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Court: White House Visitor Logs for Obama and Most of His Staff are Confidential

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Photo Credit: AP

Photo Credit: AP

A federal appeals court ruled Friday that White House visitor logs for the president and most of his staff are not public information subject to disclosure requirements of the Freedom of Information Act.

The 3-0 decision would keep the visitor records confidential for up to 12 years after President Barack Obama leaves office.

The appeals court ruling dealt a defeat to a private group that asked the Secret Service for all White House visitor logs from Obama’s first seven months in office.

“Congress made clear that it did not want documents like the appointment calendars of the president and his close advisers to be subject to disclosure” under the Freedom of Information Act, wrote Merrick Garland, chief judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit.

Judicial Watch, a conservative-oriented watchdog group that sued in an effort to get the records, said it is considering an appeal.

Read more from this story HERE.

White House: Social Media Helped Prove Chemical Attack in Syria

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Photo Credit: AP

Photo Credit: AP

By Susan Ferrechio

Social media helped American intelligence officials determine that Syrian President Bashar Assad’s regime carried out a deadly nerve gas attack on its citizens earlier this month, top White House aides said Friday, but some members of Congress remain wary of the U.S. launching a retaliatory strike.

The Obama administration, working to build a case for a potential military attack against the Assad regime, released a four-page, unclassified assessment that concluded that the Syrian government used chemical weapons in an attack on twelve neighborhoods in the Damascus suburbs, killing 1,429 people, including at least 426 children.

The assessment outlines the case against Assad, saying the August 21 attack began in the early morning hours when the regime began firing rockets and artillery at the 12 neighborhoods, all of them either controlled by the Assad opposition or contested by the two sides.

Intelligence on the ground and satellite images prove the rockets were fired into the neighborhoods from Assad-controlled areas, White House aides said Friday.

Reports of nerve gas in the area began surfacing on social media around 2:30 a.m. local times, shortly after the gas struck.

Read more from this story HERE.

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Photo Credit: AP

Photo Credit: AP

Obama: US has an ‘obligation’ to act against Syria

By Susan Crabtree

President Obama said Friday that the U.S. has an obligation as a world leader to hold the government of Syrian President Bashar Assad accountable for the deadly chemical attack in Syria last week.

“I have said before and I meant what I said, the world has an obligation” to take action against the use of chemical weapons, Obama said.

Obama, however, repeatedly stressed that he had yet to make a decision about what type of military response the U.S. would take, although he said any strike would be a “limited, narrow act” and would not involve “boots on the ground.”

“We’re not considering any open-ended commitment,” he told reporters after a meeting with leaders of Estonia and Latvia, noting that he wished that the international community had already acted.

Read more from this story HERE.

Members of ’72 Dolphins Refuse White House Invite, “Diametrically Opposed” to Obama

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Photo Credit: USATSI

Photo Credit: USATSI

Good news: On Tuesday, the White House will honor the 1972 Dolphins, the NFL’s last undefeated team, because, really, that group doesn’t get enough attention.

Bad news: At least three members of the ’72 squad won’t attend the ceremony in the nation’s capital because they oppose the views of President Barack Obama.

“We’ve got some real moral compass issues in Washington,” Hall of Fame center Jim Langer told the Sun-Sentinel’s David Hyde. “I don’t want to be in a room with those people and pretend I’m having a good time. I can’t do that. If that [angers] people, so be it.”

“I’ll just say my views are diametrically opposed to the President’s,” Manny Fernandez said. “Enough said. Let’s leave it at that. I hope everyone enjoys the trip who goes.”

Read more from this story HERE.

Heritage Foundation: WH ‘Flouting the Law’ with Obamacare Subsidies for Congress

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Photo Credit: BreitbartPolitico reported that the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) will issue a ruling next week that will allow the federal government to subsidize the insurance plans Congressmen and their aides will be forced to buy on government healthcare exchanges due to Obamacare.

The news came just hours after the Heritage Foundation released an embargoed study to reporters that found there was no legal way for the administration to offer subsidies for Members of Congress and their aides without passing a legislative “fix.”

The Obama administration may have tried to preempt the release of that study; one of the study’s co-authors insisted to Breitbart News on Friday that no matter how creative the Obama administration gets, there does not seem to be a legal manner in which the federal government can grant the Obamacare subsidies.

Ed Haislmaier and Robert E. Moffitt, both of whom are Senior Research Fellows in the Center for Health Policy Studies at The Heritage Foundation, and Joseph A. Morris, an attorney in private practice who served as General Counsel of the U.S. Office of Personnel Management from 1981 to 1985, co-authored the study, titled, “Congress in the Obamacare Trap: No Easy Escape.”

Haislmaier emphasized to Breitbart News that “we don’t see a legal avenue, no matter how creative, for them.”

Read more from this story HERE.

Kerry Screws Up, Mistakenly Promises Pakistan to End Drone Strikes

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Photo Credit: Center for American Progress Action FundThe Obama administration was forced into damage control on Thursday as officials attempted to walk back Secretary of State John Kerry’s pledge to end armed drone operations in Pakistan.

During a diplomatic visit to Pakistan on Thursday, Kerry told Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif that Washington plans to severely curtail and eventually end armed drone operations in the country.

The move was geared toward an overall effort by the Obama administration to forge “a real partnership” between the White House and Islamabad, Kerry told reporters after his meeting with Sharif.

“I think the [drone] program will end as we have eliminated most of the threat and continue to eliminate it,” Kerry said in an interview with Pakistani television…

The Obama administration reacted quickly to Kerry’s comments, saying his statements did not reflect a coming change in the use of armed drones against terrorist targets or overall U.S. counterterrorism policy.

Read more from this story HERE.

White House Now Calling Benghazi Phony Scandal

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Photo Credit: APThe White House said bluntly Wednesday that it considers the controversy over the Benghazi attack to be among the so-called “phony scandals” that President Obama has been complaining about in recent speeches — even as new questions were being raised about the lack of progress in the investigation.

Press Secretary Jay Carney was asked at the daily briefing about Obama’s repeated claim — which he asserted most recently during a speech in Tennessee on Tuesday — that Washington is getting distracted by phony scandals. Asked what the president was referring to, Carney listed the scandals over the IRS targeting of conservative groups and over Benghazi.

“What we’ve seen, as time has passed and more facts have become known, whether it’s about the attacks in Benghazi and the talking points or revelations about conduct at the IRS, that attempts to turn this into a scandal have failed,” Carney said.

Carney was specifically referring to claims by GOP lawmakers that the administration misled the public about the nature of the attack, by stressing the connection to an anti-Islam film. The administration denies this. But lawmakers continue to have concerns that extend far beyond the so-called Benghazi talking points.

Read more from this story HERE.

Two Americans Added to Food Stamp Rolls for Every Job Created

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Photo Credit: WonderlaneWhite House Press Secretary Jay Carney said yesterday that the Obama administration has pulled the nation from the depths of the “Great Recession” with the creation of 7.2 million private sector jobs.

“And what is absolutely true is that we have come a long way since the depths of the Great Recession. We’ve created over 7.2 million private sector jobs,” Carney told reporters at a press briefing.

Here’s what Mr. Carney didn’t say:

Since February of 2009, the first full month of Obama’s presidency, 9.5 million Americans have dropped out of the labor force. Nearly 90 million Americans are not working today!

Read more from this story HERE.

Book: Jimmy Carter Targeted by US and Foreign Assassins

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Photo Credit: qtschlepperPotential assassins have threatened the life of Jimmy Carter multiple times since he left the White House in 1981, making the one-term Georgian the most threatened former president in history, according to a new book about John F. Kennedy and his assassination 50 years ago.

In “The Kennedy Half Century: The Presidency, Assassination, and Lasting Legacy of John F. Kennedy,” Carter told author Larry J. Sabato that he has faced at least three home-grown assassination attempts since returning to Georgia and is constantly warned by the U.S. Secret Service of personal threats during his frequent overseas travel.

“I have had two or three threats to my life after I came home from the White House,” Carter said in the highly-anticipated book due out October 22. “When I go on an overseas trip almost invariably, I get a report from the Secret Service that where I’m going is very dangerous,” he added in the book provided in advance to Secrets.

Read more from this story HERE.

Obama Takes Over White House Press Briefing to School the Nation On Trayvon Martin and Racism (+video)

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Photo Credit: globalgrind.comObama Takes Over White House Press Briefing To Speak On Trayvon Martin

By Jennifer Bendery. President Barack Obama made an unexpected appearance at Friday’s White House press briefing to talk about the outcome of the Trayvon Martin case and, more broadly, how the United States continues to grapple with racial bias.

“When Trayvon Martin was first shot, I said that this could have been my son. Another way of saying that is, Trayvon Martin could have been me 35 years ago,” Obama said.

Obama said he understands why people are so upset that George Zimmerman was found not guilty for shooting and killing Martin, an unarmed teen who was walking down the street in Sanford, Fla., in February 2012. Zimmerman, a neighborhood watchman, pursued Martin for no clear reason and ultimately shot him in what he said was self-defense. Read more from this story HERE.

Here’s a full video of Obama’s remarks:

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Obama Says that the Disproportionate Criminal Conduct of Black Young Men is an “Excuse” for Treating Them Differently

By Neil Munro. President Barack Obama took the White House podium Friday [and] acknowledged that African-American males have a higher-than-average crime rate, shortly before he dismissed the data as an “excuse” for treating black youths differently.

“Now, this isn’t to say that the African-American community is naive about the fact that African-American young men are disproportionately involved in the criminal justice system, that they are disproportionately both victims and perpetrators of violence,” he said.

He immediately suggested that Americans should ignore the data. ”The fact that a lot of African-American boys are painted with a broad brush and the excuse is given, well, there are these statistics out there that show that African-American boys are more violent — using that as an excuse to then see sons treated differently causes pain,” he said.

A November 2011 report by the Justice Department said that young African-American men comprise only 1 percent of the population, but commit 27 percent of the murders. Read more from this story HERE.

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Obama Calls For Review Of ‘Stand Your Ground’ Laws After Trayvon Martin Verdict

By Amanda Terkel. President Barack Obama is calling for a review of the controversial Stand Your Ground laws that were at the heart of the killing of Trayvon Martin.

“I think it would be useful for us to examine some state and local laws to see if it — if they are designed in such a way that they may encourage the kinds of altercations and confrontations and tragedies that we saw in the Florida case, rather than defuse potential altercations,” Obama told reporters in a surprise press conference at the White House on Friday.

Florida was the first state in the nation to pass a law that allows an individual who feels threatened to “stand his or her ground and meet force with force, including deadly force.” There are now about 30 states with such statutes. Read more from this story HERE.

Unanswered Questions Plague Seal Team 6 Losses

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Photo Credit: WNDEveryone knows about the U.S. military’s SEAL Team Six and its involvement in the Pakistan raid that left terror leader Osama bin Laden dead – heck, Hollywood made a movie about the members after the Obama administration reportedly dished out classified information to those working on the production.

But there are many, many questions that remain unanswered about the brave Navy SEAL team members who put on the boots and weaponry and defended America and how they may have been used as political pawns in a White House campaign to “reach out and coddle Islamist fundamentalists.”

The new case has been launched by FreedomWatch’s Larry Klayman, whose complaint is on behalf of several families of Navy SEAL Team members who died when their helicopter was shot down by Taliban jihadists on Aug. 6, 2011, in Afghanistan…

Defendants in the case are Vice President Joe Biden and Defense Secretary Leon Panetta, who are accused of disclosing classified information about the team’s success in Pakistan and putting a “target on the backs” of the heroes and their families.

“Predictably, the Taliban retaliated by blasting the helicopter out of the air and killing all on board,” FreedomWatch said in its announcement about the case.

Read more from this story HERE.