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Rising Percentage of Americans Renouncing US Citizenship

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Photo Credit: Forbes America is a great land and lures immigrants worldwide, yet record numbers of U.S. citizens and permanent residents are giving up their citizenship or residency. For all the immigrant arrivals the trickle the other direction is increasing. The number is still small, with the “published” expatriates for the quarter 630 for the last quarter of 2013.

That brings the total number to 2,999 for all of 2013. The previous record high for a year was 1,781 set in 2011. It’s a 221% increase over the 932 who left in 2012. You can call it a shaming or a public record, but the Treasury Department is required to publish a quarterly list of Americans who renounced their U.S. Citizenship or terminated their long-term U.S. residency. The public outing puts Americans on notice who relinquished their rights.

Those seem like tiny numbers, yet the total thus far for 2013 is 2,369. See Number of Taxpayers Who Renounced U.S. Citizenship Skyrockets to All-Time Record High, quoting Andrew Mitchel. Under U.S. tax law, it is not relevant why someone expatriates. Whether the expatriation was motivated by tax avoidance or something else used to matter, but the law was changed in 2004.

Since then, the tax and other consequences do not depend on why one leaves. Yet after Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin departed permanently for Singapore with his Facebook IPO riches, there was an angry backlash. Mr. Saverin’s post-Facebook fly-away prompted such outrage that Senators Chuck Schumer and Bob Casey introduced a bill to double the exit tax to 30% for anyone leaving the U.S. for tax reasons.

So far, that bill remains unpassed. Meantime, are people following Tina Turner’s lead? No, and not Eduardo Saverin’s either. Most expatriations are probably motivated primarily by factors such as family and convenience. Many people like Ms. Turner have built a life somewhere else and may not plan to need a U.S. passport.

Read more from this story HERE.

Poll: Only 25% of Americans Believe Feds Will Secure the Border if ‘Immigration Reform’ is Passed

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Photo Credit: Top Right News

Photo Credit: Top Right News

While most respondents said they want border security to play a prominent role in any type of immigration reform, few believe the federal government will actually enforce it.

The Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey found that just 25 percent of “likely” U.S. voters think it is even somewhat likely that the federal government will actually secure the border and prevent further illegal immigration if that’s part of new legislation.

Further, 65 percent said they consider it unlikely. Just 5 percent said the government is “very likely” to secure the border if it’s part of comprehensive legislation to give legal status to illegal aliens already in the country.

The survey stated that “confidence in the likelihood of the federal government actually securing the border fell to a previous low of 28 percent, from a high of 45 percent in January 2013.”

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America Just Got Bumped From This Top 10 List, and That’s Really Depressing

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Photo Credit: Heritage Foundation, Wall Street Journal

Photo Credit: Heritage Foundation, Wall Street Journal

World economic freedom has increased to record levels, according to the 2014 Index of Economic Freedom, released Tuesday by the conservative think tank Heritage Foundation and the Wall Street Journal. But the United States, after seven consecutive years of slipping down the index, has dropped out of the top 10 freest economies.

For 20 years, the Index of Economic Freedom has evaluated countries’ performances in 10 categories, including property rights, freedom from corruption, government spending, trade freedom and others. Scores from 0 to 100 are then averaged and the countries are classified as “free,” “mostly free,” “moderately free,” “mostly unfree” or “repressed.”

The “mostly free” United States sank to 12th place with an economic freedom score of 75.5, half a point lower than last year, when it ranked 10th.

The reason, according to editors of the report: “The overall economic policy direction of the United States in recent years has involved substantial growth in the size and scope of government, accelerating the erosion of economic freedom and contributing directly to America’s fall from the top 10 freest economies.”

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Pope Tells America: Time to Reject Abortion and Accept Life at Every Stage

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Photo Credit: LifeNews

Photo Credit: LifeNews

The same day that he was chosen as TIME magazine’s Person of the Year – Pope Francis exhorted North and South America to “accept human life at every stage, from the mother’s womb to old age.”

Amid misinterpretations of the pontiff’s pro-life stance in the mainstream media, the Holy Father continues to affirm his unwavering belief, completely united to that of the Catholic Church, that human life is sacred from conception to natural death.

He said (emphasis added):

Tomorrow is the feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe, the Patroness of the Americas. I would like to greet all my brothers and sisters on that continent, and I do so thinking of the Virgin of Tepeyac.

When Our Lady appeared to Saint Juan Diego, her face was that of a woman of mixed blood, a mestiza, and her garments bore many symbols of the native culture. Like Jesus, Mary is close to all her sons and daughters; as a concerned mother, she accompanies them on their way through life. She shares all the joys and hopes, the sorrows and troubles of God’s People, which is made up of men and women of every race and nation.

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Senior Homeland Security Advisor: America is an “Islamic Country”

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Photo Credit: Mohamed Elibiary/TwitterA senior advisor to the Department of Homeland Security, Mohamed Elibiary, says that America is “an Islamic country” and continues to argue that the Muslim Brotherhood is comparable to Christian evangelicals.

Elibiary is a member of the Homeland Security Advisory Council and was promoted in September. He also served on the Department of Homeland Security’s Countering Violent Extremism Working Group and the Faith-based Security and Communications Advisory Committee.

He is also a long-time Texas Republican Party official and was a delegate for Senator John McCain in 2008.

On October 31, Elibiary tweeted that he believes the U.S. “is an Islamic country.”…

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Americans Must Suffer

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Photo Credit: American Thinker Watching Barack Obama and his shutdown shenanigan theatre, I discovered I have something in common with our inchoate president — we both want Americans to suffer.

As a sociopathic solipsist, Obama is incapable of feeling anyone’s pain, and because of this, his goal has been to make this shutdown as agonizing as possible.

Ted Cruz, an honorable man with conviction, thought he could force ObamaCare concessions from the administration using the continuing resolution as a cudgel. Boehner thought the debt ceiling offered better opportunities. They decided on the infamous “defund strategy.”

Yet, once you dare to stare down the bully, you must stare down the bully. Republicans picked a fight and in a fight, one must fight. Now, the Republicans feel they cannot walk away from this confrontation with nothing.

Their strategy had a fatal flaw. For the Cruz maneuver to have succeeded, Barack Obama and the Democrats had to fear the shutdown. This was obviously not the case. They, in fact, welcomed it, and have done everything in their power to make it as painful as possible.

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A Small President on the World Stage

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Photo Credit: Chad Crowe

Photo Credit: Chad Crowe

The world misses the old America, the one before the crash—the crashes—of the past dozen years.

That is the takeaway from conversations the past week in New York, where world leaders gathered for the annual U.N. General Assembly session. Our friends, and we have many, speak almost poignantly of the dynamism, excellence, exuberance and leadership of the nation they had, for so many years, judged themselves against, been inspired by, attempted to emulate, resented.

As for those who are not America’s friends, some seem still confused, even concussed, by the new power shift. What is their exact place in it? Will it last? Will America come roaring back? Can she? Does she have the political will, the human capital, the old capability?

It is a world in a new kind of flux, one that doesn’t know what to make of America anymore. In part because of our president.

“We want American leadership,” said a member of a diplomatic delegation of a major U.S. ally. He said it softly, as if confiding he missed an old friend.

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President Obama: America’s Credibility on the Line in Syria (+video)

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Photo Credit: Washington Examiner

Photo Credit: Washington Examiner

President Barack Obama warned Wednesday that the international community’s credibility — though not his — is at risk if there’s no response to the use of chemical weapons in Syria, though he expects Congress to agree to take military action against Bashar Assad’s regime.

“My credibility is not on the line. The international community’s credibility is on the line,” Obama said at a press conference in Stockholm, Sweden. “And America and Congress’s credibility is on the line.”

Obama’s comments came during a joint appearance with Swedish Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt, ahead of his brief trip to the G20 summit in Russia, where he’s expected to continue pushing for international support for intervention in Syria, even with Russian President Vladimir Putin, who remains allied with Assad.

The president deflected attention from his own role in potential action against Syria as Secretary of State John Kerry and Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel headed into a second day of public and private consultations on Capitol Hill, including an open hearing before the House Foreign Affairs Committee.

Obama said he is confident that Congress will authorize military involvement — and despite some vocal opposition, there were signs Wednesday that the Senate Foreign Relations Committee will pass a Syria resolution.

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America the Trivial

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trivialityTwo quite different 21st-century Americas are emerging. The nation is not so much divided by “wars” between the rich and poor, men and women, or white and non-white. Instead, there is the world of reality versus that of triviality.

In the vast plains of the Dakotas and the American West, thousands of men and women of all classes and colors are fracking oil and gas to create new energy for millions of homeowners and commuters — while giving America a second chance at strategic energy independence.

Yet the beneficiaries mostly ignore these elemental efforts. They instead prefer to fixate on the alleged sexual creepiness of big-city political mediocrities like Bob Filner and Anthony Weiner.

As we sleep, 7,000 miles away there are still thousands of American soldiers of all races, ages, classes, and genders in godforsaken conditions fighting the Taliban to allow millions in Afghanistan the chance for an alternative to medieval theocracy and to deter terrorists.

Meanwhile, back home, the nation is focused not on such existential struggles but is transfixed by racial melodramas.

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Which Nations Hate The U.S.? Often Those Receiving U.S. Aid

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Photo Credit: Gianluigi Guercia/AFP/Getty ImagesTo figure out which countries dislike the U.S., one quick way is to simply look at which ones are getting the largest dollops of U.S. aid.

This wasn’t the focus of a recent survey by the Pew Research Center. But it did emerge when Pew spoke to people in 39 countries about the U.S. and China, asking respondents if they had a favorable view of these two countries.

Overall, the U.S. fared better than China. Worldwide, 63 percent said they had a positive view of the U.S., compared with only 50 percent who said the same of China.

This general trend was true in every region except in the Middle East. There, animosity toward the U.S. runs high, and the countries getting the most American assistance also tended to be some of the most antagonistic toward the U.S.

— In Egypt, which gets $1.5 billion a year from the U.S., only 16 percent had a positive view of the U.S. We should note the Pew survey was taken this past spring, before the recent upheaval in Egypt that has unleashed a wave of anti-American invective that may well have pushed that approval rating even lower.

Read more from this story HERE.