EGYPTIAN POL: 'VERY STRONG PERCEPTION' OBAMA BACKS MUSLIM BROTHERHOOD

TIME Magazine reports that Egyptians "remain convinced that President Obama is backing the Muslim Brotherhood and deposed President Mohamed Morsi."

Speaking on August 22, the head of Egypt's Social Democratic Party Mohamed Abou El-Ghar said: "America is losing Egypt... There is a very strong perception that they are supporting the Muslim Brotherhood and they are against other parties."

El-Ghar said this perception began growing when Senator John McCain (R-AZ) met with representatives from the Muslim Brotherhood in February 2012 but would not meet with with representatives from other parties. He said the perception "was furthered" when U.S. Ambassador to Egypt Anne Patterson "criticized Egypt's military" for deposing Morsi in July.

On the day El-Ghar was interviewed, that perception was strengthened when State Department spokesperson Jen Psaki reiterated the Obama administration's call for the release of Morsi.

Psaki said the administration is concerned "about arbitrary arrests" and believes "there should be a process for [Morsi's] release."

Via: Breitbart

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Cokie Roberts: ‘What’s Going on With Voter Rights is Downright Evil’

ANOTHER HACK POSING AS A REPORTER

On This Week With George StephanopoulosSunday morning, Cokie Roberts attacked the GOP’s recent slew of legislation increasing voting restrictions as “downright evil,” and argued that it threatened to undue the progress made since the civil rights movement.

“Having grown up in the deep south in the era of Jim Crow, the difference is dramatic,” Roberts said. “The fact that Andy Young was Mayor of Atlanta and John Lewis is a member of Congress from Georgia, is a great testament to the fact that when you do something like pass a voting rights bill, that it makes a difference.”

“Which is why, at the moment, what’s going on about voting rights, is downright evil,” Roberts continued. “Because it is something that really needs to keep going forward, not backward.”

The Supreme Court recently invalidated key portions of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, allowing a group of mostly southern states to pass legislation increasing requirements for voting without Justice Department approval, laws which many say are intended to keep minorities from voting.

Watch the full clip below, via ABC News:

Via: Mediaite

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Has global warming hit a plateau?

And what would that mean for the threat of catastrophic climate change?

W

hy has the warming trend slowed?
Climatologists aren't sure. What they do know is that the average air temperatures at the earth's surface have risen only about 0.2 degrees Fahrenheit since 1998 — the hottest year of the 20th century — even as humanity has continued to pour vast quantities of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. The world pumped roughly 110 billion tons of CO2 into the air between 2000 and 2010 — about a quarter of the total put there by mankind since the start of the Industrial Revolution. According to the prevailing models of man-made climate change, greenhouse gases heat the planet by trapping solar radiation in the atmosphere that might otherwise radiate into space. So the additional emissions over the past decade should have caused average temperatures to continue to climb as steeply as they did in the 1980s and 1990s. Climate-change skeptics say the plateau in warming proves that the climate isn't as sensitive to greenhouse emissions as scientists claim, and that it would therefore be foolish to adopt costly measures to limit the use of fossil fuels that emit CO2. "There is no problem with global warming," said Ian Plimer, an earth sciences professor at Australia's University of Melbourne. "It stopped in 1998."

Do climate scientists agree?
No. They concede that temperatures haven't risen as rapidly as they did in the previous two decades, but say the world is still getting warmer due to man-made emissions. Despite the plateau in average temperatures, climatologists point out, the 2000s were hotter than the 1990s, and nine of the 10 warmest years on record have occurred since 1998. Overall, the world has warmed by 1.4 degrees Fahrenheit, which sounds modest, but is a tremendous amount of heat for the entire surface of the earth, already causing major melting of the polar ice caps and noticeably more extreme weather throughout the world. Still, that doesn't explain what happened to the "missing heat" — the warmth the last decade's greenhouse gas emissions should have trapped in the atmosphere.

Via: The Week

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Fallin: Obama Speaking on Killing Would Be a ‘Nice Gesture’

The Republican governor of Oklahoma, Mary Fallin, told host Chris Wallace onFox News Sunday that she thought it would be a “nice gesture” for President Obama to comment on the killing of Australian baseball player Chris Lane.

Fallin said she also intends to speak about the killing.

Lane was killed earlier this week by a trio of teenagers while jogging in Duncan, Oklahoma. The town’s police chief says that one of the teens, Michael Jones, claims they did it because they were bored.

Via: National Review Online

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New Illinois gun law requires owners to report missing firearms

Gun owners in Illinois will be required to report missing firearms under a new law signed by Gov. Pat Quinn.

According to the Chicago Tribune, Quinn said the law will make it easier to recover stolen weapons and help ensure that only responsible people buy firearms. The legislation includes a mandatory background check by gun owners of potential buyers of firearms.

The measure passed both chambers of the Illinois General Assembly.

"It's going to help our law enforcement," said Quinn, a Democrat. "It's going to help all of us be safe."

Quinn signed the legislation last Sunday at a South Side Park near when an off-duty Chicago police officer was killed with an illegal firearm in 2010, the paper reported.

Beginning immediately, gun owners whose weapons are lost or stolen will have 72 hours to notify police. And, according to the Tribune, beginning Jan. 1 individual gun owners will have to contact the state police before selling a firearm or prior to a transfer of ownership to ensure that the buyer is permitted to own a gun.

Via: Fox News

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Obama shapes foreign policy from an American cocoon

When two foreign policy experts with quite different perspectives produce interestingly similar analyses of a president's foreign policy, it's usually wise to take notice.

The two authors are Robert Kaplan, chief geopolitical analyst at Stratfor, writing in realclearworld.com, and Elliott Abrams, an appointee in the Reagan and George W. Bush administrations now at the Council on Foreign Relations, writing in the September issue of Commentary.

Kaplan has traveled to trouble distant lands and can be labeled a realist. But he also thinks presidents should have an "overriding vision" of how they want to shape and influence the world.

Policy toward any one nation or region should be shaped "with a larger purpose in mind," he writes. "There must be a specific moral and geographic logic that governs America's approach to the world."

He concedes that Barack Obama's foreign policy "is not at all terrible," but says it lacks this sense of purpose. All he finds is this: "I am not George W. Bush. He started wars. I will end them. I will kill individual terrorists as they crop up. That's all, thank you."

Abrams is usually placed in the neoconservative camp, by admirers as well as critics. But like Kaplan he sees something unusual in Obama's foreign policy. It is, he writes, "strangely self-centered, focused on himself and the United States rather than on the conduct and needs of the nations the United States allies with, engages with or must confront."

He focuses on key Obama foreign policy speeches -- and finds little there there. He notes that Obama called for a "new era of engagement" in his 2009 State of the Union speech.

Via: Washington Examiner

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Cruz presses ahead with defunding ObamaCare, says it will take a 'tsunami' of support

The race to stop ObamaCare before Americans can officially sign up this fall for the government-backed health insurance intensified Sunday with two of the movement’s biggest champions confident they will succeed but acknowledging it will take a “tsunami” of support.

Texas Republican Sen. Ted Cruz, a Tea Party-backed lawmaker at the center of the effort to “defund” ObamaCare, said the fight will play out in the weeks before the Oct. 1 signup date and that success will require a grass-roots effort in which Americans across the country must “demand” their elected officials “do the right thing.”

“This fight is likely to heat up in the month of September,” Cruz told CNN’s “State of the Union." “That's going to be when the battle is engaged.”

Cruz is joining Heritage Action for America, the advocacy arm of the conservative Heritage Foundation think tank, to get lawmakers after they return to Capitol Hill next week to separate out ObamaCare from a temporary spending bill to keep the federal government running, then vote in favor of the spending bill to avoid a politically unpopular government shutdown.

However, he acknowledges Republicans still don’t have the support on Capitol Hill -- 41 members in the Senate or 218 in the House.

Via: Fox News Politics

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ObamaCare: When Socialist Theory Meets Practice

America is lucky to have had two great social theorists: Yogi Berra and Richard Feynman. Had the Democrats heeded their words of wisdom when the issue of ObamaCare arose they'd not be sliding down the slippery slope they greased all by themselves.

Yogi's warning is nice and succinct:

"In theory there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice there is."

Professor Feynman said much the same thing but in a few more words:

"The real question of government versus private enterprise is argued on too philosophical and abstract a basis. Theoretically, planning may be good. But nobody has ever figured out the cause of government stupidity and until they do (and find the cure) all ideal plans will fall into quicksand."

Whichever version you choose, it's clear that Democrat stupidity is at the heart of Obamacare, the entire juggernaut is sliding into quicksand and taking the party down with it as bits of the law become implemented, other bits have been delayed, waived for some buddies, or jettisoned as unworkable by an administration which consistently confuses executive and legislative functions. The Republicans now face a dilemma of how best to save us from the monstrous overreach of this statute without allowing the DeMSM (a coinage expressing the partisan pro-Democrat mass media) to blame them for the onrushing disaster.

Via: American Thinker

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Sunday Show Round Up: Lawmakers Call for Intervention in Syria

Concerns amongst lawmakers and officials escalated in light of robust evidence Bashar al Assad’s forces carried out a chemical attack on civilians earlier this week.

“I think we will respond in a surgical way and I hope the president as soon as we get back to Washington will ask for authorization from Congress to do something in a very surgical and proportional way, something that gets their attention that causes them to understand we’re not going to put up with this kind of activity,” said Sen. Bob Corker (R., Tenn.), ranking member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, during an appearance on Fox News Sunday.

Shortly after the interview, the BBC reported that the Syrian government “agreed to allow UN inspectors to investigate allegations of a suspected chemical weapon attack near Damascus.”

Supporters such as Senator John McCain (R., Ariz.) have increasingly advocated for some form of military intervention, but critics previously cautioned against this approach, fearing that intervention could “trigger” a larger conflict and further destabilize the Middle East region.

Amr Moussa, former Egyptian foreign minister and former Secretary-General of the Arab League, warned against intervention on ABC’s This Week. “They always start like that, limited [air] strike, then it widens and grows and grows and then all the region will be involved.”

Via: WFB

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Calif city looks to seize loans to ease mortgages

vSAN FRANCISCO (AP) — When the mayor of Richmond, Calif., and a gaggle of activists and homeowners showed up at the Wells Fargo Bank headquarters in downtown San Francisco this month, they were on a mission to speak with the bank's chief executive.

They wanted the bank to drop a lawsuit aimed at stopping Richmond's first-in-the-nation plan to use the government's constitutional power of eminent domain to "seize" hundreds of mortgages from Wells Fargo and other financial institutions.

As Mayor Gayle McLaughlin and the plan's backers approached the bank building, security guards locked the doors. After a bank official told her there would be no meeting then and that someone would call her later, she grabbed a bullhorn.

"I am absolutely not backing down," McLaughlin said, as curious tourists and lunching office workers milled about.

Wells Fargo, three other banks and even the Federal Housing Finance Agency think otherwise.

The banks have filed two lawsuits alleging that the plan is an illegal abuse of eminent domain, which allows governments to seize private property for public use — like a house in the path of a new highway or a piece of land needed for a new park.

Via: CNS News

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Earpiece envy’: White House colleagues skeptical about why Valerie Jarrett has Secret Service detail

Why does President Obama’s senior adviser Valerie Jarrett have Secret Service protection?

It turns out that some of her colleagues inside the White House are skeptical that actual, specific threats resulted in Jarrett’s proection .

“While a high-profile White House official — especially an African-American woman, such as Jarrett — could legitimately be considered a more likely target than most, several West Wing officials I spoke to were dubious there had been any special threats against her,” writer Mark Leibovich reported in “This Town,” a new book on Washington.

Added Leibovich of Jarrett’s White House colleagues: “They suspected, rather, that Jarrett asked the president to authorize a detail out of ‘earpiece envy.’”

The Daily Caller reported in 2010 that in a largely unprecedented move, Jarrett and David Axelrod, another senior adviser who has since left the White House, were being driven to work by government drivers and that Jarrett had been made a “protectee” of the Secret Service.

Jarrett has refused to discuss why she has been assigned Secret Service when questioned by reporters.

In April 2012, The Daily Caller filed a Freedom of Information Act request for details from the Department of Homeland Security about the cost of Jarrett’s protection. That request has not yet been fulfilled.

Leibovich reported that Jarrett finds questions about the rationale for her protection “ridiculous and offensive.” The adviser declined to speak about the arrangement with him.

Via: Daily Caller

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U.S. spy agency edges into the light after Snowden revelations

Report: U.S. Bugged The UN HQs In NYC

(Reuters) - There was a time when the U.S. National Security Agency was so secretive that government officials dared not speak its name in public. NSA, the joke went, stood for "No Such Agency."

That same agency this month held an on-the-record conference call with reporters, issued a lengthy press release to rebut a newspaper story, and posted documents on a newly launched open website - icontherecord.tumblr.com (which stands for intelligence community on the record).

The steps were taken under pressure as President Barack Obama's administration tries to calm a public storm over disclosures by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden that the surveillance agency and its British counterpart scoop up far more Internet and phone data than previously known.

The NSA's moves out of the shadows were meant to show that it operates lawfully and fixes mistakes when they are detected, but not everyone is convinced that it is a fundamental shift toward more openness at the intelligence agencies.

Some steps toward openness were unprecedented.

The government for the first time released opinions - previously labeled Top Secret - from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which never publicly airs its decisions on the electronic eavesdropping and communications collection by the NSA.

The move came despite resistance from some Justice Department lawyers and some NSA and CIA officials concerned about the amount of unredacted material going public in the three FISA Court opinions released, U.S. sources told Reuters.

Via: Reuters

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Realize the Dream speaker says “racist” Stand Your Ground laws “work to kill our young people”

Just a month after the acquittal of George Zimmerman, the man who shot and killed black teenager Trayvon Martin, gun control activists continue to wage a war on Stand Your Ground laws in the United States — but perhaps none have condemned them so harshly as Sofia Campos, who on Saturday said the “racist” laws “work to kill our young people.”

Campos, who heads up the United We Dream network of youth-led immigrant organizations, spoke on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial this weekend at the Realize the Dream March and Rally, part of the 50th anniversary March on Washington. As an undocumented immigrant, Campos spoke out against “racist” policies, including Stand Your Ground.

“Racist policies like Secure Communities, which works to break apart families, and just as much as racist policies like Stand Your Ground in Florida work to kill our young people today, the prison industrial complex and the detention center industrial complex are one and the same,” she told the crowd on the National Mall.

But Campos clearly doesn’t know that in Florida, Stand Your Ground laws have actually been helping African-Americans. Blacks in the state have made about one third of the Stand Your Ground claims — almost double the 16.6 percent of Florida’s population that is black — and a majority of those claims are successful, as The Daily Caller reported. The success rate for African-Americans is also higher than that of whites.

So as “fierce” as Campos believed her rhetoric to be on Saturday, the facts simply don’t back up her claim.

Watch her speech below:

Via: Red Alerts Politics

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TEA PARTY VS. GOP BATTLE SHAPING UP FOR 2016

The conservative base's opposition to President Barack Obama and belief that government does more harm than good may embolden Republican Senators--like Ted Cruz (TX) and Rand Paul (KY)--to stake out more conservative positions as they think about potential 2016 presidential runs. 

Meanwhile, Republican governors like New Jersey's Chris Christie, Louisiana's Bobby Jindal, and Wisconsin's Scott Walker--and former governors like Florida's Jeb Bush--may try to highlight their achievements while in office and potentially run as problem-solving executives who may not be as ideologically pure as conservatives who want to use the continuing resolution to defund Obamacare. 

Christie and Paul, for instance, have already sparred over the National Security Agency's spying programs, with Christie invoking the 9/11 attacks to accuse Paul's libertarianism of being "dangerous" for national security. Paul countered and labeled Christie as a "big government" Republican known for profligate spending, citing Christie's embrace of the pork-laden Hurricane Sandy Relief Bill. 

According a recent Pew Research poll, "given the choice between a more moderate course and a more conservative one, 54 percent choose a more conservative one, while 41 percent choose moderation."

Speaking to Republicans in New Hampshire on Friday, Cruz emphasized that conservatives win elections not when they moderate, but when "we effectively articulate what it is we believe." On the other hand, Cruz argued that "liberals win when they effectively obfuscated what they believe" because "their policies do not work.

Via: Breitbart

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George F. Will: Obama’s brainy idea

Fifty years from now, when Malia and Sasha are grandmothers, their father’s presidency might seem most consequential because of a small sum — $100 million — devoted to studying something small. “As humans,” President Obama said when announcing the initiative to study the brain, “we can identify galaxies light-years away . . . but we still haven’t unlocked the mystery of the three pounds of matter that sits between our ears.”

Actually, understanding the brain will be a resounding success without unlocking the essential mystery: How does matter become conscious of itself? Or should we say, how does it become — or acquire — consciousness? Just trying to describe this subject takes scientists onto intellectual terrain long occupied by philosophers. Those whose field is the philosophy of mind will learn from scientists such as Princeton’s David Tank, a leader of the BRAIN Initiative, which aims at understanding how brain regions and cells work together, moment to moment, throughout our lives.

If, as is said, a physicist is an atom’s way of knowing about atoms, then a neuroscientist such as Tank is a brain cell’s way of knowing about brain cells. Each of us hasabout 100 billion of those, each of which communicates with an average of 10,000 other nerve cells. The goal of neuroscientists is to discover how these neural conversations give rise to a thought, a memory or a decision. And to understand how the brain functions, from which we may understand disorders such as autism, schizophrenia and epilepsy.

Via: Washington Post

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10,000 Pages Needed to Answer Common Core Questions

North Carolina Lt. Governor Dan Forest continues to stand up for educational freedom in his state by questioning the stakes connected to the implementation of the Common Core national education standards.

In June, Forest released a video explaining his opposition to North Carolina’s rush to adopt the Common Core and lending his support to the State Board of Education’s decision to review the standards.

Aiding the review process, he has now sent a letter to the superintendent of the North Carolina Department of Public Instruction (DPI) listing 67 unanswered questions about the Common Core in North Carolina. He asked for the answers to be delivered before the State Board of Education meeting later this month.

In response to the letter, the DPI requested that Forest provide 10,000 pieces of blank paper. Happy to oblige, Forest sent them the requested reams, stressing that he expects all questions to be answered by his deadline. He plans to lead a discussion of the department’s answers at the next Board of Education meeting.

Forest’s letter outlined seven chief concerns about North Carolina’s rush to implement Common Core as it pertains to: (1) development of standards, (2) cost, (3) required technology, (4) impact of standards on student performance, (5) the role of the federal government, (6) data collection, and (7) Race to the Top federal grant funding.

Via: The Foundry

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Concealed Carry: What Do Police Think?

Every concealed-carry permit holder has more than likely wondered how the law enforcement community feels about the “average Joe” carrying a concealed weapon. So did I. Fortunately, I have friends who are police officers in my area—some who trained me in the police academy, some who were a classmates—and could ask the questions that many of us have pondered.

Image courtesy of thearmedcitizen.com.

HOW DOES A SWAT OFFICER FEEL ABOUT CONCEALED CARRY PERMITS?

I asked this of one of my friends (name withheld for his safety, but we’ll call him Billy) who currently works as a SWAT officer, in the narcotics unit, and as a police academy instructor. I asked him how he feels about the “average Joe” carrying a concealed firearm in public. Billy stated, “Honestly, I love the idea of what the concealed weapons permit offers to the public. In the 10 years I have been a police officer, I have learned that crime finds you, no matter if you are ready or not. It does not make me nervous knowing that the person behind me at the store may be armed, it actually relaxes me to know that there is someone ready if crime knocks on his door.”

DO YOU GET NERVOUS WHEN PULLING SOMEONE OVER WHO REVEALS THEY HAVE A PERMIT AND ARE ARMED?

Billy calmly said, “A traffic stop is the main cause to be nervous, as they are very dangerous. But when I am informed that the occupants are armed and they have an active permit, it tells me that they aren’t trying to hide anything.”

Via: The Arms Guide

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