Pentagon Can’t Afford Syria Operation; Must Seek Additional Funds

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Photo Credit: AP

Photo Credit: AP

The U.S. military, struggling after defense cuts of tens of billions of dollars, will be unable to pay for attacks on Syria from current operating funds and must seek additional money from Congress, according to congressional aides.

President Barack Obama, meanwhile, said on Friday he has not made a final decision on a military strike against Syria. He sought to play down both the scope and duration of the anticipated punitive missile and bombing campaign.

“As you’ve seen, today we’ve released our unclassified assessment detailing with high confidence that the Syrian regime carried out a chemical weapons attack that killed well over a thousand people, including hundreds of children,” Obama said.

The president said the use of the deadly weapons had violated international “norms” and that action was needed to prevent the further use of the arms.

A future military operation would not involve troops on the ground as part of a long-term campaign, Obama said. “But we are looking at the possibility of a limited, narrow act that would help make sure that not only Syria but others around the world understands that the international community cares about maintaining this chemical weapons ban and norm,” he said.

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Justice Ginsburg to Officiate at Same-Sex Wedding

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Photo Credit: AP

Photo Credit: AP

Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg will officiate at a same-sex wedding this weekend in what is believed to be a first for a member of the nation’s highest court.

Ginsburg will officiate Saturday at the marriage of Kennedy Center President Michael Kaiser and John Roberts, a government economist.

“Michael Kaiser is a friend and someone I much admire,” Ginsburg said in a written statement Friday. “That is why I am officiating at his wedding.”

The private ceremony will take place at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, a national memorial to President John F. Kennedy. The 80-year-old Ginsburg, an opera lover, is a frequent guest at the center.

Same-sex marriage is legal in the District of Columbia and 13 states.

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Ocean Plume from Japan Nuke Disaster Will Reach U.S. by 2014

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nuclear attackWithin three years of the Fukushima nuclear plant meltdown that was triggered by a tsunami in Japan in March 2011, the radioactive ocean plume resulting from the disaster will reach the shores of the United States, researchers say.

However, according to the Australian Research Council’s Centre of Excellence for Climate System Science, by the time the plume hits the west coast of the United States it is expected to be harmless.

“Observers on the west coast of the United States will be able to see a measurable increase in radioactive material three years after the event,” Erik van Sebille, one of the paper’s authors, said in a news release from the research council.

“However,” he added, “people on those coastlines should not be concerned, as the concentration of radioactive material quickly drops below World Health Organization safety levels as soon as it leaves Japanese waters.”

Within four months of the incident, two currents off the coast of Japan, known as the Kuroshio Current and the Kurushio Extension, diluted the radioactive material to levels considered safe by the WHO, the authors of the report said.

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Al Gore’s Global Warming Desperation

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Photo Credit: FrontPageMag

Photo Credit: FrontPageMag

Those who are wondering why Al Gore chose to publicly resurface in a Washington Post interview last Thursday with that paper’s ever-pliable Journalist founder Ezra Klein only need to look in three places.

First, there’s the recently revealed empirical evidence that the “global warming” movement’s claim that climate change is causing increased extreme weather events isn’t true. Second, there’s a new summary of historical research which blows up the movement’s infamous core “hockey stick” chart forecasting unprecedented, accelerating warming. Finally, there’s a new report due to arrive in a month from an increasingly desperate United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

In late September, the IPCC, laughably described by the wire service AFP as “an expert body set up in 1988 to provide neutral advice on global warming and its impacts,” will release its next set of “scientific data” to advocate for a worldwide carbon-tax regime. Gore’s mission is clearly to start greasing the skids for the IPCC’s next round of hysteria.

Gore told WaPo’s Klein that the earth is already suffering the negative consequences of failing to act against “global warming.” He claims that “every extreme weather event now has a component of global warming in it,” and that “the appearance of more extreme and more frequent weather events has had a very profound impact on public opinion in countries throughout the world.”

There’s no doubt that the worldwide press’s emphasis on “extreme weather events” has been greater. Virtually every such occurrence will cause one or more journalists, politicians or both to claim it as definitive or presumptive “proof” of the existence of “global warming” and the urgent need to combat it.

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Turning the Tables? Group Challenges Domestic Surveillance by Tracking Obama

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Photo Credit: Tumblr

Photo Credit: Tumblr

In response to what some consider over-reaching surveillance programs conducted by U.S. intelligence agencies, which have been shown to collect thousands of communications with no terror connection, a group decrying the privacy implications of these programs is turning the tables on the president.

According to the Creator’s Project, “Where is Obama” pinpoints the location of President Barack Obama using what the group calls the ”Crowd-Sourced Positioning System, or CSPS.”

“The position of the president is a state secret. The White House website shows only Barack Obama’s schedule from the current day, but never dates beyond. The accuracy of this information is controversial. Obama, on the other hand, knows your entire calendar,” the creators Kim Asendorf, Ole Fach, Kyle McDonald and Jonas Lund said of the project. “Every person in the world can now participate in the supervision of the President.”

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ObamaCare Cuts Low-Wage Workweek Near Record Low

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Photo Credit: DUCKofD3ATH

Photo Credit: DUCKofD3ATH

Here’s something worth paying attention to this Labor Day: The workweek in low-wage industries has fallen back to the historic lows seen at the depths of the recession.

The White House and like-minded economists have disputed the notion that ObamaCare is having a meaningful impact on work hours by noting that the private-sector workweek has recovered pretty much back to where it was in 2007, before the economy tanked.

But that view from 40,000 feet overlooks what is happening in industries likely to feel the brunt of ObamaCare’s employment impact: those in which wages are modest and the ranks of the uninsured are high.

A more rigorous analysis of monthly industry data from the Bureau of Labor Statitics reveals a stark contrast between workers in low-wage industries and the rest of the private sector.

For the 30 million workers in industries where nonsupervisors average about $14.50 an hour or less, the workweek has been shrinking pretty steadily for the past 18 months, reversing a fledgling recovery in work hours.

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‘Free’ Benefits in ObamaCare Come with Hidden Costs

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Photo Credit: Fox News

Photo Credit: Fox News

The new health care law promises all sorts of free benefits — but analysts argue nothing is ultimately free, and ObamaCare is no exception.

“P. J. O’Rourke famously said that if you think health care is expensive now, wait until it’s free,” said Avik Roy, of the Manhattan Institute. “Once you lard on all these additional things, all these extras that insurers must provide, you have to pay for that.”

For the average consumer, that means taxes, the American Enterprise Institute’s Jim Capretta told Fox News.

“There’s going to be taxes on insurance. Taxes on drugs. Taxes on medical devices. All of that is getting passed through to the prices people have to pay either for direct services or their insurance premiums,” he said.

The administration points to a host of free services as one of the early benefits of the new law.

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Microsoft and Google to Sue Over US Surveillance Requests

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Photo Credit: Getty Images

Photo Credit: Getty Images

Microsoft and Google are to sue the US government to win the right to reveal more information about official requests for user data. The companies announced the lawsuit on Friday, escalating a legal battle over the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), the mechanism used by the National Security Agency (NSA) and other US government agencies to gather data about foreign internet users.

Microsoft’s general counsel, Brad Smith, made the announcement in a corporate blog post which complained of the government’s “continued unwillingness” to let it publish information about FISA requests.

Each company filed a suit in June arguing that they should be allowed to state the details under the first amendment, which guarantees freedom of speech, and in the process defend corporate reputations battered by Edward Snowden’s revelations. Critics accused the companies of collaborating in the snooping.

“On six occasions in recent weeks we agreed with the department of justice to extend the government’s deadline to reply to these lawsuits. We hoped that these discussions would lead to an agreement acceptable to all,” Smith wrote.

The negotiations failed, he wrote, so Google and Microsoft were going to court. He did not specify when, or to which court.

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White House: Social Media Helped Prove Chemical Attack in Syria

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Photo Credit: AP

Photo Credit: AP

By Susan Ferrechio

Social media helped American intelligence officials determine that Syrian President Bashar Assad’s regime carried out a deadly nerve gas attack on its citizens earlier this month, top White House aides said Friday, but some members of Congress remain wary of the U.S. launching a retaliatory strike.

The Obama administration, working to build a case for a potential military attack against the Assad regime, released a four-page, unclassified assessment that concluded that the Syrian government used chemical weapons in an attack on twelve neighborhoods in the Damascus suburbs, killing 1,429 people, including at least 426 children.

The assessment outlines the case against Assad, saying the August 21 attack began in the early morning hours when the regime began firing rockets and artillery at the 12 neighborhoods, all of them either controlled by the Assad opposition or contested by the two sides.

Intelligence on the ground and satellite images prove the rockets were fired into the neighborhoods from Assad-controlled areas, White House aides said Friday.

Reports of nerve gas in the area began surfacing on social media around 2:30 a.m. local times, shortly after the gas struck.

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Photo Credit: AP

Photo Credit: AP

Obama: US has an ‘obligation’ to act against Syria

By Susan Crabtree

President Obama said Friday that the U.S. has an obligation as a world leader to hold the government of Syrian President Bashar Assad accountable for the deadly chemical attack in Syria last week.

“I have said before and I meant what I said, the world has an obligation” to take action against the use of chemical weapons, Obama said.

Obama, however, repeatedly stressed that he had yet to make a decision about what type of military response the U.S. would take, although he said any strike would be a “limited, narrow act” and would not involve “boots on the ground.”

“We’re not considering any open-ended commitment,” he told reporters after a meeting with leaders of Estonia and Latvia, noting that he wished that the international community had already acted.

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IRS Obstructs Efforts to Stop Illegals from Fraudulent Use of Social Security Numbers

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irs_An audit report published this month by the inspector general for the Social Security Administration says that the Internal Revenue Service’s reluctance to penalize employers who consistently file W-2s on which the Social Security Number and name do not match has “hindered” the SSA’s efforts to stop “unauthorized noncitizens” from using Social Security Numbers that are fake or belong to someone else.

The audit report looked at “inaccurate wage reporting”—or the filing of W-2 forms on which the name and the Social Security Number do not match. The SSA has long said these no-match W-2s are frequently filed on behalf of illegal aliens. According to the IG audit report released earlier this month, a senior IRS official admitted to the IG that the service knows this is the case.

“Furthermore,” said the report, “a senior employment tax official at the IRS acknowledged that unauthorized noncitizens accounted for a high percentage of inaccurate wage reporting.”

The audit looked at the U.S. employers who in tax years 2007-2009 (the latest for which all data was available) had the worst records for filing W-2s on which the names and Social Security Numbers did not match.

The IG determined the 100 employers who filed the the largest raw numbers of no-match W-2s in those three years and the 100 employers (with at least 100 employees a piece) who filed the most as a percentage of their payrolls.

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