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Recordings of 911 calls from last year's Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting were released Wednesday, and they not only paint a picture of anguish and tension inside the building, they also show Newtown dispatchers mobilizing help, reassuring callers and urging them to take cover..... The calls were made public under a court order after a lengthy effort by The Associated Press. Prosecutors had argued that releasing the recordings would only cause more anguish for the victims' families.... One of the first callers to Newtown police was a woman who said in a trembling, out-of-breath voice: "I think there's somebody shooting...

White house officials claim they were unaware that ornaments of Mao Tse-tung were hung upon a Christmas Tree there.

Good stuff from Jonathan Turley at today’s House hearing on executive power, although I regret that I couldn’t find a more user-friendly format for you to watch. There’s no compilation clip; you’ll have to make do with the C-SPAN embed by fast-forwarding to the time cues I give you and being patient while the vid buffers (and buffers, and buffers). At 1:10:55 he describes the “royal prerogative” that the Constitution was designed to eliminate but which Obama, through the growth of the administrative state and his own expansive view of executive discretion, is now flirting with. At 2:53:45, he applies...

“Historians and pundits always say that the first real decision a governor makes is the one of running mate,” Cuyahoga County Executive Ed FitzGerald, Ohio Democrats’ likely nominee for governor next year, wrote to supporters when he announced he had chosen state Sen. Eric Kearney (D) as his running mate. FitzGerald may be starting to wish voters weren’t paying attention to his first gubernatorial decision. That’s because, in the two weeks since joining the ticket, Kearney has been under almost constant barrage for owing back taxes to the Internal Revenue Service. And the campaign’s response to the revelations about their...

The new mayor of New York City (Bill de Blasio) was an active supporter of a brutal communist regime well known as one of the worst human rights abusers in Latin America, according to documents obtained by Judicial Watch. It’s not information likely to be featured in the mainstream media, which has largely focused on de Blasio’s community organizing and work on behalf of the less fortunate. After all, he says the middle class is in danger of disappearing and he’s vowed to increase taxes for the rich, create more affordable housing and end the police department’s stop-and-frisk policy because...

Tuesday, December 03, 2013 Illinois high school requires parents to self-identify as liberal or conservative An assignment sent home from an Oak Forest, IL high school government class is raising eyebrows among parents who are shocked by the questionnaire they and their children are required to fill out. The questionnaire (below) has the parents identify their positions on a number of highly-charged issues, and then places them on a "political spectrum." The survey is part of Oak Forest High School's Common Core curriculum, which according to the school district's website is to ..."provide a consistent, clear understanding of what students...

Politics: We keep hearing about how the Republican Party is full of radical Tea Party crazies. But our latest IBD/TIPP Poll shows that it's Democrats who are out of touch with reality and well outside the mainstream. The public overwhelmingly believes the country is headed in the wrong direction, that current economic policies aren't working, that President Obama is doing a bad job, that government should be smaller and that ObamaCare should be repealed. But not Democrats. On issue after issue, in fact, Democrats are the outliers by wide margins, according to an analysis of the December IBD/TIPP survey.

For years, MSNBC host Chris Matthews has been sitting patiently behind the emergency glass waiting for President Barack Obama to come wildly swinging the ax of panic. As recently as August, Matthews cited Obama’s careful avoidance of the network, which just last month was forced to discipline two hosts for conduct so indefensible they could not continue to represent MSNBC, as an indication of his and his colleagues’ neutrality. On Tuesday, the air raid sirens blared and the president came screaming out of the fog begging for aid. Matthews’ interview with the President of the United States will air on...

Despite consistently beating the drum for an increased minimum wage, President Obama’s highly organized grassroots organization is offering jobs that don’t pay at all. “OFA is now accepting applications for full-time and part-time HQ Interns for the Spring 2014 and Summer 2014 HQ Internship Programs in Chicago, IL,” reads the job posting listed at Organizing for Action’s site, BarackObama.com. “This is a 14-week, unpaid internship program,” continues the listing. OFA, which describes itself as the nonprofit organization established to advance the national agenda Americans voted for when they re-elected President Obama in 2012, says it seeks candidates “with a strong...

The Obamacare insurance marketplace is even more vulnerable to security breaches since the administration “fixed” Healthcare.gov, according to a cyber security expert. Health and Human Services (HHS) released a progress report on Sunday following its self-imposed Nov. 30 deadline to repair the website, saying that the “team has knocked more than 400 bug fixes and software improvements off the punch list.” The administration said that the “site capacity is stable at its intended level,” though the site continued to crash on Monday. The eight-page report made no mention of the website’s numerous security flaws, which experts say put Americans’ personal...

Former President Bill Clinton, who prodded President Obama last month to keep his promises on Obamacare, said Tuesday that the political damage for Democrats from the flawed law will be “minimal.” “I believe that if the computer problems are all fixed, and it’s up and running by — and healthy in the next several weeks, I think that the damage will be minimal,” Mr. Clinton told interviewer Jorge Ramos of Fusion. “It’s getting better. I think it’ll be fixed by — in the next few weeks. If it’s worked through, I think within four or five months people will be...

Just because California Democrats hold every statewide office and a supermajority in the Legislature doesn't mean they're not worried about 2014. Some Democratic insiders fret that, essentially, life may be too good for the party right now. Their lurking fear: Without a high-profile presidential election or a big-name Republican challenger lined up yet against Gov. Jerry Brown, Democratic voters won't be interested enough to cast ballots in November. If that happens, the GOP could pick off a few seats in the Legislature, wrecking the Democrats' two-thirds majority and damaging Brown's ability to move his agenda. Adding to Democratic insiders' anxiety...

The U.S. economy has performed better since World War II when the president is a Democrat rather than a Republican, two prominent Princeton University economists conclude. The reasons, they say, involve more luck than successful policies. Over the past 64 years and 16 presidential terms, the U.S. grew at an average rate of 4.35% when a Democrat was in the White House and at a 2.54% when a Republican was, a gap the economists call “astoundingly large.” The research was done by Alan Blinder, a macroeconomist who served in the Clinton White House and has advised several Democratic candidates, and...

The Pulitzer Prize-winning PolitiFact.com is holding its annual “lie of the year” contest in which the site’s editors and reporters will choose between 10 finalists for the biggest political whopper of 2013.

Wendy Davis. Alison Lundergan Grimes. Mary Burke. Allyson Schwartz. Michelle Nunn. Natalie Tennant. The Democratic Party is hoping 2014 will be a Year of the Woman—again. As party operatives prepare for the 2014 midterm elections, Democratic women are being cast in starring roles, on the ballot and at the ballot box, as the party tries to take back politically important governor's mansions and keep its fragile majority in the Senate. "The importance of women to the Democratic Party in 2014 cannot be overstated," said Jess McIntosh, a spokeswoman for EMILY's List, which recruits and supports Democratic women candidates. "They are...

Rep. Jim McDermott (D-Wash.) told the Rev. Al Sharpton of MSNBC on Wednesday that Sharpton and the pope are "on the same wavelength." McDermott's observation on what he perceives as the similarity between Sharpton and the pope came up in a discussion of food stamps. McDermott noted that when Jesus fed five thousand people with five loaves of bread and two fish, “he didn’t charge food stamps.”(VIDEO-AT-LINK) “When Jesus had those five loaves and two fishes, he didn't charge food stamps. He didn't ask anybody how much money they had. He fed them because they were hungry, and that's really...

The traditional view of American political parties and their special interest groups is that the Republican Party represents big business and social conservatives while the Democratic Party represents labor unions and the poor. However, evidence suggests that this situation has changed. Labor unions and the poor are still linked with the Democratic Party. Small business is strongly with the Republicans at the moment, thanks to Obamacare, and social conservatives still lean Republican (and certainly not toward the Democrats). However, big business has now aligned itself with the Democratic Party. Big business is working with the Democrats in favor of immigration...

New York Democrat Rep. Charlie Rangel denied that President Barack Obama lied when he repeatedly claimed those who liked their healthcare plans could keep them under Obamacare, claiming that the ensuing criticism is instead “all about Obama.” Rangel appeared alongside North Carolina Republican Rep. Renee Ellmers to discuss Obamacare’s political future with Fox News’ Shannon Bream on Sunday. After checking in on a fatal subway derailment in Rangel’s New York district, Bream asked the congressman if he would be open to modifying parts of the healthcare law that need work. “I don’t know what you mean by modification,” Rangel protested....

After two months of massive glitches and bugs on the healthcare.gov website, the Obama administration says they met their self-imposed deadline of getting the site running smoothly. The administration said Sunday the site is now working for just about everyone but warned it still needs more fixes. Valley Health's health insurance enrollment campaign in Barboursville, WV proved that while the site has improved many problems, there are still kinks that need to be fixed. During Thanksgiving weekend, Valley Health helped those in need of health insurance sign up at the Huntington Mall in Barboursville, WV. In three days, certified assisters...

**SNIP** But after Obama’s initial success, the backlash set in, and it has been growing with a vengeance since the botched Oct. 1 rollout of the HealthCare.gov website. At this point, Obama’s only hope of mitigating the damage, both practical and political, is to delay the individual mandate until 2015. That’s the only way voters will understand that Obama genuinely wants to make Obamacare right. Otherwise, Republicans will capitalize on the perception that the president is unjustly asking the middle class and working poor to pay for his administration’s mistakes. Obama has two choices: He can nip that probable GOP...

SACRAMENTO, California — An ongoing federal investigation of a California senator is roiling the Democratic leadership in Sacramento and threatens to complicate relations in the majority party when lawmakers reconvene in January. FBI agents raided the offices of Sen. Ron Calderon in June, but the drama escalated within the past month when the Los Angeles-area lawmaker tried to tar his fellow Democrats after they stripped him of his committee assignments and one called for his resignation. Calderon has denied allegations he took money in return for promoting bills, but some analysts say the inquiry could affect the re-election chances for...

Mega-donor and Hollywood figure Haim Saban, a longtime Hillary Clinton backer, on Friday said he’d “pitch in with full might” if she launches a likely 2016 campaign, describing a growing consensus that she is President Barack Obama’s “natural successor.” The remarks to Israel’s Yedioth Ahronoth newspaper came several months after the media tycoon privately commissioned a movie about Clinton upon her departure from the State Department, featuring international figures including Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Obama singing her praises as Secretary of State. “I hope she will run. She would be a wonderful president,” said Saban, who gave $1...

U.S. Rep. Grace Meng was attacked and robbed while walking home after dinner in Washington D.C. last week. If U.S. Rep. Grace Meng’s (D-Queens) performance in a parody musical performed at Queens College over the weekend is any indication, she is definitely on the mend after being attacked and robbed in Washington D.C. last week. Just days before Meng sang in the “Legislative Acts” performance – including the spoof song, “There’s No Business Like Small Business” – she had been struck in the back of the head. As she fell to the ground during the attack that happened as she...

**SNIP** At stake is Illinois' $100 billion pension shortfall that affects teachers outside Chicago, public university employees and state government workers. The worst-in-the-nation deficit is gobbling up tax money that otherwise could go to education and other programs, and has resulted in Illinois holding the lowest credit rating among the states. Illinois' pension problem also is being blamed in part for the state's struggling economy and high unemployment. **SNIP** The measure would have offered pensioners a choice of keeping their 3 percent yearly compounded cost-of-living increases in return for giving up access to state health care. Cullerton maintained that such...

On Saturday, President Obama’s new Web startup—healthcare.gov—is supposed to work better. How much better is a little hard to pin down. Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius says, "We are definitely on track to have a significantly different user experience by the end of this month." Considering the initial experience was a near total collapse, Sebelius is doing an excellent job at keeping expectations in the bargain basement. It is practically impossible for the site to fail at offering a "different user experience,” so her guarantee is perhaps the weakest promise one could make. The official promise...

Just a few dozen stations now carry liberal talkers, as key affiliates in cities with active left-wing politics are falling like dominoes, going dark or switching formats. Detroit’s progressive outlet shut down in January, along with Seattle’s liberal talk station, which changed to sports. And after last year’s election, Portland’s progressive talk station ended its political programming. With the political battlegrounds of 2014 and 2016 on the horizon, reducing the whopping imbalance between conservative radio, with its huge fan base, and the left has become more important than ever, according to those in the progressive media world. POLITICO spoke with...

CARSON CITY — Nevadans who had their health insurance policies canceled because they don't meet new federal requirements cannot keep them for another year, the Division of Insurance determined Wednesday. The decision came after consultation with the attorney general's office, which concluded that the agency can't allow noncompliant plans to be renewed if they conflict with state and federal law. Nearly 25,000 Nevadans received cancellation or nonrenewal notices in October because their existing policies don't meet new requirements under the federal health reform law.

BERLIN — During the Cold War, Berlin was one of the most spy-ridden cities in the world. Now it’s the place where people go to escape government surveillance. An international cadre of privacy advocates is settling in Germany’s once-divided capital, saying they feel safer here than they do in the United States or Britain, where authorities have vowed to prosecute leakers of official secrets. Documentary filmmaker Laura Poitras, who was one of former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden’s main conduits of leaked data, lives here now. So does Jacob Appelbaum, a former spokesman for WikiLeaks. They were joined this...

When protests broke out in Syria in late 2011, Russia hoped for a short, nasty war as a matter of Russian national interest -- just enough to put the Muslim Brotherhood and assorted Sunnis in their place. Violence from its own Sunni Muslim population has plagued Russia for decades. Saudi Arabia took over the defeated nationalist Chechen rebellion in the late 1990s, infusing it with money and Islamist overtones, prompting the second Chechen war. More recently, there has been open fighting and rioting in Moscow between Muslims and Slavs. Iran counted on a short war as well -- something to...

UPDATE: The rape survivors who testified against a bill that would ban concealed carry on college campuses and who were disrespected by Hudak in the process reacted to the news that Hudak had resigned: “I am pleased that the people of Senate District 19 put enough pressure on Senator Hudak to cause her to resign her Senate seat. Her treatment of me and other women in March demonstrated Senator Hudak’s belief that she knows better than the women of Colorado how they should best defend themselves. My sincere hope is that the Democrats consider, in their replacement choice, that the...

Want to know which candidate for governor Pennsylvania Democrats prefer? According to a new survey released today, the answer is a former owner of an abortion clinic. Pennsylvania gubernatorial candidate Allyson Schwartz refuses to say if, when she ran an abortion business in the state, she would refer women to Kermit Gosnell’s infamous abortion facility. But she is leading all Democratic candidates for governor. From a poll: Things are pretty wide open when it comes to the Democratic primary for Governor. The leader is undecided, with 27% of voters unsure on who they want the nominee to be. Allyson Schwartz...

Winning a battle that costs you a war is no victory. The silver lining from President Obama’s and Senate Democrats’ unprecedented power grab last week is that now a conservative Republican president can appoint a Supreme Court that will restore the Constitution to its historical place in our nation’s life, revitalizing limited government and safeguarding fundamental rights. Had conservatives invoked the nuclear option, mainstream media outlets would have given it wall-to-wall coverage under the banner, “The Death of Democracy in America.” MSNBC hosts might have openly wept on camera. Instead, those outlets are virtually silent, and what little coverage they...

In 2005, President Obama said legislative tactics such as the filibuster were established by the Founding Fathers to protect the minority from a tyranny of the majority, but now those same things are speed bumps on the road to Progress: In Seattle Sunday, Obama sounded a nostalgic personal note and offered a rare self-assessment while criticizing congressional Republicans as an “impediment” to governing. So let’s get this country back to the monarchy the Founders intended it to be! Wait, that was King George III. Never mind. If you’re drinking something, put it down before proceeding. Ready? Alright: “I’m not a...

Children raised in single-parent households in the U.S. are far more likely to live in poverty than children with both parents present, according to Census figures released Monday. As a result, far more black and Hispanic children are raised in poverty than white kids. Bloomberg News Among all children living only with their mother, nearly half — or 45% — live below the poverty line, the Census Bureau said. For those living with just the father, about 21% lived in poverty. By comparison, only about 13% of children with both parents present in the household live below the poverty line....

The Affordable Care Act’s Hindenburg-like debut has been characterized a series of spectacular failures, the latest being an attempt by President Barack Obama’s political arm, Organizing for America, to furnish their followers with effective pro-ACA talking points. This army of true believers was instructed to bombard their unsuspecting kin with counterpoints to deflect the unceasing stream of bad ACA news screaming at them from the television set. It was a noble effort, albeit one that was mocked furiously on the right. But it wasn’t conservatives that scuttled this operation. It was the mortifying inability of the ACA’s infrastructure to back...

MADISON, WI, November 26, 2013 (LifeSiteNews.com) – If a Democrat has her way, the state's “Choose Life” license plates will soon have a counterpart. State Representative Chris Taylor of Madison has introduced a bill that would have the states press plates bearing the message “Support Planned Parenthood.” Taylor, who is former public policy director at Planned Parenthood of Wisconsin, said funds from the plates would go to Planned Parenthood and similar vendors. The move comes two weeks after Republicans in the legislature voted to authorize the state to release "Choose Life" license plates, with proceeds going to a coalition of...

The political gains that Democrats made on the generic congressional ballot as a result of the federal government shutdown continue to collapse, as a new CNN/ORC poll shows Republicans re-taking the lead on the generic congressional ballot. Less than a year ahead of the all-important 2014 midterm elections, Republicans now lead Democrats by a 49-47 edge on the ballot, in which pollsters ask respondents if they'd choose a Republican or Democrat without mentioning specific candidates. That's a remarkable shift from just a month ago — when Democrats held a formidable 50-42 advantage as Republicans were getting blamed for the shutdown....

President Barack Obama will announce another Affordable Care Act deadline delay on Wednesday, pushing back the online enrollment for small businesses until after the 2014 midterm elections. According to a Health and Human Services memo obtained by Politico, the Obama administration will delay mandate for small businesses to purchase health insurance for their employees on the federal exchanges until November of next year. “We’ve concluded that we can best serve small employers by continuing this offline process while we concentrate on both creating a smoothly functioning online experience in the SHOP Marketplace, and adding key new features, including an employee...

According to a report in The New York Post, President Barack Obama allegedly responded to a letter he received from a Texas school teacher who was concerned about the negative impact the Affordable Care Act may have on the president’s political position by referring to conservative Americans as “tea baggers.” “This bill has caused such a divisive, derisive and toxic environment,” wrote Thomas Ritter, a fifth-grade teacher at Sally B. Elliott Elementary in Irving, Texas. “The reality is that any citizen that disagrees with your administration is targeted and ridiculed.” Ritter added that he was afraid to write the president...

Created this for my Tumblr blog, American Awkward.

When I was a teenager, my mother broke her own rule of never buying someone else’s trouble and purchased a used car. We were quite excited because it was beautiful and sleek, and it was a convertible. The salesman said the car was practically new and was the deal of the century. Before long, it was discovered that the engine was completely shot, and the car was essentially a beautiful piece of junk. The salesman did not know my mother, and in the end, gladly refunded her money and took the car back. This kind of story is, of course,...

After insurance policy cancellations and the botched launch of healthcare.gov, the political fallout from the rollout of Obamacare seems to be having an impact for Democrats in general and Obama, according to recent polling conducted by CNN and ORC International. From a CNN post this morning entitled CNN/ORC poll: Democrats lose 2014 edge following Obamacare uproar: "What a difference a month makes. A new CNN/ORC International poll indicates a dramatic turnaround in the battle for control of Congress in next year’s midterm elections. Democrats a month ago held a 50%-42% advantage among registered voters in a generic ballot, which asked...

Old and busted: Healthcare.gov will be fully operational by November 30th. New hotness: Healthcare.gov will, er, work better than it did by December 1!Brought to you by the same people who insisted that if you liked your insurance plan, you could keep it: Obama administration officials said Monday that some visitors to HealthCare.gov will experience outages, slow response times or try-again-later messages in December. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) delivered the message in the latest attempt to downplay expectations for Nov. 30, the administration’s self-imposed deadline for fixing ObamaCare’s federal enrollment site. CMS spokeswoman Julie Bataille said...

It was all staged. The young man who heckled Obama from the stage yesterday during his speech is an illegal alien… And, he was invited to the speech by the White House. Ju Hong, the heckler, was invited by the White House to the speech. National Review reported: Yesterday’s heckler at Obama’s pro-amnesty speech in San Francisco was Ju Hong, an approved guest of the White House and an illegal alien from South Korea who recently graduated from UC Berkeley. People who still say illegal aliens “live in the shadows” obviously don’t know this guy: He’s on Twitter and LinkedIn,...

Sen. Sanders isn’t a Democrat, but on MSNBC he mapped out the perfect strategy for a Democratic victory in 2014. Video: (VIDEO-AT-LINK)Sen. Sanders was asked if the Republicans will take over the Senate in 2014. He answered: "Well, who knows who will take over the Senate. Certainly, the Republicans could do that, and certainly the Democrats could retain strong control of the Senate. We’ve got a long way to go until the election. I think what the Democrats have been very concerned about is the rollout of the Affordable Care Act, and the Republicans have been all over that issue....

"The community we share in Brooklyn will not tolerate random acts of violence," said Clarke. "Attacks on any people in our community are an attack on our community as a whole. With the leadership of this community and the New York City Police Department, we will stop the violence that threatens our safety." Jeffries's office said several victims have been assaulted by people playing the knockout game in Crown Heights, which has a significant Jewish population. One assailant, Amrit Marajh, has been charged with a hate crime, a response that other Brooklyn leaders welcomed. "I'm here, standing with my colleagues...

**SNIP** Good evening, everyone. I'm Megyn Kelly. Earlier today, we got the latest in the series of polls now showing plunging political fortunes for the Obama administration. A CNN poll shows 53 percent of the country now does not trust our president. Fifty three percent. The first time since Mr. Obama took office that this poll shows a clear majority does not believe that he is either honest or trustworthy. And it comes at a critical time for his presidency. The next big ObamaCare deadline is just five days from now. That is when the administration promised to have healthcare.gov...

Last Good Friday, two Russian Tu-22M3 bombers, escorted by four Su-27 fighter aircraft, simulated an aerial assault on two military targets in Sweden— the first near the capital Stockholm and the second in a southern part of the country. This was then followed in September by Zapad-13 (“Zapad” means “West”), Russia’s biannual military exercise, which this year was jointly held with Belarusian forces variously in Belarus, along the borders of Poland, Latvia, Lithuania and in Kaliningrad, Russia’s non-contiguous seaport territory that lies between Poland and Lithuania. Though initially billed as a counterterrorism operation targeting “illegal armed groups,” Zapad-13 was very...

Last week, President Obama's pollster Joel Benenson sent a memo to congressional Democrats encouraging them to refocus attention on the economy and ignore the health care chaos that has consumed the administration for the last two months. The three-page set of talking points argued that the media's relentless focus on the Obamacare website is a "distraction" from more important work on the minds of voters. But for Senate Democrats who backed the unpopular legislation, avoiding the subject isn't so easy. Republicans are armed with reams of polling data showing how the health care law could overturn the Democrats' majority, and...

A new Quinnipiac poll of Florida finds a majority of voters in the state view President Obama as untrustworthy. Just 44% believe Obama is honest. This view is a major factor in the collapse of Obama's approval rating in the state, where just 40% of voters approve of the job he is doing. This poll drop isn't just confined to Obama, however. The poll found a significant trend towards Republicans and steep drops in approval ratings for Democrats up and down the ballot. Former Gov. Charlie Crist, who is seeking the Democrat nomination for Governor next year, saw his favorable...