Article V Movement Gathers Steam, Critics Seethe

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constitution_quill_pen-300x197One of the sure signs that your federal government is in a state of disarray is when record numbers of Americans begin turning to the U.S. Constitution to figure out just where it all went wrong. Until recently, these readers might have skipped right past Article V, not noticing that therein lies the most potent of solutions.

As readers of Mark Levin’s book The Liberty Amendments have learned, Article V includes a lesser-known means by which the states can propose amendments. This was precisely the method the founders intended to be used to check an expansionist federal government.

Thanks to Levin, ConventionofStates.com, and Lawrence Lessig’s CallaConvention.org, the effort to get state legislatures to demand the first ever amendments convention seems to be hitting its stride.

But the movement is not without its critics.

Enter constitutional speaker KrisAnne Hall, who would prefer that states engage in out-and-out nullification of unconstitutional federal overreaches. Though less clear constitutionally, the idea has precedent and is also advocated by the Tenth Amendment Center. But unlike the Tenth Amendment Center, Ms. Hall has decided that an Article V amendments convention competes with nullification, and has taken the position that an amendments convention is a road to disaster because she has discovered a clandestine plot by Congress to take over the amendments convention process from start to finish.

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“God” Replaced With “Peace” In Pledge of Allegiance at Madison, Wisconsin High School

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US Flag“One nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.”

For the past few years, this line in the Pledge of Allegiance has caused an increasing amount of debate among Americans. Despite this debate, 85% of Americans still believe that “under God” should be kept in the Pledge, while only 8% do not. Forget the lawsuits, conflict, and uproar, saying that controversial line at schools daily is still part of the law.

Unfortunately, a Madison, Wisconsin high school has decided to go against that law over the past couple months.

Just last month, Samantha Murphy, a brave high school junior at Madison East High School, emailed me. In her freshman year, Madison East did not offer the Pledge every morning. Her family decided to talk to the principal and school board, reminding them that it is a state law to offer the Pledge every day. They pointed out Wisconsin State Statute Chapter 118, Section 6, which states “Every public school shall offer the pledge of allegiance or the national anthem in grades one to 12 each school day.”

After months of waiting and deciding if her family should go public with her school district’s unlawfulness and lack of patriotism, her school board finally obliged and started to offer the Pledge of Allegiance daily.

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Alaska: Neighbors Prepare for Natural Disasters with Emergency Watch

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Photo Credit: Your Alaska Link

Photo Credit: Your Alaska Link

When a natural disaster does strike, neighbors are going to be your closest source for help. Some streets are sticking together and making plans as part of the emergency watch program.

For many Alaskans having an emergency kit is not a priority,”wouldn’t it be better to just have that stuff at home?” said Michelle Torres, Public Information Officer for the Office of Emergency Management in Anchorage.

This program is designed specifically for the state’s largest city. The three major concerns are earthquakes, winter weather and wild fires, ” who in the neighborhood has tools, who in the neighborhood has a generator? does somebody know first aid or cpr?” said Torres.

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Ignorance And Cronyism Are The Only Settled Sciences

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Photo Credit: TownHall

Photo Credit: TownHall

An honest debate with a progressive is almost as rare as a verified sighting of Bigfoot.

You’d have better luck getting a devout Scientologist to say L. Ron Hubbard was a horrible writer than you would to get a progressive to admit the “science” behind climate change is not all it’s cracked up to be. For one thing, it is based on models of what could happen in 100 years, even though those models are mostly unreliable when you use them to map what happened in the last 30. That’s right, the vast majority of “climate models” predicting doom and gloom, the basis for Democrats’ oppressive legislative and regulatory push, can’t accurately predict what happened in the past, let alone predict the future. Yet, they demand it’s a moral imperative we act now.

As we traverse our second decade of “we have only 10 years to act” hysteria, the planet forgot to warm, and hasn’t since 1998. But this fact of science hasn’t deterred the “Party of Science” from pressing forward. And why would it?

The science is settled … just like it was back in the 1970s when the same people, with the same level of certainty, were predicting an ice age and famine. When that “settled science” didn’t pan out, they flipped the script. Global cooling was out; global warming was in. The only thing that didn’t change was the “solution” – a more powerful and intrusive regulatory state.

Isn’t it amazing how the exact opposite problem can have the same solution?

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President Obama’s Smoking Problem

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Photo Credit: Politico

Photo Credit: Politico

Malaysia’s government is battling against a smoking epidemic that threatens its young people — and it fears Barack Obama’s big Pacific trade deal will make the health crisis even worse.

When the president, a reformed smoker himself, lands in Kuala Lumpur this weekend for his third stop in a weeklong Asia swing, he’ll be visiting one of the other 12 Pacific Rim countries hoping to close the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a free-trade agreement that American and Asian businesses see as worth billions in sales into new markets.

But Malaysia is smarting that Obama’s negotiators won’t back the country’s efforts to take a strict anti-tobacco approach in the trade deal.

Malaysia’s fear is that it will suffer the same fate that Uruguay, Australia and Thailand have in other trade deals: dragged into an expensive, years-long international legal fight over its right to block cigarette companies from advertising.

When Malaysia’s trade negotiators have pushed to carve tobacco out of a section of the deal that would otherwise allow businesses to challenge whether a country’s laws and regulations meet its international trade obligations before an independent panel, the United States has balked and instead called for an approach that Malaysian officials believe would leave their country exposed.

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Driver Kills Teen Bicyclist Then Eighteen Months Later Sues For ‘Emotional Distress’

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Photo Credit: Facebook

Photo Credit: Facebook

Sharlene Simon drove into three bicyclists on a country road in October of 2012, about 55 miles north of Toronto, killing Brandon Majewski. Now she’s suing for over one million dollars, saying that the accident caused her “pain and suffering.” She asserts that the three were not riding in a “prudent manner,” were “improperly lighted,” and were “incompetent cyclists.”

Brandon’s father, Derek Majewski told the Toronto Sun:

I feel like someone kicked me in the stomach — I’m over the edge. Sometimes, it makes my blood boil.

This has ripped our family apart. And now this woman has the gall to try to profit from our dead child she killed? Profit from another boy who was almost crippled?

Read more from this story HERE.

California Cities Start Water-Waste Patrols

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Photo Credit: AP / Rich Pedroncelli

Photo Credit: AP / Rich Pedroncelli

Steve Upton thinks of himself more as an “Officer Friendly” than a water cop.

On a recent sunny day, the water waste inspector rolled through a quiet Sacramento neighborhood in his white pickup truck after a tipster tattled on people watering their lawns on prohibited days.

He approached two culprits. Rather than slapping them with fines, Upton offered to change the settings on their sprinkler systems.

“I don’t want to crack down on them and be their Big Brother,” said Upton, who works for the water conservation unit of Sacramento’s utilities department. “People don’t waste water on purpose. They don’t know they are wasting water.”

At least 45 water agencies throughout California, including Sacramento, are imposing and enforcing mandatory restrictions on water use as their supplies run dangerously low. Sacramento is one of the few bigger agencies actively patrolling streets for violators and encouraging neighbors to report waste.

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Michelle Obama Wreaks Havoc Across Topeka with Last-Minute Decision to Speak at Graduation

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Photo Credit: Getty Images / Win McNamee

Photo Credit: Getty Images / Win McNamee

Michelle Obama is rested, ready and screwing up a bunch of ordinary people’s lives again.

Fresh off a luxurious vacation to China (which was fresh off a long vacation at Oprah’s Maui home), the first lady has threatened hassle and hardship upon hundreds of students and their families in Topeka, Kan. with a last-minute announcement of her intention to speak at a combined graduation ceremony for the city’s five public high schools.

School district officials deserve just as much blame for the developing fiasco—possibly more. They invited Obama to speak at the May 17 graduation back in December, reports The Topeka Capital-Journal.

The reason for the invitation is the commemoration of the 60th anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, the landmark U.S. Supreme Court case that declared separate-but-equal public education unconstitutional.

“It really is a historical day,” Topeka school superintendent Julie Ford said when she announced the exciting news on Thursday. “We couldn’t be more happy.”

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‘He Suffered. He Screamed. He Cried’: Congress Calls for Investigation of Phoenix VA That Reportedly Denied Vets Medical Attention, Leaving 40 to Die

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Photo Credit: AP

Photo Credit: AP

“Why is this happening to me? Why won’t anybody help me?” 71-year-old U.S. Navy veteran Thomas Breen asked his family as his health deteriorated, his years-long struggle with cancer nearing its end.

The veteran’s daughter-in-law recalled his final months in an interview with CNN: “At the end is when he suffered. He screamed. He cried. And that’s somethin’ I’d never seen him do before, was cry. Never. Never. He cried in the kitchen right here. ‘Don’t let me die.’”

Before losing his battle with stage 4 bladder cancer and passing away on Nov. 30, 2013, Breen and his family tried again and again to seek medical help from the Phoenix Veterans Affairs Health Care system. But along with thousands of other veterans who gave their youth and energy to serve their country, Breen was reportedly placed on a “secret list” and told to wait.

Breen is one of at least 40 U.S. veterans who died while waiting for treatment, CNN reported, suggesting that the Phoenix VA used the “secret list” to stage a cover-up.

“These are extremely disturbing allegations,” Rep. Jeff Miller (R-Fla.), chairman of the House Committee on Veterans’ Affairs, said Thursday. “If proven true, these charges will only add to the growing pattern of preventable veteran deaths and patient safety incidents at VA medical centers across the country that are united by one common theme: VA’s extreme reluctance to hold its employees and executives accountable.”

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Scathing Appeals Court Calls Out Raging Hypocrisy of Race-Baiting Obama Administration Bureaucrats

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Photo Credit: EEOC public domain

Photo Credit: EEOC public domain

It’s always satisfying to see race-baiting bureaucrats get their comeuppance in court, but an opinion by the 6th Circuit issued earlier this month begins especially delightfully:

In this case the EEOC sued the defendants for using the same type of background check that the EEOC itself uses. The EEOC’s personnel handbook recites that “[o]verdue just debts increase temptation to commit illegal or unethical acts as a means of gaining funds to meet financial obligations.” Because of that concern, the EEOC runs credit checks on applicants for 84 of the agency’s 97 positions. The defendants (collectively, “Kaplan”) have the same concern; and thus Kaplan runs credit checks on applicants for positions that provide access to students’ financial-loan information, among other positions. For that practice, the EEOC sued Kaplan.

The April 9 ruling in Equal Employment Opportunity Commission v. Kaplan Higher Education Corp. has received little fanfare. It should probably receive more, though, if only because the EEOC lost so good and hard.

In the case, the unanimous three-judge panel ruled to exclude the findings of government contractor General Information Services and the testimony of a dubious statistical analyst, thus affirming a lower court’s “meticulously reasoned” summary judgment decision and likely ending the EEOC’s complaint against Kaplan.

Read more from this story HERE.