Sen. Mike Lee: Defund Obamacare or Shut Down the Government

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Photo Credit: APSen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, thinks President Obama’s delay of key provisions of Obamacare could force Senate Democrats to defend the unpopular law during the upcoming congressional debate on a new continuing resolution to fund the government through the 2014 election.

“If congressional Democrats want to oppose appropriations bills without additional Obamacare funding, shut down the government, and side with the president and Big Business against the American people, then it’s their choice,” Lee said.

“But three years in, even the president himself has now admitted that Obamacare won’t work. The only responsible choice now is to protect the country from Obamacare’s looming disaster, start over and finally begin work on real health care reform.”

Lee is responding to the Treasury Department’s July 5th announcement that it will delay implementation of Obamacare’s employer mandate on businesses to provide health insurance to workers.

The new CR would be the fourth such stop-gap funding measure since Congress failed to adopt an annual budget in 2010. The government is currently operating on a CR that expires Sept. 30.

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Is the Obama Admin. Imposing Anti-Religious Culture in Military?

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Photo Credit: JTF GuantanamoThere is a clear and present danger to religious liberty within the military, says a coalition of groups who believe the Obama Administration is pushing a secular, anti-religious culture on the nation’s armed forces.

“Christians who choose to live out their faith find themselves incompatible with the secular view of this administration,” said Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council. “We’re establishing a beach head for religious liberty and the evidence points to a very deliberate attack.”

Representatives of 14 groups concerned about religious liberty joined Reps. John Fleming R-La., Jim Bridenstine R-Okla., and Louie Gohmert R-Tex. on Capitol Hill to urge support for Fleming’s military religious freedom amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act.

The amendment protects the rights of servicemembers to not only hold religious beliefs but to act on them and speak about them. Fleming’s amendment has bipartisan support but the Obama Administration issued a statement “strongly objecting” to the legislation.

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Rush Limbaugh Says Rapper Jay-Z Takes Page Out of Obama’s Book, Snatches Private Data from Cell Phones

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Photo Credit: WNDRush Limbaugh gets it. Barack Obama gets it. Even Samsung and the producers who manage Jay-Z get it.

In a little more than a week after its June 24 launch, Jay-Z’s album “Magna Carta Holy Grail” had been downloaded free by more than a half-million people who purchased Samsung’s popular Galaxy S4 cellphone, Billboard reported.

Downloading Jay-Z’s new album on the Samsung phone required a special app that also retrieves a ton of personal information from the user and delivers it to Samsung.

Limbaugh explained to his radio audience Tuesday that it was “a data-mining app”…

“They had no idea. They just thought, ‘Holy, wowie zowie, Jay-Z, Magna Carta … Holy Grail for free.’ And they did what they had to do, and they ended up having every bit of data about themselves transferred from their phone back to Samsung and whoever else,” Limbaugh said.

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Illinois Becomes Last State in Nation to Allow Concealed-Carry

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Photo Credit: APIllinois on Tuesday became the last state in the nation to allow gun owners to carry concealed weapons, as lawmakers overcame a last-minute attempt by Gov. Pat Quinn to change the legislation.

Lawmakers were running up against a federal court’s deadline to allow concealed-carry in their state. After Quinn, a Democrat, unilaterally tried to add more restrictions into the legislation, lawmakers decided it was better to override the governor than risk the courts allowing virtually unregulated concealed weapons in Chicago, which has endured severe gun violence in recent months.

The Senate voted 41-17 in favor of the override Tuesday afternoon after the House voted 77-31, margins that met the three-fifths threshold needed to set aside what is known as an amendatory veto. Quinn had used his veto authority to suggest changes such as prohibiting guns in restaurants that serve alcohol and limiting citizens to one firearm at a time.

Quinn had predicted a “showdown in Springfield” after a week of Chicago appearances to drum up support for the changes he made in the amendatory veto. The Chicago Democrat faces a tough re-election fight next year and has already drawn a primary challenge from former White House chief of state Bill Daley, who has criticized the governor’s handling of the debate over guns and other issues.

Rep. Brandon Phelps, a Democrat from southern Illinois, predicted a history-making day in which lawmakers would dismiss Quinn’s changes as politically motivated.

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Director of National Intelligence Clapper Won’t Resign Over Lying to Congress

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Photo Credit: APDirector of National Intelligence James Clapper has no plans to resign following disclosures to the Senate Intelligence Committee that he misled Congress on widespread National Security Agency electronic surveillance of Americans.

“DNI Clapper explained his response in the letter to Chairman [Dianne] Feinstein [(D., Calif.)] and apologized for the misunderstanding,” said Michael Birmingham, spokesperson for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.

Clapper “values the decades-long stellar relationship he has with Congress and remains focused on leading the intelligence community,” Birmingham told the Free Beacon in a statement Monday.

White House National Security Council spokeswoman Caitlin Hayden said: “The president has full confidence in Director Clapper and his leadership of the Intelligence Community.”

Clapper disclosed in a June 21 letter to Feinstein that his answer to questions about the electronic surveillance were “erroneous” during March 2013 testimony before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence.

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Disabled Marine Hero IN UNIFORM Forced to Undergo Humiliating Screening by TSA, Capitol Guards

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Photo Credit: Patricia MartinWearing the uniform of the Few and Proud doesn’t rate preferential treatment from the Transportation Security Administration or California capitol security officers, retired Marine Cpl. Nathan Kemnitz recently found.

Kemnitz, severely injured in 2004 in a roadside bomb attack in Fallujah, has limited use of his right arm and cannot lift it above his head. So when security guards at the state capitol building in Sacramento, Calif., asked him to remove his dress blue blouse “because he was wearing too much metal,” and TSA asked him to raise his arms above his head for the full-body scanner at Sacramento International Airport, he could not comply.

“My right arm doesn’t work. It’s a lot of hassle for me to do that,” Kemntiz said.

At the state capitol, the Marine’s refusal to remove his uniform top grew into a heated exchange between Kemnitz, a friend who was accompanying him and security officers.

At the airport, bystanders stared as the TSA security screener looked under Kemnitz’s medals, ran his hands under the Marine’s waistband and swabbed his shoes for explosives.

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Snowden Loves America, Not Its Government; Says He’s Unwilling to Live Under Constant Surveillance

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Photo Credit: The Guardian The Guardian released the second part of Snowden’s interview with Glenn Greenwald in Hong Kong. In it Snowden, made it clear that he loved America but hated what its government has become. He also predicted that the feds would ultimately accuse him of espionage. Here are excerpts of that interview:

“I think they are going to say I have committed grave crimes, I have violated the Espionage Act. They are going to say I have aided our enemies in making them aware of these systems. But this argument can be made against anyone who reveals information that points out mass surveillance systems,” he said.

Asked whether he had sought a career in the intelligence community specifically to become a mole and reveal secrets, Snowden, 30, said he had joined government service very young, first enlisting in the US army immediately after the invasion of Iraq out of a belief in “the goodness of what we were doing. I believed in the nobility of our intentions to free oppressed people overseas.”

But his views shifted over the length of his career as he watched the news, which he saw as propaganda, not truth. “We were actually involved in misleading the public and misleading all the publics, not just the American public, in order to create certain mindset in the global consciousness and I was actually a victim of that.”

He had not fallen out of love with America, only its government. “America is a fundamentally good country. We have good people with good values who want to do the right thing. But the structures of power that exist are working to their own ends to extend their capability at the expense of the freedom of all publics.”

In the new excerpts, he explained his motivation for revealing the information. “I don’t want to live in a world where everything that I say, everything I do, everyone I talk to, every expression of creativity or love or friendship is recorded,” he said. “And that’s not something I’m willing to support, it’s not something I’m willing to build and it’s not something I’m willing to live under.”

Obama Account Caught Following (Another) Porn-Related Website on Twitter

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Last year, the official Twitter account for President Barack Obama was found to be following a semi-erotic website. Now, it appears that the account was following a full-on porn company.

Although the president doesn’t manage his own account — if a tweet is directly penned by Obama it’s signed “-bo” — but @BarackObama is curated by his Organizing for Action staff.

When it was found in April 2012 that the account was following @CelebritySideboob, Obama’s Twitter account followed more than 679,000 accounts. Since then, it appears that the staff has unfollowed many, dropping down to 660,850 followed by the president’s account. But one appears to have slipped through proper vetting.

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Officer Cleared of Threatening Michelle Obama But Guilty of Calling Barack a Commie

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Photo Credit: Carolyn Kaster/APA District police officer accused of threatening Michelle Obama has been cleared of administrative charges related to the first lady but was found guilty of posting a derogatory job description on social media and depicting the president as a communist, his attorney said Monday.

Members of a departmental review board ruled that Christopher Picciano, a 17-year veteran who was a member of the elite presidential motorcade detail, should be suspended without pay for 40 days for conduct unbecoming an officer. His attorney, James W. Pressler, said his client is weighing an appeal. The city had sought to have Picciano fired.

“We’re pleased that he was exonerated of all allegations that he made threats against the first lady,” Pressler said. “He has maintained from the beginning that it was an off-the-cuff remark, a joke.”

The U.S. attorney’s office had declined to file charges against the officer, agreeing with the Secret Service that Picciano was not serious with his comment about Michelle Obama. But during the investigation, detectives found troubling though unrelated postings on the officer’s LinkedIn and Facebook accounts.

Those included a communist emblem — a hammer and sickle — superimposed over a campaign poster of President Obama and Picciano’s self-described job description as “zoo keeper of the MPD.”

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101 Million Americans on Gov’t Food Assistance, More than Those in Private Work Force

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Photo Credit: APThe number of Americans receiving subsidized food assistance from the federal government has risen to 101 million, representing roughly a third of the U.S. population.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture estimates that a total of 101,000,000 people currently participate in at least one of the 15 food programs offered by the agency, at a cost of $114 billion in fiscal year 2012.

That means the number of Americans receiving food assistance has surpassed the number of full-time private sector workers in the U.S.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), there were 97,180,000 full-time private sector workers in 2012.

The population of the U.S. is 316.2 million people, meaning nearly a third of Americans receive food aid from the government.

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