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Is the Obama Campaign Being Financed by Foreign Donations?
Peter Schweizer’s Government Accountability Institute is out with a report today on foreign and fraudulent campaign contributions. It is the most comprehensive treatment of the issue to date. The key findings relate to the Obama campaign:
- The Obama campaign lacks the “industry standard level” of credit card security for donations
- The website Obama.com was purchased by an Obama bundler based in Shanghai, China, with questionable ties to state-run enterprises
- 68% of the traffic to Obama.com is foreign, and the site was linked to a specific donation page on the official BarackObama.com campaign website for ten months
Schweizer also finds that, based on the security measures currently in place, nearly half of Congress is vulnerable to fraudulent and foreign donations. Schweizer provided this statement to Powerline, which covers the report here:
When it comes to money in this campaign all the focus has been on Super PACs. But far more troubling in my mind is the reality of how easily foreign governments or individuals can inject funds in the U.S. presidential campaign. The FEC does not require basic security for internet donations. And in the case of the Obama campaign, the gate appears to be wide open. You need to use the CVV security code on your credit card to buy an Obama hoodie but not make a donation. And there is very real evidence that the campaign is not using the address verification system (AVS) in any real way. There are simply too many contributions they accept with either no zip code or an incorrect zip code. To make matters worse, donations under $200 don’t even need to be disclosed. Twenty years ago that might not matter but in the era of robo-donations its a huge problem.
Update: The irony here is rich, because the president railed against foreign donations in as high profile an address as the State of the Union, and David Axelrod accused both the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and Republican Super PACs for purportedly accepting donations from foreign entities. I’ve collected their remarks here.
From National Review.
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Third Court Rules Guyana-Born Muslim Lawyer Can’t Run For US President
Birther Constitution alert. via Abdul Hassan’s Bid For The Presidency Suffers Setback – Business Insider.
Despite a trio of setbacks, a labor lawyer in Queens is still fighting for his right to run for president even though he isn’t a natural-born citizen.
Abdul Karim Hassan has filed a series of lawsuits claiming the Constitution’s stipulation that only naturally born citizens can run for president is discriminatory and violates the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment, The Wall Street Journal’s Law Blog reported Tuesday.
In his opinion, the natural-born-citizens clause “has been trumped by the equal protection guarantee of the Fifth Amendment of the Constitution which prohibits the sort of national origin discrimination that is contained in the natural born provision,” Hassan wrote on his website.
Hassan’s lawsuits have already been denied in the First and Second U.S. court of appeals.
And the Tenth Circuit rounded out the trio on Tuesday when it too shut down Hassan’s case.
But Hassan doesn’t seem too upset, telling Law Blog, “It looks like I’m going to have to keep my day job.”
Despite his recent losses, Hassan still has pending cases in the Eighth and Ninth circuit courts. And he has a case challenging a law that allows presidential candidates to receive public money during primaries, according to Law Blog.
“Look, the chances are slim, but if you contribute to the discourse, it might be worth it,” Hassan told Law Blog of his numerous attempts to get on the ballot.
On his website, Hassan states he plans to be the Democratic Party’s candidate in 2012 and “if necessary, in 2016.”
Hat tip to Dr. Kates View who gets to the heart of the matter in her title: Court Rules Natural Born Citizenship Required for Presidency.
Business Insider reported on September 5, 2012, Abdul Karim Hassan’s series of lawsuits claiming his right to run for the Presidency have been denied in the Second, Third, and now Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals. A similar ruling was issued September 28, 2012 for the United States District Court for the District of Columbia.
The significance of these rulings cannot be underestimated as they affirm that the natural born citizen clause of Article II of the U.S. Constitution has not been trumped, abrogated, or implicitly repealed by the Equal Protection guarantee of the Fifth Amendment nor the citizenship clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. These arguments are the same ones used by Obama’s lawyers in fending off the legitimate challenges to Barack Obama’s candidacy and presidency; by the secretaries of state to refute ballot challenges, and by the media, pundits, Congress and the academics to cover up the usurpation of the presidency by Obama/Soetoro. Of course, the corrupt SCOTUS hears nothing, sees nothing, and says nothing.
Read it all.
From HERE.
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Mitt Romney Just Hammered Obama On Libya In A Big, Wide-Ranging Foreign Policy Speech
Republican nominee Mitt Romney gave a highly pumped-up foreign policy speech Monday that hammered President Barack Obama’s foreign policy direction, including his handling of the recent attacks in Libya that left a U.S. ambassador dead.
Here’s the full text of Romney’s speech:
“I particularly appreciate the introduction from my good friend and tireless campaign companion, Gov. Bob McDonnell. He is showing what conservative leadership can do to build a stronger economy. Thank you also Congressman Goodlatte for joining us today. And particular thanks to Gen. Peay. I appreciate your invitation to be with you today at the Virginia Military Institute. It is a great privilege to be here at an Institution that has done so much for our nation, both in war and in peace.
For more than 170 years, VMI has done more than educate students. It has guided their transformation into citizens, and warriors, and leaders. VMI graduates have served with honor in our nation’s defense, just as many are doing today in Afghanistan and other lands. Since the September 11th attacks, many of VMI’s sons and daughters have defended America, and I mourn with you the 15 brave souls who have been lost. I join you in praying for the many VMI graduates and all Americans who are now serving in harm’s way. May God bless all who serve, and all who have served.
Of all the VMI graduates, none is more distinguished than George Marshall—the Chief of Staff of the Army who became Secretary of State and Secretary of Defense, who helped to vanquish fascism and then planned Europe’s rescue from despair. His commitment to peace was born of his direct knowledge of the awful costs and consequences of war.
General Marshall once said, “The only way human beings can win a war is to prevent it.” Those words were true in his time—and they still echo in ours.
Last month, our nation was attacked again. A U.S. Ambassador and three of our fellow Americans are dead—murdered in Benghazi, Libya. Among the dead were three veterans. All of them were fine men, on a mission of peace and friendship to a nation that dearly longs for both. President Obama has said that Ambassador Chris Stevens and his colleagues represented the best of America. And he is right. We all mourn their loss.
The attacks against us in Libya were not an isolated incident. They were accompanied by anti-American riots in nearly two dozen other countries, mostly in the Middle East, but also in Africa and Asia. Our embassies have been attacked. Our flag has been burned. Many of our citizens have been threatened and driven from their overseas homes by vicious mobs, shouting “Death to America.” These mobs hoisted the black banner of Islamic extremism over American embassies on the anniversary of the September 11th attacks.
As the dust settles, as the murdered are buried, Americans are asking how this happened, how the threats we face have grown so much worse, and what this calls on America to do. These are the right questions. And I have come here today to offer a larger perspective on these tragic recent events—and to share with you, and all Americans, my vision for a freer, more prosperous, and more peaceful world.
The attacks on America last month should not be seen as random acts. They are expressions of a larger struggle that is playing out across the broader Middle East—a region that is now in the midst of the most profound upheaval in a century. And the fault lines of this struggle can be seen clearly in Benghazi itself.
READ MORE
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Celebrating Columbus, Brave and Bright
Imposing modern morality on the past is a form of historical illiteracy.
As children, my friends and I knew as a matter of indisputable rhyme that “In fourteen hundred and ninety-two, Columbus sailed the ocean blue,” and that, by doing so, he both discovered America and proved that the earth was not flat. Few of us, I’d venture, ever questioned whether or not this was true.
Our ignorance was to the clear advantage of the mythmakers, for Christopher Columbus doesn’t do too well when subjected to the eagle eye of the fact-checker. First off, however you elect to parse “discovery,” Columbus wasn’t the first outsider to discover America. As early as 30,000 years ago, human beings started to move across a Siberia-Alaska land bridge named Beringia and then to fan out throughout the Americas. On the Western side of things, Leif Ericson and the Vikings made it to North America around a.d. 1000 but saw fit not to stick around. Strike one for the fable.
Strike two: Contra Mr. Gershwin, “they” did not all laugh “at Christopher Columbus when he said the world was round” — primarily because they already knew that. As Stephen Jay Gould has observed, “there never was a period of ‘flat earth darkness’ among scholars.” They had accepted the spherical theory from the time of Socrates, and it had reigned without interruption ever since. Insinuations to the contrary, still pervasive in the public imagination, derive first from 17th-century Protestant attempts to paint Catholics as backwards, and then from the 19th-century atheist movement, which picked up the falsehood and propagated it to demonstrate the supposed benightedness of the religious.
Given that he wasn’t looking for it, Columbus’s hitting upon the New World was something of a happy accident. When he eventually bumped into land, he thought that he was in India, “but,” as the song explains, accurately this time, “India the land was not. / It was the Bahamas, and it was hot.” (This, incidentally, is why the West Indies and “American Indians” are so named.) Alas, the accident was not so happy for all. While lateness and disorientation are excusable at most affairs, it is a truth almost universally agreed upon that killing your hosts is not — which made it all the more regrettable that Columbus’s entourage brought with it the unwelcome gift of smallpox and promptly wiped out large swaths of the locals. Strike three, to be sure.
Three strikes, but not out. The explosion of certain parts of the Columbus myth, along with some more recent discoveries about his less noble proclivities, has led many to disown the man and a few more to protest against the national holiday in his honor. Berkeley, Brown, and — ironically — Columbia universities have abolished recognition of Columbus Day entirely, while others have substituted nebulous celebrations of “diversity” on that day. Journey into any trendy progressive enclave and you will find that Christopher Columbus is persona non grata.
This, like most political correctness, is a grievous mistake. As the historian William J. Connell argues, Columbus may not have been the first of the voyagers to discover America, but he was undoubtedly the most important. “His arrival,” Connell explains, “marks where we as a country and a hemisphere began our identity.” Unlike previous landings, Columbus’s mattered. It was the first to lead to a permanent settlement and the first enduring landing from a civilization that boasted modern ideas such as a belief in science, reason, individual achievement, and Christianity. Ultimately, Columbus’s story serves as the introduction to a story of immeasurable historical importance. To dismiss celebration of the man because he didn’t make it to America first would be akin to declaring that we must scorn Isaac Newton’s contribution to science because he wasn’t actually hit by an apple.
Of the charge that he brought smallpox to the New World and is thus guilty of wiping out untold numbers of the native people, Columbus must be exonerated. The vast majority of the devastation inflicted upon the Indian tribes was inadvertent: As he did not propose that the world was round, he also did not propose germ theory — that would not be proffered until after the invention of the telephone — and it is simply preposterous to postulate that he should have known what would happen when two hitherto unfamiliar worlds collided. If one is to lay the blame at Columbus’s feet for the collapse of the Indian population, one also must blame the Indians for unwittingly giving the visitors syphilis, which they took back with them and which subsequently wiped out upwards of 5 million Europeans. It was an unfortunate quid pro quo, to be sure, but not one for which either side should feel much guilt.
Okay, counter the naysayers, but Columbus was a bit of a bastard. Among the further charges leveled against him are that he considered that the natives he met “would make fine servants” and attempted to convert them to Christianity; that on his second voyage he transported slaves, many of whom died; and that, at least by one semi-reliable account, while he was serving as governor of Hispaniola, his men took to “killing, terrorizing, afflicting, and torturing the native peoples” in order to “prevent” them “from thinking for themselves as human beings.”
Heinous as this behavior was, to impose modern morality on the past is to exhibit historical illiteracy. Contrary to the picture painted by modern progressives, the Pinta, the Niña, and the Santa Maria did not sail nonchalantly through a barrier of enlightened protesters — (Don’t) Occupy America! — on their way to the shore, only to ignore their modernity. Columbus was a man of his time, and we should judge him by the standards of that age, regardless of how we assess them today. He subscribed to an internationally popular Aristotelian precept that those captured in battle were rendered slaves, which distinguished him from nobody; he was desperately ambitious and something of a social climber, qualities without which he would never have made such astonishing expeditions; he was motivated by glory and greed and evangelical fervor, as was most of the world (as is, perhaps, the world today). The fact that he reflected his society is not the interesting or exceptional thing about him. Columbus’s first voyage, like the trip to the moon, is worth celebrating in and of itself, without worrying about whether he’d be invited to the ThinkProgress annual gala.
Judging by the language used against him, one suspects that it is not really Columbus that concerns the anti-Columbus types; rather, they object to Columbus Day because they object to the colonization of America, and they disdain less Columbus qua Columbus than what subsequently flowed from the man’s exploits. There we must part company.
A peculiar but popular view holds that, until the brutish Europeans came and violated its innocence in the name of profit, American Indian culture was the last vestige of Man before the Fall. This notion replaces history with fantasy. As the European crime was not to invent but to buy into a slave trade that had afflicted Africa for almost a millennium, Columbus’s was to mirror the practices of tribal warfare and slavery that were already rife among the natives. He did not impose barbarism on the American continent, but he did fail in many instances to show the better example that many in Europe were in the process of setting. This is enough to disqualify him from being regarded as a great reformer, but it does not disqualify him from being a great explorer. Quite obviously, it is only the latter to which his champions lay claim.
Columbus’s voyage was the overture to a European colonization of the North American continent that has been a net good for the world. He may have practiced much that made the Old World execrable, but he opened the door to a New World that has set itself apart in human history as an incubator and beacon of liberty. Columbus set off a veritable scramble for America that culminated in British triumph, American insurrection, and the eventual glorification of Enlightenment values that have, by virtue of their codification, been protected at home and abroad by American predominance.
As the poem has it:
The first American? No, not quite.
But Columbus was brave, and he was bright.
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A great find by Todd Starnes with Fox News and one that should outrage parents everywhere. But I have one question.
Why would Obama For America go to middle schools to register students and why were they given access to it? The article notes that they gave left-wing speeches in the classrooms, but registering anyone less than 18 years old to vote is illegal right? It doesn’t make sense that Pasco County Schools would have given them access to middle schoolers.
Read:
TODD STARNES – Florida Republicans are outraged after a school district allowed a pro-Obama organization to conduct student voter registration drives and deliver speeches to classes – but denied the Romney campaign similar opportunities.
Pasco County Schools confirmed to Fox News that volunteers from Organizing For America were given access to as many as a half dozen high school and middle school campuses.
“They did register students to vote,” spokesman John Mann told Fox News. “We don’t know how many children were registered – (but) we have an ongoing investigation.”
According to email correspondence obtained by Fox News, volunteers tried to infiltrate at least three other school campuses – but on-campus officials rebuffed those efforts.
In addition to voter registration, a former teacher was allowed to deliver Obama speeches to a number of senior high school students.
“She got into six classrooms and gave pro-Obama speeches – like way off to the left,” said James Mathieu, general counsel for the Pasco County Republican Party. “That got out to parents and parents complained.”
Matthieu told Fox News he has filed a complaint with the Florida Division of Elections and also contacted the Florida Attorney General’s office.
“We have a liberal culture in our school system and we know that,” he told Fox News. “The problem is someone has used false credentials, false pretenses and there is a security issue.”
Mathieu said that some of the Organizing for America volunteers identified themselves to school officials as being with the local elections office.
“These people have used false pretense to get into the high schools and all they’re giving us is whitewash and lip service,” he said.
But Mann told Fox News that to his knowledge none of the volunteers misrepresented themselves.
“They identified themselves as being with Organizing For America,” he said.
However, according to an email obtained by Fox News – school officials acknowledged there may have been some deceit.
“In at least one case, those individuals said they were from the Pasco Supervisor of Elections Office,” wrote staff member Paula Lesko. “Unfortunately the SOE said that is not the case.”
From HERE.
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Is this the best political ad?
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Pumpkin Pie Vodka of the Day: Sure, why not — ‘tis the season.
From the makers of Jim Beam.
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Obama’s Bible Issue
So why isn’t a publisher of Bibles eligible for a religious exemption from HHS?
‘Tyndale was left with no alternative but to go to court,” explains Mark D. Taylor, president and CEO of Tyndale House Publishers. On the day before the first presidential debate, the company, which Taylor’s parents started when he was eleven years old, filed the 31st lawsuit over the Department of Health and Human Services’ abortion-drug, sterilization, and contraception mandate.
Tyndale publishes Bibles. But that doesn’t make it a religious endeavor. Not in the federal government’s book. Not as of August 1, anyway. That was the day that the HHS mandate — a regulation further defining the health-care legislation that then–Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi was right to tell us Congress would be passing before anyone knew what it actually contained — went into effect. Family businesses like Tyndale — which happen to be run by religious folk who want to live their lives true to what they believe — don’t qualify for any kind of “accommodation” or exemption.
“The law does not give any religious-freedom exemption to faith-based operations like Tyndale,” Taylor, who is being represented by the Alliance Defending Freedom, points out. “Instead, it imposes crushing fines on employers who are doing nothing more than following their consciences against abortion-inducing pills. The government is supposed to promote conscience protection, not attack it. The best solution is for Congress or the administration to respect the First Amendment and the Religious Freedom Restoration Act by eliminating the abortion-pill mandate. But if they refuse to do their duty, we hope the courts will rule that the mandate is unlawful.”
Tyndale, Taylor says, has always existed “for an explicitly religious purpose — to publish the Bible and other Christian publications, and direct the proceeds to ministry and charity.” And this is quite evident from a visit to Tyndale’ s website or to the religion section of most bookstores.
Continue reading HERE.
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Frustrated Residents: Raccoons Slowly Taking Over New York City
Some Who Live In Brooklyn Are Literally Having Their Lives Altered By Critters
NEW YORK (CBSNewYork) — A turf battle of sorts is taking place in some neighborhoods.
Raccoons are invading.
They’re getting into garbage cans, backyards and even breaking into homes. And what’s more, these resourceful raccoons are outsmarting the most determined of trappers, CBS 2’s Dave Carlin reported.
Clinton Hill, Brooklyn resident Susan DeBrango snapped pictures of the suspects, their faces masked, trying to get inside her home.
“They are adorable but not in your backyard when they impact your life,” DeBrango said. “When he saw at me he stood up on two legs and hissed at me.”
They are getting more brazen on Washington Avenue, rummaging through trash, and running right up to neighbors. One even went face-to-face with Barbara Mattocks on her own front stoop.
“I don’t want that feeling ever again. I was petrified,” Mattocks said
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High school guidance counselor fired over racy lingerie photos that she posted 17 YEARS ago
Tiffany Webb, 37, was a respected educator in New York City public schools for 12 years before she lost her job last December. A principal at Murry Bergtraum High School for Business Careers in Manhattan recommended she be fired after a student showed her photos of Ms Webb that he had found online.
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Dumb grenade fishermen?
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Vogue and photoshop!
Debbie Wasserman Schultz is a fat-thighed wildebeest, but you’d never know it from looking at her Vogue pics. Pravda strikes again.
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Just Old and Worthless Paper, to Recycle or Burn
As a United States Senator, I have sworn an oath to support, defend, and bear true faith and allegiance to the Constitution of the United States. Complying with this Oath is not always convenient. Sometimes this requires voting against legislation that embodies policies I agree with, other times it requires taking a stand when doing so may not be popular.
The Constitution itself is not a document of convenience. It specifies an onerous process – bicameralism and presentment – with which the government must comply to enact legislation. And it imposes separation of government powers and a system of checks and balances between the different branches.
Among those checks and balances is the requirement that the President’s nominations of federal judges and executive officers receive the Advice and Consent of the Senate before they take office, unless they are nominated during a Senate recess.
Events of the last few weeks show just how inconvenient the Constitution can be for politicians who want to get their way at any cost. On January 4, 2012, President Obama attempted to bypass the Senate and unilaterally “recess appoint” those nominees even though the Senate was not in fact in recess.
These are brazen actions with real consequences. As a duly sworn United States Senator I feel duty bound to resist these actions, regardless of the difficulty.
In taking a stand against the President’s unconstitutional assertion of executive power, I have already been targeted by the President himself. In his weekly radio address, the President singled me out, suggesting that I am playing politics with the judicial nominations process.
[snip]
It seems as if the President’s response to the inconvenient Constitution is simply to interpret away its restrictions if he doesn’t like them.
I and members of Congress of both parties who care about the Constitution must take a stand. If, as a political branch, the legislature does not protect the Senate’s constitutional right to advise and consent to nominees, it may lose it forever. Doing so would have far-reaching implications for Democrats as well as Republicans.
I call on all Americans – Republicans, Democrats, Independents – to stand with me in defense of this blatant and egregious encroachment on our basic constitutional liberties.
Read the article here.
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Mitt Romney has come under fire this morning — less than 24 hours after winning the Florida primary — for telling CNN’s Soledad O’Brien that he isn’t concerned “about the very poor”because “we have a safety net there.”
When pressed on this statement by O’Brien, the presidential candidate reiterated his commitment to fixing any holes in that safety net, but also took the time to repeat the phrase “I’m not concerned about the very poor,” which was undoubtedly a very poor choice of words from the man who would become one of the richest presidents in US history.
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Mean Joe Greene reprises his role as Mean Joe Greene for a Downy-promoting, Amy Sedaris-starring sendup of his iconic 1979 Super Bowl commerical for Coca-Cola.
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A former elementary school teacher in Los Angeles has been arrested for allegedly molesting nearly two dozen children after photos of students posed in bondage positions were passed to the Sheriff’s Department.
Mark Berndt, 61, a teacher with over 30 years experience at Miramonte Elementary School in south Los Angeles, is charged with molesting 23 children, according to a statement from the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department.
Police began the investigation after a photo processing facility passed along suspicious images depicting students blindfolded with their mouths covered in tape. Female students were depicted with a blue plastic spoon containing “an unknown clear/white liquid” in front of their mouths, while other students were pictured with live cockroaches on their faces. In some photos, Berndt had his arm around the children or his hand over their mouths.
Police found the spoon, along with an empty container in the trash in Berndt’s classroom and, through DNA testing, determined that both contained Berndt’s semen.
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Another reason to completely ban unions in the public sector.
For ten years this shithead has been doing nothing but collect almost a million dollars.
Alan Rosenfeld — a 66-year-old disgraced typing teacher — hasn’t taught since he was accused of making inappropriate comments and leering at 8th grade girls in 2001, but still collects $100,049 a year from the city, the New York Post reports.
Rosenfeld, a millionaire businessman and attorney, could have retired at 62 but, a friend told the Post, “It’s an F-U” to the school system. And every year he stays onboard, his $85,400 yearly pension grows by another $1,700.
His case is one of seven in the New York City Department of Education, where teachers the department can’t fire are “rubber-roomed” — essentially meaning they don’t do any real work but keep getting paid.
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A special permit has been renewed for the statue of Jesus Christ atop Big Mountain.
Flathead National Forest Supervisor Chip Weber announced Tuesday that he is reauthorizing a special use permit for The Knights of Columbus Council No. 1328 of Kalispell for the display of a statue on a small parcel of federal land within the Whitefish Mountain Resort permit boundary at Big Mountain.
The permit is reauthorized for 10 years.
“I understand the statue has been a long-standing object in the community since 1955, and I recognize that the statue is important to the community for its historical heritage based on its association with the early development of the ski area on Big Mountain,” Weber said.
Last August, Weber denied the permit renewal for the statue. That denial was based on legal advice that the statue violated of the Constitution’s Establishment clause and legal precedent regarding religious symbols on public lands.
However, public outcry prompted the Forest Service to reconsider the issue.
An ensuing public comment period attracted 95,000 responses.
Once the new permit is returned to the Flathead National Forest by the Knights of Columbus with signature and payment, it will be signed by Weber and remains in effect for the next 10 years.
A Wisconsin-based group, the Freedom from Religion Foundation, plans to file a lawsuit this week challenging the permit renewal.
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Saudi Cops Blame House Fire on Ghosts
DeMint: Just say ‘no’ to compromise
GOP Sen. Lee: Obama’s Consumer Bureau Insulated From Congress, A Power “Reserved For Despots”
Give Me A Break: WND Chief Birther Now Claiming Marco Rubio Not Eligible
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And why the crap is the price of gasoline going UP???? Yesterday, gas was $3.15 per gallon (for some reason, both the ethanol blend and the regular unleaded, strange I think) and today? Went up 12 cents a gallon! To $3.27 a gallon. This is in Des Moines. This morning when we went down to Missouri, gas here in our town was still set at $3.15 and when we came back from Missouri, gas in Osceola was still at $3.15 a gallon. Have not gone up the road to see if the gas here has now jumped to $3.27. And the were saying that the price of gasoline could go to $4.95 at least (at least? so it may go up even more) by Memorial Day. Geesh. I think this fits it with those who said last year and continue to say now that the price of gasoline would go up quite a bit prior to the presidential election and then just before, the price would drop like a rock so Obama could then say he got the prices back down and get re-elected. And blame the whole mess on the Republicans! Will see for sure…
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And this is how Obama is creating jobs in the US?
This took place on the same day Obama told Americans in the SOTU that car makers needed to stop shipping jobs overseas.
Tuesday, the 24th of January, Joel Ewanick, CMO of General Motors awarded the more than $3 billion dollar GM media account to Aegis/Carat. Strangely enough, Carat is the French division of its parent company, Aegis, which is a UK based operation currently trading on the London Stock Exchange.
Mr. Ewanick insisted that it wasn’t only money, but better quality that drove him to place the $3 billion piece of business with a non US company. Or, as he so succinctly put it… “It was definitely about finding efficiencies, while at the same time wanting to raise the quality of the service provided.”
Apart from the fact that if it wasn’t for the billions of US tax payer dollars pumped into the floundering GM operation, Mr. Ewanick would currently be another of Detroit’s unfortunate unemployed, did he ever pause to consider that we (the US taxpayers) still own 28% of the company and might be somewhat pissed off about the fact that all this stuff was going overseas?
Yes, various people have pointed out to me that the $3 BILLION is the media spend, and the income to Aegis/Carat will be perhaps, a meager 3%… Which, sadly for the unfortunate Aegis management guys currently celebrating their win by wining and dining on Chateaux Laffite 83, and Beluga Caviar at Claridges, just happens to work out at a measly $90 million. And yes, they will assuredly employ people in their American offices to co-ordinate with the client and make the domestic bookings. But you just know a great deal of the grunt work will be off-shored to somewhere you can get call-center help for peanuts. Heck, why should they be any different from your friendly local neighborhood bank?
However, at the end of the day, it isn’t about the money, it’s about the brass balls of GM to think that the American taxpayer doesn’t mind having a sharp stick shoved in their eye when it comes to how their tax dollars are being spent.
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In New York a democrat senator wants to fine people $250 for eating on the subway.
College girl expelled for refusing to provide counseling services to homosexuals wins in court:
If you want examples of the types of people that will sell our country out, they can be found in groups like VoteVets.
The democrats who were investigating the DOJ involvement in the “Fast and Furious” case where our guns were sold to Mexicans and then used by those Mexicans to kill Americans miraculously found nothing wrong with DOJ’s actions.
WOW! What a surprise, eh? They took a page from Obama’s “Blame Anyone But Me” book.
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Yet somehow it’s only the Tea Party types who are prone to violence?
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Walker Recall Petitions NOT Available for Online Review
MacIver News Service
[Madison, Wisc…] The Wisconsin Government Accountability Board has not posted scanned copies of the Governor Walker recall petitions online despite promises to the citizens of Wisconsin that they would do so.
GAB staff delivered copies of the scans to the Governor’s campaign late last week. The campaign, with the assistance of the Republican Party of Wisconsin, began reviewing the petitions at satellite offices across the state this weekend.
Once they scanned documents, they were going to make them public, having issued an alert to all media earlier in the day. The revelation was the top of many radio broadcasts Monday.
Such a public disclosure would have allowed the volunteers at the independent VerifytheRecall.com to also begin their effort.
But early this evening the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported GAB staff was going back on their promise, citing alleged privacy concerns by some who signed the public documents.
This is the latest development in a series of back and forth decisions by the GAB that promises more legal challenges ahead.
And it could thwart a massive effort by Tea Party groups to conduct an independent review of the petitions.
“Never before have regular citizens organized in this way to this scale in a nonpartisan sense to uphold the integrity of Wisconsin’s elections,” said Ross Brown, Founder and President of the Tea Party Group, We the People of the Republic and co-organizer of the Verify The Recall effort before the GAB’s surprise announcement was made. “Our volunteers are anxious to start and committed to the effort.”
Brown said approximately 87 percent of the more than 11,000 volunteers who signed up at his website are from Wisconsin, although they do have volunteers from all but one of the 50 states.
“Verify the Recall has written a new play in the citizens’ playbook as to how we can preserve our clean and honest elections,” Brown said.
With Monday night’s revelation that the GAB was refusing to comply with their earlier public pronouncements, the Verify the Recall process could be in jeopardy.
Read the article here.
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Even scarier is we have a loon president crazy enough to go along with this.
(AFP) — The world can no longer afford to ignore the environmental cost of economic growth and must redefine the very concept of national wealth, a UN panel of heads of state and environment ministers said Monday.
The panel challenged leaders to recognise that “current global development is unsustainable.”
“We need to chart a new, more sustainable course for the future, one that strengthens equality and economic growth while protecting our planet,” UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon said in Addis Ababa to mark the release of the panel’s report, which outlines more than 50 policy recommendations.
By 2030, the report warned, the planet will need at least 50 percent more food, 45 percent more energy and 30 percent more water.
These needs are emerging “at a time when environmental boundaries are throwing up new limits to supply,” it said.
Continuing along the same path as today risks “irreversible damage to both ecosystems and human communities.”