Maher Mocks WWII Vets Visiting Closed Memorial: ‘Nobody Said They Were the Brightest Generation’ (+video)

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Photo Credit: APLiberal comedian Bill Maher ridiculed the group of World War II veterans for visiting the barricaded World War II memorial, telling his audience that the Greatest Generation wasn’t the “brightest generation.”

“The other that was apparently so important for the Republicans to keep open was the World War II Memorial in Washington. That was closed, so a bunch of the World War II vets knocked down the barriers and stormed it,” Maher said on his Friday HBO “Real Time” program, making a sardonic face at the audience.

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Nine Percent Have Considered Quitting Their U.S. Citizenship

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Photo Credit: mrsdkrebsFew Americans have ever thought about giving up their U.S. citizenship, but nearly half think U.S. citizens should be able to be citizens of more than one country.

A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that only nine percent (9%) of U.S. citizens have considered giving up their American citizenship. (To see survey question wording, click here.)

Perhaps in part that’s because 93% consider it at least somewhat important to be a U.S. citizen, including 79% who think it is Very Important.

But 45% believe U.S. citizens also should be allowed to be citizens of other countries. Thirty-six percent (36%) disagree, while 19% are not sure.

However, in the context of immigration reform, 54% of likely U.S. voters said in March found that potential U.S. citizens should not be allowed to maintain dual citizenship.

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Campaign Contributions, Recess Appointments Slated for Supreme Court

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Photo Credit: APThe Supreme Court is beginning a new term with topics that offer the court’s conservative majority the chance to move aggressively to undo limits on campaign contributions, rule on presidential recess appointments and allow for more government-sanctioned prayer.

Assuming the government shutdown doesn’t get in their way, the justices also will deal with a case that goes to the heart of the partisan impasse in Washington: whether and when the president may use recess appointments to fill key positions without Senate confirmation.

The court was unaffected for the first few days of the government shutdown and there was no expectation that arguments set for October would have to be rescheduled.

The new term that starts Monday may be short on the sort of high-profile battles over health care and gay marriage that marked the past two years. But several cases ask the court to overrule prior decisions — bold action in an institution that relies on the power of precedent.

“There are an unusual number of cases going right to hot-button cultural issues and aggressive briefing on the conservative side asking precedents to be overruled,” said Georgetown University law professor Pamela Harris, who served in President Barack Obama’s Justice Department.

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Hidden Spending Measures Playing Chicken with Shutdown

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Photo Credit: Robert F. Bukaty, APTemporary spending bills approved by the House of Representatives and the Senate include measures that would require the Obama administration to rescind strict new rules on the poultry industry.

Advocates for independent chicken farmers want lawmakers to drop the language, which had been sought by poultry processors and their trade groups. The rules give farmers more clout in their business dealings with the processors.

“It’s a totally outrageous for a handful of multinational corporations to waltz in while we are trying to keep the government open and insert these” provisions, said Ferd Hoefner, policy director of the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition, one of the groups siding with roughly 32,000 farmers who produce the broiler chickens that end up on supermarket shelves.

The most recent showdown between the two adversaries illustrates the way interest groups, large and small, are racing to shape whatever stopgap spending bill Congress passes to end the partial government shutdown that began Oct. 1.

Medical-device manufacturers, for instance, are lobbying aggressively to repeal a 2.3% excise tax imposed on their industry as part of the 2010 Affordable Care Act. Some of the medical-device makers’ supporters on Capitol Hill want to insert the language in either a temporary spending bill restarting government operations or in another measure to raise the nation’s debt ceiling. Treasury Secretary Jacob Lew has warned the government will run out of borrowed money Oct. 17, requiring action by Congress.

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Federal Government Closes AMBER Alert Website

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Photo Credit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Amber_Alert.jpgBy Christine Rousselle.

The government website for AMBER Alerts, a service dedicated to the safe recovery of missing children, has been closed during the shutdown. The name is a reference to Amber Hagerman, who was abducted and murdered in 1996. Over 650 children have been safely recovered since the advent of the AMBER Alert system.

According to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children:

AMBER Alerts are broadcast through radio, television, road signs and all available technology referred to as the AMBER Alert Secondary Distribution Program. These broadcasts let law enforcement use the eyes and ears of the public to help quickly locate an abducted child. The U.S. Department of Justice coordinates the AMBER Alert program on a national basis.

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America’s Warning About Jihadis in the Military

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Photo Credit: WNDRet. Command Sergeant Major Bart E. Womack says it was golfer Tiger Woods who saved his life when a grenade landed at his feet.

Womack was stationed in Kuwait before the coalition’s invasion of Iraq to remove Saddam Hussein from power in 2003.

He said he was awake in the middle of the night because he is a golf fan, and Woods was competing in the Bay Hill Invitational and Womack knew a campaign was coming so every swing could have been the last one he would see for a long time.

Then it happened.

“As I concentrated on Tiger’s swing and listened for the sweet THWACK of a ball, I heard the tent flap flutter again and a scraping sound as something rolled toward me,” he writes in his new book “Embedded Enemy: The Insider Threat.”

“The hand grenade rolled between Tiger and me, resting at the tent’s edge,” he reports. “It is amazing how quickly thoughts can ping through your mind. I knew grenades only took five seconds to blow, and I think I wasted two seconds coming to the shocking realization of what was happening.”

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Boy Boards Plane To Vegas At MSP Without Ticket

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Photo Credit: CBSA 9-year-old Minneapolis boy was able to get through security and onto a plane at the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport without a ticket, an airport spokesman said Sunday.

Security officials screened the boy at airport shortly after 10:30 a.m. Thursday, Metropolitan Airports Commission spokesman Patrick Hogan said. The boy then boarded Delta Flight 1651, which left for Las Vegas at 11:15 a.m.

The flight was not full, Hogan said, and the flight crew became suspicious mid-flight because the boy was not on their list of unattended minors. The crew contacted Las Vegas police, who met them upon landing and transferred the boy to child protection services, Hogan said.

Minneapolis Police went to his residence. Parents told officers they “hadn’t seen much of him today.”

WCCO contacted the Transportation Security Agency (TSA) Sunday morning, during which a spokesperson said staffing is currently low due to the number of employees furloughed in the wake of the federal government shutdown.

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Top Dem: Shutdown ‘May Widen our Path’ to Re-Taking House

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Photo Credit: DonkeyHoteyBy Alexandra Jaffe.

House Democrats believe the shutdown will help them put the lower chamber in play this cycle.

Democratic candidates running against vulnerable Republicans have wasted no time in hammering the incumbents as key actors in what they’re characterizing as a Tea Party-led shutdown that’s hurting Americans.

Many of those Republicans, in a signal they’re concerned about the possible political ramifications, are calling for an end to the stalemate — like Reps. Scott Rigell (R-Va.), Pat Meehan (R-Pa.) and Jon Runyan (R-N.J.), all of whom are facing reelection in difficult districts and all of whom called this week for the passage of a clean CR to end the shutdown.

Multiple polls, too, have shown Americans are placing the blame for the shutdown on Republicans.

Democrats need to pick up 17 seats to win back the House, a tall order under any circumstances, and even taller in an off-year when the party holding the White House typically loses seats.

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Photo Credit: © Images.com/CorbisThe Shutdown Is a Sideshow. Debt Is the Threat

By Niall Ferguson.

In the words of a veteran investor, watching the U.S. bond market today is like sitting in a packed theater and smelling smoke. You look around for signs of other nervous sniffers. But everyone else seems oblivious.

Yes, the federal government shut down this week. Yes, we are just two weeks away from the point when the Treasury secretary says he will run out of cash if the debt ceiling isn’t raised. Yes, bond king Bill Gross has been on TV warning that a default by the government would be “catastrophic.” Yet the yield on a 10-year Treasury note has fallen slightly over the past month (though short-term T-bill rates ticked up this week).

Part of the reason people aren’t rushing for the exits is that the comedy they are watching is so horribly fascinating. In his vain attempt to stop the Senate striking out the defunding of ObamaCare from the last version of the continuing resolution, freshman Sen. Ted Cruz managed to quote Doctor Seuss while re-enacting a scene from the classic movie “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.”

Meanwhile, President Obama has become the Hamlet of the West Wing: One minute he’s for bombing Syria, the next he’s not; one minute Larry Summers will succeed Ben Bernanke as chairman of the Federal Reserve, the next he won’t; one minute the president is jetting off to Asia, the next he’s not. To be in charge, or not to be in charge: that is indeed the question.

According to conventional wisdom, the key to what is going on is a Republican Party increasingly at the mercy of the tea party. I agree that it was politically inept to seek to block ObamaCare by these means. This is not the way to win back the White House and Senate. But responsibility also lies with the president, who has consistently failed to understand that a key function of the head of the executive branch is to twist the arms of legislators on both sides. It was not the tea party that shot down Mr. Summers’s nomination as Fed chairman; it was Democrats like Sen. Elizabeth Warren, the new face of the American left.

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Democrats say House Vote for Back Pay Shows GOP Wants Government to Stay Closed

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Photo Credit: REUTERSThe Republican-led House passed a bill Saturday to give thousands of furloughed federal workers back pay when the government reopens, but Democrats promptly characterized it as a signal the GOP doesn’t want the partial shutdown to end.

“Now we’re saying to federal employees: We’re going to pay you when this is all over with,” Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said minutes after the 407-to-0 House vote. “But right now, you just stay home … watch TV, play chess, whatever you’re going to do, because we won’t let you work.”

The Senate is expected to OK it as well but adjourned Saturday without a vote. The Democrat-controlled chamber will not scheduled a vote until at least Monday afternoon, when members return to Washington.

The back-and-forth comes on the fifth day of the partial government shutdown and marks the second straight weekend that members of Congress are on Capitol Hill trying to agree on a spending bill to end the saga.

At the same time, House Democrats extended Reid’s talking point while also adding that both sides have agreed to spending levels for a temporary funding bill to end the partial shutdown, so House Republicans should drop their effort to defund or delay ObamaCare and vote this weekend to fully re-open the government.

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Obama to Public: Don’t Give Up On Health Sign-Ups

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Photo Credit: Washington Examiner Defending the shaky rollout of his health care law, President Barack Obama said frustrated Americans “definitely shouldn’t give up” on the problem-plagued program now at the heart of his dispute with Republicans over reopening the federal government.

Obama said public interest far exceeded the government’s expectations, causing technology glitches that thwarted millions of Americans when trying to use government-run health care websites.

“Folks are working around the clock and have been systematically reducing the wait times,” he said.

The federal gateway website was taken down for repairs over the weekend, again hindering people from signing up for insurance.

Obama, in a wide-ranging interview with The Associated Press, also disclosed that U.S. intelligence agencies believe Iran continues to be a year or more away from having the capability to make a nuclear weapon. That assessment is at odds with Israel, which contends Tehran is on a faster course toward a bomb.

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