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Why on earth did John McCain just rescue Chuck Hagel’s nomination? Why did he go on Meet the Press this morning to say that Chuck Hagel was going to get confirmed as Secretary of Defense? McCain argued that Hagel had the votes to be confirmed and that he didn’t want the process to be delayed further. But if that is the case then why did Bob Woodward go on Fox News yesterday to say that Democratic Senators were calling the White House to ask when Hagel was withdrawing? Now I doubt Woodward would have dropped that tidbit if there wasn’t...

Sen. Rand Paul says he'll wait until 2014 to decide whether to run for president, but he believes voters are ready for a Libertarian-minded Republican candidate. "I would absolutely not run unless it were to win," the Kentucky Republican said on "Fox News Sunday." "Points have been made, and we we will continue to make points. But I think the country is really ready for the narrative coming — the Libertarian Republican narrative." Voters want a "different face," he said. In order to expand the party's reach, Paul believes the GOP should embrace candidates who are willing to push a...

Investing In A Low Economic Growth World Stock-Markets / Investing 2013February 17, 2013 - 10:42 AM GMT By: John Mauldin The jury – unless you are the Fed and Ben Bernanke or the Congressional Budget Office, which cannot make lower growth assumptions without really blowing their deficit projections out of the water – is pretty well in on GDP growth: it’s going lower. Ed Easterling and I wrote a recent Thoughts from the Frontline on multiple pieces of research suggesting slower future growth. We asked the question, “So what about stock prices; will they follow suit?” Our thought was that,...

Lots of people like to think of government as a black hole that sucks in tax dollars and allows nothing of value to emerge. They haven’t taken a look at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. This secretive research arm of the Defense Department has a unique mission: to embrace the most wide-eyed visions of the future and manifest them in the here and now. Founded in 1958 as a shocked and fearful response to Russia‘s launch of Sputnik, the first artificial satellite, Darpa has over 45 years racked up a consistent record of innovation that has utterly transformed contemporary...

Black people, politicians in particular, avoid discussing the problems at the heart of Hadiya Pendleton's death, the heavy toll of black-on-black violence and the moral decay that keeps us trapped.... Empathy and social capital are absent from too many of today's black communities nationwide. In places like Chicago's South Side — where violent teenage gangs have replaced the traditional family — empathy is seen as a weakness and social capital is seen as that warm-and-fuzzy stuff that whites and black traitors practice. Many African-Americans blame urban poverty for this crisis. But poverty does not explain away the lack of a...

When we saw the headline "Four Ways ObamaCare Could Still Fail," our reaction was that it sounded like an unrealistically low estimate. But we were intrigued enough to read the article because of the source: TalkingPointsMemo.com, a news site with a strong (and acknowledged) liberal Democratic slant. Its framing as friendly criticism makes the piece, by congressional reporter Sahil Kapur, a powerful indictment of ObamaCare. To be sure, it's not clear Kapur intends to indict ObamaCare, and if he does, he downplays it, presumably in order to avoid alienating his liberal readers or his liberal editors. In his lead paragraph,...

Even Obama's experts say his gun control policies won't work. According to an internal Department of Justice memorandum, a gun ban, like the one being debated right now in Congress, will not work without a mandatory gun buyback, and "universal" background checks will not work without requiring gun registration. Call Congress at 202-224-3121 and tell them to reject President Obama's gun control agenda -- and to get serious about prosecuting criminals and fixing our broken mental health system.

Explains how Al Jazeera English is violating U.S. law by not registering as "Foreign Agent"

That's why you can have polling data that show 55, 60% of the people oppose Obama's agenda and still support him. They don't associate his agenda with the problems in the country. They don't believe, they don't understand, they don't think that Obama's policies have had any of the negative impact on the country. Somebody else did that, other presidents did that. They view Obama as trying to fix it. So this led to a discussion of the theory on Fox News yesterday. Megyn Kelly had a couple of guests. The first is the Talk Radio News Service president, Tony...

Once seen as the future of surveillance, the Long-Endurance Multi-Intelligence Vehicle has been terminated, InsideDefense.com reports. Is the military airship revival drawing to a close? UPDATE, 6:30pm Thursday: The Army confirmed that the LEMV airship project has been canceled. Here's the statement an Army spokesman emailed us: "The Long Endurance Multi-Intelligence Vehicle (LEMV), a hybrid air vehicle, is a technology demonstration project administered by the U.S. Army Space and Missile Defense Command. This project was initially designed to support operational needs in Afghanistan in Spring 2012; it will not provide a capability in the timeframe required. Due to technical and...

The Benghazi Report chronicles and analyzes what really happened in Benghazi. You know, what the 'mainstream media' used to do? These two picked up the investigatory weight and carried it all the way here so we can learn the facts. Benghazi is possibly the most important story of the Obama years. I'm going to quote extensively from Blake Miles' published analysis of the book, because there's no point to plowing the same ground twice. Blake, you should know, is Green Beret. Another American man who's been there, done that. Chewed some of the same dirt, sipped some of the same...

Shortly after her move from New Hampshire to Newtown in 1998, Nancy Lanza had good news about her troubled son. "Adam is doing well here, and seems to be enjoying the new school," Lanza wrote to a friend back in Kingston, N.H., in a Feb. 9, 1999, email. But Adam, 6, then diagnosed with a condition that made it difficult for him to manage and respond to sights, touch and smell, eventually struggled in the first grade at his new school — Sandy Hook Elementary. His mother would respond, touching off a 10-year educational shuffle with moves in and out...

The politicians and analysts have been talking for more than a year about the potential winners and losers from Mayor Nutter's property tax reform, and now the lines have been drawn. The results of a citywide reassessment key to Nutter's Actual Value Initiative (AVI) were released Friday, and the data confirm some long-held expectations - wealthier, fast-changing neighborhoods are facing stiff increases, and many large commercial properties will see big drops in their bills. Some hikes are jaw-dropping. --snip-- It amounts to a massive redistribution of the city's property tax burden, and the stakes for both homeowners and politicians could...

A veteran parking enforcement officer who unsuccessfully used a “sleepwalker’s defence” to explain why he punched a suspect in police custody was sentenced Friday to 100 hours of community service in Old City Hall Court. “I have determined that this is an exceptional case,” Justice Peter Harris said. The judge noted that Devon Henry, 43, has already been fired for the attack at 14 Division on April 24, 2011, and that Keith Ryan, the man he punched twice, didn’t want him sent to jail.

“Blade Runner” Oscar Pistorius may have beat his girlfriend with a cricket bat before shooting her to death in his South Africa home, according to a new report. -snip- "There was lots of blood on the bat. Forensic tests will show whose blood it was," a source with inside knowledge of the case told City Press. As well as bullet wounds to the head, arm, hand and hip, Steenkamp suffered a “crushed” skull, according to the South African paper.

Todd’s parents, Mary and Rick Todd, raised questions about their son's death that remain unanswered. Todd, an electronics engineer, had just concluded an 18-month employment with Singapore’s Institute of Microelectronics (IME). He had been developing, in collaboration with Chinese telecom giant Huawei, sophisticated radar and satellite technology for both civilian and military applications. His mother says that at work, he was “being asked to do things that made him uncomfortable", FT quoted her as saying. His girlfriend knew that he was increasingly stressed about the nature of his research. Todd resigned from IME sometime later. Days before his death, he...

Remember Ray's Hell Burgers, the burger joint Obama visited a couple of times early in his first term? Dead. Kaput. The latest victims of the Obama Kiss of Death, in which seemingly every business he personally visits - especially those he touts as New Economy success stories - goes bankrupt. Sometimes this is understandable, as in the case of those green energy losers he keeps picking. But other times it really does seem like a curse.

"On Bolton: You know that we had a committee meeting to vote him out [i.e. to the full Senate]. You know that we decided to take three additional weeks to investigate the new allegations and charges that have come in. I said, at the time, on the record, in the committee, and many times publicly: these are very serious allegations, and they deserve serious attention. And we should not move forward until we address these allegations....I have always taken the approach, and I think in the nine years I have been in the Senate I have only voted against one...

An increasing number of blacks appear to finally be getting angry with Obama. It’s just too bad it took four years and voting for Obama a second time for blacks to realize the president doesn’t care about their interests. Immigration and the president’s determination to get legislation passed granting amnesty to an estimated 11-20 million illegal aliens seems to be the straw that broke black liberals’ backs. Recently some Black Americans have been calling into black talk radio shows like “Keeping it Real with Al Sharpton, complaining immigration is not an important issue to them. This is despite Al Sharpton’s...

President Obama is golfing in Florida Sunday with Tiger Woods, according to a press report. The news was first reported by Tim Rosaforte, a writer for Golf World. "The President is arriving at The Floridian range. Awaiting is Tiger Woods and club owner Jim Crane. Historic day in golf. Their first round," Rosaforte said on Twitter. Read