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US, Video

The former Navy SEAL who shot and killed Usama bin Laden talked to Fox News’ Peter Doocy in an exclusive interview, detailing his life and the event. He said that members of the Navy’s SEAL Team 6, the elite team who took out the most wanted terrorist, believed that it was “going to be a one-way mission,” but it would be “worth it to kill him.”

In part one of “The Man Who Killed Usama bin Laden,” Rob O’Neill described growing up in Butte, Montana, and how he became the highly-trained Navy SEAL who shot the most wanted terrorist in the world at bin Laden’s compound in Pakistan in 2011.

O’Neill, who tried out for Navy’s elite SEAL Team 6 after SEAL Team 2 wasn’t seeing the action he wanted, was also part of the mission to rescue of the crew of the Maersk Alabama from Somali pirates, which was depicted in the movie “Captain Phillips.”

He told Peter Doocy how he discovered he was embarking on the mission to kill bin Laden.

“They told us a couple of things like we’re going to read you in eventually and here’s whose going to be there…and they said a few names that didn’t make sense,” O’Neill said. “A few of us were talking a couple days later about this person, this person why would they be there… It’s bin Laden…they found him…we’re going to go get him.”

O’Neill said he and the other SEALs did not think they would survive the mission.

“The more we trained on it, the more we realized…this is going to be a one-way mission,” he said. “We’re going to go and we’re not going to come back. We’re going to die when the house blows up. We’re going to die when he blows up. Or we are going to be there too long and we’ll get arrested by the Pakistanis and we’re going to spend the rest of our short lives in Pakistan prison.”

O’Neill pushed to become a part of the group that landed on the roof of the compound, rather than leading the element of the team that provided cover outside of the compound’s western wall. The CIA officer told him that if he wanted to get a shot at bin Laden, “he’s on the third floor.”

He said that the soldiers felt that the mission would be worth sacrificing their own lives, saying “we are going to die eventually, this is a good way to go and it’s worth it to kill him. He’s going to die with us.”

“To be part of something so historic, you can’t ask for more…we wanted it bad,” he said. “It’s it. It doesn’t get any better. This is it this is why we’re here. We are at war because of this guy and now we are going to go get him.”

O’Neill said he believes he was “definitely” the last person bin Laden saw before he died, and he has thought about the mission every day in the years since it happened.

“I’m still trying to figure out if it’s the best thing I’ve ever done or the worst thing I’ve ever done,” he said.

The former Navy SEAL who shot and

World

president_obama_xi_jinping_china_ap

President Barack Obama, right, follows China’s President Xi Jinping to a meeting after participating in the APEC summit Tuesday. (Photo: AP)

The United States and China have reached a trade agreement that would end tariffs on high-tech products, including information and communication products. The US-China trade deal was touted by administration officials as a job creator that would end protectionist policies on $1 trillion in annual global sales.

“This is encouraging news for the U.S.-China relationship,” U.S. Trade Representative Michael Froman told reporters in Beijing, where President Obama is attending the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum, known as APEC.

“It shows how the U.S. and China can work together to advance their bilateral economic agenda and support a multilateral trading system,” Froman added.

Prior to the announcement of the deal, the president said U.S. and China would be easing visa rules for each other’s citizens, a move Obama says will “benefit everyone from students, to tourists, to businesses large and small.” Speaking the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum, the president said it would boost the U.S. tourism industry.

“Chinese travelers persistently rank the United States as their top desired travel destination, but only slightly more than 1.8 percent of total outbound travelers go to the United States.”

But while the White House would love to focus on the positive aspects of the two deals, even if exaggerated, the trip was plagued by the apparently increasing anti-American fervor that can not be ignored by those closely watching a new, emboldened Chinese leadership.

Chinese president Xi Jinping openly praised a young Chinese blogger that is best known by academics and mediates in the U.S. for his anti-American platform.

In Nine Knockout Blows in America’s Cold War Against China, Zhou Xiaoping claimed that American culture was “eroding the moral foundation and self-confidence of the Chinese people.” He likened the American media coverage of China to Hitler’s Jewish propaganda, while in past works he accused the West of having “slaughtered and robbed” China since the 17th century, and was now “brainwashing” it.

President Xi characterized the blogger’s works as giving off “positive energy.”

State-run media welcomed President Obama with a blistering piece that said he was visiting China in desperate need of a win after suffering an embarrassing defeat in the midterm elections.

The Chinese increasing see President Obama as a weakened world leader, a sentiment that was validated when the president failed  to bring up the Justice Department’s pursuit of intellectual property right theft committed by sanctioned Chinese organizations and military outfits.

The United States and China have reached

Politics

Howard_Kurtz_Valerie_Jarrett_AP_Fox

Obama advisor Valerie Jarrett, left, and Fox News mediate Howard Kurtz, right. (Photos: AP/FOX News)

Critics have long-held senior White House advisor Valerie Jarrett a consigliere-like figure standing between President Obama and, well, everyone else. They suspect Jarrett enables what appears to be a profound personal narcissism, which is largely to blame for the president’s obvious inability to listen to the advice of others, or learn from his past policy mistakes.

Further, with good reason, critics on both sides have questioned the borderline inappropriate and certainly unprecedented treatment of a woman whose role and title(s) — senior advisor to the president, assistant to the president in charge of the Office of Intergovernmental Affairs, assistant to the president in charge of the Office of Public Engagement, the White House Council on Women and Girls — is too shadow-like and undefined.

“Jarrett seems to have a 24 hour, around the clock detail, with five or six agents full-time,” said Democratic operative Pat Caddell. “The media has been completely uninterested. We don’t provide security for our ambassador in Libya, but she needs a full Secret Service security detail. And nobody thinks there’s anything wrong with this. And nobody in the press will ask. What kind of slavish stoogery are they perpetrating here?”

The security detail assigned to Jarrett is completely unprecedented. After all, he is nothing more than a private citizen. In America, service to the president does not come with very, very expensive Secret Service perks.

“This country has reached the point of absurdity,” Cadell added. “There are people dead because we don’t have security details for them. But she’s privileged to have a full Secret Service detail on vacation?”

Sadly, as Caddell notes, the media elites have left both Jarrett’s White House role and record untouched. Undoubtedly, the details of Jarrett’s past if ever told by the media, would be extremely unpalatable to the American people. Her record of failed public-private partnerships, in which she represented some of the Chicago slums dirtiest slumlords, is even worse than some of her staunchest critics describe.

In 2008, Binyamin Appelbaum of the Boston Globe, chronicled in great detail the events that transpired while Valerie Jarrett was executive vice president of Grove Parc’s management firm Habitat Company. Basically, Jarrett was getting paid to ensure the government threw people out of downtrodden neighborhoods that her clients destroyed, then rebuild those neighborhoods using her clients as the benefactors.

“They are rapidly displacing poor people, and these companies are profiting from this displacement,” Matt Ginsberg-Jaeckle said at the time. Ginsberg-Jaeckle was with Southside Together Organizing for Power, a community-based group that was trying to help these tenants stay in the same neighborhoods.

Jarrett represented private companies paid by the government to build and manage the city’s affordable housing, but they only ever built and profited, leaving the management for, well, nobody. The neighborhoods went to pot and poor people froze in the Chicago winter, literally.

“The same exact people who ran these places into the ground now are profiting by redeveloping them,” Ginsberg-Jaeckle told Appelbaum.

Yet, somehow, this and other highly questionable dealings — in which, the Obamas were also involved — including a “patient-dumping scheme” she carried out with the now-first lady, weren’t newsworthy.

Now, on the heels of the president’s second devastating midterm defeat, with Obama’s presidency seen as a failure by a majority of the American people, the media have finally turned their attention to Jarrett.

“The media have identified the problem with the Obama presidency and want her tarred and feathered,” says Fox News’ resident mediate Howard Kurtz. “Or just fired. Or sidelined. Or made an ambassador to some faraway land. Her name is Valerie Jarrett.”

Kurtz points to a new, blistering piece by Noam Scheiber published in The New Republic, which highlights Jarrett’s bizarre influence with the president. An aide cited in the story calls her influence “pretty toxic,” while another says she’s regarded by others “as a spy.”

The piece confirms what critics have suspected for roughly 6 years, which is that Jarrett acts not only as the gate-keeper, but insulator and panderer to the president. Sadly, it is only now — when they frantically need to find some explanation for the failures of a man they so heavily invested their own credibility in — that Valerie Jarrett seems headed for the media chopping block.

Kurtz cites an argument by USA Today columnist Michael Wolff, whom he says “has an interesting take” on the media reversal, in particular from MSNBC.

“MSNBC’s problem is almost exactly the same as the Democrats’ problem: It built its future around a vivid and dramatic hero who, unfortunately, turned out to be both opaque and conflict averse. MSNBC now has a lineup of ever-righteous and often sulky defenders of President Barack Obama, who seem, not just to conservatives but to many liberals, too, bizarrely tone-deaf and lost in time”

Sadly, it is only now -- when

Politics, Video

Former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice told FOX News’ Brian Kilmeade during his broadcast Kilmeade & Friends that real racists oppose school choice. Rice was responding to a recent decision in a California court that held teacher tenure violates children’s civil rights,

“Poor black kids trapped in failing neighborhoods schools, that’s the biggest race problem of today,” Rice said in an interview that was aired on the Monday. “That’s the biggest civil rights issue of today. Anybody who isn’t in favor of school choice, anybody who isn’t in favor of educational reform, anybody who defends the status quo in the educational system, that’s racist to me.”

Condi Rice also said in an earlier interview with Kilmeade on Fox & Friends in the morning that racial campaign ads are insulting to her. “Don’t tell me how to be black,” she said.

Rice slammed the Obama administration’s handling of Iraq and America’s lack of strength on the world stage, saying that “nobody listens” when the U.S. isn’t leading.

“What we’re seeing is that when the United States steps back and speaks softly, nobody listens,” she said. “Americans also don’t like the world that they get when the United States is not deeply engaged and deeply involved.”

Former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice told

Politics

ATT_Obama_Internet_Regulation_AP

AT&T store on New York’s Madison Avenue, left, and President Barack Obama on Saturday, Nov. 8, 2014, in the Roosevelt Room of the White House in Washington, right. (Photo: AP)

President Obama said Monday that Internet service providers should be regulated as public utilities, declaring they shouldn’t be allowed to cut deals with online services like YouTube to move their content faster. Shares of major Internet service providers Comcast Corp (NASDAQ:CMCSA) and Time Warner Cable Inc (NYSE:TWC) tanked after the announcement.

The president, who has been pushing the social justice “net neutrality” argument on the Internet for years, said federal regulators should reclassify the Internet as a public utility under Title II of the 1934 Communications Act.

“For almost a century, our law has recognized that companies who connect you to the world have special obligations not to exploit the monopoly they enjoy over access in and out of your home or business,” Obama said in his statement. “That is why a phone call from a customer of one phone company can reliably reach a customer of a different one, and why you will not be penalized solely for calling someone who is using another provider. It is common sense that the same philosophy should guide any service that is based on the transmission of information — whether a phone call, or a packet of data.”

Time Warner Cable shares were down 7 percent before closing out down 5 percent, while Comcast closed down 4 percent. The announcement drew harsh criticism from both companies and lawmakers, alike.

“We are stunned the president would abandon the longstanding, bipartisan policy of lightly regulating the Internet and calling for extreme” regulation, said Michael Powell, president and CEO of the National Cable and Telecommunications Association.

This “tectonic shift in national policy, should it be adopted, would create devastating results,” Powell said, stating that “only Congress should make a policy change of this magnitude.” It is certainly true that others have made similar claims, including the former head of the FCC.

“By classifying broadband access services as ‘interstate telecommunications services,’ those services would suddenly become required to pay FCC fees,” former FCC commissioner Harold Furchgott-Roth explained. “At the current 16.1 percent fee structure, it would be perhaps the largest, one-time tax increase on the Internet.”

CTIA-The Wireless Association called Obama’s rule a “gross overreaction” that would ignore other facts in a much larger issue. But The Club For Growth came out strongly against the rule following the announcement, stating what is perhaps the most obvious objection to giving the administration the power to regulate another intimidate area of Americans’ lives.

“The IRS is corrupt, ObamaCare is a disaster and its website was laughably terrible, the debt goes up year after year, and we’re supposed to trust the government to regulate the Internet?” said Club for Growth President Chris Chocola. “Private Internet providers already compete with each other to provide broadband access to millions of Americans, and limiting their ability to sell their products how they see fit will stifle innovation and competition, not encourage it. The Internet is not broken, and there is no need for a team of government bureaucrats to come in and fix it.”

In January, Verizon was victorious in federal court after they challenged the Obama administration’s previous FCC rule set, which allowed “commercially reasonable” restrictions of traffic. While the court did affirm regulation of broadband, they said the FCC mission creep was evident, particularly regarding the arbitrary treatment of ISPs.

“Reclassification — which for the first time would apply 1930s-era utility regulation to the Internet — would be a radical reversal of course,” Verizon Communications Inc (NYSE:VZ) said in a statement. They also said the “gratuitous” maneuver would not stand up in court, and they intend to prove it.

“The president’s call would turn the Internet into a government-regulated utility and stifle our nation’s dynamic and robust Internet sector with rules written nearly 80 years ago for plain old telephone service,” said Sen. John Thune (R-SD), the Republican expected to lead the Senate Commerce Committee in the new Congress.

AT&T (NYSE:T) and ISPs have said they would participate in another legal challenge with Verizon, as well.

“Net neutrality is ObamaCare for the Internet,” said Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX). “It puts the government in charge of determining Internet pricing, terms of service, and what types of products and services can be delivered.”

Most know the president will likely veto any legislative measure from the Congress, but industry allies cite harsher FCC oversight as a possibility to fight back against the overreach.

“All this administration does well is mission creep,” said one Time Warner executive. “It is never about consumer protection, it is always about consumer control.”

Meanwhile, FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler has said he is open to a “hybrid” ruling, which would encompass both Title II and the 1996 Telecommunications Act. However, Wheeler admitted these pose “substantive legal questions.”

“We found we would need more time to examine these to ensure that whatever approach is taken, it can withstand any legal challenges it may face,” he said.

President Obama's Internet regulation plan, which is

Politics, Video

 

In a newly released video, one ObamaCare architect said Democrats used a “lack of transparency” and “the stupidity of the American voter” to pass the bill. The conservative group American Commitment posted the remarks by Jonathan Gruber, the MIT economist who helped write ObamaCare, which were reportedly made on Oct. 17, 2013, on YouTube.

“Lack of transparency is a huge political advantage,” says the MIT economist who helped write ObamaCare. “And basically, call it the stupidity of the American voter or whatever, but basically that was really, really critical for the thing to pass.”

This isn’t the first time Gruber has been caught demonstrating a complete elitist-like contempt for the American people. In July, after the powerful D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals invalidated ObamaCare subsidies for health insurance obtained through the federally-run HealthCare.gov, he did a series of interviews and made a number of comments and accusations, including calling those who say the law should be interpreted as it was written “screwy,” “nutty,” “stupid,” and “desperate.”

The man who recently said that he knew “more about this law than any other economist,” insisted that those who crafted the law “had no intention of excluding the federal states,” and even outrageously proclaimed that anyone who disagreed with that statement was a “criminal.”

“Literally every single person involved in the crafting of this law has said that it`s a typo,” Gruber said in an interview with MSNBC.

Of course, that was after he said back in 2012 that subsidies were only permitted per the law in SBMs, or state-based exchanges.

With the ink from the headlines screaming the historic defeat of Democrats in last week’s elections still fresh on the newspapers, this is truly rich.

The rest of his remarks are as follows:

“You can’t do it political, you just literally cannot do it. Transparent financing and also transparent spending. I mean, this bill was written in a tortured way to make sure CBO did not score the mandate as taxes. If CBO scored the mandate as taxes the bill dies. Okay? So it’s written to do that,” Gruber said.

“In terms of risk rated subsidies, if you had a law which said that healthy people are going to pay in, you made explicit healthy people pay in and sick people get money, it would not have passed. Lack of transparency is a huge political advantage. And basically, call it the stupidity of the American voter or whatever, but basically that was really really critical to get for the thing to pass. Look, I wish Mark was right that we could make it all transparent, but I’d rather have this law than not.”

In a newly released video, one ObamaCare

Opinion

Republican-ObamaCare-Alternative

People are defining ObamaCare as a success because they now have insurance that’s subsidized by government. That’s not a success when more people are on a form of welfare — it’s a success when people are able to pay their own way.

Are food stamps successful when more people go on it every year? Are people being helped out of poverty by welfare if more people need it every year? Hardly. That’s a disaster.

We need to look at success as how many people no longer need it than by the amount of people that do. If we had a program that got people producing more and using it less and less I’d be all for that.

Poverty and other social ills are problems to be sure, but the solution is not curing the symptom but by treating the disease. The disease is always the same– an inability of a person to provide for one’s own self. Give a person that, and all the other problems go away.

As Ronald Reagan said, the best social program I know of is a good job.

A lot of the GOP is claiming they want to do something about ObamaCare now that we have control of Congress. The battle cry is “Repeal and Replace.”

But what does that mean? Lower the taxes on it? Remove the mandate? Eliminate the employer portion? No one knows.

I want one thing — restore the free market in health care. We haven’t had a free market in 50 years in health care and it’s about time someone begins to talk to about it. No one in the Republican party or the Democrats is talking about it. No one even knows what it means.

I do, and probably because few alive today even remember what a free market looks like. It looks like house calls and small neighborhood clinics. It looks like paying with cash and simplified billing. It looks like doctors driving the same car you do, and living in the same neighborhood and not living like the town tycoon.

Since Medicare and its brother Medicaid was introduced, health care costs have risen in the triple digits when before those bills were passed it was single digit increases. I want a market where you buy insurance for the big things which it pays for 100%, while the little things you pay for in a competitive market. I want doctors to be able to post prices. I want to be able to shop around. I want to go to any doctor I choose and not worry about all the stupid little rules we both have to play by now.

Most of all, I want people to pay their own way in life and therefore act responsibly in their own life’s decisions. Those that don’t will have to suffer the consequences just like any other of 20 million life decisions we make.

How does that begin? A repeal of ObamaCare — not “repeal and replace.” Give the sick and elderly that are in the system now an ability to exit it. Restore a market where you can bargain or shop around for a better health care product not a better health insurance premium. Encourage and enable charities to help the sick and the poor, not punishing them when they do. That’s why they get the tax break after all.

Most of all we need to kill the politically correct idea that we are our brother’s keeper. We are not. Our nation’s beginnings came from the concept that if you don’t work, you don’t eat and it’s served us well for 200 plus years.

Jesus wanted us to help our fellow man and that’s pretty hard to do when the government takes half our paycheck.

After all, he never suggested you outsource your charity to government.

Thomas Purcell is nationally syndicated columnist, author of the book “Shotgun Republic” and is host of the Liberty Never Sleeps podcast. More of his work can be found at libertyneversleeps.com

[mybooktable book=”shotgun-republic” display=”summary”]

 

People are defining ObamaCare as a success

World

ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi

Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the leader of the terrorist group ISIS, otherwise known as ISIL or the Islamic State. (Photo: AP)

Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the leader of the terrorist group ISIS, otherwise known as ISIL or the Islamic State, has reportedly been injured in an airstrike. Iraqi officials said Sunday the U.S.-led assault hit the ISIS leader as he attended a Saturday meeting with militants in the town of Qaim in Iraq’s western Anbar province.

While a senior Iraqi military official also said he learned in operational meetings that al-Baghdadi had been wounded, the Pentagon said they are unable to confirm the Iraqi claim at this time.

“We have no information to corroborate press reports that ISIL leader al-Baghdadi has been injured,” said Col. Pat Ryder, a spokesman for U.S. Central Command in the Middle East.

Al-Baghdadi is believed to be in his early 40s, and currently has a $10 million U.S. bounty on his head. Since he took to the helm at the Islamic State in 2010, the group has been transformed into a terror army and cut vast swathes of territory out of Iraq and Syria.

By all accounts, he is a reclusive leader, making just one recent public appearance when he gave a sermon at a mosque in Iraq’s second-largest city of Mosul. His sermon was seen in a video posted online in June, which came five days after the terror organization proclaimed the establishment of an Islamic state, or caliphate, in the Middle East region it currently controls. The group proclaimed al-Baghdadi its leader and demanded that all Muslims pledge allegiance to him.

Iraqi officials said Sunday the ISIS leader

Politics, Video

Appearing on Face The Nation Sunday, former President George W. Bush said he had no regrets in Iraq, except for the fact “that a violent group of people has risen up again.”

“Do you have any regrets [about sending troops into Iraq]?” host Bob Schieffer asked. “I mean, do you ever feel that maybe it was the wrong decision?”

As usual, President Bush opted not to take a shot at his successor, President Obama. Instead, he expressed hope that the new strategy, which has taken an enormous amount of criticism, will in the end work.

“No, I think it was the right decision,” the former president said. “My regret is that a violent group of people has risen up again. This is al Qaeda plus. I put in the book that they need to be defeated. And I hope they are. I hope the strategy works.”

A video of a press conference just before the former president announced the surge was widely circulated in the wake of the rise of ISIS due to the prophetic message he put forth.

The president conducted the interview to promote a new book, 41: A Portrait of My Father, which details the life and career his father and 41st president, George H.W. Bush. Never before has a president told the story of his father, who is another president, through his own eyes and in his own words.

Schieffer also asked the former president about whether his brother and former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush would also run for the post. G.W. has repeatedly expressed his support for his brother, whom he says he hopes runs.

“I occasionally fuel the speculation by saying I hope he runs,” Bush said. “I think he’d be a very good president. I understand the decision-making process very well and I know that he is wrestling with the decision.”

When asked what the odds were of his brother running, he said, “I think it’s 50/50.”

“I give it a toss up.”

Appearing on Face The Nation Sunday, former

Opinion, Video

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UGbXZ_yFqv4

This week on Fox News Sunday, Brit Hume, Peter Baker, Carly Fiorina, and Charles Lane debate whether Obama will compromise after Republicans’ big gains Tuesday. In the second half, another panel discusses Obama’s recent decision to more than double the number of U.S. troops in Iraq.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FqiowhI-wvs

The White House had already put together a lame-duck agenda, which included a request for Congress to authorize increased force against ISIS in Iraq and Syria, a vote the Democrats in the Senate were scheming to avoid until after the midterms.

However, the president has repeatedly stated that he will move forward with an executive order to push amnesty for millions of illegal immigrants down the throats of the American people, despite it being a deeply unpopular move. House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) and the presumptive Majority Leader Mitch McConnell have both said that such a move would “poison the well” between congressional Republicans and the White House.

This week on Fox News Sunday, Brit

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