Republican Senators Rally Behind Abortion Ban

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Photo Credit: Lauren SchneidermanRepublican senators facing primary challenges are rallying behind the most exhaustive congressional push to restrict abortion rights in a decade.

Eleven of the 14 GOP senators up for reelection next year support a new bill to ban the fraction of abortions that take place after 20 weeks of fetal development.

A nearly identical bill passed the House this summer. Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), who is fending off four opponents on the right, introduced the Senate measure on Thursday.

“In light of medicine and what we know about the unborn child in 2013, is it time to do more [to stop abortions]?” Graham asked. “We expect a robust debate.”

The bill stems from an assertion that fetuses feel pain after 20 weeks, and follows the murder conviction of Philadelphia abortion doctor Kermit Gosnell, whose trial drew attention to the practice of late-term abortion.

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Economy Continues to Grow at a Plodding Pace

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Photo Credit: NewscomThe Bureau of Economic Analysis’s (BEA) first estimate of economic growth for the third quarter of this year shows an economy that continues to grow at a plodding pace.

According to BEA, the economy grew at 2.8 percent from July 1 through September 30. This was slightly faster than the 2.5 percent the economy grew in in the second quarter of the year.

The main driver of growth in the third quarter was increased investment, the strongest component of which was a sharp climb in business inventories. Inventory accumulation could mean either that businesses didn’t sell as much as they anticipated during the third quarter or that they ramped up production in anticipation of a busy fourth quarter. Time will tell which.

Personal consumption was also a large contributor to growth. Purchases of durable goods—such as cars and home furnishings—drove the growth in consumption.

This is BEA’s first estimate of growth in the third quarter, and subsequent estimates will change.

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Supreme Court Opens Hearing on Public Prayer—With a Prayer

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Photo Credit: APThe United States Supreme Court heard oral arguments Wednesday in a case examining whether sectarian prayer should be allowed at government meetings.

The Supreme Court began the day’s session with its traditional opening, “God save the United States and this honorable court.” The irony of the high court hearing a public prayer complaint after its own mention of God was not lost on the justices.

Atheists sued the town of Greece, N.Y. for its practice of opening its town council meetings with mostly Christian prayers, and asking everyone to rise for those prayers. A federal appeals court sided with the plaintiffs, who insisted that any prayers said at council meetings must be nondenominational and inclusive, and the town then appealed to the Supreme Court.

Justice Antonin Scalia asked Thomas Hungar, who argued for the town of Greece, if he objected to the way the Supreme Court opens its sessions.

“But you — but you – you had no problem, Mr. Hungar, with the marshal’s announcement at the — at the beginning of this session. ‘God save the United States and this honorable court,’” Scalia said. “There — there are many people who don’t believe in God.”

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Snowden Reportedly Persuaded Other NSA Workers to Give Up Passwords

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Photo Credit: AFP-Getty ImagesFormer U.S. National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden used login credentials and passwords provided unwittingly by colleagues at a spy base in Hawaii to access some of the classified material he leaked to the media, sources said.

A handful of agency employees who gave their login details to Snowden were identified, questioned and removed from their assignments, said a source close to several U.S. government investigations into the damage caused by the leaks.

Snowden may have persuaded between 20 and 25 fellow workers at the NSA regional operations center in Hawaii to give him their logins and passwords by telling them they were needed for him to do his job as a computer systems administrator, a second source said.

The revelation is the latest to indicate that inadequate security measures at the NSA played a significant role in the worst breach of classified data in the super-secret eavesdropping agency’s 61-year history.

Reuters reported last month that the NSA failed to install the most up-to-date, anti-leak software at the Hawaii site before Snowden went to work there and downloaded highly classified documents belonging to the agency and its British counterpart, Government Communication Headquarters.

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Senate Approved Legislation Banning Workplace Discrimination Based on Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity

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Photo Credit: AP/J. Scott ApplewhiteReflecting Americans’ increasing acceptance of gays, the Senate on Thursday approved legislation that would bar workplace discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity.

Gay rights advocates hailed the bipartisan, 64-32 vote as a historic step although it could prove short-lived. A foe of the bill, Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, has signaled that the Republican-led House is unlikely to even vote. Senate proponents were looking for a way around that obstacle.

Seventeen years after a similar anti-discrimination measure failed by one vote, 54 members of the Senate Democratic majority and 10 Republicans voted for the Employment Non-Discrimination Act. It is the first major gay rights bill since Congress repealed the ban on gays serving openly in the military three years ago.

“All Americans deserve a fair opportunity to pursue the American dream,” said Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, a chief sponsor of the bill.

Proponents cast the effort as Congress following the lead of business and localities as some 90 percent of Fortune 500 companies and 22 states have outlawed employment discrimination against gay, bisexual and transgender Americans.

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Botched NC DOT Traffic Alert Warns Of ‘Women Drivers, Rain, ObamaCare’

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Photo Credit: David McNew/Getty ImagesThe North Carolina Department of Transportation sent out a traffic alert, warning people of female drivers, rain and Obamacare.

The North Carolina DOT sends out routine alerts to drivers about accidents and road work using email and Twitter messages.

On Wednesday, the NCDOT sent out an alert which reads: “A High severity incident has been Added for I-40 Eastbound in Wake County in Raleigh,” before going on to list the incident as “Vehicle Accident: Women Drivers, Rain, Obama Care.”

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Health Care Law Allows Hiring Convicted Felons as Obamacare Navigators

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Photo Credit: Graeme Jennings/Washington ExaminerBy Susan Ferrechio

Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius told a Senate panel Wednesday that there are no safeguards in place that would prevent convicted felons from becoming “navigators” for the new health care law implementation.

“That is possible,” Sebelius told Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, who asked her about felons being hired for the job.

Health care navigators are certified counselors hired to help consumers and small businesses with the application process for healthcare.gov, the health insurance exchange website.

Navigators, according to healthcare.gov, are trained to help consumers complete eligibility and enrollment forms, which include sensitive personal information including Social Security and financial information.

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Photo Credit: Evan VucciSebelius: Sorry, but we won’t delay Obamacare

By Tom Howell Jr.

President Obama’s top health official said Wednesday that early Obamacare enrollment numbers will be “very low” but rejected any talk of delaying the reforms, even as Senate Democrats pressured the White House to correct the law’s failures.

Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius made her second apology on Capitol Hill in the span of one week for the persistent glitches that have made it difficult for people from 36 states to enroll for coverage on HealthCare.gov.

“It’s unacceptable. I am focused on fixing it, and I’m accountable,” Mrs. Sebelius testified before the Senate Finance Committee.

But putting off the Affordable Care Act, she said, “wouldn’t delay people’s cancer or diabetes or Parkinson’s” disease.

“People’s lives depend on this,” she told lawmakers on the Democrat-led panel.

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Tom Graves: The Man Behind the Campaign to Defund Obamacare

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Photo Credit: Alex Wong/Getty ImagesTom Graves was a man ahead of his time.

Long before Ted Cruz was orchestrating 21-hour homilies on the Senate floor, Graves, a Republican congressman from Georgia, was waging a lonely—and largely anonymous—campaign to defund the Affordable Care Act.

Graves won a June 2010 special election that brought him to Washington amid a dead legislative summer leading up to midterm elections. It was then that the former Georgia state representative saw an opportunity to influence the debate over President Obama’s recently passed health care law. And those efforts forever changed his path in Congress.

Having run in the months immediately following Obamacare’s passage, Graves felt a unique connection to the electorate and its disapproval of the new law. But he saw no Republican proposal to stop the government from paying for it. Intent on filling this legislative “vacuum,” Graves in July 2010 introduced the Defund Obamacare Act—the very first bill he authored in Congress, and one he would introduce in each new session.

Three years later, as Republicans grappled with a stalled appropriations process and ongoing anxiety over financing the law, the phone rang in Graves’s congressional office. It was a staffer in Cruz’s office. Cruz wanted to become the Senate cosponsor of Graves’s defund bill, the staffer said. Would the Georgia congressman be interested in teaming with the senator from Texas?

The rest, as they say, is history.

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Loyal Obama Supporters’ Health Insurance Canceled by Obamacare

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Photo Credit: REUTERS/Larry DowningSan Francisco architect Lee Hammack says he and his wife, JoEllen Brothers, are “cradle Democrats.” They have donated to the liberal group Organizing for America and worked the phone banks a year ago for President Obama’s re-election.

Since 1995, Hammack and Brothers have received their health coverage from Kaiser Permanente, where Brothers worked until 2009 as a dietitian and diabetes educator. “We’ve both been in very good health all of our lives – exercise, don’t smoke, drink lightly, healthy weight, no health issues, and so on,” Hammack told me.

The couple — Lee, 60, and JoEllen, 59 — have been paying $550 a month for their health coverage — a plan that offers solid coverage, not one of the skimpy plans Obama has criticized. But recently, Kaiser informed them the plan would be canceled at the end of the year because it did not meet the requirements of the Affordable Care Act. The couple would need to find another one. The cost would be around double what they pay now, but the benefits would be worse.

“From all of the sob stories I’ve heard and read, ours is the most extreme,” Lee told me in an email last week.

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Filmmaker Michael Moore: ‘Guns don’t Kill People, Americans Kill People’

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Photo Credit: APFilmmaker Michael Moore had a lot to say about guns to a paparazzo who caught up with him at LAX, the scene of a shooting last week that left a TSA worker dead.

“I think the NRA, they’ve got it half right when they say ‘guns don’t kill people, people kill people,’” he told the TMZ cameraman. “I change it to ‘guns don’t kill people, Americans kill people.’ Because we’re really the only ones that do it on this level, on this scale. Why?”

The cameraman asked Moore about his thoughts on the LAX shooting.

“Nothing changes. It’s the country we live in… Legally purchased gun, bullets. What are you going to do?” Moore said.

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