Dictator-In-Chief Says ObamaCare 'Here To Stay'

MAUMEE, Ohio (AP) -- President Barack Obama has told an Ohio campaign crowd that he's betting they won't lose heart or interest in the November election despite political stalemates. He says the outcome will determine the nation's economic future for the next 10 to 20 years.

He also offered a stout defense of his health care law, saying: "The law I passed is here to stay."

Obama's remarks were the first of a two-day bus tour of Ohio and Pennsylvania. He was drawing attention to economies in both states that have been helped by a stronger auto industry.

The Joys of Islamist Spring: Egyptian Student Stabbed To Death For Violating the Sharia

The worst is yet to come

CAIRO (AP) — An Egyptian university student was fatally stabbed as his girlfriend looked on after three suspected Islamic militants confronted the couple in a park and told them they should not be together if they are not married, security officials said Wednesday.

The murder is fueling fears that vigilante groups may be seeking to strictly enforce Islamic mores, emboldened by the election of Islamist President Mohammed Morsi. Moderate Muslims along with liberal and women's groups worry that Morsi's presidency will slowly eradicate Egypt's entrenched secular traditions and change the social fabric of the mainly Muslim nation of 82 million people.

The student, 20-year-old Ahmed Hussein Eid, was attacked on June 25 in the Red Sea city of Suez east of Cairo while he was with his girlfriend in a quiet park that is a favorite spot for romantic rendezvous, according to the officials. It was not immediately clear what the two were doing when challenged by the three men who arrived on a motorbike.

But the officials, citing initial testimony of the girlfriend, said the men told the couple they should not be together because they were not married and must immediately leave and go their separate ways. An argument followed and one of the three men stabbed Eid in the upper left thigh, near his genitals.

He was hospitalized and died of his wounds a week later on Monday, according to the security officials who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to talk to the media.

Happy Fourth Of July To All Lovers Of Freedom

Ronald Reagan Speaks About Freedom and Big Government

The Great Communicator speaks at the 1964 Republican National Convention.

No Martha's Vineyard Summer Vacation This Year For Campaigner-In-Chief

What's a hard working sort of guy to do?

  (The Telegraph) -- Barack Obama and his family will not spend their summer vacation on Martha's Vineyard this year, after Baron Foster, Britain's most celebrated architect, bought their regular retreat.

With just four months remaining before he faces the toughest US re-election contest for a generation, Barack Obama could have done with a relaxing escape to the so-called playground of presidents. But the idyllic ocean-side retreat on Martha’s Vineyard where President Obama has holidayed with his wife and daughters for the past three summers has been snapped up by Britain’s most celebrated architect.

 Baron Foster and Lady Foster of Thames Bank have bought the 30-acre estate for £14.3 million — and they appear to be in no mood for renting it out to the world’s most powerful family.

 The sprawling Blue Heron Farm, which comprises a golf course, stables and an orchard, lies in Chilmark, to the south-west of the Massachusetts island made famous by the Kennedys and Clintons. Mr Obama and his wife, Michelle, are believed to have paid £32,000 a week to rent the property from its previous owner, timber tycoon William Van Devenderi.

 The president was seen cycling around the island with his daughters, Sasha and Malia, and the family frequented a seafood restaurant close to the home of Valerie Jarrett, their friend and White House aide.

 However, it is understood that after buying the property through Sotheby’s last year, Lord and Lady Foster have not made it available for rent.

HT: Freeper workerbee

Tests Indicate Yasser Arafat May Have Died Of Polonium Poisoning...Update: Arafat's Rotten Corpse To Be Exhumed

What dreadful news. Tsk, tsk.

Recent tests conducted on Yasser Arafat's personal belongings at the time of his unexpected death in 2004 suggest his body contained abnormal levels of radioactive polonium, the same poisonous substance that killed Russian spy-turned-dissident Alexander Litvinenko, Al-Jazeera TV reports.

Al-Jazeera says its nine-month investigation found that Arafat was in good health until he fell suddenly ill Oct. 12, 2004, at his compound in Ramallah on the West Bank. He was flown to a French miitary hospital in Paris, where he died several days later.

No autopsy was performed on the longtime Palestinian leader, who died at the age of 74.

Al-Jazeera says the tests on his clothes, including his toothbrush and kaffiyeh, were conducted by the Institut de Radiophysique in Lausanne, Switzerland.

"I can confirm to you that we measured an unexplained, elevated amount of unsupported polonium-210 in the belongings of Mr. Arafat that contained stains of biological fluids," Francois Bochud, the director of the institute, tells Al-Jazeera.

Additional tests, conducted over a three-month period from March until June, concluded that most of that polonium found in samples of body fluids -- sweat and urine -- on Arafat's clothes, was "unsupported," meaning that it did not come from natural sources.

Read rest here... 

Update:

(ABC News) -- Palestinians leaders agreed Wednesday to exhume the body of Yasser Arafat after a television documentary suggested that he had been assassinated while being treated in a Paris hospital.

Arafat was 75 and had long been ill when he slipped into a coma and died on Nov. 11, 2004. He had been suffering from a mysterious illness. The cause of the death was never determined and French medical officials would not release details of his illness because of privacy laws. The medical report was given to his family.

The television network al Jazeera broadcast a documentary this week in which a Swiss institute examined clothing provided by Arafat's widow, Suha, and determined there were high levels of polonium-210, the same substance found to have killed a former Russian spy in London in 2006.

Suha Arafat has since called for her husband's body to be exhumed from its mausoleum in the West Bank city of Ramallah.

Presidential adviser Nabil Abu Rdeineh said Wednesday that Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas has given instructions to launch an investigation with international experts to look into the findings of the al Jazeera report.

Campaigner-In-Chief To Hit The Road With His "Betting On America" Bus Tour

(AP) -- President Barack Obama is hitting the road again this week with a "Betting on America" bus tour of Ohio and Pennsylvania.

Obama beat Republican John McCain by 11 percentage points in Pennsylvania and 5 percentage points in Ohio in 2008. Now, both states are seen as competitive.

In fact, battleground states abound this year and that makes the race extra expensive since that's where both campaigns and independent groups are plowing big bucks.

Ohio may be the premier swing state. No Republican has ever made it to the White House without carrying Ohio and no Democratic candidate since John F. Kennedy in 1960. Obama has scheduled stops Thursday in the northern Ohio cities of Maumee, Sandusky and Parma.

His Friday tour includes a speech in Pittsburgh. Pennsylvania hasn't gone Republican since backing George H.W. Bush in 1988.

Liar-In-Chief Continues Romney 'Outsourcing' Attacks With New Ad

The Obama propaganda campaign against Romney continues despite reports from FactCheck.org that the outsourcing accusations against him are false.

Holder Claims GOP Using Him As Proxy for Attacks On Chairman Obama

The lies come fast and furious

(Washington Post) -- Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. sharply criticized lawmakers Monday for voting to hold him in contempt of Congress last week, saying Republicans have made him a “proxy” to attack President Obama in an election year.

 In his first interview since Thursday’s vote, Holder said lawmakers have used an investigation of a botched gun-tracking operation as a way to seek retribution against the Justice Department for its policies on a host of issues, including immigration, voting rights and gay marriage.

 He said the chairman of the committee leading the inquiry, Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), is engaging in political theater as the Justice Department tries to focus on public safety.

“I’ve been doing all of these things all the time Darrell Issa and his band have been nipping at my heels,” a defiant Holder said. “They’ve been nipping, but I’ve been walking.”

The attorney general has long been a lightning rod for Republican lawmakers’ anger toward the Obama administration. But Holder said the debate over documents related to the gun operation, known as “Fast and Furious” — along with the National Rifle Association’s attempts to make it an electoral issue — have made matters worse.

“I’ve become a symbol of what they don’t like about the positions this Justice Department has taken,” he said. “I am also a proxy for the president in an election year. You have to be exceedingly naive to think that vote was about . . . documents.”

GOP Sen. Mitch McConnell Says Odds Against Gutting ObamaCare

Senate Minority Leader McConnell talks about the difficulty of repealing ObamaCare at a meeting today with hospital workers in Kentucky.

Rep. Henry Waxman (D-Nostrilla) Says GOP Can Repeal ObamaCare With 51 Senate Votes

 Via The Washington Examiner:

Republicans can repeal Obamacare with a 51-vote majority in the U.S. Senate through budget reconciliation, according to an architect of the health care law, Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Calif., who also made a death panel-style indictment of the Republican budget.

“I think they could do it,” Waxman told Newsmakers when asked about reconciliation. “I think the American people have to understand that if they vote for Romney and they vote for Republicans to have control of the house and the senate, there’s a good chance that the health care bill will be wiped out and all these benefits will be wiped out.”

After denouncing Republicans for saying that Obamacare would lead to death panels — people who ration health care and thus end up denying care to some people — Waxman deployed the same kind of argument against Republicans.

“[T]he states will have to tell a lot of people at the very bottom — very poor people who are often disabled — that you’re not going to get care anymore in order to keep tax cuts for billionaires,” he said, citing Republican budget plans for Medicaid.

2009 CPAC's 13-Year Old Conservative Pundit Turns To The Left

Politico -- Jonathan Krohn took the political world by storm at 2009’s Conservative Political Action Conference when, at just 13 years old, he delivered an impromptu rallying cry for conservatism that became a viral hit and had some pegging him as a future star of the Republican Party.

Now 17, Krohn — who went on to write a book, “Defining Conservatism,” that was blurbed by the likes of Newt Gingrich and Bill Bennett — still watches that speech from time to time, but it mostly makes him cringe because, well, he’s not a conservative anymore.

“I think it was naive,” Krohn now says of the speech. “It’s a 13-year-old kid saying stuff that he had heard for a long time.… I live in Georgia. We’re inundated with conservative talk in Georgia.… The speech was something that a 13-year-old does. You haven’t formed all your opinions. You’re really defeating yourself if you think you have all of your ideas in your head when you were 12 or 13. It’s impossible. You haven’t done enough.”

Krohn won’t go so far as to say he’s liberal, in part because his move away from conservatism was a move away from ideological boxes in general.

“I want to be Jonathan Krohn,” he said, “and I’m tired of being an ideology, and it’s not fun and it gets boring and it’s not who we are as individuals.”

But a quick rundown of his current political stances suggests a serious pendulum swing away from the right.

Gay marriage? In favor. Obamacare? “It’s a good idea.”

Who would he vote for (if he could) in November? “Probably Barack Obama.” His favorite TV shows? “The Daily Show” and “The Colbert Report.” His favorite magazine? The New Yorker.

Read rest here...

Chief Justice Roberts Switched Sides On ObamaCare Vote

(CBS News) -- Chief Justice John Roberts initially sided with the Supreme Court's four conservative justices to strike down the heart of President Obama's health care reform law, the Affordable Care Act, but later changed his position and formed an alliance with liberals to uphold the bulk of the law, according to two sources with specific knowledge of the deliberations.

Thank you, George W. Bush

Roberts then withstood a month-long, desperate campaign to bring him back to his original position, the sources said. Ironically, Justice Anthony Kennedy - believed by many conservatives to be the justice most likely to defect and vote for the law - led the effort to try to bring Roberts back to the fold.

"He was relentless," one source said of Kennedy's efforts. "He was very engaged in this."
But this time, Roberts held firm. And so the conservatives handed him their own message which, as one justice put it, essentially translated into, "You're on your own."

The conservatives refused to join any aspect of his opinion, including sections with which they agreed, such as his analysis imposing limits on Congress' power under the Commerce Clause, the sources said.

Instead, the four joined forces and crafted a highly unusual, unsigned joint dissent. They deliberately ignored Roberts' decision, the sources said, as if they were no longer even willing to engage with him in debate.

Read rest here...

White House Chief of Staff Tells America To 'Get Over' ObamaCare Debate

The most arrogant President in American history

(CNN) — Jack Lew, the White House chief of staff, said Sunday the Supreme Court decision upholding President Barack Obama’s health care measure should put to rest the national debate over the law’s practicality.

Speaking on CNN’s “State of the Union,” Lew said the Affordable Care Act, which was signed into law in 2010, needs to be fully implemented before Americans assess its merit, and that detractors of the law, including Obama’s opponent in the 2012 presidential election, were using it to divide the country.

“This was a plan that Gov. Romney supported,” Lew said, “and it’s something that I would have thought he would be proud of.”

The national debate over the law, which has been ongoing since the law was implemented, can now end with the court’s ruling, Lew said.

“It’s time now to get over the debate and implement that law,” he told CNN chief political correspondent Candy Crowley. “What the American people don’t want is, they don’t want to be taken back to the old divisive debate. They want to get on with it, and they want us to be focusing on economic growth and creating jobs.”