Department of Homeland Security adviser Mohamed Elibiary has penned yet another controversial tweet, this time likening the Muslim Brotherhood to evangelical Christians and comparing the Brotherhood’s indoctrination to Bible study groups.WND found that Elibiary tweeted: “Ignorant #Islamophobes (redundant I know) protested my saying #MB like #Evangelicals. Usra like Bible study grp.”The “MB,” or Muslim Brotherhood, seeks a worldwide Islamic caliphate ruled by Shariah, or Islamic law, and teaches followers to help establish an Islamic state wherever they live.
Masked from public view, two of the U.S. military’s elite special operations commandos have been awarded medals for bravery for a mission that further undercuts the Obama administration’s original story about the Benghazi tragedy.For months, administration officials have claimed no special operations forces were dispatched from outside Libya to Benghazi during the Sept. 11, 2012, al Qaeda terrorist attacks on the U.S. diplomatic mission and CIA annex because none was within range.The Pentagon, under intense public criticism for not coming to the aid of besieged Americans, published an official timeline in November that carefully danced around the issue.It said time and distance prevented any commandos outside Libya from reaching a CIA compound under attack. The timeline disclosed that a reinforcement flight 400 miles away in Tripoli contained two “DoD personnel” but did not describe who they were. Later, the official State Department report on Benghazi said they were “two U.S. military personnel” — but provided no other details. It made no mention of special operations forces.But sources directly familiar with the attack tell The Washington Times that a unit of eight special operators — mostly Delta Force and Green Beret members — were in Tripoli the night of the attack, on a counterterrorism mission that involved capturing weapons and wanted terrorists from the streets and helping train Libyan forces.When word of the Benghazi attack surfaced, two members of that military unit volunteered to be dispatched along with five private security contractors on a hastily arranged flight from Tripoli to rescue Americans in danger, the sources said, speaking only on the condition of anonymity because the special operations forces’ existence inside Libya was secret.The two special operations forces arrived in time to engage in the final, ferocious firefight between the terrorists and Americans holed up in the CIA annex near the ill-fated diplomatic mission in Benghazi, the sources added.The two special operators were awarded medals for valor for helping repel a complex attack that killed Ambassador J. Christopher Stephens, another American diplomat and two former Navy SEALs, but spared many more potential casualties.“Yes, we had special forces in Tripoli, and two in fact did volunteer and engaged heroically in the efforts to save Americans,” one source told The Times. “The others were asked to stay behind to help protect Tripoli in case there was a coordinated attack on our main embassy.“The remaining [special operations forces] were ready to dispatch the next morning, but by that time American personnel had been evacuated to the airport, local militias had provided additional security and it was determined there was no need for them to be dispatched at that point,” the source added.Pressed why the Pentagon and administration officials did not publicly acknowledge the special operations forces’ contribution that tragic night, the sources said officials decided that their anti-terror work inside Libya was sensitive and closely guarded. In addition, U.S. officials did not have a Status of Forces Agreement in place that would have authorized the troops’ presence, the sources said.The administration’s story line was that no U.S. special operations forces were deployed to Benghazi because none was within range to arrive during the eight-hour onslaught“The bottom line is this: that we were not dealing with a prolonged or continuous assault which could have been brought to an end by a U.S. military response,” Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta told Congress this year. “Very simply, although we had forces deployed to the region, time, distance, the lack of an adequate warning, events that moved very quickly on the ground prevented a more immediate response.”Mr. Panetta, who has since left office, eventually acknowledged that two soldiers were involved in the firefight, but he offered little detail.“The quickest response option available was a Tripoli-based security team that was located at the embassy in Tripoli.,” he told the Senate Armed Services Committee in February. “And to their credit, within hours, this [seven]-man team, including two U.S. military personnel, chartered a private airplane, deployed to Benghazi. Within 15 minutes of arriving at the annex facility, they came under attack by mortar and rocket-propelled grenades.”What Mr. Panetta left unspoken in public, however, was why those troops were in Tripoli and who else accompanied them.At the time of the al Qaeda attacks, the military was setting up a terrorist-hunting unit in Tripoli that included U.S. Special Operations Command’s super-secret Delta Force and Green Berets, the sources say.
Labels: Always On Watch, Blog Talk Radio, The Gathering Storm Radio Show
Major military aid will start when crackdown on Muslim Brotherhood ends
The administration of President Barack Obama has outlined its new aid policy toward Egypt.Officials said the administration would continue to withhold major combat platforms while releasing equipment for Egyptian border security and counter-insurgency operations.The officials said fighter-jets, main battle tanks and missiles would be stored until Egypt ends its military crackdown on the Muslim Brotherhood.
With U.S. security ties suspended, Cairo opens dialogue with Moscow
Egypt, in wake of a suspension of U.S. military aid, has turned to Russia for enhanced defense and intelligence cooperation.Officials said Egypt and Russia have been conducting a high-level military dialogue amid the crisis with the United States.The officials said Egyptian Defense Minister Abdul Fatah Sisi was mulling Russian offers of defense and military cooperation.“Russia has always tried to sell Egypt advanced systems, but this might be more realistic given current circumstances,” an official said.On Oct. 28, Russian military intelligence chief Gen. Vacheslav Kondrasco arrived in Cairo for what officials said marked an effort to renew a strategic dialogue between the Kremlin and Egypt.Officials said Kondrasco was discussing Egypt’s military requirements and the prospect of Russian arms sales. Russia was the leading military supplier to Egypt in the 1960s and 1970s.
Near the end of the fourth story on Monday’s NBC Nightly News, White House correspondent Peter Alexander managed to squeeze in a mention of the network’s scoop that the Obama administration knew for years that millions of people would be kicked off of their current health insurance plans because of ObamaCare, despite the President’s repeated assurances to the contraryAlexander provided a mere twenty-one seconds of air time for the revelation: ”That millions will lose or have to change their individual policies is not a surprise to the administration. NBC News senior investigative correspondent Lisa Myers found buried in the 2010 ObamaCare regulations, language predicting, ‘A reasonable range for the percentage of individual policies that would terminate is forty percent to sixty-seven percent.’”Tuesday’s Today completely ignored the news and neither ABC nor CBS bothered to mention it at all.
Read more: http://newsbusters.org/blogs/kyle-drennen/2013/10/29/nbc-gives-only-21-seconds-scoop-obama-knew-people-would-lose-health-pl#ixzz2jIKl6UZx
Michelle Obama and her friend Toni Townes-Whitley - a Senior Vice President at the company that developed the dysfunctional Obamacare website (for those not in the US, you cannot imagine how much of last week's news was dominated by that website's failure) - were trustees of a group called Third World Center at Princeton.In 1981, Third World Center hosted PLO terror supporter Hassan Rahman on the Princeton campus, forcing whites to sit separately from blacks, and raising tensions with Jewish groups on campus (Hat Tip: Jack W).
Justice Department attorneys are advancing an argument at the Supreme Court that could allow the government to invoke international treaties as a legal basis for policies such as gun control that conflict with the U.S. Constitution, according to Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas.
Their argument is that a law implementing an international treaty signed by the U.S. allows the federal government to prosecute a criminal case that would normally be handled by state or local authorities.
That is a dangerous argument, according to Cruz.
“The Constitution created a limited federal government with only specific enumerated powers,” Cruz told the Washington Examiner prior to giving a speech on the issue today at the Heritage Foundation.
“The Supreme Court should not interpret the treaty power in a manner that undermines this bedrock protection of individual liberty,” Cruz said.
In his speech, Cruz said the Justice Department is arguing “an absurd proposition” that “could be used as a backdoor way to undermine” Second Amendment rights, among other things.
Going forward we have to ask the question of why is it that only 58% of US counties only have one or two insurance companies to choose from. In fact, less choices than you have in the private sector. because quite frankly most companies only bid the urban areas and not the rural areas.”
Last year more than 1,000 people in four countries sat down and watched 115 television ads, such as one featuring anthropomorphized M&M candies boogying in a bar. All the while, webcams pointed at their faces and streamed images of their expressions to a server in Waltham, Massachusetts.
In Waltham, an algorithm developed by a startup company called Affectiva performed what is known as facial coding: it tracked the panelists’ raised eyebrows, furrowed brows, smirks, half-smirks, frowns, and smiles. (Watch a video of the technology in action below this story or here.) When this face data was later merged with real-world sales data, it turned out that the facial measurements could be used to predict with 75 percent accuracy whether sales of the advertised products would increase, decrease, or stay the same after the commercials aired. By comparison, surveys of panelists’ feelings about the ads could predict the products’ sales with 70 percent accuracy.
Although this was an incremental improvement statistically, it reflected a milestone in the field of affective computing. While people notoriously have a hard time articulating how they feel, now it is clear that machines can not only read some of their feelings but also go a step farther and predict the statistical likelihood of later behavior.GO READ THE WHOLE THING.
For all of the Affordable Care Act’s technical problems, at least one part is working on schedule. The law is systematically dismantling the individual insurance market, as its architects intended from the start.The millions of Americans who are receiving termination notices because their current coverage does not conform to Health and Human Services Department rules may not realize this is by design. Maybe they trusted President Obama’s repeated falsehood that people who liked their health plans could keep them. But Americans should understand that this month’s mass cancellation wave has been the President’s political goal since 2008. Liberals believe they must destroy the market in order to save it.***
Until this month, consumers who weren’t insured through their jobs were allowed to buy insurance that provides the best value based on their own needs. One of every 10 private policies is sold through the individual market, covering about 7% of the U.S. population under age 65.Some states have ruined this market through regulation and price controls, and in others costs can be high. But the individual market works well for millions of people, who can choose from many plans—from Cadillac coverage to cheaper protection against catastrophic illness.The political problem for the White House is that these choices are a threat toObamaCare. If too many people keep these policies instead of joining the government exchanges, ObamaCare could fail. HHS has thus reviewed the decisions of people in the individual market and found them wanting. HHS believes as a matter of political philosophy that everyone should have the same kind of insurance, and in the name of equity it wrote rules dictating the benefits that all plans must cover and how they must be financed.In most cases these mandates are more comprehensive and thus more expensive than the status quo, but the ObamaCare refugees aren’t merely facing higher costs. The plans they want and are willing to pay for have been intentionally outlawed. Ponder that one.Liberals claim the new insurance should cost more because it’s better, at least as defined by liberal paternalism. But the real reason they want policies to cost more is to drive as many people as possible out of this market and into the subsidized ObamaCare exchanges.The exchanges need these customers to finance ObamaCare’s balance sheet and stabilize its risk pools. On the exchanges, individuals earning more than $46,000 or a family of four above $94,000 don’t qualify for subsidies and must buy overpriced insurance. If these middle-class ObamaCare losers can be forced into the exchanges, they become financiers of the new pay-as-you-go entitlement.The political press corps is reporting this as a shocking discovery, and we suppose it is if you believed Mr. Obama’s promises. NBC News even reports as a “scoop” that the White House knew all along that millions would lose their policies. But HHS’s trail of purpose has been there for anyone willing to look.The text of the Affordable Care Act said that none of its language “shall be construed to require that an individual terminate coverage” that existed as of March 23, 2010, or the date the law was enacted. But as early as June 2010 HHS published a regulation reinterpreting this “Preservation of Right to Maintain Existing Coverage” to obviate that promise.Even minor policy changes, such as increasing a copay by as little as $5, means that a plan cannot be renewed without rewriting it to obey all of ObamaCare’s regulations
In HHS’s “regulatory impact analysis” published in the Federal Register, the department estimated that between 40% and 67% wouldn’t qualify as a permitted plan, and this was the point—to prevent such policies “from being bought and sold as a commodity in commercial transactions.” HHS knew that lightly regulated policies might be popular, especially compared to the restricted choices in the exchanges.HHS wrote that the purpose was to offer merely “a small number of meaningful choices.” Letting people make tradeoffs for themselves “would have allowed extremely wide variation across plans in the benefits offered” and “would not have assured consumers that they would have coverage for basic benefits.” Forced equity again trumped individual choice.Hard to believe, but at the time liberals complained that this HHS “essential health benefits” rule wasn’t restrictive enough. Pediatric services stop being required at age 19, not 21, and what about speech therapy, medical foods or lactation services?Liberals needn’t have worried. Once customers are herded into the exchanges, HHS has the power to further standardize benefits, further limit choices by barring certain insurers from selling through selective contracting, and generally police the insurers to behave like the government franchises they now are. The state-run exchanges in Vermont and the District of Columbia have already barred individual coverage outside their exchanges.***
None of this is an accident. It is the deliberate result of the liberal demand that everyone have essentially the same coverage and that government must dictate what that coverage is and how much it costs. Such political control is the central nervous system of theAffordable Care Act, and it is why so many people can’t keep the insurance they like.
...[The] belief in socialized medicine is under strain, for the health services of the rich European states are in various kinds of “crisis.” I put the word in quotation marks because healthcare is ritually said by journalists to be in crisis: it’s the word that cries wolf. But this time there is a wolf.A reality check.
In Italy, the UK, Spain and France, cuts of varying depths are now being introduced. In France, where the health system is usually seen as the best, the budget is exceded by billions of euros every year: the head of the association of French pharmacies says the system cannot survive more than six years without deep reform. In the UK, the new director of the Care Quality Commission that oversees standards, said after his appointment earlier this year that “the system is on the brink of collapse.”
The more socialized the U.S. system becomes, the more it will find itself facing the same dilemmas as the Europeans’. These dilemmas are all symptoms of the way we live now.
In nearly every country, people live longer than they once did. And in most countries, women give birth to fewer kids. In 2000, around 16 percent of Germany and the UK’s population was over 65 in 2000, while the U.S. had only 12.7 percent. But in the U.S., the proportion of over-65’s will increase to near 20 percent of the population in 2050, and over 80’s to around 8 percent. The UK will have over 20 percent of 65-plus citizens by 2050. Germany will have around 30 percent of 65-and-up by 2050; it will have around 15 percent of its population in their 80s.
So there will be fewer economically active taxpayers in North America and Europe while there’s a greater need for taxes to pay for socialized medical care....
Labels: Always On Watch, Europe, Healthcare, our ailing economy
Washington (CNN) – The Obama administration was given stark warnings just one month before that the federal healthcare site was not ready to go live, according to a confidential report obtained by CNN.
The caution, from the main contractor CGI, warned of a number of open risks and issues for the HealthCare.gov web site even as company executives were testifying publicly that the project had achieved key milestones.
On Capitol Hill on Monday, Medicaid Chief Marilyn Tavenner, whose job it was to oversee the October 1 rollout of the website, said she did not foresee its problems.
“No, we had tested the website and we were comfortable with its performance,” she said.
“Now, like I said, we knew all along there would be as with any new website, some individual glitches we would have to work out.
But, the volume issue and the creation of account issues was not anticipated and obviously took us by surprise. And did not show up in testing.”
Read documents
But the CGI document, which describes “top risks currently open” and “outstanding issues currently being mitigated” says the testing timeframes are “not adequate to complete full functional, system, and integration testing activities” and lists the impact of the problems as “significant.”
Another element is listed as ” not enough time in schedule to conduct adequate performance testing” and given the highest priority.AND THEN, THERE'S THIS:
“I happen to be a proponent of a single payer universal health care program.” (applause) “I see no reason why the United States of America, the wealthiest country in the history of the world, spending 14 percent of its Gross National Product on health care cannot provide basic health insurance to everybody. And that’s what Jim is talking about when he says everybody in, nobody out. A single payer health care plan, a universal health care plan. And that’s what I’d like to see. But as all of you know, we may not get there immediately. Because first we have to take back the White House, we have to take back the Senate, and we have to take back the House.”And Sen. Reid has said:
Obama speaking to the Illinois AFL-CIO, June 30, 2003.
We have a rare moment of bipartisan agreement in the United States Senate. Reid now appears to concur with Republican senator Tom Coburn of Oklahoma, who has has been warning for quite some time that Obamacare was "rigged to fail" in order to pave the way for a total government takeover of the health insurance industry.So...HOW will they get to single-payer? NOBODY is talking about that. Not even the right and the conservative media. Why?
Labels: MR
BREEZY POINT, N.Y. — Thousands of New York and New Jersey residents displaced when Superstorm Sandy barreled ashore one year ago are still fighting with insurance companies, slogging through red tape and waiting for government aid – and many still aren’t home. The storm, which made landfall in the U.S. last Oct. 29, killed an estimated 160 people here and dozens more in the Caribbean, according to the National Hurricane Center, and inflicted billions of dollars in damages, including some 366,000 structures in New York and New Jersey.From Fox:
The company that won a multi-million dollar contract from the Obama administration to help develop the problem-plagued HealthCare.gov site was also hired in May to help distribute $1.7 billion in federal Superstorm Sandy relief money.
The company — CGI Federal — was hired by New York housing officials to distribute $1.7 billion in Sandy disaster money, according to a document obtained by the fiscal conservative group FreedomWorks.
The company, a U.S. subsidiary of the Canada-based CGI Group, states CGI Federal was paid $49,000 for a short-term deal and will get $4.3 million through 2016, the document shows.MEANWHILE:
The news world, and the right blogosphere, from what I can tell, is still missing the story here.
The story is not that "Obama knew" that policies would be terminated. That's damning.But what is hugely damning and very important going forward is not that Obama knew, but that Obama made this happen, and could unmake it with a phone call, but chooses not to.
This is not just about having knowledge that events beyond Obama's control would unfold -- this is about events directly at his control. Regulation-writers are executive employees, and as such, answer to the president and not Congress.
This means Obama has the actual power -- not the puffed up, falsely asserted unconstitutional power, but the genuine legal power -- to call this agency and tell them, "We sold this bill as permitting people to keep their insurance; please re-write the regulations in a way that will honor this promise."
Remember, regulations are supposed to add details to the spirit of the law. They are not supposed to change the meaning of the law.
Obama's regulations -- written at his behest, or at least with his connivance -- change the meaning of the law to render the "grandfathered policy" provision a nullity.
Obama has it within his power to call up the HHS reg-writers and instruct them to honor the promise he made time and again for two years. And he doesn't want people to know this, because he is determined to break that promise.
That promise was always a lie, and not a meaningless lie at the periphery, but a central lie propping up the political campaign for ObamaCare. Had he told Americans that they would be losing their current health care in order to be dumped into what is effectively a high-risk pool, so that they could subsidize high-risk clients, the public would have rejected the law even more strongly than he did.
So he lied. And lied. And lied. And lied some more.
And even at this late date, he could still choose to honor his promise.
But he won't, because he can't -- he always intended to take people's insurance away from them.
Always.GO READ THE WHOLE THING.
All of us, every single man, woman, and child on the face of the Earth were born with the same unalienable rights; to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. And, if the governments of the world can't get that through their thick skulls, then, regime change will be necessary.
OBSESSION
UNDERCOVER MOSQUE
GERT WILDER'S
Original Artwork By Bosch Fawstin
CULTURISM
by John Kenneth Press
