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As the government shutdown entered its 12th day, the best lawmakers on Capitol Hill could say on Saturday is that they’ve started talking — again..... ....Mr. Reid has rejected every request Republicans have made, including most recently a proposal circulated by Sen. Susan Collins, Maine Republican, that would have repealed a despised Obamacare tax and given the White House more flexibility to manage the sequesters, in return for opening up the government and passing a debt increase........ House Republicans and the White House had both said they were making progress over the previous two days, saying that they had cleared...

Senator Ted Cruz easily beat the competition in the Value Voters Summit Presidential Straw Poll, winning a whopping 42 percent of votes cast by social conservatives at the summit. Both Doctor Ben Carson and former senator Rick Santorum won 13 percent of the vote. Rounding out the top five were Senator Rand Paul (six percent) and Senator Marco Rubio (five percent).

Sen. Ted Cruz may be under fire from colleagues at the Capitol, but he was a hero to the thousands at the annual Values Voters Summit who praised him for refusing to give up his push to defund Obamacare and helping ignite the government shutdown. While other potential 2016 presidential candidates also spoke at the summit, Mr. Cruz emerged from the first day of the event as the favorite of religious conservatives in attendance, saying they back his no—surrender approach to politics that he has brought to Washington. “He has some talents and facilities from God for just delivering a...

Glenn Beck played up the Thursday night “Crossfire” showdown between Sen. Ted Cruz and former Obama green jobs czar Van Jones to tout Cruz as a “brilliant� carrier of the conservative banner – and slam Jones as a “communist revolutionary” hiding behind a shield of respectability.“You’re a communist revolutionary, Van Jones,” Beck said on his show Friday after playing a clip of the Cruz-Jones confrontation. “This is one of the most dangerous men in America.”In the “Crossfire� segment, Jones demanded Cruz, R-Texas, apologize to the Republican Party for the government shutdown in Washington, but Cruz turned the tables with...

Sen. Ted Cruz seized the opportunity afforded by a White House invitation to confront President Barack Obama over his healthcare plan. Cruz said he appreciated the chance to go see the president — but then presented him with "substantial" changes for Obamacare. In the meeting, also attended by dozens of other Republican senators, Cruz refrained from using the word "defund," reports Politico. Instead he told Obama that all sides need to "provide substantial relief to the millions of people who are hurting because of Obamacare, who are losing their jobs, being forced into part-time work and losing their health insurance."...

Some grocery and food shoppers who were trying to used government benefit cards to pay got a rude awakening on Saturday morning: their EBT cards were not working. A check here in Central New York, however, showed that grocery chains were apparently unaffected. We are being told that a technical services vendor (Xerox) had a power outage which did affect being able to pay with a benefits card in several states. As of early Saturday afternoon, the debit system was back up and the SNAP program was being rebooted, with expectations that all services would be back up shortly.

WASHINGTON — The Air Force fired the general in charge of its nuclear missiles on Friday, just two days after a Navy admiral with top nuclear weapons responsibilities was sacked. Both men are caught up in investigations of alleged personal misconduct, adding to a cascade of turmoil inside the nation’s nuclear weapons force. The Air Force removed Maj. Gen. Michael Carey, a 35-year veteran, from his command of 20th Air Force, responsible for all 450 of the service’s intercontinental ballistic missiles. Carey, who took his post in Wyoming in June 2012, will be reassigned pending the outcome of an investigation...

enate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) and Republican Leader Mitch McConnell (Ky.) are taking the lead on talks to raise the debt limit and reopen the government, according to senators. Reid and McConnell are working off a six-point proposal sponsored by Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) that would fund the government for six months and raise the debt ceiling until Jan. 31, 2014. Senators view discussions between the two leaders as a promising sign of potential bipartisan compromise. “Reid and McConnell are talking now and those discussions continue so I see that as progress,” said Senate Republican Whip John Cornyn (R-Texas)....

North Korea has issued a fresh warning of an "all-out war", urging the United States to stop military drills and what it described as "nuclear blackmail". The country also refused to sign a non-aggression pact that John Kerry, the US Secretary of State, offered last week on condition of denuclearisation. In a thinly veiled threat to strike the United States, the North's National Defence Commission (NDC), chaired by leader Kim Jong-Un, said the US government must withdraw its policy of hostility against the North if it wants peace on both the Korean peninsula and the "US mainland".

Talks between House Speaker John Boehner and President Barack Obama over the government shutdown and looming debt limit deadline have hit a brick wall. Boehner relayed the news to his Republican caucus during a Saturday morning meeting after a night of work where little progress was made. Republican Rep. Paul Labrador of Idaho emerged from the meeting, telling CNN that "the President rejected our deal." The standstill has decreased the possibility that the House would vote to reopen the government this weekend and while leadership would remain in Washington to work on a proposal, rank-and-file members might return to their...

If anyone is still so deluded as to think Obama actually cares about the poor, this should extinguish your delusion for good. The (un)Affordable Care Act, better known as Obamacare and more truthfully should be called Lucifercare, will fine charitable hospitals that provide healthcare for poor people — for free. The fines can be as high as $50,000. After that, Lucifercare — via its minions in the IRS — will remove the nonprofit status from those hospitals. Currently, some 60% of U.S. hospitals are nonprofits. Of those, a sizeable number are Catholic. 615 Catholic hospitals account for 12.5% of community...

House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan lashed out at Senate Republicans for interfering with the House GOP’s talks with the White House to reopen the government and lift the debt ceiling, suggesting his colleagues on the other side of the Capitol were betraying Speaker John Boehner. “They’re trying to cut the House out, and trying to jam us with the Senate. We’re not going to roll over and take that,” Ryan told reporters. When asked if he felt “double crossed,” Ryan said “you look at the facts and draw your own conclusions.” Senate Republicans, led by Senator Susan Collins of...

[with AUDIO] House Republicans wouldn’t accept a bad deal on the government shutdown and the pending federal debt ceiling negotiations from President Barack Obama, House Rules Committee chairman Texas Republican Rep. Pete Sessions announced. “I will tell you we will not back down, but there is much, much that we must understand about what is out there and how to accomplish it,” Sessions said on an interview set to air on Hugh Hewitt’s radio show on Friday night. Hewitt asked Sessions about the possibility of a deal made by the first of the month to ensure the government fulfills certain...

Tropical Storm Karen dumped varying amount of rain all over the South Central, tri-county PA area, ranging from 5.6" to 10.2", but the "official" tally is 9.11"; all of it causing widespread flooding and misery. Multi-million-gallon retention ponds and containment areas overflowed quickly, wiping-out travel on roads and streets for much of Friday. I recorded 14.7" at my Condo's Weather Station, in East York, as of Saturday morning, at 6:45am. If you have pics of your area Compared to 2011's TS Lee, which dumped 13" over an even wider area, it's hard to tell much difference from the pictures coming...

7 hours ago Obama: “This is not normal” Posted by CNN's Gabe LaMonica Washington (CNN) - President Barack Obama on Saturday said House Republican agreement over the need to raise the debt ceiling and reopen the government, without agreement over how long, was a “positive development.” Both Houses of the United States Congress are in session this weekend, and in his weekly address, Obama told members of the House and Senate to “pass a budget, put people back to work, and end this shutdown.” The President, who updated a group of nearly 150 top U.S. business leaders on Friday on...

Appearing on MSNBC on Friday, Congressman Peter King continued his epic verbal assault on Ted Cruz — and, to a lesser extent, Rand Paul — by describing the Texas Senator as a “RINO” (Republican in name only) and a “fraud.” Speaking with MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell, King called the ongoing government shutdown “the strategy of Ted Cruz” and wondered aloud “why more Republicans around the country didn’t join me in denouncing Ted Cruz” before the shutdown began. “We cannot allow our party to be taken over by the likes of Ted Cruz and Rand Paul,” King continued, describing Cruz and Paul...

It may not mark a tectonic shift in the political landscape, but it seems significant that CNN’s Wolf Blitzer expressed support for Republican proposals to delay ObamaCare for a year: Blitzer was then set upon by other CNN hosts while leaving the studio, resulting in a melee that escalated quickly, ending when Piers Morgan killed a guy with a trident. CALL TO ACTION: Should Congress be exempt from Obamacare? Sign the petition to deny Congressional exemption here! This particular conversation revolved around the epic “glitches” that have plagued the ObamaCare website. ”Glitchy” is a debatable term for a website that...

The push for radical transgender rights in schools is trumping privacy rights at one Colorado high school. A male student at Florence High School who claims to be a transgender has been harrassing girls in the bathroom. When parents complained, school officials said the boy's rights as a transgender trumped their daughters' privacy rights. As the controversy grew, some students were threatened with being kicked off athletic teams or charged with hate crimes if they continued to voice concerns. The Pacific Justice Institute sent the school a letter warning against squelching privacy rights. "We're not going to stand by and...

(VIDEO-AT-LINK)Ben Carson is probably best known for his work as a neurosurgeon, but in recent months he has become a conservative firebrand and today he offered some controversial red meat to the audience at the Values Voter Summit in Washington. Carson, who is a contributor to Fox News, assailed president Obama’s health care law, saying it is akin to slavery. “I have to tell you, you know Obamacare is really, I think, the worst thing that has happened in this nation since slavery,” Carson said. “And it is slavery in a way because it is making all of us subservient...

Full YouTube Video of Senator Ted Cruz's speech at the Value Voters Summit 2013 Conference

<p>REP. PETER KING (R-NY): Andrea, this is the strategy of Ted Cruz and going back to mid-September, I said that Ted Cruz was a fraud, that there was a dead-end to this policy and it made no sense to follow it. John Boehner also told us in early September that it would be the wrong thing to do to shut down the government in an attempt to defund Obamacare. Unfortunately, we have three or four dozen Republicans in the House, Cruz Republicans, who basically threatened to bring the House down if John Boehner did not pursue this policy. John knew it was not doing to work, but he felt he had no choice. I understand his position.</p>

Rep. Peter King (N.Y.) would support a discharge petition on a "clean" spending bill if GOP leaders don't bring it to the floor soon, the centrist Republican vowed this week. King has long-pushed Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) to take up the Senate-passed continuing resolution (CR) to reopen the government. But he has refused to buck leadership further by endorsing the Democrats' discharge petition, which would force a floor vote on the bill. Until Friday. "If we have to do a discharge petition, ultimately, we will, but this is going to come [to the floor]," King said in an interview with...

In its first report on press freedom in the United States, the Committee to Protect Journalists warns Obama has ushered in a paralyzing climate of fear for both reporters and their government sources. Among the case it details: six government employees - plus two contractors, including Edward Snowden - have faced felony criminal prosecutions since 2009 under the 1917 Espionage Act for leaking classified information to the press, compared with three such prosecutions in ALL previous U.S. administrations. ...

Illegal immigrant advocates interrupted Sen. Ted Cruz’s speech to the Values Voters Summit on Friday more than a dozen times on, calling on the Texas Republican and potential presidential candidate to support a pathway to citizenship for illegal immigrants. But the Texas Republican repeatedly deflected the criticism, turning it into an attack against President Obama. “How scared is the president?” Mr. Cruz said. “Oh, they don’t want the truth to be heard. They definitely don’t want the truth to be heard.” The crowd also tried to drown out the protestors with chants of “USA! USA!” The protesters were dragged out...

A group of truckers left Doswell, Virginia Friday morning to take part in the ‘Ride for the Constitution’ in Washington, D.C. They planned to join truckers from across the country slowing down traffic around the nation’s capital. Virginia State Police, who beefed up patrols ahead of the planned demonstration, pulled over at least one group of truckers, according to WTOP.com. “Four commercial vehicles began driving side-by-side across all four northbound lanes of I-495 on the Inner Loop slowing traffic to 15 mph. Virginia State Police stopped the four tractor-trailers at the 53 mile marker (Fairfax County) and warned them not...

Gun-rights advocates are ready to launch a recall attempt aimed at some of California's most vulnerable Democratic state lawmakers - and the party's supermajority hold on the Legislature - if Gov. Jerry Brown signs some of the dozen-plus gun-control bills sitting on his desk. They're emboldened by the successful recalls last month of two Colorado Democratic legislators who supported gun restrictions, including the leader of the state Senate. Voters replaced both with Republicans. "As soon as the results came in Colorado, our phones started ringing," said Jennifer Kerns, the California political consultant who helped lead the Colorado recalls. "Until then,...

This is a youtube of the Crossfire appearance of Senator Cruz yesterday, October 10, 2013.

Washington (CNN) -- As trench warfare over the government shutdown drags into its 11th day, a number of Republicans with visible roles in the stalemate, including Texas Sen. Ted Cruz and Wisconsin Rep. Paul Ryan, will take a breather from Capitol Hill on Friday to speak at the Values Voter Summit, one of the conservative movement's marquee annual events. Pretty much everyone in official Washington has taken a beating in public opinion polls during the shutdown mess. Republicans, however, continue to shoulder most of the blame. But don't expect to hear calls for GOP compromise from the hundreds of activists,...

“So, the President offered an off ramp, in which he said ‘I will accept any length of extension’... “So, Boehner has his offer, he goes in to see the president, you would expect that he would then have a six-week extension and discuss all of these issues. What seems to have happened is there are now demands from the president...

Behold the Hollywood bubble. This week, actress Olivia Wilde starred in an Obamacare propaganda video targeting young people. "You can sign up for health care online in 10 minutes," her co-propagandist chirped as she cheered. Cue the laugh track. Back on planet Earth, Americans nationwide are still struggling with the $634 million online health care exchange nightmare. One reader asked me to share his story. Like me and 22 million other citizens in the private individual market for health insurance, he recently received his You Can't Keep It cancellation notice. Here's what happened when he went online to find alternatives....

Sen. John McCain said Wednesday that there was never a chance of defunding Obamacare, blaming politicians who said it was possible for the current government shutdown. “We started this on a fool’s errand, convincing so many millions of Americans and our supporters that we could defund Obamacare,” McCain (R-Ariz.) told Wolf Blitzer on CNN. “[That] obviously wouldn’t happen until we had 67 Republican senators to override a presidential veto.”[snip] “[It was] the people that convinced so many millions of Americans, tea partiers specifically we’re talking about, that there was some way to defund Obamacare. We can’t,” McCain said.

Rebel forces in Syria killed as many as 190 civilians and seized more than 200 hostages during a military offensive in August, Human Rights Watch says.... A report by the New York-based group says the deaths occurred in villages inhabited predominantly by members of President Bashar al-Assad's minority Alawite sect near the city of Latakia. ... "This operation was a co-ordinated, planned attack on the civilian population in these Alawite villages." ... The report says ISIS [the 'Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant'] and Jaysh al-Muhajirin were [are]still holding the hostages, most of them women and children. ... "The...

That's been my impression of the coverage of the shutdown: The folks you see on TV are much too sure of themselves. They've been making too much of thin slices of polling and thinner historical precedents that might not apply this time around. There's been plenty of bullshit, in other words. We really don't know all that much about how the shutdown is going to be resolved, or how the long-term political consequences are going to play out.

New 'deadline' for fixing Obamacare glitches seen in mid-November 7:44pm EDT By David Morgan WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. administration has a little over a month to fix the technology problems crippling its online health insurance marketplace, or jeopardize the goal of signing up millions of Americans in time for benefits under President Barack Obama's healthcare law, experts said on Thursday. Problems with the federal marketplace's entry portal serving 36 states, the website Healthcare.gov, continued for a 10th day on Thursday despite signs of gradual improvement, keeping a brake on the ability of consumers to shop for federally subsidized health...

Kwame M. Kilpatrick, the former mayor of Detroit, stood before a federal judge on Thursday and apologized for putting the people of his city through a corruption scandal so vast that prosecutors say it helped accelerate Detroit’s march toward bankruptcy.

Jonathan (Jon) B. Jarvis officially became the 18th Director of the National Park Service on October 2, 2009. [appointed by Barack 0bama] A career ranger of the National Park Service, who began his career in 1976 as a seasonal interpreter in Washington, D.C., Jarvis takes the helm of an agency that preserves and manages some of the most treasured landscapes and valued cultural icons in this nation.

WASHINGTON – The White House signaled Thursday that President Obama might not sign a bill to pay death benefits to the families of fallen soldiers, leading a top Republican senator to allege the president has hit a "new low." The Senate approved the bill Thursday afternoon, after it cleared the House a day earlier. The bill would reinstate the $100,000 "death gratuity" payments to military families, as well as resume funeral and burial expenses -- after funding was suspended as a consequence of the partial government shutdown. But White House Press Secretary Jay Carney claimed the bill was "not necessary,"...

Washington (CNN) - Republican Rep. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin broke his relative silence on the ongoing government shutdown in a Wall Street Journal opinion piece . . chairman of the House Budget Committee - argues in the editorial that in order to "end this stalemate," Democrats and Republicans should focus on "modest reforms to entitlement programs and the tax code." "Right now, we need to find common ground," Ryan wrote. "We need to open the federal government. We need to pay our bills today – and make sure we can pay our bills tomorrow. So let's negotiate an agreement to...

Azerbaijan's President Ilham Aliyev was elected to serve a third term on Wednesday evening but voting was marred by local media reports that suggested the results were released even before the polls opened. With counting soon to be completed, election officials said last night that Aliyev was one course to receive nearly 85 percent of the votes, with opposition candidate Jamil Hasanly receiving 5 percent. However, 24 hours beforehand, local media outlet Meydan TV reported that the results were accidentally pre-announced by the Central Election Commission of Azerbaijan using a new mobile phone application that the organization has introduced. Users...

If Congress doesn't raise the debt ceiling soon, the U.S. government won't be able to pay its debts. Here's who the government owes money to — all the holders of U.S. Treasury debt, broken down by category and by how much government debt they hold. Notes The graph includes debt owed to the Social Security trust fund and other federal funds. These are sometimes excluded when calculating the debt for other purposes. For details, see this GAO report. Source: Federal Reserve; FMS; GAO; Social Security Administration Credit: Quoctrung Bui For more, see our story: What A U.S. Default Would Mean...

President Obama opposed passage of funding for veterans' death benefits because the Fisher House Foundation has agreed to cover the costs, according to his spokesman.

Canadian provincial health officials last year fired the parent company of CGI Federal, the prime contractor for the problem-plagued Obamacare health exchange websites, the Washington Examiner has learned. CGI Federal’s parent company, Montreal-based CGI Group, was officially terminated in September 2012 by an Ontario government health agency after the firm missed three years of deadlines and failed to deliver the province’s flagship online medical registry. The online registry was supposed to be up and running by June 2011. Officials at the U.S. government's Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services awarded six technology contracts worth $87 million to CGI Federal for...

Senate Republicans are unhappy with a House GOP plan to raise the debt ceiling for six weeks without funding the federal government — and are coalescing around their own proposal to pair a short-term debt-ceiling increase with a year-long stopgap spending bill. Under their plan, government would be funded for a year at the $967 billion level set by the 2011 Budget Control Act. The package would also include a repeal of ObamaCare's medical-device tax and language to require income verification of people who apply for healthcare subsidies under the Affordable Care Act, say GOP sources familiar with the talks....

700,000 people a day would have been visiting the parks and that the surrounding areas are losing $76 million in visitor spending per day. The park service said it is losing $450,000 per day in revenue from entrance fees and other in-park expenditures, such as campground fees and boat rentals.

Orlando, Fla. — Terrorists are in the midst of practice runs in preparations for an attack on U.S. airlines. (snip) The pilots say the most recent dry-run occurred on Flight 1880 on September 2. The flight left Reagan National Airport in Washington D.C. and headed to Orlando International. Crew members say that shortly after takeoff, a group of four "Middle Eastern" men caused a commotion......continues

Richmond, Virginia (CNN) - Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, blamed by Democrats and some of his fellow Republicans as a chief architect of the ongoing government shutdown, struck back on Saturday, faulting President Obama and Senate Democrats for the political stalemate. “Let me be very clear, I don’t think we should be in a shutdown,” Cruz said in a speech to conservatives in the Virginia state capital. “Throughout the course of it, I have said we should not shut down the government. But sadly this is Harry Reid’s and President Obama's shutdown.” . . . In the run-up to the shutdown,...

I was born at the beginning of the Second World War into a family of high school teachers who were members of the Communist Party, and therefore were actually part of a vast conspiracy dedicated to the destruction of this country, although they would never have looked at it that way, and so-called liberals would be the first to deny it. n those days, the schools were old fashioned enough that my parents did not use their classrooms to indoctrinate students as tens of thousands of university professors and even more K-12 teachers regularly do today. It is also an...

Recent news reports have suggested that the hard line taken by Tea Party and other conservative Republicans in the House in the budget and debt ceiling battles may be producing a backlash among party supporters and donors who are concerned about the political impact of the government shutdown and a possible U.S. default on its debt. But to whatever extent that pushback may be happening, it’s a point of view not shared by rank-and-file Republicans. Just 18% of Republicans believed their leaders were paying too much attention to the Tea Party, up slightly from 13% two years ago, according to...

Libyan Prime Minister Ali Zidan fwho was kidnapped at dawn Thursday by armed gunmen from the Corinthia Bab Africa Hotel in the Libyan capital, Tripoli where he was residing, is said to have been released unharmed, Libyan state television said. On the other hand, an Interior Ministry official has been quoted telling the country’s news agency that he is being held at the Interior Ministry’s anti-crime department. Meanwhile, according to Reuters news agency, the group, which in principle reports to the defence and interior ministries, said on its Facebook page it had seized Zidan “on the prosecutor’s orders.” In the...