White House Defends Potential $100 Million Africa Sequestration Trip as “Great Bang for Our Buck”

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Photo Credit: Pablo Martinez Monsivais

The White House Friday defended the first family’s upcoming weeklong trip to Africa, which could cost taxpayers up to $100 million, as “great bang for our buck.”

“There will be a great bang for our buck for being in Africa because when you travel to regions like Africa that don’t get a lot of presidential attention, you tend to have very longstanding and long-running impact from the visit,” said Ben Rhodes, a deputy national security adviser to President Obama.

The Obamas’ trip, at a time of “sequestration” budget cuts, will take them to Senegal, Tanzania and South Africa from June 26 to July 3. Citing a confidential planning document, the Washington Post reported that the trip will cost between $60 million to $100 million.

The excursion will involve military cargo planes airlifting 56 support vehicles, including 14 limousines, and three trucks to carry bulletproof glass panels to cover the windows where the first family is set to stay. A Navy aircraft carrier or amphibious ship with a fully staffed medical trauma center will be stationed offshore in case of an emergency.

Fighter jets will fly in shifts to provide around-the-clock protection over the president’s airspace. The trip will reportedly involve hundreds of Secret Service agents.

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Happy Father’s Day: Returning Soldiers Get First Look at Newborn Children

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Photo Credit: Abel Uribe

Stationed thousands of miles away in Afghanistan, Illinois National Guard soldier Paul Stansbury was crushed when he missed the birth of his son, Hunter, five months ago.

His experiences as a new father were limited to a collection of digitized, two-dimensional photos of his son posted on Facebook and one Skype conversation that made him yearn to hear more of the boy’s voice, and to inhale that baby smell that fills the hearts of most parents.

That wish came true on Saturday when Stansbury and about 130 other National Guard soldiers returned home from a 10-month deployment, just in time to celebrate Father’s Day with their families.

“This is unbelievable,” said Stansbury, 22, as he held a crying Hunter in his arms for the first time, kissing his cheeks and seemingly not wanting to let go. “He’s a perfect child.”

With nine other soldiers also finally meeting their recently born children and the soldiers’ parents gathered at O’Hare International Airport to welcome everyone home, the morning was filled with tears, laughter and expressions of relief.

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Who Needs Term Limits? Obamacare Driving Congressmen into Retirement

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Photo Credit: AP

Dozens of lawmakers and aides are so afraid that their health insurance premiums will skyrocket next year thanks to Obamacare that they are thinking about retiring early or just quitting.

The fear: Government-subsidized premiums will disappear at the end of the year under a provision in the health care law that nudges aides and lawmakers onto the government health care exchanges, which could make their benefits exorbitantly expensive.

Democratic and Republican leaders are taking the issue seriously, but first they need more specifics from the Office of Personnel Management on how the new rule should take effect — a decision that Capitol Hill sources expect by fall, at the latest. The administration has clammed up in advance of a ruling, sources on both sides of the aisle said.

If the issue isn’t resolved, and massive numbers of lawmakers and aides bolt, many on Capitol Hill fear it could lead to a brain drain just as Congress tackles a slew of weighty issues — like fights over the Tax Code and immigration reform.

The problem is far more acute in the House, where lawmakers and aides are generally younger and less wealthy. Sources said several aides have already given lawmakers notice that they’ll be leaving over concerns about Obamacare. Republican and Democratic lawmakers said the chatter about retiring now, to remain on the current health care plan, is constant.

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Obama Admin. Attempting to Ban as Racist Criminal Background Checks For New Hires

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Photo Credit: brettneilson

Are criminal background checks racist? That’s the startling new legal theory that the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission unveiled this week in lawsuits against employers. It’s another example of how President Obama’s appointees are using regulation to achieve policy goals they can’t get through Congress.

On Tuesday the EEOC accused retailer Dollar General DG -0.04% and a U.S. unit of German car maker BMW BMW.XE +1.26% of violating the 1964 Civil Rights Act by using criminal checks as part of their employment decisions. The logic? Blacks have higher conviction rates than whites, and therefore criminal checks discriminate against blacks.

The EEOC alleges that BMW discriminated against blacks because it screened contractors in South Carolina for convictions for “Murder, Assault & Battery, Rape, Child Abuse, Spousal Abuse (Domestic Violence), Manufacturing of Drugs, Distribution of Drugs, [and] Weapons Violations,” and more blacks than whites are convicted of those crimes.

The suit says 70 black BMW contractors and 18 non-black contractors had criminal convictions, and the company declined to hire them. The suit seeks redress, such as hiring the plaintiffs, back pay, legal costs and more, but only for the black contractors.

In its Dollar General suit, the agency says that 10% of blacks and 7% of non-black applicants failed the retailer’s criminal screening. The EEOC calls that three-percentage-point difference a “gross disparity” that is “statistically significant” enough to qualify as discrimination.

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Sarah Palin on Fertility and the Syrian Civil War

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Photo Credit: Reuters

Former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin criticized the Obama administration’s decision to supply weapons to the rebels in the civil war in Syria today, arguing that the U.S. should “Let Allah sort it out” until there is a stronger leader in the White House.

“Militarily, where is our commander in chief? We’re talking now more new interventions. I say until we know what we’re doing, until we have a commander in chief who knows what he’s doing, well, let these radical Islamic countries who aren’t even respecting basic human rights, where both sides are slaughtering each other as they scream over an arbitrary red line, ‘Allah Akbar,’ I say until we have someone who knows what they’re doing, I say let Allah sort it out,” Palin said at the Faith and Freedom Coalition Conference…

Palin, speaking at the conclusion of the three-day Faith and Freedom Coalition Conference, also took a swipe at another speaker at the conservative forum, former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, who argued Friday that one of the reasons to support the Senate’s immigration reform plan is because “Immigrants are more fertile.”

“I think it’s kind of dangerous territory, territory to want to debate this whole one race’s fertility rate over another, and I say this from someone who’s kind of fertile herself,” Palin said. “I don’t think that’s where we want to go in deciding how will we incentivize the hardworking responsible families who want to live in the light, follow the law, become Americans, versus those whose very first act on our soil is to break the law? There are different ways that we can debate this.”

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Bushmaster CEO Responds to Critics Blaming Him For Newtown Murders

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Photo Credit: Associated Press

Six months ago, the nation was horrified that a deranged man entered Sandy Hook Elementary School and killed 20 young children and six educators. The man, Adam Lanza, happened to use a Bushmaster brand AR-15-style, semi-automatic rifle in the Newtown, Conn., massacre. Almost instantly, gun-control politicians and activists blamed the weapon, instead of the man.

George Kollitides, the CEO of Freedom Group, which owns Bushmaster, was blamed by some as being complicit in the killings. He has not commented on the controversy, until now.

“It’s very easy to blame an inanimate object. Any kind of instrument in the wrong hands can be put to evil use. This comes down to intent — criminal behavior, accountability and responsibility,” Mr. Kollitides said in an exclusive interview last week. The killer’s mother, Nancy Lanza, taught her son to shoot and is said to have given him access to the gun safes.

“He killed the gun’s owner, stole her car, stole her gun and then went to a school and killed innocent kids. No background checks could have prevented that. He illegally obtained the guns,” he told me in his small New York office. “Only two things could have potentially stopped him: his mother locking up her guns and an armed guard. Even then, he could have driven his stolen car into a playground full of kids. He was intent on killing, which we know is already illegal.”

Nevertheless, the liberal media is intent on blaming the gun company executive personally.

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NSA Now Admits to LISTENING to U.S. Phone Calls Without Warrants

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Photo Credit: Getty Images

The National Security Agency has acknowledged in a new classified briefing that it does not need court authorization to listen to domestic phone calls.

Rep. Jerrold Nadler, a New York Democrat, disclosed this week that during a secret briefing to members of Congress, he was told that the contents of a phone call could be accessed “simply based on an analyst deciding that.”

If the NSA wants “to listen to the phone,” an analyst’s decision is sufficient, without any other legal authorization required, Nadler said he learned. “I was rather startled,” said Nadler, an attorney and congressman who serves on the House Judiciary committee.

Not only does this disclosure shed more light on how the NSA’s formidable eavesdropping apparatus works domestically, it also suggests the Justice Department has secretly interpreted federal surveillance law to permit thousands of low-ranking analysts to eavesdrop on phone calls.

Because the same legal standards that apply to phone calls also apply to e-mail messages, text messages, and instant messages, Nadler’s disclosure indicates the NSA analysts could also access the contents of Internet communications without going before a court and seeking approval.

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Vice President Biden: Cruz, Paul Control the GOP

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Photo Credit: Matt Rourke

By Dave Boyer. At a fundraiser late Friday night in San Francisco, Mr. Biden said there is no one in the Republican Party in Congress with whom the administration can negotiate anymore.

“There’s no one with whom to deal with and there’s no one in charge anymore,” Mr. Biden said, at one point pounding the podium with his fist.

Referring to Mr. Paul and Mr. Cruz, both first-term senators, the vice president said he’s never before seen lawmakers with their conservative views.

“They are the ones that control the Republican party right now, literally,” Mr. Biden said. “I’ve never seen a time in all the years I was in the Senate that two freshmen have so much impact on the entirety of the Republican party.”

He did call them “bright young guys.” Read more from this story HERE.

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Biden slaps GOP for letting Cruz, Paul ‘control’ the party

By Paul Bedard. Just six months after he cut a fiscal cliff deal with Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, Vice President Joe Biden declared Friday night that the GOP has no adult leadership and he said it is being pushed around by two “bright new guys,” Sens. Ted Cruz of Texas and Rand Paul of Kentucky.

“This is not your father’s Republican Party, it’s fundamentally different,” he said at a San Francisco Democratic Party fundraiser. “There’s no one with whom to deal with and there’s no one in charge anymore.”

In December and January, Biden worked closely with senior GOP leaders like McConnell to work out a budget deal that halted the nation’s fall over the so-called fiscal cliff.

But in his 10 minute address at the home of Dawn Ross and Doug Hickey, the CEO of BinWise, a beverage distribution company in San Francisco, Biden forgot all that to slam the emergence of Tea Party-backed Cruz and Paul, part of the group GOP Sen. John McCain dubbed “wing nuts.” Read more from this story HERE.

Governor Jan Brewer Defies Arizona Conservatives, Rams Through Obama’s Medicaid Expansion

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Photo Credit: State Rep. Jeff Dial

Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer won a battle with state lawmakers this week, defying most other conservatives in her party to get a key component of President Obama’s Medicaid expansion through the Legislature.

The Arizona Senate voted Thursday to approve the measure 18 to 11. That followed approval earlier this week by the state House of Representatives.

The issue had inflamed passions and divided the Legislature for weeks. Things came to a head Tuesday when Brewer called lawmakers into the Capitol in Phoenix for a surprise special session.

Brewer — a vocal opponent of President Obama’s healthcare reform law — came out in support of Medicaid expansion for her state in January and ended up leading a contingent of moderate Democrats and Republicans who won over the objections of some conservative Republicans.

“By joining me in extending health coverage to hundreds of thousands of Arizonans, legislators of my own party have come under sharp criticism in some quarters. Some have had threats made not just against their political future, but also their personal livelihood,” Brewer said in a prepared statement.

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Another Bush Tries to Snooker the Nation on Amnesty, Argues the Economy Needs Illegals’ “Fertility” (+video)

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Photo Credit: World Affairs Council of Philadelphia

Jeb Bush may have been speaking to conservative Christians, but he wasn’t preaching to the choir.

His pitch to grow the economy by providing amnesty for illegal immigrants was met with silence in a packed room at the Faith and Freedom Coalition’s “Road to Majority” Conference.

The Republican former governor of Florida may not have helped his case by stating, “Immigrants are more fertile and they love families,” which appeared to confuse the audience.

Bush presented a four-point economic plan that justified amnesty by arguing America needs more taxpayers to pay for the retirement benefits of the aging baby boomer generation.

Immigrants bring a younger population and “create far more businesses than native-born Americans over the last 20 years,” claimed the brother of former President George W. Bush.

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