This b*tch knew all along what her husband planned to do...

Boston jihadi murderer's wife had al-Qaeda magazine and other jihad material on her computer

From Jihad Watch / Posted by Robert Spencer

They built the bomb largely according to the specifications in the al-Qaeda magazine. "Investigators sharpen focus on Boston bombing suspect’s widow," by Sari Horwitz for the Washington Post, May 3 (thanks to Axel):

Federal law enforcement officials are sharpening their focus on the widow of the dead suspect in the Boston Marathon bombings after finding al-Qaeda’s Inspire magazine and other radical Islamist material on her computer, according to law enforcement officials. 

The probe of the computer belonging to Katherine Russell, 24, the widow of Tamerlan Tsarnaev, is part of the effort by investigators to determine whether Russell knew anything about the April 15 bombing plot or helped the Tsarnaev brothers hide from authorities, according to the officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the ongoing investigation.

Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, 19, the surviving suspect, has told investigators that he and his brother learned to build the pressure-cooker bombs from English-language Inspire magazine, and that they were partly influenced by the online sermons of Anwar al-Awlaki, the al-Qaeda propagandist who was killed in a drone strike in Yemen in 2011.

According to officials, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev also told investigators that he and his brother built the bombs in Tamerlan Tsarnaev’s Cambridge apartment, where the elder brother lived with Russell and their daughter. Officials said that Russell called her husband when she saw his photograph on television — following the FBI’s release of the pictures of the suspects — but did not notify authorities.

One of the key questions for investigators is whether the radical Islamist materials on Russell’s computer belonged to her or were downloaded by her husband or someone else....

In another development, federal agents, state troopers and local law enforcement officers scoured a wooded area near Dartmouth, Mass., where Dzhokhar Tsarnaev attended college. Investigators are looking for possible evidence that might indicate the brothers tested explosives there, according to a law enforcement official. Residents in the vicinity had reported hearing loud noises coming from the woods on March 30....

On Monday, FBI special agents spent about 90 minutes inside the North Kingstown, R.I., home of Russell’s parents. The agents left with bags of material and a sample of Russell’s DNA.

Two law enforcement officials said that investigators found fingerprints and female DNA on fragments of the pressure-cooker bombs that exploded at the marathon. The DNA could have come from a woman who helped the suspects make the bombs or from a person who handled the materials at a store where the suspects bought them, said the officials. The DNA may have also come from someone in the crowd at the marathon, one of the officials said.

Law enforcement officials said several “persons of interest” in the United States and Russia are being investigated in connection with the brothers. One of the primary focuses remains the seven months that Tamerlan Tsarnaev spent in strife-torn regions of southern Russia in 2012.

During 16 hours of questioning in the hospital by the FBI, the younger Tsarnaev told agents that he and his brother initially considered carrying out suicide bombings and executing their plot on the Fourth of July at Boston’s large celebration along the Charles River, two law enforcement officials said.

But Tsarnaev said that he and his brother decided to launch their attack earlier because they were able to assemble the bombs in three or four days, more quickly than they had expected, according to two law enforcement officials.

Officials have expressed some skepticism about Tsarnaev’s account, saying that the complexity of the bombs makes it unlikely that the brothers could have completed assembling them as fast as he claimed.

According to a government document obtained by NBC News, a detailed analysis of the bombs used at the Boston Marathon — and the pipe bombs allegedly thrown at police from the Tsarnaevs’ car during a gunfight four days later — show striking similarities to instructions from Inspire magazine.

The report from the Terrorist Explosive Device Analytical Center (TEDAC) said that the design of the pressure cooker bombs and the pipe bombs resembled the instructions provided in an article in the first issue of Inspire headlined “Make a Bomb in the Kitchen of Your Mom.”...

Study Devastating for ObamaCare Backers

John C. Goodman / Townhall Columnist

 

Within the White House, within the Democratic chambers in Congress and among the (overwhelmingly liberal) health policy community there was considerable anguish this week. The reason: a new study finds that (as far as physical health is concerned) there is no difference between being in Medicaid and being uninsured.

It's hard to exaggerate what a blow this is to the people who gave us the Affordable Care Act (ObamaCare). Everything about ObamaCare ? from the money we are spending to the damage being done to the labor market to the hassles the whole nation is going through ? depends on one central idea: that enrolling people in Medicaid will give them access to more health care and better health.

Beginning next year, ObamaCare is expected to newly insure about 34 million people. About half of these will enroll in Medicaid, the federal/state program for low-income families. Yet, if they won't be any healthier once they are in Medicaid than they were when they were uninsured, that implies that fully half of the entire ObamaCare program is one huge waste of money.

[Actually, the results weren't a complete disappointment. There was less depression among the Medicaid enrollees, they reported that they were a tiny bit happier and they spent about $215 less out of pocket annually on medical care, on average. But, remember, we could have simply given every one of them $215 in cash and spent far less than was actually spent on this program.]

It gets worse. The other half of the newly insured next year are supposed to get their insurance in health insurance exchanges, where most will qualify for generous premium subsidies paid for by federal taxpayers. If the Massachusetts health reform is precedent, however, these people will be in health plans that pay doctors only about 10 percent more than what Medicaid pays. Think of these plans as Medicaid Plus.

The study released this week is not the first study to find that enrollees in Medicaid do no better than the uninsured. In fact there are studies that show that Medicaid enrollees find it more difficult to get a doctor's appointment and have worse outcomes than the uninsured. Each of these studies has been subjected to a lot of nitpicking on various grounds, however, and a fair-minded person would probably have to say that how much difference Medicaid makes is an open question.

Until now. What makes this week's study so different is a special set of circumstances that originated in the state of Oregon. A few years ago the state had a limited amount of money to expand its Medicaid program and the number of qualified people greatly exceeded the state's budget. The state responded to this dilemma by conducting a lottery. This made possible an ideal experiment in which the people who remained uninsured were no different from the people who were enrolled in Medicaid, except for the luck of the draw.

Thanks to a budget crunch in Oregon, scholars had the ability to do a double-blind study (the gold standard for researchers) and it came out very, very bad for the supporters of the new health reform law.

The study doesn't speculate on the reasons why, but I will.

The uninsured in this country have access to a patch work system of free care when they are unable to pay for it out of their own pockets. In Dallas, Texas, where I live, for example, the entire county is part of a health district which makes indigent health care available to needy families. It covers people up to 250% of the poverty level, with sliding scale co-payments, based on family income. Parkland Memorial Hospital and its satellite clinics is the primary provider.

You could argue that uninsured, low-income families in Dallas are actually "insured" in this way, although they face the problems of rationing by waiting and other non-price barriers to care. Officially, they are counted as "uninsured," however. When these very same individuals enroll in Medicaid, they enter another system of patchwork care. A third of the doctors aren't taking any new Medicaid patients, for example. There is rationing by waiting in Medicaid along with its non-price barriers to care. Often, the uninsured and Medicaid enrollees are getting the same care from the same doctors and facilities ? even though one group is labeled "insured" and the other "uninsured."

A similar description applies to Massachusetts. RomneyCare cut the official "uninsurance" rate in half. But it created no new doctors or nurses or clinics. As far as I can tell, the same people are going to the same places and getting pretty much the same care that they got before the health reform. Hospital emergency room traffic is higher than it was before the reform. The traffic to the community health centers has changed very little.

But since they have expanded health insurance in Massachusetts, the demand for care has grown, even as the supply has remained unchanged. As a result, the time price of care has increased. The wait to see a new doctor in Boston is two months ? the longest waiting time in the entire country.

People are getting the same care they got before, but they are paying a higher price for it.

I expect to see the Massachusetts results replicated nationwide.

April Jobs Aside, We're Falling Behind 

By: Larry Kudlow  / Townhall Finance

April Jobs Aside, We're Falling Behind

The really good news from April's employment report is that all the pessimistic, end-of-the-world, spring-swoon forecasters were wrong. It wasn't a fabulous report. But it handily beat Wall Street expectations. Stock markets soared on the news.

The bad news, however, is that the U.S. continues to fall further behind its own long-term trends for jobs and economic growth. And lately, hours worked -- a key labor measure -- have begun to fall.

First the good: Nonfarm payrolls rose by 165,000 last month, with private payrolls up 176,000. And the prior two months were revised higher by a net 114,000. The unemployment rate fell slightly, from 7.6 percent to 7.5 percent.

And with all the hysteria over the economic evils of the sequester cuts, government jobs have fallen only by an average 5,000 over the past three months -- dwarfed by private job gains. Keynesians should weep. So might President Barack Obama. The sequester doom and gloom has not come to pass. In fact, 4 percent real growth in the private economy in the first quarter far outstrips the slippage in government spending.

The 10-year, $1 trillion spending cut launched in 2011 and the 10-year, $1 trillion sequester cuts, which began this year, are (SET ITAL) bright (END ITAL) spots in economic policy. As a share of gross domestic product, federal spending is now less than 23 percent, down from a peak of 25 percent. That helps take the government's boot off the neck of the free enterprise economy. It leaves more resources in the private sector, letting business -- the real hero behind the modest growth we have -- breathe a little easier.

But as good as it is that more Americans are working, they may be working fewer hours. Not a good trend.

Total private hours worked are declining. They fell 0.4 percent in April, with manufacturing hours dropping 0.2 percent. And aggregate hours worked for all employees also fell 0.4 percent. Those are worrisome trends for the future. It may be a harbinger of the ill effects of the job-killing Obamacare program, in which rising tax, mandate and regulatory costs penalize the 50th worker hired and the 30th hour worked in small business.

Fearing Obamacare, profitable business is reluctant to invest in the kind of capital projects that create jobs. That is one reason job growth is falling short by at least 100,000 per month.

Nonfarm payrolls remain 2.6 million short of the peak, reached in January 2008. What's more, the number of people who are effectively unemployed -- those who are not working, underemployed or forced to work only part time -- is roughly 22 million.

And partly because people are dropping out of the labor force or collecting government benefits instead of working, the employment-to-population ratio, which peaked at 64.6 percent in April 2000, has dropped to 56.8 percent. That translates to a loss of roughly 10 million jobs from the long-term trendline. It's a huge waste of human capital and talent, as well as economic growth.

What's more, the anemic 2.1 percent real GDP recovery of the past 15 quarters (compare that with the 4.4 percent post-World War II average) has thus far created an output gap of roughly $3 trillion, according to RDQ economist John Ryding. This country will need to grow at more than 5 percent yearly for more than a decade if that economic gap is to be closed.

Or think of this: From 1950 through 2007, the long-term historical U.S. economic growth rate was 3.25 percent yearly after inflation. Today we are a staggering 20 percent below that trend.

But a 5 percent growth target would at least get us back on the right directional track. Growth solves a lot of problems. Over 10 years, 5 percent growth could reduce the tax-hike-threatening budget deficit by more than $7 trillion.

Is 5 percent growth possible? It could be, with the right market-oriented incentives for work, investment, innovation, immigration, health and retirement. Keep the heat on spending restraint. And don't forget a sound dollar.

In other words, stop our downward economic course. The U.S. needs an ambitious growth agenda. There is no time to waste.

This says it all...

Op-ed:
The drama that is Benghazi continues
By: Diane Sori 

The Benghazi whistleblowers will be talking to Congress next week, and what they have to say I'm sure will NOT make Barack HUSSEIN Obama and Hillary Clinton happy campers. The cover-ups and lies told by this administration in regards to Benghazi is just mind-boggling and yet NOT one member of Congress has had the guts and fortitude to demand that the key players responsible for the criminally negligent deaths of Ambassador Christopher Stevens, Information Officer Sean Smith, and former Navy SEALS Tyrone Woods and Glen Doherty, be arrested for treason, murder, and crimes against America.

And on what grounds...on the grounds that Barack HUSSEIN Obama and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton knew damn well that the security group, The February 17th Martyrs Brigade, that the State Department hired to guard our diplomatic personnel at the Embassy compound in Benghazi had ties to and sympathies with the terrorist group al-Qaeda....the same al-Qaeda that caused buildings to fall on a fateful day almost 12 years ago.
 

Not only did the Brigade have ties to al-Qaeda but they were NOT shy about proclaiming them. In fact, in clear view for all to see, and don't tell me that NO one in the State Department saw the Brigade's very public posting of an al-Qaeda flag on their Facebook page along with posts and comments openly professing sympathy for the hardline islamist extremist tied to al-Qaeda group Ansar al-Sharia. This is the very group that's widely blamed for the actual attack on the compound, and if the State Department dares to claim that they didn't know this then they're lying through their teeth. 

Lying through their teeth...something this administration and all connected to it do best. 

So it shouldn't be surprising to anyone that the Brigade, once regarded as one of the more capable militia groups in Eastern Libya, NOT only did NOT sound a warning when they knew an attack was imminent, but that they actually fled the compound leaving Ambassador Stevens and the Embassy personnel unprotected and basically on their own.  On their own...paramount to jihad against Americans without having to lift a finger...jihad in support of the Ansar al-Sharia compound attackers...jihad in support of murdering Americans.

And Barack HUSSEIN Obama watched this all unfold from the safety of the White House, and told US military in the area to 'stand down' and NOT try to help those in harm's way. 

But the audacity in all this is that Obama's State Department, under the stewardship of Hillary Clinton, had the unmitigated gall to knowingly put islamic terrorist supporters in charge of the safety of America diplomatic personnel...more than enough grounds for an arrest for treason I would say. 

And questions remain unanswered as to why American military personnel or American civilian personnel weren't guarding an American Embassy compound...questions as to why did the Obama administration 'hire' the enemy, yes the enemy, to guard our diplomatic team. 

Sadly, I can see only one answer...the February 17th Martyr Brigade was hired to 'guard' Obama's secret of weapons smuggling, after all they're his brethren, and told to look away and do NOTHING  if and when that secret might be exposed or an attack was imminent. 

Ever since Benghazi first happened I have said, and said repeatedly, that I believed Ambassador Stevens found out that the Obama administration was smuggling guns and weapons to the rebels in Syria through Libya, and more than ever I stand by that belief as Secretary of State Chuck 'muslim sympathizer' Hagel a few days ago said that Obama is now considering arming the rebels...arming the rebels outwardly to cover for his arming of them all along...arming rebels with ties to al-Qaeda, and I believe Ambassador Stevens was going to publicly call Obama to task for it.

So maybe next week the whistleblowers will answer the questions and set to truth all the lies told by Obama and crew, especially since an interim report issued by House Republicans cited 'numerous reports' that 'the Brigade had extremist connections, and it had been implicated in the kidnapping of American citizens as well as in the threats against U.S. military assets.'

And with the word Benghazi actually meaning 'city of holy warriors' maybe these whistleblowers will be the holy warriors that avenge the murders of Ambassador Stevens, Sean Smith, Tyrone Woods, and Glen Doherty.