GOP Feuds Over Obamacare Funding

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Photo Credit: APBy Manu Raju and Jake Sherman

A brewing Republican versus Republican fight over whether to use a government funding measure to choke off Obamacare is splitting the party ahead of this fall’s budget battles.

A growing number of Republicans are rejecting calls from leading conservatives, including Sens. Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz and Rand Paul, to defund the president’s health care law in the resolution to keep the government running past Sept. 30. The rift exposes an emerging divide over how the GOP can best achieve its No. 1 goal — to repeal Obamacare — while highlighting the spreading fears that Republicans would lose a public relations war if the dispute leads to a government shutdown in the fall.

The debate is happening behind closed doors and over Senate lunches, as well as during a frank meeting Wednesday with House leaders in Speaker John Boehner’s suite where fresh concerns were aired about the party’s strategy. On Thursday, the dispute began to spill into public view, most notably when three Senate Republicans — including Minority Whip John Cornyn — withdrew their signatures from a conservative letter demanding defunding Obamacare as a condition for supporting the government funding measure.

Sen. Richard Burr (R-N.C.) called the push to defund the law through the continuing resolution the “dumbest idea” he had ever heard. Read more from this story HERE.

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Photo Credit: Reuters House GOP-ers: Defund Obamacare in CR

By Jake Sherman and John Bresnahan

More than 60 Republicans have signed a letter urging Speaker John Boehner to defund Obamacare when Congress funds the government in September.

The letter, being circulated by the office of freshman Rep. Mark Meadows, doesn’t explicitly say that supporters will vote against a government funding bill if it does not strip funding for Obamacare. But it says that signers of the letter are “urging [Boehner and Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.)] to defund the implementation and enforcement of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act in any relevant appropriations bill brought to the House floor in the 113th Congress, including any continuing appropriations bill.”

“In light of the Administration’s recent delay of the employer mandate and the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) scandal, it is imperative, now more than ever, that Congress do everything in its power to halt the implementation of the healthcare law,” Meadows writes. “It is entirely unacceptable that the IRS, a government agency that actively discriminates against Americans, is in charge of implementing a law that Americans do not want.” Read more from this story HERE.

FBI Ignored Warnings About Boston Bombers’ Radical Mosque

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Photo Credit: The Daily CallerFederal Bureau of Investigation officials ignored warnings about the radical origins and nature of the mosque frequented by the Tsarnaev brothers for years before this April’s deadly Boston Marathon bombings.

Outgoing FBI Director Robert Mueller has also said that although the FBI visited the mosque in the past — as part of its “outreach” to the Muslim community — he was unaware of the Islamist leanings of the Islamic Society of Boston (ISB), which runs the Boston bombers’ house of worship.

But the FBI was warned nearly four years prior to the bombings that the ISB was a nest of Islamic radicalism.

On May 1, 2009 our organization, Americans for Peace and Tolerance (APT), briefed representatives of the Boston FBI office on the ISB mosques’ affiliation with Islamic extremism. Nevertheless, the FBI continues to claim it was surprised by the background of the ISB.

In a June appearance before the House Judiciary Committee, Mueller described how it took four days after the Boston Marathon bombings for his agency to canvass the Tsarnaev brothers’ controversial mosque.

Read more from this story HERE.

Shock: Study Finds Washington D.C. the Least Honest Place in America

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Photo Credit: CorbisGeorge Washington believed honesty was the most enviable quality in a human being, but the residents of the city that bears his name clearly don’t agree.

People in Washington D.C. are by far the most dishonest in America, according to a new study, while their cousins in Hawaii and Alabama are basically saints.

Beverage company Honest Tea went to every U.S. state earlier this month and set up 61 unmanned kiosks offering tea for $1. Tea drinkers were instructed to place their buck in a box nearby.

But only eight in 10 beverage guzzlers in the nation’s capital paid for their tea, while the other 20 per cent of people skipped out on the minimal amount.

The other states where you should hold on to your purse were West Virginia where only 85 per cent of participants paid for their tea, followed by Texas and Kentucky at 87 per cent.

Read more from this story HERE.

The Explosive Secret Huma is Hiding

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Photo Credit: WNDWith the news media now profiling New York City mayoral candidate Anthony Weiner’s wife, there is a glaring part of Huma Abedin’s personal story that is not being told – her ties to the Muslim Brotherhood and other Islamic supremacists.

The connections not only extend to her mother and father, who are both deeply tied to al-Qaida fronts, but to Abedin herself, as WND previously reported in a series of exposes.

Abedin’s purported forgiveness of Weiner’s extramarital sexting is regarded as central to the politician’s continued candidacy.

The New York Times claimed Abedin was “eager to end a difficult period of social exile” and “a main architect of her husband’s rehabilitative journey, shaping his calculated comeback.”

Abedin has played a visible role in Weiner’s campaign and has been instrumental the effort to portray her husband as rehabilitated, leading to significant backlash from critics.

Read more from this story HERE.

College Enrollment Falls as Economy Recovers

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Photo Credit: William Widmer The long enrollment boom that swelled American colleges — and helped drive up their prices — is over, with grim implications for many schools.

College enrollment fell 2 percent in 2012-13, the first significant decline since the 1990s, but nearly all of that drop hit for-profit and community colleges; now, signs point to 2013-14 being the year when traditional four-year, nonprofit colleges begin a contraction that will last for several years. The college-age population is dropping after more than a decade of sharp growth, and many adults who opted out of a forbidding job market and went back to school during the recession have been drawn back to work by the economic recovery.

Hardest hit are likely to be colleges that do not rank among the wealthiest or most prestigious, and are heavily dependent on tuition revenue, raising questions about their financial health — even their survival.

“There are many institutions that are on the margin, economically, and are very concerned about keeping their doors open if they can’t hit their enrollment numbers,” said David A. Hawkins, the director of public policy and research at the National Association for College Admission Counseling, which has more than 1,000 member colleges.

The most competitive colleges remain unaffected, but gaining admission to middle-tier institutions will most likely get easier.

Read more from this story HERE.

Health and Human Services Department Sought to Spend an Estimated $159 MILLION Per Year on New Employees to Help Run Obamacare

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Photo Credit: Reuters Documents obtained from the Health and Human Services Department through a Freedom of Information Act request show that on the day the Affordable Care Act became law, the agency received fast-track authority to hire 1,814 new high-level employees to put Obamacare into practice, at a likely cost of more than $159 million per year.

It’s unclear whether those employees were ever hired. HHS did not respond to a request for comment.

But the hiring request was approved by the Obama administration’s Office of Personnel Management despite a government-wide hiring freeze.

Judicial Watch, a nonprofit that has told MailOnline it files ‘hundreds’ of such FOIA requests, showed MailOnline the documents on Thursday. They show that HHS designated the hiring as a project worthy of ‘direct-hire appointing authority,’ a mechanism designed to sidestep normal restrictions on how much federal agencies can spend on personnel.

An analysis by MailOnline indicates that the annual base pay for those 1,814 employees, many of them slated for hiring at the highest salary levels available, would exceed $127.7 million.

Read more from this story HERE.

Obama Killing Race Relations in U.S.

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Photo Credit: WNDPublic attitudes about race relations have drastically worsened since Americans elected the first black president, according to a new poll from NBC News and the Wall Street Journal, and talk radio icon Rush Limbaugh has an explanation for the disturbing trend.

According to the survey, 52 percent of whites and 38 percent of blacks now have a favorable opinion of race relations in the U.S.

In just four-and-a-half years, since the election of President Obama, those numbers have dropped sharply. In the month of Obama’s inauguration, January 2009, 79 percent of whites and 63 percent of blacks held a favorable view of race relations. The data show a decline of 27 points for whites and 25 points for blacks today.

Limbaugh weighed in on the news, telling his listeners Thursday that while many expected the election of a half-black president would ease racial strife in American, it is worse than ever now.

“You know what’s kind of stunning about this to me?” he asked. “You would think – and I hope all of you white people that voted for Obama hoping it was gonna end racism, that 63 percent, why isn’t that higher? I mean, it was truly historic – electing the first African-American to the highest office in the land.

Read more from this story HERE.

Atheist Group Opposes Holocaust Memorial on Ohio Statehouse Grounds

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Photo Credit: daniel-libeskind.comA Wisconsin-based atheist group has expressed its opposition to a Holocaust memorial set to be built on the ground of the Ohio statehouse, arguing that its location violates the separation of church and state and calling the Star of David “exclusionary” in memorializing victims of the Nazis.

But Ohio Gov. John Kasich and proponents of the memorial say it will teach people about man’s inhumanity to man and that, contrary to the atheists’ claim, it will include all those killed by the Nazis — including U.S. soldiers, ethnic and religious minorities, homosexuals and the mentally ill.

Joyce Garver Keller, executive director of Jewish Communities, an organization that represents Jewish groups across the state, said the memorial is intended “mostly to honor those who had survived and who had come to Ohio to build a life.”

Keller said it is appropriate to build the structure on state grounds because it will “remind lawmakers and those who work in and around government of the important role and responsibility they have in speaking out in the face of hatred, anti-Semetism and genocide.”

“The Holocaust did not begin in concentration camps in the ovens with smoke stacks and mass graves,” Keller told FoxNews.com. “It began in the halls of government with the passage of laws that targeted Jews, taking their properties, their businesses, their home, their freedom and ultimately their lives.

Read more from this story HERE.

Campaign Puts ‘Gay Rights’ Behind Constitution

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Photo Credit: WNDThe cases are well known: The Colorado baker in trouble because he declined to violate his faith and promote same-sex “marriage” with his work, the Washington florist who made the same decision and the New Mexico photographer who was fined by the state for turning down a request to promote lesbianism with her services.

More and more people who adhere to the biblical definition of marriage are finding themselves in that no-win situation of being forced by “nondiscrimination” laws to endorse and support “alternative lifestyles.”

An attorney whose work on constitutional issues is well known says such conflicts shouldn’t happen. Matt Barber, vice president for Liberty Counsel Action, told WND that the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution is supreme, and local ordinances that demand people violate its precepts must fall.

But some place their own agenda above the Constitution, and therein lies the conflict, he said.

The solution?

Read more from this story HERE.

Two Americans Added to Food Stamp Rolls for Every Job Created

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Photo Credit: WonderlaneWhite House Press Secretary Jay Carney said yesterday that the Obama administration has pulled the nation from the depths of the “Great Recession” with the creation of 7.2 million private sector jobs.

“And what is absolutely true is that we have come a long way since the depths of the Great Recession. We’ve created over 7.2 million private sector jobs,” Carney told reporters at a press briefing.

Here’s what Mr. Carney didn’t say:

Since February of 2009, the first full month of Obama’s presidency, 9.5 million Americans have dropped out of the labor force. Nearly 90 million Americans are not working today!

Read more from this story HERE.