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US Troops to Syrian Border

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photo credit: CJCS

INCIRLIK AIR BASE, TURKEY — The United States authorized on Friday the deployment of 400 troops for two Patriot missile-defense batteries along Turkey’s border with Syria, a move that could put American forces near the front lines of the Arab country’s escalating civil war.

Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta signed the order authorizing the deployment of the batteries Friday morning while flying from Kabul to this military base in southern Turkey.

Speaking to U.S. airmen inside a hangar, Panetta said the crisis in Syria has made this base, roughly 60 miles from Syria, and others in the region exceptionally important.

“This is a challenging time, a critical time,” Panetta said. “You are in a critical place doing a critical task.”

Pentagon press secretary George Little told reporters the U.S. troops operating the Patriots will be tasked with a defensive mission only. The surface-to-air missiles could technically be used to enforce a no-fly zone over northern Syria, but NATO officials have stressed that they are not gearing up for such a move, which would mark a sharp escalation in the West’s involvement in Syria’s conflict.

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Surrender: McConnell Prepares to Raise the White Flag on Taxes

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Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell is privately signaling that Senate Republicans are open to a strategy that would effectively allow the Bush-era tax rates for high earners to expire in order to avert the year-end fiscal cliff.

At a dinner with lobbyists Thursday night, McConnell disclosed that Senate Republicans were eyeing a so-called “two-bill strategy” increasingly being pushed by lawmakers in both parties, according to multiple sources in the room.

The idea would be to advance two bills, giving each party an opportunity to vote on the approach they favored, but only one would be signed into law: The extension of the Bush-era rates for families who earn less than $250,000 annually.

But House Republicans haven’t bought into this scenario yet, the latest divide between the House and Senate GOP in the already tense negotiations.

Under one possible scenario, the House would take up a Senate-passed bill to extend the Bush-era rates for all but the top 2 percent of wage earners and increase taxes on capital gains and dividends from 15 percent to 20 percent, sending that to President Barack Obama’s desk on the backs of Democratic votes in the House.

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Boehner Is Giving Away The Farm

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photo credit: gage skidmore

House Speaker John Boehner has already conceded the biggest tax increase in history – $800 billion – in negotiations with Barack Obama and Democrats.

But now he is reportedly offering much more than that if the administration will agree to much deeper cuts to entitlement programs.

There are several problems with this that illustrate, again, why it is totally unacceptable for Boehner to remain in the position as the most powerful Republican in Washington.

No. 1: The definition of “cuts” in Washington: Most Americans think of budget cuts as actual money not spent. That is the not the definition Washington uses. Each and every year, spending for entitlements and many other budget line items increases automatically and substantially. When government programs don’t grow as much as they would normally grow, that is considered a “cut” in Washington. Under that definition, even when the budget is growing, in Washingtonese, the politicians say they are “cutting” spending.

No. 2: The only cuts that are really meaningful are those proposed and enacted in the current session of Congress. Most of the “cuts” talked about in these negotiations are phantom cuts Congress will try to impose on future Congresses – something they don’t have the authority and enforcement power to do. That means to have any real impact, the cuts have to be made between January 2013 and January 2015. You have to front load them. Believe me, Obama and the Democrats will never do that.

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Michele Bachmann Says Obama Wants to ‘Lift Up the Islamists’ and Allow Sharia Law in America

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Representative Michele Bachmann has claimed that Barack Obama is determined ‘to lift up the Islamists’ and bow to their ‘ultimate demand’ of imposing Sharia law on America.

In an extraordinary interview at the weekend, the woman who once had high hopes of being the Republican candidate in this year’s presidential election, said that Americans should study Islamist texts just as those worried about fascism pored over Adolf Hitler’s ‘Mein Kampf’ in the 1930s and 1940s.

In an extended on-air conversation with conservative radio hosts Jan Markell and Eric Barger, Bachmann contended that Obama was endangering the United States and Israel by supporting radical Islamists.

‘President Obama, if you look at nearly every decision he has made about this issue, it is to lift up the Islamists and to take down Israel.’

The congresswoman, who won the Republican presidential straw poll in Ames, Iowa, in 2011 and who narrowly won re-election to the House of Representatives last month, said that Americans who are not Islamists will ‘lose their right of speech and expression’ because there was ‘no tolerance for dissent or disagreeing in any way with the goals or the beliefs of the Islamists’.

She said: ‘Not just verbal speech, but written, a cartoon, a painting, whatever it is, if it is in any way construed as being against Islam that is where the confrontation comes from the Islamist world and they want to stop anyone in the world from saying anything negative about Islam.

‘Which means there is only one free speech right and that would belong to the Islamists. Everyone else would lose their right of speech and expression.’

It would be ‘game over’ for America’ if free speech were denied because ‘once you criminalised anti-Islamic speech, anything that we would say that would be critical in any way of anything Islam does would be considered criminalised.’

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Congressman: State Dept Hiding Benghazi Survivors

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Congressman Jason Chaffetz (R- UT) told Breitbart News on Wednesday that he has been “thwarted” by the State Department from seeing any Americans who survived the deadly attack on the U.S. diplomatic mission in Benghazi. Many people forget that there were Americans who survived the Benghazi attack, some of whom were badly injured and are still recovering.

“My understanding is that we still have some people in the hospital. I’d like to visit with them and wish them nothing but the best but the State Department has seen it unfit for me to know who those people are—or even how many there are,” Rep. Chaffetz said. I don’t know who they are. I don’t know where they live. I don’t know what state they’re from. I don’t even know how many there are. It doesn’t seem right to me.

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600 Workers To Be Fired As Controversial Activist Judge Sides With Obama-NLRB And SEIU Strikers

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A Democrat-appointed federal judge with a controversial past and a “weird record of empathy for those accused of sexual crimes involving children” has sided with Barack Obama’s National Labor Relations Board and the Service Employees International Union by ordering a nursing home chain whose SEIU workers are striking to reinstate the strikers. The judge’s decision to side with the NLRB and SEIU will cause more than 600 replacement caregivers’ employment to be terminated.

To make matters worse, among those who will be reinstated will be SEIU strikers who are alleged to have committed acts of sabotage against nursing home residents (including Alzheimer’s patients) when the union struck back in July.

On Tuesday, federal judge Robert N. Chatigny weighed in on a nearly two-year old labor battle between SEIU-affiliated New England Health Care Employees Union, District 1199 and New Jersey-based Healthbridge Management by granting an injunction to temporarily halt to Healthbridge Management’s June implementation of its “last, best and final offer.”

At issue is whether Healthbridge management and the union were, after 19 months of negotiations, at a lawful impasse when the company implemented its final offer in June.

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Welcome to QE4!

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photo credit: dctim1

The actions of the Federal Reserve over the past 4 years exemplify insanity more than anything else in politics. They continue implementing one monetary stimulus policy after another in an attempt to jumpstart the economy, even though they keep failing in that goal. We had QE1,2,3 and Operations Twist 1 and 2. Now the Fed’s Open Market Committee has announced a new monetary stimulus package that can only be described as QE4.

Evidently, the economy was recovering enough for Obama to win reelection, but not enough to end the market distorting, dollar-destroying stimulus from the unelected governors at the Fed. So not only will the Fed continue purchasing $40 billion in mortgage-backed securities per month, they will engage in another round of buying long-term treasuries:

“To support a stronger economic recovery and to help ensure that inflation, over time, is at the rate most consistent with its dual mandate, the Committee will continue purchasing additional agency mortgage-backed securities at a pace of $40 billion per month. The Committee also will purchase longer-term Treasury securities after its program to extend the average maturity of its holdings of Treasury securities is completed at the end of the year, initially at a pace of $45 billion per month. The Committee is maintaining its existing policy of reinvesting principal payments from its holdings of agency debt and agency mortgage-backed securities in agency mortgage-backed securities and, in January, will resume rolling over maturing Treasury securities at auction. Taken together, these actions should maintain downward pressure on longer-term interest rates, support mortgage markets, and help to make broader financial conditions more accommodative.”

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“There Will Be Blood”: Union Violence in the Age of Obama

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photo credit: soulstealer.co.uk

Not so many moons ago, President Obama urged us all to “make sure that we are talking with each other in a way that heals, not a way that wounds.” He Who Heals advocated “a more civil and honest public discourse” in the wake of the January 2011 Tucson massacre. As usual, though, the White House has granted Big Labor bullies a permanent waiver from the lofty edicts it issues to everyone else.

This week, menacing union goons unleashed threats, profanity and punches in Michigan, which is now poised to become a “right-to-work” state. Obama met the initial outbreak of violence with the same response he’s given to every other union outbreak of violence under his reign: dead silence.

On the floor of the Michigan legislature on Tuesday, Democratic state Rep. Douglas Geiss thundered: “We’re going to pass something that will undo 100 years of labor relations, and there will be blood. There will be repercussions!” Geiss referenced the Battle of the Overpass, a violent 1937 incident between the United Auto Workers and corporate security officers for the Ford Motor Company. Dozens of union activists were beaten.

But Geiss wasn’t crying victim. This was clearly a signal to the brass-knuckled Big Labor bosses, whom Obama egged on during his Monday visit to the state. Obama inveighed against right to work with his usual class warfare dog-whistle. The thugs heard it loud and clear.

As the Michigan House voted inside to approve right-to-work legislation allowing workers to choose whether or not to join/fund unions as a condition of employment, protesters outside the state Capitol ambushed a tented information booth sponsored by the pro-right-to-work state chapter of Americans for Prosperity. Angry union mobsters were filmed cursing and screaming just before the attack.

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Fox News Contributor Punched in Face at Pro-Union Protests in Michigan (+video)

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A Fox News contributor was punched in the face during a pro-union protest Tuesday in Michigan, one of a series of confrontations between union demonstrators and opponents on the day the state Legislature approved so-called “right to work” legislation that unions oppose.

Steven Crowder, a conservative comedian and Fox News contributor, had spent the day questioning demonstrators, and video he posted on YouTube showed some of them becoming verbally aggressive, with one telling him, “get the f— out of my face!”

Another protester can be seen later in the video punching Crowder in the face before being restrained by another man.

Crowder later posted photos on his Twitter account showing a chipped tooth and “minor cut on forehead.” He told the website TheBlaze.com that the scuffle started when protesters tried to tear down a tent set up by conservative organization Americans for Prosperity.

“They were trying to tear down the tent and people were trying to pull them off. … And as they did that, a few people tripped,” he told the website. “This guy tripped over a tent peg and then got up and hit me.”

Watch video:

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