Rush Limbaugh: Why Media Ignores Benghazi

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Photo Credit: AP

Photo Credit: AP

By Lucy Mccalmont.

Conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh said Friday that the mainstream media is not covering Benghazi because it is an issue that he and Fox News are interested in.

“There are a lot of reporters who will discount Benghazi simply because of who is interested in it,” Limbaugh said, according to a transcript of his radio program “The Rush Limbaugh Show.” “For example, Fox is interested in it and it automatically is nothing. If I’m interested in it it doesn’t rate any interest, because Fox and me, all we want is to get Obama.”

Slamming its coverage of the 2012 attacks on the U.S. diplomatic in Benghazi that left the ambassador and three others dead, Limbaugh said of the mainstream media, “They’re working with the regime to cover it up.”

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Where was Obama? Question resurfaces of president’s whereabouts during Benghazi attack

By Fox News.

Republican senators on Friday put pressure on President Obama to confirm his whereabouts during the night of the Benghazi attack, after an ex-White House spokesman revived the debate by telling Fox News he was not in the Situation Room.

The detail about the president’s location the night of the attack is just one of many revelations that have, in a matter of days, kicked up the controversy to a level not seen since last year. After new emails were released raising questions about the White House response to the attack, a key panel on Friday subpoenaed Secretary of State John Kerry and House Speaker John Boehner announced a special investigative committee.

On Friday afternoon, three GOP senators wrote a letter to Obama asking about his whereabouts and spokesman Tommy Vietor’s comments to Fox News.

“Last night, the former Communications Director for the National Security Council, Tommy Vietor, stated that on the afternoon and night of September 11, 2012 — while the U.S. mission in Benghazi, Libya was under attack — that you never visited the White House Situation Room to monitor events,” they wrote.

Claiming that Americans still do not have an “accounting of your activities during the attack,” the senators asked him to confirm Vietor’s account. The letter was signed by Sens. John McCain, R-Ariz.; Lindsey Graham, R-S.C.; and Kelly Ayotte, R-N.H.

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Horowitz: Nothing Clever about Winning with Lies and Special Interest Riches

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GOP Civil WarOver the past few weeks, political news outlets have been filled with articles beaming about the masterful strategy of the GOP establishment in crushing grassroots challenges. They smugly celebrate the wily tactics of Senator Mitch McConnell, the Chamber of Commerce, and Crossroads in counterattacking the Tea Party. But when you think past the initial headline, you will find that there is nothing special, clever, or innovative about their strategy. It is quite simple.

Members of the political class, which is comprised of the leaders in both parties, support unconstitutional policies, corporate welfare, amnesty for illegals, consistent debt ceiling increases, federal control of local functions, and anything else demanded by the dominant moneyed interests. In return, they receive unlimited campaign support in the form of direct contributions and independent expenditures that are carefully coordinated with their candidates through McConnell’s network of the Chamber, NRSC, and Karl Rove – as outlined by National Journal.

In comes a grassroots candidate from the country class. Needless to say, unless they are a billionaire, they struggle to collect small donations from patriotic citizens in order to develop a modicum of legitimacy and grow their name ID with the electorate. In fact, it is precisely because these candidates support principle over power that they have a difficult time raising money – at least anywhere near the scale of the political class. There is a clear inverse relationship between principled stances on the issues and raising money.

The campaign finance “inequality” has been further exacerbated by McCain-Soros campaign finance laws that place upstart candidates at a disadvantage. They lack a large network of donors, but might know of a handful of patriots who are willing to fully support the candidate. However, they are hamstrung by caps on individual contributions.

Challenging the political class in both open seats (or Democrat seats) and incumbent seats would be arduous enough if the only inherent problem was the money gap. But there are two more challenges: defining of the candidate and ideological lies.

Read more from this story HERE.

The Heavy Hand of the IRS Seizes Innocent Americans’ Assets

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Photo Credit: AP

Photo Credit: AP

Earnest moralists lament Americans’ distrust of government. What really is regrettable is that government does much to earn distrust, as Terry Dehko, 70, and his daughter Sandy Thomas, 41, understand.

Terry, who came to Michigan from Iraq in 1970, soon did what immigrants often do: He went into business, buying Schott’s Supermarket in Fraser, Mich., where he still works six days a week. The Internal Revenue Service, a tentacle of a government that spent $3.5 trillion in 2013, tried to steal more than $35,000 from Terry and Sandy that year.

Sandy, a mother of four, has a master’s degree in urban planning but has worked in the store off and on since she was 12. She remembers, “They just walked into the store” and announced that they had emptied the store’s bank account. The IRS agents believed, or pretended to believe, that Terry and Sandy were or conceivably could be — which is sufficient for the IRS — conducting a criminal enterprise when not selling groceries.

What pattern of behavior supposedly aroused the suspicions of a federal government that is ignorant of how small businesses function? Terry and Sandy regularly make deposits of less than $10,000 in the bank across the street. Federal law, aimed primarily at money laundering by drug dealers, requires banks to report cash deposits of more than $10,000. It also makes it illegal to “structure” deposits to evade such reporting.

Because 35 percent of Schott’s Supermarket’s receipts are in cash, Terry and Sandy make frequent trips to the bank to avoid tempting actual criminals by having large sums at the store. Besides, their insurance policy covers no cash loss in excess of $10,000.

Read more from this story HERE.

Memo to GOP: To Win in 2014 We Need an Anti-Cronyism, Anti-Corporate Welfare Agenda

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Photo Credit: Fox News

Photo Credit: Fox News

When even Nate Silver, editor-in-chief of ESPN’s FiveThirtyEight blog and ABC News Special Correspondent, thinks Republicans are favorites to win back control of the Senate, you know things are going in the right direction.

The Republican Party – America’s allegedly conservative party – has momentum on its side. Conservatives in 2013 kept focus on President Obama’s unfair, unworkable and unaffordable health care law while liberals tried to stifle debate, and the result has been a favorable electoral landscape few predicted a year ago.

But six months out from the November midterm elections, there is plenty of time for the forces of the status quo to arrest this conservative momentum.

The lessons of the 2012 election cycle are plain in the history books for all to see. When Republicans keep their heads down, worry about “not making ourselves the issue,” and stick to safe, silent stump speeches, the vociferous left has everything it needs to reframe the debate on the terms upon which it prospers.

To avoid this outcome, conservatives must stay on offense and keep our agenda before the American people. That means continuing to make the case that ObamaCare must be replaced with an alternative that lowers cost and increases choice in health care.

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Obama’s Foreign Policy of Denial

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Photo Credit: Charles Dharapak

Photo Credit: Charles Dharapak

Barack Obama’s 949-word response Monday to a question about foreign policy weakness showed the president at his worst: defensive, irritable, contradictory and at times detached from reality. It began with a complaint about negative coverage on Fox News, when, in fact, it was the New York Times’ front page that featured Obama’s foreign policy failures, most recently the inability to conclude a trade agreement with Japan and the collapse of Secretary of State John Kerry’s Middle East negotiations.

Add to this the collapse of not one but two Geneva conferences on Syria, American helplessness in the face of Russian aggression against Ukraine and the Saudi king’s humiliating dismissal of Obama within two hours of talks — no dinner — after Obama made a special 2,300-mile diversion from Europe to see him, and you have an impressive litany of serial embarrassments.

Obama’s first rhetorical defense, as usual, was to attack a straw man: “Why is it that everybody is so eager to use military force?”

Everybody? Wasn’t it you, Mr. President, who decided to attack Libya under the grand Obama doctrine of “responsibility to protect” helpless civilians — every syllable of which you totally contradicted as 150,000 were being slaughtered in Syria?

And wasn’t attacking Syria for having crossed your own chemical-weapons “red line” also your idea? Before, of course, you retreated abjectly, thereby marginalizing yourself and exposing the United States to general ridicule.

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Obama’s Foreign-Policy ‘Flexibility’ Seen as Weakness

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By Joseph R. John.

The below listed Op-Ed was written by Admiral James A. Lyons, USN (Ret), the former Commander-In-Chief of the Pacific Fleet; he discussed the unilateral disarmament of the US Armed Forces by the occupant of the Oval Office, while Russia, China, Iran, and Al Q’ieda are building up their military strength.

Admiral Lyons discusses how the Obama administration’s 5 year foreign policy retreat resulted in Russia’s aggression in Crimea and Ukraine, China’s aggression opposing Japan ownership of the Senkaku Islands, Iran’s aggression against Israel & its development of nuclear weapons because Obama unilaterally lifted sanctions, Assad’s aggression against Syrian freedom fighters & his use of chemical agents again this past week against Syrian freedom fighters, and Egypt’s shift from its close relationship with the US to the establishment of a new military alliance with Russia.

Obama halted 30 years of longstanding military aid to Egypt, when the pro US Military Junta ousted Moslem Brotherhood President Mohammed Morsi. Morsi was deposed because his supporters were rioting & killing Christians throughout Egypt, and because Egyptian State Security documented for US Intelligence Agency in 2012 that Mohamed Morsi was a co-conspirator in the attack on the US Mission in Benghazi, that resulted in the death of 4 Americans (the Obama administration has withheld the fact that Morsi was a co-conspirator in the attack on the US Mission from the American people for 20 months).

As soon as Obama halted longstanding military aid to the new pro-US military Junta, Putin executed a long term military alliance with Egypt. Russia is now providing Egypt with $2 billion in military aide consisting of MIG 29M/M2 Fulcrum jet fighters, MI-35 helicopters, air defense missiles, coastal anti-ship defensive complexes, light weapons, and supporting ammunition. Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates are paying Russia for that on-going military aid to Egypt, displacing America’s strongest Arab military ally in the Middle East.

The Black Flag of Al Q’ieda is now flying over territories it has been acquiring in its massive expansion over the last 5 years in Eastern Libya, in Fallujah in Iraq, in large areas of Yemen, in southern Somalia, in areas of Afghanistan, in the tribal region of Pakistan, and Al Q’ieda has been involved in the cocaine trade with FARC terrorists from Columbia, working in the Tri Border area of Argentine/Brazil/Paraguay based in the city of Ciudad del Este. Obama replaced Spec Ops boots on the ground that used to attack and capture Al Q’ieda terrorists for interrogation, with drone strikes from afar that has done nothing to stem the out of control worldwide expansion of Al Q’ieda over the last 5 years. Whenever an Al Q’ieda leader that is taken out by a drone strike, he is simply replaced by another Al Q’ieda leader.

History has taught mankind over the last 2000 years that, “Weakness Encourages Aggression”; President Ronald Reagan understood that well known fact and followed a different course, “Peace Through Strength.” The current occupant of the Oval Office still doesn’t understand the “Weakness Encourages Aggression” and for the past 5 years he has been intentionally disarming the US Armed Forces and systematically dismantling many of America’s military alliances.

Captain Joseph R. John, a combat veteran, is a 1962 graduate of the United States Naval Academy who retired from the US Navy after a long and distinguished career. He currently is the President of the Combat Veterans Training Group and is the founder of the Combat Veterans for Congress PAC.
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Photo Credit: Greg Groesch / The Washington Times

Photo Credit: Greg Groesch / The Washington Times

Obama’s foreign-policy ‘flexibility’ seen as weakness

By James A. Lyons.

The administration Kabuki dance we’re witnessing featuring U.S. refusal to provide nonlethal support equipment for Ukraine is President Obama displaying the new “flexibility” he promised Vladimir Putin he would have after his re-election. In short, it is capitulation.

The administration is trying to make the case that by showing restraint, Mr. Obama will encourage Mr. Putin, the Russian president, to be more willing to negotiate. The mind boggles. What’s taking place in Ukraine has far-reaching implications for the United States and our allies in both Europe and the Far East.

The apparent lack of support from NATO’s political leadership to help Ukraine maintain its sovereignty is clearly tied to its dependence on Russia for more than 30 percent of their energy requirements. This compromised position was accepted based on the assumption that European security after the Cold War could be guaranteed (with reduced defense budgets) by engaging Russia, not confronting it.

This now appears to be a costly error, since it has been known for some time that NATO’s engagement policies have not required Russia’s reciprocity. However, one positive outcome of the current crisis should be an unmistakable wake-up call for NATO, as its credibility is clearly being challenged.

The administration’s rationale for not providing nonlethal equipment, such as night-vision devices, body armor, medical kits, uniforms, boots and military socks to the “victim” is that it could be perceived by Russia as “destabilizing” and as a “force-multiplier,” and, therefore, too provocative. This is nonsense. Russia has deployed 40,000 fully equipped, modernized troops backed up by tanks, aircraft and helicopters, plus paid KGB goon squads that are creating havoc in Eastern Ukraine.

Read more from this story HERE.

Contraception Mandate Turning into Abortion Mandate?

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Photo Credit: Evan Vucci, AP

Photo Credit: Evan Vucci, AP

During a recent Supreme Court argument over the Affordable Care Act’s contraceptives mandate, Justice Anthony Kennedy cut to the heart of the government’s argument. “Under your view,” he told Solicitor General Donald Verrilli, “a for-profit corporation could be forced to pay for abortions.” After some verbal fumbling, Verrilli conceded: “you’re right.” But, he quickly added, there is nothing to fear because there “is no law like that on the books.”

Not yet.

Earlier this year, Washington State tried to be the first. HB 2148, Washington’s Reproductive Parity Act, would require any health plan that covers maternity care to cover elective, surgical abortions also. The bill is supported by a majority of the Washington legislature and the governor. It is stalled — for now — in the Senate Health Care Committee.

The reach of this abortion mandate would be extensive, because current federal laws require almost all insurance plans to cover maternity services. Washington State stands ready to require almost every business in the state to cover elective abortions.

Although HB 2148 cites an existing conscience clause in Washington law, it is immediately followed by another clause that seems to nullify it. How the two can be reconciled is unclear.

What is clear is that the federal government believes no for-profit corporation has an enforceable – or even cognizable – conscience objection to such a law. In his argument, Solicitor General Verrilli made it clear, repeatedly, that the government believes for-profit corporations do not have constitutional or statutory rights to protection of their religious exercise. The government seems to believe the same regarding religious nonprofit corporations. While grudgingly recognizing that churches are entitled to an “exemption” from the contraceptives mandate, HHS granted religious nonprofit corporations an “accommodation” instead.

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Doctor’s Declaration of Independence: Time to Defy Healthcare Mandates Issued by Bureaucrats…

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Photo Credit: Corbis

Photo Credit: Corbis

In my 23 years as a practicing physician, I’ve learned that the only thing that matters is the doctor-patient relationship. How we interact and treat our patients is the practice of medicine. I acknowledge that there is a problem with the rising cost of health care, but there is also a problem when the individual physician in the trenches does not have a voice in the debate and is being told what to do and how to do it.

As a group, the nearly 880,000 licensed physicians in the U.S. are, for the most part, well-intentioned. We strive to do our best even while we sometimes contend with unrealistic expectations. The demands are great, and many of our families pay a huge price for our not being around. We do the things we do because it is right and our patients expect us to.

So when do we say damn the mandates and requirements from bureaucrats who are not in the healing profession? When do we stand up and say we are not going to take it any more?

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services dictates that we must use an electronic health record (EHR) or be penalized with lower reimbursements in the future. There are “meaningful use” criteria whereby the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services tells us as physicians what we need to include in the electronic health record or we will not be subsidized the cost of converting to the electronic system and we will be penalized by lower reimbursements. Across the country, doctors waste precious time filling in unnecessary electronic-record fields just to satisfy a regulatory measure. I personally spend two hours a day dictating and documenting electronic health records just so I can be paid and not face a government audit. Is that the best use of time for a highly trained surgical specialist?

This is not a unique complaint. A study commissioned by the American Medical Association last year and conducted by the RAND Corp. found that “Poor EHR usability, time-consuming data entry, interference with face-to-face patient care, inefficient and less fulfilling work content, inability to exchange health information between EHR products, and degradation of clinical documentation were prominent sources of professional dissatisfaction.”

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ObamaCare and Common Core – Both are Bad to the Bone

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Photo Credit: Weekly Standard

Photo Credit: Weekly Standard

By Bruce Deitrick Price.

Medical insurance and public education might seem to be two different worlds with different problems. But the proposed solutions by the left were essentially the same. Here are ten descriptions that apply equally to ObamaCare and Common Core:

1) Huge federal power grab: The obvious result from both ObamaCare and Common Core is that Obama and his Czars get a bigger government to administer, more money to play with, more jobs for their loyal troops, and more control over people’s lives.

2) Unresponsive to popular demand.:ObamaCare and Common Core were massive, top-down interventions demanded by leftwing politics and ideology, not something the public asked for. Alleged problems were used as an excuse for adopting solutions that would grow government. The big question was, what can they get away with? (We see the same dynamics playing out in climate change.)

3) Incomprehensible by design: A sentence was not used if a paragraph could be concocted. Thousands of new requirements, regulations, laws, and standards were contained in dense verbiage that neither Congress nor the public would ever read and couldn’t understand if they did. Almost every paragraph includes expanded powers and hidden consequences. Citizens would be further reduced to a childlike dependence on bureaucrats.

4) Public excluded from legislative process. The complexity of the political process, plus the density of jargon and propaganda, ensured that John Q Citizen was ignored. These programs were passed by stealth, chicanery, arm-twisting, and bribes. The Cornhusker Kickback put ObamaCare over the top. Similarly, so-called stimulus money earmarked for shovel-ready jobs was used as grants (i.e. bribes) to persuade the states to embrace Race to the Top, a precursor of Common Core. The fix was in.

Read more from this story HERE.

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Photo Credit: Sara Caldwell / The Augusta Chronicle / ZUMAPRESS.com

Photo Credit: Sara Caldwell / The Augusta Chronicle / ZUMAPRESS.com

Pushback Continues: States Grow Increasingly Wary of Common Core

By Brittany Corona.

Common Core is on the ropes. More and more states are pulling back from the national standards as the 2014–15 school year implementation deadline looms near.

In Louisiana, Governor Bobby Jindal (R)—formerly a Common Core supporter—is now encouraging the legislature to remove the state from the Common Core aligned Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for Colleges and Careers (PARCC) test. And if they don’t act, he will.

Jindal’s new stance comes after eight members of the Louisiana State House of Representatives sent him a letter, informing him of his prerogative to opt out of the standards and encouraging him to do so. As The New Orleans Advocate reported:

Gov. Bobby Jindal said Monday that a gubernatorial order for the state to drop controversial Common Core tests is a ‘very viable option’ if state lawmakers fail to act. Jindal made the comment in response to a letter from eight House members who said the governor can opt the state out of the exams and should do that… ‘We believe you have the authority, as governor, under the 2010 PARCC memorandum of understanding, to opt out of the consortium,’ state Rep. Brett Geymann, (R–Lake Charles), and seven other legislators wrote.

Read more from this story HERE.

Ignorance And Cronyism Are The Only Settled Sciences

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Photo Credit: TownHall

Photo Credit: TownHall

An honest debate with a progressive is almost as rare as a verified sighting of Bigfoot.

You’d have better luck getting a devout Scientologist to say L. Ron Hubbard was a horrible writer than you would to get a progressive to admit the “science” behind climate change is not all it’s cracked up to be. For one thing, it is based on models of what could happen in 100 years, even though those models are mostly unreliable when you use them to map what happened in the last 30. That’s right, the vast majority of “climate models” predicting doom and gloom, the basis for Democrats’ oppressive legislative and regulatory push, can’t accurately predict what happened in the past, let alone predict the future. Yet, they demand it’s a moral imperative we act now.

As we traverse our second decade of “we have only 10 years to act” hysteria, the planet forgot to warm, and hasn’t since 1998. But this fact of science hasn’t deterred the “Party of Science” from pressing forward. And why would it?

The science is settled … just like it was back in the 1970s when the same people, with the same level of certainty, were predicting an ice age and famine. When that “settled science” didn’t pan out, they flipped the script. Global cooling was out; global warming was in. The only thing that didn’t change was the “solution” – a more powerful and intrusive regulatory state.

Isn’t it amazing how the exact opposite problem can have the same solution?

Read more from this story HERE.