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American President Barack Obama’s step-grandmother underwent emergency eye surgery in an Israeli-run hospital in Equatorial Guinea last week. Sarah Onyango Obama, the president’s father’s third wife, lives in the remote Kenyan village of Nyang’oma Kogelo and suffered from an unspecified optical ailment. … The procedure was successful and Obama is making a full recovery, Yedioth Ahronoth reported on Sunday. …

President Obama is headed to Hawaii. Again. The White House announced late Tuesday that Obama — who was forced to cut his Christmas vacation short last week to return to Washington — would be traveling back to Hawaii, where he would be reunited with the first family.

Are you ready for a wild 2013? It should be a very interesting year. When the calendar flips over each January, lots of people make lots of lists. They make lists of “resolutions”, but most people never follow through on them. They make lists of “predictions”, but most of those predictions always seem to end up failing. Well, I have decided to put out my own list of predictions for 2013. I openly admit that I won’t get all of these predictions right, and that is okay. Hopefully I will at least be more accurate than most of the other...

Speaking Jan. 1 at the White House at 11:20 p.m., less than an hour after the House voted 257 to 167 to approve new tax hikes, President Barack Obama announced that he will assert the authority to raise the debt ceiling for spending approved by Congress. “One last point I want to make,” said the president flanked by Vice-President Joseph R. Biden Jr., whose Capitol Hill summitry closed the deal on a “fiscal cliff” compromise. “I will negotiate over many things, I will not have another debate with this Congress over whether or not they should pay the bills, they...

On Nov. 11, a mere five days after the presidential election, the cruise ship Nieuw Amsterdam pushed off from Fort Lauderdale for a Caribbean jaunt. Aboard were nearly 600 emotionally tattered Republicans, most of whom had been expecting a Republican victory of Rovian proportions — surely they had all read Karl’s prediction in The Wall Street Journal — and now were about to cruise 750 miles to nowhere, just like the party they so adored. The Nieuw Amsterdam was 86,000 tons of painful metaphor. The cruise was sponsored by National Review, the magazine founded by William F. Buckley and for...

For President Obama, the fiscal deal passed by Congress on Tuesday finally ends four years of debate with Republicans about raising tax rates on the wealthy. But it seemed to reopen a debate within his party about the nature of his leadership and his skills as a negotiator. While Mr. Obama got most of what he sought in the agreement, he found himself under withering criticism from some in his liberal base who accused him of caving in to Republicans by not taxing the rich more. Just as Speaker John A. Boehner has been under pressure from his right, Mr....

President Barak Obama left Washington D.C. tonight and is flying to Hawaii to rejoin his family on vacation.

Grover Norquist, the Americans for Tax Reform president and anti-tax activist who has become a key figure in the ongoing negotiations on the fiscal cliff, took to Twitter as the House was voting Tuesday night to give his blessing to the deal: "The Bush tax cuts lapsed at midnight last night. Every R voting for Senate bill is cutting taxes and keeping his/her pledge." "Congress about to make permanent most of the temporary tax cuts that Democrats voted against in 2001 and 2003. Permanent beats temporary."

Tucked inside the "fiscal cliff" deal is a provision repealing the CLASS Act, a giant unfunded mandate that was part of President Obama's health care law. The Community Living Assistance Services and Supports program was a priority of the late Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, Massachusetts Democrat, and was designed to create a program for long-term care for the functionally disabled. Mr. Obama halted the program, saying he couldn't find a way to make it cost-effective. But he had objected when Republicans tried to repeal it outright, saying he wanted to keep it on the books and try to amend it...

Mychal Massie is a respected writer and talk show host in Los Angeles. The other evening on my twitter, a person asked me why I didn't like the Obama's? Specifically I was asked: "I have to ask, why do you hate the Obama's? It seems personal, not policy related. You even dissed (disrespect) their Christmas family picture." The truth is I do not like the Obamas, what they represent, their ideology, and I certainly do not like his policies and legislation. I've made no secret of my contempt for the Obamas. As I responded to the person who asked me...

Federal workers are bracing for furloughs that could start to take place in the next few months if Congress doesn't replace massive budget cuts scheduled to begin Wednesday. Even as a fiscal cliff deal was beginning to emerge Monday afternoon, lawmakers and the president still lacked agreement to stop measures carving some $110 billion in spending power from federal budgets each year over the next decade through automatic cuts. President Obama dubbed the sequester cuts akin to "using an ax instead of a scalpel" on the budget in a Monday speech, while announcing a deal was close. "Some of these...

While the American people are being hit with new ObamaCare taxes, and the ObamaDeficit is climbing through the roof and will pass 20 trillion dollars before long, there’s always plenty of sweetheart deals and pork to be found. 1. Hollywood. Celebrities flocked to Obama and the industry poured millions into his campaign. Payday comes in the form of an extension of the Special Expensing Rules which allow Hollywood productions to deduct 15 to 20 million dollars. That’s pretty generous considering that companies that manufacture medical devices are being hit with a tax. But who really needs pacemakers anyway when you’ve...

House Republican leaders will assess support within their conference for two options on the Senate's "fiscal cliff" compromise before deciding whether to try to amend the legislation and send it back to the upper chamber, lawmakers and aides said. The two choices: amend the bill with spending cuts - likely killing it for the 112th Congress - or voting to adopt the Senate measure and sending it to President Obama for his signature. House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.) told his conference he was flatly opposed to the Senate bill without more spending cuts, members said as they emerged from...

We are being played; it's time we learned the game. Conservatives have their Constitution. Progressives have their Narrative. The current battle for America is between these two concepts, and each side uses different rules to fight it. One set of rules is consistent with an unchanging objective: limited government and individual freedoms. The other side's rules are as fickle as their goals, which are never fully disclosed beyond the equivocal references to fairness and hyphenated forms of justice. They will have to remain vague and deny their true allegiances until a time when American voters will no longer squirm at...

Emergency legislation to avoid the economy-threatening fiscal cliff ran into vehement New Year's Day opposition from House Republicans, casting doubt on the divided government's ability to prevent widespread tax increases and painful, across-the-board federal spending cuts. "I do not support the bill. We are looking, though, for the best path forward," House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, R-Va., declared after a closed-door meeting of his party's rank and file. While Speaker John Boehner took no public position, an attempt to add spending cuts was all but certain before the leadership called for a final House vote on the measure that cleared...

One of the first items on the agenda for Congress in January 2013, if not the first, will be the new and even more Draconian “assault weapons and magazine ban” long since drafted by Dianne Feinstein, Democrat Senator from California. Here, in 1995, Dianne Feinstein explains why she would ban all private ownership of firearms if she could: ---- Moreover, THE TRANSFER TAX (“REGISTRATION TAX”) PER ITEM IS $200 APIECE FOR NFA ITEMS! Only, this would be a transfer “from you to yourself,” an extortionistic demand that you pay to keep something you have already legally purchased and responsibly owned....

If you’re reading this, you’ve probably had a conversation with someone in the last few days who asked, “Why do ordinary law-abiding people need those semiautomatic firearms with magazines that can hold more than ten cartridges?” There are lots of sound answers. For one thing, defensive firearms are meant to be “equalizers,” force multipliers that can allow one good person to defend against multiple evil people. To allow one good person to defend against a single evil person so much stronger and/or bigger and/or more violent than he or she, that the attacker’s potentially lethal assault can be stopped. History...

This year has been quite a storm. Three hundred sixty-five days in a cyclone with fierce weather on all fronts: an economy tossing around in fits and starts; politics stalled by fog and precipitation, with heavy rains arriving in the fall to wash away Republican hopes of winning the White House and both houses of Congress. What about the coming year? No doubt we will again find ourselves at year’s end shaking our heads and contemplating what has happened, especially the unexpected. Here are a few of my educated guesses — and a bit of speculation — about what 2013...

The more the media covers the "fiscal cliff" fiasco, the more perspective is lost. It is really quite simple. Because the Republicans unilaterally jettisoned their trademark anti-tax stance, they will get nothing in return. The Democrats are not going to cut spending. In fact, the new tax revenues will fuel new spending, that will be leveraged into even more debt. The pre-emptive Republican capitulation decoupled the tax issue from the spending issue, precluding any "Grand Bargain'" or even token spending cuts. The Democrats trademark stance of protecting social programs like Medicare and Social Security from cuts is intact. Thus, Obama...

The Cuomo administration is preparing to shove thousands of mentally ill New Yorkers out of supervised settings — where they can be forced to take their medication — into far less restrictive, far more dangerous “community housing.” Albany, under pressure from the Obama administration, recently ordered psychiatric facilities not to place any discharged patients in adult homes, where staff can ensure they take their meds. Instead, they’ll be placed in “community housing,” without full-time supervision. This is part of the state’s plan to essentially empty adult homes into community-based “supportive” apartments, leaving up to 6,000 people — including those with...