John McCain: Let Joe Biden Out of Witness Protection

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Photo Credit: Getty ImagesJoe Biden to the rescue!

A top Senate Republican called for President Obama to get the long absent Vice President Joe Biden “out of the witness protection program” to restart stalled talks to end the government shutdown and stop a US credit default.

“I hope the president will become engaged. Maybe we need to get Joe Biden out of the witness protection program,” Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) said on CBS’ “Face the Nation.”

Biden has been the chief White House negotiator in previous high-stakes budget talks, including the deal that averted the 2011 “fiscal cliff.”

McCain said the vice president’s mysterious absence this time underscored the uncompromising position of the White House, which has refused to negotiate with House Republicans.

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Palin and Lonegan Rev Up NJ Crowd Ahead of This Week’s Special Election (+video)

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Sarah Palin rode the Tea Party Express tour bus into Ocean County today to lend her political star power to Republican Steve Lonegan’s U.S. Senate campaign, urging the roughly 2,000 supporters to muster up “their Jersey fight” to help him defeat Cory Booker.

In the final weekend before the special election on Wednesday, Booker also revved up his campaign by launching a bus tour in north Jersey for a series of events he delayed after his father’s death on Thursday.

With polls putting Lonegan within 12 percentage points of Booker — a much closer margin than pundits had predicted — both camps worked aggressively to energize their supporters. Both candidates capitalized on the public discontent with the federal government shutdown, 12 days old with no end in sight.

If New Jersey, a blue state, sends a conservative like Lonegan to Washington, President Obama and the Democratic leaders in Congress would understand that their policies and message are failing, Palin said.

“New Jersey, know that the eyes of America are on you now,” Palin said. “You can turn things around. Something big is happening here,” the former vice presidential candidate and Alaska governor told an enthusiastic crowd at the New Egypt Speedway.

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Boehner says Obama Rejected GOP Plan to End Shutdown as Negotiations Shift to Senate

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Photo Credit: Getty Images By ASSOCIATED PRESS and DAILY MAIL REPORTER.

House Speaker John Boehner today told fellow Republicans that his talks with President Barack Obama have stalled.

‘The Senate needs to hold tough,’ Representative Greg Walden said Boehner told House GOP lawmakers. ‘The president now isn’t negotiating with us.’

Obama rejected the speaker’s effort to lift the debt ceiling for six weeks and reopen government in exchange for a budget negotiating process.

Attention now turns to the Senate, where a bipartisan group of Senators are working on a separate plan to reopen the government.

Word of the negotiations between Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, and the top Republican, Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, emerged as the Senate, as expected, rejected a Democratic effort to raise the government’s borrowing limit through next year.

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Photo Credit: APFocus on Senate after Obama rejects House plan

By JAKE SHERMAN, JOHN BRESNAHAN and BURGESS EVERETT.

Speaker John Boehner told House Republicans Saturday morning that his efforts to strike a deal with President Barack Obama are at a standstill.

There is no agreement, Boehner said in a room in the Capitol Saturday, and there are no negotiations between House Republicans and the White House, since Obama rejected the speaker’s effort to lift the debt ceiling for six weeks and reopen government while setting up a budget negotiating process.

With that, a familiar dynamic has resurfaced 12 days into the government shutdown and five days before Treasury says the nation runs out of borrowing authority: The pendulum has swung back to Senate Republicans, who now look more likely to cut a deal with Obama to end the first government shutdown since 1996, and avoid the first default on U.S. debt in history.

After the news that talks between Boehner and Obama have broken down, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) emerged on the floor to emphasize that the nation’s eyes are firmly fixed on the chamber.

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Hillary Clinton: We Need to Talk Sensibly about Spying

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Photo Credit: Lefteris Pitarakis/APHillary Clinton has called for a “sensible adult conversation”, to be held in a transparent way, about the boundaries of state surveillance highlighted by the leaking of secret NSA files by the whistleblower Edward Snowden.

In a boost to Nick Clegg, the British deputy prime minister, who is planning to start conversations within government about the oversight of Britain’s intelligence agencies, the former US secretary of state said it would be wrong to shut down a debate.

Clinton, who is seen as a frontrunner for the 2016 US presidential election, said at Chatham House in London: “This is a very important question. On the intelligence issue, we are democracies thank goodness, both the US and the UK.

“We need to have a sensible adult conversation about what is necessary to be done, and how to do it, in a way that is as transparent as it can be, with as much oversight and citizens’ understanding as there can be.”

Her words were echoed by the British shadow home secretary, Yvette Cooper, who repeated her call in a speech in July for reform of the oversight of the intelligence agencies. Cooper, a former member of the parliamentary intelligence and security committee that oversees the agencies,said: “I have long argued that checks and balances need to be stronger – this would benefit and maintain confidence in the vital work of our security and intelligence agencies as well as being in the interests of democracy.”

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Food Stamp Debate Holds Up Farm Bill

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Photo Credit: Rich Pedroncelli/APThe final stage of the long-delayed U.S. farm bill is about to begin, but drafting a legislative compromise between the Senate and House of Representatives is still hampered by deep partisan divisions over cuts in food stamps for the poor.

Lawmakers in the House agreed on Friday to open negotiations with the Senate over a final version of the five-year, $500 billion bill. Its salient agricultural initiative, but one that is mostly not controversial, is an expansion of federally subsidized crop insurance by 10 percent.

The major dispute in the bill is food stamps, which help low-income Americans, mostly children, the elderly or disabled, to buy food. The latest figures show a near-record 47.8 million people received benefits averaging $133 a month.

The Republican-controlled House wants to cut the major U.S. antihunger program by $39 billion over a decade, nearly 10 times the reduction proposed by the Democrat-run Senate. The tighter eligibility rules in the House plan would cut 4 million people from the program in 2014.

House Majority Leader Eric Cantor was the leading proponent of the cuts. Another prominent supporter,Steve Southerland of Florida, was expected to be named one of the House negotiators as a signal of Republican resolve to see major reforms.

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Food Stamp Debit Cards Not Working in 17 States

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Photo Credit: clementine gallotPeople in Ohio, Michigan and 15 other states found themselves unable to use their food stamp debit-style cards on Saturday, after a routine check by vendor Xerox Corp. resulted in a system failure.

The electronic benefits system experienced a temporary shutdown during a routine test of Xerox back-up systems, company spokeswoman Jennifer Wasmer said Saturday.

“While the system is now up and running, beneficiaries in the 17 affected states continue to experience connectivity issues to access their benefits. Technical staff is addressing the issue and expect the system to be restored soon,” Wasmer said in an emailed statement. “Beneficiaries requiring access to their benefits can work with their local retailers who can activate an emergency voucher system where available. We appreciate our clients’ patience while we work through this outage as quickly as possible.”

U.S. Department of Agriculture spokeswoman Courtney Rowe underscored that the outage is not related to the government shutdown.

Shoppers left carts of groceries behind at a packed Market Basket grocery store in Biddeford, Maine, because they couldn’t get their benefits, said fellow shopper Barbara Colman, of Saco, Maine. The manager put up a sign saying the EBT system was not in use. Colman, who receives the benefits, called an 800 telephone line for the program and it said the system was down due to maintenance, she said.

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Nancy Pelosi Joins Women’s Hall of Fame

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Photo Credit: APHouse Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi, the late former first lady Betty Ford and Title IX advocate Bernice Sandler are among the nine women set to be inducted into the National Women’s Hall of Fame on Saturday.

The ceremony is being held in Seneca Falls, the western New York village where the first known women’s rights convention was held in 1848.

“I’m absolutely thrilled. I can’t believe it,” Pelosi told The Associated Press this week by phone from Washington before the ceremony. Several of her female congressional colleagues, along with two of her daughters and two granddaughters, plan to attend.

Also being honored are “Sexual Politics” author Kate Millett; horse racing’s most successful female jockey, Julie Krone; Ina May Gaskin, who is known as the “mother of authentic midwifery”; and monetary scholar Anna Jacobson Schwartz, who collaborated with Nobel laureate Milton Friedman on “A Monetary History of the United States, 1867-1960,” published in 1963. She died last year.

The inductees also include the late Mother Mary Joseph Rogers, who in 1912 founded Maryknoll Sisters, the first U.S.-based Catholic missionary congregation of religious women, and 19th-century educator Emma Hart Willard, who advocated for equal education for women in higher education in the early 1800s.

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Los Angeles School District Wants Teachers to Wear Pro-Gay Badges

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Photo Credit: John Deasy/CBS screenshotLos Angeles public schools are encouraging teachers and staff to wear badges that identify them as “LGBT allies” and supporters of the pro-gay movement.

Superintendent John Deasy kicked off the effort Thursday, which he said was necessary to prevent gay kids from being bullied.

“We want all our youth and staff to know that it is safe to be you in LAUSD,” said Deasy in a statement to the Los Angeles Times.

The move is part of the L.A. Gay and Lesbian Center’s “Out for Safe Schools” initiative….

Because nothing deters bullies like having their victims’ specialness publicly praised by authority figures, the L.A. Gay and Lesbian Center applauded the school district for its “groundbreaking” work in applauding gay students.

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Cruz Slams Immigration Hecklers: ‘They Don’t Want the Truth to be Heard’ (+video)

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Photo Credit: ReutersIllegal immigrant advocates interrupted Sen. Ted Cruz’s speech to the Values Voters Summit on Friday more than a half-dozen times, calling on the Texas Republican and potential presidential candidate to support a pathway to citizenship for illegal immigrants.

But the Texas Republican repeatedly deflected the criticism, turning it into an attack against President Obama.

“How scared is the president?” Mr. Cruz said. “Oh, they don’t want the truth to be heard. They definitely don’t want the truth to be heard.”

The crowd also tried to drown out the protestors with chants of “USA! USA!”

The protesters were dragged out by security guards.

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Ben Carson: Obamacare Worst Thing to Happen to the U.S. Since Slavery (+video)

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Photo Credit: Doug Wetzstein/special to The Washington TimesBy Cheryl Wetzstein.

Dr. Ben Carson didn’t mince words: Obamacare is “the worst thing that has happened in this nation since slavery.”

Dr. Carson made the declaration about President Obama’s sweeping health care mandate Friday during a speech at the Values Voter Summit.

“It is slavery because it aims to make all of us subservient to the government,” he said. “It was never about health care. It was about control.”

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Photo Credit: APBen Carson Warns: ‘Socialized Medicine Is Keystone to Establishment of a Socialist State’

By James Beattie and Michael W. Chapman.

Dr. Ben Carson, the former director of Pediatric Neurosurgery at Johns Hopkins University and Hospital, drew a parallel between Obamacare and “socialized medicine” and cited Communist leader Vladimir Lenin’s support for government-run health care as the “keystone to the establishment of a socialist state.”

Speaking at the Values Voter Summit in Washington, D.C. on Friday, Dr. Carson said that Obamacare “was never about healthcare. It was about control,” and making all Americans “subservient to the government.”

He then commented on why the Democrat-dominant Congress in 2010 moved swiftly to pass the Affordable Care Act, a.k.a. Obamacare.

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