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Secretary of State Hillary Clinton will testify before Congress in December about the attacks in Benghazi, Libya, the chairwoman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee said Thursday. Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-Fla.) announced during her committee’s hearing on Benghazi that Clinton would testify in early- to mid-December about the State Department’s own Libya review findings. Clinton will speak before the House and Senate foreign affairs committees, Ros-Lehtinen said. The hearings will be open, Fox News reported.

Cyber hackers at "Anonymous" launched a cyber onslaught on Thursday aimed at the Israeli government and corporate websites in retaliation for Israel’s airstrikes in the Gaza Strip this week.

General David Petraeus illuminates two grand military issues at just the right moment: officer corps character and flag officer performance. Petraeus could be the poster child for a clueless Gilbert and Sullivan character too -- "The very model of a modern major-general." Major-general was the highest rank to which an officer might aspire to in the last century. Grade inflation has created the contemporary glut of four stars, including Petraeus. Read more: http://www.americanthinker.com/2012/11/generals_and_geographic_bachelors.html#ixzz2CJv3fjUF

"President Obama; that's why people aren't buying stocks," says Todd Schoenberger, managing principal at The BlackBay Group. 1. Companies aren't going to hire with the increased expenses associated with Obamacare 2. People aren't going to have money for discretionary spending when taxes going up for the 1% 3. Small business owners won't expand 4. Higher tax rates for individuals making over $250,000 a year will result in a general lack of ambition.

Paula Broadwell, the biographer with whom former CIA ­director David Petraeus had an extramarital affair, abandoned her bid for a doctorate from Harvard in 2007, failing to advance to PhD candidacy after four semesters at the Kennedy School of Government, and now faces the prospect of an ethical review at King’s College London, where she has resumed pursuit of a doctorate. The revelations about her mixed academic record add to the portrait of a principal figure in the Petraeus scandal who has refused to respond to multiple Globe requests for comment and hasn’t spoken publicly since disclosure of her relationship...

NEW YORK (AP) -- President Barack Obama got his first look Thursday at the devastation that Superstorm Sandy waged on New York City, with a helicopter tour above flood-ravaged and burned-out sections of Queens and Staten Island. Two and a half weeks after the massive East Coast storm displaced New Yorkers, thousands of whom remain without power, Obama took an aerial tour that included Breezy Point, a waterfront community in Queens where roughly 100 homes were burned in a massive fire.

VANiTY POST. Trump enjoys headlines and offered $5 million for Obama to put up information about his past. How about a national "crime stopper" style hotline? $500-$1000 for proof of election fraud. A $1 million bonus payment if it alters the outcome of a state. $5 million if it alters the outcome of the entire presidential election. The local crime tip lines get family members stepping up to rat out criminals. This is a huge crime. Republicans are unwilling to tackle it (except Col. West) for fear of being called bad losers or (worse)'racist. Yet same day registration, buses of...

Three Lubavitchers have been killed in a grad rocket attack on a Chabad neighborhood of Kiryat Malachi, Israel Thursday morning. The victims were identified as Ahron Smadga, 50, Yitzchak Amsalam, 27, and Mira Scharf (nee Cohen), 25, who was 7 months pregnant. Scharf's husband Shmuel was critically injured, as were their 3 children. The Scharfs were active in the Jewish community in New Delhi, India. Her funeral will take place Thursday at 8 pm from Shamgar Funeral Home in Jerusalem. Today, Rosh Chodesh Kislev is the yahrtzeit of Mumbai Shluchim Rabbi Gabi and Rivky Holtzberg obm, murdered in a terrorist...

Fordham University is in a bit of a bind. After loudly proclaiming his “disgust” with the “hate speech” of conservative pundit Ann Coulter in an email to all students, in the process slamming the Fordham College Republicans—his own students—as immature bigots who lack character, Fordham President Joseph McShane, S.J., is now faced with defending his administration’s invitation to philosopher and infanticide advocate Peter Singer to participate in a panel on “animal ethics.” This puts Fordham in a tough spot. Father McShane could have allowed the marketplace of ideas to function on its campus without engaging in an electronic temper tantrum....

(Reuters) - In his first public remarks since resigning as CIA director last Friday over an extramarital affair, retired General David Petraeus said he did not share any classified documents with his mistress and biographer, Paula Broadwell. Petraeus also told a reporter for the HLN television network that it was the affair, not any questions over the CIA's role during the September 11, 2012, attacks on the U.S. diplomatic mission in Benghazi, Libya, that prompted him to step down.

Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.) confirmed Thursday that she will seek the chairmanship of the Senate Budget Committee next year but told The Hill that she cannot commit to doing a budget. This opens up the possibility that Senate Democrats will avoiding passing a budget resolution for the fourth year in a row. The last time the Senate passed a standalone budget resolution was in 2009. This past year, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) said a budget was not necessary because the top-line spending number for appropriations was set in the August 2011 debt-ceiling deal. Murray said that an agreement...

<p>Sources tell FOX 32 News that Congressman Jesse Jackson Jr. is willing to give up his 2nd Congressional District seat if he's given disability when he steps down.</p> <p>Jackson Jr. was re-elected to his tenth term but last month, sources say, he applied for a disability package--what could be his only income if he resigns. It is expected to take a couple of weeks for Congress to approve or deny the request.</p>

Cessna Aircraft has signed a contract with China Aviation Industry General Aircraft Co. (CAIGA) to form a joint venture company to conduct final assembly of Cessna Citation XLS+ business jets in China for the Chinese market. Cessna’s relationship with CAIGA “taps into what is expected to be the highest growth aviation market during the coming decade,” Cessna said in a statement. Formation of the company is subject to various government approvals. “It’s so exciting,” Cessna spokeswoman Stephanie Harder said of the agreement. Currently she said no Citation XLS+ airplanes operate in China. Cessna remains close to signing a similar arrangement...

If you believed the earlier media reports about him, he’s either (a) lovesick for Kelley to the point where he tried to seduce her with barechested pics or (b) obsessed with the idea of a cover-up here because of his, ahem, “worldview.” Either way, he’s letting personal/political judgments interfere with his professional duties.Third possibility: Maybe he’s an agent with a good track record who really did suspect that there’s something going on that shouldn’t be swept under the rug. Time for his side of the story: Two former law enforcement colleagues said Mr. Humphries was a solid agent with experience...

By Paul McDougall InformationWeek November 15, 2012 11:37 AM Texas Instruments said it will lay off about 1,700 workers, or about 5% of its total workforce, as part of a restructuring that will see it exit the market for mobile chips that power smartphones and tablets, including Amazon's Kindle Fire. The company said it would instead focus its OMAP (Open Multimedia Applications Platform) business on embedded systems that power business tools and other products that don't evolve as rapidly as mobile gadgets.

WASHINGTON, Nov. 15 (UPI) -- The U.S. Labor Department Thursday said first-time jobless benefits claims rose by 78,000 in the week ending Saturday. Initial claims jumped out of a relatively comfortable 355,000 claims -- the third lowest week since the recession ended in June 2009 -- to 439,000 with the four-week rolling average up 11,750 to 383,750. The weekly figure has been volatile of late -- rising by 46,000 one week in mid-October, for example, but a one-week jump of 78,000 is a clear setback. First time claims have not been this high since the week of April 30, 2011....

The real Petraeus scandal is why the bureau was rummaging around in his private communications in the first place. For the past week, Washington has been embroiled in an ever-escalating sex scandal involving Gen. David Petraeus, his biographer Paula Broadwell, and a third woman named Jill Kelley, and now, tangentially it seems, Gen. John Allen. The affair between Petraeus and Broadwell was discovered by the FBI and revealed late last week when Petraeus resigned as director of the CIA. But while the salacious details have kept Washington's press corps busy, the details about how the bureau ever got this information...

At a Thursday press conference in Bangkok, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta said he's unaware of any more top military brass involved in the web of scandal uncovered by the investigation into Gen. David Petraeus's affair with his biographer, Paula Broadwell, the Associated Press reports. The clarification comes now that the U.S. commander in Afghanistan, Gen. John Allen, has been sucked into the controversy after the discovery of potentially flirtatious emails with Tampa, Fla., socialite Jill Kelley.

(Reuters) - Superstorm Sandy drove a surge in new claims for U.S. jobless benefits last week and weighed on factory activity in November, providing early signs of how heavily the storm could hit the U.S. economy in the fourth quarter. Initial claims for state unemployment benefits rose 78,000 to a seasonally adjusted 439,000, the highest level since April 2011, the Labor Department said on Thursday. It was the biggest one-week jump since the spike caused by Hurricane Katrina in September 2005.

CAIRO – Egypt asked the United States to push Israel to stop its offensive against Hamas militants in the Gaza Strip, warning that the violence could "escalate out of control," the Foreign Ministry said Thursday. Foreign Minister Mohammed Kamel Amr spoke with U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton late the night before, asking for "immediate U.S. intervention to stop the Israeli aggression," the ministry said in a statement. The call came after Egypt recalled its ambassador to Israel to protest the offensive.

LONDON — BP, the British oil company, said Thursday it would pay $4.5 billion in fines and other payments to the United States government and plead guilty to 14 criminal charges in connection with the giant oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico two years ago.

India Friday added more teeth to its navy when it inducted a new Russian-built multi-role stealth frigate, carrying the BrahMos supersonic cruise missile, into its fleet, adding to its recently growing blue water capabilities. The warship will join the Western Fleet of the Indian Navy by the end of December and its first commander is Captain Antony George, an anti-submarine warfare specialist. The new guided missile frigate, christened INS Tarkash, was handed over to the Indian Navy by Russia's United Shipping Corporation at Kaliningrad in western Russia, the seat of its Yantar Shipyard in the Baltic. India's Mumbai-based Western Naval...

In June, the Washington Post celebrated the 40th anniversary of the biggest scoop in journalistic history — Watergate. Looking back on it, the Post has every right to crow. The story was so huge that every political scandal since has been labeled with the word “gate” tagged onto the end of it. However, the Post should also consider the adage, “You’re only as good as your last story,” because there’s a bigger one out there for the taking, if it only had the courage to pursue it. That story is, of course, the attack on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi,...

(CNSNews.com) – The Obama administration named Holly Petraeus--wife of retired Gen. David Patraeus, who resigned last week as CIA director after revealing he had had an extramarital affair--to a $187,605-per-yer job in the newly formed Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB). The CFPB, created by the Dodd-Frank law, was placed by that law under the umbrella of the Federal Reserve. The funding of the CFBP, which comes from the Federal Reserve, is not subject to congressional oversight. Mrs. Petraeus became a member of the CFPB Implementation Team on Jan. 12, 2011. She is now the assistant director for the Office of...

During a speech today in Washington D.C., AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka called the looming debt disaster a "manufactured crisis" and said "there isn't a fiscal cliff." "There is no fiscal cliff," Trumka says in prepared remarks to the National Mediation Board Conference in Washington on Thursday. "What we’re facing is an obstacle course within a manufactured crisis that was hastily thrown together in response to inflated rhetoric about our federal deficit." Obama met with Trumka earlier this week, in addition to other far left leaders, to discuss economic policy. Apparently a $3500 tax increase on every family doesn't serve as...

Just in case the unaffordable price tag and rising costs don't quite do the trick, America's spiraling dearth of doctors will contribute heavily to the collapse of our re-engineered health care system, according to a new study:   The United States will require at least 52,000 more family doctors in the year 2025 to keep up with the growing and increasingly older U.S. population, a new study found. The predictions also reflect the passage of the Affordable Care Act -- a change that will expand health insurance coverage to an additional 38 million Americans. "The health care consumer that values...

CBS News has obtained the CIA talking points given to U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice on Sept. 15 regarding the fatal attack on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi, Libya, four days earlier. CBS News correspondent Margaret Brennan says the talking points, which were also given to members of the House intelligence committee, make no reference to terrorism being a likely factor in the assault, which left U.S. Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans dead. "Available information suggests that the demonstrations in Benghazi were spontaneously inspired by the U.S. Embassy in Cairo and evolved into a direct assault... There are indications...

The Arab world seeks the death of American, Israel, and all Jews, and the Dems/UN meet to condemn Israeli self-defense.

We know that Wall Street would rather not have consumer advocate Elizabeth Warren sitting on the Senate Banking Committee, but right now it looks like if she wants it, she can have it. Here's why (it's very simple). Ultimately, the decision of who sits on what committee is left up to Harry Reid (D-NV), the Senate Majority leader. He takes into consideration things like seniority and Senators' talents, backgrounds and preferences. But in the end, the choice is his. Now let's look at the committee. There are two seats opening up: Herb Kohl (D-WI) and Daniel Akaka (D-HI). New York...

Do you believe Maine should legalize, tax and regulate marijuana?

It began with traditional newspaper circulation about a decade ago, and now the phenomenon has spread to television: Like millions of Americans who shun the daily paper, many are voting with their remotes and are turning off network TV.

HOUSE COMMITTEE HEARING ON BENGHAZI ATTACK

Kahlberg is reporting news and opinion from the front line of Israel: The UN Security Council held an emergency meeting on Wednesday night to discuss Israeli strikes against the Palestinian terrorists in the Gaza Strip but took no action, as Israel threatened a wider offensive in the Palestinian terror enclave to stop missile and rocket attacks by terrorists. Is it not sad that the United Nations sees fit to convene an emergency session less than 12 hours after Israel is forced to defend itself against the ongoing and continuous acts of terror against innocent Israeli civilians? Is it not sad...

Russia introduced a new law broadening the definition of treason on Wednesday, alarming opponents who say Vladimir Putin will use it to silence his critics and that almost anyone in contact with foreigners will be at risk. The legislation allows Russians representing international organizations to be charged with treason, as well as those working for foreign states and bodies, and expands the range of actions that can be considered treasonous.

CNN) -- David Petraeus' resignation was not linked to the September attack that killed four Americans in Benghazi, Libya, and he never passed classified information to the woman he was having an affair with, the former CIA director told an HLN journalist. Petraeus, in conversations with HLN's Kyra Phillips, confirmed to her what his supporters have been saying about ongoing scandal. "In our first conversation," Phillips said Thursday, Petraeus "had told me he had engaged in something dishonorable. He sought to do the honorable thing in response -- and that was to come forward. He was very clear that he...

Maine Republican Party Chairman Charlie Webster is once again alleging possible voting irregularities, this time claiming that groups of unknown black people showed up in some rural towns to vote on Election Day.

(Reuters) - The euro zone debt crisis dragged the bloc into its second recession since 2009 in the third quarter despite modest growth in Germany and France, data showed on Thursday. The French and German economies both managed 0.2 percent growth in the July-to-September period but their resilience could not save the 17-nation bloc from contraction as the likes of The Netherlands, Spain, Italy and Austria shrank. Economic output in the euro zone fell 0.1 percent in the quarter, following a 0.2 percent drop in the second quarter. Those two quarters of contraction put the euro zone's 9.4 trillion euro...

James Pethokoukis writing at the AEI Enterprise blog, examines the president's "balanced" plan to cut $4.4 trillion from the budget over the next decade. James points out that the plan is "reheating of his 80-page deficit reduction package from September 2011 which, on paper, showed $2 in spending cuts for every $1 in taxes raised. Not so fast: ***** Once you begin to dig into the numbers, the plan doesn't look balanced at all. As the bipartisan Committee for Responsible Federal Budget noted back then: The Administration claims that the plan would save about $4.4 trillion in total (including interest...

Paula Broadwell, the biographer with whom former CIA ­director David Petraeus had an extramarital affair, abandoned her bid for a doctorate from Harvard in 2007, failing to advance to PhD candidacy after four semesters at the Kennedy School of Government, and now faces the prospect of an ethical review at King’s College London, where she has resumed pursuit of a doctorate. The revelations about her mixed academic record add to the portrait of a principal figure in the Petraeus scandal who has refused to respond to multiple Globe requests for comment and hasn’t spoken publicly since disclosure of her relationship...

Florida's permissive firearm laws have landed the state in the center of a national controversy but the Sunshine State is refusing to bow to pressure to reform its controversial Stand Your Ground Laws. After George Zimmerman cited the law in the shooting death of unarmed teenager Trayvon Martin, Gov. Rick Scott created a Stand Your Ground task force to review the law. And now the task force has decided not to change the gun laws, The Associated Press reported Tuesday. "The task force concurs with the core belief that all persons, regardless of citizenship status, have a right to feel...

If one wanted to sum up the consequences of the entire 2012 election in a single issue, look no farther than Obamacare. The new health-care law is generally regarded as the signature achievement of the president’s first term. It’s certainly emblematic of Obama’s entire approach to government and what we can expect from his second-term initiatives. The president promised a great deal of benefits from health-care reform: lower premiums, better care, universal coverage. He reassured Americans: If you had health insurance, and you liked it, you could keep it. The bill’s gross ten-year cost would be less than $1 trillion,...

Oil giant BP has agreed to pay the largest criminal penalty in U.S. history, totaling billions of dollars, for the 2010 oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, a person familiar with the deal said Thursday. The person, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak on the record about the deal, also said two BP PLC employees face manslaughter charges over the death of 11 people in the explosion of the Deepwater Horizon oil rig that triggered the massive spill. The person said BP will plead guilty to obstruction for lying to Congress about...

It’s pardonable to be defeated, but never surprised. — Frederick the Great Over the past week, there has been plenty of harsh criticism of the Romney campaign’s get-out-the-vote efforts and volunteer system. While the campaign has pushed back on these claims, my experience inside a swing-state legal war room last Tuesday leads me to say that the criticisms of the campaign’s GOTV in general, and of its use of the Orca system in particular, ring true. The main GOTV effort was supposed to operate like this: Poll watchers listen to the names of everyone coming in to vote and notate...

Hope - it appears - peaked at the start of the year in the US, following the global coordinated central bank pump which ramped it from lows to highs within a few months. All that hope - and then some - has now apparently faded. The General Business Conditions expected six months forward dropped to its lowest level since March 2009. What is perhaps worse, given the focus on jobs jobs jobs, is that for the first time since April 2009, the employment outlook for employment turned negative - suggesting firms are looking to reduce employees at the fastest rate...

John Boehner isn’t selling out conservatives on taxes. All he has done is reiterate that Republicans are open to a tax-reform deal that generates extra revenues, so long as the entitlements that are driving our long-term debt explosion are also addressed. He has also said that this reform should not raise marginal tax rates, and should indeed lower them. A deal along those lines might be worth supporting, depending on the details. The White House is, however, insisting that the top tax rates have to go up as scheduled under the law — and that even more taxes should be...

In an article published in 2001, Jude Wanniski, the author of The Way the World Works, noted that since 1896, only Republican presidential candidates running on “pro-growth” platforms have won. Republicans advocating “austerity” have invariably lost. With the defeat of Mitt Romney, the election of 2012 continued this pattern, with one addition. Republican presidential candidates offering clueless confusion also lose. Democracies tend to evolve two political parties, a party of economic growth and a party of income redistribution. If a credible plan for economic growth is offered, the people will vote for it, provided that it does not involve crushing...

President Obama's proposed tax hike on the top 2% of incomes will do next to nothing to close our chronic budget deficits, now running more than $1 trillion a year. But it will have a major impact on one struggling part of our economy: small business. In his Wednesday press conference, just before meeting with representatives of the nation's largest businesses, the president again claimed his plan to reduce the deficit and avoid the fiscal cliff would mean that "97% of small businesses are not going to see their taxes go up." But this is, to put it politely, deceptive....

"Let it crash!" "Give them what they want and they'll see what happens!" "Surely, once the left's programs are implemented and the economy crashes, people will come to their senses." Since the election, many on the right have echoed this meme. They are convinced that widespread poverty and lack of opportunity will bring a resurgence of the America many of them knew growing up. Grandma and Grandpa's America. Perhaps these people forget that Roosevelt was re-elected three times during a depression that he helped prolong -- a depression that featured soup lines and starvation in a population that actually wanted...

chicagotribune.com 'Jihad' ads on CTA buses spark outrage By Manya A. Brachear and Jon Hilkevitch Tribune reporters 7:29 AM CST, November 15, 2012 The controversial ads unveiled on the back of 10 CTA buses Wednesday read, “In any war between the civilized man and the savage, support the civilized man.” They conclude with the words, “Support Copts. Defeat Jihad,” referring to friction between Muslims and Coptic Christians in Egypt. Within hours of the buses' first runs, messages appeared on Facebook and Twitter denouncing the campaign. Many said degrading a spiritual tenet of Islam -- one that refers to a Muslim's...

For adman Donny Deutsch, there's really no difference between pushing a political party or a bag of potato chips: it's all about the branding. S.E. Cupp, in contrast, is a conservative with bedrock principles. Seated next to each other on today's Morning Joe set during a discussion on GOP strategy going forward, a blow-up was clearly in the cards. And clash they did, with Cupp arguing that the GOP doesn't need to re-brand itself, but rather to "spend more time explaining why their policies work for everyone." Deutsch, repeatedly trying to cut Cupp off, exclaimed that she "couldn't be more...