Credit: AP/BRUCE CHAMBERS

Two former California police officers were acquitted Monday in the death of a homeless man after a violent struggle with officers that was captured on surveillance video.

It was a rare case in which police officers were charged with a death involving actions on duty.

Former Fullerton police officer Manuel Ramos was acquitted of second-degree murder and involuntary manslaughter. Former Cpl. Jay Cicinelli was acquitted of involuntary manslaughter and excessive use of force.

Cincinelli embraced his lawyer and put his face in his hands as the verdict concluded.

Outside court, Kelly Thomas’s parents condemned the verdict.

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Famous Name Leads Boy Scouts in ‘Gay’ Change

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Photo Credit: WND

Photo Credit: WND

The man who led the U.S. Defense Department through its transition to allowing openly acknowledged homosexuals to serve in the military is set to take over the Boy Scouts of America as the iconic youth organization undergoes a similar historic change.

Former Defense Secretary Robert Gates, who made news last week with the release of a memoir in which he harshly criticizes President Obama’s leadership, was chosen last October to begin a two-year term as BSA president in May 2014.

The Boy Scouts of America began allowing openly “gay” scouts for the first time Jan. 1 after a controversial vote last May by its National Council.

Gates, as defense secretary, backed Obama’s withdrawal of the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy. Congress repealed the ban in 2010, and it was lifted in 2011.

Gates earned the BSA’s highest honor, Eagle Scout, as a teen.

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Police Interview Shown in Case of Slain DC Writer

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supreme-court-building-washington-d-c-dcscJurors in the trial of a German man charged with killing his 91-year-old wife were shown bloody crime scene photographs Monday and a portion of an interview with homicide detectives in which he referred to the couple’s relationship as a “marriage of convenience.”

Albrecht Muth, 49, also describes in matter-of-fact fashion how he found the lifeless body of his wife, Viola Drath, in a bathroom of their home but decided that it would be futile to even try to resuscitate her.

“The obvious was obvious,” Muth can be heard telling the pair of detectives.

Muth is charged with first-degree murder in the August 2011 beating and strangulation death of Drath, a German journalist and socialite. He faces life in prison if convicted.

The interview, recorded in a cramped police interrogation room in the days between the discovery of Drath’s body and her husband’s arrest, gave jurors their closest look yet at the defendant: Muth has been absent from the trial, participating passively through videoconference, after doctors said his self-imposed starvation made him too weak to appear in court. He has been fasting off-and-on for what he says are religious reasons.

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MSNBC: Joe Miller is Retiring? Not So Fast. . .

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If you were watching MSNBC Live this morning, you might be wondering why former and current Alaska Republican senatorial candidate Joe Miller is retiring in the middle of his campaign. It’s an unorthodox political strategy for someone who is not currently embroiled in scandal, and who stands a reasonable chance of walking away with the nomination for a second time.

Joe Miller MSNBC

It appears that reports of his political death have been exaggerated. And so has his conversion to the Democratic Party, his relocation to California, and his service to the United States Congress since the early 1970s.

Someone at MSNBC confused candidate Joe Miller with George Miller, 21-term Democratic congressman from California who came out with a statement today declaring his upcoming retirement.

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Taxpayers Paid Nearly $175M for Penis Pumps Between 2006 and 2011

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Photo Credit: Andromedical Indonesia Flickr

Photo Credit: Andromedical Indonesia Flickr

Taxpayers paid nearly $175 million for vacuum erection systems (VES), commonly known as “penis pumps,” from 2006 to 2011, according to an inspector general report released on Monday.

The federal government paid more than double the retail price for VES, the Department of Health and Human Services IG found. Medicare prices for the systems, the report said, “remain grossly excessive compared with the amounts that non-Medicare payers pay.”

Medicare paid 473,620 VES claims during calendar years 2006 through 2011, according to the IG report.

Health care policy experts said the revelations in the IG report are a troubling indication of what they describe as wasteful spending in federal health programs.

“The fact that taxpayers have spent more than a quarter of a billion dollars over the past decade on penis pumps via Medicare is obscene and insulting – even more so when you consider that this is an arena of Medicare expenditures rife with fraud and where the government doesn’t even bother to assess medical necessity,” said Ben Domenech, a senior fellow at the Heartland Institute.

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