Saturday, May 26, 2012

Website asks women to be proud of their abortions

May 25, 2012 (LiveActionNews.org) - Since xoJane.com prides itself on being the website “where women go when they are being selfish, and where their selfishness is applauded,” it’s no surprise they are asking women to brag about their experience with abortion. The site is asking women to submit photos of themselves declaring why they support the act of killing one’s own child. They want women to end their silence and proclaim to the world that they’ve had abortions and feel zero guilt about it.

In the post, “It Happened to Us: Abortion,” author S.E. Smith writes:

For a medical procedure that should be routine, like getting a filling at the dentist or getting a vaccination, it sure is politically charged. I wear my abortion on my sleeve (so to speak) because I want other people to know that they don’t need to feel shame about choosing to get an abortion[.]


First, abortion isn’t something that “happens” to anyone. It is not an arbitrary, unexpected event beyond a woman’s control, but an act of aggression, which she sought out. Second, it is not and should not be routine to rip your own child out of your womb. Unlike vaccinations and dental fillings, abortion ends the life of a baby and can leave mothers with a lifetime of remorse and bouts of depression.

Smith also says:

There’s a tendency in some corners of the pro-choice movement to talk about abortion as a tragic but sometimes necessary procedure, to talk about the need to reduce the overall number of abortions, and this is a mistake. It plays into the hands of the anti-choice movement by assigning a moral value to abortion.

There’s a reason so many people who affiliate themselves with the pro-choice side call abortion tragic but necessary. There’s a reason so many of them say that no one wants to have an abortion, but sometimes it’s the right thing to do. It’s because they know that abortion is tragic and wrong, but they have become so snarled up in politically correct lingo that they can’t see straight anymore. They know that abortion is a gravely horrific act of murder, but they cannot get themselves out from under the weight of their own misguided attempts to help women. The fact is that murdering someone is legally wrong because it is morally wrong. Since abortion is murder, the same rules should apply. To help someone commit a murder is also morally and legally wrong. And the pro-choicers who assign a moral value to abortion know this, but they live in denial, preferring to ignore their own consciences.

Smith tells all of her readers:

If you had an abortion, you can rock on with your bad self, whether you braved the dangers of illegal abortion pre-Roe v. Wade or took some mifepristone this morning. And if anyone has a problem with that, that’s their problem, not yours.

She believes that women who have had abortions should celebrate themselves and that those women who risked their health to kill their own children in pre-Roe days (and really, in these days, too) should honor their twisted principles. When did women who would risk death in order to kill their child become more admirable than those who risk their lives to save their children? Imagine slave owners who may have told those fighting for freedom for slaves: “If you don’t like that I own slaves, that’s your problem, not mine.” Or picture an abusive man telling his wife’s family: “If you don’t like my relationship, that’s your problem.” Envision terrorists telling us that if we don’t like their actions, that’s our problem. Abortion is about a woman and her doctor the way child abuse is about a parent and her child. To imply that none of us has a right to protect victims of violence is unacceptable.

Interwoven in Smith’s post are photos of women supporting abortion.

Lesley Kinzel holds up a note with drawings of three cats. It reads, “If I was pregnant TODAY, I would get an abortion. (Cats are enough, thank you.) (Less crying) (Self reliance) (Smaller poops).” It seems that for Kinzel, having to love a child is a horrid task.

When Sari Botton proclaims in her photo, “Had 1 surgical + 1 chemical. Been perpetuating the shame by keeping silent…until now. 1+1=2 abortions,” all I picture (graphic link) is a baby burned to death by saline and another being ripped to pieces. Never given a name, never given a hug, never allowed to feel love from another person.

It is all obviously and pathetically egocentric. And it all plays into the master plot of Planned Parenthood and the Population Council to shift society’s view of children from blessing to curse, to alter the perception of family to be a unit that includes only one or two children, and to convince everyone that there is no one more important than I am.

Helena Andrews’ photo stating, “I Choose Life. Mine,” says it all.

Brownback signs bill blocking use of Islamic law

Gov. Sam Brownback has signed into law a bill aimed at keeping Kansas courts or government agencies from basing decisions on Islamic or other foreign legal codes.

Brownback's office notified the Senate of his action Friday, but he actually signed the measure Monday. The new law will take effect in July. Muslim groups had urged him to veto the measure, arguing it promotes discrimination. Supporters say it simply restates American values. Supporters have worried about Shariah law being applied in Kansas courts. However, they also point out that the bill doesn't specifically mention codes within the Islamic legal system. Instead, it says courts or other tribunals can't base rulings on any foreign law or legal system that would not grant rights guaranteed by state and U.S. constitutions.

SOURCE: KSNT.com

U.N. Law Of The Sea Treaty Must Be Stopped

Geopolitics: The administration begins the push for ratification of a 1982 treaty that would end America's sovereignty on the high seas, limit our freedoms on land and speed up the global redistribution of wealth and power.

Defense Secretary Leon Panetta told Sen. John Kerry's Senate Foreign Relations Committee last Wednesday that the freedom of the sea once guaranteed by the British Royal Navy and then the U.S. Navy should be in the hands of United Nations bureaucrats in Montego Bay, Jamaica, enforcers of the Law of the Sea Treaty (LOST) he said we must ratify.

It used to be that a carrier battle group led by 90,000 tons of American diplomacy was sufficient to ensure that no nation could threaten our freedom of navigation and that of other countries.

But the nation whose motto was "we win, they lose" under President Reagan is replacing it with President Obama's "mother, may we?"

"If we are not a party to this treaty and can't deal with it at the table, then we have to deal with it at sea with our naval power, and once that happens, we clearly increase the risk for confrontation," Panetta told members of the committee.

Once upon a time, other nations were afraid of us; now we're afraid of them.

LOST would codify the "global test" Kerry uses to assess the validity of U.S. activities. For example, Communist China, a LOST signatory, contends the treaty bans the Proliferation Security Initiative under which we can stop and search ships on the high seas suspected of transporting WMDs on behalf of or for use by terrorists.

What would we do if China's claim to undisputed sovereignty over the 1 million square miles of the South China Sea were honored by this new international body to which we would be subservient? Would the U.S. Navy quietly keep off their grass?

LOST establishes an International Seabed Authority with the power to regulate 70% of the earth's surface, placing seabed mining, fishing rights, deep-sea oil exploration and even the activities of the U.S. Navy under control of a global bureaucracy.

It even provides for a global tax that would be paid directly to the ISA by companies seeking to develop resources in and under the world's oceans.

The treaty was originally finalized in the 1980s but rejected by Reagan over concerns it would cede U.S. sovereignty to the ISA and could force the United States to hand over sensitive technology to Soviet-allied states.

"One of the more nefarious and insidious of its provisions is Article 82, which requires the U.S. to forfeit royalties generated from oil and gas development on the continental shelf beyond 200 nautical miles — an area known as the 'extended continental shelf,'" notes the Heritage Foundation's Mike Brownfield.

Treaty opponent Sen. James Inhofe, R-Okla., cited the work of the U.S. Interagency Extended Continental Shelf Task Force — a government group whose mission is to map the area off U.S. coasts beyond 200 nautical miles — that estimates mineral wealth in the billions to trillions of dollars. Included are supplies of rare earths required by high-tech and military applications.

That wealth and technology would be turned over to a U.N. body whose mission would be to redistribute it to thugs, tyrants and postage-stamp countries of the world.

"This is the first time in history that an international organization — the U.N. in this case — would possess taxing authority over this country," Inhofe says.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton told the Kerry committee that opposition to LOST is based in ideology and mythology, not in facts, evidence or the consequences of our continuing failure to accede to the treaty."

Fact is, LOST would be an incalculable loss of wealth and sovereignty. Those who wish to plunder our wealth and neuter our power should be told to get lost.

SOURCE: INVESTORS.COM

The Party of Civil Rights

This magazine has long specialized in debunking pernicious political myths, and Jonah Goldberg has now provided an illuminating catalogue of tyrannical clichés, but worse than the myth and the cliché is the outright lie, the utter fabrication with malice aforethought, and my nominee for the worst of them is the popular but indefensible belief that the two major U.S. political parties somehow “switched places” vis-à-vis protecting the rights of black Americans, a development believed to be roughly concurrent with the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the rise of Richard Nixon. That Republicans have let Democrats get away with this mountebankery is a symptom of their political fecklessness, and in letting them get away with it the GOP has allowed itself to be cut off rhetorically from a pantheon of Republican political heroes, from Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass to Susan B. Anthony, who represent an expression of conservative ideals as true and relevant today as it was in the 19th century. Perhaps even worse, the Democrats have been allowed to rhetorically bury their Bull Connors, their longstanding affiliation with the Ku Klux Klan, and their pitiless opposition to practically every major piece of civil-rights legislation for a century. Republicans may not be able to make significant inroads among black voters in the coming elections, but they would do well to demolish this myth nonetheless.

Even if the Republicans’ rise in the South had happened suddenly in the 1960s (it didn’t) and even if there were no competing explanation (there is), racism — or, more precisely, white southern resentment over the political successes of the civil-rights movement — would be an implausible explanation for the dissolution of the Democratic bloc in the old Confederacy and the emergence of a Republican stronghold there. That is because those southerners who defected from the Democratic party in the 1960s and thereafter did so to join a Republican party that was far more enlightened on racial issues than were the Democrats of the era, and had been for a century. There is no radical break in the Republicans’ civil-rights history: From abolition to Reconstruction to the anti-lynching laws, from the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to the Civil Rights Act of 1875 to the Civil Rights Acts of 1957, 1960, and 1964, there exists a line that is by no means perfectly straight or unwavering but that nonetheless connects the politics of Lincoln with those of Dwight D. Eisenhower. And from slavery and secession to remorseless opposition to everything from Reconstruction to the anti-lynching laws, the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, the Civil Rights Act of 1875, and the Civil Rights Acts of 1957 and 1960, there exists a similarly identifiable line connecting John Calhoun and Lyndon Baines Johnson. Supporting civil-rights reform was not a radical turnaround for congressional Republicans in 1964, but it was a radical turnaround for Johnson and the Democrats.

The depth of Johnson’s prior opposition to civil-rights reform must be digested in some detail to be properly appreciated. In the House, he did not represent a particularly segregationist constituency (it “made up for being less intensely segregationist than the rest of the South by being more intensely anti-Communist,” as the New York Times put it), but Johnson was practically antebellum in his views. Never mind civil rights or voting rights: In Congress, Johnson had consistently and repeatedly voted against legislation to protect black Americans from lynching. As a leader in the Senate, Johnson did his best to cripple the Civil Rights Act of 1957; not having votes sufficient to stop it, he managed to reduce it to an act of mere symbolism by excising the enforcement provisions before sending it to the desk of President Eisenhower. Johnson’s Democratic colleague Strom Thurmond nonetheless went to the trouble of staging the longest filibuster in history up to that point, speaking for 24 hours in a futile attempt to block the bill. The reformers came back in 1960 with an act to remedy the deficiencies of the 1957 act, and Johnson’s Senate Democrats again staged a record-setting filibuster. In both cases, the “master of the Senate” petitioned the northeastern Kennedy liberals to credit him for having seen to the law’s passage while at the same time boasting to southern Democrats that he had taken the teeth out of the legislation. Johnson would later explain his thinking thus: “These Negroes, they’re getting pretty uppity these days, and that’s a problem for us, since they’ve got something now they never had before: the political pull to back up their uppityness. Now we’ve got to do something about this — we’ve got to give them a little something, just enough to quiet them down, not enough to make a difference.”

Johnson did not spring up from the Democratic soil ex nihilo. Not one Democrat in Congress voted for the Fourteenth Amendment. Not one Democrat in Congress voted for the Fifteenth Amendment. Not one voted for the Civil Rights Act of 1875. Eisenhower as a general began the process of desegregating the military, and Truman as president formalized it, but the main reason either had to act was that President Wilson, the personification of Democratic progressivism, had resegregated previously integrated federal facilities. (“If the colored people made a mistake in voting for me, they ought to correct it,” he declared.) Klansmen from Senator Robert Byrd to Justice Hugo Black held prominent positions in the Democratic party — and President Wilson chose the Klan epic Birth of a Nation to be the first film ever shown at the White House.

Johnson himself denounced an earlier attempt at civil-rights reform as the “nigger bill.” So what happened in 1964 to change Democrats’ minds? In fact, nothing.

President Johnson was nothing if not shrewd, and he knew something that very few popular political commentators appreciate today: The Democrats began losing the “solid South” in the late 1930s — at the same time as they were picking up votes from northern blacks. The Civil War and the sting of Reconstruction had indeed produced a political monopoly for southern Democrats that lasted for decades, but the New Deal had been polarizing. It was very popular in much of the country, including much of the South — Johnson owed his election to the House to his New Deal platform and Roosevelt connections — but there was a conservative backlash against it, and that backlash eventually drove New Deal critics to the Republican party. Likewise, adherents of the isolationist tendency in American politics, which is never very far from the surface, looked askance at what Bob Dole would later famously call “Democrat wars” (a factor that would become especially relevant when the Democrats under Kennedy and Johnson committed the United States to a very divisive war in Vietnam). The tiniest cracks in the Democrats’ southern bloc began to appear with the backlash to FDR’s court-packing scheme and the recession of 1937. Republicans would pick up 81 House seats in the 1938 election, with West Virginia’s all-Democrat delegation ceasing to be so with the acquisition of its first Republican. Kentucky elected a Republican House member in 1934, as did Missouri, while Tennessee’s first Republican House member, elected in 1918, was joined by another in 1932. Throughout the 1940s and 1950s, the Republican party, though marginal, began to take hold in the South — but not very quickly: Dixie would not send its first Republican to the Senate until 1961, with Texas’s election of John Tower.

At the same time, Republicans went through a long dry spell on civil-rights progress. Many of them believed, wrongly, that the issue had been more or less resolved by the constitutional amendments that had been enacted to ensure the full citizenship of black Americans after the Civil War, and that the enduring marginalization of black citizens, particularly in the Democratic states, was a problem that would be healed by time, economic development, and organic social change rather than through a second political confrontation between North and South. (As late as 1964, the Republican platform argued that “the elimination of any such discrimination is a matter of heart, conscience, and education, as well as of equal rights under law.”) The conventional Republican wisdom of the day held that the South was backward because it was poor rather than poor because it was backward. And their strongest piece of evidence for that belief was that Republican support in the South was not among poor whites or the old elites — the two groups that tended to hold the most retrograde beliefs on race — but among the emerging southern middle class, a fact recently documented by professors Byron Shafer and Richard Johnston in The End of Southern Exceptionalism: Class, Race, and Partisan Change in the Postwar South (Harvard University Press, 2006). Which is to say: The Republican rise in the South was contemporaneous with the decline of race as the most important political question and tracked the rise of middle-class voters moved mainly by economic considerations and anti-Communism.

The South had been in effect a Third World country within the United States, and that changed with the post-war economic boom. As Clay Risen put it in the New York Times: “The South transformed itself from a backward region to an engine of the national economy, giving rise to a sizable new wealthy suburban class. This class, not surprisingly, began to vote for the party that best represented its economic interests: the GOP. Working-class whites, however — and here’s the surprise — even those in areas with large black populations, stayed loyal to the Democrats. This was true until the 90s, when the nation as a whole turned rightward in Congressional voting.” The mythmakers would have you believe that it was the opposite: that your white-hooded hillbilly trailer-dwelling tornado-bait voters jumped ship because LBJ signed a civil-rights bill (passed on the strength of disproportionately Republican support in Congress). The facts suggest otherwise.

There is no question that Republicans in the 1960s and thereafter hoped to pick up the angry populists who had delivered several states to Wallace. That was Patrick J. Buchanan’s portfolio in the Nixon campaign. But in the main they did not do so by appeal to racial resentment, direct or indirect. The conservative ascendency of 1964 saw the nomination of Barry Goldwater, a western libertarian who had never been strongly identified with racial issues one way or the other, but who was a principled critic of the 1964 act and its extension of federal power. Goldwater had supported the 1957 and 1960 acts but believed that Title II and Title VII of the 1964 bill were unconstitutional, based in part on a 75-page brief from Robert Bork. But far from extending a welcoming hand to southern segregationists, he named as his running mate a New York representative, William E. Miller, who had been the co-author of Republican civil-rights legislation in the 1950s. The Republican platform in 1964 was hardly catnip for Klansmen: It spoke of the Johnson administration’s failure to help further the “just aspirations of the minority groups” and blasted the president for his refusal “to apply Republican-initiated retraining programs where most needed, particularly where they could afford new economic opportunities to Negro citizens.” Other planks in the platform included: “improvements of civil rights statutes adequate to changing needs of our times; such additional administrative or legislative actions as may be required to end the denial, for whatever unlawful reason, of the right to vote; continued opposition to discrimination based on race, creed, national origin or sex.” And Goldwater’s fellow Republicans ran on a 1964 platform demanding “full implementation and faithful execution of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and all other civil rights statutes, to assure equal rights and opportunities guaranteed by the Constitution to every citizen.” Some dog whistle.

Of course there were racists in the Republican party. There were racists in the Democratic party. The case of Johnson is well documented, while Nixon had his fantastical panoply of racial obsessions, touching blacks, Jews, Italians (“Don’t have their heads screwed on”), Irish (“They get mean when they drink”), and the Ivy League WASPs he hated so passionately (“Did one of those dirty bastards ever invite me to his f***ing men’s club or goddamn country club? Not once”). But the legislative record, the evolution of the electorate, the party platforms, the keynote speeches — none of them suggests a party-wide Republican about-face on civil rights.

Neither does the history of the black vote. While Republican affiliation was beginning to grow in the South in the late 1930s, the GOP also lost its lock on black voters in the North, among whom the New Deal was extraordinarily popular. By 1940, Democrats for the first time won a majority of black votes in the North. This development was not lost on Lyndon Johnson, who crafted his Great Society with the goal of exploiting widespread dependency for the benefit of the Democratic party. Unlike the New Deal, a flawed program that at least had the excuse of relying upon ideas that were at the time largely untested and enacted in the face of a worldwide economic emergency, Johnson’s Great Society was pure politics. Johnson’s War on Poverty was declared at a time when poverty had been declining for decades, and the first Job Corps office opened when the unemployment rate was less than 5 percent. Congressional Republicans had long supported a program to assist the indigent elderly, but the Democrats insisted that the program cover all of the elderly — even though they were, then as now, the most affluent demographic, with 85 percent of them in households of above-average wealth. Democrats such as Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare Anthony J. Celebrezze argued that the Great Society would end “dependency” among the elderly and the poor, but the programs were transparently designed merely to transfer dependency from private and local sources of support to federal agencies created and overseen by Johnson and his political heirs. In the context of the rest of his program, Johnson’s unexpected civil-rights conversion looks less like an attempt to empower blacks and more like an attempt to make clients of them.

If the parties had in some meaningful way flipped on civil rights, one would expect that to show up in the electoral results in the years following the Democrats’ 1964 about-face on the issue. Nothing of the sort happened: Of the 21 Democratic senators who opposed the 1964 act, only one would ever change parties. Nor did the segregationist constituencies that elected these Democrats throw them out in favor of Republicans: The remaining 20 continued to be elected as Democrats or were replaced by Democrats. It was, on average, nearly a quarter of a century before those seats went Republican. If southern rednecks ditched the Democrats because of a civil-rights law passed in 1964, it is strange that they waited until the late 1980s and early 1990s to do so. They say things move slower in the South — but not that slow.

Republicans did begin to win some southern House seats, and in many cases segregationist Democrats were thrown out by southern voters in favor of civil-rights Republicans. One of the loudest Democratic segregationists in the House was Texas’s John Dowdy, a bitter and buffoonish opponent of the 1964 reforms, which he declared “would set up a despot in the attorney general’s office with a large corps of enforcers under him; and his will and his oppressive action would be brought to bear upon citizens, just as Hitler’s minions coerced and subjugated the German people. I would say this — I believe this would be agreed to by most people: that, if we had a Hitler in the United States, the first thing he would want would be a bill of this nature.” (Who says political rhetoric has been debased in the past 40 years?) Dowdy was thrown out in 1966 in favor of a Republican with a very respectable record on civil rights, a little-known figure by the name of George H. W. Bush.

It was in fact not until 1995 that Republicans represented a majority of the southern congressional delegation — and they had hardly spent the Reagan years campaigning on the resurrection of Jim Crow.

It was not the Civil War but the Cold War that shaped midcentury partisan politics. Eisenhower warned the country against the “military-industrial complex,” but in truth Ike’s ascent had represented the decisive victory of the interventionist, hawkish wing of the Republican party over what remained of the America First/Charles Lindbergh/Robert Taft tendency. The Republican party had long been staunchly anti-Communist, but the post-war era saw that anti-Communism energized and looking for monsters to slay, both abroad — in the form of the Soviet Union and its satellites — and at home, in the form of the growing welfare state, the “creeping socialism” conservatives dreaded. By the middle 1960s, the semi-revolutionary Left was the liveliest current in U.S. politics, and Republicans’ unapologetic anti-Communism — especially conservatives’ rhetoric connecting international socialism abroad with the welfare state at home — left the Left with nowhere to go but the Democratic party. Vietnam was Johnson’s war, but by 1968 the Democratic party was not his alone.

The schizophrenic presidential election of that year set the stage for the subsequent transformation of southern politics: Segregationist Democrat George Wallace, running as an independent, made a last stand in the old Confederacy but carried only five states, while Republican Richard Nixon, who had helped shepherd the 1957 Civil Rights Act through Congress, counted a number of Confederate states (North Carolina, South Carolina, Florida, and Tennessee) among the 32 he carried. Democrat Hubert Humphrey was reduced to a northern fringe plus Texas. Mindful of the long-term realignment already under way in the South, Johnson informed Democrats worried about losing it after the 1964 act that “those states may be lost anyway.” Subsequent presidential elections bore him out: Nixon won a 49-state sweep in 1972, and, with the exception of the post-Watergate election of 1976, Republicans in the following presidential elections would more or less occupy the South like Sherman. Bill Clinton would pick up a handful of southern states in his two contests, and Barack Obama had some success in the post-southern South, notably Virginia and Florida.

The Republican ascendancy in Dixie is associated with the rise of the southern middle class, the increasingly trenchant conservative critique of Communism and the welfare state, the Vietnam controversy and the rise of the counterculture, law-and-order concerns rooted in the urban chaos that ran rampant from the late 1960s to the late 1980s, and the incorporation of the radical Left into the Democratic party. Individual events, especially the freak show that was the 1968 Democratic convention, helped solidify conservatives’ affiliation with the Republican party. Democrats might argue that some of these concerns — especially welfare and crime — are “dog whistles” or “code” for race and racism, but this criticism is shallow in light of the evidence and the real saliency of those issues among U.S. voters of all backgrounds and both parties for decades. Indeed, Democrats who argue that the best policies for black Americans are those that are soft on crime and generous with welfare are engaged in much the same sort of cynical racial calculation President Johnson was practicing when he informed skeptical southern governors that his plan for the Great Society was “to have them niggers voting Democratic for the next two hundred years.” Johnson’s crude racism is, happily, largely a relic of the past, but his strategy endures.

— Kevin D. Williamson is a roving correspondent for National Review and the author of The Dependency Agenda, which will be published by Encounter Books on May 29. This article appears in the May 28, 2012, issue of National Review.

SOURCE: NATIONAL REVIEW

Mexico gang launches car bomb near US border

CIUDAD VICTORIA, Mexico (AP) — Suspected drug cartel gunmen opened fire on a hotel being used as a police barracks then attacked it with a car bomb Thursday, wounding eight officers less than 4 miles (6.5 kilometers) from the U.S. border, Mexican officials said.

Revealed: Obama Thanked Drug Dealer, not Mother, in High School Yearbook

It has been well known for years that President Obama was an avid user of cocaine and marijuana in both his high school and college years. However, the rabbit hole appears to be much deeper than previously thought.

Over the last few days, Mr. Obama's "rules" for taking drugs has been widely publicized. The fact that President Obama took so many drugs that he needed specific guidelines should speak for itself.

Additionally, and possibly most shocking, we have learned that in his high school year book, Mr. Obama thanked his drug dealer by name. One person that he failed to even acknowledge? His mother.

The dealer's name was Ray. You can see a picture of the high school yearbook below:


So what happened to Ray, you might ask. Why has he not spoken up about this incident? Well, "Many years later they learned that he had been killed with a ball-peen hammer by a scorned gay lover."

SOURCE: Pundit Press

Obama Doesn’t Want You to Attend – GRPC


BELLEVUE, WA --(Ammoland.com)- I would like to personally invite you to our 27th annual Gun Rights Policy Conference (GRPC), which will be taking place September 28, 29, and 30, 2012 in Orlando, Florida at the Hyatt Regency Orlando International Airport hotel.

With new battles over individual rights in the age of terrorism, attacks on our gun rights from the UN, a number of Second Amendment cases in the courts and an important upcoming election, your attendance is critical. The theme of Elect Liberty is most important as we set the pro-gun rights agenda for the year to come.

This year GRPC will be action-packed. With over 50 speakers hand-picked from the leadership of the Gun Rights Movement, the topics to be presented promise to have an impact that will help direct the path of our cause for years to come. Invited speakers this year include: myself, Joe Tartaro, Alan Gura, Otis McDonald, John Lott, Massad Ayoob, David Kopel, John Snyder, as well as staff from the Second Amendment Foundation, Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms, National Rifle Association, National Shooting Sports Foundation, KeepAndBearArms.com, and Gun Owners of America. A number of elected political leaders have been invited as well.

As in the past, the Second Amendment Foundation will not only pick up the tab for lunch and refreshments, but will also provide more than $125 worth of vital pro-gun rights materials to each attendee.

In addition to the luncheon and free materials, you will have the opportunity to chat with the speakers at the two evening planned receptions.

This event is so important to our cause, that the SAF Board of Trustees has elected to help underwrite the entire cost of the event. Your cost to attend this event is absolutely free!

Because of the number of people who travel every year to attend this event, I have negotiated a special discount room rate for GRPC attendees. Reservations for the special discounted room rate of $99 per night can be made by clicking here or by calling 1-888-421-1442 and telling them you are planning on attending the Gun Rights Policy Conference (GRPC) sponsored by the Second Amendment Foundation.

If you have any questions, please call the SAF office at (425) 454-7012 to register. You can also register online at our GRPC Registration & Information Page, or send an e-mail to grpc2012@saf.org, or fax us at 425-451-3959.
Sincerely yours,

Alan M. Gottlieb
Founder
Second Amendment Foundation

As Wisconsin recall vote looms, much more at stake than Scott Walker's job


You can have this long weekend off. But get ready right after for a ton of politics news about Wisconsin.

June 5 is the election in Wisconsin, the unions' attempt to recall Republican Gov. Scott Walker using Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett. Yeah, Yeah, yeah, you say. That's a re-run of the 2010 election. And you're right. It is. And the same result is likely, according to late polls.

But this time much more is at stake. This time Wisconsin's election has become a symbol of the national struggle between Republicans and Democrats, between fiscal restraint and spending as usual, between President Obama's vision of uncontrolled spending to transform America into something else and the opposite.

The stakes are huge. Because either way the winning side will....... CONTINUED

What Do Facebook And Egypt's Elections Have In Common?

So how's that old Arab Spring going? You remember — the "Facebook Revolution."

As I write, they're counting the votes in Egypt's presidential election, so by the time you read this the pecking order may have changed somewhat. But currently in first place is the Muslim Brotherhood candidate Mohammed Morsi, who in an inspiring stump speech before the students of Cairo University the other night told them, "Death in the name of Allah is our goal."

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In second place is the military's man Ahmed Shafiq, Hosni Mubarak's last prime minister and a man who in a recent television interview said that "unfortunately the revolution succeeded."

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In third place is moderate Islamist Abdel-Moneim Abolfotoh, a 9/11 Truther endorsed by the terrorist organization al-Gama'a al-Islamiya. He's a "moderate" because he thinks Egyptian Christians should be allowed to run for the presidency, although they shouldn't be allowed to win.

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As I said, this thrilling race is by no means over, and one would not rule out an eventual third-place finish by a rival beacon of progress such as Amr Moussa, the longtime Arab League flack and former Mubarak foreign minister.

So what happened to all those candidates embodying the spirit of Egypt's modern progressive democratic youth movement that all those western media rubes were cooing over in Tahrir Square a year ago? How are they doing in Egypt's first free presidential election?

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Yet Another Attack on Small Business

Barbecue restaurants facing fire from South Florida cities

If you want authentic barbecue, it's a good weekend to fire up your backyard pit because barbecue restaurants say some South Florida cities aren't too hot on their traditional slow cookers.

The fragrant smoke that attracts 'cue lovers is often a turnoff to neighboring homes, so a growing list of cities are adding restrictions to routine health and fire codes, making it difficult for restaurants to open.

"If they knew what they were going to have to go through to open a place, I don't think anybody in their right mind would ever get into this business," said Mark Vasturo, CEO of Miami-based chain, Shorty's Bar-B-Q.

Open pits are legal under national rules, there are limits as to how the flame and smoke need to be controlled.

More at the Sun Sentinel

Watch It Live: Bringing Justice to Black Men


Judge Greg Mathis, comedian Marlon Wayans and others will join Trayvon Martin family attorney Daryl Parks for an NAACP-hosted panel discussion on the late teenager, the justice system and its treatment of black and minority youths.

Titled "Protecting Our Black Men Walking," the two-hour town hall will feature talks on racial profiling, the high incarceration rates of minorities, police misconduct and more. The event, which is the centerpiece of the NAACP's annual leadership conference in Destin, Fla., will be streamed live below, and viewers can submit questions to the panelists via Twitter.

Location: Sandestin Family Resort, 9300 Emerald Coast Parkway W., Destin, Fla.

Date and time: Saturday, May 26, 12-2 p.m EDT. You can also catch it on the live stream below. HERE

Media's Blackout Working: MRCTV Street Interviewer Finds Just One Person Aware of Catholic Lawsuit Against Obama HHS

The broadcast media's blackout on news of the Catholic Church's lawsuit against the Obama administration continues apace, while the news media covers much more important events like who won American Idol.

So it's no wonder that MRCTV's Dan Joseph found only one person yesterday who knew about the lawsuit. Watch the video HERE

Bible-era earthquake reveals year of Jesus' crucifixion


Summary

Researchers believe that Jesus, as described in the New Testament, was crucified on Friday April 3, 33 A.D.

Textual and geological clues, along with astronomical data, support the date.

Scientists acknowledge that natural events described in the Bible could be allegorical.

MORE HERE

FACT CHECK: Obama off on Thrifty Spending Claim

5/26/12

The White House is aggressively pushing the idea that, contrary to widespread belief, President Barack Obama is tightfisted with taxpayer dollars. To back it up, the administration cites a media report that claims federal spending is rising at the slowest pace since the Eisenhower years.

"Federal spending since I took office has risen at the slowest pace of any president in almost 60 years," Obama said at a campaign rally Thursday in Des Moines, Iowa.

The problem with that rosy claim is that the Wall Street bailout is part of the calculation. The bailout ballooned the 2009 budget just before Obama took office, making Obama's 2010 results look smaller in comparison. And as almost $150 billion of the bailout was paid back during Obama's watch, the analysis counted them as government spending cuts.

It also assumes Obama had less of a role setting the budget for 2009 than he really did.

Obama rests his claim on an analysis by MarketWatch, a financial information and news service owned by Dow Jones & Co. The analysis simply looks at the year-to-year topline spending number for the government but doesn't account for distortions baked into the figures by the Wall Street bailout and government takeover of the mortgage lending giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

The MarketWatch study claims that spending is grown only 1.4 percent over 2010-2013, or annual increases averaging 0.4 percent over that period. Those are stunningly low figures considering that Obama rammed through Congress an $831 billion stimulus measure in early 2009 and presided over significant increases in annual spending by domestic agencies at the same time the cost of benefit programs like Social Security, Medicare and the Medicaid were ticking steadily higher.

A fairer calculation would give Obama much of the responsibility for an almost 10 percent budget boost in 2009, then a 13 percent increase over 2010-2013, or average annual growth of spending of just more than 3 percent over that period.

So, how does the administration arrive at its rosy claim?

First, there's the Troubled Assets Relief Program, the official name for the Wall Street bailout. First, companies got a net $151 billion from TARP in 2009, making 2010 spending look smaller. Then, because banks and Wall Street firms repaid a net $110 billion in TARP funds in 2010, Obama is claiming credit for cutting spending by that much.

The combination of TARP lending in one year and much of that money being paid back in the next makes Obama's spending record for 2010 look $261 billion thriftier than it really was. Only by that measure does Obama "cut" spending by 1.8 percent in 2010 as the analysis claims.

The federal takeover of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac also makes Obama's record on spending look better than it was. The government spent $96 billion on the Fannie-Freddie takeovers in 2009 but only $40 billion on them in 2010. By the administration's reckoning, the $56 billion difference was a spending cut by Obama.

Taken together, TARP and the takeover of Fannie and Freddie combine to give Obama an undeserved $317 billion swing in the 2010 figures and the resulting 1.8 percent cut from 2009. A fairer reading is an almost 8 percent increase.

Those two bailouts account for $72 billion more in cuts in 2011. Obama supported the bailouts.

There's also the question of how to treat the 2009 fiscal year, which actually began Oct. 1, 2008, almost four months before Obama took office. Typically, the remaining eight months get counted as part of the prior president's spending since the incoming president usually doesn't change it much until the following October. The MarketWatch analysis assigned 2009 to former President George W. Bush, though it gave Obama responsibility that year for a $140 million chunk of the 2009 stimulus bill.

But Obama's role in 2009 spending was much bigger than that. For starters, he signed nine spending bills funding every Cabinet agency except Defense, Veterans Affairs and Homeland Security. While the numbers don't jibe exactly, Obama bears the chief responsibility for an 11 percent, $59 billion increase in non-defense spending in 2009. Then there's a 9 percent, $109 billion increase in combined defense and non-defense appropriated outlays in 2010, a year for which Obama is wholly responsible.

As other critics have noted, including former Congressional Budget Office Director Douglas Holtz-Eakin, the MarketWatch analysis also incorporates CBO's annual baseline as its estimate for fiscal years 2012 and 2013. That gives Obama credit for three events unlikely to occur:

—$65 billion in 2013 from automatic, across-the-board spending cuts slated to take effect next January.

—Cuts in Medicare payments to physicians.

—The expiration of refundable tax cuts that are "scored" as spending in federal ledgers.

Lawmakers are unlikely to allow the automatic cuts to take full effect, but it's at best a guessing game as to what will really happen in 2013. A better measure is Obama's request for 2013.

"You can only make him look good by ignoring the early years and adopting the hope and not the reality of the years in his budget," said Holtz-Eakin, a GOP economist and president of the American Action Forum, a free market think tank.

So how does Obama measure up?

If one assumes that TARP and the takeover of Fannie and Freddie by the government as one-time budgetary anomalies and remove them from calculations — an approach taken by Holtz-Eakin — you get the following picture:

—A 9.7 percent increase in 2009, much of which is attributable to Obama.

—A 7.8 percent increase in 2010, followed by slower spending growth over 2011-13. Much of the slower growth reflects the influence of Republicans retaking control of the House and their budget and debt deal last summer with Obama. All told, government spending now appears to be growing at an annual rate of roughly 3 percent over the 2010-2013 period, rather than the 0.4 percent claimed by Obama and the MarketWatch analysis.

SOURCE: ABC News

Obama’s Education Hypocrisy — Again

The president tries to kill a successful scholarship program.

If you were a child in the District of Columbia school system (51st in state rankings for academic achievement, first for school violence), you and your parents probably greeted the election of Barack Obama with great joy. If someone had suggested to you then that the president would attempt to torpedo the scholarship program that permits some District kids to attend the private schools of their choice, you might have thought you were hearing racist smears.

More at The National Rewiew

President's “My Sons” Reference Explained

President Obama's campaign speech defending his healthcare policy on the grounds that “my daughters should have the same economic opportunities as my sons” has puzzled observers. Only two daughters (Malia and Sasha) have been explicitly acknowledged by the President.

Press Secretary Jay Carney explained that while “it is obvious that the President and First Lady have only the two daughters currently living with them in the White House, critics shouldn't be jumping to the conclusion that he misspoke. Statistics show that the average urban Black male fathers 3.2 children out-of-wedlock. Earlier in his life, the President was a member of this demographic. Given the roughly 50% chance that a child could be male, that would work out to 1.6 male offspring per urban Black male. So, statistically speaking, the President's desire that his daughters enjoy the same rights as his sons is probably accurate.” HUH????

SOURCE: MyFreedomPhoenix

Update #26 Part 2 – Trayvon Martin Shooting – A year of drug use culminates in predictable violence…


This update, like several before it, does not stand alone. To truly understand the depth of the research and background it is important to have first read Update #26 Part 1. This Part 2 builds on the previous presentation of Trayvon Martin’s lifestyle choices and drug use connections.

This update is a creation of Treeper “Dedicated Dad“, who deserves full credit for investing numerous hours researching, learning, understanding and fitting the disconnected puzzle pieces together. What we outline here was right in front of our face the whole time. Yet we looked past it because we were in a position of ignorance about what we were looking at. We just didn’t know. Now however, it all comes together:


KEEP READING

Why Phased Unification is Impossible (North Korea)

At some point, the North Korean people are going to see South Korea as the absolute benchmark for its standard of living, given that it is a country inhabited by fellow Koreans and which it may eventually unify with under one flag. If North Korea does not begin to see the same standard of living as is enjoyed in the South, people will quickly begin to regard themselves as poor. Accordingly, if the regime cannot deliver progress which suggests a quick upswing toward such standards of living, it may take just as little time for that public displeasure to turn its attention on the regime itself.

Continued at The DailyNK

U.S. Army General: The Whole Northern Hemisphere is at Risk of Becoming Largely Uninhabitable

You may have entertained the idea of an improbable civilization ending events such as a ‘global killer’ asteroid, earth crust displacement or massive solar storms, but what if there existed a situation right now that was so serious that it literally threatened our very existence?

According to a host of scientists, nuclear experts and researchers, were are facing exactly such a scenario – and current efforts may not be able to stop it.

Read more at SHTFplan.com>

Justice Department to Monitor Elections in Texas

May 25, 2012

The Justice Department announced today that it will monitor primary elections on May 29, 2012, in Fort Bend, Harris and Jefferson Counties in Texas, to ensure compliance with the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and other federal voting rights statutes. The Voting Rights Act prohibits discrimination in the election process on the basis of race, color or membership in a minority language group. In addition, the act requires certain covered jurisdictions to provide language assistance during the election process.

Under the Voting Rights Act, the Justice Department is authorized to ask the U.S. Office of Personnel Management (OPM) to send federal observers to jurisdictions that are certified by the attorney general or by a federal court order. Federal observers will be assigned to monitor polling place activities in Fort Bend and Jefferson Counties based on the attorney general’s certification. In addition, Fort Bend is subject to a court order entered in 2009, which requires the jurisdiction to comply with the minority language and assistor of choice requirements of the Voting Rights Act, as well as the requirements of the Help America Vote Act. The observers will watch and record activities during voting hours at polling locations in these counties, and Civil Rights Division attorneys will coordinate the federal activities and maintain contact with local election officials.

In addition, Justice Department personnel will monitor polling place activities in Harris County. A Civil Rights Division attorney will coordinate federal activities and maintain contact with local election officials.

Each year, the Justice Department deploys hundreds of federal observers from OPM, as well as departmental staff, to monitor elections across the country. To file complaints about discriminatory voting practices, including acts of harassment or intimidation, voters may call the Voting Section of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division at 1-800-253-3931.

Visit www.justice.gov/crt/voting/index.php for more information about the Voting Rights Act and other federal voting laws.
12-677

Civil Rights Division

I-Team: Priest Removed From Ministry Due To Sex Abuse Allegations Now Works At PHL



PHILADELPHIA (CBS) – The CBS 3 I-Team has learned that a Catholic priest who was removed from the ministry over sex abuse allegations now holds a sensitive security post at Philadelphia International Airport.

The security checkpoint between Terminals D and E is a busy place where thousands of people – including lots of kids – pass through every day. But you might not believe who the I-Team observed working as a TSA supervisor at that checkpoint this week: Thomas Harkins.

KEEP READING>

Obama caves to China on currency manipulation

WASHINGTON -- The Obama administration may be getting tougher with China on trade, but its approach in dealing with Beijing on the thorny currency issue remains patient diplomacy.

The Treasury Department, in its semiannual report Friday on exchange-rate policies, once again refrained from labeling China a currency manipulator -- an accusation that would embarrass Beijing and trigger negotiations and possibly even lead to U.S. sanctions.

More at Los Angeles Times

Friday, May 25, 2012

The Top 20 Reasons To Vote For Barack Obama In 2012 According To Liberals

1) You even have to ask who you should vote for? What are you, some kind of racist?

2) Obviously Republicans hate women like Sarah Palin and Michele Bachmann! Wait, bad examples...ahm, let's see, they kill female babies, put women's faces on pinatas and beat them, and degrade women by drawing them with penises in their mouth! That's still us? Geeze, uh...war on women! Move on to the next item! Hurry, hurry!

3) Mormons are scary! Ooooh, magic underwear! Multiple wives! They probably hate black people and were behind something or another awful that happened 150 years ago!

4) Obama did lots of great things besides killing Obama! I just don't want to talk about any of those things right now, for no particular reason!

5) Did you know Mitt Romney is a Republican? You're going to vote for a Republican? Seriously? Everybody in my lesbian studies class at Berkeley always says, "no" when I ask that question.

6) Barack Obama evolved on gay marriage unlike Mitt Romney who flip flops on things!

7) It's George Bush's fault! What is? Uh....everything bad while Obama is responsible for everything good!

8) Mitt Romney is REALLY rich unlike Barack Obama who is just worth 7-8 million dollars, has 40k a plate fund raisers with celebrities, and goes on lavish vacations every 2 1/2 months.

9) Mitt Romney is mean! Republicans are mean! You're mean -- unless you vote for Barack Obama, which makes you nice!

10) Rush Limbaugh. Sarah Palin. Glenn Beck. Andrew Breitbart. Case closed!

11) According to Joe Biden, he's the, "first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy. I mean, that’s a storybook, man."

12) Did you see how good that guy was at reading speeches off of a teleprompter back in 2008? That was really something, wasn't it? Now it's all kind of dull, but, he might get better again.

13) Mitt Romney once put his dog on the roof of his car so he could go along with the family on vacation instead of humanely eating him as Barack Obama would have undoubtedly done in the same circumstances.

14) 50 years ago, when he was in high school, Mitt Romney may or may not have cut some kid's hair. You really want to reward that kind of behavior with the presidency?

15) Obama has driven up gas prices which encourages people to buy more electric cars....ehr, wait, this is for an environmental group, right?

16) Do you know how SAD it would make Chris Matthews if Obama lost? How could you do that to him?

17) Did I mention you're racist if you don't vote for Obama? Even if I did, it never hurts to bring it up twice, does it?

18) If you want to stick it to those Wall Street jerks who've given Barack Obama more money than any candidate in history for no reason whatsoever, vote for Bo!

19) Barack Obama is the first gay President! Not literally gay, mind you -- well, unless that would make you more likely to vote for him, in which case, depending on who you believe, he may be gay.

20) You don't want the Jackie Robinson of American politics to get sent back to the minors just because he can't hit, he can't field, and he can't throw do you? Think what a setback that would be to black Americans!

SOURCE: Townhall.com

Google is cleared of Java patent infringement in Android

ENTERPRISE VENDOR Oracle has lost its alleged Java patent infringement case against Google after the jury returned a unanimous verdict that Oracle had failed to prove patent infringement in Android by Google.

Oracle's lawsuit against Google started falling apart just weeks after it was filed, with lengthy and often comical pre-trial proceedings leaving little of Oracle's case standing. Nevertheless Oracle continued to throw money at the case, however now the jury has returned a verdict that clears Google of infringing Java patents in its Android operating system.

Judge William Alsup has yet to rule on whether the Java language APIs are protected by copyright, but US legal precedents suggest that he will rule that they are not copyrightable.

READ MORE HERE

EPA holds 12-hour hearings with environmentalists to slow coal production

The Environmental Protection Agency held 12 hours of stacked hearings in Washington, D.C. and Chicago on Thursday in favor of a regulation that analysts have concluded would kill the building of new conventional coal plants in the U.S.

Among the participants scheduled to testify in consecutive five minute blocks throughout the day were multiple representatives from the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and environmental activists from the Sierra Club, the Environmental Defense Fund, the Natural Resources Defense Council and Greenpeace.

Article continues at The Daily Caller

Are you clear about what happened between Pres. Obama and the HHS mandate v. our first liberties?

The excellent Becket Fund for Religious Liberty has a great timeline on their site about the HHS mandate, along with a detailed list of plaintiffs against the Obama Administration.

HHS Mandate Timeline:

August, 2011, Federal government issues a regulation requiring that all group health plans must cover “[FDA-]approved contraceptive methods, sterilization procedures, and patient education and counseling for all women with reproductive capacity.” The mandate, a provision of the “Affordable Care Act,” would take effect August 1, 2012.
November 10, 2011, Press Release, Belmont Abbey College Sues Federal Government (Becket Fund)
December 21, 2011, Press Release, Colorado Christian University First Evangelical University to Fight Abortifacient Mandate (Becket Fund)
January 20, 2012, Press Release, Obama Administration Refuses to Change Abortion-Drug Mandate
January 31, 2012, Press Release, Senator Rubio introduces conscience rights bill
February 6, 2012, Press Release, White House Makes False Claims about HHS Mandate
February 9, 2012, Press Release, Becket Funds Files Lawsuit for Nun’s TV Network
February 10, 2012, Press Release, Obama Administration Offers False “Compromise” on Abortion-Drug Mandate
February 15, 2012, HHS Mandate, After “Compromise,” HHS Mandate Remains unchanged
February 15, 2012, Press Release, UNACCEPTABLE: Diverse group of more than 300 academics and religious leaders call Obama’s HHS statement “Unacceptable”
February 15, 2012, Press Release, Priest for Life Join Fight
February 17, 2012, Press Release, Obama Administration Responds to Becket Fund Lawsuit: “Please Look the Other Way”
February 18, 2012, Congressional Hearing, First Congressional Hearing on HHS Mandate, President Theirfelder Testifies (Belmont Abbey College)
February 18, 2012, Press Release, Louisiana College joins fight (ADF)
February 21, 2012, Press Release, Becket Fund Files on Behalf of Ave Maria University
February 21, 2012, Press Release, Geneva College joins fight (ADF)
February 23, 2012, Press Release, 7 states sue over mandate (Nebraska v. HHS)
February 28, 2012, Press Release, Obama Administration Takes Another Pass on Defending HHS Mandate
February 28, 2012, Congressional Hearing, Becket Fund Testifies before full House Judiciary Committee regarding constitutionality of the HHS Mandate
February 28, 2012, Press Release, Administration seeks to dismiss Becket Fund’s CCU lawsuit
March 15, 2012, Press Release, First for-profit client files, O’Brien v. HHS (ACLJ)
March 16, 2012, Press Release, Administration Offers new details on “accommodation” and fails to satisfy religious groups (Advanced Notice of Proposed Rulemaking)
March 22, 2012, Press Release, Alabama Joins Becket Fund’s Fight Against Unconstitutional HHS Mandate
March 23, 2012, Media Advisory, Becket Fund co-host Religious Freedom Rallies nation-wide
April 23, 2012, Press Release, Becket Fund Fires Back at Administration’s Attempt to Dismiss Lawsuit (BAC)
April 26, 2012, Video, Sebelius admits before congress that she did not consult Supreme court decision on religious liberty when drafting the HHS mandate
April 30, 2012, Press Release, Second Private Business Owner Sues, Newland v. Sebelius (ADF)
May 7, 2012, Press Release, Legatus v. Sebelius (Thomas More Law Center)
May 21, 2012, 11 Additional Lawsuits, representing 43 plaintiffs filed (Jones Day)

Additional Resources:

Becket Fund’s HHS Mandate Challenge

SOURCE: WDTPRS

President Obama Won’t Be Returning His Donations From Bain Capital

Though the Obama campaign has repeatedly attacked Mitt Romney for his career at Bain Capital, President Obama still accepted $7,500 in campaign contributions from three Bain executives. His campaign press secretary, Ben LaBolt told The Politicker the president has no intention of giving the money back.

Continue Reading>>

Scooter Obama Outs Navy SEAL Team 6 Leader For Movie

National Security: New documents obtained by a watchdog group show our commander in chief gave the name of a Navy Seal Team 6 commander to the makers of a movie about Osama bin Laden. Valerie Plame, call your office.

Those documents, recently obtained by Judicial Watch, reveal that the Obama administration not only spiked the football and did an end-zone dance after the Navy SEALs dispatched bin Laden from his Club Pakistan abode, but was also willing to expose to the other side our playbook and the name of a SEAL commander.

FULL STORY AT INVESTORS.COM

Victory Over Anti Gun Educators in Kentucky

Frankfort, Ky --(Ammoland.com)- In April 2009 Michael Mitchell was at work, doing his job as an anesthesia tech at the University of Kentucky Medical Center.

Michael was at that time also a graduate student doing his pre-med work in preparation for medical school. But a comment to a friend about a firearm that was overheard by a co-worker was reported erroneously to his supervisor, and he ended up having his locker searched for a gun that wasn’t there. Then, in an effort to be honest and helpful, Michael told them that he did have a gun, but that it was in his car in the parking lot at Commonwealth Stadium over 1/4 mile away, securely locked up.

He was then taken to his car, his handgun was seized illegally by UK police and he was sent home. He was subsequently fired from his job.

He approached KC3 for advice on the law and assistance in bringing legal action against UKMC.

The board of directors voted to assist him and referred him to our attorney, Christopher Hunt of Lexington. With the financial support of KC3 they brought suit against UKMC in Fayette circuit court, where it was dismissed. After consultations following the dismissal, the decision was made to appeal directly to the Supreme Court of Kentucky.

The rest, as they say, is history! In April of this year, the court issued its ruling and unanimously struck down the lower court’s ruling, and remanded it to the circuit court for trial! Here’s the opening of the ruling from the court:

READ: OPINION OF THE COURT BY JUSTICE SCHRODER REVERSING AND REMANDING>>>

The end of all-powerful Germany

The advent of a new administration in Paris has shifted the balance of power in the European Union away from Berlin and German austerity — a development that has been welcomed in Athens as a source of renewed hope and a light at the end of the tunnel for the Greek population.

Continued at PressEurop.com

RCMP ‘to ease Canadians into the idea’ of U.S. agents in Canada

Uncle Sam could soon be coming after you on Canadian soil.

According to an article in Embassy Magazine, the Harper government is moving forward on several initiatives that could give U.S. FBI and DEA agents the ability to pursue suspects across the land border and into Canada.

But, according to a RCMP officer, they're doing it in "baby steps."

More at Yahoo News>>

How Europe Could Sink Obama’s Election Chances—And What He Can Do About It

Europe’s Greek tragedy has now entered its final act, with potentially fateful consequences for the global economy—and for Barack Obama, whose reelection may hinge on the decisions of Germany in the coming weeks. The 2012 election will pivot on the public’s evaluation of the president’s economic stewardship, and a perceptible decline in the U.S. growth rate—which a badly handled Greek exit from the Eurozone would cause—could easily spell the difference between victory and defeat. Obama’s fate, then, may well lie in Angela Merkel’s hands. That doesn’t mean, though, that there’s nothing he can do about it.

More at TNR

Hawaii State Registrar does not verify authenticity of President Obama's birth certificate

WASHINGTON, May 24, 2012 – The “Verification of Birth” letter sent by the Hawaii State Registrar Alvin T. Onaka Ph.D to Arizona Secretary of State Ken Bennett fails to respond to the fundamental question asked by Mr. Bennett in a March 30, 2012 letter to Hawaii Department of Health officials: Whether or not the image of President Obama’s “long form” Certificate of Live Birth, posted on the White House web site on April 27, 2011 is a “true and accurate representation of the original record in your files”.

More at The Washington Times>>

West New York Mayor Felix Roque and his son face federal charges of hacking opposition website

The mayor of West New York, who mounted a recall campaign against the former mayor before eventually being elected, was charged along with his son yesterday with three counts of hacking a website that aimed to recall him.

Dr. Felix Roque, 55, and his son, Joseph Roque, 22, were arrested at their homes yesterday morning and charged with gaining unauthorized access to computers in furtherance of causing damage to protected computers; causing damage to protected computers; and conspiracy to commit those crimes. They each face up to 11 years in prison and fines of $600,000 if convicted on all counts.

FULL STORY

George Soros and Other Lefty Moneybags Types Aren't Primarying Lousy Old Democrats Because the Party Is More Ideologically Diverse! Wait, What?

Former Reasoner David Weigel has an interesting article up that seeks to answer why there aren't any Club For Growth/FreedomWorks/Tea Party/Paulista-style primary-election challenges to the worst of the Democratic Party's status quo (like, say, the execrable Dianne Feinstein). This section in particular is unintentionally revealing:

MORE at Reason.com

Convicted Bomber Brett Kimberlin, Neal Rauhauser, Ron Brynaert, and Their Campaign of Political Terrorism

You’re about to listen to one of the most bone-chilling pieces of audio you will ever hear. At least, it was to me when I first heard it.

It’s a phone call that could have gotten me killed.

In this post you will hear that audio clip. You will also read about a months-long campaign of harassment carried out by at least three individuals: Ron Brynaert, Neal Rauhauser, and Brett Kimberlin — much of it directed at critics of Brett Kimberlin. This harassment includes repeated references to critics’ family members, workplace complaints, publication of personal information such as home addresses and pictures of residences, bogus allegations of criminal activity, whisper campaigns, frivolous legal actions, and frivolous State Bar complaints.

And finally, you will hear a comparison of one of those men’s voices to that of the man who made the call that sent police to my home. And you’ll read a declaration from a forensic audio expert comparing those two voices.

BREITBART TOLD THE STORY JUST BEFORE HE DIED

Fox Sues Dish Over Ad-Zapper; Dish Sues Everyone

Washington, D.C. (May 24, 2012) -- Fox has sued Dish Network over its new Auto Hop feature which automatically eliminates network commercials during recorded playback.

Update at 6:15 p.m. ET: Dish has filed suit against all four major networks, asking for a ruling that Auto Hop does not infringe any network copyright and that the satcaster is not in violation of its agreement with the networks. Also, NBC Universal filed a separate suit against Dish.

The Fox suit, which was filed in Los Angeles, says the Auto Hop feature is not authorized and violates the satcaster's license with Fox. The network adds that Auto Hop could destroy its business model because viewers would not see their commercials.

Auto Hop, which was added this month to Dish's new Hopper HD DVR, allows viewers to watch the playback of a network show without ever seeing the commercials. (Auto Hop works with the set-top's 'PrimeTime Anytime' network recordings. The Hopper automatically records all primetime shows on ABC, Fox, NBC and CBS.)

Unlike the Fast Forward button on a DVR, Auto Hop automatically removes the commercial without the viewer doing a thing.

NBC and Fox network executives last week blasted the Auto Hop, saying it was an "insult" and an "attack."

SOURCE: TVPredictions.com

Obama’s America: EPA Officials Visit Man For Sending Email

About a month ago, EPA regional official Al Armendariz made news when a YouTube video of him describing the way the agency handles oil and gas companies surfaced. In it, Armendariz said an analogy he liked to use about enforcement was how the Romans used crucifixion to keep smaller towns and villages under their thumb. Since then, Armendariz has resigned his post at the EPA. Case closed, right? Wrong.

A local North Carolina man named Larry Keller didn’t particularly like the analogy that Al Armendariz used, so, along with thousands of others assumably, he set about to contact Mr. Armendariz to discuss his views on the oil and gas industries. One of our basic rights and privileges in a free society is to be able to petition our government for a redress of grievances without fear of repercussion from said government simply for voicing our grievance.

Keller proceeded to try and contact Mr. Armendariz by Googling him. His domain was a subset of Southern Methodist University, he was directed to contact a Dr. David Gray who is the Director of External Affairs for the EPA. Keller wrote a simple, one sentence email to Dr. Gray which said simply, “Hello Mr. Gray-Do you have Mr. Armendariz’s contact information so we can say hello?”

On May 2nd, just a little over a week after the Armendariz crucify comments had flared up, two special agents from the EPA and a local police officer showed up at Mr. Keller’s home. Here is the story in his own words>>>

UK economy in deeper decline than previously estimated


The UK’s double-dip recession is deeper than originally estimated, according to new figures released today by the Office for National Statistics (ONS).

An updated assessment shows that gross domestic product (GDP) shrank by 0.3% in the first three months of 2012, revised from last month’s initial estimate for the quarter of 0.2%.

The main reason for the downward revision was a bigger contraction in construction output, which is now believed to have fallen by 4.8% – the steepest decline seen for 11 years – compared with the previous estimate of 3%.

The ONS said that the quarterly output of the production industries fell by 0.4%, within which manufacturing output was flat, while the service industries made a positive contribution to growth with output rising by 0.1%......

Article Continues at Financial-News.co.uk

The facts about the growth of spending under Obama

“I simply make the point, as an editor might say, to check it out; do not buy into the BS that you hear about spending and fiscal constraint with regard to this administration. I think doing so is a sign of sloth and laziness.” — White House spokesman Jay Carney, remarks to the press gaggle, May 23, 2012

The spokesman’s words caught our attention because here at The Fact Checker we try to root out “BS” wherever it occurs. FULL STORY at WaPo

Another taxing problem for Elizabeth Warren

If there’s any politician that infuriates me more than a carpetbaggin’, recipe-stealing fake Indian, it’s one that unloads her imported BMW 528i just before announcing her candidacy, and then doesn’t even bother to pay the automobile excise tax on her campaign’s new Ford Escape.

Yes, Comrade Warren, I’m talking about you.

A BMW — how tenured Harvard Law is it? She’d owned it since early 2000, but it had to go. After all, she’s a “fight-ah,” as her new TV ad says. So adios BMW and hello used 2008 Ford — hybrid, of course — which is registered to her teepee on Linnaean Street in Cambridge under Elizabeth for MA Inc.

More at The Boston Herald

Charlie Rangel’s Career Might Be in Peril

There is a growing sense among New York political insiders that next month’s primary could mark the end of 81-year-old Rep. Charlie Rangel’s storied Congressional career.

Rangel, the third-most-senior House Member, has been weakened by health, the weight of an ethics rebuke and redistricting. Moreover, he is battling a message, being delivered on multiple fronts, that it’s time for a change and new leadership.

More about this "tragedy" at Roll Call

Hamas-Run Schools Set Out to Teach ‘the Language of the Enemy’

GAZA — There are few electives in the Hamas-run high schools here. Students can study health and the environment, or they can learn French. And, starting this fall at some schools, they will be able to sign up for a new course called Know Your Enemy.

The New York Times has more..

Arabic mandatory at city public school

An upper Manhattan public elementary school will be the first in the city to require that students study Arabic, officials said yesterday.

Beginning next semester, all 200 second- through fifth-graders at PS 368 in Hamilton Heights will be taught the language twice a week for 45 minutes — putting it on equal footing with science and music courses.

One reason Principal Nicky Kram Rosen selected Arabic — as opposed to more common offerings, such as Spanish or French — is because it will help the school obtain a prestigious International Baccalaureate standing.

More @ The New York Post

Obama Neuters War on Islamic Terrorists

Dr. Sebastian L. v. Gorka, Military Affairs Fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, said on Tuesday that the Obama Administration is rapidly revising federal counter-terrorism training materials in order to eliminate references to Jihad and Islam.

FULL STORY>>

Senate Democrats pay female staffers less than male staffers

A group of Democratic female senators on Wednesday declared war on the so-called “gender pay gap,” urging their colleagues to pass the aptly named Paycheck Fairness Act when Congress returns from recess next month. However, a substantial gender pay gap exists in their own offices, a Washington Free Beacon analysis of Senate salary data reveals.

Of the five senators who participated in Wednesday’s press conference—Barbara Mikulski (D., Md.), Patty Murray (D., Wash.), Debbie Stabenow (D., Mich.), Dianne Feinstein (D., Calif.) and Barbara Boxer (D., Calif.)—three pay their female staff members significantly less than male staffers.

Murray, who has repeatedly accused Republicans of waging a “war a women,” is one of the worst offenders. Female members of Murray’s staff made about $21,000 less per year than male staffers in 2011, a difference of 35.2 percent.

That is well above the 23 percent gap that Democrats claim exists between male and female workers nationwide.... CONTINUE READING

GOP Rep. King says Obama officials disclosed identity of jailed Pakistani doctor

GOP Rep. Peter King, chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, expressed concern Wednesday about the extent of the Obama administration’s efforts to protect the Pakistan doctor who was sent to prison in Pakistan for treason after helping to find Usama bin Laden.

Fox News has MORE

GM (US Taxpayers) Paid For Communist Chinese Film

Cadillac, a symbol of "American Freedom & Prosperity" division of General Motors, is quickly turning Communist Chinese. With the agreement by Cadillac to pay for the production expenses of a Chinese Communist Party propaganda film, the Cadillac brand now stands for something quite different: the appeasement of a power hostile to the United States in the name of financial gain.

In late 2010, General Motors agreed to sponsor a propaganda film celebrating the 90th anniversary of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). The CCP made film titled (translated to English) “The Birth of a Party” or “The Great Achievement of Founding the Party" is set to premiere all over the Communist nation on June 15 reported China AutoWeb last September. The auto website adds:

"According to an announcement posted on Shanghai GM’s official web site yesterday, whose title reads "joining hands with China Film Group, Cadillac whole-heartedly supports the making of the Birth of a Party..."

The report goes further: KEEP READING

Another 1%er Bails!!!

Facebook cofounder living large in Singapore as he stiffs US for a possible $600M in taxes

America saved Eduardo Saverin — and he won’t repay the favor.

When he was 13, Saverin was named on a gangster’s list of potential kidnapping targets. His family fled Brazil to Miami for his safety.

Saverin thrived, attending a fancy prep school. He became a citizen in 1998, and made his way to Harvard, where he became pals with Mark Zuckerberg and the other founders of Facebook.

Now he’s shunning the United States — the place that gave him personal safety, along with immense opportunity and wealth — by stiffing us for a possible $600 million in taxes.

MORE HERE

Deception Indicated: Obama runs deficit to $5.6 trillion... Uses trick accounting to lie

Real federal deficit dwarfs official tally

The typical American household would have paid nearly all of its income in taxes last year to balance the budget if the government used standard accounting rules to compute the deficit, a USA TODAY analysis finds.

Under those accounting practices, the government ran red ink last year equal to $42,054 per household — nearly four times the official number reported under unique rules set by Congress.

A U.S. household's median income is $49,445, the Census reports.

FULL STORY HERE

Radical Extremist Wasserman shunned at Jewish temple

Temple Israel cancels Wasserman Schultz speech

Politics, both internal and international, fueled the dispute over her invitation to speak in the historic sanctuary.

WASHINGTON -- Miami's Temple Israel on Thursday canceled a program featuring Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz after a high-profile Republican donor quit the congregation to protest the top Democratic congresswoman's speech.

Stanley Tate, a well-known philanthropist and prominent Republican who started Florida's pre-paid college tuition program, resigned from the temple after he learned Wasserman Schultz would be talking about Israel following services on Friday night, and that he wouldn't get an opportunity for rebuttal.

The temple's president, Ben Kuehne, a Miami attorney, said the event was canceled because of security concerns. He said they "certainly embrace the congresswoman's willingness to participate in one of our programs," but decided it was "unwise to proceed with the program tomorrow."

More at The Miami Herald

Drop Biden Into the Supreme Court

by Keith Koffler on May 22, 2012, 11:33 am

There is growing talk that Vice President Biden will be booted off the ticket by President Obama. But dumping Biden begs an urgent question: Where to dump him?

VETTING BIDEN (Hint: he was 76th in a class of 85, got one degree from college, and was unfortunately not ”the outstanding student in the political science department”)

FULL STORY at WhiteHouseDossier.com

Police face criticism over reported arrest quota

Officers union: Miami Beach brass order 2,000 arrests over holiday weekend

....The ALCU sent a letter to Martinez saying this is "targeted solely toward a predominately African-American event" and "raises serious constitutional concerns......"

Local10.com has the full story

Florida teen has diploma withheld, ordered to clean school gym after Tebowing during graduation ceremony

FORT MYERS, Fla. - A Florida teenager had his diploma withheld and was ordered to clean the school gym as punishment for Tebowing on stage during his graduation ceremony -- and later discovered the punishment was his mother's idea.

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Amnesty International: Osama bin Laden raid was illegal


Amnesty International condemned the United States on Wednesday for the "unlawful" commando raid that killed Osama bin Laden in his lair in Pakistan.

Full Story at UK Telegraph

Government-Backed Green Energy Company Sweetens Package For Top Executives Despite Mounting Problems

In SEC filings, A123 Systems raises 'substantial doubt on the Company's ability to continue'

One of the showcase companies of the green energy movement propped up by the federal stimulus questioned in recent filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission whether it can survive with its mounting debt and problems with defective batteries.

Yet, even with its struggles, its top executives were awarded sweetened severance packages that would give them an extra six-figures in payout if they lose their jobs.

Read the FULL STORY

O’Malley signs hundreds of bills that will tint Maryland a deeper shade of blue

Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley signed into law a package of tax increases Tuesday targeting six-figure earners, tobacco users and companies engaged in real estate transactions to cover record spending on education.

More @ WaPo>>>

EVEN MORE BUSH BASHING: Obama Tells Air Force Cadets US Is 'Stronger And More Respected' In The World



The World Wildlife Fund Targets Humanity

The World Wildlife Fund, the posh flagship of the global environmentalist movement, has just released its biennial publication assessing “the state of the planet.” Entitled “Living Planet Report 2012,” the publication bemoans alleged catastrophic effects that humanity is inflicting upon the Earth, and calls for drastic curbs on civilization as a necessary corrective measure.

According to the WWF, the human race is currently consuming at a rate that would be sustainable only if we had 1.5 Earths. Since we do not, overall human activity needs to be reduced by 33 percent to put mankind “in balance with the Earth’s biocapacity.”

Full Story>>

Sen. Reid Blocks Ban on $4 Billion Illegal Immigrant Tax Credit Loophole

A bill that would close an IRS tax credit loophole that allows the IRS to funnel over $4 billion to illegal immigrants is being held up by Sen. Harry Reid (D-NV).

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