Monday, June 30, 2014

Liberal Rolling Stone Magazine Allows Billionaire Scam Artist Al Gore To Spout More Lies About Pending "Climate Change Doom"

Amazing that not a single, non-conservative professional journalist in America has the guts to take on Al Gore's continuous lies and the fortune he's accumulated thanks to his global warming lies and propaganda:

FORMER US vice-president Al Gore got rich by predicting global warming doom — but also got reckless.

His film, An Inconvenient Truth, was found by a British judge to have nine significant errors, and Gore may have become even more unreliable.

Here are just some of the astonishingly false claims Gore made in a lecture last week to Climate Reality Project presenters in Melbourne.

“You sometimes hear this silliness where people say, well, global warming has stopped ... But the last decade has been by all odds the hottest decade ever measured.”

In fact, the atmosphere has not warmed for some 16 years.

“Super typhoon Haiyan [last year] became the most powerful, the most destructive ocean-based storm over to make landfall ... These events are becoming more common.”

In fact, the Philippine Met Agency says Haiyan was not even the Philippines’ most powerful typhoon. It had wind gusts at landfall of 275km/h — the same as Typhoon Sening in 1970, but less than the 320km/h of Typhoon Reming in 2006.

Haiyan killed about 6000 people, but the world’s 35 deadliest typhoons killed between 12,000 and 500,000.

Nor are cyclones and hurricanes becoming more common. Geophysical Research Letters in 2009 reported “no net change” in the number of cyclones hitting the Philippines, and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change said worldwide data over a century “suggests slight decreases in the frequency of tropical cyclones making landfall in the North Atlantic and the South Pacific”.

“[Cyclone Yasi in 2001 was] one of the most powerful cyclones to hit Queensland ... These kind of events are happening with increased frequency all over the world.”

In fact, even the Australian Climate Commission, led by alarmist Tim Flannery, admitted Yasi and its floods “were … not the result of climate change”.

The Bureau of Meteorology adds: “The total number of [Australian] cyclones appears to have decreased to the mid-1980s, and remained nearly stable since.” Worldwide, cyclones have not increased.

“The warmer temperatures ... make the ocean-based storms more powerful.”

But the IPCC says “confidence in large scale changes in the intensity of extreme extratropical cyclones since 1900 is low”.

How does Gore get away with this?

Sunday, June 29, 2014

Politiks As Usual: In The News 6/29/14

Supreme Court Narrows Obama’s Recess-Appointment Power

Same Sex Marriage: Big Government Power Grab

Appeals Court Orders Atheists to Justify Lawsuit Against 9/11 Cross

Reince Priebus: People Tired of the Clintons' Show

Give It Back! Students Ask Selfish Hillary to Return $225K Speaking Fee

Al Gore Denounced in Australian Press as Money Hungry 'Ferengi' for Suspicious Mining Magnate Alliance

Pastors Rise Up To Challenge Same-sex Bathrooms

MSNBC's Melissa Harris-Perry: GOP Wants To 'Humble' 'Uppity' Obama

Soros Offered Ex-Girlfriend $6.9 Million Settlement

Egos And Infighting: The GOP’s Biggest Opponent In November

Saturday, June 28, 2014

6 Years Later and Things Have Only Gotten Worse For Blacks Under Barack Obama

Politico.com:

On January 20, 2009, when Barack Obama assumed the presidency, the overwhelming majority of African-Americans cheered and prayed for him. His inauguration was a signal moment in black history, reminiscent of the celebrations that accompanied the Emancipation Proclamation, Joe Louis’ victory over Max Schmeling and the March on Washington. Irma Brown-Williams traveled to the inauguration from Tuskegee, Alabama, wearing a coat on which she had pinned photos of her mother, father and siblings, all of whom were deceased. Asked to explain, she said, “I’m here for them. … They could not be here, so I brought them with me.” Against the backdrop of such exhilaration and triumphalism, an emotional downturn was inescapable. It has come to pass. For many, the passion has cooled. For some, the thrill is gone.

Obama swept into office with a reputation as an intellectual politician with vision. Part of the reason had to do with his memoir, Dreams from My Father, his campaign book, The Audacity of Hope, and a March 18, 2008, address, “A More Perfect Union,” in which he explained his relationship with the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, the Chicago preacher who had denounced the status quo in memorably inflammatory fashion: “God Damn America!”

The speech was immediately celebrated, with some likening it to Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address or Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech. These gushings were a vivid symptom of Obamamania. For in fact “A More Perfect Union” is not a speech for the ages; it was simply a tactical intervention aimed at quelling whites’ discomfort about Obama’s long association with a radical, left-wing minister. In neither its rhetoric nor its analysis nor its prescriptions did the speech offer anything beyond a carefully calibrated effort to defuse a public relations crisis. “In the end,” Obama declared, “what is called for is nothing more, and nothing less than … that we do unto others as we would have them do unto us. Let us be our brother’s keeper. … Let us be our sister’s keeper. Let us find that common stake we all have in one another, and let our politics reflect that spirit as well.” Fine banalities that could have been voiced just as easily by Mitch McConnell.

Still, many listeners discerned in the speech a desire and ability to grapple in an innovative fashion with the unfinished business of racial justice. Obama said, after all, that the subject of race was too important to ignore and implicitly promised to confront it if he won the presidency.

He has not. He has avoided the subject assiduously. And when he has addressed it, he has typically done so only obliquely. “Trayvon Martin could have been me 35 years ago” and similar signature musings over the Obama years do not explain much, do not promise much and do not tell us where we should go from here.

For many African-Americans, he has been a hero—but also a disappointment. On critical matters of racial justice, he has posited no agenda, unveiled no vision, set forth no overarching mission to be accomplished.

Take criminal justice. Nothing in the day-to-day lives of black Americans is more menacing than their vulnerability to criminality on the one hand and mistreatment by police on the other. Yet on neither front has Obama focused the attention of the nation. Oh, yes—there was the “beer summit.” In his first term, the president suggested that a police officer in Cambridge, Massachusetts, had acted “stupidly” when, after investigating a report of a possible burglary, he arrested a black man, Henry Louis Gates Jr., the Harvard professor who owned the house to which the officer had been dispatched. Obama expressly refrained from attributing a racial motive to the officer’s action. But many commentators nonetheless saw it that way, which fueled a fierce reaction against Obama. He backpedaled quickly, invited the officer (and Gates) to the White House for a beer and abandoned any further discussion about the matter of black Americans’ interactions with police in particular and the criminal justice system more generally. This was painful to witness. In the words of Glenn Loury, an economist at Brown University who wrote a 2008 book on the racial politics of incarceration, the president’s performance was “depressing in the extreme.”

The conspicuous disproportionality of blacks in handcuffs, jails and prisons is an urgent matter. In 2010, the imprisonment rate for blacks was 4.6 times that of whites—a greater magnitude of racial disparity than in almost any another arena.

This is not to say the president has done nothing. The Obama administration played a key role in persuading Congress to pass the Fair Sentencing Act, which reduced somewhat the penalties associated with possessing or distributing crack cocaine, drug crimes that were punished with peculiar harshness and that ensnare blacks disproportionately. (In 2006, 82 percent of offenders under federal anti-crack cocaine laws were black, while only 8.8 percent were white.) But the president virtually hid himself away when he signed the legislation on Aug. 3, 2010, and he has said little to educate the public regarding the larger question: Are racial disparities in stops, arrests, prosecutions and imprisonment more a function of racial discrimination by the authorities, or are African-Americans simply more engaged than others in criminal misconduct?

Or take affirmative action. For middle-class blacks, policies that favor racial minorities in competition for scarce opportunities in employment and higher education are of critical importance. At the most elite law schools, for example, withdrawing racial affirmative action would decimate the number of black students present; their number would fall from 8 or 9 percent to as low as 1 percent. But affirmative action is under increasing pressure from commentators, voter initiatives and court rulings (in April, the Supreme Court affirmed the power of state electorates to rescind affirmative action through referenda). Obama’s Justice Department supports affirmative action in little-publicized briefs and in the arguments of the solicitor general. But the president has declined to offer his own view of the controversy, in his own voice. George W. Bush set forth a definite position—against affirmative action in the form of quotas. So did Bill Clinton—in favor. Yet Obama is virtually mute.

Or take unemployment. Early in his administration, the president strongly rejected demands by black lawmakers that he specifically target black joblessness, given its peculiarly pronounced and stubborn presence. “I can’t pass laws that say I’m just helping black folks,” Obama replied. The president “tries to describe our challenges in ways that are inclusive,” his senior adviser Valerie Jarrett later explained.

On that, Obama seems to have changed his mind in recent months. “We need to spend some time in thinking about how do we bolster and reinforce our African-American boys,” he said last July. In February, he returned to this theme, announcing My Brother’s Keeper, an interagency task force aimed at “creating and expanding ladders of opportunity for boys and young men of color.” The president was moved to do this, he said, because of the “persistent gaps in employment, educational outcomes and career skills” that so strikingly and destructively set young men of color apart from their white peers. The president’s apparent reversal raised the question: If race-targeted policy is appropriate for the My Brother’s Keeper initiative, why is it not appropriate more generally? He has offered no explanation.

Rachel Maddow Lies About Supreme Court Decision On Massachusetts Abortion Buffer Zones

Don't get your way, spin the facts and lie to your simpleton viewers--they'll believe just about anything that comes out your mouth anyway. All SCOTUS did with their ruling here was protect the rights of anyone who expresses their opposition to abortion, this ruling won't interfere with anyone's right to not be harassed or intimidated by abortion foes:

Rachel Maddow opened her show last night by highlighting instances of angry confrontation, and even violence, by pro-life advocates outside abortion clinics to rail against the Supreme Court decision striking down the “buffer zone” for protestors. And Maddow found it wildly hypocritical that the Supreme Court itself actually has a buffer zone.

Maddow pointed out that the Supreme Court has made sure it has a wide space around the building where protestors cannot show up so that they can’t, say, directly harass justices or other federal employees as they enter and exit the building. “Must be nice,” she said.

She pointed to a number of Supreme Court decisions where the concept of a “buffer zone” has been upheld, with respect to polling places and military funerals. (The latter ruling being decided after objections to the infamous Westboro Baptist Church.) Maddow declared, “From inside its own protective buffer zone, the Supreme Court issued its majority ruling striking down the one outside abortion clinics.”

And given all the horrible history of violence and intimidation outside abortion clinics, Maddow found it bewildering that the Supreme Court decision read that pro-life protestors just “wish to converse” with people.

John Boehner Announces Plans To Sue Barack Obama

CBSNews.com:

House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, announced Wednesday that he's pushing the House of Representatives to sue President Obama "in an effort to compel the president to follow his oath of office and faithfully execute the laws of our country."

He did not say which specific laws the suit will say the president has not enforced, although he wrote in a letter addressed to his House colleagues that Mr. Obama has "run an end-around on the American people and their elected legislators" on issues ranging from health care, to energy, to foreign policy and education.

"On one matter after another during his presidency, President Obama has circumvented the Congress through executive action, creating his own laws and excusing himself from executing statutes he is sworn to enforce - at times even boasting about his willingness to do it, as if daring the America people to stop him," Boehner said.

He warned that allowing the pattern to continue unchecked " shifts the balance of power decisively and dangerously in favor of the presidency, giving the president king-like authority at the expense of the American people and their elected legislators."

White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest said that the president had taken action consistent with this executive authority because of Republican opposition. Now, he said, they have "shifted their opposition into a higher gear."

Friday, June 27, 2014

Tyrant Liberal Alec Baldwin's Daughter Ireland Is A Lesbian Dating A "Butch" Black Rapper

Thanks to the Gay Mafia and Godless, white liberals giving their stamp of approval, homosexuality has not only become normalized, but an easy choice for uneducated, young, naive souls who grew up in a toxic environment. Ireland Baldwin, famous for not only being the daughter of Kim Basinger and Alec Baldwin, but also for modeling and for famous dad calling her a 'pig' on a voicemail when she was younger, is now just another victim of Hollyweirdo parents as well as a calling she'll probably never understand:

The interview starts off talking about Kanye West due to the fact that Angel Haze is supporting him at Wireless later this year. "To be on the same stage as one of my favourite artists is just insane. I admire his honesty, his brashness may be hard for some people to deal with, but it's always real and it comes from a place that you know he's completely passionate about. It's inspiring to see someone who is true to who they are."

After this, the interview explores her relationship with Ireland Baldwin. Angel has been dating the model daughter of Alec Baldwin and Kim Basinger for four months, and even though Angel describes herself as 'pansexual', telling the paper, "Love isn't defined by gender", it sounds like the relationship is going from strength to strength.

"It's going well … We met during New York Fashion Week - I knew her cousin really well. We ended up hanging out and becoming friends for a few months, then…"

The loved-up pictures tell us all we need to know...

Angel also goes on to describe how the media portray their relationship: "I don't know if there's like some confirm or deny thing with the way relationships work in the media, but everyone just calls us best friends, best friends for life, like we're just friends hanging out.

"It's funny. It's rad in some ways, it sucks in others.

"We f**k and friends don't f**k. I have never f**ked one of my friends. Once I see you in that way, it doesn't happen."

Scientists At NASA and NOAA Manipulated Temperature Data To Overstate "Global Warming"

Breitbart.com:

Scientists at two of the world’s leading climate centres - NASA and NOAA - have been caught out manipulating temperature data to overstate the extent of the 20th century "global warming".
The evidence of their tinkering can clearly be seen at Real Science, where blogger Steven Goddard has posted a series of graphs which show "climate change" before and after the adjustments.

When the raw data is used, there is little if any evidence of global warming and some evidence of global cooling. However, once the data has been adjusted - ie fabricated by computer models - 20th century 'global warming' suddenly looks much more dramatic.

This is especially noticeable on the US temperature records. Before 2000, it was generally accepted - even by climate activists like NASA's James Hansen - that the hottest decade in the US was the 1930s.
As Hansen himself said in a 1989 report:

In the U.S. there has been little temperature change in the past 50 years, the time of rapidly increasing greenhouse gases — in fact, there was a slight cooling throughout much of the country.

However, Hansen subsequently changed his tune when, sometime after 2000, the temperatures were adjusted to accord with the climate alarmists' fashionable "global warming" narrative. By cooling the record-breaking year of 1934, and promoting 1998 as the hottest year in US history, the scientists who made the adjustments were able suddenly to show 20th century temperatures shooting up - where before they looked either flat or declining.

But as Goddard notes, the Environmental Protection Agency's heatwave record makes a mockery of these adjustments. It quite clearly shows that the US heat waves of the 1930s were of an order of magnitude greater than anything experienced at any other time during the century - far more severe than those in the 1980s or 1990s which were no worse than those in the 1950s.

These adjustments, however, are not limited to the US temperature data sets. Similar fabrications have taken place everywhere from Iceland to Australia.

The fact that supposedly reputable scientists can make these dishonest adjustments and get away with it is, notes long-time sceptic Christopher Booker, one of the more remarkable anomalies of the great climate change scam.

When I first began examining the global-warming scare, I found nothing more puzzling than the way officially approved scientists kept on being shown to have finagled their data, as in that ludicrous “hockey stick” graph, pretending to prove that the world had suddenly become much hotter than at any time in 1,000 years. Any theory needing to rely so consistently on fudging the evidence, I concluded, must be looked on not as science at all, but as simply a rather alarming case study in the aberrations of group psychology.

10 Reasons Why Iraq's Bloodbath Is Not George W Bush's Fault

Townhall.com:

1) In 2011, President Barack Obama pronounced Iraq "self-reliant and democratic," and "a country in which people from different religious sects and ethnicities can resolve their differences peacefully through the democratic process." In 2010, Vice President Joe Biden called Iraq "one of the great achievements of this administration." Obama ignored pleas by top generals who advised against pulling out without leaving a residual force.

2) Nearly everybody assumed Saddam Hussein possessed stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction. Of the newspaper editorials that opposed the war, not one challenged the assumption that Iraq possessed stockpiles of WMD.

President George W. Bush relied on the same intelligence -- and on the same CIA director -- as did President Bill Clinton. Kenneth Pollack, Clinton's Persian Gulf adviser, said not one government intelligence analyst disagreed with the assumption that Iraq possessed stockpiles of WMD.

"The intelligence community," said Pollack, "convinced me and the rest of the Clinton Administration that Saddam had reconstituted his WMD programs following the withdrawal of the U.N. inspectors in 1998, and was only a matter of years away from having a nuclear weapon. ... The U.S. intelligence community's belief that Saddam was aggressively pursuing weapons of mass destruction predated Bush's inauguration, and therefore cannot be attributed to political pressure. ... Germany ... Israel, Russia, Britain, China and even France held positions similar to that of the United States. ... In sum, no one doubted that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction."

3) Saddam Hussein did possess stockpiles of WMD. James Clapper, the current director of National Intelligence, said in 2003 that materials for WMD had "unquestionably" been moved out of Iraq, to Syria or perhaps other countries, in an effort to "destroy and disperse" evidence just before the war began.

One of Saddam's top generals, Georges Sada, in his book called "Saddam's Secrets," said truck convoys and 56 airplane flights moved tons of WMD into Syria.

Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, in December, 2002, said, "Chemical and biological weapons which Saddam is endeavoring to conceal have been moved from Iraq to Syria."

4) Had we not invaded, Saddam Hussein would have soon restarted his chemical and biological program -- and resumed his pursuit for a nuclear capability. After the war started, Bush sent David Kay, a weapons hunter, to locate the assumed stockpiles of WMD. Kay found no stockpiles, but he did find that Saddam had the intent and the ability to restart his WMD program as soon as the heat was off.

5) George Bush did not "rush" America into the war. He obtained a consensus -- a resolution from the House, a resolution from the Senate and a resolution from the United Nations. There was a 15-month run-up before the war, during which time Saddam could have declared what he did or did not do with the WMD.

6) Americans supported the Iraq War, overwhelmingly at least at first. Gallup found 76 percent of Americans supported the Iraq War when the military action began, about the same percentage that supported the first Persian Gulf War.

7) Obama wanted out of Iraq, and ran in 2008 with a promise to do just that. A year after the troop pullout, during a 2012 debate, Mitt Romney said he wanted a residual force to remain. Obama pointedly disagreed, saying that leaving "10,000 troops in Iraq ... would tie us down."

Incredibly, Obama now blames the Iraqis for his refusal to leave any troops. Obama says he wanted legal protection for the soldiers left behind and that Iraq's parliament would not provide it. So Obama happily walked away, blaming it on "a decision made by the Iraqi government" to reject the offer of "a modest residual force." Obama sure had no difficulty in quickly working out an agreement -- via diplomatic notes, without the approval of Iraq's parliament -- for the recently promised 300 "advisers."

8) We were greeted as liberators in Iraq. The New York Times Iraq reporter John Burns said: "The American troops were greeted as liberators. We saw it." In April, 2003, the New York Daily News reported, "Jubilant crowds chanted, 'Thank you, Bush' and showered troops with yellow and pink flowers, exactly as administration hawks had promised."

9). There were legitimate, good-faith reasons why we sent "too few troops." The Times' Burns said, "I think that to be fair to the United States, when I speak as a citizen of the United Kingdom, I think that the instincts that led to much that went wrong were good American instincts: the desire not to have too heavy of a footprint, the desire to empower Iraqis."

10) The men and women who served in Iraq deserve better. They achieved great things under harsh and unforgiving circumstances. That the succeeding commander-in-chief did not preserve their hard-fought gains ought not devalue what they accomplished. Perhaps the returning soldiers might more readily adjust to civilian life if Americans truly understood and appreciated what they achieved in Iraq. They did their jobs -- and their mission was just, important and noble.

Thursday, June 26, 2014

Supreme Court Unanimously Rejects Obama Recess Appointments

HotAir.com:

The Supreme Court dropped a huge bomb on the Obama administration, unanimously rebuking the President for arrogating to himself the determination of when Congress is in session for the purpose of making recess appointments. According to reports on the opinion, the court may have taken a middle path on what a recess actually is, toning down one appellate court ruling that only allowed for recess appointments between formal sessions:

The US Supreme Court today limited a president’s power to make recess appointments when the White House and the Senate are controlled by opposite parties, scaling back a presidential authority as old as the republic.

The case arose from a political dispute between President Obama and Senate Republicans, who claimed he had no authority to put three people on the National Labor Relations Board in January 2012 when the Senate was out of town.

He used a president’s power, granted by the Constitution, to “fill up all vacancies that may happen during the recess of the Senate.” But the Republicans said the Senate was not in recess at the time the appointments were made, because every three days a senator went into the chamber, gaveled it to order, and then immediately called a recess.

By a unanimous vote, the Supreme Court agreed that the Senate was not in recess, holding that it’s up to both houses of Congress to define when they’re in session or in recess. As a result of the decision, the Senate can frustrate a president’s ability to make recess appointments simply by holding periodic pro forma sessions, a tactic used in recent years by both political parties.

According to NBC’s Pete Williams, the opinion provides a timeframe for Congress and the White House to follow in the future:

That will certainly make it easier to play keep-away from the President. A minority on the court wanted to limit the recess power to strictly the period between sessions, as did one appellate court, but in the end a 5-4 majority decided to allow for a looser interpretation of “recess.” Certainly, if Congress wants to stop recess appointments from being made, it will be fairly easy to gavel into session every nine days.

The question will now be what happens to the NLRB rulings during the period when recess appointments provided a quorum. The answer appears to be that they can be successfully challenged and set aside. That was the context of the challenge to the recess appointments in the first place — lawsuits against regulation created in that period that alleged they were illegitimate. This ruling means that the Supreme Court
unanimously agrees on that point, a severe rebuke to the “constitutional scholar” President and his abuse of power. More practically, though, the recent appointments to the NLRB can reconstitute that regulation if they wish, so the victory may be short lived for the plaintiffs.

Wednesday, June 25, 2014

Surprise: New York Times Covers Christie Bridge Rehash, Not IRS Scandal, on Front Page

Townhall.com:

Last week, America's self-proclaimed "paper of record" saw fit to run an A1 story on the Scott Walker smear heard 'round the media -- which we pilloried as one of the worst episodes of laziness, bias and journalistic malpractice in recent memory. (The Wall Street Journal's scathing editorial on the subject was also excellent). Today, the New York Times' front page was bereft of any IRS coverage, despite yesterday evening's contentious Congressional hearing. Noah Rothman grabbed screenshots of both the Gray Lady's print and online versions this morning. Lois Lerner's missing emails and IRS Commissioner John Koskonin's evasions were no where to be found:

We'll return to the IRS matter in a moment, but first, a quick detour. The Times included an above-the-fold article about another bridge-related controversy "said to be linked" to Chris Christie. The story summarizes a mind-numbingly boring dispute over Christie's 2011 maneuvering to divert funds originally earmarked for a canceled Port Authority tunnel project to fix an aging bridge instead. The heart of this red hot story is whether the bridge repairs were technically within the Port Authority's purview. The Christie administration says the deal was reviewed and approved by attorneys on all sides of the deal, and a left-wing magazine reported that New York's Democratic Governor, Andrew Cuomo, also signed off on the agreement. The Nation's story was published in...early April. The Bergen Record first had the story in March. In fact, the Times itself printed a story about the SEC investigating the bipartisan transportation pact two weeks ago. Today's article, therefore, is little more than a re-run, with the only obvious hook being Chris Christie and the word "bridge." In the Times' pristine news judgment, this non-update to an abstruse transit funding flap merited front page amplification. An investigation into the federal government's most punitive agency's ritual and deliberate targeting of Americans for their political beliefs -- and the intensifying brouhaha over the suspicious disappearance of revelant evidence -- received nary a mention.

The Real Gun Problem is Mental Health, Not the NRA

CNN.com:

Next time there's a mass shooting, don't jump to blame the National Rifle Association and lax gun laws. Look first at the shooter and the mental health services he did or didn't get, and the commitment laws in the state where the shooting took place.

Strengthening gun control won't stop the next mass shooter, but changing our attitudes, the treatment options we offer and the laws for holding the mentally unstable and mentally ill for treatment just might.

Take the case of the recent mass shooting incident in Isla Vista, California. Police say Elliot Rodger went on a killing spree near the University of California campus in Santa Barbara, shooting and stabbing victims, killing six and wounding 13 before he killed himself.

He had legally purchased three guns, passed a federal background check and met several other requirements in one of the most liberal states with the toughest gun control laws in the country. California was one of eight states that passed major gun reforms in the wake of 2012's Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting, in which a lone gunman killed 20 children and six adults.

In fact California's gun control laws received an "A-" grade from both The Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence and the Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence, the Los Angeles Times reported.

In this climate, how did Rodger succeed in his lethal plan? It wasn't the gun laws, it was the lack of common sense mental commitment laws.

A 2014 report by the Treatment Advocacy Center, a nonprofit aimed at removing the stigma of mental illness and barriers to treatment, analyzed the state of mental commitment laws state by state, looking at both the "quality of involuntary treatment (civil commitment) laws which facilitate emergency hospitalization during a psychiatric emergency and the availability of court orders mandating continued treatment as a condition of living in a community."

On virtually all counts, California received an "F" (it got a "C" on emergency evaluation). In Rodger's case, a friend concerned about alarming videos he'd posted on YouTube had alerted a county mental health staff member, and police had conferred with his mother, but this was not enough to get him committed.

Under California's Welfare and Institutions Code Section 5150, a person must be a danger to himself or others before he can be held for 72 hours for evaluation, and the standard is even higher to mandate treatment. Police visiting Rodger found him to be "polite and courteous" and not an apparent danger, so they had no authority to detain him or search his home for weapons to seize. The reason had nothing to do with gun laws. It had to do with the commitment laws in California.

We need to adopt a nationwide standard for involuntary civil commitment, and that standard should be "need for treatment." If a family member, law enforcement officer or mental health professional is concerned about the well-being of an individual, they should be able to have that individual held for a mental health evaluation.

Tuesday, June 24, 2014

Bill Maher Says Barack Obama is Obviously An 'Atheist'

Of course, anyone paying attention to The One's support for "gay marriage" and "transgender rights", his ignorance on the global persecution of Christians around the world and his one-time pastor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, admitting that Barry used the church for political purposes, would already know this. But it's still nice to hear a smug, Godless, white liberal like Maher publicly state the obvious:

It’s been awhile since we’ve had a palate cleanser and … this is sort of cleansing, I guess? Skip to 3:00 for the key bit. I’m tempted to say it proves Gary Oldman’s point that Maher and Jon Stewart get away with stuff that would give the left a collective outrage-aneurysm if it came from anyone else, but eh. Not really.

We already know from Obama’s gay marriage “evolution” that he’s willing to lie, repeatedly and in major public forums, about his morals in the name of getting elected. He’s a stereotypical ivory-tower liberal; of course he’s always supported gay marriage, and lefties knew it. If Maher wants to go one step further and draw a conclusion about O’s religious beliefs from that same stereotype, they’re in no position to get huffy now. I’m not even sure Oldman’s right that being a comedian is what earns Maher his license to say things that would draw liberal ire otherwise. He’s not joking here, after all. There’s no way to spin this as some over-the-top exaggeration in service to a gag. I think he gets a pass (most of the time) because he’s consistently willing to be vicious to the right, such that when he screws up occasionally and says something “outrageous” about the left, they’re inclined to give him a break to keep him in the game. Being a comedian is just the fig leaf by which that break is given.

Anyway, two things. One: Maher’s not the first to speculate that Obama joined Rev. Wright’s church for political, not religious, reasons. Look no further than Wright himself for that:

In speaking about Barack and Michelle Obama, their longtime pastor, the Rev. Jermiah Wright said, “Church is not their thing. It never was their thing.”…

Wright continues, “ … [S]o the church was not an integral part of their lives before they got married, after they got married.”

Klein says, “But the church was an integral part of his politics?”
Wright says, “Yeah.”
O wanted to get into politics but may have feared, not without reason, that his black “authenticity” would be challenged at some point. It was, in fact, challenged later when he ran against former Black Panther Bobby Rush in a House primary, as he was savaged by opponents for being “not from the ‘hood” and a “white man in blackface.” Joining Trinity may have been his way to build racial and religious credibility among an important constituency. Whether that personal ambition justifies smiling through a “God damn America” sermon or two or 20, I leave for you to judge. (Hint: It doesn’t.)

Meriam Ibrahim, Christian Woman Sentenced to Death for Apostasy, Is Freed From Prison

Townhall.com:

No doubt today is a joyous one for Meriam Ibrahim and her young family, along with the countless human rights activists and government officials from across the globe who worked to bring her home. For months this young Christian mother languished -- and was chained down -- in a Sudanese prison with her infant child for apostasy. (She was pregnant at the time of her incarceration, too, and later delivered a second baby while in prison).

It didn’t matter that she was raised in a Christian home or that she herself was a disciple of Christ. These facts were completely irrelevant to her oppressors. Under Islamic Shariah law, her father was a Muslim and therefore she was too -- even though he abandoned her family when she was just a child. Nevertheless, when the authorities learned of her non-Islamic faith, her marriage to her Christian husband was annulled. She was was later sentenced to death and imprisoned upon refusing to renounce her Christian faith.

Of course, none of these details matter a whole lot at the moment. What matters is that at long last, Ibrahim is reunited with her family -- and finally free:
A Sudanese appeal court freed Meriam Yehia Ibrahim and canceled the death sentence she received after refusing to recant her Christian faith, her lawyer said.

Ibrahim, 27, was released from jail today and is now with her husband, Daniel Wani, one of her lawyers, Elshareef Ali, said by phone from the capital, Khartoum.

Ibrahim was sentenced to death by hanging by a Sudanese court last month in a case that sparked condemnation from governments including the U.S. and U.K. as well as rights groups such as Amnesty International. Sudan’s government said it wouldn’t interfere in the decisions of the judiciary.

“This is a victory the Sudanese constitution and for freedom of faith in Sudan,” Ali said. “The court canceled all the decisions taken against her, including annulling the marriage and the adultery conviction. She is now free to go anywhere.”

Actor Gary Oldman Goes Off on PC ‘Crap,’ Liberal Double Standards in Hollywood

When conservative actors (who rarely have the guts to "come out" for fear of being blacklisted by the Gay Mafia that runs Hollyweird) speak openly it's funny how a resident liberal journalist will refer their words as "rants":

Actor Gary Oldman is more conservative, politically speaking, than most other people in Hollywood, and in a new interview with Playboy, he goes off on the political correctness that torpedoed both Mel Gibson and Alec Baldwin‘s careers, as well as the liberal double standard in Hollywood over who gets to make jokes about whom.

When asked to weigh in on what Gibson’s dealt with over the years, Oldman said, “I just think political correctness is crap. That’s what I think about it. I think it’s like, take a fucking joke. Get over it.” He said so many “fucking hypocrites” condemned Gibson, but they privately use words like he did.

Oldman also didn’t begrudge Alec Baldwin for using the word “fag” against a paparazzo after his family had been harassed by people with cameras. But because of that one word, he said, Baldwin’s been made into “an outcast, a leper.”

Oldman also went on a bit of a rant about how certain people in Hollywood are allowed to get away with politically incorrect jokes but people like him really can’t:

“Well, if I called Nancy Pelosi a cunt—and I’ll go one better, a fucking useless cunt—I can’t really say that. But Bill Maher and Jon Stewart can, and nobody’s going to stop them from working because of it. Bill Maher could call someone a fag and get away with it. He said to Seth MacFarlane this year, ‘I thought you were going to do the Oscars again. Instead they got a lesbian.’ He can say something like that. Is that more or less offensive than Alec Baldwin saying to someone in the street, ‘You fag’? I don’t get it.”
He also found it ridiculous that the culture in Hollywood last Oscar season was “if you didn’t vote for 12 Years a Slave you were a racist.”

Monday, June 23, 2014

How The Trans-Agenda Seeks To Redefine Everyone

TheFederalist.com:

Did you think only women get pregnant? Or only women get abortions? Planned Parenthood and NARAL—ironically both pro-abortion organizations that self-identify as champions of women’s rights—may soon be trying to change your mind about that.

One signal comes from a little petition drive that goes by #protransprochoice. It urges both Planned Parenthood and NARAL to adopt language more “inclusive” of transgender persons and to acknowledge “gender-non-conforming” people. Both pro-abortion organizations, which have been longtime supporters of the LGBT lobby, tweeted back supportive replies.

So what does this mean and why should we care?

Well, maybe Exhibit A should be Oprah Winfrey introducing us to “the first pregnant man” in 2008. This would be a woman named Tracey who “transitioned” to being Thomas by having a double mastectomy with a dose of hormones to produce facial hair and such. Thomas thought it would be nice to have a baby someday, and so decided to keep “his” vagina, uterus, and ovaries intact. But for some reason, even though Thomas was legally documented as male, she (oops!) needed a sperm donation. (Life isn’t fair.) In any event, when pregnant, Thomas was happy to pose nude (mostly, anyway) for the camera.

Thomas has since had two more children and in 2012 decided to undergo surgery for a more complete transition to a male bodily appearance. She now lectures on “trans fertility and reproductive rights.” Most do not understand what a seismic shift in language is being pushed here. In this scheme of things, using the pronoun “she” to refer to a person who goes through pregnancy and gives birth to a child is grounds for punishment.

So what does it all mean? At root, this isn’t really about people like Thomas. It’s mostly about everybody else. It’s all about changing you and your self-concept. As fringy as they may sound, injecting such lies into our language—“the pregnant man” and the push to separate the word “pregnancy” from the word “woman”—are clear signals that we are moving steadily towards erasing all gender distinctions in the law.

And why should we care? Because erasing gender distinctions, especially as they apply to childbearing and rearing, would serve to legally un-define what it means to be human. A new legal definition of human—as neither male nor female—would apply to you whether you like it or not. Already, there is social pressure for everyone to comply with the gender theory notion that biological facts are mere “social constructs.”

We should especially care because we are well on the way to enacting such laws already. In November, the U.S. Senate voted in favor of the Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA). The law is based on the assumption that one’s perceived “gender identity” does not always “match” your sex “assigned” or “designated” at birth. So, the thinking goes, the law should allow a more ambiguous array of gender identities: male, female, both, neither, or something else entirely. It’s not an overstatement to say that ENDA is a huge step, mostly under the radar, to codify a new definition of humanity.

In the Senate, every Democrat and ten Republicans voted for ENDA: Senators Ayotte, Collins, Flake, Hatch, Heller, Kirk, McCain, Murkowski, Portman, and Toomey. So all that remains is for the House of Representatives to take up ENDA (which hasn’t happened just yet) and follow suit.

Sunday, June 22, 2014

Liberal Media Wants You To Sympathize With Illegal Immigrant Antonio Velasquez

Of course, if this guy had gotten his papers and come into this country the legal way, like millions like have done in the past, he wouldn't have this problem. But hey, thanks to a liberal media that makes up its own rules along the way, we're supposed to sympathize with his plight. Again, control the words and you control the debate:

Antonio Velasquez sat in his home on the west side of Phoenix glued to his computer screen. The U.S. Senate was voting on a monumental immigration reform bill that was months in the making. Velasquez was so excited he took the day off from work to watch the proceedings live on C-SPAN.

One by one, the senators cast their votes. The outcome wasn't close. The bill passed by an overwhelming 68-32 majority, with 14 Republicans, including Arizona's two senators, John McCain and Jeff Flake, joining 52 Democrats and two independents. It was June 27, 2013.

Velasquez was thrilled. His dream of one day gaining legal status, after having lived here illegally for almost a quarter of a century, seemed closer than ever. The bill included a provision calling for millions of immigrants such as Velasquez living in the U.S. illegally to gain temporary legal status, followed by green cards and eventually U.S. citizenship.

But Velasquez tempered his excitement. He knew the bill still faced an uphill battle in the House before it could be sent to President Obama to sign.

"At that moment, I was overjoyed. There is no question it was a huge step," Velasquez said. "But at the same time, I felt trepidation. We still needed to wait to see what would happen in the House."

As it turned out, nothing happened.

Now, a year later, Velasquez has lost hope that Congress will pass an immigration bill — ever. As a result, Velasquez believes he may never have the chance to gain legal status through an act of Congress.

Sunday, June 15, 2014

Liberal Media Now Officially Referring To Ex-Army Traitor Bradley Manning As "Chelsea"

Despite the heinous crimes he committed and thus, all the lives he put in danger by salaciously releasing classified information to an anti-secrecy group, the liberal media bows down this criminal's request to now be referred to as "Chelsea" because he chooses to dress like a woman (i.e. "transgender rights"). Control the words and you control the debate:

Chelsea Manning, currently serving a thirty-five year sentence for leaking a heap of classified military materials to Wikileaks, penned an op-ed for the New York Times Sunday morning in which she called for greater press access to U.S. military operations, arguing that more transparency would produce a better informed populace and restore confidence in political and military officials.

“I believe that the current limits on press freedom and excessive government secrecy make it impossible for Americans to grasp fully what is happening in the wars we finance,” she wrote.

Manning, a former intelligence analyst, said she saw in Iraq the wide gulf in the understanding of U.S. military operations enjoyed by intelligence analysts versus that attainable by the public or even lawmakers, both of whom made poor decisions based on incomplete information:

“The more I made these daily comparisons between the news back in the States and the military and diplomatic reports available to me as an analyst, the more aware I became of the disparity. In contrast to the solid, nuanced briefings we created on the ground, the news available to the public was flooded with foggy speculation and simplifications.”
Manning especially critiqued the embedded reporter procedures, which she said all but demanded favorable coverage from the few members of the press who achieved access to it in the first place — not, Manning argued, a coincidence:

“The embedded reporter program, which continues in Afghanistan and wherever the United States sends troops, is deeply informed by the military’s experience of how media coverage shifted public opinion during the Vietnam War. The gatekeepers in public affairs have too much power: Reporters naturally fear having their access terminated, so they tend to avoid controversial reporting that could raise red flags.”

Al Michaels: Washington Redskins Name Change Talk Is 'Nuts'

Finally, a sports journalist refusing to bow down to the politically-correct geniuses/hypocrites on the Left. And why doesn't hardly anyone mention that all those 50 senators calling for the Redskins to change their name just happen to be Democrats?:

Longtime play-by-play announcer Al Michaels called the heated debate over the Washington Redskins' team name "nuts," and feels team owner Dan Snyder isn't likely to bow to public pressure.
"It seems to me as if he is going to hold on," Michaels told the "Jim Rome on Showtime" program this week, according to The Washington Post.
"I mean all of a sudden — I mean, for 70-some-odd years this was a zero issue, and then it became an issue. I understand we live in this politically correct environment. It's crazier than ever; you know, senators want to weigh in on this, like there's nothing better to do in Congress. This becomes a big issue. I mean, I just think it's nuts. And I do know, I've talked to Snyder about it — not recently but when we were in Washington last year — and he basically said 'over my dead body.'"
The push to change the Redskins' name has raged for some time. Last month, 50 United States senators sent a letter to NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell asking him to act and argued that the name was a racist slur to Native Americans.
Team President Bruce Allen responded to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid a few days later.

"Our use of 'Redskins' as the name of our football team for more than 80 years has always been respectful of and shown reverence toward the proud legacy and traditions of Native Americans," Allen wrote in a letter that was released by the team.
Allen's response cites research that "Redskins originated as a Native American expression of solidarity," and explained that the logo was designed by Native American leaders.

Hillary Clinton's Gay-Marriage Problem

TheAtlantic.com:

Hillary Clinton didn't refrain from supporting same-sex marriage for political reasons—before last year, she earnestly believed that marriage equality should be denied to gays and lesbians. That's the story the 66-year-old Democrat settled on when NPR host Terry Gross pressed her on her views. The admission is easily the most significant in the interview with the former senator, secretary of State, and presidential candidate, though much of the subsequent media attention has focused on the perception that there was a "heated exchange" where Clinton "lashed out" at her interviewer.* The mild tension stemmed from persistent questioning as Clinton obfuscated on an issue that could damage her chances in a 2016 primary but is relatively unlikely to hurt her in a contest against a Republican, given that her coalition is so much stronger on gay rights than the opposition.

In a primary, Clinton could be forced to explain a longtime position that a significant part of that Democratic political coalition now views as suspect or even bigoted. Most famously, the Silicon Valley left forced the ouster of Mozilla CEO Brendan Eich for a 2008 donation he made to an anti-gay-marriage ballot initiative. That same year, Clinton ran for president while openly opposing gay marriage. If she is to be believed, she also opposed gay marriage as recently as 2013, long after a majority of Americans already held a more gay-friendly position. Would the subset of Democrats who thought 2008 opposition to gay marriage should prevent a man from becoming CEO in 2013 really support the 2015 presidential campaign of a woman who openly opposed gay marriage until last year?

Doing so would seem to show inconsistency, yet there's a strong argument to be made that Clinton's anti-gay-marriage past shouldn't drive decisions to support or oppose her. No one doubts she will be a strong supporter of gay equality if elected president, now that all the political incentives to take that position are aligned. She has advanced gay rights other than marriage at times in her long career. And she has never come across in speeches or interviews as an anti-gay bigot. There is, however, a vocal segment of the left that is invested in likening people who opposed gay marriage to racists who opposed interracial marriage. There is also resentment from gays who feel that the Clintons wronged them in the past.

Andrew Sullivan's perspective is instructive:
She was the second most powerful person in an administration in a critical era for gay rights. And in that era, her husband signed the HIV travel ban into law (it remained on the books for 22 years thereafter), making it the only medical condition ever legislated as a bar to even a tourist entering the US. Clinton also left gay service-members in the lurch, doubling the rate of their discharges from the military, and signed DOMA, the high watermark of anti-gay legislation in American history. Where and when it counted, the Clintons gave critical credibility to the religious right’s jihad against us. And on the day we testified against DOMA in 1996, their Justice Department argued that there were no constitutional problems with DOMA at all (the Supreme Court eventually disagreed).

What I’d like to hear her answer is whether she regrets that period and whether she will ever take responsibility for it. But she got pissed when merely asked how calculated her position on this was. Here’s my guess: Unlike Obama, she was personally deeply uncomfortable with this for a long time and politically believed the issue was a Republican wedge issue to torment the Clintons rather than a core civil rights cause. I was editor of TNR for five years of the Clintons, aggressively writing and publishing articles in favor of marriage equality and military service, and saw the Clintons’ irritation with and hostility to gay activists up close. Under my editorship, we were a very early 1991 backer of Clinton – so I sure didn’t start out prejudiced against them. They taught me that skepticism all by themselves, and mainly by lying all the time.

Saturday, June 14, 2014

Study Shows White People Believe One Successful Black Person Means Racism Is Over

And when white liberals somehow got Barack Obama elected POTUS, the "Black Power" movement effectively came to an end:

As the votes were tallied for the 2008 presidential election, conservative pundit William Bennett weighed in on the election's significance. “I’ll tell you one thing it means, as a former secretary of education,” Bennett said on CNN. “You don’t take any excuses anymore from anybody who says, ‘The deck is stacked.'”

Bennett, who is white, suggested that if Barack Obama could become president, so could any black man. Implicit in the argument was that systemic racial discrimination was no longer keeping black men and women from success.

Bennett is far from alone in arguing that a single black American's success is proof that impenetrable racial barriers no longer exist. In fact, it's a common view, according to a recent study published in the peer-reviewed Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.

The study authors, Clayton R. Critcher, assistant professor at University of California Berkeley, and Jane L. Risen, associate professor at the University of Chicago, found that exposure to a single African-American in a high-performing position -- any position outside stereotypical jobs in which blacks “traditionally” excel -- is enough to make whites more likely to deny the existence of systemic racism.

“People shifted the blame from vestiges of racism in America to problems in black communities,” Critcher told The Huffington Post over the phone.

To test this finding, Critcher and Risen recruited several hundred college students and adults to participate in eight experiments. In each study, participants were asked to identify images of marginally famous individuals.

In most cases, all participants were shown the same images, depicting moderately famous white men and women. However in certain cases, one group was presented with an image of a successful African-American, like Merck CEO Kenneth Frazier, while others saw an image of a white person of equivalent success, like Lockheed Martin Executive Chairman Robert Stevens.

Then, participants were asked their opinion of the role of race in modern America, including whether they felt that race could influence workplace success.

President of Godless Liberals, Barack Obama, Calls Climate Change Deniers A ‘Serious Threat’ to Future

No doubt, more and more of our "tolerant" liberals will use this as an excuse to censor manmade climate change deniers:. This man is pure evil:

Describing lawmakers and pundits who deny manmade climate change as a “fairly serious threat to everybody’s future,” President Obama on Saturday called for less debate and more action in combating warming trends.

Delivering the address at University of California Irvine’s commencement, Obama underscored the view of some scientists that the effects of climate change are already being felt nationwide and said he was allocating new funds for communities recovering from natural disasters.

Speaking at Angel Stadium in Anaheim, Obama compared the scientific problem of curbing climate change to that of putting a man on the moon. And while skeptics in the 1960s may have made a case against the mission, Obama said he couldn’t remember “saying the moon wasn’t there, or that it was made of cheese.”

“Today’s Congress, though, is full of folks who stubbornly and automatically reject the scientific evidence about climate change,” he said. “They’ll tell you it’s a hoax, or a fad.”

Obama said Republicans had a long history of supporting environmental causes, naming Teddy Roosevelt, Richard Nixon and George H. W. Bush as examples of past presidents who did more than current GOP politicians.

“People are thinking about politics instead of thinking about what’s good for the next generation,” he added later.

The White House has taken on climate change as a top issue for Obama’s second term, announcing at the beginning of the month proposed new restrictions on power plants that would reduce emissions by 30% from 2005 levels by 2030.

On Saturday Obama announced a $1 billion fund for towns and cities recovering from disasters. About $130 million is reserved for places affected by 2012’s Superstorm Sandy; the rest will be distributed nationwide.

Opponents of Obama’s actions on climate change— some of whom deny humans are responsible for climate change — say the rules will kill jobs and increase the cost of energy.

IRS Has 'Lost' Two Years of Lois Lerner's Emails

Townhall.com:

According to the House Ways and Means Committee, the IRS has "lost" two years of emails belonging to former head of tax exempt organizations Lois Lerner. The IRS doesn't have a record of her emails to outside groups or government agencies from January 2009 through April 2011, conveniently encompassing some of the same time when tea party groups were being targeted for extra scrutiny and possible criminal prosecution. The IRS says the loss of emails is due to a "computer crash" and claims emails from or to Lerner from the White House, Democratic members of Congress, the Treasury Department, FEC and Department of Justice cannot be located. They do however have emails belonging to Lerner that she sent to other IRS employees.

“The fact that I am just learning about this, over a year into the investigation, is completely unacceptable and now calls into question the credibility of the IRS’s response to Congressional inquiries. There needs to be an immediate investigation and forensic audit by Department of Justice as well as the Inspector General," Ways and Means Committee Chairman Dave Camp said in a statement. “Just a short time ago, Commissioner Koskinen promised to produce all Lerner documents. It appears now that was an empty promise. Frankly, these are the critical years of the targeting of conservative groups that could explain who knew what when, and what, if any, coordination there was between agencies. Instead, because of this loss of documents, we are conveniently left to believe that Lois Lerner acted alone. This failure of the IRS requires the White House, which promised to get to the bottom of this, to do an Administration-wide search and production of any emails to or from Lois Lerner. The Administration has repeatedly referred us back to the IRS for production of materials. It is clear that is wholly insufficient when it comes to determining the full scope of the violation of taxpayer rights.”

Emails belonging to Lerner that were not "lost" have shown that she was in contact with Democratic members of Congress and the Department of Justice about prosecuting tea party groups. Just this week, emails surfaced showing Lerner sent confidential tax information belonging to conservative groups to the FBI for investigation just before the 2010 midterm elections.

According to Camp, this is the first time the IRS has disclosed the loss of emails since the investigation into IRS targeting of conservatives started more than a year ago.

UPDATE: Chairman of the House Oversight Committee Darrell Issa responds:

“Isn’t it convenient for the Obama Administration that the IRS now says it has suddenly realized it lost Lois Lerner’s emails requested by Congress and promised by Commissioner John Koskinen? Do they really expect the American people to believe that, after having withheld these emails for a year, they're just now realizing the most critical time period is missing? Congressional oversight has revealed that the IRS has –potentially illegally– shared confidential taxpayer information with the FBI and lost crucial email records even as the agency continues to withhold information by not fully complying with the Committee’s subpoena. Left to the IRS’ own preferences, the White House would still be retelling the lie that this was all about mismanagement confined to a local office. The supposed loss of Lerner’s emails further blows a hole in the credibility of claims that the IRS is complying with Congressional requests and their repeated assurances that they’re working to get to the truth. If there wasn't nefarious conduct that went much higher than Lois Lerner in the IRS targeting scandal, why are they playing these games?"

Mitt Romney Bashes Hillary Clinton, Calls Foreign Policy A 'Monumental Bust'

Mediaite.com:

Former GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney harped on Hillary Clinton on Friday, further criticizing the foreign policy she and the Obama administration pursued during her time as secretary of state.

"The Obama-Biden-Hillary Clinton foreign policy is a monumental bust," Romney told about 300 of his top donors, according to The Washington Post's Philip Rucker.

The donors were gathered, along with potential presidential candidates, at Romney's "ideas summit" in Park City, Utah.

Romney took a number of punches at Clinton during his speech on foreign policy and domestic issues, saying the United States is worse off after her tenure as secretary of state leading the U.S. diplomatic corps.

"Secretary Clinton actually presented Russia's foreign minister with a large plastic button labeled reset," he said, according to Rucker. Romney added that she was "gushing with smiles" as she did so.

On Thursday, Romney told Fox News, "There’s almost not a place in the world that’s better off because of her leadership in the State Department."

Romney also responded to Clinton's remarks in regard to the exchange of five Taliban detainees for Army Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl's release.

In an interview on NBC News this week, Clinton said, "These five guys are not a threat to the United States. They are a threat to the safety and security of Afghanistan and Pakistan."

Romney told Fox News, "Well, that may be one of the most clueless responses I have heard in a long time because of course you don’t throw our allies under the bus."

Friday, June 13, 2014

Denmark Forces Churches to Conduct Gay Marriages

CharismaNews.com:

In what could be a prophetic sign for the church at large, Denmark's parliament is forcing its will on the church.

A new law there now mandates that churches in the nation conduct gay marriages instead of short ceremonial blessings that some pastors have been performing up until now.

The new law does have one saving grace. Clergy can refuse to officiate the actual ceremony. Nevertheless, that bishop, pastor or priest is charged with arranging a replacement venue for the service.

Denmark has sanctioned gay civil unions since 1989. The nation legalized gay marriage in 2012.

Wednesday, June 11, 2014

DC Comics Writer Chuck Dixon Claims His Conservative Politics Lost Him Jobs in Comics

TheMarySue.com:

Chuck Dixon has not only written a lot of Batman comics, he was heavily involved in my favorite era of the character, in which the state of Batman’s relationships with his various surrogate family members and friends held just as much weight as his triumph over his foes. And while Gail Simone is more closely associated with the Birds of Prey, Dixon was the first to popularize the all-female superhero team in a way that wasn’t primarily for the male gaze. From his most popular and longstanding work in the DC Universe alone, you would not immediately guess Dixon is an outspoken social conservative.

This weekend, Dixon and artist Paul Rivoche (whose graphic novel adaptation of a popular conservative reading of the Great Depression hit shelves in the last month) published a post on the Wall Street Journal‘s opinion section bemoaning the predominantly liberal bias of modern comics (as they see it). The piece also claims Dixon’s career dried up once he started to voice his political views in the workplace, and calls for conservative creators of all stripes to take up the torch and catch up to the left wing in their dominance of the market. I think.

The essay also has a healthy dose of the “won’t somebody think of the children” argument, claiming we should eliminate politics from superhero comics because they are aimed at impressionable minds.

Our fear is that today’s young comic-book readers are being ill-served by a medium that often presents heroes as morally compromised or no different from the criminals they battle. With the rise of moral relativism, “truth, justice and the American way” have lost their meaning.
I can agree with Dixon on the fact that kids are ill-served by the superhero medium. Take, for example, DC offering an issue full of gore and violence for Free Comic Book Day, the most kid-oriented date on the comics publishing calendar. Superhero comics simply aren’t targeted at children any more (much to the annoyance to a number of geek parents I know, who’d really like to be able to share a Superman comic written within the last year with their tiny offspring), and they haven’t been since before Dixon started working on them.

Dixon and Rivoche acknowledge this when they talk about the rise in anti-hero comics of the nineties and the subsequent effect of that change on classic characters like Batman and Superman. Conveniently, they do this without mentioning the contributions of Frank Miller, another very outspoken right-wing comics pro, to the beginnings of that trend with his work on The Dark Knight Returns, and lay the source of all this “moral relativism” at the feet of liberal politics. Dixon claims that this bend towards liberal politics in comics lost him jobs:

[In the 1990s, Chuck Dixon] expressed the opinion that a frank story line about AIDS was not right for comics marketed to children. His editors rejected the idea and asked him to apologize to colleagues for even expressing it. Soon enough, Chuck got less work.
This description raises more questions than it answers. Millions of people live with AIDS every day. What is so political about their lives that a frank and honest depiction of their disease can not be made appropriate for children? Except, of course, that AIDS has long been associated, sometimes exclusively, with the gay community, and we all know that Superman can romance Lois Lane as much as he wants, and Bruce Wayne can date every socialite in Gotham, but homosexual relationships are inappropriate for children. Ultimately, at the end of the piece, Dixon and Rivoche’s call is not for less political subjects in comics to make them more kid friendly, but for more, different politics in comics. “We hope conservatives,” they say, “free-marketeers and, yes, free-speech liberals will join us. It’s time to take back comics.”