This is an abomination. RT @jpodhoretz: Oh my God. http://t.co/tQA7MgLqLX
— Melissa Clouthier (@MelissaTweets) October 11, 2013
Check out the wonderful @StaceyPoole1 from Portugal! pic.twitter.com/xecmyhZvcU
— Damien Morley (@damienmorley) October 5, 2013
5 things you need to know about Sara Malakul Lane, this month's Would Wife - http://t.co/SCKRIs1Yx7 pic.twitter.com/j8gUo5gpAF
— FHM UK (@FHM) October 11, 2013
The Texas senator wasn't able to give a cogent speech because of outbursts of protesters. But the crowd loved it.
When Obama called Afghanistan a "war of necessity" the US had to win, did you think he was serious? http://t.co/Qz4VjuY4ec
— Jeff Jacoby (@Jeff_Jacoby) October 11, 2013
During a testy video conference in June, President Obama drew a line in the sand for Afghan President Hamid Karzai. If there was no agreement by Oct. 31 on the terms for keeping a residual U.S. military presence in Afghanistan, Obama warned him, the United States would withdraw all of its troops at the end of 2014.Right. A "fading priority." This was the "good war" that Obama campaigned for in 2007, as the most antiwar presidential candidate in the Democrat-Treason Party.
With that deadline less than three weeks away and deep rifts persisting, the White House appears increasingly willing to abandon plans for a long-term, costly partnership with Afghanistan. Despite the Pentagon’s pleas for patience, much of the rest of the administration is fed up with Karzai and sees Afghanistan as a fading priority amid far more ominous threats elsewhere in the world.
The Obama administration insisted Tuesday it had no choice but to withhold death benefits to relatives of 1st Lt. Jennifer Moreno, a 25-year-old soldier born and raised in San Diego, and four other soldiers killed since the partial government shutdown began Oct. 1.Obama loves inflicting as much pain as possible on innocent bystanders for political gain. He is truly depraved. And personally reviled by legions of patriotic Americans. 2016 can't come to soon.
This is ridiculous and perverse. President Barack Obama has used an expansive — and some legal scholars believe extreme — interpretation of his powers to unilaterally rewrite key provisions of the No Child Left Behind law, the sweeping 2002 measure that drastically reshaped federal education policies. In similar fashion, the president has unilaterally rewritten key provisions of the Affordable Care Act, his sweeping 2010 measure that is drastically reshaping federal public health policies. His administration has also essentially rewritten federal laws governing illegal immigration and penalties for drug possession.
Just this month, the federal government has authorized the spending of billions of dollars since the partial shutdown began without explicit congressional approval. Contrary to the Obama administration’s representations, there are not hard, definitive rules governing how the executive branch must act during these budget fights. That is reflected in the amazingly arbitrary ways that the federal government has shuttered some services and agencies but not others — often with the barely hidden goal of making people suffer to build pressure on House Republicans to give in to the White House. For one of hundreds of examples, the Armed Forces Network serving U.S. military personnel abroad still shows news — but it has stopped showing NFL games, blaming the shutdown.
This is obnoxious enough. In denying death benefits to the relatives of fallen U.S. soldiers, however, the Obama administration has broken new ground in its budget theater. This decision is accurately described as depraved.
White House press secretary Jay Carney said Wednesday that the president was prepared to act unilaterally to resolve the problem. But Carney also insisted the denial of death benefits was House Republicans’ fault. Those claims are not mutually sustainable.
Soon afterward, the White House announced that the Fisher House Foundation — a private organization that helps veterans in need — would provide the death benefits and be reimbursed after the partial shutdown. At about the same time Wednesday, the House voted unanimously to authorize paying survivor benefits. Thankfully, this problem is going to be solved, one way or the other.
But the outrage should remain. On Wednesday, CNN reported that on Sept. 27, days before the shutdown began, the Pentagon was already telling reporters it planned to suspend death benefits.
So for two weeks, the Obama administration has been anticipating this nightmare would come to pass — and did nothing to pre-empt it.
Cindy Vinson and Tom Waschura are big believers in the Affordable Care Act. They vote independent and are proud to say they helped elect and re-elect President Barack Obama.And ICYMI, be sure to watch the CBS News report from yesterday, "CBS News Issues Devastating Report on #ObamaCare Failure: System Needs 'Heart Transplant'."
Yet, like many other Bay Area residents who pay for their own medical insurance, they were floored last week when they opened their bills: Their policies were being replaced with pricier plans that conform to all the requirements of the new health care law.
Vinson, of San Jose, will pay $1,800 more a year for an individual policy, while Waschura, of Portola Valley, will cough up almost $10,000 more for insurance for his family of four.
"Welcome to the club," said Robert Laszewksi, a prominent health care consultant and president of Health Policy and Strategy Associates in Virginia.
For years, the nation has been embroiled in the political rhetoric of "Obamacare," but this past week the reality of the new law sank in as millions of Americans had their first good look at how the 3 1/2-year-old legislation will affect their pocketbooks.
This much quickly became clear:
As state- and federal-run health insurance exchanges debuted across the country offering a range of prices for different tiers of insurance coverage, the new online marketplaces -- which represent the centerpiece of Obamacare -- could greatly benefit more than 40 million Americans who now lack coverage. But an additional 16 million -- who buy individual health insurance policies on the open market -- are finding out that their plans may not comply with the new law, which requires 10 essential benefits such as maternity care, mental health care and prescription drug coverage.
In California, 1.9 million people buy plans on the open market, according to officials with Covered California, the state's new health insurance exchange. And many of them are steaming mad.
"There's going to be a number of people surprised" by their bills, said Jonathan Wu, a co-founder of ValuePenguin, a consumer finance website. "The upper-middle class are the people who are essentially being asked to foot the bill, and that's true across the country"....
Even those who don't qualify for the tax subsidies could see their rates drop because Obamacare doesn't allow insurers to charge people more if they have pre-existing conditions such as diabetes and cancer, he said.
People like Marilynn Gray-Raine.
The 64-year-old Danville artist, who survived breast cancer, has purchased health insurance for herself for decades. She watched her Anthem Blue Cross monthly premiums rise from $317 in 2005 to $1,298 in 2013. But she found out last week from the Covered California site that her payments will drop to about $795 a month.
But people with no pre-existing conditions like Vinson, a 60-year-old retired teacher, and Waschura, a 52-year-old self-employed engineer, are making up the difference.
"I was laughing at Boehner -- until the mail came today," Waschura said, referring to House Speaker John Boehner, who is leading the Republican charge to defund Obamacare.
"I really don't like the Republican tactics, but at least now I can understand why they are so pissed about this. When you take $10,000 out of my family's pocket each year, that's otherwise disposable income or retirement savings that will not be going into our local economy."
Both Vinson and Waschura have adjusted gross incomes greater than four times the federal poverty level -- the cutoff for a tax credit. And while both said they anticipated their rates would go up, they didn't realize they would rise so much.
"Of course, I want people to have health care," Vinson said. "I just didn't realize I would be the one who was going to pay for it personally."
When President Obama declared that Syrian dictator Bashar Assad must "step aside" two years ago, many believed that it was only a matter of time before the U.S. intervened on behalf of the rebels battling the regime. Now that seems increasingly out of the question. The growing power of hard-core Islamic radicals among the rebels has made the White House, and many in Congress, look upon the Syrian opposition with little enthusiasm. Instead, Washington focuses on the charade of trying to relieve Assad of his chemical weapons, as if that will have any effect on the civil war.Continue reading at the top click-through.
America ignores the rebels at its peril. Yet on the left and right, anti-interventionists argue against American airstrikes, or any serious military aid, because such assistance would abet al Qaeda-linked jihadists. Perhaps what these anti-interventionists don't realize is that the president and Congress may have already done their part to create the most deadly Islamic movement since the Taliban merged with al Qaeda in the 1990s.
Social order in the Muslim world depends, as it so often does elsewhere, on older men keeping younger men in check. In Afghanistan in the 1990s, the Taliban's medieval mores—a zealously crude form of village Pashtun ethics—gained the high ground because older men and their moderating social structures had been obliterated over three decades by Afghan communists, Soviets and civil war.
Urban culture—the core of Islamic civilization—was wiped out. The elites of the country's primary ethnic groups, who had been based in the bustling, literate, Persian-speaking culture of Kabul, went into exile or became brutal warriors. Heartless men bred by battle embraced Osama bin Laden, a Saudi-born Sunni militant. Bin Laden's vision of jihad against the United States easily melded into the Taliban's localized jihad against Ahmad Shah Masoud, the Sunni Tajik commander who formed the Northern Alliance and kept the Taliban from conquering all of Afghanistan.
To be sure, Syrian Sunni culture is vastly more cosmopolitan and urbanized than Afghan Sunni culture. Syria is where Arab Bedouins first became polished men of arts and letters and transformed Byzantine architecture into a Muslim motif that defined Islamic elegance for centuries. But the shocking satellite photos of a constantly bombarded Aleppo, the center of Sunni Syria since the 10th century, ought to warn us how quickly society can be transformed—no matter how sophisticated.
Though Arab Syrian nationalism is more solid now than when it was born 90 years ago, it isn't nearly as deep as Syrians' Muslim identity. And in times of tumult in the Middle East, Islam—and the ancient divide between Sunnis and Shiites—comes to the fore. Shatter Syria into fragments, and radical Islamists who appeal to a higher calling, just as they did in Afghanistan, are guaranteed to attract young men who yearn for a mission beyond their destroyed towns and villages. There may be as many as 1,000 Sunni rebel groups scattered across Syria, stocked with such fighters.
The Taliban played on tribal sentiments while always appealing to a post-tribal, Muslim conception of state. The Islamist fighters in Syria appear to be following the Taliban's playbook. Loyalty among these men isn't ultimately based on family, tribe, town or even country, but on the supremely fraternal act of holy war.
We don't know what the recuperative power is for Sunni Syrian society. We do know that whatever the power is now, it will be much reduced in six months. If Assad's manpower reserves can hold out for another year and a half or two years, Syrian Sunni society could be beyond help.
In such a Hobbesian world, radical Sunni groups that promise "stability"—of security, home and private property—could win over a popular base that would be very difficult to dislodge. This was how the Taliban were initially welcomed into Pashtun towns that were shellshocked by war...
We spend a full five hours and 16 minutes a day in front of a screen, and that's without even turning on a television.Continue reading.
So says a statistic from eMarketer, a research firm that focuses on digital media and marketing. It says that for the first time we are devoting more attention each day to smartphones, computers and tablets. All of which points to a big question: What counts as TV-watching today?
We are actually watching more television programming, just from a growing range of devices and platforms, say digital and television executives, as well as academics and statisticians. Traditional TV or cable-network fare is now available online, via streaming services like Netflix or for sale to be watched on mobile phones and tablets.
The report says that adults are watching their televisions slightly less—with a daily intake of four hours and 31 minutes this year, seven minutes less than in 2012.
The increase in mobile devices and the multitasking they allow, plus the trend toward watching TV shows on devices other than televisions, is driving the changes measured in the report, says Clark Fredricksen, a spokesman for eMarketer. The study, which came out in August, is conducted twice annually.
The company says its numbers reflect raw data and studies of consumer media behavior from sources such as companies that measure TV ratings and online traffic, social networking platforms, gadget retailers, software manufacturers and government records.
Although Americans are gravitating toward digital platforms and social networks, "in many cases, what's popular comes from the large entertainment companies," says James Webster, a professor who studies audience measurement and behavior at Northwestern University. He points to a recent video that looks homemade and shows a woman failing badly at the twerking dance move.
After the video exploded on YouTube—it has been viewed more than 13 million times—ABC late night host Jimmy Kimmel announced that his team had produced the short.
Database programmer on Obamacare website: "It's not even ready for beta testing for my book." http://t.co/DJU5NakhQC
— Eddie Scarry (@eScarry) October 9, 2013
A massive cache of stolen top-secret documents published in The Guardian has handed a ‘gift’ to terrorists, the head of MI5 warned last night.
In a blistering attack, Andrew Parker said the publication of confidential files leaked by US fugitive Edward Snowden had caused huge ‘harm’ to the capability of Britain’s intelligence services. Security officials say the exposé amounts to a ‘guide book’, advising terrorists on the best way to avoid detection when plotting an atrocity.
In Whitehall, it is considered to have caused the greatest damage to the Western security apparatus in history. In his first public speech since taking the job earlier this year, Mr Parker said the leaks handed the ‘advantage’ to terrorists and were a ‘gift they need to evade us and strike at will’.
He said there were several thousand Islamist extremists living in the UK who ‘see the British people as a legitimate target’.
The security services were working round the clock to stop the fanatics, but MI5 was now ‘tackling threats on more fronts than ever before’....
Mr Parker said: ‘What we know about the terrorists, and the detail of the capabilities we use against them, together represent our margin of advantage. That margin gives us the prospect of being able to detect their plots and stop them.
‘But that margin is under attack. Reporting from GCHQ is vital to the safety of this country and its citizens.
‘GCHQ intelligence has played a vital role in stopping many of the terrorist plots that MI5 and the police have tackled in the past decade.
‘It causes enormous damage to make public the reach and limits of GCHQ techniques. Such information hands the advantage to the terrorists.
'It is the gift they need to evade us and strike at will. Unfashionable as it might seem, that is why we must keep secrets secret, and why not doing so causes such harm.’
You have to shake your head at the Obama death benefit snit. Beyond the gross immorality of it, it's just plain stupid. #caring
— Kurt Schlichter (@KurtSchlichter) October 9, 2013
China, the biggest foreign creditor of the United States, has waded into the American budget crisis, warning Congress that it must resolve the political impasse over the debt ceiling without further delay.Continue reading.
The Chinese Vice Foreign Minister, Zhu Guangyao, told America’s deadlocked politicians on Monday that “the clock is ticking” and called on them to approve an extension of the national borrowing limit before the federal government is projected to run out of cash on 17 October.
“We ask that the United States earnestly takes steps to resolve in a timely way the political issues around the debt ceiling and prevent a US debt default to ensure the safety of Chinese investments in the United States,” Mr Zhu told reporters in Beijing. “This is the United States’ responsibility,” he added.
The American government entered its seventh day of shutdown on Monday, following the failure of Congress to approve the national budget a week ago. And there was little sign of progress on the still more crucial issue of the fast-approaching “debt ceiling” deadline.
The one-time lawyer and closest confidant of legendary 'Tonight Show' host Johnny Carson has revealed the moment the notoriously mercurial star broke down in tears when he discovered his wife was allegedly cheating on him.RTWT.
Having been roped into breaking and entering the secret Manhattan apartment of Joanne Copeland, Carson's second wife, attorney Henry Bushkin and the entertainer discovered a virtual shrine of photographs to pro-footballer Frank Gifford - confirming Carson's greatest fears.
As Carson began to weep, Bushkin, who was aged only 27 during the clandestine 1970 raid recalls that the multi-millionaire television host's raincoat had fallen open to reveal a .38 revolver in a holster on his hip...
