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Monuments and Memorials Remained Open During Previous Shutdowns

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Photo Credit: Daily Caller

Photo Credit: Daily Caller

Although President Obama claims that he can’t avoid shutting down public sites and monuments, war memorials were in fact kept open during the 1995/1996 government shutdowns. The administration’s decision to barricade the Lincoln Memorial marks the first time in its history the memorial has been totally off limits to visitors during a shutdown.

The administration has also balked at efforts by non-governmental groups to maintain access to public sites.

But during the Clinton-era shutdown, World War II veterans kept the Pearl Harbor memorial open.

“Despite the federal government shutdown and an unrepaired sign that reads ‘Arizona Memorial closed,’ tourists are still getting expert commentary about the World War II memorial at Pearl Harbor,” wrote the Associated Press on January 1, 1996.

“It’s our way of helping to preserve the history of this place,” Bob Kinzler, president of the Aloha Chapter of the Pearl Harbor Survivors, told the AP.

Read more from this story HERE.

Iran Military Official: Obama has Surrendered

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Photo Credit: WND

Photo Credit: WND

President Obama’s statement to the United Nations last week that America is not seeking regime change in Iran is not merely a kind remark, but a recognition of U.S. inability to bring change to Iran, the head of Iran’s Quds Forces, Gen. Qasem Soleimani, said.

Joining in that view, an outlet of the Quds cyber forces officers posted an image of a surrendering Obama in military uniform under the title “In a not too distant future.”

The image has Soleimani on top overlooking the defeat of America with a note at the bottom: “One Qasem Soleimani is enough for all the enemies of this country (Iran).”

That claim was underscored this week by Seyed Hossein Naqavi Hosseini, a member of Parliament’s National Security and Foreign Policy Commission, who said that while “Iran complies with the Non-Proliferation Treaty rules and regulations and cooperates within that framework, it will never accept the Additional Protocol.”

That protocol allows the IAEA to verify whether countries are complying with nuclear regulations.

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No Go: Boehner says Obama Still Won’t Negotiate on Government Funding

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Photo Credit: Manuel Balce Ceneta

Photo Credit: Manuel Balce Ceneta

Congressional leaders emerged Wednesday night from a meeting with President Obama at the White House reporting little progress as all sides struggle for a solution to the government shutdown, which began Tuesday and showed no signs of breaking.

At the Capitol, the House continued to try to chip away at the problem by passing bills to fund high-profile programs such as national parks and the National Institutes of Health. But Mr. Obama has vowed to veto those bills, saying he won’t fund the government piece by piece.

Instead, Democrats held firm on their insistence that Republicans pass the Senate’s version of a spending bill that would fund the entire government at last year’s levels, and would preserve Mr. Obama’s health care law.

“They will not negotiate,” House Speaker John A. Boehner, Ohio Republican, told reporters after the meeting.

Although both sides said they didn’t want a shutdown, congressional aides were predicting that the fight could last for weeks. Mr. Obama canceled part of a trip to Asia, scheduled to begin this weekend, to keep working on the issue.

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Obama Sued for ‘Illegal’ ObamaCare Move: Impermissibly Changing Law

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Photo Credit: WND

Photo Credit: WND

Another lawsuit has been filed against the president’s health care takeover strategy – this time by a Florida company complaining that Barack Obama had no authority to simply go in and change the law once it had been approved by Congress and signed.

It was last July, according to reports, that Obama simply announced he was changing the law, which had scheduled a requirement for employers to provide adequate and affordable health insurance starting Jan. 1, 2014, or pay huge fines.

Obama, responding to complaints from businesses, simply changed the effective date of that requirement to Jan. 1, 2015, strategically after the 2014 elections.

Obamacare already has been the subject of dozens of lawsuits, and the U.S. Supreme Court last year ruled that it is a tax, and therefore constitutional, even thought he Obama administration had argued it wasn’t a tax.

There is another case now heading toward the U.S. Supreme Court, too, that could end up with critical sections being determined to be illegal.

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Obama Ignores Law, Waives Ban on Aiding Regimes that Use Child Soldiers

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Photo Credit: AP

Photo Credit: AP

President Obama determined that it is once again in the national interest of the United States to waive a provision of a law against aiding regimes that use child soldiers to provide non-lethal assistance and peace-keeping support to several African countries.

By law, the president has to notify Congress that he is waiving the Child Soldiers Prevention Act of 2008 within 45 days of making the decision. Obama’s press team published the presidential determination on Monday afternoon, with Congress on the eve of a government shutdown.

The Child Soldiers Prevention Act waiver applies fully to Chad, South Sudan and Yemen. Congo and Somalia received partial waivers.

Obama first waived the provision in 2010. Samantha Power, then the National Security Council senior director for multilateral affairs and human rights, promised “at the time that the waivers would not become a recurring event,” as The Cable recalled.

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Ten States where Obamacare Wipes out Existing Health Care Plans (+video)

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Photo Credit: Daily Caller

Photo Credit: Daily Caller

President Barack Obama famously promised, “If you like your health care plan, you can keep your health care plan.” He later got even more specific.

“If you are among the hundreds of millions of Americans who already have health insurance through your job, or Medicare, or Medicaid, or the VA, nothing in this plan will require you or your employer to change the coverage or the doctor you have,” Obama said.

But as Obamacare’s rollout approaches, we have learned this is not true. Here are the ten states where consumers may like their health care plans, but they won’t be able to keep them.

1) California: 58,000 will lose their plans under Obamacare. The first bomb dropped in California with a mass exodus from the most populated state’s Obamacare exchange. Aetna, the country’s third largest insurer, left first in July and was closely followed by UnitedHealth. Anthem Blue Cross pulled out of California’s Obamacare exchange for small businesses as well.

Fifty-four percent of Californians expect to lose their coverage, according to an August poll.

Read more from this story HERE.

Obama: Republicans Would Own Government Shutdown

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Photo Credit: AP

Photo Credit: AP

President Obama on Friday pushed Republicans to pass a spending bill and warned that he would not give in to their demands to defund Obamacare as Washington careened closer to a shutdown.

“If Congress chooses not to pass a budget by Monday, they will shut down the government,” Obama told reporters at a hastily-arranged press conference from the White House briefing room.

Obama said blame for a shutdown would rest solely on Republicans whom he accused of undermining the recovery because they “can’t get their way.”

The White House and Congress are facing an Oct. 1 deadline to keep the government funded and have achieved scant progress on a compromise thus far. In addition to the government-shutdown fight, leaders are up against an Oct. 17 deadline to increase the nation’s borrowing limit.

Conservatives are using the fiscal fights to try to block Obama’s healthcare reform law. Last week the House GOP passed a short-term spending bill that defunded Obamacare.

Read more from this story HERE.

Will Obama Fall for Iranian President’s Deception?

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Photo Credit: AP

Photo Credit: AP

He’s been portrayed by the mainstream media as the anti-Ahmadenijad—a pragmatic moderate who’s set to strike a grand bargain with the United States and save the world from a looming military showdown over Iran’s nuclear weapons program.

But as Iranian president Hassan Rowhani takes center stage at the U.N. General Assembly this week, full of reassuring smiles and promises of peace, the Obama administration would be wise to keep a peculiar-sounding Arabic word in mind.

That word is taqiyya (pronounced ta-kee-ah). Translated into English, it means “deception.”

Taqiyya has long been a favorite tactic utilized by radical Shia Islamists—like those that comprise the current Iranian regime—to confound their enemies and lull them into a false sense of security, even complacency.

If President Obama ends up meeting with Rowhani on Tuesday when both men speak before the General Assembly (an encounter White House officials have hinted may take place), expect nothing less than a full-on taqiyya-fest.

Read more from this story HERE.

Obama Has Dismantled America

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Photo Credit: AP

Photo Credit: AP

Does the extinguished candle care about the darkness? Ask the huddled masses who are yearning to be free. America was once thought of as a light unto nations. Obama has single-handedly extinguished that light.

I saw it all coming. In my 2010 book The Post-American Presidency: The Obama Administration’s War on America, I noted that one student who was interviewed after an Obama town hall meeting during his first presidential trip to Europe in 2009 said happily: “He sounds just like a European.” That is, not like an American president who loves his country. And he doesn’t: asked during that visit to Europe about American exceptionalism, Obama answered: “I believe in American exceptionalism, just as I suspect the Brits believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism.”

In other words, he didn’t believe in American exceptionalism at all. In a seminal moment for modern historians and active political observers like myself, a snapshot came across the newswires in May 2008, showing candidate Obama crossing an airplane tarmac, mid-gait, and holding Fareed Zakaria’s American epitaph, The Post-American World. In the photo, Obama is holding his place in the book with his finger, as if he didn’t dare put it down and wanted to dive back into it as soon as he could.

The vicious Zakaria describes his book this way: “This is not a book about the decline of America, but rather about the rise of everyone else.” In it, he details the era he hopes we are entering now — a world in which the United States would “no longer dominate the global economy, orchestrate geopolitics, or overwhelm cultures.” He asserts that the “rise of the rest” is the “great story of our time, and one that will reshape the world. The tallest buildings, biggest dams, largest-selling movies, and most advanced cell phones are all being built outside the United States. This economic growth is producing political confidence, national pride, and potentially international problems.”

Obama seems bound and determined to drive America over a cliff and make Zakaria’s vision of the future a self-fulfilling prophecy. Obama went to work from his first day in office to make Zakaria’s wishful thinking about America’s decline a reality. As the most powerful man in the world, he would level the playing field, even if it meant cutting America off at the knees. Good and evil would be made equivalent, with evil sanctioned by the world’s only remaining superpower. He turned against our allies (particularly Israel) and showed them that America could not be relied on. He taxed us into poverty and stirred up racial strife to make us all less safe. He has enabled Russia to re-emerge as a world power, and the Islamic jihadists are bolder than ever.

Read more from this story HERE.

Obama Invokes Daughters As He Talks Up ‘Contraceptive Care’ (+video)

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Photo Credit: AP

Photo Credit: AP

Repeating his new talking point about the Affordable care act, President Obama mentioned his own daughters on Thursday as he made the point that the new health care law offers free preventive care, including contraception.

“Let’s say — let’s say you’re a young woman — I’m interested in this because I’ve got two daughters, right? Let’s say you just turned 26. Let’s say you can’t stay on your parents’ plan anymore. If you buy health care through the marketplace, your plan has to cover free checkups, flu shots, contraceptive care — so you might end up getting more health care each month than you’re paying for the premiums,” Obama said.

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