Prop. 8 Players Join Bid to Repeal Transgender Law

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Photo Credit: AP

Photo Credit: AP

An effort to overturn a new law allowing transgender students to choose which school restrooms they use and whether to play boys or girls sports got a boost Friday when a major player in the passage of California’s now-defunct same-sex marriage ban threw its support behind the campaign.

The National Organization for Marriage announced it was working with another conservative group, the Capitol Resource Institute, to repeal the law at the ballot box. The marriage group provided early fundraising and organizing for the 2008 ballot initiative that outlawed same-sex marriages, known as Proposition 8.

Opponents of the transgender student law have until Nov. 8 to gather the signatures of 504,760 registered voters needed to place a referendum on the November 2014 ballot to nullify the statute.

The National Organization for Marriage is encouraging its members to help circulate petitions and to give money that could be used to hire professional signature-gatherers.

The political strategist who ran the successful Proposition 8 campaign, Frank Schubert, has signed on to manage the referendum campaign. Noting that no one has ever qualified a referendum in California using only volunteers, Schubert said “it’s a virtual certainty” the campaign will hire paid petition-circulators to supplement work already going on at churches statewide.

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University of Kansas Suspends Controversial Journalism Professor over Vile Tweets Calling for the Murder of NRA Members’ Children

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Photo Credit: AP

Photo Credit: AP

A journalism professor who boasts online about his love of free speech has been placed on administrative leave by the University of Kansas over controversial remarks he posted on Twitter calling for the murder of the children of members of the National Rifle Association.

The tweets were in response to Monday’s deadly Naval Yard shooting, in which 12 people were killed.

In the post, Associate Professor David Guth blames the fatal attack on the NRA, and goes on to say that next time there’s a mass-shooting that he hopes the victims are the children of NRA members.

He ends his 140-charecter rant with ‘shame on you. May God damn you.’

On Thursday, the university issued a statement condemning Guth’s offensive tweet.

Photo Credit: Twitter

Photo Credit: Twitter

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Chinese Military Capable of Jamming U.S. Communications System

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Photo Credit: AP

Photo Credit: AP

China’s military is using stolen U.S. military secrets obtained from a convicted spy to defeat a high-technology communications system used in joint warfighting, combined arms warfare, and missile defenses, according to U.S. officials.

The disclosure that China has the capability of jamming the Joint Tactical Information Distribution System, or JTIDS, was revealed in a Chinese military technical article published in July.

JTIDS is part of a group of military communications systems called Link 16 that gives U.S. military forces jam-resistant communications, a key strategic advantage used in joint warfighting, a specialty of the American military.

JTIDS allows for a nearly unlimited number of military commanders and operators to share information, such as precision location or position data, critical in tracking, monitoring, and targeting. It is also resistant to electronic warfare attacks by rapidly jumping to different frequencies.

The Chinese article reveals that the People’s Liberation Army is studying this feature and working to defeat it.

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E-ZPass Scanners Track Cars Far Away from Toll Plazas (+video)

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Photo Credit: Fox

Photo Credit: Fox

One man who wants to remain anonymous posted a video showing himself driving around Manhattan with a device on his dashboard that makes a cow mooing sound signaling that your privacy is being compromised by something sitting right in your own car: your E-ZPass tag.

In a blog, the driver says he rigged this “cow” so it would go off whenever E-ZPass technology was being used. You can see for yourself: it’s going off in the middle of New York City, nowhere near a toll plaza.

These contraptions, which reportedly went up citywide over the last few months on traffic lights, are what are reading your E-ZPass tag.

New York News

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BlackBerry to Fire 4,500 Employees as Sales of New Device Plummet

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Photo Credit: Mast Irham/EPA

Photo Credit: Mast Irham/EPA

BlackBerry confirmed it was firing 4,500 of its staff on Friday as the struggling smartphone firm said it expects to lose nearly $1bn in the three months to August on disappointing sales of new phones.

Revenues for the three months were only $1.6bn, the company said, against analysts’ forecasts of $3bn – indicative of a collapse in its business after lacklustre sales of its new Z10 and Q10 phones. In all, it shipped 3.7m smartphones in the quarter, its lowest since summer 2007, when the first iPhone came out.

The company’s shares crashed from $10.20 to $8.03 before recovering to $8.73, a 17% drop on the day, valuing it at $4.5bn. The shares were briefly suspended as rumours of the loss circulated, and it was forced to indicate its quarterly earnings a week ahead of their scheduled date. It said it would announce a loss of between $930m and $955m next week.

That brings its total losses in the past seven quarters to $1.8bn, putting its viability as a going concern into question.

The company announced it was putting itself up for sale at the end of August – which market observers took to indicate it had failed to find a buyer privately. Microsoft’s acquisition of Nokia this month effectively left the Ontario-based company in the cold.

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Ultra Liberal Professor Disrupts College Republican Meeting with Vulgar Rant

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Photo Credit: Fox News

Photo Credit: Fox News

From that great bastion of academic freedom known as Temple University comes another example of a liberal professor bullying conservative students with a bevy of F-bombs.

The potty-mouth professor is Joseph Schwartz, a political science professor who told he’s won every teaching award at the university. He’s also a card-carrying Democratic Socialist (but he stresses he’s not an authoritarian communist).

The good professor, along with a handful of his followers, took over a “right to work” discussion hosted by Temple’s College Republicans and featuring a representative from Pennsylvania Right to Work Defense and Education Foundation.

Joseph Oleksak, the chairman of Temple’s Republican group, said the meeting was running smoothly until Professor Joseph Schwartz started raising questions.

“I understand that not everyone agrees with my point of view,” Oleksak told me. “But the fact that somebody can come into another person’s meeting and take it over and then accuse them of racism – it’s an insult.”

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Awesome Dairy Queen Manager Stands Up for Blind Customer When His Money Is Stolen

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Photo Credit: Robert W. Howington

Photo Credit: Robert W. Howington

It’s true that sometimes people just suck. Take the case of a Dairy Queen customer in Hopkins, Minn., who last week stole a $20 bill from a blind man when he dropped it unknowingly on the floor. It’s also true, however, that there are some really awesome human beings in the world, like Dairy Queen Manager, Joey Prusak, who saw the whole slimy act go down and responded in the most amazing way.

According to ABC, when Prusak, 19, first saw the woman bend down and scoop up the man’s money, he thought surely she would just hand it back to him. When she put it in her purse instead, he wasn’t going to stand for it.

He first asked her to return it, but she actually said no and tried to make up a story that it was really hers. Prusak called b.s. on that. He told ABC:

I told her ‘Ma’am, you can either return the $20 bill or you can leave the store, because I’m not going to serve someone as disrespectful as you.’

Read more from this story HERE.

Supreme Court to Consider New Obamacare Case

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picture - supreme-courtObamacare is before the U.S. Supreme Court again. On Thursday, Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) lawyers filed the first viable petition for Supreme Court review involving Kathleen Sebelius’ HHS Mandate, which requires employers to provide abortion-related insurance coverage, even if those employers have a religious objection to abortion.

Section 1001 of the Affordable Care Act (ACA, or Obamacare) requires all large employers to offer “preventive services” to their employees or face enormous financial penalties. With President Obama’s approval, Sebelius issued a regulation that defined preventive services to include access to birth control, including those that cause abortions after conception.

The regulation issued by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) only allows narrow exceptions, such as for churches, but leaves other religion-oriented or religiously-owned employers subject to the regulation.

Over 60 lawsuits have been filed nationwide against this unprecedented government command. Many involve nonprofit entities, such as the University of Notre Dame. But roughly 35 of these lawsuits involve for-profit businesses which are wholly owned by a person or family with a religious belief against abortion, such as devout Christians.

These lawsuits argue both that the HHS Mandate violates the Free Exercise Clause of the First Amendment as well as a federal law called the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA). The federal appeals courts have split on whether a religiously-owned business can claim religious-liberty protections and whether requiring people to provide abortion-related services is a substantial burden on religious faith…The [Supreme] Court will likely vote in November whether to hear arguments in the case, which, if granted, would occur next spring.

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Obama: ‘Raising the Debt Ceiling…Does Not Increase Our Debt,’ Though It Has ‘Over 100 Times’ (+video)

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Photo Credit: abangbay @ Malaysia

Photo Credit: abangbay @ Malaysia

Raising the debt ceiling doesn’t increase the nation’s debt, Pres. Obama declared in a speech today.

In a speech at the Business Roundtable headquarters in Washington, D.C., Obama dismissed concerns about raising the debt ceiling by noting that it’d been done so many times in the past:

“Now, this debt ceiling — I just want to remind people in case you haven’t been keeping up — raising the debt ceiling, which has been done over a hundred times, does not increase our debt; it does not somehow promote profligacy. All it does is it says you got to pay the bills that you’ve already racked up, Congress. It’s a basic function of making sure that the full faith and credit of the United States is preserved.”

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Sen. Mark Begich Laughs Off Notion of Voting to Defund Obamacare

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Mark BegichWhile pushing an effort to defund Obamacare or risk a government shutdown, congressional Republicans have insisted they might have some unlikely allies on their side: Senate Democrats up for reelection in red states.

But at least two of those Democrats, Sens. Mark Begich (Alaska) and Mark Pryor (Ark.), laughed off the suggestion Thursday that they would vote for a continuing resolution that permanently strips the Affordable Care Act of its funding.

“We’re not going through another [vote to repeal Obamacare], 43rd or 44th — no,” Begich told reporters on Capitol Hill. “Do I have issues with Obamacare? Yes. We’ve proposed multiple amendments and ideas to fix it, to make it better and take out things that aren’t working … but we’re not going through this process.”

When The Huffington Post asked Begich to respond to the idea that Democrats facing tough reelection battles in conservative states might favor House Republicans’ strategy, which ties Obamacare funding to a continuing resolution to keep the government running past Sept. 30, Begich laughed and shook his head.

“No — I think those guys over there should focus on what the American people want, and that is a budget done,” he said. “Quit playing with the continuing resolution, putting the debt at risk, and causing this great economy that’s moved in the right direction to falter again.”

Polling consistently shows a majority of Americans disapprove of Obamacare. A new poll finds that 54 percent want to return to the healthcare system in place in 2009, while 35 percent want to keep Obamacare.

Read more from this story HERE.

At a recent town hall in Anchorage, Senator Begich vowed Obamacare will never be repealed.