912 Patriots of Lower Bucks - Your Daily Updates ALL in ONE Place!
April 5, 2013
Quote:
"The steady character of our countrymen is a rock to which we may safely moor; and notwithstanding the efforts of the papers to disseminate early discontents, I expect that a just, dispassionate and steady conduct, will at length rally to a proper system the great body of our country. Unequivocal in principle, reasonable in manner, we shall be able I hope to do a great deal of good to the cause of freedom & harmony."
~ Thomas Jefferson, letter to Elbridge Gerry, 1801
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Mike Lee Hammers the Final Nail in The UN Small Arms Treaty Coffin
Since March Madness is in full swing and Obama was able to completely fill out his tournament brackets, I believe a basketball visual is in order. Barack Obama is galloping loose on a fast break with the wonderful athletic grace that only "The Big O" can display. There is a quickening of his stride and growing determination in his eyes. As he powers toward the rack, from out of nowhere, Mike Lee rises like the Kraken and towers like Godzilla to slap the ball 20 rows up into the stands. Rejected Mr. President. A quick taunt from Mike Lee is in order as he waves his index finger to signal that you must come strong or not at all Mr. President.
Don't hate the player. Hate the game.
It's over. The fat lady is in full chorus. As for all the basketball stuff? This is what happens when a blogger is deprived of sleep. So what on earth am I talking about?
On Wednesday Senator Mike Lee became the 34th co-sponsor of S. Con. Res 7, a resolution expressing opposition to the United Nations Arms Trade Treaty (ATT). The treaty contains several troubling provisions that could prevent the United States from coming to the aid of its closest allies, as well as limit the constitutional rights of Americans. Senator Lee was the 34th co-sponsor of the resolution introduced by Senator Jerry Moran of Kansas, which gives the opposition more than enough votes in the Senate to block ratification of the treaty.
Ralph V. Boccia of the Center for Cancer and Blood Disorders runs a cancer clinic that is in danger of losing funding due to the sequester cuts. (Sarah L. Voisin/The Washington Post)
Cancer clinics across the country have begun turning away thousands of Medicare patients, blaming the sequester budget cuts.
Oncologists say the reduced funding, which took effect for Medicare on April 1, makes it impossible to administer expensive chemotherapy drugs while staying afloat financially.
Patients at these clinics would need to seek treatment elsewhere, such as at hospitals that might not have the capacity to accommodate them.
"If we treated the patients receiving the most expensive drugs, we'd be out of business in six months to a year," said Jeff Vacirca, chief executive of North Shore Hematology Oncology Associates in New York. "The drugs we're going to lose money on we're not going to administer right now."
After an emergency meeting Tuesday, Vacirca's clinics decided that they would no longer see one-third of their 16,000 Medicare patients.
"A lot of us are in disbelief that this is happening," he said. "It's a choice between seeing these patients and staying in business."
Some who have been pushing the federal government to spend less on health care say this is not the right approach.
"I don't think there was an intention to disrupt care or move it into a more expensive setting," said Cathy Schoen, senior vice president of the Commonwealth Fund, which recently released a plan for cutting $2 trillion in health spending. "If that's the case, we're being penny-wise and a pound-foolish with these cuts."
Legislators meant to partially shield Medicare from the automatic budget cuts triggered by the sequester, limiting the program to a 2 percent reduction - a fraction of the cuts seen by other federal programs.
But oncologists say the cut is unexpectedly damaging for cancer patients because of the way those treatments are covered.
N.Y. Dad's Pistol License Suspended Over Something His 10-Year-Old Son Said - and It Could Be 8 Years Before He Gets It Back
The Blaze | Jason Howerton | Apr. 4, 2013 3:20pm
A New York father has had his firearms all but confiscated after the Suffolk County Pistol License Bureau suspended his pistol license indefinitely over a perceived threat made by his 10-year-old son and two of his classmates at school.
John Mayer, of Commack, N.Y., told TheBlaze that the incident occurred on March 1. It was like any other day, the father explained. He put his son on the bus and sent him off to school.
Later that day, Mayer got a call from school officials at Pines Elementary School informing him that his 10-year-old son and two other students were talking about going to a boy's house with a water gun, "paint gun" and a BB gun. There had reportedly been a school yard pushing incident the day before involving the boys, excluding Mayer's son, and they were seemingly talking about getting even in some way.
Mayer told TheBlaze that a teacher overheard the students talking and informed the principal, who then immediately called police and filed a report. He said the principal told police something to the effect of, there's a "kid with a gun, ready to go." Mayer maintains that no serious death threats were made by the students. The Hauppauge Public School District has not returned several messages left by TheBlaze, therefore, it is not clear what they are claiming was said.
School officials then "interrogated" the boys, Mayer explained. It was later determined that the 10-year-old boys did not have access to a BB gun, paintball gun or any actual firearms.
. . . Mayer said police officers were then deployed to his home where he was advised by officers that they might have to confiscate his firearms, which he says were all properly stored and secured.
Chief Kessler's Constitutional Security Force Meeting
Friendship Fire Co, 147 N. 7th St, Frackville PA 17931 Guest Speakers- 2nd Amendment Attorney Joshua Prince Criminal Defense Attorney Joseph Nahas Oath Keepers Representative Larry Liguori Pro-gun Schuylkill County DA Candidate Christine Holman Pro-gun Schuylkill County Sheriff Candidate Pat Reynolds Justin Caldwell & Joseph Smith from Fast-Tactics
CGOBC will be represented! We are calling out a challenge to get 50 people from CGOBC to the meeting. Please email Andy Rumbold for information on carpooling/caravaning. It is about 2 hours from central Bucks. Hope to get a good turnout from Bucks County!
Announcing - Women On Target, Getting Comfortable With Firearms
Place: Wicen's Shooting Range, 3179 Mozart Road, Furlong, PA 18925
Date: April 26-27.
This is a 2-day class, 4 hours total. You may attend Day 1 classroom only, or you may attend both Day 1 classroom & Day 2 shooting event. You may NOT attend Day 2 shooting event without attending the Day 1 classroom portion. (Some students may choose not to attend the shooting portion, but we will encourage them to do so.)
Day 1 Classroom (40 people maximum): Friday, April 26, 2013 from 7-9pm Day 2 Range: Saturday, April 27, 2013 Two sessions (20 people each maximum): First come first serve 9 am -11 am 1 pm - 3 pm
Cost: Each Day is $25.00. Total cost if you attend both Day 1 and Day 2 will be $50.00 per student. You must make payment in the form of check or cash.
On Day 1 students will take an after-hours range tour, learn firearm safety, reasons to own a firearm, and have the opportunity to handle and ask questions about various pistols, rifles and shotguns.
On Day 2 students will split into 3 small groups, and have the opportunity to shoot pistols, rifles and shotguns, with an NRA Certified Instructor coaching them through each safety step.
All firearms and ammunition will be supplied. Up to 50 rounds per student will be allocated.
This will be performed by Lori Wicen of Wicen's Range (not CGOBC):
Email will be checked each evening and respond accordingly. Please note how many ladies will be attending this course in your email. (Lori will answer and allocate spots according to the time stamp on the email from you.)
Lori will keep a chart of interest, and then highlight when their check is received.
Lori will let us know (via the the Facebook post) when she has 15 in either Saturday session so we know when one class is almost full.
Check must be at least $25.00 (per person) .. you may pay the entire $50 (per person) if you want to lock in both days. If you only pay $25 (per person) then your Saturday class will not be locked in and you risk not getting the time slot you desire.
Please make check payable to: Wicen's Shooting Range Mailed to: Wicen's Shooting Range 3179 Mozart Road Furlong, PA 18925 note in comment area or enclose a note: WOT April 26, and specify morning or afternoon Saturday session, put their telephone number on the check ***You must submit payment (cash or check only) no later than close of business Saturday April 13th or your spot will be released.
contact info: loriwicen@yahoo.com Telephone at the range: 215-598-3534 leave a message!
************************************************ There will be a raffle on day one where four lucky women will receive their $25 "DAY 1" payment refunded and on day two there will be a raffle where four lucky women (two in each session) will receive their "DAY 2" payment refunded. ************************************************ As an added bonus through the generosity of Tanner's Sport Center, Ray Tanner is offering 5% off a gun purchase to attendees of the course after completion of the full course.
***Please refer all questions pertaining to this course to Lori Wicen. loriwicen@yahoo.com 215-598-3534
Gun Owners of America
Gun Control can be Passed Only If Republicans Sell Out
Tell them Gun Owners oppose "universal" background checks
"Gun-control measures that seemed destined to become law after the school shootings in Newtown, Conn., are in jeopardy amid a fierce lobbying campaign by firearms advocates." - The Washington Post, April 1, 2013
We realize that you have been receiving several emails from Gun Owners of America in recent days. And while we apologize for filling your inbox so frequently, we hope you realize that we are in an all-out fight to stop Congress from infringing upon our liberties.
Your activism is making a difference, but we need to keep the pressure on!
As so, as we approach "gun control Armageddon" next week, we are faced, not surprisingly, with "sell-outs and rumors of sell-outs."
But we can conclude that all gun control will die UNLESS Republicans flinch. And this is why, now that anti-gun Senator Chuck Schumer is on the verge of a humiliating defeat, he's scrambling for some feckless Republican who will help him turn GOP victory into GOP defeat.
Anti-gun columnist Ruth Marcus spoke for Schumer last Wednesday morning when she suggested that, as a desperation measure, anti-gunners might have to drop recordkeeping from the universal registry bill.
But even if ALL recordkeeping were dropped, which is doubtful, background checks would mean that:
Americans would still have to get the government's permission to own a firearm from whatever source.
Americans in rural areas without access to the Internet could be barred from gun ownership.
The Brady Check system would break down on weekends even more often than it currently does.
Eight percent of all applicants would still be illegally denied the right to purchase firearms through "false negatives."
Schumer would still claim that he "broke the back of the gun lobby."
The universal registry bill would still be nothing but a vehicle for consideration of other gun control now - and a platform for gun control demands in the future.
The solution to all of this is easy, and it's for Senators to support the Paul-Cruz-Lee filibuster! Tell them not to let Congress sidle up to the gun control buffet and to defeat the motion to proceed to gun control.
ACTION: Click here to contact your Senators. Demand they support the Paul-Cruz-Lee filibuster and oppose the motion to proceed to any gun control vehicle.
The system will automatically select a pre-written editable response, depending upon whether your Senator is a Republican or Democrat.
Terri's Day 2013!
Terri Schiavo Life & Hope Network announces the, "International Day of Prayer and Remembrance for Terri Schindler Schiavo, and All of Our Vulnerable Brothers and Sisters," (Terri's Day!), which is typically observed each year on March 31, the anniversary of Terri's death.Because Easter falls on March 31, this year Terri's Day Memorial Mass will be held on Friday, April 5, 2013. (Read below)
National Memorial Mass for Terri's Day!
This year's Terri's Day Memorial Mass will be held on Friday, April 5, 2013 at the Cathedral Basilica of Saints Peter and Paul located at 18th Street & Benjamin Franklin Parkway, Philadelphia, PA 19103.
The mass will be celebrated by Archbishop Charles Chaput, Archbishop of the Diocese of Philadelphia, beginning at 5:00 p.m. All are invited to attend.
Terri Schiavo Life & Hope Network's Award Gala with Governor Sarah Palin
Following the Memorial Mass, there will be the Terri Schiavo Life & Hope Network's Award Gala, currently scheduled to begin at 6:30 p.m. with a cocktail reception. This dinner gala will be held at the Philadelphia Marriott Downtown, located at 1201 Market Street in Philadelphia. The first "Terri Schiavo Life & Hope Award" will be presented.
*As you may know, Philadelphia parking is very limited in the city, particularly around the Cathedral Basilica of Saints Peter & Paul. The Marriott, however; has plenty of parking available. Please plan ahead.
Introduction to Terri's Day!
We invite individual believers to spend time on that day learning about Terri, and praying for all whose lives are threatened in the same way that Terri's was.
We invite Churches to hold memorial services and to educate their people on the dignity of every human life, despite any disability or disease with which that life may be afflicted.
We invite educational institutions to help dispel the myths and inaccuracies about Terri's life and death, and to contribute to our society's debate regarding the rights of the disabled by providing accurate, factual information and mature reflection on the ethical demands of caring for the weak and vulnerable.
We invite all people to use the resources on this website and to help us continue to draw good out of the sad and tragic way in which Terri was treated.
It will be a vital addition to your ministry when you attend this very important luncheon. ABSOLUTELY FREE! Olive Tree Ministries and our event hosts invite you to join us for a Middle East Briefing with Pastor Victor Styrsky on April 4th and 5th. Victor a speaker your will love! His straight forward and passionate heart drew enthusiastic response last Fall when his powerful message about Israel reached audiences throughout Delaware and Pennsylvania region. Victor has just returned from Israel where he hosted over 50 pastors on life - changing tours and briefings. As the First State, Delaware need to be on God's radar in support fo Israel, the apple of His eye! Won't you become part of our initiative here in this area to bring together Pastors, Rabbis and congregational Leaders for Israel? NOW is the time! We will look forward to having you join us. Staff of Olive Tree Ministries.
Click above to register for either or both events Bring spouses and guests. You will be linking directly to the CUFI registration pages. Your guests are welcome but each individual person must register as indicated on the registration pages.
The Philadelphia Freedom Center Presents: The Crisis in Syria is Exploding
There is no better thinker on the region than Michael Ledeen, the Freedom Scholar at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. Michael is a highly regarded expert on Iran's Green Movement and maintains close ties to opposition groups inside Iran. Join us as Michael provides us with his invaluable insights to the crisis in Syria, in a sit-down conversation with Andrew McCarthy.
Wednesday, April 10, 2013 6:00 PM
Union League of Philadelphia 140 South Broad Street
Program & Cocktails: $35
Private Dinner Party with Andy McCarthy and Michael Ledeen: $125 (limit 12)
More than 70,000 Syrians have been killed, and hundreds of thousands displaced, in the ongoing civil war. Western governments, including the United States, are now being drawn into the fray. Where is the crisis headed? What should American policy be? Join us April 10 at 6 pm participate in this forum!
Michael Ledeen Michael Ledeen is the Freedom Scholar at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. He is a highly regarded expert on Iran's Green Movement and maintains close ties to opposition groups inside Iran. Click for full bio.
Andrew McCarthy Andrew McCarthy is a former federal prosecutor and New York Times bestselling author. He's the Executive Director of the Philadelphia Freedom Center. Click here for full bio.
West Chester Tea Party monthly meeting April 10 Your Property Rights at Risk! Please join us and guest speaker John Anthony, founder of the Sustainable Freedom Lab.
On Wednesday April 10 @ 7PM
John Anthony will explain how across the country our rights to personal property - land, homes, privacy - are at greater risk than ever.
Plans and ordinances approved in our region could take control of your own property out of your hands! You worry about your mortgage while politicians and bureaucrats consider policies that will slash the value of your property!
Have you ever wonder where the words Sustainable or Agenda 21 originated, then this is the meeting for you. Find out about the plan that is intended to take away the rights and liberties of all Americans. Currently the push is to institute a global tax (Carbon tax) and make the UN the global IRS.
If you think this is not possible, I challenge you to find out the real truth. There are many counties and townships in our area that have already signed up and are involved, including the borough of West Chester. Some municipalities in Maryland have fought and have won their way out of the program.
Location: East Goshen Township Building 2nd floor 1580 Paoli Pike West Chester, PA 19380
VALLEY FORGE PATRIOTS APRIL MEETING
FRIDAY, APRIL 12, 6pm AT PJ RYANS
BRIDGE ST. PHOENIXVILLE
We will have an organizational meeting with members. The VFP wants to talk with our members to review how the organization is structured, what kind of help we need to be successful and to discuss our plans for 2013. We also need to discuss meeting location(s) and what amenities you want.
There will be no formal speakers, however, Paula Stiles will fill us in on the latest with Smart Meters and state legislation dealing with them.
We really need your thoughts and ideas about how you want your organization to function and what you think we should focus on. We have learned that we can't do everything because there is so much going on at all levels.We must focus on a few most important issues.
Should we work on projects at the local level, the state level, and/or the federal level? Or, should we pick several focal points that could be worked on at all levels? Voter ID would be one of these issues. Should the VFP continue its legislator visit program. This would be another program that would involve all levels of government. How about UN Agenda 21? School Board?
The VFP Steering Committee wants your ideas, your help, and your involvement in continuing to make our programs successful.
PLEASE COME OUT AND JOIN IN THE DISCUSSION!
P.S. Since we are having the meeting at a commercial establishment, and since the room is free, we are expected to buy our food and drink at PJ Ryans. No outside food or drink please.
SAVE THE DATE: APRIL 16th CITIZENS FOR CONSTITUTIONAL GOVERNMENT
Tuesday, April 16, 2013, 6:30-8:30 pm
Quakertown Library, 401 W. Mill Street, Quakertown
hosts PEG LUKSIK on Indoctrination in Education
Founder & Chairman Pennsylvania Parents Commission and National Parents Commission - to give parents a voice in education and public policy: State-wide leader in successful effort to stop implementation of Outcome Based Education
Founder, CEO, Chair Board of Trustees of Mom's House - service network assisting single parents and children in completing education to become employable
State Chairman, Constitutional Party of Pennsylvania 1995
T.V. host "The Learning Curve"
Co-author "Outcome Based Education: The States Assault on our Children's Values"
WHO CONTROLS THE CHILDREN??For a preview of this fantastic speaker, watch this dynamite YouTube video
Peg Luksik "Who Controls Our Children" How Public Schools Dumb Down Kids
Updated PA Leadership Conference Agenda Released
The conference which will be held April 19-20, 2013 at the Radisson Penn Harris Convention Center in Camp Hill (Harrisburg), PA.
Registration includes admission to all conference functions EXCEPT the pre-dinner reception. Registration DOES include the Friday evening dinner with speaker Steve Hayes of Fox News/The Weekly Standard (do not register separately for the dinner); the Saturday breakfast with John Gizzi and Saturday lunch with pollster/commentator Scott Rasmussen. It also includes all panels, workshops and speakers. The only function NOT included in the registration fee is the pre-dinner reception with Steve Hayes, which is priced separately.
Depart: Doylestown Library When: 8 AM Rally at the Capitol followed by lobbying visits 12noon Returning to Doylestown 8:30
Cost is Free To reserve your spot
Please Call Anastasia at 215-534-1851
April 23rd-Bus Trip-2nd Amendment Rally
Depart: Doylestown Library When: 7:30 a.m. Arrive: Harrisburg, PA Depart: 2:30 p.m. Cost: $50.00 due ASAP to reserve bus(es) Includes: Shirt, Drink
Please mail your check payable to CGOBC as follows:
CGOBC PO Box 745 Doylestown, PA 18901
Come join the Concerned Gun Owners of Bucks County (COGBC) on their bus trip to Harrisburg to promote H.B. 357. Plan on entering the capital to meet with your legislators and to support your 2nd Amendment Right!
FrackNation is a documentary on hydraulic fracturing (fracking) and the natural gas boom in the US and abroad. FrackNation shows how unfounded opposition to fracking is damaging the lives of some of the poorest and hardest working people in America. FrackNation dispels myths and tells the story of the people directly affected by fracking bans.
FrackNation premiered January 22, 2013 on Mark Cuban's AXS TV. The New York Times called the film "meticulously researched...provocative." And Variety said it was a "briskly paced...mischievous pic."
The film was created and directed by the husband and wife team of Phelim McAleer and the always outrageous Ann McElhinney. Ann will be speaking on April 20th at the upcoming PA Leadership Conference. DVDs of the film will be available for purchase at the PA Coalition booth at PLC
Phelim will be touring Pennsylvania for a series of screenings across the Commonwealth. Listed below are venues and dates for screenings in April. Additional screenings are planned for May including one in the Pittsburgh area. If your grass roots group would like to schedule a screening, please contact Magdalena Segieda at magda@fracknation.com
We are so blessed that over the last four years thousands of churches in over 60 countries have stood in solidarity with Israel through CUFI Sunday. From the largest cities to the smallest towns, from mega churches in the American heartland to underground churches in China, Christians have come together to express their love and support for Israel.
We pray that your church will participate in the fifth annual CUFI Sunday on May 5, 2013. CUFI will provide you with all the materials you need to implement a successful CUFI Sunday, including videos, literature and Pastor John Hagee's personal sermon notes for your use.
Please click hereto participate in CUFI Sunday. As you'll see, you don't have to be a pastor to ensure that your church stands with Israel on CUFI Sunday.
The date we've chosen for CUFI Sunday -- May 5th -- is close to Israeli Independence Day. As the Jewish State celebrates her 65th birthday, there is no better present we can send than the news of thousands of churches standing in solidarity with her!
We look forward to uniting in action and prayer on behalf of Israel with you and your congregation on May 5, 2013.
May God Bless You and Those that You Love,
Pastor John Hagee National Chairman
David Brog Executive Director
Brigitte Gabriel to Speak
in Baltimore, MD!
Brigitte Gabriel
Leading Global Islamic Terrorism Expert
CLICK HERE to view Brigitte's special video invitation!
It is my privilege to invite you to a special event featuring Brigitte Gabriel, Founder and President of ACT! for America. This event is free and open to the public and will be held at the following:
Central Christian
7411 Rossville Blvd. Baltimore, MD 21237
Monday, May 6th at 7 pm
Ms. Gabriel will speak on the rise of Islamic radicalism in your community and in our nation. Her story of survival as a persecuted Christian living in a bomb shelter for 7 years will have you captivated and inspired! She will share how the events of 9/11 compelled her to start ACT! for America, the largest national security grassroots organization in the U.S.
The recent assaults at our embassies have been a sobering wake-up call to America. The lesson is that we should be displaying strength to our enemies, not appeasement which only demonstrates our weakness. Without question, the threats of radical Islam to America have increased.
These are just some of the threats Brigitte will discuss:
Suppression of criticism of Islam
Homegrown jihad
Terrorists infiltrating our borders
The Muslim Brotherhood and creeping sharia law in America
Misrepresentation of history in our public education
You will hear first-hand how ACT! for America is successfully rolling back the tide of radical Islam...how we are winning legislative victories...how we don't have to live in fear or resign ourselves to the inevitability of the threats arrayed against us...and how we will prevail.
I encourage you to forward this email to everyone you know. For those who are not familiar with ACT! for America, please share this short video with them.
I know those of you who have heard Brigitte will agree, not only do you not want to miss this, but you will want to bring your relatives and friends with you. It will be an event people will be talking about for a long time to come!
Invite your friends and come join us in Baltimore, MD! We look forward to seeing you on May 6th
Guy Rodgers Executive Director
Announcing the 2013 National Conference
& Legislative Briefing!
June 19 - 21 we will convene at the Omni Shoreham Hotel in Washington, DC for our fourth annual National Conference & Legislative Briefing.
And here's some really great news: This year's registration fee is only $229! Register by April 15th and you'll receive our "Early Bird" rate of just $189!
We also offer again this year special benefits for Patriot Eagle and Patriot sponsors.
We have some exciting new wrinkles planned for this year's event, and our list of confirmed speakers already includes:
Steven Emerson - Journalist, author, and the Executive Editor of the Investigative Project on Terrorism. A. M. Rosenthal, late-managing editor of The New York Times, described Emerson as "one of the nation's best national security correspondents."
John Guandolo - Former FBI agent and one of America's leading authorities on the Muslim Brotherhood and its inner workings in America. Guandolo spoke at our conference in 2011 and received rave reviews from conference attendees!
Ezra Levant - Canadian lawyer, author, newspaper columnist with Sun Media, and former publisher of the Western Standard. Hauled before a Canadian "human rights commission" because he published the Danish cartoons that satirized Muhammad, Levant's personal account of a politically correct government inquisition is something you won't want to miss!
The National Conference & Legislative Briefing will begin on Wed. evening, June 19th, and conclude on Friday, June 21st at noon, with additional optional training sessions Friday afternoon.
It will again feature our very popular Capitol Hill Awards Luncheon and our signature gala banquet-and of course, our Legislative Briefing, where Members of Congress will brief you on various issues and answer your questions.
So make your plans now to join us in our nation's capital for what promises to be our best National Conference & Legislative Briefing ever!
More details to come!
As Israelis celebrate their 65th Independence Day this year, we should all take time out to reflect on the miracle of Israel's independence. We must also ask ourselves the question, "What can I do to ensure that this miracle of Israel survives and thrives?"
We announced earlier this week that we'll be headed to New Orleans the first weekend in August for this year's RedState Gathering. As a member of our RedState family, we'd like to extend exclusive Early Bird registration and pricing to you (just use the promo code EARLYBIRD on the registration page).
The 2013 RedState Gathering will be held August 2-3 at the Westin Canal Place in New Orleans, LA. We'll have two full days of speakers and activities and you can expect a good mix of elected officials and potential candidates for the 2014 cycle (we'll keep you informed as additions are made).
The Gathering has always been a unique event, in that all speakers, even the most in-demand and influential, pay their own way and make their own travel arrangements. This helps keep our costs low, a savings we are happy to pass along to our conference attendees. Additionally, we strive to get you up close to the speakers, ask them to take your questions, and we take care of nearly all your meals during the conference. Bottom line: fewer frills, more thrills and access.
We are thrilled to once again be joined by Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal, who will be hosting a reception for all attendees and appear at the Gathering podium as a keynote speaker. A huge hit in 2012, we're looking forward to Gov. Jindal playing an even larger role this year as he welcomes us to his home state.
Now, more than ever, true conservative activists must come together to exchange ideas and strategize for the future. That's what this year's Gathering is all about. We hope you'll join us.
P.S. Don't delay! You'll receive 20% off if you register today - just use the promo code EARLYBIRD. Click here.
Glenn: Help us get in millions of home
Why should you support the "Get TheBlaze" movement to get TheBlaze in millions of homes across the country? For starters, how about a network that will cancel out the damage Al-Jazeera will be doing in America as it replaces Current in your lineup? Check out Glenn's "why" in this exclusive letter HERE.
Ready to take action? Click here to contact your TV provider and urge them to add TheBlaze.
ATTENTION: Are you a Verizon FiOS Subscriber? They've created a new form for you to fill out to request TheBlaze! You can complete the form HERE. And don't forget to make your request public by posting on their Facebook page. Thank you for supporting us!
Sirius XM adds TheBlaze Radio News to Patriot channel
Sirius XM Radio announced today that TheBlaze, Glenn Beck's multi-platform news, information, and opinion network, will produce 24/7 hourly radio newscasts on SiriusXM Patriot, SiriusXM's conservative talk channel. DETAILS
If you're like most of TheBlaze TV community, you watched the first episode of For the Record when it premiered and immediately wanted to share the truth about how the NSA has turned America into a surveillance state. Now, due to popular demand, we have made this must-see episode available on DVD.
The restoration of journalism has begun. For The Record is an investigative news magazine with no political agenda and nothing to lose. Probing, fair, but unforgiving. Journalism the way it used to be.
Don't miss your chance to own the premiere episode of For The Record. Watch as For the Record investigates how the NSA turned America into a surveillance state. Hear from former NSA employees who left the agency after discovering the government was spying on her people. Plus, join us as we investigate a facility being built in Utah slated to become the largest information-gathering center in the country.
This chilling, one-hour episode, reminds us all that with every call, every email...the government is watching.
We can't rely on "honest" journalists to get this information to the public, so we are counting on YOU. Order your copy now.
TheBlaze | 1133 Avenue of the Americas | New York, NY 10036 | TheBlaze LLC | All Rights Reserved 2013
Hi All - I just spoke w/ Lisa Lnancollas@aol.com (717 437 1327) who lives in Lewistown, Pa and is majorly involved in fighting the smart meters............and it's more than just electric, it's water, furnaces/ac's and wells too
We need to share this information. I asked her if she'd speak to groups in our area and she said yes, but would like to include Mike Reese who's written several bills that we want to get out of committee and approved:
2.signs in our yards saying NO SMART METERS......put them around like election signs
3.Let our State Reps know how you feel ie Warren Kampf....tell him you're in favor of the bills against smart meters
4.Do neighbor alerts........call your neighbors if you see trucks coming into the area
5.Write letters to the editors....remember if they get several letters, they're more likely to put at least one in.....educate the public
6.Prepare handouts
7.Send certified letter to electric company and get return receipt of name of person who signed for it
Be aware:
Water Smart Meters.........(IF YOU LET THEM IN, you're giving permission.) YOU DO NOT HAVE TO LET THEM IN
Well Smart Meters......are coming and will limit the amount of water you use.
If you get someone knocking on your door asking if you want to save money on your heat/ac, do not say yes or they'll put a clip on your unit that will limit your usage of air conditioning. The fan will work, but your usage will be CONTROLLED.
IF you get a new wall mount (thermostat & it may be required w/ a new ac unit because of the wiring) for your AC DO NOT GET ONE WITH A GPS in it........there is a cheaper model that has no GPS........ask questions BEFORE you start or consider any changes!!!!!!!!
Important Announcement from SFL
Across America, state and local officials are writing bills and resolutions to protect citizen's from Agenda 21's policies. Because many people do not recognize Agenda 21 in action, property owners still remain at risk.
To help officials recognize Agenda 21's footprint, SFL created a document in a Q&A format that answers:
How do I know Agenda 21 exists in the U.S.?
What does Agenda 21 have to do with sustainable development?
What is wrong with the Brundtland Commission's definition of sustainable development?
How do I know the UN's sustainable development is the same one in our community?
I thought sustainable development is good, what makes you think it is so bad?
How can something like this happen in America?
How will I recognize Agenda 21?
The document has a lot more information for community members and officials, including a brief history of Agenda 21 and actions to take to have safe planning without top-down intervention.
Grants issued in conjunction with government 'sustainability initiatives' contain stipulations or implementation practices that are the primary doorway for Agenda 21/sustainable development to enter your community. These stipulations often require no growth boundaries, income integration through low-income housing demands, reduced vehicle usage, healthy cities, livability principles and other forms of social engineering.
Other grants issued by non-profit groups such as the Packard, Pew or Carnegie Foundations, frequently promote Agenda 21. Often this happens when HUD or some other federal agency funds the foundation with the money they in turn offer as a sustainability-related grant.
Non-governmental organizations:
Non-governmental organizations (NGOs) including ICLEI, the Nature Conservancy, American Farmland Trust and the American Planning Association have close ties to HUD-EPA-DOT sustainability initiatives and promote Agenda 21 through their regional and community work, conservation easements and funding.
Federal agencies:
Federal agency Acts including the Clean Water Act, Clean Air Act and Endangered Species Act have so expanded, that individual's rights are losing way to unfounded and often exaggerated endangerment findings. The solutions to their findings invariably require fines, taxes, property rights' infringements or the outright transfer of private lands to the government.
Preservation programs, National Parks, Historic Places and Byways, Heritage Sites and Legacy Forest programs have exceeded prudent land and species' protection and are now confiscating massive quantities of the U.S. land mass in alignment with Agenda 21 principles.
The planning process:
Planners' surveys - contain unfair questions that do not express all of resident's options
Consensus meetings - are conducted in ways that elicit responses that support the planner's goals rather than genuine community desires
Visioning sessions- may be over-conducted to the point that the vision belongs to the facilitator and only appears to be that of the community.
Stakeholder meetings - can produce misleading results when the stakeholders do not represent the average community member. Frequently the "stakeholders" have a financial or ideological interest in implementing the plan.
Zoning regulations - originating with the American Planning Association (and others,) contains language that establishes the legal framework to implement Agenda 21 in communities. HUD, other federal agencies and firms such as Siemens funded the development of the APA's Growing Smart Legislative Guidebook, 2nd ed. These supporters all have a stake in Agenda 21's implementation.
Conservation easements - often contain undiscussed clauses that severely restrict property owners' rights, reduce property values and favor the land trust for future contract changes.
Regionalism:
Regional councils replace much of the local officials' authority with unelected boardmembers.
As the regional council matures, local rule diminishes, leaving citizens with more distant and reduced representation.
Once a region is formed, the ability to oppose sustainable development is limited.
Generally, when the regional council accepts grant monies, all tethered communities are bound by the grant stipulations.
Regional planning often includes tax base sharing which promotes wealth transfer by forcing community members to pay for services in other locations.
Regional planning often includes "no growth boundaries" that force housing into urban and inner ring suburban areas. This reduces homebuyers' choices and artificially inflates the value of some properties, while reducing it for others.
Awareness about Agenda 21 is finally spreading throughout the country, due in no small part to your efforts. But knowing it is there isn't enough. Now we need to educate ourselves on how to combat it. That's where you come in.
American Policy Center has recently released a booklet that explains everything you need to know to start fighting back against sustainable programs both locally and nationally. The booklet is called Special Report: Agenda 21 and How to Stop It and is available in the APC store for only $5.95.
I wrote this 35 page booklet in order to give activists a succinct resource they can refer to if they suspect Agenda 21 or Sustainable Development is being implemented in their area. It includes my own research coupled with incredibly helpful graphics created by Carroll County, Maryland Commissioner Richard Rothschild.
In the booklet you will find answers to several roadblocks that grassroots anti-Agenda 21 activists often face, including a definition of property rights and "Resolution to Protect Citizens' Property Rights," which many concerned citizens are already using to tie the hands of power hungry politicians.
This booklet is a great resource for anyone interested in preserving their property rights. It includes all the information to put up a first line of defense and step by step instructions for how to proceed from there. If you face Agenda 21 or Sustainable development in your area or are simply concerned with the national fight this booklet is a must read.
P.S. - The American Policy Center store has recently updated our inventory to include everything you need to fight back against Agenda 21. The revamped catalogue includes the "Stop Agenda 21 Action Kit", which provides users with everything they need to know about Agenda 21 in their own living room, as well as ways to share it with other concerned activists and critical knowledge on how to fight back. The store also offers DVDs of past successful conferences and symposiums, books and articles that deal with the issues of sustainability and Agenda 21 and individually packaged manuals and workbooks to aid you in your activism. You don't need to look any farther than the American Policy Center Store for everything you need to combat Agenda 21 and Sustainable Development in your area.
A concerned parent tipped off TheBlaze to the disturbing fact that NY public schools are teaching the U.N.'s Socialist-leaning Universal Human Rights. We also discovered that the schools are delivering this indoctrination using videos made by the Church of Scientology. Learn what our investigation revealedHERE.
TheBlaze has been at the forefront in uncovering the disturbing details of the nationalized curriculum standard known as Common Core. One of the most troubling aspects of this federal program is that government bureaucrats are currently mining sensitive and highly personal information on children through Common Core's tracking system. Watch the powerful segments from The Glenn Beck Program HERE.
It's time to opt out of the creepy federal data-mining racket.
By Michelle Malkin
Last week, I reported on the federal government's massive new student-tracking database, which was created as part of the nationalized Common Core standards scheme.
The bad news: GOP "leadership" continues to ignore or, worse, enable this Nanny State racket. (Hello, Jeb Bush.)
The good news: A grassroots revolt outside the Beltway bubble is swelling. Families are taking their children's academic and privacy matters out of the snoopercrats' grip and into their own hands. You can now download a Common Core opt-out form to submit to your school district, courtesy of the group Truth in American Education.
Parents caught off guard by the stealthy tracking racket are now mobilizing across the country. According to the
New York Daily News
, Public Advocate Bill de Blasio, echoing parents across New York City, blasted the tracking database in a letter to government officials: "I don't want my kids' privacy bought and sold like this." This Wednesday, prompted by parental objections, Oklahoma state representatives unanimously passed House Bill 1989 - the Student Data Accessibility, Transparency and Accountability Act - to prohibit the release of confidential student data without the written consent of the student's parent or guardian.As I noted in last week's column, the national Common Core student database was funded with Obama stimulus money. Grants also came from the liberal Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (which largely underwrote and promoted the top-down Common Core curricular scheme). A division of the conservative Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. built the database infrastructure. A nonprofit startup, "inBloom, Inc.," evolved out of this strange-bedfellows partnership to operate the invasive database, which is compiling everything from health-care histories, income information, and religious affiliations to voting status, blood types, and homework completion.
And it gets worse. Research fellow Joy Pullmann at the Heartland Institute points to a February Department of Education report on its data-mining plans that contemplates the use of creepy student-monitoring techniques such as "functional magnetic resonance imaging" and "using cameras to judge facial expressions, an electronic seat that judges posture, a pressure-sensitive computer mouse and a biometric wrap on kids' wrists."
The DOE report exposes the big lie that Common Core is about raising academic standards. The report instead reveals Common Core's progressive designs to measure and track children's "competencies" in "recognizing bias in sources," "flexibility," "cultural awareness and competence," "appreciation for diversity," "empathy," "perspective taking, trust, [and] service orientation."
That's right. School districts and state governments are pimping out highly personal data on children's feelings, beliefs, "biases," and "flexibility" instead of doing their own jobs of imparting knowledge - and minding their own business. And yes, Republicans such as former Florida governor Jeb Bush continue to falsely defend the centralized Common Core regime as locally driven and non-coercive, while ignoring the database system's circumvention of federal student-privacy laws.
Why? Edu-tech nosybodies are using the Common Core assessment boondoggle as a Trojan horse to collect and crunch massive amounts of personal student data for their own social-justice or moneymaking ends. Reminder: Nine states have entered into contracts with inBloom: Colorado, Delaware, Georgia, Illinois, Kentucky, Louisiana, Massachusetts, New York, and North Carolina. Countless other vendors are salivating at the business possibilities in exploiting public-school students.
Marxism in Education - The Infiltration of Our School Systems by the Common Core Standards
Details
Written by Terresa Monroe-Hamilton
Right Side News has been reporting on progressive education reformers and the Common Core Standards being implemented in our public schools across the nation. Here is an excellent article with videos detailing how the Obama Administration is requiring the public schools in your county through grants (bribes) to adopt Common Core Standards.
Bottom line: the Obama Administration is using your tax money to indoctrinate your children to a Marxist mindset. You can make a difference, as explained below the videos by downloading an OPT-OUT form and submitting that to your local school district.
Terresa Monroe-Hamilton, Noisy Room Blog
I caught Glenn Beck on The Blaze and his excellent showcasing of Obama's Common Core Standards that are now in 45 states, including my state of Idaho. Common Core is Marxism for children. It is state run propaganda and is meant to dumb down and control our little ones. It is evil and it has been a long time coming. Obama pushed it through slyly and quickly after coming into office, but I can tell you, this has been brewing since at least the 1990s.
A little background... When my children were in school in the 1990s, my husband and I requested to see the school curriculum for their school in Las Vegas, Nevada. We were refused and basically told we were too dumb to understand what the teachers were instructing our son and daughter in. The last straw came when they wanted to put my daughter in the second grade on Ritalin instead of disciplining her. I was pulled in front of four teachers and accused of not raising my daughter correctly, as well as basically being an abusive and stupid parent.
I promptly told these teachers that they could pound sand and pulled our children (our son was in third grade at the time) out of school that very same day. I left the Fortune 500 and home schooled both of them till high school and in retrospect, should have kept them out even then. My children could not do the simplest of math or read when we pulled them out. I tested them and started them all over again with the ABEKA home schooling system, which at the time, cost a great deal of money.
Forty-five states, the District of Columbia, four territories, and the Department of Defense Education Activity have adopted the Common Core State Standards.
What information is being collected on your kids through Common Core?
TheBlaze TV subscribers can watch past episodes covering Common Core and CSCOPE. The March 14th episode focused on Common Core and the March 7th episode focused on CSCOPE. Not a subscriber? Sign up HERE.
Glenn has spent a lot of time over the past few weeks exposing some of the education initiatives in states across the country that are indoctrinating kids into the radical progressive agenda. Today, Glenn discussed an issue tied into Common Core that many people aren't aware of: data mining.
"We cover many important stories and topics on this program, but I don't think any could be more important than what we are covering tonight: the progressive takeover of America's schools,"
OK....when they look at you like you have a tin foil hat on your head......take some of this information with you. It is 126 pages. I have not read through the entire document (YET) but what I have read is enough to blow off the top of your head. I have highlighted some stuff. KIPP (Charter Schools) has a CHARACTER REPORT CARD on Page 39. So for now start on page 39 and work your way through to page 45. Remember FERPA laws were changed last year and I am sure not one parent is aware that permission to share information about our children no longer requires parental consent. Obama just slipped all these new changes in and I don't believe any parents were ever asked their opinions about these changes. And where was our Republican Congress when this happened???
AGENDA 21 is: The complete control and inventory of every human activity. After your friends read some of this information ask them if they still believe A21 is not real. Chapter 36 of A21 document is devoted to education.
Our government forgets there are still people alive that can think and see through their garbage.
Print this document and get a highlighter...........then start visiting your neighbors, school boards, elected officials and start screaming. GET COMMON CORE AND THE GOVERNMENT out of our class rooms. I think it is time to start a MASS movement for Home Schooling. I know Home Schooling will not be spared. This should be a movement to bring education back to the local level and DESTROY the Federal Department of Education. If our kids are not in school it will create an uprising at all levels. We should not settle for shutting down Common Core because they will masquerade it....they are already doing this in VA. VA supposedly never signed on to Common Core but GUESS WHAT........they ARE implementing Common Core and disguising it from the citizens in VA....of course they aren't doing a good job of hiding it and people in VA are catching on. Our schools have been in the process of a government take over (in earnest) for more than 20 years. If we don't shut down the Department of Education it will never stop. We have to cause a citizen uprising!!
Here is the U.S. Department of Education - Office of Educational Technology document:
"The Constitution is not an instrument for the government to restrain the people, it is an instrument for the people to restrain the government - lest it come to dominate our lives and interests"- Patrick Henry
To fix "THE SYSYEM" We must become "THE SYSTEM" - k. bracken "The change we seek has always required great struggle and great sacrifice." - Barack Hussein Obama "The man who speaks to you of sacrifice, speaks of slaves and masters. And intends to be the master." - Ayn Rand
Has Communist Ideology Overtaken America? Education is crucial. Today I want to share two very interesting lists with you, and rather than adding an extensive amount of my commentary, I want to give you the chance to examine the facts for yourself. It is my opinion that many communist goals have already been accomplished. I also believe that advancement has been made in other areas. But, you owe it to yourself to do your own research. I believe not only in the freedom of speech, but also in the responsibility of free thought. So please don't take my word for it. Examine the facts for yourself.
Again, I want to share two lists with you. The first is a list that was entered into 1963 Congressional Record. The second is the 10 planks of The Communist Manifesto.
If you can't see this happening in America, and a ton of progress being made, then I offer two potential explanations:
You are one of the "useful idiots" of communist teaching.
I am one of the "village idiots" that your Mama probably warned you about.
Some of these points will be open for debate and some will not. In some cases it is blatantly obvious that they have achieved their goals. It is even rumored that our own President has deep communist ties. You might want to check that out as well but I will withhold my opinion at this point. Let's just lay it out and you can interpret it.
This list was originally printed in "The Naked Communist" by Cleon Skousen. It was entered into Congressional Record in 1963 as the 45 goals of "The Communist Takeover of America."
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Overview:
The sectional divide that led to the outbreak of the Civil War was rooted in fundamentally opposing interpretations of the principles of the Declaration of Independence in addition to diverging perceptions of the institution of slavery. Slaveholders and non-slaveholders alike at the time of the Founding generally agreed that slavery was unjust and an evil that ran counter to the ethos of the Founding, even while countenancing it in practice. By the 1850s, prominent men such as John C. Calhoun and Alexander Stevens argued that slavery was a positive good, and that liberty and equality, far from being natural rights belonging to every human being, were privileges to be earned.
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Java Jerk Jolt for "Gay Marriage"
Latest Entries from the Cultural Entropy Files
By Mark Alexander · April 4, 2013
"Marriage is ... in its origin a contract of natural law. ... It is the parent, and not the child of society; the source of civility and a sort of seminary of the republic." --Justice Joseph Story (Commentaries on the Conflict of Laws)
There's never a dull moment when it comes to Leftist miscreants endeavoring to dismantle Liberty and the very culture that has sustained it since our Founding. This week was no different, especially in regard to the disoriented gender crowd.
First, there was news that the somewhat Reverend Luis Leon used his "Easter sermon" pulpit as a political soapbox for the Obama clan attending St. John's Episcopal Church. "It drives me crazy," Leon lamented, "when the captains of the religious right are always calling people back, never forward, forgetting that we are called to be a pilgrim's people. The captains of the religious right are always calling us back, back, back. For blacks to be back in the back of the bus, for women to be back in the kitchen, for gays to be in the closet and for immigrants to be on their side of the border." (Somebody call the IRS and have them revoke St. John's non-profit status!)
For that remark, Leon received our Non Compos Mentis Award Monday. Of course, Leon is no Jeremiah "G-d Damn America" Wright, who spewed the sort of awful, divisive, America-hating sermons that now largely inform Obama's worldview.
Next came the news that another lynch mob was gathering to hang Dr. Ben Carson, who was already under fire for having delivered a bold and unapologetic defense of Christian morality at the National Prayer Breakfast -- with Obama scowling a few feet away at the head table. (So much for the Left's support of those who speak truth to power.)
Typical of the assault on Carson, who is black, was this observation from one of MSNBC's talkingheads, who claimed Dr. Carson is an Uncle Tom for conservatives, their "new black friend" who is "helpful in assuaging their guilt."
The Leftmedia is quick to brand any black citizen who departs the ObamaNation Plantationssimilarly. (See Clarence Thomas, Condi Rice, Allen West, Tim Scott, Ward Connerly et al.) Of liberals, Carson says, "They're the most racist people there are because they put you in a little category, a box. 'How could you dare come off the plantation?'"
Apparently Dr. Carson, a brilliant neurosurgeon at Johns Hopkins, offended a minuscule but very vocal minority this week when he defended the traditional Judeo-Christian context for marriage -- a historic definition consistent with every religion on the planet. Carson said, "Well, my thoughts are that marriage is between a man and a woman. It's a well-established, fundamental pillar of society, and no group -- be they gays, be they NAMBLA, be they people who believe in bestiality, it doesn't matter what they are -- they don't get to change the definition."
How dare he mention homosexuals in the same sentence with pedophiles and other sexual miscreants -- even though NAMBLA is, by its very definition, a homosexual group which predates on young boys.
Students at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine are protesting a scheduled speech by Dr. Carson at this year's commencement, claiming his views are "deeply offensive to a large proportion of our student body."
(Sidebar: In other news from Hopkins, the Student Government Association has declined to allow the formation of a pro-life group, Voice for Life, but has approved a Students for Justice in Palestine group. An SGA memo, leaked to the media, compared Voice for Life with a white-supremacist group.)
I have met Dr. Carson, the subject of the TV movie, Gifted Hands, about his rise from abject material poverty to the pinnacle of the neurosurgical profession. His character and devotion to fellow Americans is unimpeachable.
Responding to the protests, Carson said, "They want to shut us up completely, and that's why the attacks against me have been so vicious. I represent an existential threat to them. They need to shut me up, they need to get rid of me. They can't find anything else to delegitimize me, so they take my words, misinterpret them, and try to make it seem that I'm a bigot."
I offer the single most politically incorrect statement a modern American -- indeed a modern Westerner, period -- can make: I first look to the Bible for moral guidance and for wisdom. I say this even though I am not a Christian (I am a Jew, and a non-Orthodox one at that). And I say this even though I attended an Ivy League graduate school (Columbia), where I learned nothing about the Bible there except that it was irrelevant, outdated and frequently immoral. I say this because there is nothing -- not any religious or secular body of work -- that comes close to the Bible in forming the moral bases of Western civilization and therefore of nearly all moral progress in the world.
Senator John Thune (R-SD) has proposed an amendment to the Senate Budget Resolution submitted by Senator Patty Murray (D-WA) that would provide a deficit neutral fund for the permanent repeal of the death tax. Jim Martin, Chairman of the 60 Plus Association, noted that his organization has been leading the charge and pushing for repeal of what Martin described as an "onerous tax" at death and "we commend Senator Thune for his continued leadership to kill the Death Tax."
RedState Morning Briefing
For April 5, 2013
1.Rick Perry's Failure to Lead Leads Texas Closer to Obamacare
Late Thursday afternoon, the Republican-controlled Texas House of Representatives took the first step toward capitulation on the ObamaCare Medicaid expansion. A few hours later, the amendment directing the Texas state healthcare bureaucracy to start preparing for the expansion was reconsidered and rescinded after a handful of conservatives scrambled to rescue the situation - but the fact that it passed at all is a wake-up call.
Here's the bottom line: Texas is closer to caving on the ObamaCare Medicaid expansion than people realize. It's no surprise that Texas House Speaker Joe Straus, elected with the votes of Democrats and liberal Republicans, would let this happen.
Jeremy Irons is making headlines for his hesitancy on gay marriage and whether it might lead to incestuous marital relationships if only to avoid estate taxes.The interviewer was dismissive, but why not incest? Because of tax problems? Is't that why Ms. Windsor went to the Supreme Court to begin with - taxes?
Seriously. Why not incest.
The left is championing what Senator Mark Kirk said last week when he decided he would support gay marriage. Senator Kirk said, "Life comes down to who you love and who loves you back - government has no place in the middle."
CNN Marketwatch offers a glimpse of our paper-pushing future under ObamaCare. . . . [N]either the citizens trapped in this bureaucratic nightmare, nor the bureaucrats perched atop the maze, know how most of it works, assuming any great portion of it does work.
Completion of all this paperwork will require hours of homework, followed by perhaps an hour of scribbling, during which the commissars of ObamaCare will gather all sorts of dubiously relevant information about us, such as our voter registration status.Fortunately, the government will spend millions more of our tax dollars hiring tens of thousands of "navigators" to assist us in filling out the paperwork.(Paul Bedard of the Washington Examiner reveals that California alone says it needs 21,000 of these "navigators," and they'll be paid $20-$48 per hour.Just wait until they have their own public employee union!). . . please click here for the rest of the post →
4.Connecticut further suppresses Constitutional right to bear arms
Yesterday morning, in the dead of night - 2:26 a.m., Connecticut's House of Representatives voted to pass a repressive 139 page gun control bill. The vote was 105 to 44, with two absent. Of the 98 Democrats present, 13, and 31 of the 51 Republicans present voted no. The state Senate approved it Wednesday evening, by a 26-10 vote. Two of 22 Democrats and eight ofthe 14 Republicans voted no.
Connecticut's new restrictions on citizens Constitutional right to bear arms is said to be a response to the horrific murders of 20 children and six adults in Newtown's Sandy Hookelementary school last December. Sadly, nothing in the 139 page bill would have done anything to prevent the killings. Nor does it do anything to prevent another such incident. . . . please click here for the rest of the post →
5.Exposed: President Morsi's 'Brotherhoodization' Plan for Egypt
The Muslim Brotherhood's former General Guide, Mahdi Akef, the organization's supreme leader from 2004-2010, declared during an interview published yesterday by Kuwait's well-known newspaper, Al Jarida, that the "Brotherhoodization" of Egypt's state organs-which would see the transformation of Egypt into the image of the Muslim Brotherhood-is President Muhammad Morsi's grand plan for the nation. . . . please click here for the rest of the post →
Gays for Sharia? Pamela Geller Turning themselves inside out to defend an ideology that hangs gays in public, tears their faces off with a razor blade in Gaza More
Alinsky and McCarthy: Brothers under the Skin Richard Winchester There are plenty of ways in which the left embodies hypocrisy. But you'd have to look pretty hard to find something to beat this. More
'Trust Us, Skeptics Are Crooks' Russell Cook For an issue supposedly rooted in pure science, it's hard to overlook how promoters of man-caused global warming have every appearance of being not only anti-intellectual, but also blatantly anti-science. More
More is Never Enough G. Murphy Donovan The U.S. policy for dealing with the Middle East is based on mulitiple levels of fantasy and wishful thinking. The awakening will be quick and brutal. More
The Gods of the Copybook Headings are in Cyprus Howard Richman, Raymond Richman, and Jesse Richman In his 1919 poem, The Gods of the Copybook Headings, Rudyard Kipling compares the truths of the real world ("the Gods of the Copybook Headings") with the promises of social progressives. Cyprus just got a dose of the former. More
Oh-oh! The dreaded i-word starts attaching itself to Obama April 4, 2013 We have already seen Peak Obama; from here on, it's going to get rougher and rougher for Barack Obama. Even worse, the one word he must fear the most has just been uttered by a man regarded as a bit of a truth-teller among liberal elites. More
Threat and Response-Part Six We're fighting the Islamist intimidation of authors-and winning!
One of the weapons in the arsenal of stealth jihadists is called "libel tourism."
They file lawsuits against American authors in countries like Great Britain, where authors don't have the same protection against defamation lawsuits they enjoy in the U.S.
They know they can't win their lawsuits in the U.S., but their goal is simple-intimidate authors who are writing about terrorism.
Rachel Ehrenfeld
This tactic was used against Rachel Ehrenfeld, author of the book Funding Evil. A wealthy Saudi won a judgment against Ehrenfeld in a British court.
Ms. Ehrenfeld fought back, getting a bill introduced in the New York state legislature in 2008 that became known as "Rachel's Law."
The legislation was designed to protect New York authors from the kind of intimidation lawsuit that targeted Ms. Ehrenfeld.
ACT! for America delivered thousands of names on a petition, and hundreds of phone calls and emails to legislators in support of the bill, and the bill passed.
In 2010, we got a similar bill passed in Tennessee.
Why is this important?
If authors and their publishers fear lawsuits in foreign countries that don't protect freedom of speech and the press like we do in America, they'll be less likely to write the truth about terrorism.
And that's a victory for stealth jihad because it's a victory for suppression of free speech. It's another way that Islamists impose sharia law on Americans.
ACT! for America is now working in several states to pass what has become known as The Free Speech Defense Act-and a little over two weeks ago, South Dakota became the latest state to pass The Free Speech Defense Act.
With every state that passes this legislation we protect that many more authors from "libel tourism." We win, free speech wins-and radical Islam and stealth jihad loses.
Your financial support for ACT! for America will help us continue fighting-and winning-this battle.
Please log on here and make either a monthly Patriot Partner contribution or a single gift Contributing Member contribution.
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If you've been following our "Threat and Response" emails, you see the many ways in which radical Islam is trying to impose its will on the West and on America.
"Libel tourism" is just one of the tactics employed by our enemies.
With your help, we can shut down this tactic and ensure that authors can write the truth about radical Islam without fear from those who would use the courts of other countries against us.
Yesterday's villain can become tomorrow's hero or in the case of Kathy Boudin, former member of the Weather Underground, and convicted murderer, a heroine.
It is disgraceful that the Obama administration is denying those soldiers the military honors they are long overdue from having been wounded by an enemy operative in a wartime terrorist attack.
The Obama administration publicly attacked Israel to stop "settlement building" in Jerusalem, even though many of the Jewish residents who live there were originally expelled from Muslim countries.
Unfortunately, "hope" isn't a good basis for a foreign policy, especially toward the likes of Hezbollah, which has plenty of European - and other - blood on its hands.
Calling Sens. Paul and Cruz: Is any of this secret stuff constitutional? Is this kind of secret war -- no matter how common -- really within the parameters of the presidency?
In the national defense context, Rashid also discussed dangerous leaks of intelligence to the media during World War II as well as the Obama Administration's refusal to release photos of Osama bin Laden's corpse.
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Incredible! Liberals wake up as Jon Stewart Skewers Morsi for arresting "Egypt's Jon Stewart." In response, Obama Admin buckles to Egyptian Gov't outrage.
Of course, the Obama Administration stood against Stewart's free speech, once again bowing to Muslim Brotherhood pressure. Could it be that Stewart's fans will finally realize that Obama is not a friend of the freedoms they enjoy? When will they realize that it is outrageous for any foreign nation to have
anything to say about American comedy? If the jailed producer of the "The Innocence of Muslims" video and the attacks by Sec. of State Clinton and Gen. Petraeous on the Koran-burning pastor didn't wake them up to creeping Sharia, maybe an attack on Jon Stewart will.
The U.S. Embassy in Cairo got into a very-public digital dispute Wednesday with the Egyptian government -- as well as State Department headquarters -- over a tweet that linked to a "Daily Show" video mocking Egyptian President Mohammed Morsi.
The segment was a monologue by Stewarton the arrest of an Egyptian satirist. Even though the State Department has spoken out strongly on behalf of satirist Bassam Youssef -- making an argument roughly in line with what Stewart talked about -- the tweet sparked a diplomatic flare-up.
The U.S. Embassy temporarily shut down its Twitter feed over the incident. When the Twitter feedreturned, the "Daily Show" tweet had been scrubbed from the site.
The incident was the latest to raise questions both about the operation of the sometimes-wayward U.S. Embassy Twitter account but also whether U.S. officials were unduly pressured by the Egyptian government.
Morsi's office and the political wing of the Muslim Brotherhood had publicly complained about the U.S. Embassy's comments. Morsi's office wrote on Twitter that "it's inappropriate for a diplomatic mission to engage in such negative political propaganda."
State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland, in Washington, was peppered with questions Wednesday afternoon about the incident. She explained that the embassy should not have taken down its Twitter account and was effectively told by headquarters to bring it back online.
"There was an instruction that taking down the Twitter feed altogether was not in line with department policy," she said.
At the same time, Nuland suggested that State Department headquarters and the leadership at the embassy in Cairo had concerns about the decision to tweet a link to Stewart's show in the first place.
Gosh...who could have seen this coming? Oh yeah...US! Why are we surprised to find that allies of the "rebels" we support are using our weapons? Just too bad that those allies turn out to be Al Qaida. Does anyone else see a problem with Obama's rebel "friends"?
A British special forces member used the AS-50 to kill to Taliban fighters from more than a mile and a half away.
By Paul Alster Published April 03, 2013 FoxNews.com
New YouTube video from the Syrian battlefield shows rebels firing the same high-powered sniper rifle favored by U.S. Navy SEALs, leaving some experts wondering who the ragtag army of insurgents might train the guns on in the future.
The British-made AS-50, accurate from a distance of 20 football fields, is made for British Special Forces and Navy SEALs. Videoshowing Syrian rebels, who are aligned with Al Qaeda, firing the guns and shouting "Alahu akbar," has also raised questions about who is supplying such devastating hardware.
"The video, showing jihadist rebels of the 'Descendents of the Prophet Brigade' firing one of the world's most effective sniper rifles, should be cause for alarm," said David Reaboi, of the Washington-based Center for Security Policy. "We don't know who has been supplying this group (or the myriad others) with these weapons but, given the jihadist ideology of these groups, it's only a matter of time until they're turned on Americans or our allies and interests."
This undated image posted on a militant website purports to show militants in the al-Jazeera region on the Iraqi side of the Syria-Iraq border. Last month, militants inside Iraq killed 48 Syrian government troops who had sought refuge from the war in their country _ an ambush that regional officials now say is evidence of a growing cross-border alliance between two powerful Sunni jihadi groups _ Al-Qaida in Iraq and the Nusra Front in Syria. Middle Eastern intelligence officials said the jihadi groups are sharing military training compounds, logistics, intelligence and weapons as they grow in strength around the Syria-Iraq border, particularly in a sprawling region called al-Jazeera, which they are trying to turn into a border sanctuary they can both exploit.(AP Photo) (The Associated Press)
Published April 02, 2013 Associated Press
BAGHDAD - The wounded Syrian government troops were returning to their country in trucks escorted by Iraqi soldiers. They'd almost reached the border, near the frontier town of Akashat, when the attackers struck.
Regional intelligence officials saw the March 4 ambush, which left 48 dead, as evidence of a growing, cross-border alliance between two powerful Islamic extremist groups - al-Qaida in Iraq and Jabhat al-Nusra or Nusra Front in Syria. Nusra Front is the most effective rebel faction fighting President Bashar Assad's regime, and the U.S. designates both Sunni jihadi groups as terrorist organizations.
Iraqi intelligence officials say the burgeoning cooperation is pumping new life into the Sunni insurgency in their country. They point to nearly 20 car bombings and suicide attacks that killed over 65 people, mostly in Baghdad, on the eve of the 10th anniversary of the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq last month.
The alliance is also nurturing Nusra Front, which emerged as an offshoot of Iraq's al-Qaida branch in mid-2012 to battle Assad's regime as one of a patchwork of disparate rebel groups in Syria. Nusra Front's presence on the battlefield complicates desperately needed international support for Syrian rebels because foreign backers do not want to bolster Islamic extremist groups.
Two Iraqi intelligence officials said the cooperation reflected in the attack on the wounded Syrian troops prompted their government to request U.S. drone strikes against the fighters.(Dave's comment: Notice how the US is now being pressured to fight on BOTH sides of this sectarian war? In Syria, we're aiding the Sunni rebels, but in Iraq)
A tiny totalitarian regime is threatening the United States with nuclear attack, and the president has barely spoken on the matter since the threats were made. It isn't hard to imagine how other presidents would have reacted differently.
Larry Grathwohl, who infiltrated the Weathermen, is re-releasing his memoirs to coincide with Robert Redford's ode to the terror group. (Order the paperback here, and the Kindle version here.)
While far too late, the Obama administration may be adopting a sensible policy on Syria. The strategy, however, is unlikely to succeed. Oh, and there is also a very important clue -- I think the key to the puzzle -- about what really happened in Benghazi.
We should not let Havana's timid economic reforms or its new travel policy distract us from the more important story: In its treatment of human-rights activists, pro-democracy dissidents, and pretty much anyone it considers a threat to Communist rule, the Cuban government is becoming more repressive, not less.
Since taking office, the Obama Administration has been intent on controlling what is taught at every grade level in all of the nation's schools. It has used its flagship "Race to the Top" competitive grant program to bring states together to adopt the K-12 standards developed by a joint project of the National Governors Association (NGA) and the Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO). It has also suggested, in its 2009 Blueprint for Education Reform, that adoption of these common standards could one day be a qualification for states wanting future Title 1 dollars for low-income schools.
The Common Core State Standards provide a consistent, clear understanding of what students are expected to learn, so teachers and parents know what they need to do to help them. The standards are designed to be robust and relevant to the real world, reflecting the knowledge and skills that our young people need for success in college and careers. With American students fully prepared for the future, our communities will be best positioned to compete successfully in the global economy.
Education 'Reform' 101: How The Common Core Relates To Other Big Ideas Sweeping Florida Schools
That's a familiar refrain in K-12 education. And the latest big thing may be bigger than all the others: It's the Common Core education standards that Florida and 45 other states are now putting in place. And it has public schools across the country sitting on the cusp of a massive change in nearly every aspect of how math andEnglish are taught, learned and tested.
Posted by Daniel Greenfield @ the Sultan Knish blog
Right next to the tables where the chess players wait, chessboards laid out, clocks set up, to gull some passing businessman or arrogant NYU student out of his lunch money, the remnant of the Occupation remains.
Below the breakdancers spin and tumble enjoying the first days of spring. A bad drummer by the fountain persistently whacks away providing a dissonant soundtrack to the yuppies toting bags full of supposedly organic groceries from the stalls of the farmers' market.
Occupy Wall Street isn't much in the news now. It lost the battle on the southern frontier and has settled into a prolonged brawl with Trinity Church that was doomed from the start. Not too long ago, the Occupiers earned constant headlines. Now they have been reduced to a single folding table manned by a beardo with a banner featuring Martin Luther King and Obama. "I have a dream, not a drone," it reads.
A homeless man toting a rusted shopping cart full of bottles and cans stops by to chat with him and then moves along after dropping a dime in the coffee cup.
Thanks to New York City's recycling laws, the cans and bottles are money in the bank. The homeless man with the rusted shopping cart is working for a living while the Occupier has a coffee cup and is protesting for a living.
This is Occupy Wall Street and even though spring is in the air and the weather is warm enough for a renewal of the occupation, you don't hear much about them anymore. And there are good reasons for that. There are bands to follow, streetcorners to squat and trends to hop on elsewhere in the country. If you're going to protest for a living, California with its more temperate weather, is a better bet than New York City, where the warm weather is only now waving a flag while promising to show up in a month or two. But the bigger reason is that Occupy Wall Street is now surplus to requirements.
New York City radicalism is a lifetime occupation for a small fringe, but the fringe is mostly ignored. The Trotskyite fronts never stop organizing anti-war rallies and informational events, no matter who sits in the White House. If Dennis Kucinich won in 2016 and replaced the Defense Department with the Department of Peace, on the next day the usual suspects would still assemble at Union Square, right between the chess players and the breakdancers, and demand an end to war.
According to the Washington Post, the Obama administration is pushing big banks to make more home loans available to Americans with bad credit - the same kind of government guidance that helped blow up the housing market:
In response, administration officials say they are working to get banks to lend to a wider range of borrowers by taking advantage of taxpayer-backed programs - including those offered by the Federal Housing Administration - that insure home loans against default.
Housing officials are urging the Justice Department to provide assurances to banks, which have become increasingly cautious, that they will not face legal or financial recriminations if they make loans to riskier borrowers who meet government standards but later default.
Think about this statement. The administration is asking banks - banks that Washington bails out; banks that Washington crafts regulations for - to embrace risky policies that put the institution and its investors (not to mention, all of us) in a precarious position. So precarious, in fact, that banks have to ask government if they can be freed of any legal or financial consequences.
Obama Administration officials announced this week that they would miss a deadline for the implementation of a key Obamacare program designed to help small businesses. Starting next year, Obamacare was supposedly going to setup an exchange program specifically created to help small businesses purchase cheaper health insurance.
But the New York Times reported that the small business exchanges won't be functioning until 2015. Small businesses purchasing health insurance through the exchange in 2014 will have only one option.
The small business exchange was a big selling point for Obamacare. As the Times notes, "The promise of affordable health insurance for small businesses was portrayed as a major advantage of the new health care law, mentioned often by White House officials and Democratic leaders in Congress as they fought opponents of the legislation." Any Democrat who voted for Obamacare and who is running for reelection in 2014 is going to have a tough time explaining this one.
Liberals are furious. TIME's Joe Klein ripped into Obama in a column entitled "Obamacare Incompetence." He was livid that the bureaucrats were giving the impression that big government was incompetent. Well guess what, Joe? Big government is incompetent.
Obama Shows His Solidarity
President Obama is taking a pay cut thanks to sequestration. The White House announced yesterday that Obama would give up 5% of his salary "in a move intended to symbolize solidarity with federal workers." What about showing some solidarity with the taxpayers?
The only reason Senate Democrats produced a budget this year is because House Republicans passed legislation suspending congressional salaries if no budget was approved. That is what it took to get them to do their jobs. Taxpaying voters should be outraged! But as usual the media ignored the story.
While I'm glad Obama is taking the pay cut, here's a better idea: Let's pay our presidents based on performance. If the unemployment rate goes up, the president loses pay. If it goes down, he gets a raise. Maybe that would help focus Obama's attention on the economy.
Jobless benefits spiked this week by 28,000 to the highest figure so far this year. What's Obama doing? He's attending fundraisers in California hoping to make Nancy Pelosi Speaker of the House again.
At a San Francisco fundraiser last night, Obama said, "I could get a whole lot more done if Nancy Pelosi is Speaker of the House." As if higher taxes, more regulation and bigger government will help the economy or small business owners create jobs.
Speaking Of San Francisco...
How radical is the left in America? So radical that it thinks Obama is too moderate. Hundreds of San Francisco radicals gathered to protest Obama's fundraiser last night. Some were there opposing the Keystone pipeline. According to a recent Pew poll, 66% of Americans, including 54% of Democrats, support the pipeline.
Some were in orange jumpsuits demanding the terrorist detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, be closed. Others were opposing the use of drone strikes against foreign terrorists. A Gallup poll last month found that 65% of Americans supported the use of drone strikes against suspected foreign terrorists.
While it is easy to mock the left as out-of-touch, the protest shows why the left often succeeds. It makes its voice heard and it is relentless. It is another reminder of why men and women of faith must remain engaged in the political arena. The left is fighting for its values. We must do the same!
Assuming we eventually elect a conservative president, we can take nothing for granted. If that president is under liberal attack, conservatives must be willing to make noise and add pressure that counteracts whatever the left is up to. The same lesson applies right now to the current debate over the meaning of marriage, which is why I encourage you to contact your members of Congress now and let them know where you stand.
Speaking Up For Marriage
Bill Kristol, editor of The Weekly Standard, recently discussed the Republican Party's attempts to moderate its position on values issues. He described the effort as a "pathetic attempt" to align the party with the whims of today's pop culture. He warns GOP elites that they are "totally out-of-touch" with the party's base when it comes to normal marriage and should heed warnings of conservative leaders like Mike Huckabee and me. Click here to listen to his podcast.
Speaking Up For Life
I received several emails today from readers of this daily report who were shocked that they had never heard of Dr. Kermit Gosnell before reading yesterday's "End of Day." It's not their fault. The left-wing, pro-abortion media do not want the public to know about Dr. Gosnell and the reality of abortion-on-demand.
But the American people must know what is being done in the name of "choice." Dr. Gosnell's "house of horrors" is a consequence of the coarsening of our culture that comes from the daily destruction of innocent human life. You can read more in my latest column entitled "A House of Horrors in Philadelphia."
We've heard about the government spending $1.5 million to determine why most lesbians are fat and almost twice that much to discover why they are drunks, but a peek under the White House rug shows much more willful waste of our money.
Barack Obama is arming Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood so they'll be able to defeat our ally Israel in the next Middle East war. He gives the PLO hundreds of thousands of our money each year as well.
King Barack has eaten through $1.4 BILLION in happy lifestyle spending on him, Mooch and their royal highnesses.
$505,000 of our tax dollars went to "to promote specialty hair and beauty products for cats and dogs" - yes cats and dogs!
The feds are lining someone's pockets with $1 million a year to develop a menu for space travel with no such trips even scheduled.
Senate Budget Committee Republican staff on Thursday released a description of what they claim is a "major flaw" in the immigration reform plan being pushed by the bipartisan "Gang of Eight"--a loophole that will end up being a multi-trillion dollar entitlement spending increase, with the burden falling on American taxpayers.
"According to what has been publicly reported about the Gang of Eight's forthcoming immigration bill, there appears to be a major flaw that could allow millions of illegal immigrants to access federal welfare benefits and poverty programs," the GOP Budget Committee staff wrote in a statement to media.
On Tuesday, during a public forum on national gun control legislation hosted by the Denver Post editorial board, U.S. Rep. Diana DeGette (D-Colo.) mocked a concerned pro-gun senior citizen when he expressed his fears regarding how gun control will affect his ability to defend himself. Watch the video and witness the insulting as it comment as it happenedHERE.
Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah) continued his tour of the U.S.-Mexico border, posting a new round of tweets on Wednesday that further display the need for enhanced border security. The �worst thing� he reported seeing was 60 unaccompanied elementary age children leaving school and crossing the border to go home to Mexico. A supervisor reportedly told Chaffetz that this happens daily. You can also see photos the Congressman posted of the 500 lbs of pot, 15 lbs of meth and the obvious problems with the border fenceHERE.
Ratcheting up pressure for Congress to limit access to guns, on Wednesday, President Barack Obama said that recent steps made by Colorado to tighten its gun laws show �there doesn�t have to be a conflict� between keeping citizens safe and protecting Second Amendment rights to gun ownership. The President dismissed gun owners� concerns that gun control legislation could be a stepping stone to gun confiscation in the U.S., saying �I am constrained by a system our founders put in place.� Watch President Obama's addresasHERE.
Tuesday night, during a Trenton, NJ city council meeting, Councilwoman-at-Large Kathy McBride set herself up for considerable embarrassment when she demanded to know what the local government was doing to combat the outbreak of an STD known as �Blue Waffle Disease.� (Graphic content warning � do not Google that term unless you are prepared for shocking and very graphic images.)HERE
An unidentified U.S. Marine sergeant from Camp Pendleton was caught on camera screaming profanities and making violent threats during a fit of rage that was sparked by a minor traffic accident. Watch the incident (Warning! Very strong language)HERE.
In a video posted on the Field & Stream website by blogger Tim Romano, an unnamed man spots two keeper-size largemouth bass in the lake. So, what�s weird about this story? One of the bass had actually half-swallowed the other one, even though it was nearly the same size. Watch the video and see what happened to both of these large-mouth bass after they were hauled into the boat HERE.
On Wednesday, Academy Award-winning actor Jeremy Irons (�The Mission,� �Die Hard With a Vengeance,� �Brideshead Revisited�) savaged New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg�s attempts to coerce people into healthier lifestyles, comparing the mayor�s policies to a �nanny state.� Watch the very Libertarian Mr. Irons express his opinions on Mayor Bloomberg and his plans for New York CityHERE.
CNN host Piers Morgan has made his views on gun control more than known. And last night, the controversial host, once again, unleashed on President Barack Obama � and the U.S. government as a whole � for not pushing through controversial gun control measures. Watch the clipHERE.
A Sony Action Cam mounted on a RC multicopter captured some stunning fly-over footage of Japan's "Battleship Island.�If the place looks familiar, it�s because it was the site of the �Skyfall� villain Javier Bardem�s headquarters in the latest James Bond. Check out this cool video HERE.
A British archaeologist says he and his colleagues have unearthed a huge, rare complex near the ancient city of Ur in southern Iraq, home of the biblical Abraham. The team first discovered the magnificent find using a satellite. See more about the projectHERE.
"Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity." ~ Seneca
They'd Make A Cute Couple
[Video] Bill Maher To Marry Ann Coulter? America's Conservative News Well... it wasn't exactly a marriage proposal but liberal Bill Maher did make some rather shocking statements to Jimmy Kimmel that might leave his leftist buddies seething in anger...
Impeaching Supreme Court Justices By Matt Shipley CanadaFreePress.com Most Americans incorrectly believe Supreme Court Justices are appointed for life and therefore somehow immune from public accountability, but this understanding is contrary to the Constitution and detrimental to our Republic.
41% in Bankrupt Stockton Don't Speak English At Home; 21% Can't Speak It Very Well By Terence P. Jeffrey CNSNews.com In Stockton, Calif., which has just entered into Chapter 9 bankruptcy, 41 percent of the people do not speak English at home and 21 percent cannot speak it very well, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.
'Illegal Immigrant' Becoming 'Illegal Invader'? By Bob Unruh WorldNetDaily When the Associated Press announced it was dropping the use of the term "illegal immigrant," "Tonight" show host Jay Leno joked that it was being replaced with "undocumented Democrat."
Almost everything Obama says in this video is a blatant lie... Related posts: Saturday Night Live Unexpectedly Mocks Obama! I have been watching Saturday Night Live for a year... Defiant County Official Refuses To Hand Over List Of Gun Owners To Newspaper Dennis Sant 'not backing down'; I say good for him!...
Apr 04, 2013 01:16 pm We've heard about the government spending $1.5 million to determine why most lesbians are fat and almost twice that much to discover why they are drunks, but a peek under the White House rug shows much more willful waste of our money. Barack Obama is arming Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood so they'll be able to defeat [...]
He is going to give up 5% of his salary; what a guy! He is a complete joke, and him giving up 5% of his salary when everything that he does is paid for is insane! Related posts: DonorGate: The Obama-China Connection Obama's DonorGate is expanding exponentially. Now we know a foreign-based,... O'Reilly To Leno: [...]
Video: Every Obama Document Is Plagued With Problems
Apr 04, 2013 01:04 pm
Please share this public service announcement with as many people as you can!! Related posts: Fmr. Marine Calls FBI About Obama's Identity Document Fraud Here is recorded audio from Pete Santilli's telephone calls to... Pictures From Sheriff Joe Document Fraud Press Conference, March 31 Here are some pictures from Sheriff Joe's March 31 news...
Apr 04, 2013 12:56 pm Offending the moral sensibilities of millions of Americans, Time Magazine is featuring cover stories showing two white homosexual couples kissing. The Right Scoop blog ran a "censored version of the offensive covers." John Aravosis, the homosexual activist who runs Americablog.com, said this is part of a propaganda campaign to normalize homosexuality. He said, "The kiss has been quite a [...]
Video: Associated Press Banning Word "Illegal Immigrant"!
Apr 04, 2013 12:49 pm
Michael Savage is not happy over this!! Related posts: Majority Of U.S. Citizens Say Illegal Immigrants Should Be Deported Michael Savage reports this great news!!... Continue to Post... Illegal Immigrant IRS Fraud In Indiana Exposed I wish the national mainstream media was reporting stories like...
Apr 04, 2013 12:45 pm Billions of Christians around the world celebrated Easter last Sunday, but not our media. Once again, the holiest day of the Christian year slipped under their godless radar. I saw Easter pop up in the news a only few times last weekend, but the stories had nothing to do with God or religion or the [...]
Video: Fischer: O'Reilly A '"Pompous, Arrogant Windbag"
Apr 04, 2013 12:37 pm
Bryan Fischer rips into Bill O'Reilly for saying that anti-gay marriage actvists do nothing but "thump the Bible." Related posts: Fischer: The Left Driven By 'Dark, Satanic Powers' Bryan Fischer says the Left is being used by demonic... Fischer: Obama's Christian Faith Is A "Total Sham" Bryan Fischer of the American Family Association is not convinced [...]
Apr 04, 2013 12:34 pm For those of you living in anticipation of the implementation of Obamacare, you may have unexpected surprises in store. Do you want another reason for social workers (i.e. some young college graduate out to change the world before experiencing it) coming to your door? Telling you they are taking your children to a state care [...]
Video: Democrat Mocks Elderly Man During Gun Control Forum
Apr 04, 2013 12:23 pm
Diana DeGette (D-CO) mocked the concerns of a senior citizen who said that his impairments would put him at a significant disadvantage in a firefight under the state's new gun laws. She tells him: "You'd probably be dead anyway." Related posts: Washington Times Creates Citizen Journalism Forum PRWeb The Washington Times is launching a groundbreaking [...]
Young Reporter Bails Out-Says Newspapers Killed Newspapers
Apr 04, 2013 12:11 pm Newspapers have been in decline for a number of years now, and the general assumption is that among the reasons for this decline are the growth of online news coupled with a broad decline in advertising revenue. But according to one young reporter who recently quit the newspaper business, it's really the newspapers that killed newspapers. Allyson [...]
Video: Protests Against Obama's Drone Use Hit New York
Apr 04, 2013 12:09 pm
Washington's overseas drone strikes and their surveillance use at home has long attracted the attention of activists. Groups across the U.S. political spectrum say the strikes breach American law and hurt the country's international standing. Now a month-long anti-drone campaign has kicked off, with a protest in Manhattan. Related posts: Lawmakers Consider Regulating Drone Strikes [...]
Apr 04, 2013 12:06 pm WASHINGTON - Senate opponents of a treaty regulating the multibillion-dollar global arms trade said Wednesday they have the votes to block ratification of the pact, which is also opposed by the outlaw regimes of North Korea, Syria and Iran. One day after the U.N. General Assembly overwhelmingly approved the treaty, Republican Sen. Mike Lee of [...]
Video: North Carolina May Declare Official State Religion
Apr 04, 2013 11:58 am
Republican North Carolina state legislators have proposed allowing an official state religion in a measure that would declare the state exempt from the Constitution and court rulings. Related posts: North Carolina A Political Headache For Democrats Once a bright spot for President Barack Obama, North Carolina... New Ad - These Hands: North Carolina A small [...]
As North Korea Crisis Deepens, Obama Raises Campaign Cash
Apr 04, 2013 11:50 am (CNSNews.com) - As North Korea announced it has approved a nuclear strike on the United States, President Barack Obama was back on the campaign trail, raising money for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee in San Francisco, California. The first two DCCC fundraising events for the 2014 election cycle had Obama appearing with House Minority Leader [...]
Apr 04, 2013 11:45 am PHOENIX - Arizona stands out in the Southwest. Most of its neighbors are independent-minded states that once leaned Republican but are trending Democratic, partly because of increasing numbers of Hispanic voters alienated from the GOP by its tough stance on illegal immigration. But not Arizona. Read More at OfficialWire . By Nicholas Riccardi. Related posts: What Arizona [...]
Apr 04, 2013 11:41 am WASHINGTON- Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel put the Pentagon and Congress on notice Wednesday that he is considering fundamental changes to the size of the military's management and command structures, requiring sweeping and dramatic spending cuts that are likely to hit programs favored by lawmakers. Hagel said in a speech to the National Defense University at [...]
Apr 04, 2013 11:30 am The real vocation of some people entrusted with delivering primary and secondary education is to validate this proposition: The three R's - formerly reading, 'riting and 'rithmetic - now are racism, reproduction and recycling. Especially racism. Consider Wisconsin's Department of Public Instruction. It evidently considers "instruction" synonymous with "propaganda," which in the patois of progressivism [...]
Apr 04, 2013 10:53 am The final step of Nazi control in Austria was registration and confiscation of guns. (Fairly Civil) It's not a surprise. Gun Registration often leads to confiscation. Now this... Harry Reid is pushing a gun control bill that will likely lead to a national gun registry. The Foundry reported: As Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) [...]
There is plenty going on today on NRO. Here are a few items of particular interest.
Costs, Benefits, and Background Checks Our lead editorial today explains why NY Democrat Senator Chuck Schumer's bill to legislate universal background checks is a bad idea. It's just the sort of wise analysis of a current hot topic that you really should share with friends and family members.
Beware Schumer's Latest Pose Well, old Chuck sure is one busy liberal. On top of trying to push through new gun control restrictions, he is also trying to compromise Republicans on immigration legislation. Our Andrew Stiles has written a great report on the infamous lawmaker and how "he has earned his reputation as a cutthroat partisan hack." You won't want to miss it.
After Obama Sweet phrase, no? Victor Davis Hanson's new column looks ahead at 2017 and sees a president, Democrat or Republican, who must be a budget hawk. As always, VDH is a tremendous read.
Speaking of which: Get hold of a copy of VDH's NRO essays on Obama. If anyone has had Barry's number from the get-go, it's been Victor. You'll find "Obama, The Dream and the Reality" at the NRO Store.
Sticks and Stones Dan Foster explains why the AP's ban on the use of "illegal immigrant" should be term-limited.
Hey, visit NRO like they vote in Chicago, early and often. Have a great day, and a greater tomorrow (yes, Jonah Goldberg's "G-File" will be paying you a visit).
Best,
Jack Fowler Publisher
Morning Jolt - April 4, 2013
By Jim Geraghty
Here's your Thursday Morning Jolt.
Enjoy!
Jim
We Will Probably Not Be Attacked by a North Korean Nuke Today. . . . Probably.
North Korea dramatically escalated its warlike rhetoric on Thursday, warning that it had authorized plans for nuclear strikes on targets in the United States.
"The moment of explosion is approaching fast," the North Korean military said, warning that war could break out "today or tomorrow".
Pyongyang's latest pronouncement came as Washington scrambled to reinforce its Pacific missile defenses, preparing to send ground-based interceptors to Guam and dispatching two Aegis class destroyers to the region.
Tension was also high on the North's heavily-fortified border with South Korea, after Kim Jong-Un's isolated regime barred South Koreans from entering a Seoul-funded joint industrial park on its side of the frontier.
You don't want to fear-monger in situations like this, but . . . isn't a country that allegedly has nuclear weapons (and has a heck of a destructive conventional arsenal) threatening to attack us a big deal?
A lot of old foreign-policy hands scoffed at today's statement out of Pyongyang, and I suppose they know more than I do. But remember that North Korea defines "harmless saber-rattling" differently than we do. For example, in 2010, they had two rounds of "harmless saber-rattling" that included killing people. First they torpedoed a South Korean Navy ship, killing 46 people, and then a couple of months later they fired around 170 artillery shells and rockets at Yeonpyeong Island, hitting both military and civilian targets, killing four South Koreans and injuring 19.
Two months into Secretary of State John Kerry's tenure, a large number of senior State Department positions remain vacant, and the process to fill them seems indefinitely stalled, officials inside the department tell The Cable.
When Kerry's predecessor, Hillary Clinton, came into office, she negotiated for herself 100 percent control over State Department appointments and largely kept Obama campaign officials at arms' length. Kerry has no such deal with the White House, and his office is only one voice in a White House-managed appointment process that is moving as slowly as molasses, several State Department officials and insiders say.
As Kerry prepares to travel to East Asia next week, his third major overseas adventure in his short time in Foggy Bottom, the most glaring opening at State is the post of assistant secretary for East Asian and Pacific affairs (EAP), which was vacated by Kurt Campbell in February. NSS Senior Director for Asia Danny Russel has been long assumed the leading contender, but Kerry is said to prefer a non-White House staffer. Meanwhile, Deputy Assistant Secretary Joe Yun has been running the EAP shop.
But the EAP is only one of nearly a dozen bureaus that are working without politically appointed leaders and there are several reports of angst that the vacancies are being left unfilled for so long.
Eh, I'm sure this will all work out once Caroline Kennedy is representing us in Japan.
Obama's 5 Percent Solution for the Sequester
Big question for the next news cycle: Is this covered as a bold, magnanimous, generous gesture on the part of our Munificent Sun God/President? Or does it get treated as a meaningless publicity stunt?
President Barack Obama will put 5% of his paycheck back into the federal government's coffers in a show of camaraderie with furloughed federal workers, a senior administration official said Wednesday.
Obama, whose $400,000 annual salary is set in law and can't officially be changed, will write a check made out to the U.S. treasury every month beginning in April. Since the mandatory across-the-board spending cuts went into effect March 1, his payment for that month will be paid retroactively.
Obama will give back five percent of all his paychecks from March to December, so we're talking about $16,666.66 or so. That amount would cover the costs of Air Force One in flight for about five and a half minutes.
President Obama has a net worth estimated between $2.6 million and $11.8 million; he makes $400,000 per year before taxes, lives rent free at the White House, pays absolutely nothing in official travel costs, and gets $169,000 to cover expenses, personal travel, and entertainment. The government pays for state dinners and other official functions, but the president pays for personal services like dry cleaning and food that he, his family, and personal guests consume.
But he's giving up about $1,666 per month, so, hey. Shared sacrifice!
President Barack Obama could be able to claim a tax break for his decision to return 5 percent of his salary to the government.
Obama is giving back part of his $400,000 in salary in solidarity with federal workers facing furloughs because of budget cuts in the sequestration of federal funds.
Voluntary payments to reduce the public debt can be taken as deductions for charitable contributions, according to the Congressional Research Service.
At the 39.6 percent top federal tax rate -- the one Obama insisted on last year -- the $20,000 deduction for this returned pay would put $7,920 in tax relief back in his pocket.
If this happens, the government would pay Obama, who would pay the government, which would then pay Obama.
Our New National Pastime: Giving Marital Advice to Strangers
Sometime when I wasn't looking, the national pastime became giving marital advice to strangers.
Susan Patton kicked up a firestorm with her letter last week to the editor of The Daily Princetonian urging female students to find a man to marry before they graduate because "the cornerstone of your future and happiness will be inextricably linked to the man you marry, and you will never again have this concentration of men who are worthy of you."
If only the Princeton alum's advice had come out 30 years earlier when I was in college, perhaps I could have avoided the costly mistake of focusing on what makes me come alive and then pursuing it for a living. Perhaps if I'd focused instead on nailing down a man by the time I was 22, I could be going to cocktail parties and co-opting my husband and children's successes, bragging about them as if they were my own, rather than being forced to talk about the current state of politics or what we can do as a society to engage the next generation in the struggles of today.
Perhaps, if I'd had Ms. Patton's wisdom and foresight about what really matters in college, I wouldn't have taken so many pesky classes, and instead concentrated on designing my hair, makeup, attire and personality to create the perfect man-catching machine.
Perhaps it would have all worked out exactly as Ms. Patton implies -- the perfect house, kids, husband and future. And yet I'm skeptical. I made a lot of stupid decisions in college; I'm really glad the choice of life partner wasn't one of them. How many people, do you think, could choose a tattoo at 22 years old and still be happy with it by the time they are 50? Let's be generous here: maybe a quarter of all people? And tattoos don't even talk.
CNN offers a bit more background on Patton and her argument:
Patton, who graduated from Princeton in 1977 and went on to run an executive coaching business in New York City, said she spent most of her twenties focused on her professional life. At 30, she married a man who did not go to Princeton.
She wrote that "ultimately, it will frustrate you to be with a man who just isn't as smart as you." The couple recently divorced.
"I wish I had ended up with a Princeton man," she said.
Is anyone else suddenly gripped with sympathy for that non-Princetonian ex-husband? During the marital troubles that led up to that divorce, how many times do you think he heard, "this never would have happened if I had married a Princeton man!"?
From preschool until your last day of college or graduate school, you're constantly surrounded by people who are around the same age as you. Then at some point you enter the working world, and suddenly the people you see every working day are in a much wider range of ages and mostly older, from the early 20s to the retirement age. Chances are, a good portion of the people you encounter will be married or in relationships. So if your mate is most likely to be around the same age as you, then yes, your prime opportunity to meet those mates will be when they're around you the most -- in your classes, in your dorm, hanging around the quad, and so on. But it's not like post-collegiate life is devoid of opportunities to meet potential spouses.
Of course, folks start coming "off the market" not that long after you enter the working world. Doesn't everyone have that one year where it seems like everyone you know is getting married? My year arrived when I was 27 going on 28, and most of those folks had been in a relationship for a couple of years before then.
There's a reason that "all the good ones are taken" is a cliché of romantic-comedy dialogue. Good mates are always in demand, and people who are attractive, charming, intelligent, caring, driven and successful, and so on are always going to have lots of people interested in them. (If I forgot any of your preferred criteria, put those in there.) Those who have some of those traits will have slightly fewer suitors, and those who have none of those traits will likely be single or available for a long time. So Patton's warning, to grab a good mate while you can find one, doesn't seem to be such bad advice, unless you're absolutely confident in your ability to find and attract a first-rate mate in your later years.
And yet everybody, regardless of marital status or happiness, feels comfortable telling others what they ought to do with what is probably one of the most important decisions of their lives. Over at Slate, Julia Shaw writes an essay entitled, "I got married at 23. What are the rest of you waiting for?" Amanda Marcotte characterizes her argument as "conservatives desperately try[ing] to bully women into younger marriage with a couple of promises and a whole lot of threats."
Why do we find it so hard to let people make their own decisions on this? Why can't we just accept that marrying young might be right for some people, and not right for other people?
Does anyone else find it ironic that we have Patton, a divorced woman, and Brazile, a woman who has never married (as far as I can tell in all of the profiles written about her) arguing about what makes happy marriages?
Then Brazile plays the "what about the gays?!?" card:
I find it refreshing that as the same-sex marriage debate swirls through society, Ms. Patton remains untouched in her heteronormativity. Does it even occur to her to question the premise that "the cornerstone" of a woman's future is finding a husband? No! Of course not! It simply must be. I haven't heard regressive rhetoric like this since I mistakenly tuned in Dr. Laura on the radio.
Really? Must all discussions about modern marriage include a "oh, and here's how it is for homosexuals" paragraph? Is it really so outrageous to write about opposite-sex marriages, and talk about the issues of what women look for in men, and men look for in women, and not address how things are in gay and lesbian relationships?
You know why magazine articles and books and blog posts and e-mail newsletter sections get written about this? Because everyone has an opinion on it.
A Debate on Fire about 'A Movement on Fire'
Here's the play-by-play on a controversy that's big in my conservative blogospheric world, but may or may not be a big deal in your world.
Ben Howe, Red State contributor and video producer, writes on BuzzFeed that a new production by the conservative nonprofit Tea Party Patriots, called "A Movement on Fire," "looks like it may do more harm than good" and contends that the "the dialogue is trite and the portrayals are robotic." He initially described the video as a trailer for a film in production; he later updated his piece that "Keili Carender, who was involved in the project, said there are no plans to turn the trailer into a feature-length film, and that it was intended primarily to draw attention during last month's CPAC."
You can watch the short video here and decide for yourself about its quality.
I guess because people liked what they saw, Howe felt some artistic sense of duty to strangle an allies [sic] project in the crib.
There are ways to make the general points Howe claims he wanted to make without isolating and holding up for public ridicule a conservative project you believe is a work-in-progress (a completed project is fair game). Over the three-plus years I ran Big Hollywood, many of our contributors managed to make these same points to right-of-center artists, but did so without using their superiority as a weapon against some poor unsuspecting ally.
(There appears to be continuing genuine confusion about whether this is a trailer for a future film, an uncompleted project, or a one-time trailer. Nolte later updates, "Please submit to me an early draft of anything you are working on -- be it a short video, novel, short story, blog post, feature film, song . . . whatever. And what I will do is summon 1500 words to 'review' it at BuzzFeed Politics -- or any other media outlet willing to twist it into an attack on the entire movement.")
Is it a betrayal for a conservative to write on BuzzFeed that another conservative's project stinks? Are conservatives only allowed to critique the work of other conservatives in certain approved publications? Or is the idea that we should always stand together in brotherhood, and insist that any work by a conservative is good?
ADDENDUM: I'm guessing the same groundhogs that predicted spring back in February spent their previous years calculating the rate of job creation under the 2009 stimulus.
Obama reminds 1 in 4 Americans of THIS Bible character
Twenty-five percent of Americans say they think they might know who the REAL Barack Obama is.
And it's something about a famous Bible personality that has tipped them off ...
I'm having to pinch myself today to make sure I'm not living in my own special Groundhog Day hell where every day is April 1.
Gets yours while they last!
How else to take the story that Lego is discontinuing a Jabba the Hutt palace set because the Turkish Cultural Association of Austria (!!) complained that the Lego set is raaaccciist. The Turkish Cultural Association of Austria?? Okay, I know the Turks rolled briefly through Vienna a few hundred years ago, leaving behind mostly coffee grounds, but if the TCAA really exists, wouldn't a complaint that decaf is racist degradation make more sense? From the story:
Kilic's organization argued earlier this year that the set resembled the a former mosque in Istanbul, the Jami al-Kabir mosque in Beirut and a minaret. Because Jabba The Hutt is a villain in the Star Wars films, the group claimed the alleged close resemblance reinforced negative stereotypes about Muslims. "This does not belong in children's bedrooms," Kilic told NBC. "And the minaret-like tower features machine guns. Children will become insensitive to violence and other cultures."
Oh-kay. But typical of the Hollywood racists to try to slip one by us fanboys. By the way, I still can't believe Star Trek has gotten away with Klingons all these years.
Calliope Wong, 17, a Connecticut senior who was born a male but has identified as female since adolescence, says Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts, twice opted not to read her application and returned it in the mail.
Calliope? I'm not even going to make the obvious jokes about steam pipe noise-makers here. That's just another job this American won't do. Naturally this good sense by the Smith admissions office has "prompted outcry."
Laurie Fenlason, Smith's vice president for public affairs, said the school does not comment on the status or admissibility of individual applicants. But she added, "Every application to Smith is treated on a case-by-case basis, and application materials must reflect female identity."
The truly absurd part here is that I'll bet there isn't a single person among the faculty or administration at Smith that could give a coherent reason why "application materials must reflect female identity," since it is likely their wymyn's studies courses and student indoctrination orientation sessions reinforce the idea that gender identity is "socially constructed." And since bathrooms are most definitely socially constructed, what's the problem so long as Calliope has had hisher ??? pipes re-tuned to the right pitch?
Turns out that may be the problem:
In Massachusetts and Wong's home state of Connecticut, a transgender person would need to have sex-reassignment surgery to change the legal sex on a birth certificate and thus amend a FAFSA [college application] form.
Wong has not undergone the costly reassignment procedure.
It might be cheaper to reconstruct some Smith bathrooms, no?
So pinch me again. It is still April Fools Day, right?
Last night I noted the absurd case of Colorado Congresswoman Diana DeGette, who has sponsored legislation to ban many, if not most, of the firearms magazines now sold in the United States, but does not know what a magazine is. Today it turned out that Barack Obama, who has campaigned tirelessly for gun control legislation over the last several months, doesn't know the first thing about firearms either. Daniel Halper noticed this transcript of Obama's speech at a fundraiser yesterday in San Francisco on the White House's web site:
Now, over the next couple of months, we've got a couple of issues: gun control. (Applause.) I just came from Denver, where the issue of gun violence is something that has haunted families for way too long, and it is possible for us to create common-sense gun safety measures that respect the traditions of gun ownership in this country and hunters and sportsmen, but also make sure that we don't have another 20 children in a classroom gunned down by a semiautomatic weapon - by a fully automatic weapon in that case, sadly.
This is painfully elementary: all of the weapons that reportedly were used by Adam Lanza were semiautomatic. Possession of a fully automatic weapon requires a special license from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms. It has never been reported that Lanza's mother had such a license or owned any fully automatic firearms. Nor is there any apparent reason why local law enforcement authorities would conceal the use of a fully automatic weapon, if that had been the case. No: Barack Obama is one more example of a gun-control advocate who has no idea what he is talking about. One of the reasons why the current gun control campaign has fallen so flat is, I think, that it has been apparent to many people that the gun control advocates are generally ignorant of the subject matter.
Jack Pardee died earlier this week. I remember Pardee not just for his great play for the Washington Redskins and his solid stint as our coach, but also for his remarkable football life - as rich as any I can think of.
That football life began playing six-man football for a small Texas high school (Pardee also worked in the oil fields throughout high school to help support his family). The next stop was Texas A&M, where Paul "Bear" Bryant was building his program.
Pardee was one of the "Junction Boys," the legendary collection of players who survived the hell Bryant put 100 prospects through, in the heat of Junction, Texas, to find out, as Pardee put it, "who wanted to pay the price to not only play football, but to win." Only 35 players passed that test. The ordeal became the basis for a made-for-TV movie starring Tom Berenger as the legendary coach Bryant
Pardee went on to become an All-American and co-captain of Texas A&M during the 1956 season. That team went 9-0-1 and was ranked No. 5 nationally in the AP poll.
Pardee, an outside linebacker, played most of his pro career for the Los Angeles Rams. After nine seasons, he missed the 1965 campaign due to life-threatening cancer. Pardee returned in 1966 and turned in five more seasons for the Rams.
In 1971, former Rams coach George Allen brought Pardee to Washington as part of his "Over the Hill Gang" (there's no truth to the rumor that John McCain and Lindsey Graham were part of it). Pardee captained the defense, which was Allen's core unit and the main reason why, after year of futility, the Skins made it to the playoffs in 1971 and to the Super Bowl the following season.
Pardee was 35 years old when he came to Washington. Nonetheless, he was selected for the Pro Bowl in 1971. That year, in my view, Pardee played outside linebacker as well as I've seen it played by a Washington Redskin. That includes Chris Hanburger, the Hall of Famer who played the other outside backer position in 1971-72.
Pardee, so obviously born to coach, began that portion of his career with the old World Football League in 1974. His first team made it to the championship game, which it lost by a point.
This earned Pardee the head coaching job with the Chicago Bears. In 1977, he led that struggling franchise to its first playoff appearance in 14 years.
When the Redskins ousted George Allen, Pardee was the natural choice to replace his former coach. Unfortunately, the team he inherited was aging and not exactly flush with draft picks, given Allen's propensity to trade them.
Pardee's first Redskins team went 8-8. But the next season, 1979, the Skins were on their way to an 11-5 record, the division championship, and a home field playoff game. All they needed to do was hold a 13 point lead in the late going of the season finale against the hated Dallas Cowboys.
Shockingly, they failed to do so. A fumble by one of Washington's most sure-handed runners did us in. There would be no division crown and no playoff game, home or away.
Pardee's final season in Washington was a disaster. The next year, he would be out. The Joe Gibbs era was upon us.
But Pardee was not without influence on this, the brightest era in Redskins history. Richie Petibon - Pardee's friend, former teammate with the Rams and Redskins, and the Redskins defensive coordinator under Pardee - would run the defense under Gibbs. And those underrated, mostly no-name defenses would play their part in bringing three Super Bowl victories to Washington.
Meanwhile, Pardee was far from finished as a head coach. In 1984, he returned to Texas to coach the Houston Gamblers of the USFL. Pardee installed an potent, innovative offense called the "Run and Shoot" with Jim Kelly at the helm.
Despite being an expansion team, the Gamblers finished the regular season with the best record in their conference. In the playoffs, Pardee went head-to-head with his old mentor George Allen, and his star-laden Arizona Wranglers. The Gamblers led 16-3 with only 7 minutes remaining, but lost 17-16 following a furious Wrangler comeback.
Thus, Pardee suffered a galling defeat similar to that inflicted by the Cowboys in 1979. An even more galling loss lay in the future.
The Gamblers made the playoffs again in 1985 and, after some great personnel moves, were poised (now as the New Jersey Generals) for a huge 1986 season. However, the USFL folded before Pardee's Generals could take the field.
In 1987, Pardee moved into college coaching, as head coach of the University of Houston. Shortly after his arrival, the program was hit with NCAA sanctions due to violations committed under the previous coach. But the sanctions didn't prevent Pardee from compiling a fine 22-11-1 record in three years with the Cougars. And under Pardee, Andre Ware became the first ever African-American quarterback to win the Heisman Trophy.
In 1990, Pardee returned to the NFL as head coach of the Houston Oilers. Led by Warren Moon, his Oiler teams made the playoffs in each of his first four years.
But Pardee's tenure with the Oilers is probably best remembered for a playoff loss to Buffalo in which the Oilers were the victims of the biggest comeback in NFL history. Early in the third quarter of that January 1993 contest, Houston led 35-3. But the Bills rallied to win in overtime, 41-38. You can read about this amazing game here.
After a terrible start to the 1994 season, Pardee resigned. But he wasn't finished. In 1995, he coached in the Canadian Football League. The twist was that he coached the Birmingham Barracudas, part of the CFL's attempt to expand into the U.S.
The Barracudas folded after one season. Naturally, Pardee guided them to the playoffs that season.
From 6-man football; to the Junction Boys; to an All-American college career; to a Pro Bowl NFL career; to mostly successful coaching stints in the NFL, the WFL, the USFL, the CFL, and college - as I said, Pardee's football life was as rich as any I can think of.
I want to second Steve's thoughts about Kim Jong Un and North Korea. The recent words and moves by North Korea strike me as saber rattling for a purpose (or, more likely, purposes). One purpose, as Steve says, is to obtain new concessions from the U.S. Another purpose may well be to shore up the dictator's standing with the military.
It has been reported that Kim Jong Un has turned to an "economic reformer" to try and boost the North Korean economy. It's anyone's guess as to what constitutes an economic reformer in the context of North Korea (the concept probably has less reality than a moderate jihadist). But if Kim Jong Un is perceived in his country as flirting with economic reform, then he may need to offset the heresy by asserting himself on the world stage.
I always viewed Kim Jong Ill, the current tyrant's father, as a classic late Communist, conservative dictator interested above all in clinging to power. As such, he was unlikely to take action that might put his regime at risk, and extremely unlikely to put his physical well-being (and sex-life) at risk. Accordingly, it seemed almost unimaginable that Kim Jong Ill would start a war. The risk his North Korea posed lay in the transfer of nuclear technology to other hostile forces.
It's certainly possible that Kim Jong Un is less conservative than his father was. But he'd have to be crazy to start a war. Putting Dennis Rodman to one side, I see no evidence that the North Korean dictator is irrational. As Steve explained, the dictator's conduct can more plausibly be viewed as shrewd.
Obama's response also seems shrewd. As with Kim Jong Un, Obama's foreign policy is mostly about his domestic policy. Above all, he wants to avoid monumental events that might undercut the popularity he must maintain to be a transformative president. In addition, when the cost is low, he would like to appear tough enough towards certain adversaries to gain "extra credit" with the American public.
Uniquely among enemy foreign states, North Korea presents the prospect, however remote, of inflicting direct, devastating military damage on portions of our homeland. Talk about a monumentally tragic event. That's why Steve's prediction of another appeasement deal is reasonable.
But North Korea also presents Obama with the opportunity to pick up "extra credit" by talking up the threat and making showy moves in response. I'm for Obama's showy moves. And talking up the threat, as opposed to being dismissive (the administration's initial reaction), might help Kim Jong Un obtain domestic mileage from the latest drama, thus satisfying the dictator.
But, as Steve suggests, if the North Korean threat is serious, the best response is a preemptive strike, not the current dance. For what it's worth, I just don't think the threat is serious.
We conclude our preview of the new issue of the Claremont Review of Books this morning with a humdinger. Thanks to our friends at the CRB for the privilege of previewing the issue for Power Line readers. Please think about subscribing here for the ridiculously low price of $19.95 and getting access to the whole shooting match online immediately in addition to home delivery of the hard copy at some time in the indefinite future courtesy of the United States Postal Service. Limited to three pieces from this magnificent issue, we have passed over a wealth of riches that will delight and inform the intelligent reader.
What's with the accelerating evolution of public opinion on gay marriage? Weekly Standard senior editor Christopher Caldwell addresses the question more elegantly than I have stated it in "Gay Rites."Caldwell hangs an argument concerning freedom and the formation of public opinion on a critical review of Harvard law professor Michael J. Klarman's From the Closet to the Altar: Courts, Backlash, and the Struggle for Same-Sex Marriage.
The backlash of Klarman's subtitle refers to the perceived threat to the gay agenda of voters rescinding judicially decreed gains. The anti-democratic sneer implied in this usage is of a piece with the campaign of intimidation waged by the forces of supposed enlightenment over the past decade.
For a movement claiming to seek liberation (Caldwell has his doubts), the movement has proven itself rather comfortable with the suppression of dissent. "The most troubling aspect of the gay-marriage movement," writes Caldwell, "is that, more than any social movement in living memory...it aims not to engage in lively debate but to shut it down. Scurrility has become a norm. In April 2009, Miss California, Carrie Prejean, told a Miss America judge she thought marriage should be between a man and a woman and got called a 'dumb bitch' for it on the judge's website. If it is now easier to call people dumb bitches, then it makes no sense at all to extol the gay marriage movement as a moral advance."
Wisconsin Welfare Reform Promotes Self-Sufficiency by Rachel Sheffield, Policy Analyst at The Heritage Foundation
Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker (R) says welfare dependence is no measure of success when it comes to helping the poor.
"Sadly, there are some in our nation's capital who measure success in government by how many are dependent on the government," said the governor. "Our mindset in Wisconsin is a sharp contrast.... We measure true compassion by helping people no longer require the assistance of the government."
That's why Wisconsin will reform the food stamps program to require work for able-bodied recipients.
Food stamp rolls have swelled nationally, with spending doubling in the past four years. Part of the reason for the growth is connected to President Barack Obama waiving the (small) work requirement in food stamps, which requires able-bodied adults to work or prepare for work in exchange for receiving benefits.
According to the governor's plan, able-bodied adult recipients without young children would be required to work or participate in job training for 20 hours a week in order to receive food stamp benefits:
Previously, Wisconsin was one of 46 states receiving a waiver from a federal requirement for food stamp recipients to get job skills. However, we think it is an important investment in the future's of these individuals and our state.
Work requirements for able-bodied individuals should be at the foundation of welfare. This policy establishes the principle of work and promotes personal responsibility and self-sufficiency.
Tragically, the vast majority of the federal government's 80-plus welfare programs include no work requirement at all, and the Obama Administration has been diligently toiling to remove work requirements from those programs that do include them.
In 2009, Obama suspended food stamp work requirements as part of his stimulus package. That suspension was supposed to end in September 2010, but his next two budgets requested that the suspension continue. Rather than waiting for Congress to act, however, the Administration simply began allowing states to waive the work requirement.
To make matters worse, last summer the Administration issued another policy to waive the work requirements from the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program, which was created by the1996 welfare reform law.
Self-sufficiency for those who are able should be the goal of welfare assistance. "It is important to give temporary hand up to those in need, but for those who are able, we should not provide a permanent hand out."
"Our goal is simple: transition people from government dependence to true independence," said Walker.
Total federal and state welfare spending has increased more than 16-fold since 1964. Even since the 1996 welfare reform replaced Aid to Families with Dependent Children with the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program, spending has increased by 76 percent and by more than 20 percent since 2008.
DeVos Center for Religion and Civil Society at The Heritage Foundation
Founded in 1973, The Heritage Foundation is the nation's most broadly supported public policy organization. Heritage established the DeVos Center for Religion and Civil Society in 2004 to educate government officials, the media and the public about the role religion, family, and civil society play in sustaining freedom and the common good.
This is an important week for The Heritage Foundation. Not only are we celebrating our 40th anniversary of advancing principled conservative reforms, but we're also honoring Ed Feulner's 36 years of leadership as president and welcoming Sen. Jim DeMint as his successor.
Heritage Foundation Trustee Kay Coles James narrates a new video celebrating The Heritage Foundation's 40 years of advancing conservative principles.
The video was shown to members of Heritage's President's Club Tuesday night at the Annual Leadership Celebration and President's Club Meeting in Washington.
Share your memories of Heritage through the years here.
Retiring Heritage Foundation President Ed Feulner sent a powerful e-mail to members and supporters Wednesday, his last day as president:
In this last note as your Heritage president, I challenge conservative thinkers, here at The Heritage Foundation and elsewhere, to come up with solutions to strengthen the family, civil society, and our nation. I know they will come up with far better solutions than the progressives who, when they see a problem, automatically turn to the government.
Our Founders bequeathed to us the principles and the culture of a self-governing republic. They created the first experiment in leaving people free to live their lives as they wish as long as they don't infringe on the freedoms of others. They believed in coming together voluntarily to solve common problems under the rule of law. Their vision was a country of faith, family, and free enterprise.
It's been my honor and my joy to fight alongside you in order to secure America's blessings for future generations. The battle continues with Jim DeMint as your president. Please join me in giving him, and Heritage, our full and enduring support.
His successor, Jim DeMint, outlined his plans and vision for America in a separate e-mail today:
Heritage has always believed the values that made America great-honesty, industriousness, courage, determination-should inform our policies and our public institutions. We must never forget the ideas and principles that made America the strongest and most prosperous nation in history.
Our principles will stay the same, but we will constantly need innovative policy ideas to address our nation's new problems. Heritage's experts and researchers are busy every day working out solutions to our myriad national challenges. We don't need new principles. Our values have stood the test of time. It's important that we draw this distinction between timeless values that have been with us for centuries and new policies that we will need in the 21st Century.
"There will be plenty of revenue coming into Washington over the next 10 years," Dubay explains. "Additional tax hikes would not address the problem of excessive spending but instead give more money to Congress and President Obama to spend."
And tax increases would slow economic growth and limit opportunity.
In the latest development in its long history of belligerence, North Korea is threatening preemptive nuclear attacks against the U.S.
Unfortunately, cuts to defense may limit America's ability to deter or defend against attack, The Heritage Foundation's Nick Zahn writes. "The bottom line," he explains, "is that as U.S. capability erodes, warfighters will be unable to provide the necessary credible deterrence to maintain peace-not just on the Korean peninsula, but elsewhere in the world where the U.S. has critical national interests. Nor in a conflict will they be assured victory with the least possible U.S. and allied casualties."
But the communist government isn't just a threat to other countries. It's a threat to its own people. Read more here.
Today: President of union of immigration enforcement agents warns: Unless all enforcement is implemented first, any amnesty will lead to 10-20 million more illegal aliens coming in
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Rasmussen poll finds most Americans agree with ICE union president
Two big developments to repor t. Both make clearer a strong reason why a comprehensive bill won't pass this year (if we keep the pressure on):
The legislation being prepared by Senate & House "Gangs of Eight" behind closed doors fundamentally fails to account for the public's colossal mistrust of government to ever enforce immigration laws.
The selling point for "comprehensive immigration reform" is that this would be the last amnesty because the enforcement provisions in the bill will stop future illegal immigration.
But the public doesn't buy that.
Rasmussen's new poll found that only 9% of likely voters think it is very likely that the "federal government would actually secure the border and prevent illegal immigration" if Congress passes comprehensive immigration reform and legalizes 11 million illegal aliens.
The lack of trust in the government is shared by the head of the union that represents the government's agents who are the ones charged with actually enforcing immigration laws.
"Here's my promise for America, if we don't take care of the enforcement side of this first, it will never happen.
"The only thing that will happen will be that 11 million illegal aliens will be legalized and 10-20 years from now the nation will again be facing the influx of 10-20 million illegal aliens and all the problems and expenses that come with that."
It isn't that Crane doesn't believe in the men and women agents he represents. But he has complained repeatedly that their bosses in the Department of Homeland Security have ordered the agents NOT to enforce the immigrat ion laws that Congress has passed.
Boiled down, his message seems to be: Until you see the laws actually enforced, don't believe any promises that they will be enforced in the future.
Send This Message To Congress
Make sure every member knows what the union chief said and what Rassmussen polling found.
Even Senators who are on the fence or leaning toward legalizing all the illegal aliens have to be confronted with near certainty that if they give legalization before fully implementing enforcement, the enforcement is not going to happen.
Send these free faxes that urge postponing comprehensive amnesty bills until enforcement has been proven.
GANG OF EIGHT INSISTS ON LEGALIZATION BEFORE ENFORCEMENT -- A CLEAR REASON TO KILL BILL
On Sunday, Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) said on NBC's "Meet the Press:"
"We've come to a basic agreement, which is that first, people will be legalized. . . .Then, we will make sure the border is secure."
Schumer is the same politician who promised in 1986 that after giving that first-ever amnesty to illegal aliens enforcement would stop most future illegal immigration.
By the year 2000, there had been seven amnesties. None was ever followed by securing the border, by cutting off the jobs magnet or by tracking the tens of millio ns of foreign visitors each year.
There is no reason to believe enforcement would follow an amnesty this time, said Chris Crane, president of the National ICE Council, in his call with journalists.
The fact that Schumer and the Senate Gang of Eight are insistent that illegal aliens get legalized and get a work permit immediately with only the promise that enforcement will come later should be proof enough that the legislation can't be trusted.
Another reason not to trust the Gang of Eight is that it has refused to meet with ICE Agents during the writing of enforcement legislation. Of course, those Senators have been meeting constantly with leaders of the organizations that have fought every enforcement effort.
IF THERE IS AN AMNESTY, IT HAS TO FOLLOW FULL ENFORCEMENT, POLL FINDS AMERICANS SAYING
The new poll from Rasmussen asks a question about legalization that is somewhat unfair in that it doesn't offer a choice between legalization and some practical alternative.
And it asks the question with a huge assumption in it.
Here's the question:
"A comprehensive immigration reform plan has been proposed that would secure the border and prevent future illegal immigration. As part of the plan, those who entered the country illegally but have otherwise obeyed the law, would be given legal status to stay in the United States. If you knew that that the border would really be secured to prevent future illegal immigration, would you favor or oppose this plan?"
Whew! That's a mouthful.
With that wording and with no other option offered, 59% said they would favor such a plan.
But here's the big catch:
Rasmussen asked ONLY those who said they would support the plan whether legalization could happen first or if it had to wait until after enforcement. This was the result:
26% chose that "those who are now in this country illegally be granted legal status right away."
64% chose that legal status should "come only after the border is secured."
In other words of the people who said they could go along with legalization of illegal aliens, two thirds of them said only after enforcement.
Only one out of four supporters of legalization agree with Sen. Schumer's insistence that the enforcement happen after giving 11 million illegal aliens legal status, work permits, travel documents, etc.
It is most important that all opponents of comprehensive amnesty emphasize in every setting that the legislation gives out most of the goodies before dealing with the lack of enforcement that created the illegal immigration problem in the first place.
Rasmussen also asked:
"If a law was passed to secure the border, prevent future illegal immigration and allow those who entered the country illegally to stay, how likely is it that the federal government would actually secure the border and prevent illegal immigration?
9% said "very likely"
29% said "somewhat likely"
36% said "not very likely"
17% said "not at all likely"
And that is their reaction to a law that stated its purpose as preventing future illegal immigration!
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Ryan took a stand! So did we! And now...you can too!
April 4, 2013
Dear ##FirstName[AFA Supporter]##,
Ryan Rotela a is student at Florida Atlantic University and when one of his professors told him and his classmates to write the name "Jesus" on a sheet of paper, put it on the floor and stomp on it Ryan said, "NO!"
He took a stand! And after first threatening to expel him, university officials backed down completely and apologized to Ryan.
What happened to Ryan Rotela is an all too common occurrence in today's classrooms.
And because it is, AFA is helping lead the fight to protect students from the kind of anti-Christian bigotry Ryan Rotela was forced to endure.
But we need you to now get personally involved in protecting our children from the intimidation of teachers who mistakenly violate the religious rights of students.
Specifically, I'm calling on you to personally take up the issue in your state.
Not a week goes by, it seems, without an incident of a Christian student being persecuted by a teacher or school administrator for daring to publicly express his Christian beliefs or practice his faith.
Most of these students are either too young or uncertain of their rights to stand up for themselves when bullied by teachers in the classroom.
Recognizing this, the people of Mississippi decided to take concrete actions to protect students' religious rights. Specifically, they banded together and supported their lawmakers as they passed the Student Religious Liberties Act of 2013.
This is a landmark piece of legislation because it empowers students to exercise their constitutionally guaranteed religious liberty while freeing school administrators - who are considered "government employees" - from having to police religion.
In a nutshell, the Student Religious Liberties Act:
Protects the right of a student to express a religious viewpoint.
Protects the right of a student to include religious content in coursework, art work, written or oral assignments.
Protects the right of students to form religious clubs or engage in religious activities at school on the same basis permitted for other non-curricular student groups or activities.
Guarantees that students may wear clothing or jewelry that displays religious messages or symbols to the same extent that other types of clothing or jewelry displaying messages are permitted.
Requires the school create a limited public forum for student speakers at all school events at which the school authorizes a student to speak publically (such as graduation and football games).
That's what Governor Phil Bryant just signed into law in Mississippi! And that's the kind of law you can get your state governor to sign, too!
Will you help get the Student Religious Rights Act passed in your state?
An atheist group that tried to block the display of a Ground Zero Memorial Cross in a collection of 9/11 artifacts, is determined to fight a U.S. District judge's decision that the cross-shaped steel beam found in the rubble at the site of the World Trade Center was "non-religious" and thus didn't infringe on their right to believe in Nothing.
While many non-aligned atheists have expressed their non-concern with display of the Cross, American Atheists, Inc. dismisses these people as "non-practicing Atheists" or "secularized secularists" who don't take their non-religious beliefs seriously.
Obama: Constitution 'Constrains' Me By Ben Shapiro If Americans weren't afraid of government violation of rights before President Obama spoke about guns this week, they should be now. This is a president who cannot understand or willfully ignores the notion of tyrannical government.
Minority Student Needs By Walter E. Williams Craig Frisby, a professor at the University of Missouri, has written a book called "Meeting the Psychoeducational Needs of Minority Students." It provides more evidence that the actions of soft-minded, guilty white liberals have done far more harm to black people than racists of the past could have ever done.
I've been out on vacation this week with the family visiting friends and working with the American Dream Labs team on The Man in the Moon. I have some exciting updates that I'll share with you Monday on the radio show. But I wanted to write you all a note to just say "Thank you" to everyone who has participated in our "Get TheBlaze" campaign over the past few weeks and encourage you to keep making your voice heard. I'd also like to ask those of you who haven't contacted your TV provider to take a few minutes today and make your voice heard by requesting that TheBlaze be added to your channel lineup.
We've had 97,000 people contact their TV providers via e-mail, 43,000 place phone calls, and countless numbers of posts on Facebook and Twitter. Those are incredible numbers, and I'm so very blessed to have such an actively engaged audience.
Just last week, we announced four new TV providers that have listened to YOU, their customers, and added TheBlaze to their channel lineup: Blue Ridge Communications (the nation's 21st largest cable operator), BEK Communications, Sweetwater Cable Television and Atwood Cable. Those are just the first wave of new providers, and I'm excited that they've joined DISH Network in giving their customers the choice of TheBlaze.
In addition to the four new providers, there is some movement with other groups interested in adding TheBlaze. Unfortunately, my staff has sworn me to secrecy - and are most likely reading this e-mail now to make sure I don't slip up - but we are making some movement with other providers and it is truly all because of your phone calls, e-mails, tweets, and Facebook posts.
Letter continues after the jump...
And yet, despite your phone calls, there are still some out there who are not listening. On Facebook, most of the major TV providers are delivering generic responses and links off their page to make sure your messages don't go viral. Meanwhile, the Executive team at TheBlaze, who are working day and night to get our channel into your homes, are being told that there isn't enough interest or they aren't looking to add any new channels until at least 2015.
Look, I'm behind a microphone three hours every morning having a conversation with an audience of millions. I think if I gave responses like that to the people who were investing their time and their money into my product and my company I would be left on a street corner speaking into a tin cup.
I've always said that I have one of the best audiences in the world, and that's because we treat one another with mutual respect and we are working together, you and I, toward a common goal: The restoration of America and everything that made it great. Everything I do, I do it because I want to reconnect us all with the things that made this country great. The things that made us good. And TheBlaze is going to be play a big role in how I personally will do this. Everyone has their role to play in life, their own way that they will contribute to this common goal. This is mine.
But I need your help, because only YOU can make these giant media companies pay attention.
Here are three ways that you can help us get the attention of these TV providers:
Call 1-800-996-2529. We will connect you directly to your cable company. By far, this is the most impactful thing you can do because it directly impacts their bottom line and you'll be dealing directly with an employee of your TV provider.
Post a message on your TV providers Facebook page. We've got a list of links to most of them HERE. This is a way to publicly show your support for TheBlaze and a way to spread the message to other people and get them to join our cause.
Send an e-mail. We've made it quick and easy, just click HERE and we'll help you make your voice heard in just a few minutes.
Let's show them that there is demand for a network that deals in truth and that there are people out there in the country who want another option than what is currently being offered by CNN, MSNBC, Al Jazeera America, and all the rest.
Again, and I cannot say it enough, thank you for your dedication and your support.
Laus Deo,
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A New York father has had his firearms all but confiscated after the Suffolk County Pistol License Bureau suspended his pistol license indefinitely over a perceived threat made by his 10-year-old son and two of his classmates at school.
Gun Control can be Passed Only
Following the Memorial Mass, there will be the Terri Schiavo Life & Hope Network's Award Gala, currently scheduled to begin at 6:30 p.m. with a cocktail reception. This dinner gala will be held at the Philadelphia Marriott Downtown, located at 1201 Market Street in Philadelphia. The first "Terri Schiavo Life & Hope Award" will be presented.
Glenn: Help us get in millions of home
American Policy Center has recently released a booklet that explains everything you need to know to start fighting back against sustainable programs both locally and nationally. The booklet is called Special Report: Agenda 21 and How to Stop It and is available in the APC store for only $5.95.
OK....when they look at you like you have a tin foil hat on your head......take some of this information with you. It is 126 pages. I have not read through the entire document (YET) but what I have read is enough to blow off the top of your head. I have highlighted some stuff. KIPP (Charter Schools) has a CHARACTER REPORT CARD on Page 39. So for now start on page 39 and work your way through to page 45. Remember 
Send This Message To Congress
But we need you to now get personally involved in protecting our children from the intimidation of teachers who mistakenly violate the religious rights of students.
An atheist group that tried to block the display of a 
Hello America,
