Women’s Group: Obama’s Cabinet ‘Clearly’ Needs To Be 50-percent Female

As President Barack Obama finalizes his second-term cabinet picks, the nation’s leading feminist group is pushing for more female appointments.

Currently, the president, who garnered 55 percent of the women’s vote on Election Day, has eight females in his 23-member cabinet. According the National Organization for Women, that number isn’t nearly high enough.

NOW president Terry O’Neill, in an interview with The Daily Caller, explained that she would like to see complete gender parity in Obama’s second-term cabinet.

“I think that if half of the cabinet were women and half of the Supreme Court and half of Congress were women, we would see a lot more policies for expanding education and health care and social services that allow communities to thrive,” O’Neill explained. “We’d see a lot less spending on military weapons systems, and we would also see a lot less of the most powerful, moneyed people not paying their fair share.”

While O’Neill said Obama’s inner circle needs more gender diversity, she praised the president for nominating women and minorities to other posts, joking that Obama doesn’t “need binders” to pick top females.

Read more from this story HERE.

Limbaugh Rips GOP Leadership: They Gave ‘A Seminar On How To Surrender’

Rush Limbaugh took a moment on Wednesday to speak about the joint press conference held by the “so-called Republican leadership” — comprised of House Speaker John Boehner, House Majority Leader Eric Cantor and several others. Criticizing the party’s acquiescing on the issue of tax increases on the wealthy, Limbaugh said the Republicans have “conceded.”

“I don’t know why, but they were smiling,” Limbaugh said. “What we got today was a seminar on how to surrender. It was weak. The Republicans have conceded the language, they have conceded the silly notion of baseline budgeting.”

To his point about the language, Limbaugh said that now “deductions are loopholes,” which sets up the premise that 100 percent of income is subject to taxation. The bottom line: “All money is Washington’s.”

Read more from this story HERE.

Video: Stray Dogs Being Taught to Drive in New Zealand

In a world already full of road hogs this is perhaps the last thing you want to see in the rear view mirror.

Animal experts are teaching dogs how to drive.

Astonishingly, it took three mutts just eight weeks to master the basics in wooden carts.

Porter, a 10 month old beardie cross, is one of three dogs being trained to drive a specially converted Mini in a stunt for the New Zealand Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. Monty, an 18 month old Giant Schnauzer cross in one of the specially built training cars built to get the dogs used to the controls of the specially modified mini. Ginnie, a one year old Beardie Whippet Cross is the third driver in the group.

The three dogs will drive a modified Mini in which they sit on their haunches in the driver’s seat with their paws on the steering wheel. Their feet go on extension levers which had been attached to the accelerator and the brake whilst their paw will rest on the gearstick.

They then graduated to a modified Mini in which they sat on their haunches in the driver’s seat with their paws on the steering wheel. Their feet go on extension levers which are attached to the accelerator and the brake while their paw rests on the gearstick. Read more from this story HERE.

Famous Fox News Faces ‘Get Dumped Off Air’

If you’re used to watching Fox News, you may notice a lot less face time by political analysts Karl Rove and Dick Morris.

New York Magazine is reporting the top-rated cable-news network is doing some “post-election soul searching,” and Roger Ailes, head of Fox News, is changing the characters who appear as talking heads on the air.

“According to multiple Fox sources, Ailes has issued a new directive to his staff,” reports Gabriel Sherman of New York Magazine. “He wants the faces associated with the election off the air – for now. For Karl Rove and Dick Morris – a pair of pundits perhaps most closely aligned with Fox’s anti-Obama campaign – Ailes’s orders mean new rules.”

Among the reported new rules is a mandate from Fox News programming chief Bill Shine that producers receive permission before booking Rove or Morris for an appearance.

Both pundits were on the air in the immediate aftermath of last month’s election, “but their visibility on the network has dropped markedly,” wrote Sherman.

Read more from this story HERE.

Group-Home Staff Took Illiterate, Developmentally Disabled Resident to Vote

Cecil Pearson is “shocked” his daughter voted for Barack Obama in November, but not for a typical reason: Darlene, Pearson’s daughter, is intellectually disabled and functionally illiterate, and lives with five other women in a group home operated by Easter Seals.

“We are here to support the individual’s rights and we help them exercise their rights as adults,” Jeff Smith, Easter Seals chief communication officer, told The Daily Caller.

“We we were providing the support for those individuals based on their community involvement and desires, and in this case their desire was to vote.”

In the state of North Carolina, Darlene can vote, marry and enter into contracts, despite a court ruling in 1995 declaring her incompetent.

“Its not my role to refute law or otherwise,” Smith told TheDC, “They are individuals and they have the same rights. … They were fully in their right to vote.”

Read more from this story HERE.

Video: Calif. Teachers Union Releases Cartoon Clip Featuring ‘The Rich’ Urinating on the Poor

A new animated video released by the California Federation of Teachers shows the rich “1 percent” urinating on and stealing money from the less fortunate and middle class. The purpose of the video is to explain “economic inequality” and the need for wealthy people to pay their “fair share of taxes.”

The video argues that the rich got richer by evading taxes and using loopholes to hold onto their money. The union claims this is why Congress needs to repeal Bush-era tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans . . .

Here is how CFT summarizes its new cartoon video:

“Tax the rich: An animated fairy tale, is narrated by Ed Asner, with animation by award-winning artist Mike Konopacki, and written and directed by Fred Glass for the California Federation of Teachers. The 8 minute video shows how we arrived at this moment of poorly funded public services and widening economic inequality. Things go downhill in a happy and prosperous land after the rich decide they don’t want to pay taxes anymore. They tell the people that there is no alternative, but the people aren’t so sure. This land bears a startling resemblance to our land. After you watch this video, click here to share with friends, and send an email to your elected officials to let them know they need to restore higher federal tax rates on the wealthy so that we may once more enjoy properly funded public services.”

Read more from this story HERE.

Purged Reps Speak Out: ‘Petty’ ‘Vindictive’ Establishment Punishing Members for Voting Conservative

A day after learning he was yanked from from the Agriculture Committee, Kansas Rep. Tim Huelskamp lit into GOP leaders Tuesday, charging that conservative Republicans are punished for not toeing Speaker John Boehner’s line.

“No good deed goes unpunished,” Huelskamp said at a Heritage Foundation event. “We were not notified about what might occur but it confirms in my mind the deepest suspicions that most Americans have about Washington D.C: it’s petty, it’s vindictive, and if you have conservative principles you will be punished.”

Huelskamp spoke at the briefing with Rep. Justin Amash (R-Mich.), who was booted from the Budget Committee as part of a series of committee moves by Republican leaders that drew criticism from the right. Amash said he still hadn’t been contacted by leadership about what happened, and neither man has been told which committees they’ll be appointed to in the next Congress.

Huelskamp said that when the Republican freshman class of 2010 came in, they were told they had to fundraise for the party and notify leadership how they would vote but could otherwise “vote their conscience and their district.”

His removal, the congressman said, was “not about principle, it was about obedience.”

Read more from this story HERE.

Mark Levin “Goes Nuclear” on Boehner, DeMint Criticizes Him For Wanting to Destroy Jobs

DeMint Criticizes Boehner’s Deficit-Cut Plan

By Kathleen Hunter and Richard Rubin. House Speaker John Boehner’s proposal to generate $800 billion in new revenue “will destroy American jobs” and Republicans should oppose it, Senator Jim DeMint of South Carolina said today.

The comments from DeMint, co-founder of the Senate’s anti- tax Tea Party caucus, represent a strong indictment of Boehner’s plan from a fellow Republican lawmaker and highlight a divide within the party. Boehner yesterday proposed a $2.2 trillion deficit-cutting proposal that seeks $800 billion in revenue in the next decade from an overhaul of the tax code that would curb some breaks.

“Speaker Boehner’s $800 billion tax hike will destroy American jobs and allow politicians in Washington to spend even more, while not reducing our $16 trillion debt by a single penny,” DeMint said in a statement. “Republicans must oppose tax increases and insist on real spending reductions that shrink the size of government and allow Americans to keep more of their hard-earned money.”

The remarks signify that Boehner will have to tamp down opposition from the anti-spending wing of his conference — and probably rely on some Democratic votes — to advance legislation to avert the so-called fiscal cliff through the House. Unless Congress acts, more than $600 billion in tax increases and spending reductions will begin in January.

“Is John Boehner prepared to bring this measure to a vote with the understanding that it will pass with a bipartisan majority? If he is, let’s press forward in negotiations,” the Senate’s second-ranking Democrat, Richard Durbin of Illinois, said today in an interview. “But if this is just a negotiation to win over the Tea Party Republicans, I am not very hopeful.” Read more from this story HERE.

Mark Levin Goes Nuclear on Boehner

By the Right Scoop. Mark Levin has had enough, saying that Huelskamp was elected by American citizens in his district who sent him there to vote the way he pledged to them he’d vote, and now Huelskamp is being treated like crap from Speaker Boehner because he’s not falling in line? Levin asks “who the hell does Speaker Boehner think he is?” Listen to the audio HERE.

That’s Indoctrination!

Next week, fourth-grade students at Penn Valley Elementary School in the gilded Philadelphia suburb of Lower Merion will spend part of their school day watching and discussing a very clever piece of cinematic propaganda courtesy of organized homosexuality. The film is called That’s a Family!, and it is endorsed by the Human Rights Campaign along with other homosexual activist groups.

As a fellow practitioner of the occult arts of persuasion, I must confess my admiration for That’s a Family! The film clearly is a product of the institutional wing of the gay-rights movement, and the filmmaker’s earlier efforts include many examples of the Left’s garden-variety sex and sexuality obsessions: It’s Elementary — Talking about Gay Issues in School, One Wedding and a Revolution (“contains now-historic footage of the tearful exchange of vows between long-time lesbian activists Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon who, celebrating their 51st anniversary, were the first couple to tie the knot”), Straightlaced: How Gender’s Got Us All Tied Up. The ingenious thing about That’s a Family! is that it does not present itself as a straightforward piece of gay agitprop. Though the same-sex couples are clearly at the center of filmmaker Debra Chasnoff’s agenda, she deftly mixes them in with other kinds of “different” families: children with divorced parents, children being raised by guardians other than their parents, adopted children, etc. Crucially, there is a racial-ethnic angle: Families that speak Spanish at home and mixed-race families, here amusingly enough represented by an adorable little girl who explains: “My dad’s Chinese-American and my mom’s German-American. My parents aren’t the same race, but they can still be married,” a statement that obviously is not directed at the imaginary cabal of bigots protesting Sino-Germanic romances.

Which is to say, That’s a Family! is an extended exercise in intentionally begging the question: Moral reservations about homosexuality extending to questions related to marriage and childrearing are indistinguishable from prejudices against mixed-race marriages or discounting the value of adopted families. Question the gay-rights program and you may as well be a member of the Klan — and not the kind of Klansman that Democrats send to the Senate, either. The identification of moral objections to homosexuality with racism is the holy grail of gay-rights rhetoric. As I used to tell my persuasive-writing students, begging the question may be a logical fallacy, but it often is an extraordinarily effective rhetorical tool: Most people are not intellectually sophisticated enough to understand how they have been manipulated. (Me, cynical? In an age of “hope and change” political rhetoric, it is impossible to set the bar too low.)

Most newspaper-reading adult voters do not understand the logical fallacy of begging the question, and I am entirely confident that Lower Merion’s fourth-graders do not, either, high-achieving kids though they may be.

I lived for many years in Lower Merion, where I was the editor of the local newspaper. The township has government schools that are both excellent and shockingly expensive. (I was endlessly entertained by the fact that the local schools’ million-dollar boss styled himself: “Dr. Jamie P. Savedoff, Ph.D.” — Dr. and Ph.D., the guy’s got you coming and going.) Though once a Republican stronghold, the place is not exactly a hotbed of social conservatism, unless by conservatism you mean “serve from the left and clear from the right.” Nonetheless, there are a fair number of Catholics and a few of the old Main Line WASPs who may not be entirely on board with the mandatory celebration of homosexual parenting, and they must of course be suffocated by the very government agency into whose care they are compelled by law to entrust their children for more than a decade.

Read more from this article HERE.

U.S. and British Counter-Terrorism Intelligence May Have Been Compromised By Swiss Spy Agency

photo credit: malias

ZURICH (Reuters) – Secret information on counter-terrorism shared by foreign governments may have been compromised by a massive data theft by a senior IT technician for the NDB, Switzerland’s intelligence service, European national security sources said.

Intelligence agencies in the United States and Britain are among those who were warned by Swiss authorities that their data could have been put in jeopardy, said one of the sources, who asked for anonymity when discussing sensitive information.

Swiss authorities arrested the technician suspected in the data theft last summer amid signs he was acting suspiciously. He later was released from prison while a criminal investigation by the office of Switzerland’s Federal Attorney General continues, according to two sources familiar with the case.

The suspect’s name was not made public. Swiss authorities believe he intended to sell the stolen data to foreign officials or commercial buyers.

A European security source said investigators now believe the suspect became disgruntled because he felt he was being ignored and his advice on operating the data systems was not being taken seriously.

Read more from this story HERE.