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The president is expected to issue a call to action on global warming in a commencement address Saturday at the University of California, Irvine. Earlier this month, he announced a contentious plan to cut pollution from power plants. While in Orange County, Obama also raised money for the Democratic National Committee at a closed-door fundraiser at the Laguna Beach home of Getty oil heiress Anne Earhart. About 25 people paid up to $32,400 to participate in a roundtable discussion with the president. He's spending the rest of the Father's Day weekend on vacation at the Rancho Mirage home of White...

ANAHEIM, Calif. (AP) — President Barack Obama said denying climate change is like arguing the moon is made of cheese, as he issued a call to action on global warming to Saturday's graduates of the University of California, Irvine.

Many residents of Mosul say they prefer life under ISIS to that under Iraqi army control Less than one week ago the jihadists seized control of Iraq’s second city, Mosul, where they have set to work imposing the hardline rules and summary justice of their “Islamic State”. In the Sunni dominated city, the removal of the Iraqi army by ISIS has been interpreted as a local victory; as a means of empowering Mosul residents against ...the Shia dominated national government who they feel has kept their people “oppressed”. But the crises in northern Iraq is now less one of a...

Link only due to copyright issues: http://www.sctimes.com/story/news/local/2014/06/13/rick-nolan-minnesota-bergdahl-veterans-hospitals/10447371/

http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2013/05/how-can-we-understand-benghazi-without-probing-the-cias-role/275781/

Lots of tense, awkward laughter on NPR today! Hillary Clinton's book tour took her to "Fresh Air" with Terry Gross this afternoon, where the two got into it a bit over if and when Clinton "evolved," as they say, on the issue of gay marriage, or whether she held her personal opinions in favor of equality until they were politically viable. The answer is: Clinton is not telling. But it wasn't for Gross's lack of trying. "So what's it like when you're in office and you have to do all these political calculations to not be able to support something...

Sen. Lindsey Graham spent his summer testing out lines on global warming. As the Republican hit the town halls in South Carolina, a state with a major military presence and one of the country's highest unemployment rates, Graham would ask people if they thought climate change was a problem. Few did. But Graham quickly followed with another question, asking for a show of hands from those concerned about energy security. The response was strong, and Graham wasted little time making the connection. "You can't look at it in isolation," Graham said in an interview last week. "I'm trying to say,...

On Saturday, Bowe Bergdahl was a hero, and the five members of the Taliban being freed in exchange for him were the worst of the worst. By the end of the week, it seemed that neither is actually true. The parade in Bergdahl’s Idaho hometown was canceled. Four of the five aren’t nice guys, but they aren’t war criminals, either. As for Bergdahl, I don’t pretend to know whether he deserted his unit. That is a question that can only be answered in a properly and fairly conducted court-martial. But the account that broke my heart was the interview with...

Doing his best to keep the Obama administration’s front line from falling into retreat, MSNBC’s Ed Schultz sprayed rhetorical cover fire all over the place on his June 5 program, defending Team Obama’s much-criticized deal to release Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl in exchange for five deadly Taliban leaders.

Four months ago, Sen. John McCain said he would support the exchange of five hard-core Taliban leaders for the release of Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl. "I would support ways of bringing him home," he told CNN, "and if exchange was one of them I think that would be something I think we should seriously consider." But the instant the Obama administration actually made that trade, McCain, as he has so often in the past... SNIP Though we criticized the administration for ignoring the law in not informing Congress of the transfer of the Taliban detainees 30 days in advance, leave it...

One-time presidential candidate Hillary Clinton refused to go along with an Obama campaign attack against Sarah Palin in 2008 that she saw as gender baiting, according to an except from her new memoir reported Friday. NBC News’ Kelly O’Donnell said during a morning segment on “The Today Show” that despite reconciling with the Obama camp after the primaries, Clinton didn’t endorse the campaign’s anti-Palin line upon her selection as John McCain’s vice-presidential nominee. “When Sarah Palin was picked by John McCain, Clinton refused to back up a ‘dismissive statement’ from Obama’s campaign,” O’Donnell reported. “‘I was not going to attack...

President Obama’s record of lawlessness is prodigious. There is the assumption of a power to rule by presidential decree — unilaterally amending ObamaCare provisions, immigration statutes, and other enactments in flagrant disregard of Congress’s constitutional power to write the laws. There is rampant fraud on the American people — think: “If you like your health care plan, you can keep your health care plan, period,” just for a start. In the Benghazi massacre, we see the arc of administration malfeasance: In the absence of congressional authorization, the president instigated an unprovoked and ultimately disastrous war in Libya, empowering virulently anti-American...

When the history of this presidency is written, it will record that bold, progressive reforms dramatically reshaped the face of government, thanks to the vision, creativity, and political will of one man. And that man is Mitt Romney. President Obama already has Gina McCarthy, who designed Romney’s cap-and-trade program in Massachusetts, running the Environmental Protection Agency for him. Coral Davenport reports today that the administration’s new regulations of power plants, due for release Monday, will be designed to expand the structure Romney built: As governor of Massachusetts, Mr. Romney was a key architect of a cap-and-trade program in nine northeastern...

For his Parts Unknown visit to Israel, adventuresome chef Anthony Bourdain has been honored with the Voices of Courage and Conscience in Media award from the U.S. Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC). It was the chef’s first time in Israel, and he visited Jerusalem, the West Bank, and Gaza.   -snip-In his own words: “By the end of this hour, I’ll be seen by many as a terrorist sympathizer, a Zionist tool, a self-hating Jew, an apologist for American imperialism, an Orientalist, socialist, a fascist, CIA agent, and worse.”

President Barack Obama and the woman who likely wants to be his successor, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, held a secret meeting at the White House on Thursday. In a strange sequence of events, the White House was forced to confirm the previously undisclosed Obama-Clinton lunch summit after People magazine tweeted — then mysteriously deleted — the news about the meeting. “The President enjoyed an informal, private lunch with Secretary Clinton at the White House this afternoon,” a White House official said. Because the lunch had not been on the president’s public schedule, Roll Call reporter Steve T. Dennis,...

Dan from Squirrel Hill's Blog Poet Maya Angelou shoots gun at home intruder. Barack Obama thinks she should be in jail because of it. Checking both google and google news, I did not see this reported on by any of the mainstream media, other than Time magazine. No New York Times, Washington Post, or Associated Press articles. No CBS, NBC, or CNN coverage.No wonder why some on the political left hate Fox News, which did report it.For News reports:Poet Maya Angelou Blasts Gun at Home IntruderObama supporter and famous poet Maya Angelou was asked by Time Magazine if she had ever...

As the House Appropriations Committee voted on party lines Thursday to allow school districts to waive nutrition requirements in school lunches, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi’s office sent out a photo caught by an NPR reporter showing what Republicans were ordering for breakfast. The tweet by NPR reporter Todd Zwillich shows a feast of processed fats, sugars and salts sometimes called food. The new nutrition guidelines championed by first lady Michelle Obama call for reducing those ingredients in federally subsidized lunch programs in favor of fresh fruits and vegetables, whole grains and the like. Obama has been on an all-out...

First lady Michelle Obama is more aggressively wading into policy fights while expanding her portfolio. Six years into the Obama administration, the first lady has gone to bat on issues outside her bailiwick in the East Wing. [snip] Most notably, earlier this month, she spoke out on the kidnapping of more than 200 Nigerian girls......[snip] She also made a rare foray into Capitol Hill politics earlier this week when House Republicans threatened to rollback the school lunch programs......[snip] The first lady’s more public role in politics goes beyond Boko Haram and the fight over school lunches.[snip] the first lady is...

On Wednesday, Democrats deigned to join Republicans on the House Select Committee investigating Benghazi, primarily to protect Hillary Clinton’s reputation in particular, and the Obama administration’s in general. Toward that end they will likely do what they always do whenever their party is threatened: denigrate the investigation as it unfolds and obstruct it as much as possible. Thus, it was completely unsurprising that even as House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) appointed five colleagues to the panel she dismissed the need for it. “The Republican obsession with Benghazi has not been about the victims, the families or the country,” she...

CNN President Jeff Zucker declared his network would “not going to be shamed” into covering Benghazi and other stories without “real news value” at an awards dinner Monday. Capital New York reports that Zucker explained CNN’s post-plane plans during an interview at the Deadline Club’s annual dinner on Monday night. “I don’t think there’s any question about our commitment to breaking news, as evidenced by all the questions about the plane,” Zucker told The New York Times’ Bill Carter (RELATED: The five most ridiculous aspects of CNN’s missing Malaysian flight coverage). “So we’re still there whenever that happens,” he continued,...