The Tea Party movement is showing signs of a resurgence following the revelation that the IRS targeted groups and other politically conservative organizations for the past several years.
A recent poll shows Americans have a more favorable opinion of the less-government, anti-tax groups. And one of the biggest groups in the grassroots movement told FoxNews.com this weekend that fundraising and donations have increased since news of the IRS targeting broke earlier this month.
21 steps. Hurricanes. Snowstorms. Or the brutal summer heat in Virginia.
This tomb will always have a guard.
Here is another story you likely did not hear about in the lamestream media. And if you did, you would have gotten a terribly one-sided slant on all this. So how many of you know about Kaitlyn Hunt? Nope, didn’t think you would. However, a few of you may have heard something about a “Free Kate” movement.Well, yeah. It's been pretty clear for awhile.
So what is all this about, and why should Kate be freed? Well, the story is quite straight forward – except to the homosexual activists and a pro-homosexual MSM who are trying to pretend it isn’t. Kate is an 18-year-old lesbian who was caught out having a sexual affair with a child – a 14-year-old girl.
Now that is illegal in the state of Florida, where this sordid event occurred. So we have here a clear case of paedophilia: adults having sex with children. That should be the end of the story, except that the homosexual activists have turned Kate into a poster girl – and even a victim – for their cause.
They can find absolutely nothing wrong with this, and are bending over backwards to justify it to the world. Just imagine if a man was found to have had sexual relations with a 14-year-old girl: he would be in jail by now and the whole world would think justice had been served.
But because this is a lesbian affair, the media as a whole and a homosexuality-drenched West is having trouble finding anything wrong with this. Thus we have yet another clear indication that the granting of special rights to homosexuals simply opens the door to every other sort of sexual perversion – in this case paedophilia.
In January, Rush Limbaugh warned that there was “an effort under way to normalize pedophilia,” and was ridiculed by liberals (including CNN’s Soledad O’Brien) for saying so. But now liberals have joined a crusade that, if successful, would effectively legalize sex with 14-year-olds in Florida.RTWT at the link.
The case involves Kaitlyn Ashley Hunt, an 18-year-old in Sebastian, Florida, who was arrested in February after admitting that she had a lesbian affair with a 14-year high-school freshman. (Click here to read the affidavit in Hunt’s arrest.) It is a felony in Florida to have sex with 14-year-olds. Hunt was expelled from Sebastian High School — where she and the younger girl had sex in a restroom stall — and charged with two counts of “felony lewd and lascivious battery on a child.” The charges could put Hunt in prison for up to 15 years. Prosecutors have offered Hunt a plea bargain that would spare her jail time, but her supporters have organized an online crusade to have her let off scot-free — in effect, nullifying Florida’s law, which sets the age of consent at 16.
Using the slogan “Stop the Hate, Free Kate” (the Twitter hashtag is #FreeKate) this social-media campaign has attracted the support of liberals including Chris Hayes of MSNBC, Daily Kos, Think Progress and the gay-rights group Equality Florida. Undoubtedly, part of the appeal of the case is that Hunt is a petite attractive green-eyed blonde. One critic wondered on Twitter how long activists have “been waiting for a properly photogenic poster child of the correct gender to come along?”
Portraying Hunt as the victim of prejudice, her supporters claim she was only prosecuted because she is homosexual and because the parents of the unnamed 14-year-old are “bigoted religious zealots,” as Hunt’s mother said in a poorly written Facebook post. The apparent public-relations strategy was described by Matthew Philbin of Newsbusters: “If you can play the gay card, you immediately trigger knee-jerk support from the liberal media and homosexual activists anxious to topple any and all rules regarding sex.”
A week of disturbances in Sweden's capital has tested the Scandinavian nation's reputation for tolerance, reports Colin Freeman.And as the "Paradise Lost" clip points out above, this is taking place in a country with perhaps the most generous social welfare system on Earth. Cradle to grave government services, health care, and universal education. But no. It's all going up in smoke like a tinder brush fire. Damned ingrate immigrants. And it's coming to a Western democracy near you. Cheers!
Like the millions of other ordinary Swedes whom he now sees himself as one of, Mohammed Abbas fears his dream society is now under threat. When he first arrived in Stockholm as refugee from Iran in 1994, the vast Husby council estate where he settled was a mixture of locals and foreigners, a melting pot for what was supposed to be a harmonious, multi-racial paradise.
Two decades on, though, "white flight" has left only one in five of Husby's flats occupied by ethnic Swedes, and many of their immigrant replacements do not seem to share his view that a new life in Sweden is a dream come true. Last week, the neighbourhood erupted into rioting, sparking some of the fiercest urban unrest that Sweden has seen in decades, and a new debate about the success of racial integration.
"In the old days, the neighbourhood was more Swedish and life felt like a dream, but now there are just too many foreigners, and a new generation that has grown up here with just their own culture," he said, gesturing towards the hooded youths milling around in Husby's pedestrianised shopping precinct...
There were times this past week when it seemed like the 19th-century Know-Nothing Party had returned to Washington. President Obama insisted he knew nothing about major decisions in the State Department, or the Justice Department, or the Internal Revenue Service. The heads of those agencies, in turn, insisted they knew nothing about major decisions by their subordinates. It was as if the government functioned by some hidden hand.A good piece. But the argument's not new. Political scientists have long warned of the rise of an unaccountable administrative state. Still, despite the decline of accountability inherent in mass bureaucratization, the culture of corruption starts at the top. And this White House is among the most corrupt in American history.
Clearly, there was a degree of willful blindness in these claims. However, the suggestion that someone, even the president, is in control of today’s government may be an illusion.
The growing dominance of the federal government over the states has obscured more fundamental changes within the federal government itself: It is not just bigger, it is dangerously off kilter. Our carefully constructed system of checks and balances is being negated by the rise of a fourth branch, an administrative state of sprawling departments and agencies that govern with increasing autonomy and decreasing transparency.
For much of our nation’s history, the federal government was quite small. In 1790, it had just 1,000 nonmilitary workers. In 1962, there were 2,515,000 federal employees. Today, we have 2,840,000 federal workers in 15 departments, 69 agencies and 383 nonmilitary sub-agencies.
This exponential growth has led to increasing power and independence for agencies. The shift of authority has been staggering. The fourth branch now has a larger practical impact on the lives of citizens than all the other branches combined.
The rise of the fourth branch has been at the expense of Congress’s lawmaking authority. In fact, the vast majority of “laws” governing the United States are not passed by Congress but are issued as regulations, crafted largely by thousands of unnamed, unreachable bureaucrats. One study found that in 2007, Congress enacted 138 public laws, while federal agencies finalized 2,926 rules, including 61 major regulations.
This rulemaking comes with little accountability. It’s often impossible to know, absent a major scandal, whom to blame for rules that are abusive or nonsensical. Of course, agencies owe their creation and underlying legal authority to Congress, and Congress holds the purse strings. But Capitol Hill’s relatively small staff is incapable of exerting oversight on more than a small percentage of agency actions. And the threat of cutting funds is a blunt instrument to control a massive administrative state — like running a locomotive with an on/off switch.
The day after 25-year-old Drummer Lee Rigby was murdered outside Woolwich barracks, anxious mothers met Army chiefs to call for more protection.Continue reading.
The women asked for their views to be heard at the very top “because they are feeling so exposed to danger”. Highly trained MoD police would have been at the scene of the murder in minutes had they still been conducting patrols.
They are trained to deal with lifethreatening incidents on the perimeter of the barracks and have authority to shoot to kill, the Sunday Express can reveal.
One source claimed that had such officers been in place, they would have been able to deal with the situation last Wednesday quicker than the Met Police firearms officers who arrived at the scene within 14 minutes.
During the wait the two suspects spouted extremist propaganda to bystanders.
The source said: "MoD police radios were linked into the Met's so they would have been right on top of this within minutes and would have known exactly what to do...
As Americans prepare for Memorial Day—the official kickoff to a summer grilling season of burgers and T-bones—rising beef prices have some consumers balking in the grocery aisles.Well, my wife's working on Monday, otherwise we'd be having a huge tri-tip roast, damn the prices!
Retail beef prices are widely expected to set new records in coming weeks after wholesale prices, or the amount meatpackers charge sellers for beef, hit an all-time peak this past week.
After achieving new highs for three weeks, choice-grade beef, the most common variety in the U.S., jumped to $2.1137 a pound Thursday, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. That level broke a decade-old record for wholesale prices set in 2003, when a case of mad-cow disease in Canada led to a spike in export demand for U.S. beef.
Wholesale prices retreated slightly Friday afternoon, falling to $2.0887 a pound, confirming some market-watchers' suspicions that retailers may be unwilling to swallow the record-high beef costs.
The fat beef prices are the result of years of drought in major cattle-producing states, a trend that has shrunk the nation's cattle herd to its smallest level in six decades.
Higher beef prices are pinching food budgets for consumers already wrestling with a rise in gasoline prices, the expiration of the federal payroll-tax holiday and stubbornly high unemployment. They're also expected to drive consumers to other meats after the holiday weekend, one of the biggest beef-sales periods of the year. That could threaten high beef profit margins for meatpackers like Tyson Foods Inc. TSN -0.20% and Cargill Inc. and also pose a challenge for restaurants and grocery stores.
"Consumers may favor beef more, but they've got to feed their families," said Gary Morrison, an analyst with Urner Barry's Yellow Sheet, a meat-industry newsletter in Bayville, N.J.
Caught in a public relations crisis, the administration has released internal emails and details of closed-door discussions. But the sharing has still been selective.
WASHINGTON — The White House decided to release internal emails about the deadly attack on the diplomatic compound in Benghazi, Libya — but only after summaries of the exchanges had leaked.Obama's a hypocritical asshole. A Muslin socialist interloper asshole loser. 2016 can't come soon enough.
The president's spokesman disclosed details of closed-door discussions about a report that found the IRS targeted conservative groups — but did so in a drip-drip-drip fashion that only raised more questions.
And in a speech meant to expose the top-secret drone program to public examination, President Obama shrouded key details, such as whether the CIA would still use drones.
Caught up in a public relations crisis, White House officials have drawn open a few curtains, revealing once-secret documents and answering queries that they would ordinarily have dismissed with an eye roll.
But the sharing has been selective and done under duress. It has come in fits and starts to an administration that promised to be the most open in American history.
Many allies of the president think that with this burst of sunshine he has arrested the run of bad news and taken charge of the "narrative." Even in some Obama-friendly quarters, though, the sharing is seen as too little and too late, and all the more disappointing for the high hopes Obama had set for transparency at the outset of his presidency.
Civil liberties advocates are disappointed that Obama's drone speech glossed over some of the more difficult legal and moral aspects of targeted killings. The chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, a Democrat, questioned the candor of former officials at the Internal Revenue Service.
Lanny Davis, who handled scandals for the Clinton White House, has been critical of the Obama administration.
"The nontransparency instinct of the Obama White House is more about not understanding effective, proactive crisis management," said Davis, who remains an Obama supporter. "The idea is to inoculate by being transparent."
David Cameron is planning new powers to muzzle Islamic hate preachers accused of provoking terrorist outrages such as the killing of soldier Lee Rigby.More at the link.
The Prime Minister wants to stop extremist clerics using schools, colleges, prisons and mosques to spread their ‘poison’ and is to head a new Tackling Extremism and Radicalisation Task Force (TERFOR) made up of senior Ministers, MI5, police and moderate religious leaders.
The high-powered group will study a number of measures, including banning extremist clerics from being given public platforms to incite students, prisoners and other followers – and forcing mosque leaders to answer for ‘hate preachers’.
Vin Scully and Jack Buck via@dodgers @jonsoohoo #StlCards #GreatnessRecognizingGreatness twitter.com/VinScullyTweet…
— Vin Scully Tweets (@VinScullyTweet) May 25, 2013
Picked up some #Angels tickets this afternoon. twitter.com/AmPowerBlog/st…
— Donald Douglas (@AmPowerBlog) May 25, 2013
7th win a row for the @angelsthat's what I call baseball. 7-0. I'm so happy we playing like this. #AngelsBaseball
— Frankie Argumedo (@frankiepiton) May 25, 2013
Final from KC: #Angels 7, #Royals 0. Angels (22-27) extend win streak to 7 games, move to within 5 games of .500.
— Mike DiGiovanna (@MikeDiGiovanna) May 25, 2013
