[VIDEO] DHS has no record of State Dept. giving info for Clinton server audit, despite rules

The State Department does not appear to have submitted legally required information regarding Hillary Clinton's secret computer server to the Department of Homeland Security during her term as secretary, FoxNews.com has learned. 

All federal government agencies are mandated to submit a list of systems, vulnerabilities and configuration issues to DHS every 30 days. The department then performs a "cyberscope audit" to ensure security, a responsibility the agency has had since 2010. 

FoxNews.com learned of the lapse as a result of a Freedom of Information Act request submitted June 11. It is not clear if State Department officials in charge of compliance with the DHS audits knew of their boss's server, which has been shown to have included "top secret" information in emails. 

Clinton headed the agency from 2009-2013. The DHS established the "Continuous Diagnostics and Mitigation" program in 2010, amid growing concerns government systems could be vulnerable to cyber attack. But Clinton's computer server, through which she and key aides sent and received tens of thousands of emails, was apparently never audited, according to DHS, which conducted a comprehensive search of Office of Cyber Security and Communications records after FoxNews.com lodged its request. 

"Unfortunately, we were unable to locate or identify any responsive records," wrote Sandy Ford Page, chief of Freedom of Information Act operations for DHS. 

The revelation means DHS never audited Clinton's server, and the State Department allowed Clinton to operate outside the federal mandate aimed at hardening defenses in federal networks, one cyber expert told Fox News. 

The State Department has not provided a substantive response to a similar FOIA submitted by FoxNews.com in early June. 

The State Department did not comment on media requests about why it did not comply with the DHS security review requirement. 

"There are reviews and investigations under way, including by the IG and Congress," said State Department Spokesman Alec Gerlach. "It would not be appropriate to comment on these matters at this time." 

Denver-based Platte River Networks upgraded and maintained the server Clinton shares with her husband, former President Bill Clinton, after she left the State Department. 

The company is not on the list of contractors approved by the Pentagon's Defense Security Service, the only federal agency with the authority to review and approve private contractors. The department administers the National Industrial Security Program on behalf of the Pentagon and 30 other federal agencies, including the State Department. About 13,000 companies have received clearance. 

"But Platte River is not one of them," a spokesman for the DSS told Fox News. "As Platte River Networks is not a cleared facility under the National Industrial Security Program, DSS has no cognizance over the facility and cannot comment further." 

Clinton, the leading contender for the 2016 Democratic presidential nomination, and the State Department have been under fire in recent months after it was revealed Clinton had a "homebrew" server and private Blackberry system that could have left classified or sensitive government data open to hackers. 

Clinton maintains her use of a private email server was allowed under government regulations and her system was secure. 

But this followed the news Clinton wiped her server of some 31,000 private email messages, turning over just 30,000 hard copies of her emails to the State Department amid a congressional investigation into her actions during the Sept. 11, 2012 attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, where four U.S. personnel including the U.S. ambassador to Libya were killed. 

While Clinton has maintained that she neither sent nor received information marked classified on her private server or Blackberry, Reuters reported last week that dozens of emails that passed through Clinton's server while she was secretary of state, under the U.S. government's own regulations, were automatically considered classified. 

That includes 30 email threads starting as early as 2009, which contained information on foreign governments, Reuters said. 

The FBI has opened an investigation to determine whether or not Clinton's private email server was secure and if classified material was improperly shared or stored on the Clintons' private email account. 

A federal court hearing last week only added to the intrigue. The State Department asserted in a court filing that it did not give personal electronic devices to Clinton and may have destroyed the smartphones of her top aides, Huma Abedin and Cheryl Mills. 

"If the State Department was not providing secure email devices to Mrs. Clinton, who was? Best Buy? Target? Mrs. Clinton clearly did whatever she wanted, without regard to national security or federal records keeping laws," said Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton, who took the State Department to court over its lack of disclosure on the email and server issues.

Via: Fox News

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A college student literally just redefined what it means to be ‘nude’

What’s “nude” mean to you?

Until recently, anyone searching the Merriam-Webster dictionary for the word would have come across the following.

• having no clothes on
• of or involving people who have no clothes on
• having the color of a white person’s skin

To Luis Torres, the third definition wasn’t just wrong. It was racist: a “micro aggression” toward people of color.

So Torres, an incoming sophomore at Ithaca College, started an Internet campaign called Nude Awakening to shame Merriam-Webster and coax it into changing its entry.

“This is something small that most white people, myself included, take for granted,” he told Mic.com. “I started doing research around Band-Aids, which led to nude fashion, which led to me discovering the Merriam-Webster definition of nude. It blew my mind that an academic source was perpetuating this same racism.”

[Columbia students claim Greek mythology needs a trigger warning]

On July 14, a.k.a. National Nude Day, Torres urged people to “demand Merriam-Webster Dictionary change its racist definition of the word ‘nude.'”

More than 800 responded, flooding the dictionary’s entry with angry comments and attacking Merriam-Webster on Twitter.

“Hey @Merriam-Webster Dictionary, did you know you’re the only dictionary with a racist definition of the word ‘nude’?” many of the critics wrote. “Remove the third definition from this word to get with the times. #NudeAwakening”

Others tailored the message to fit their own personal fury.

“This is disgusting,” one woman wrote. “Nude is a state of being, not a skin tone.”

“Now, black models were a leap forward, but NUDE black models?! That must be, frankly, impossible,” wrote another woman. “It’s most certainly never happened. Defining ‘nude’ to specifically be the color of a white person’s skin is pure bigotry and is plain offensive. How can you define a shade as another’s individualized flesh tone when there’s not even a concrete definition of WHAT a white person’s coloring is?”

Via: Washington Post

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[VIDEO] OBAMA LEAVING FOR LAS VEGAS AS STOCK MARKET CRASHES

President Obama returned from his Martha’s Vineyard vacation to Washington D.C. last night, only to wake up to negative headlines about the stock market crashing, partially in reaction to financial troubles in China.

But the president won’t be in the White House to see the market close. Later this afternoon he will board Air Force One for a trip to Las Vegas where he is expected to make a speech at the National Clean Energy Summit to promote his stiff regulatory policy on power plant emissions.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average fell more than 1,000 points after it opened this morning, suggesting another frightening close for markets at the end of the day.

Later this evening President Obama has scheduled a fundraiser for the Nevada State Democratic Party and Catherine Cortez Masto, the Democratic candidate hoping to replace retiring  Sen. Harry Reid (D-NV)

Via: Breitbart

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States Using Obamacare Dollars to Fill Budget Holes Instead of to Fund Child Health Programs

In March 2010, while the details of Obamacare were still being hammered out, Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Cali.) famously declared to a frustrated and bewildered American public, “But we have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it away from the fog of the controversy.”

Congress did pass Obamacare, and citizens and states have steadily been finding out what’s actually in the legislation ever since.

One of the recent “finds” includes a provision that will shift to the federal government a significant amount of the financial burden previously placed on states for the funding of the Children’s Health Insurance Program.

CHIP, formerly called the State Children’s Health Insurance Program, was created as part of the Balanced Budget Act of 1997 to help states provide insurance for children in low-income households who are not eligible for Medicaid. According to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, an estimated 8.1 million children were enrolled in CHIP in fiscal year 2014.

To help offset the expected growing costs of Obamacare to the states, legislators included a provision in Obamacare that shifts all or nearly all of the CHIP burden to the federal government, beginning this year.Sarah Ferris reports in The Hill that under Obamacare, states will not pay more than 12 percent of CHIP expenses, and 11 states plus Washington, D.C. will not contribute anything. In previous years, federal contributions to CHIP amounted to 65–83 percent.

Shifting the CHIP burden to the federal government could free up as much as $6 billion for states over two years. Special-interest groups and advocacy organizations say the increased federal funding should only be used to improve CHIP, but instead of expanding or shoring up CHIP programs, many states are choosing to use those dollars to help fill budget holes completely unrelated to health care.

Via: The Blaze

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Kentucky Chuck E. Cheese refuses to serve police officer with firearm

A Kentucky Chuck E. Cheese appears to have taken the kid-friendly chain’s “no guns” policy too far, refusing to serve a police officer who entered the restaurant with a firearm.

The gun-toting officer encountered the problem at the Chuck E. Cheese in the Greenwood Mall in the city of Bowling Green, prompting outrage from some people, including a sheriff from a neighboring jurisdiction, WBKO-TV reported Friday.

"I was upset,” Edmonson County Sheriff Shane Doyle told the station. “I was shocked for that officer and also for all the patrons there because you know if you have an obvious police officer and they're wearing police clothing, then I don't understand what the problem would be having someone like that with the training and experience of a police officer [coming] into an establishment."

Chuck E. Cheese’s national headquarters called the situation an unfortunate misunderstanding.

"Our firearms policy does not apply to officers in uniform. We do have a no firearms policy for civilians and off-duty non-uniformed officers, but officers in uniform are always welcome to bring in their firearms," Chuck E. Cheese spokeswoman Alexis Lynn told the station.

But what constitutes a uniform? The officer refused entry was wearing a marked police polo shirt.

Doyle said that shouldn't have been an issue.

"I've seen Bowling Green officers in polos many times in my history working in law enforcement, and obviously I recognize that person as a sworn employee," he said.

Besides, the sheriff said, Kentucky state law permits police officers to carry their weapon in most locations regardless of whether they were on duty or not.

"The state law allows us to carry concealed anywhere in the state of Kentucky except for federal buildings, that's basically the only place," he said.

Doyle told the station he still plans to take his family to the Bowling Green Chuck E. Cheese, but he added that everybody “needs to understand that somebody who is trained and qualified to carry a weapon, they’re there to help people.” 

Via: Fox News

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[VIDEO] S. Korea slams North over submarine, artillery deployments

Seoul (AFP) - North Korea has mobilised dozens of submarines and doubled its artillery units along the border, South Korea said Sunday, accusing Pyongyang of undermining top-level talks aimed at averting a military confrontation.

A defense ministry spokesman said 70 percent of the North's total submarine fleet -- or around 50 vessels -- had left their bases and disappeared from Seoul's military radar.

The movement of such a large number of submarines was "unprecedented," the spokesman said, adding that Seoul and Washington were beefing up their military surveillance in response.

"The number is nearly 10 times the normal level... we take the situation very seriously," he said.

The North has also doubled the number of artillery units along the heavily-fortified land border with the South, he added.

The move came as top officials from both Koreas resumed a talks aimed at easing military tensions after a marathon negotiating session the night before ended without final agreement.

"The North is adopting a two-faced stance with the talks going on," said the spokesman.

Yonhap news agency, citing military officials, said the submarine deployment was the largest since the end of the 1950-53 Korean War.

"No one knows whether the North will attack our warships or commercial vessels... we are mobilising all our surveillance resources to locate them," it quoted one military official as saying.

The North operates more than 70 submarines -- one of the world's largest fleets -- compared to about 10 in the South, according to Seoul's latest defense white paper.

The South accused Pyongyang in 2010 of using a submarine to torpedo a Seoul warship resulting in the loss of 46 lives -- a charge the North denied.

Tension flared on the Korean peninsula after Seoul accused Pyongyang of planting landmines across the border that earlier this month maimed two South Korean soldiers.

Pyongyang denied involvement but Seoul retaliated by resuming loudspeaker propaganda broadcast hated by the North along the border on August 10.

The North's leader Kim Jong-Un last week ordered his military to move to a war-footing after an exchange of artillery fire on Thursday that claimed no casualties but further escalated tension

Via: Yahoo News

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Fiorina Hits Todd for Using Climate Change to Talk California Drought

During an appearance on Meet the Press, Republican presidential candidate Carly Fiorina hit back at moderator Chuck Todd for pushing the issue of climate change during a discussion on the ongoing California drought. Todd proclaimed “[i]n your home state of California, drought, the wildfires. More evidence is coming out from the scientific community that says climate change has made this worse. Not to say that the drought is directly caused but it’s made it worse. 

For her part, Fiorina refused to accept Todd’s claim and instated blamed “liberal politicians” for causing the massive drought: 

You know what’s also made it worse? Politicians, liberal politicians who stood up for 40 years as the population of California doubled and saying, you cannot build a new reservoir and you cannot build a water conveyance system. And so, for 40 years 70% of the rainfall has washed out to sea. That's pretty dumb when you know you’re going to have droughts every single year, or every three years let’s say. 

The Meet the Press moderator continued to play up how climate change made the California drought worse and how he “asked Governor Jerry Brown to respond to that exact criticism you made. I said, do you blame liberal environmentalists in California, specifically on dams and reservoirs, and this is how he responded.” 

After Brown called Fiorina’s argument “such utter ignorance” and how “these people if they want to run for president, better do kind of eighth grade science before they make any more utterances” the Republican presidential candidate pushed back once again: 

That's a lot of insults but of course it makes no sense what he just said. It would be helpful if you were fighting fires to have more water. Firefighters in California have difficulty getting enough water now, so they're using other means. 

It would be helpful to agriculture and everything else to have water saved in the good years so that you could use it in the bad years. I'm not denying that California's air is dry. That's obvious. I'm not denying that there is a drought. But there is no denying that politicians have made this problem immeasurably worse. 

Via: Newsbusters

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FIRE EPA EMPLOYEES, SAYS GEOLOGIST: ‘WHERE IS DONALD TRUMP WHEN YOU NEED HIM?’

Dave Taylor, the retired geologist who predicted the EPA project that caused the massive 3 million toxic spill in Colorado on August 5 would fail, says the EPA employees who caused the spill should be fired as soon as possible.

In a second letter to the editor published in the Silverton Standard on Thursday, Taylorwrote:

When I wrote my Letter to the Editor, published July 30, 2015, I warned of potential problems with the EPA’s Red and Bonita mine plugging scheme. At the time, I had no idea that the EPA could be so incredibly incompetent as to cause the failure of the Gold King Mine plug. Breaching the plug, August 5, 2015, resulted in a catastrophic deluge of 3 million gallons of contaminated water and mine waste that flowed down Cement Creek to the Animas River.

“In my opinion,” Taylor continued, “the EPA employees responsible for the breach should be held accountable and fired ASAP.”

“But of course, that probably won’t happen. Following the VA investigation, which took many months, only one employee was fired,” Taylor noted.

“Where is Donald Trump when you need him?” Taylor asked rhetorically.

“You’re fired!” Taylor added, indicating the message he wanted Trump to send to the EPA employees responsible for the breach.

“In the mining business, one must have the attitude that all accidents are preventable and prepare accordingly,” Taylor wrote.

“Obviously, the EPA was over confident and didn’t take the time to stand back, evaluate and think about how much water was upstream of the plug, what the hydrostatic pressure might be and what could happen if the plug was disturbed,” the retired geologist added.

“Over the years, I have worked on similar delicate projects. I always thought out my most effective Plan ‘A’ and subsequent additional back-up Plans ‘B,’ ‘C’ and ‘D’ just in case ‘Murphy’s Law’ came into play,” he noted.

“I don’t think the EPA even thought about a back-up plan, afterall, they are geniuses and could never make a mistake!” Taylor commented.

“The EPA is going to be covered up with follow-up testing, lawsuits and clean-up efforts,” Taylor predicted.

Taylor just might see Trump follow his recommendation about the firing of EPA employees responsible for the August 5 spill.

On August 13, eight days after the spill, GOP presidential front-runner Donald Trump toldtalk radio host Hugh Hewitt, “[t]his is all the more example why EPA, we should do it locally. We shouldn’t be doing it from Washington.”

“Often times for a thing like this, you have to just get rid of them [the bureaucrats in charge],” Trump added. That would presumably include EPA administrator Gina McCarthy, who visited Colorado earlier this month but didn’t go to see the site of the spill.

Via: Breitbart

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WaPo Writer: Black Votes Should Count For More Than White Votes

A writer over at The Washington Post has a bold new proposal he believes can heal the American racial divide: empower blacks by making their votes count more than those of other races.

“Racial reconciliation is impossible without some kind of broad-based, systemic reparations,” writes Theodore R. Johnson, a former White House fellow and current Ph.D candidate in law and policy at Northeastern University. “But if a pecuniary answer can’t fix the structural disadvantage — and it can’t — what can?”

The answer, Johnson argues, is simple: weighted voting, where black votes count for more than white ones. Specifically, Johnson suggests giving each black person five-thirds of a vote, to reverse the old three-fifths compromise written into the U.S. Constitution.

As Johnson gleefully notes, counting black votes more than others would significantly alter many elections in the U.S. In the 2012 election, several Southern states with high black populations, such as Mississippi and Georgia, would have swung over to Barack Obama’s column, and their recent Senate races would have been decided in Democrats’ favor as well.

Johnson justifies his argument by saying it’s the only way to solve the “structural disadvantages” faced by blacks.

“A five-thirds compromise would imbue African Americans with a larger political voice that could be used to fight the structural discrimination expressed in housing, education, criminal justice and employment,” he says. “Allowing black votes to count for 167 percent of everyone else’s would mean that 30 million African American votes would count as 50 million, substituting super-votes for the implausible idea of cash payments.” With black voters so massively empowered, politicians will have no choice to but to put black priorities first if they hope to remain in office.

Via: Daily Caller

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[VIDEO] Mika: Hillary’s ‘Condescending’ Email Defense Relies on ‘People Not Being Smart’

The panel of MSNBC’s Morning Joe tore into former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton after she turned her private email sever over the government after two top secret emails were found to have been stored on her email.

“Politically, it’s a no-win situation for her,” Bloomberg Politics’ Mark Halperin said. “If they recover the information from the emails, the 30,000 personal ones, I think it’s almost certainly the case that someone will find something that should have been turned over, and that would be a problem for her.”

“If it’s been fully deleted and permanently erased… I think people will say, ‘Wow, why did Hillary Clinton go to such length to permanently delete the e-mails?’” he continued. “And the question will linger forever, what was on there?”

Republican strategist Nicole Wallace agreed, and slammed Clinton’s “cumulative string of dishonesty” and desperate excuses. “I just think they’re down the rabbit hole of now squandering of whatever is left of the general public’s trust.”

Contributor Mike Barncile said the emails were indeed a problem, but the larger problem was the scandal “regurgitates” all the public’s worries about the Clintons. “Hillary Clinton, it’s quite obvious thus far her candidacy, too much of it has been about the past.”

The panel also ripped Clinton for framing the inquiry into her emails as a partisan issue, even though she was being investigated by Obama appointees.“I have to say, that feels condescending” host Mika Brzezinski said.

Via: Mediaite

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Why We Have More Than 40 Million Functional Illiterates

Hundreds of websites still casually assert what is probably the most destructive sophistry in the history of education:

The Dolch Sight Words [created in the 1940s] are a list of the 220 most frequently used words in the English language. These sight words make up 50 to 70 percent of any general text….Dolch found that children who can identify a certain core group of words by sight could learn to read and comprehend better. Dolch's sight word lists are still widely used today and highly respected by both teachers and parents. These sight words were designed to be learned and mastered by the third grade.

Even at a glance, you may see several problems.  Just because they were “designed to be learned and mastered” by the third grade doesn’t mean they will be.  The majority of children cannot master these words by any grade, if by master you mean name them with automaticity at reading speed. 

“Respected by both teachers and parents” is a slippery construction that conspicuously omits mention of “reading experts who conduct research.” 

Furthermore, even if these words make up two thirds of a text, that means a child cannot read every third word.  Nothing resembling reading can take place. 

Note that phonics instruction would allow the student to read every word by the second grade.  But the sight-word method promises that by third grade, the children will know a small subset of English words but still remain largely illiterate.  What sort of promise is that?

Even all that is not the full indictment.  Trying to memorize many graphic designs – and that’s what learning to read with sight-words entails – is virtually impossible.  The brain becomes cluttered with hundreds of partly memorized designs, all of which look quite similar.  There are children with photographic memories who can survive.  But let’s focus on the average student.  This child might not be able to memorize even 100 sight-words each year, or ever.  But the real flaw is that few children achieve automaticity.  Most are always wandering slowly in the forest, so to speak.  If parents understood how hopeless and painful this process is, they would never allow their children near sight-words.

So we need a way for parents to grasp viscerally that sight-words are a mission impossible for almost all children.  Consider:

Dolch words for first grade include think.  Fluent readers of English see the phonics in this word; they see the logic of this word.  As a result, such readers do not realize how utterly bizarre and difficult this word looks to first-graders told to memorize the design as a sight-word.

It’s important that everyone see this word as the first-grader sees it.  In fact, there is a simple way to do this.  Here are the same letters arranged in other ways: hinkt, inthk, nihkt, htnik, khtni, tkhin.

From the point of view of visual memorization, they are all equally difficult.  For experimental purposes, pick one of them and memorize it (as a shape, not a series of letters).

One site actually prints the official dogma: “Many students do not need extra practice with the Dolch words, as they learn them by reading them repeatedly in context.”

This nonsense is repeated to parents, who then expect their kids to acquire these words the same way a dog picks up burrs in the woods.  It’s not so easy.  If schools were serious about memorizing word-shapes, children would draw them over and over.  Flashcards would be used relentlessly.  But keep in mind that our schools constantly campaign against rote memorization, which is said to be a great evil.  Meanwhile, they’re asking children to commit rote memorization on hundreds (and in Whole Word’s heyday, thousands) of English words.  So you know they are hypocrites.  But let’s stick to the task at hand.  Consider the words again.  I bet you can’t pick out the one you memorized:

itkni, itikn, hkitn, kinht, nktni, ntikn.

That’s a bit of a trick, because these are six new configurations made from the same group of letters.  The point is, English letters and words look a lot alike.  There is not much to work with.  And imagine the nightmare of longer words.

In the process of trying to memorize these look-alike designs, the brain is soon overwhelmed by complexity and clutter. Furthermore, our eyes scan a face or visual design from all directions.  But English must be read left-to-right, letter by letter, then by syllables and words, but always left to right.  The instant our eyes start darting around, which they always do with graphic designs, reading is finished.  Sight-word readers report the most amazing cognitive problems.  Words slide around on the page.  Words reverse themselves.  This doesn’t seem to make sense until you consider that the eyes are jumping around on the page in random jerks, thus inducing complementary side-effects. 

For many children, the next step is to be told they have dyslexia, which simply means they don’t read well.  They are told they have ADHD.  They need an appointment with a shrink.  They need to take Ritalin.  Pretty soon these children are a mess inside and out, all because their school gave them an impossible task.

Even if you do memorize the 220 sight-words perfectly, you have been set up for a lifetime of cognitive schizophrenia.  You will read some words phonetically and some as designs, back and forth in no predictable order.  You won’t know which kind of word is coming next.  There will be anxiety as your eyes go from left to right.  What is this next thing coming at you?  Is it in your sight-word inventory?  No, apparently not, which means you have to read it phonetically.  Your brain has to make a lot of extra decisions, which cripples reading speed.  You become one of those millions of people who never reads for pleasure because it is, for you, hard work.

Experience suggests that girls are more patient with bad pedagogical methods.  Many boys become angry and sullen.  They pull back and refuse to participate.  If you want to know why American college students are 57% female, think first of the phrase “sight-words.”

When Rudolf Flesch published Why Johnny Can’t Read in 1955, he thought he had made the case so compellingly that no one would dare promote sight-words in the future.  He was wrong.  Our Education Establishment spun off the International Reading Association in 1956.  Their dozens of celebrated experts continued to promote sight-words up until the present day.  First-graders still come home with lists of sight-words that they must commit to memory.  So we have a surreal situation: sixty years later, many a Johnny still can’t read.

For simplicity’s sake, let’s say that Balanced Literacy and Whole Language are the contemporary repositories of all the bad reading theories from the last 85 years, perpetuated to the degree that each separate community will tolerate them.  Now, Common Core seems comfortable with locking in all of this baggage.  That should tell us from the start that Common Core is not serious about improving education.  Common Core Math loves elaborate and elusive word problems – not a good idea anyway, but just imagine these semi-illiterate kids struggling with “Juanita, Charlotte, and Darcy walked to the mall to buy seven bags of stickers, but they had only $22.45 between them and…”  Even the parents are getting ulcers from trying to help their kids.

Via: American Thinker

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[VIDEO] Newly Released Video Shows Planned Parenthood Partner Laughing About Shipping Whole Dead Babies

There’s one word to describe the upcoming video exposing Planned Parenthood’s trafficking of aborted babies: demonic. The Center for Medical Progress (CMP) released a trailer on August 21 advertising its eighth investigative video. In the two-minute clip, StemExpress CEO Cate Dyer admitted that her company receives “intact” (whole) aborted baby bodies from the abortion clinics they work with – and laughed at the thought of shipping baby heads.

Via: Fox News

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Denver City Council halts Chick-fil-A’s airport operation because its owners believe the Bible

Forcing you to bake a gay wedding cake is just the start. The gay marriage fascists are pretty resourceful when it comes to using the power of government to enforce their orthodoxy. And by the way, this is one of the less-discussed problems with the perpetual expansion of government into everything. If you can’t do business without government contracts, or without tax exemptions, you inevitably empower someone in the political realm to judge your worthiness to be in business at all.

When the Denver City Council chooses a concessionaire for the Denver International Airport, the decision is supposed to be based on the applicant’s operational prowess, its quality, its track record and, of course, its ability to make the arrangement profitable for both parties while pleasing airport patrons with products and service.

But it’s not about that for what appears to be a majority of the Denver City Council. It’s about gay marriage, and the now airtight requirement that anyone doing business with the government must not agree with 1 Corinthians 6:9-10. It makes no difference if all you do is sell chicken sandwiches, which has nothing to do with homosexuality. If you’re like Chick-fil-A, and your owners have made it clear they believe the Bible, you’re not running concessions at the DIA:

Chick-fil-A’s reputation as an opponent of same-sex marriage has imperiled the fast-food chain’s potential return to Denver International Airport, with several City Council members this week passionately questioning a proposed concession agreement.

Councilman Paul Lopez called opposition to the chain at DIA “really, truly a moral issue on the city.”

His position comes despite ardent assurances from the concessionaires — who have operated other DIA restaurants — that strict nondiscrimination policies will include protections based on sexual orientation and gender identity.

Robin Kniech, the council’s first openly gay member, said she was most worried about a local franchise generating “corporate profits used to fund and fuel discrimination.” She was first to raise Chick-fil-A leaders’ politics during a Tuesday committee hearing.

The normally routine process of approving an airport concession deal has taken a rare political turn. The Business Development Committee on Tuesday stalled the seven-year deal with a new franchisee of the popular chain for two weeks. 

This is where we’ve gotten with gay marriage politics in the United States. It used to be that if a politician had it in for a business for some reason that had nothing the legitimate terms of a proposed contract, the politician would at least invent some phony pretext for stalling the deal. Not anymore. Now they come right out and admit that they’re only doing it because the business doens’t agree with them on a social issue. Even the editors of the Denver Post, which backs gay marriage, is warning the City Council to be careful about the precedent it’s setting here:

Think this one through, Denver City Council. If you block Chick-fil-A from returning as a vendor at Denver International Airport, how far might you then go in imposing political litmus tests on corporations seeking to do business there — or elsewhere in the city?

And what are the implications for free speech in America if such political vetoes by cities were to become the norm?

At a committee meeting this week, Councilman Paul Lopez described opposition to the chain at DIAbecause of its CEO’s hostility toward same-sex marriage as “really, truly a moral issue on the city.” Some other council members clearly agreed.

Via: Canada Free Press

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The man building Barack Obama’s future

CHICAGO — President Barack Obama’s post-presidential center will return full circle to his community organizing days, making an outreach program to help the historically underprivileged South Side a focus. Obama is expected to pick a community engagement director to lead the effort before leaving the White House.

The search is already underway.

Story Continued Below.

Details of the Obama Foundation’s mission and organization were shared with POLITICO in an exclusive interview with Marty Nesbitt, Obama’s best friend and the chairman of the foundation. Nesbitt said the planning includes a concerted effort to learn from the experiences of past presidents, including avoiding the financial tangles stemming from Bill Clinton’s decision to separate his presidential library in Little Rock and his family foundation in New York.

As much as the Obama team admires the work of the Clinton Foundation, Nesbitt said, “his [Clinton’s] physical presence is separate from his library. We will be all in one place. Everything that the president does will be from one central entity.”

When Obama leaves office in January 2017 at age 55, he will begin what could become the longest post-presidency in U.S. history. He is unlikely to be drawn back into politics, as Clinton was through his wife, already a senator and prospective presidential candidate by the time he left office.

Nesbitt sketched out a vision of an actively changing agenda that’ll keep Obama moving around the country and the world.

“I don’t see this being one thing forever,” Nesbitt said.

Nesbitt said that in contrast to other former presidents, Obama’s Chicago-based library will be an all-in-one institution — a presidential library, museum, archive, foundation and center — and it will serve as the primary platform for both Barack and Michelle Obama, who has ruled out any future in politics.

Fundraising isn’t expected to begin in earnest until after Obama’s left office, limiting the leverage and access he can use to woo donors, potentially putting him far behind on fundraising for a project that’s yet to land on a final price tag.

The center will also incorporate an academic component, potentially through partnered professors either at the University of Chicago a few blocks away, or with Obama’s alma mater Columbia University, the University of Illinois at Chicago and another satellite location still very much under discussion in Hawaii.

“We want to be able to have that academic perspective, to add to the social perspective,” Nesbitt said.

Obama’s mentoring program for black youth, My Brother’s Keeper, and the scaled-down version of his grass-roots campaign network, Organizing for Action, are both expected to become part of the institution as well.

“I know, just from our conversations, that in whatever idle time he has, he’s been thinking through what comes next,” said Obama’s former adviser, David Axelrod, saying those conversations date back years.

Via: Politico

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