60-Foot Petition Demands End to Benghazi Secrets

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Photo Credit: Human EventsBy Gina Loudon.

It has been almost one year since the tragedy in Benghazi, Libya, where four Americans were killed and 10 others were injured in a terror attack.

Included in those murdered that day were U.S. Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens, and two Navy Seals, Glen Doherty and Tyrone Woods.

But a lot of other information isn’t yet known about the attack that day.

So Special Operations Veterans have presented a petition of 1,000 names calling for a Select Committee in Congress to “end the cover-up” of the Benghazi scandal.

The petition is 60 feet long, and it was unrolled near the Capitol building Tuesday. Read more from this story HERE.

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General can’t explain why forces not deployed to Benghazi

By Aaron Klein. Gen. Carter Ham, the former head of U.S. forces in Africa, has admitted that highly trained Special Forces were stationed just a few hours away from Benghazi on the night of the attack but were not deployed to Libya.

Ham’s explanation for why the military assets stationed abroad were not utilized during the attack raises more questions than it provides answers about his decision-making.

During the Sept. 11, 2012 Benghazi attack, command of the Special Forces reportedly was transferred from the military’s European command to Ham’s AFRICOM, or the United States Africa Command.

The Special Forces unit is known as C-110, or EUCOM CIF. It is a 40-man Special Ops force maintained for rapid response to emergencies such as the Benghazi attack.

Ham told the Aspen Security Forum that he first received word of the Benghazi attack from his command post in Stuttgart, Germany. The post is where EUCOM CIF is normally based. The night the of the Benghazi attack, the unit was on a training mission in Croatia, as first reported by Fox News and now reconfirmed by Ham.

Read more from this story HERE.

DHS Nominee Under Investigation for Allegedly Helping Hillary Clinton’s Brother

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Photo Credit: APAuthorities are investigating the man President Obama tapped to take over the second highest spot at the Department of Homeland Security for allegedly using his position and power to unfairly obtain U.S. visas for foreign investors in a company run by Hillary Clinton’s brother, FoxNews.com has confirmed.

Alejandro Mayorkas, director of the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, was named by Homeland Security’s Inspector General’s Office as a target in an investigation involving the foreign investor program run by USCIS, according to an email sent to lawmakers late Monday.

The investigation was opened in September 2012 following a referral from an FBI counterintelligence analyst. The probe was first reported by The Associated Press.

The investigation into Mayorkas is based on allegations he helped secure U.S. visas for Chinese businessmen after they had been denied by his own agency’s officials. The visas had been sought by Gulf Coast Funds Management, a financing company headed by then-Secretary of State Clinton’s brother Anthony Rodham, according to an aide to GOP Sen. Charles Grassley, who had received internal USCIS emails about the matter from a department whistle blower.

According to an email sent to lawmakers Monday, the IG’s office said, “At this point in our investigation, we do not have any findings of criminal misconduct.” The email did not specify any criminal allegations it might be investigating.

Read more from this story HERE.

Defunding Obamacare Already Sees Success

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Photo Credit: WNDBy Garth Kant

Whether the GOP should press for debilitating cuts to Obamacare – and risk a government shutdown – is the talk of Capitol Hill, but a most important point may be getting lost in the chatter: The strategy is already working.

A discussion with the “House Doctor” indicates the strategy to defund Obamacare is already largely in effect and has scored some significant victories.

Rep. Michael Burgess, R-Texas, is uniquely qualified to assess Obamacare after spending nearly three decades practicing medicine in North Texas, serving as co-chair of the Congressional Health Caucus and authoring the WND book “Doctor in the House” with its prescriptions for more efficient and less expensive health care.

Burgess told WND, “In the last continuing resolution, there was a billion dollars cut out of the implementation of the Affordable Care Act. There was well over $300 million cut out of the Treasury Department budget for implementation of activities regarding the Affordable Care Act. So, those were some serious sideswipes.”

The doctor-turned-lawmaker said GOP efforts to limit the implementation of Obamacare are already seeing results. Read more from this story HERE.

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Government shutdown looms over ObamaCare

By Alexander Bolton. ObamaCare is at the center of a rapidly escalating fight that threatens to shut the government down this fall.

Senate Republicans, including two members of the leadership, are coalescing around a proposal to block any government funding resolution that includes money for the implementation of the 2010 Affordable Care Act.

But such a move is a nonstarter for President Obama and congressional Democrats. Republicans have tried this maneuver in Obama’s first term, only to back off later to the chagrin of Tea Party leaders.

This time, GOP lawmakers are emboldened by problems plaguing the administration’s ObamaCare implementation. But that zeal could put Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) and Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) in a tough spot. Both leaders have downplayed previous talk of shuttering the government.

In the House, 64 Republicans have signed onto a letter pressing Boehner not to bring any legislation funding ObamaCare to the floor. Read more from this story HERE.

Lookie Here! College Scans Students’ Eyeballs

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Photo Credit: WNDA public university in in Rock Hill, S.C., has announced it is implementing a new eye scanner system that collects and records data about the features of students’ eyes before granting access to school buildings this fall.

Winthrop University’s Associate Vice President for Information Technology James Hammond told Campus Reform the college plans to use the devices to stop “bad guys” from accessing buildings at the 445-acre campus.

The scanners, or “EagleEye stations,” cost an estimated $2,000 each. The university has already scanned the eyes of more than 1,600 of its students.

Winthrop University head of technology services, Patrice Bruneau, told WCNC-TV the school is taking extra precautions after Newtown, Conn., gunman Adam Lanza killed 26 people at Sandy Hook Elementary School and his mother Nancy Lanza, before taking his own life, on Dec. 14, 2012.

“The Newtown tragedy just got everybody’s attention,” Bruneau said.

Read more from this story HERE.

Is Common Core Failing the Test? (+video)

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Photo Credit: Ethan BlochPresident Barack Obama’s goal of holding all students across the U.S. to the same high academic standards may be on the verge of unraveling as states take a hard look at the more rigorous tests under development — and balk.

Backed by $360 million in federal grants, some 40-plus states have spent the past three years working with testing companies to develop math and language arts exams tied to the academic standards known as Common Core. They’re minimizing the dreary fill-in-the-bubble multiple choice in favor of more challenging tasks. Kids as young as third grade, for instance, will be asked to write essays synthesizing information from multiple nonfiction texts and to explain their reasoning on math problems.

Yet now that the new tests are almost ready, state officials are complaining that they’re too long and too costly and require too much computer technology. They’re also beginning to push back against the exams as an unwanted federal intrusion on local policy, echoing a groundswell of opposition from tea party critics of Common Core.

Georgia dropped out of the testing collaboration on Monday, saying it would create its own exams instead. Pennsylvania, Alabama, Oklahoma and Utah have already withdrawn. There are strong indications that Florida and Indiana will be next. Other populous states are also teetering. The Michigan Legislature has effectively nixed the new tests by blocking spending on them, though the ban may be revisited next fall. New York is officially undecided but it’s already spending heavily on alternatives. Texas and Virginia never signed on in the first place.

Read more from this story HERE.

OFA Embraces Tea Party Blueprint for August Push

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Photo Credit: APIf Organizing for Action’s plans come together, 2013 will be its turn to make trouble for members of Congress back home in their districts.

Four years after the tea party surprised Democrats at town halls that led to the Republican wave of 2010, the political action group formed out of the remains of President Barack Obama’s campaign laid out its plans Monday for Action August, a month of activity meant to break congressional opposition to the White House agenda.

OFA’s preparing a range of under-the-national-radar tactics in conjunction with heading for town halls. Rallies, distribution of fliers and district office demonstrations will be aimed at drawing the same sort of local attention that tea party groups managed four years ago, hoping to spook members of Congress worried about the 2014 midterms.

But with Obama off to a sometimes disappointing and dispiriting start to his second term, the question is one the president himself asked volunteers Monday night: “Are you still fired up?”

The crowd cheered “Yes!” but they’ll need more than that.

Read more from this story HERE.

Anthony Weiner Kept Sexting After Resignation (+video)

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Photo Credit: APBy Mike Zapler and Katie Glueck

Joined by his wife at a dramatic news conference Tuesday, New York City mayoral candidate Anthony Weiner acknowledged that he continued to have illicit relationships with women online even after he resigned his seat in Congress two years ago over the same behavior.

“Some of these things happened before my resignation, some of them happened after,” Weiner said.

It was an astonishing admission: After an episode that wrecked his political career, nearly destroyed his marriage, and made him an object of international mockery, Weiner couldn’t stop himself from going back for more. Until now a leading contender for mayor, Weiner intends to seek forgiveness from New Yorkers, again.

Asked when he stopped exchanging raunchy messages with other women, Weiner pointed to “sometime last summer” though he said he couldn’t “say exactly when.” Read more from this story HERE.

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Photo Credit: Christopher SadowskWeiner admits to XXX online chats with woman for 6 months after resigning from Congress because of sext scandal; won’t drop out of race

By Carl Campanile. Mayoral candidate Anthony Weiner admitted today he had another extended, raunchy online sexual relationship with a young woman — just months after resigning in disgrace from Congress in a sexting scandal.

But he won’t be dropping out of the race. And his wife, Huma Abedin, is standing by him.

In a hasty scheduled joint press conference Abedin, Weiner said he will forge ahead with the campaign despite the latest sex scandal.

Weiner insisted that Huma knew all the details of the new revelations and insisted it’s “behind” them.

Abedin, sometimes looking uncomfortable and stiff, stood by her husband. Read more from this story HERE.

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Huma and Anthony: Scenes from a marriage

By Glenn Thrush. New York City Mayoral candidate Anthony Weiner unleashed his typical torrent of verbiage on Tuesday — but words couldn’t compete with the excruciating image of his embarrassed wife squirming in the spotlight both have sought.

In the most cringe-worthy moment of a four-month political comeback yarn that has tested Gotham’s gag reflex, Huma Abedin, the dignified wife of a serially disgraced Democrat, nervously defended her husband at a Tuesday press conference.

Her effort came amid new disclosures Weiner had shared an online relationship, and anatomical snapshots, with yet another female admirer.

If the presence of Abedin, an elegant longtime aide to Hillary Rodham Clinton, was intended to buttress the former congressman’s decision to remain in the race, it graphically illustrated the personal toll his quest is taking on his family, and represented the gravest threat yet to Weiner’s fragile repentance-and-redemption narrative. Read more from this story HERE.

Obama Donors Keep Sending Those Checks Months After the Election

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Photo Credit: APThey send checks, a hundred dollars at a time, to President Barack Obama’s reelection bid — and they’re not stopping just because the election is over.

Some want to stick it to conservatives. Some are dedicated volunteers who didn’t realize Obama’s new tax-exempt group Organizing for Action took over fundraising from Obama for America.

And some didn’t remember sending Obama money at all.

Obama — who is scheduled to speak to his most loyal volunteers, donors and supporters on Monday at an Organizing for Action event — is having a rough time in Washington: Gun control is dead; immigration reform is stalled; Edward Snowden is still on the loose in a Moscow airport. But there’s a handful of die-hards so supportive of the president and his agenda that they continue to mail unsolicited donations to a campaign that now exists only on paper.

Many who spoke with POLITICO are seniors who don’t get their campaign news online and reflexively send checks through the mail when they feel Obama needs their support.

Read more from this story HERE.

Black Caucus Member: Blacks Worth Less Than Whites in America

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Photo Credit: APBy Pete Kasperowicz. A member of the Congressional Black Caucus (CBC) said Monday night that the Trayvon Martin trial is the latest evidence that America does not value the lives of blacks and whites equally.

“The tragic death of our young man, Trayvon Martin, followed by the acquittal of the man who pursued him and killed him, has reminded us that although it may seem as if African Americans and other minorities have achieved full equality in our civil society, we are still victims of racial profiling in violation of our laws and our morals,” Rep. Yvette Clarke (D-N.Y.) said on the House floor Monday night.

“The lives of black men and women are not accorded the same value as the lives of white Americans,” she said. “This is a reality for far too many black Americans.”

Clarke was one of many members of the CBC who spoke on the floor in reaction to last week’s decision by a jury that George Zimmerman was not guilty of murder or manslaughter after shooting Martin earlier this year.

Rep. Charlie Rangel (D-N.Y.) acknowledged violence in black neighborhoods, but implied that the way to solve this is to ensure equal opportunity for all. Read more from this story HERE.

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For blacks, empathy trumps the economy

By Niall Stanage. To African-Americans, President Obama just gets it.

Obama’s notably personal comments on Friday about the verdict in the trial of George Zimmerman, and on race in America, struck a chord. They vividly underlined the fact that, for the first time, the person in the Oval Office has lived an African-American experience.

To black supporters, that is more important than Obama’s inability to narrow racial inequalities during his four and a half years in office, something that has frustrated members of the Congressional Black Caucus.

Rep. Charles Rangel (D-N.Y.), a former head of the black caucus, was in the middle of a phone interview with The Hill when Obama appeared at the White House briefing room podium to address the raw feelings exposed by the “not guilty” verdict on the man who had fatally shot Trayvon Martin, an unarmed black teenager.

Pausing to listen to an office television for several minutes, Rangel said: “I don’t see how a person not-of-color could possibly do the job that he’s doing.” Read more from this story HERE.

President Seeking Credit for Tiny Economic Uptick

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Photo Credit: APBy Justin Sink. President Obama will grab credit for an improving economy in a series of speeches this week that the White House hopes will increase his political clout.

The messaging effort is intended to portray Obama as focused on jobs, which voters repeatedly say is the most pressing issue facing Washington, according to the White House.

Democratic allies argue it will allow Obama to go on offense after months in which he has been dragged down by political controversies that have dogged his second term and injured him in the polls.

“We have to keep focused on these issues, even as we all are buffeted about by, you know, the variety of things that confront us … fake scandals or things like that,” White House press secretary Jay Carney said Monday at his daily briefing.

“We have to keep focused on the North Star here, the issues that the American people want us to be focused on,” he added. Read more from this story HERE.

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Photo Credit: APPressure mounts on Obama as he REFUSES to pay his interns (while campaigning to raise the minimum wage)

By Hayley Peterson. As President Obama campaigns to increase the minimum wage, his own interns aren’t getting paid a cent to work a minimum of 45 hours a week.

White House interns are expected to show up to work ‘at least’ Monday through Friday from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m., according to the administration’s website. Housing and commuting assistance aren’t provided either, so the White House encourages applicants to petition nonprofits for help funding their living expenses.

Just this summer alone, the White House ‘hired’ 147 interns, saving the administration roughly half a million dollars if it had otherwise paid each intern minimum wage for 45 hours of work per week. The internship program, which lasts 11 weeks in the summer, runs year-round.

Unpaid internships are widespread in Washington. It’s estimated that the federal government uses as many as 30,000 uncompensated interns every summer.

But with Obama calling for an increase to the minimum wage – which is set at $7.25 an hour – activist Mikey Franklin says it’s particularly disdainful for the White House to be relying on free labor. Read more from this story HERE.

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Obama approval rating drops for second straight quarter

By Rick Moran. Gallup tracking poll shows the decline in President Obama’s approval numbers over the last 3 quarters.

The Hill:

Obama averaged a 47.9 percent approval rating for his 18th quarter in office, running from April 20 to July 19. That’s down from 49.7 percent in the first quarter of Obama’s second term in office, and down from 51.9 in the 16th quarter, when he was reelected.

The president got a slight boost in the early stages of the 18th quarter after the Boston Marathon bombings, but declined steadily from there and has not topped the 50 percent mark in almost a month.

According to Gallup, Obama’s average for the quarter is typical for second term presidents. The president comes in well below former presidents Dwight Eisenhower, Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton, well above Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon, and is near in approval to Harry Truman and George W. Bush.

Read more from this story HERE.