The House will vote this summer on continuing wide-ranging tax cuts first enacted under President George W. Bush, House Majority Leader Eric Cantor said Friday as the GOP sharpened its plans for confronting Democrats on one of the election’s top issues.

In a memo to fellow Republican lawmakers, Cantor said the House would vote on extending those tax cuts before leaving Washington for its August recess. Without congressional action, tax rates on wages, dividends, capital gains and other earnings will rise and most Americans will face higher taxes.

In one of the defining partisan disputes of recent years, Republicans want to keep those tax cuts — first enacted in 2001 and 2003 — for all taxpayers. President Barack Obama and Democrats oppose renewing the tax cuts for the highest earning Americans, though they haven’t agreed among themselves yet where the cutoff should be.

The House vote will be symbolic because Democrats running the Senate are sure to block a bill cutting taxes for the rich. Senate Democrats haven’t decided yet whether to hold votes this summer or fall on extending the tax cuts, and whether the reductions should be renewed for people earning up to $250,000 or $1 million annually.

The two parties are expected to get more serious about working toward legislation that would actually become law after the elections, with the details dependent on who captures control of the White House, House and Senate.

Read More at OfficialWire .  By Alan Fram, AP.

JERUSALEM — Members of the Syrian opposition are pressing to openly announce an affiliation with the Muslim Brotherhood at a meeting scheduled to take place in Turkey later this week, according to informed Middle Eastern security officials.

The opposition has been plagued by infighting, with competing divisions sparing with each other even since the movement was created in September.

Just last week, Syrian National Council leader Burhan Ghalioun announced his resignation after major divisions within his council reached a climax two days after the coalition voted to renew his term for another three months.

Ghalioun has faced criticism from some opposition members of being too close to the Muslim Brotherhood and of trying to monopolize power within the SNC.

“I will not allow myself to be the candidate of division,” he said. “I am not attached to the position, so I announce that I will step down after a new candidate has been chosen, either by consensus or through new elections.”

Read More at Klein Online. By Aaron Klein.

Senator Marco Rubio criticized the Obama administration for cooperating with a Hollywood moviemaker on a film about the top-secret Navy unit that killed Osama bin Laden, warning such actions could “impact the ability to carry out similar operations in the future.”
It was “wrong” and “part of a troubling trend of chest- thumping” on the part of the administration, Rubio said in an interview on Bloomberg Television’s “Political Capital with Al Hunt,” airing this weekend. The 40-year-old Florida Republican sits on the Senate Intelligence Committee.

The Pentagon’s top intelligence official, Michael Vickers, met with Oscar-winning director Kathryn Bigelow and divulged the name of the typically secret Navy commando unit known as SEAL Team Six, according to a transcript of the July 15 meeting released May 22 by Judicial Watch, a Washington-based legal organization. The meeting, sanctioned by the White House, came after then-Defense Secretary Robert Gates and then-Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Admiral Michael Mullen urged military officials to stop talking about the May 2, 2011 raid on bin Laden’s compound in Pakistan.

‘Most Divisive’

In the interview, Rubio chastised Barack Obama on a number of issues and reiterated a charge that the president is more divisive than former Republican President Richard Nixon, who resigned under the threat of impeachment for his administration’s involvement in the Watergate break-in scandal.

On immigration, Rubio is crafting an alternative to a bill known as the DREAM Act that would grant a pathway to citizenship for military veterans and allow some students to stay and work legally on non-immigrant visas. A DREAM Act measure backed by Obama and most Democrats that would have given some students brought to the U.S. as children a path to citizenship was blocked by Republican congressional leaders.

Read More at newsmax.com.

The daughter of Cuban dictator Raul Castro has told an audience in San Francisco that she would vote for Barack Obama if she lived in this country.

The Obama administration granted Mariela Castro a special visa to attend a San Francisco meeting where she promoted homosexual rights.

“If we don’t change our patriarchal and homophobic culture … we cannot advance as a new society, and that’s what we want — the power of emancipation through socialism,” she said. “We will establish relationships on the basis of social justice and social equality …. It seems like a Utopia, but we can change it.”

Read More at onenewsnow.com. By Associated Press.

In 2009, President Barack Obama reportedly called members of the Tea Party “teabaggers.” It turns out that our fourth greatest president, first in so many things, may have been the first “teabagger” himself, as seen in the 1997 photograph above. Yes, that really is Barack Obama wearing a regimental coat and carrying a tricorn hat in his hand. And that flag behind him really is a Gadsden flag, with its serpent and its “Don’t Tread On Me” slogan. You may want to let all of this sink in a bit, especially if you’re a Tea Party-bashing progressive.

Neither Democrats nor the media have been particularly kind to the Tea Party. There is hardly space to go through all the times the Tea Party has been compared to terrorists (including by the Vice President) or fascists, or the many times it has been accused of racism by progressives in supposedly mainstream news outlets. That’s a book-length story of its own.

But given the photo above, it is certainly a good time to think back upon some of the ridicule Tea Party members were forced to endure for evoking the Revolutionary War era by their dress and choice of symbols.

MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow was one of many who saw mockery of the “teabaggers” as the first recourse. (The word was used so often by liberals in 2009 that Oxford made it a Word of the Year finalist.) Liberal sites like Talking Points Memo presented attendees who dressed up the way Obama did above as weirdos. The ever-predictable Bill Maher got hoots from his audience when he donned his own tricorn hat (complete with dangling tea bags) to bash the Tea Party on TV.

President Obama blamed the “teabaggers” for his failures, according to Jonathan Alter’s book The Promise: President Obama, Year One, complaining that his own 2009 stimulus “helped to create the tea-baggers and empowered that whole wing of the Republican Party to where it now controls the agenda for the Republicans.” (Vice President Joe Biden is blaming them still.)

Read More at breitbart.com. By John Sexton.