My Favorite “Democratic Communist”
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Federal Court Strikes Blow to Atheist Activists Attacking Religious Monuments
A federal court ruled on Feb. 19 that a religious monument in a Florida city park does not violate the establishment clause of the First Amendment. In an important victory for religious liberty, the 11th Circuit decided that the Bayview Cross, a 34-foot Latin cross erected in 1941, can remain standing. The monument represents the city of Pensacola’s history and serves as a symbol of hope. It was originally built to commemorate Easter sunrise services, a traditional Christian holiday.
In 2016, an atheist group sued to have the cross removed from the park and argued that it violated the establishment clause. Surprisingly, a district court judge ruled in the group’s favor and said the monument must come down because “the City’s maintenance of the cross violated the First Amendment’s Establishment Clause.”
Becket, a religious liberty organization, took on the case in defense of Pensacola and the Bayview Cross, arguing that while the establishment clause is certainly vital, a monument with religious undertones showcases historical value and authenticity and is not an attempt by the city to establish a formal religion.
At first, on appeal, the 11th Circuit Court affirmed the lower court’s ruling because even though it seemed like the judges wanted to keep the monument up, they were bound by Supreme Court precedent. Then, the city of Pensacola asked the Supreme Court to review the case, and while that was pending, the Supreme Court ruled on American Legion v. American Humanist Association, a similar case regarding an old, historic cross monument. In that case, the Supreme Court held that a 32-foot Latin cross sitting on a piece of public land in Bladensburg, Maryland, did not violate the establishment clause despite another nonreligious group’s arguments.
Now, this federal court has essentially tossed out its own previous ruling and made a new decision based on the Supreme Court’s 2019 decision. The new federal court decision also noted that an atheist group suing the city over a monument that’s almost 80 years old, causing significant expense and commotion, just because the group is “offended” is “just plain wrong.”
#5: Two judges concurred, noting that letting plaintiffs sue merely because they’re “offended” by a symbol is "just plain wrong." This issue of “standing” may be the next frontier in religious-symbol cases. More here: https://t.co/D9sViITfzX 10/
— Luke Goodrich (@LukeWGoodrich) February 19, 2020
(Read more from “Federal Court Strikes Blow to Atheist Activists Attacking Religious Monuments” HERE)
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Patents Secured for Revolutionary Nuclear Fusion Technology
Scientists in Australia are making some astonishing claims about a new nuclear reactor technology. Startup HB11, which spun out of the University of New South Wales, has applied for and received patents in the U.S., Japan, and China so far. The company’s technology uses lasers to trigger a nuclear fusion reaction in hydrogen and boron—purportedly with no radioactive fuel required. The secret is a cutting-edge laser and, well, an element of luck.
The laser doesn’t heat the materials. Instead, it speeds up the hydrogen to the point where it (hopefully) collides with the boron to begin a reaction. . .
When the lucky hydrogen does fuse with a boron particle, the reaction throws off helium atoms whose lack of electrons means they’re positively charged. It’s this charge that the device gathers as electricity. (Read more from “Patents Secured for Revolutionary Nuclear Fusion Technology” HERE)
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Parents Sue School District for Allowing Children to Change Gender Identity Without Parental Notice
A group of parents in Madison, Wisconsin, has filed a lawsuit against the Madison Metropolitan School District (MMSD) for violating parental rights by implementing a policy that allows children to change their gender identity without parental notice or consent.
The Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty (WILL) filed the lawsuit in Dane County Circuit Court on behalf of the parents. According to a press release from WILL, the school policy, issued in April 2018, also instructs district employees to “conceal and even deceive parents about the gender identity their son or daughter has adopted at school.”
The MMSD policy, titled “Guidance & Policies to Support Transgender, Non-binary & Gender-Expansive Students,” contains content and information provided by LGBTQ+ rights activist group GLSEN. . .
Educators, if you're wondering how including pronouns can make your classroom more welcoming for students, check out this resource: https://t.co/uMUdr5dDwM
— GLSEN (@GLSEN) February 8, 2020
“Madison schools have adopted policies that violate constitutionally recognized parental rights,” said WILL President and General Counsel Rick Esenberg. “A public school district should not, and cannot, make decisions reserved for parents.”
In December, WILL issued a demand letter to Sherry Terrell-Webb, Interim General Legal Counsel of MMSD, calling upon the district to amend its policies in order to avoid a lawsuit. (Read more from “Parents Sue School District for Allowing Children to Change Gender Identity Without Parental Notice” HERE)
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JPMorgan Chase Joins the War on America’s Energy
JPMorgan Chase has decided that it’s better for the company to join the progressive environmental gods than to continue supporting the great American energy miracle that has brought so much prosperity, stability, and job creation to this country. Has the Left finally won the war for the heart and soul of corporate America?
During the company’s annual investor day on Tuesday, the giant bank announced it would no longer be financing loans for oil and gas drilling in the Arctic and would divest from financing coal plants or mines. It also announced it would be divesting from any company that gets the majority of its revenue from coal by 2024.
When the Left can’t win at the ballot box or in a democratic debate in legislatures, it seeks recourse through the courts, or even better, the culture and markets. In this case, groups like Rainforest Action Network bullied the bank into submission, publishing a report showing JPMorgan Chase to be the single biggest lender to the oil and gas industry.
At Tuesday’s announcement, JPMorgan committed to investing in $200 billion worth of projects in support of the United Nations’ sustainable development goals. That is the company’s credential in the elite world that will make its profits kosher – sort of an extortion that the progressives make companies pay as the cost of doing business in a political system they control.
However, it is never enough for the leftist anarchists, who are now demanding the bank also pull out of financing drilling in the lower 48 states as well.
It’s truly hard to overstate the economic miracle that oil and gas drilling has ushered into our job market. We have now become the global superpower of oil and gas production and exports, to the point that even the conflict with Iran in January did not cause a spike in energy prices at all.
According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA), American crude oil production has hit an all-time record of 13 million barrels per day (bpd). That is an astounding 46 percent increase in production since Trump took office in January 2017. Poor states like New Mexico have benefited enormously with more state revenue and jobs, as oil production has increased 250 percent since 2012.
The more we drill for oil and gas, the more we recover. Far from running out of resources, proven reserves of crude oil have increased by 12 percent since 2017 and have more than doubled over the past 13 years. Likewise, proven reserves of natural gas increased to 9 percent since 2017 and more than doubled since 2005 to 504.5 trillion cubic feet.
Yet the flat-earth progressives are trying to reverse all that progress, which will result in regressive price increases and job losses for the most vulnerable citizens.
The revelation from JPMorgan comes as BP announces it is withdrawing its membership in the American Fuel and Petrochemical Manufacturers, the Western Energy Alliance, and the Western States Petroleum Association due to concerns about the environmental stances of those trade groups. “Our priority is to work to influence within trade associations, but we may publicly dissent or resign our membership if there is material misalignment on high-priority issues,” said BP chief executive Bernard Looney in a February 12 announcement.
The cancel culture and boycott campaigns of the Left, coupled with a very weak Republican Party, have ensured that the cultural inertia is moving in one direction. Whereas the Left always controlled academia, media, and entertainment, its recent conquest of the corporate world is the key to actually moving the needle of anarchist socialist policies. We are seeing this with corporations boycotting ICE as well.
However, the growth in extremism among those on the Left provides conservatives with an opportunity to finally make these companies pick sides.
Until now, Republicans have allowed corporations to promote fiscal and cultural Marxism on the cheap by saving them from high taxes and a few targeted regulatory issues that they care about. Meanwhile, as we bail out the companies, corporate America has become the number-one enforcer – even more effective than the media and academia – of promoting open borders, endless Middle East migration, weak-on-crime laws, anti-religious-liberty policies, mindless multiculturalism, eco-socialism, and the transgender agenda. Even on fiscal issues, they support the welfare state, Obamacare, and all the regulations that help them shut out competition.
The one missing issue from the Democrats’ portfolio of corporate bosses is the tax issue. If the corporations empowered Democrats on that issue too, they couldn’t survive. Thus they keep the Republican lifeline against Democrats raising taxes and still promote the rest of the progressive agenda. And remember, government-run health care is the single biggest driver of our debt, and that is being fueled by big business.
These businesses also count on traditional establishment Democrats to ease off them when it counts, even as they talk tough to jazz up their activists. Well, now Bernie Sanders is changing all of that. He will actually put them out of business. So now it’s time for conservatives to make them pick sides. They either jump off the bandwagon of progressivism, or we will step back and allow the Bernie Democrats to hurt them at their bottom line. They must remember we’re all in the same sinking ship that they helped destroy. (For more from the author of “JPMorgan Chase Joins the War on America’s Energy” HERE)
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Buzzfeed Posts List of LGBTQ Children’s Books ‘Every Kid Deserves in Their Life’
Popular digital media company BuzzFeed is known for pushing a left-wing agenda, and it exemplified such a reputation once again over the weekend by publishing a listicle with the social media headline “17 LGBTQ Children’s Books That Every Kid Deserves In Their Life.”
“It’s never too early to teach kids that being queer is totally normal,” the subhead for the article states. . .
Among the titles, which were submitted by members of the BuzzFeed Community as well as by the article’s author, are “Julián is a Mermaid,” “Prince & Knight, “Santa’s Husband,” and “It Feels Good to Be Yourself: A Book About Gender Identity.”
According to Google Books, “Julián is a Mermaid” tells the story of a young boy who is captivated after spotting three magical women dressed up as mermaids on his way home one day. When he gets home, all he can think about is dressing up just like the women in his own mermaid costume, but he worries about what his grandma will think. In the end, he finds that he “is ultimately supported in being his true mermaid self,” BuzzFeed said.
In “Prince & Knight,” a prince in line to take the throne travels the world to find a princess to be his bride, but he never quite finds what he is looking for. Then, a dragon attacks the kingdom and the prince rushes back fight the beast. There he meets “a brave knight in a suit of brightly shining armor … together they fight the dragon and discover that special something the prince was looking for all along.” (Read more from “Buzzfeed Posts List of LGBTQ Children’s Books ‘Every Kid Deserves in Their Life'” HERE)
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20-Year-Old Illegal Alien Enrolled in U.S. High School Accused of Raping 11-Year-Old Girl
How is it that there are 20-year-old illegal alien men in our public schools, walking the same halls as junior high girls?
Last week, Jonathan Coreas-Salamanca, 20, and Ivan Reyes Lopez, 19, were each arrested in two different Montgomery County, Maryland, high schools for raping two 11-year-old girls outside school.
WJLA reports that Coreas-Salamanca attends Montgomery Blair High School in Silver Spring. He is accused of having multiple sexual encounters with an 11-year-old after the victim’s father found salacious text messages on her phone. ICE has lodged a detainer on Coreas-Salamanca, who is an illegal alien from El Salvador.
There is no information available on Lopez’s immigration status. He is accused of luring a different 11-year-old girl to an apartment and raping her. But according to WJLA, he recently arrived from Honduras a few years ago and spoke in court through a Spanish interpreter. It is therefore very possible he also initially came here during the wave of Central American unaccompanied alien children and, along with thousands of others, was resettled in Maryland and perhaps was given some sort of legal status.
While criminal alien activity in general, and child sexual assaults in particular, are nothing new in this notorious sanctuary county, this incident raises other important questions. Why are illegal aliens placed in our public schools even as adults?
WJLA’s Kevin Lewis reached out to Montgomery County Public Schools for comment. He asked them how many 19- to 21-year-olds are in the school system, whether they are kept separate from the minors, and what the statute is that mandates their enrollment.
MORE: Lopez is accused of luring a different 11yo girl from a park near the Rollingwood Apartments in Silver Spring to his uncle's apartment.
The 19yo reportedly told the girl to sit on a bed. He then turned on Netflix before raping her, the victim would later tell detectives. pic.twitter.com/fnha493WHS
— Kevin Lewis (@ABC7Kevin) February 25, 2020
The school district was extremely defensive about the obvious questions the local parent body is likely also asking.
“There is no data suggesting that being a high school student at 19, 20, or 21 makes a person more or less likely to commit a crime,” spokeswoman Gboyinde Onijala wrote in an email to the local ABC affiliate. “Any suggestion otherwise is wrong and trying to make a connection there to students enrolled in our district is wrong.”
The problem in this case is that while, generally speaking, it’s uncommon for 20- or 21-year-olds to be in high school, the illegal alien UAC resettlement program has upended that natural balance. UACs are resettled all over the country, including in schools that weren’t traditionally known for having adult kids. They go wherever their sponsors live, who are usually also illegal aliens.
Aside from a few obvious resettlement jurisdictions, such as Houston, Miami, and Los Angeles, Montgomery County and its adjacent neighbor Prince George’s County have been inundated with more illegal alien teens than any other part of the country. This is a big part of why the D.C. suburbs have seen one of the worst resurgences of MS-13 and criminal alien gang activity since 2014.
According to the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR), the two D.C. suburban counties have taken in 11,874 UACs combined from fiscal year 2014 through December 2019. But that number doesn’t include the countless thousands of teens who likely came in as part of “family units” and wound up settling in the same communities over the past few years.
As former Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein said in May 2018, “We’re letting people in who are gang members.”
Maryland now has the highest concentration of Salvadorans in the country. Not surprisingly, it also has the most MS-13 prosecutions of any federal district.
“Many of these alien children, who have no parents, no family structure — we’re releasing them into communities where they’re vulnerable to recruitment by MS-13,” said Rosenstein, who previously served as U.S. attorney in Maryland. “And so some of these kids who come in without any gang ties develop gang ties as a result of the pressure that they face from people that they confront in the communities.”
Many of these “children” are already in their late teens when they arrive, and many have been known to lie about their age because they know that is their ticket into the country. Then they begin attending classes with ninth-graders or those even younger and remain there into their 20s. According to ORR, over 70 percent of the UACs are 15 or older, and roughly 70 percent in recent years have been male.
The problem of illegal aliens in their older teens or early 20s flooding school systems is also evident in Long Island, New York. In a letter to schools from New York’s attorney general and state commissioner of education, school officials were reminded of the “right of undocumented students” to enroll in schools and that officials “should not ask questions related to immigration status that may reveal a child’s immigration status, such as requesting a Social Security number.”
“We also have advised that, while school districts may need to collect certain data pursuant to state and/or federal laws, they should do so after a student has enrolled in school so as not to inadvertently give the impression that information related to immigration status will be used in making enrollment determinations,” wrote New York State Commissioner of Education Mary Ellen Elia and Attorney General Eric Schneiderman in the 2017 letter.
None of the politicians have given any thought to what this does to our communities. Prince George’s County, which was once a thriving African-American middle class area, is now full of MS-13 and 18th Street gang wars in the schools. The same is true for Montgomery County schools. In December, several 18th Street Gang members were arrested for a gruesome murder in Montgomery County, after police failed to honor prior ICE detainers for previous arrests.
The UAC loophole remains the biggest open-borders loophole we have and poses the most significant threat to our communities. The Trump administration can reinterpret the statute administratively to properly reflect the fact that these teens are self-trafficked by their families, not victims of trafficking. The UAC program essentially amounts to the government constructing an MS-13 smuggling bridge to our country and making the American citizen pay for it.
American taxpayers should demand a new bill of rights stating a simple proposition: The American people should not have to pay the cost or endure the crimes of those who break our laws and come here illegally. (For more from the author of “20-Year-Old Illegal Alien Enrolled in U.S. High School Accused of Raping 11-Year-Old Girl” please click HERE)
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Here’s Why the CDC Is Telling Men to Shave Their Facial Hair
Men may need to hack off their muttonchops, void their Van Dykes or pluck their ducktails if they plan on using a respirator, according to information from the CDC about how facial hair can interact with the devices.
A graphic released by the agency shows the fashionable facial-hair-wearer which styles will conflict with potentially life-saving respirators as the US braces for the quickly spreading coronavirus to emerge state-side.
Handlebar, walrus, and Zorro mustaches are fine, but the CDC says folks may need to lose their Fu Manchus, Dalis, and Englishes — because they could prevent respirators from making a seal on wearers’ faces. . .
Standard beards and chops are also risky, as the hair could come in contact with a respirator’s exhalation valve, reducing their effectiveness, the graphic said. (Read more from “Here’s Why the CDC Is Telling Men to Shave Their Facial Hair” HERE)
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WATCH: Who Would You Rather Hang out With — Donald Trump or Bernie Sanders?
If you had the chance to hang out with President Donald Trump or Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders — who would you pick?
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President Trump Appoints Pence to Head Coronavirus Task Force
By Daily Caller. President Donald Trump appointed Vice President Mike Pence to head the Coronavirus task force charged with preparing for and preventing outbreaks in the United States Wednesday night.
The White House press briefing came hours after Trump returned from a diplomatic trip to India, and he described the current threat level of the disease as “low” in the U.S. His statement echoed that of Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar in a Tuesday press briefing, where he described the virus as “contained,” but warned that more cases are expected as borders can’t be closed off entirely. Pence will replace Azar as head of the task force and report directly to the president.
Trump went on to cite a study from Johns Hopkins University that found the U.S. was the most well-prepared nation in the world when it comes to a flu-like outbreak such as Coronavirus.
“It could be at a small level or a larger level,” Trump said of the potential U.S. outbreak. “Whatever happens we’re totally prepared. We have the best people in the world. You see that from the study. We have the best prepared people, the best people in the world. Congress is willing to give us much more than we’re even asking for. That’s nice for a change. But we are totally ready, willing and able. It’s a term we use. Ready, willing and able. It’s going to be very well-under control.” (Read more from “President Trump Appoints Pence to Head Coronavirus Task Force” HERE)
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Trump Says Coronavirus Vaccine Coming Along ‘Rapidly’
By Fox News. As fears spread of a possible coronavirus outbreak in the U.S, President Trump addressed the nation in a Wednesday evening news conference at the White House to discuss how his administration was handling the virus threat — saying that a vaccine is being developed “rapidly” and “coming along very well.”
However, Anthony Fauci, who heads the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said later at the press conference that a vaccine would not be applicable to the epidemic for a “year to a year and a half,” due to delays from testing, development, production and distribution.
The freewheeling and sometimes confusing press conference marked a rare appearance by the president in the James S. Brady Press Briefing Room, as he usually takes questions from reporters outside the White House while his Marine One helicopter prepares for takeoff. . .
So far, there have been 60 confirmed cases of coronavirus in the U.S. in total. That figure includes individuals who have been repatriated to the United States, Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar later clarified at the podium. Fifteen people were in the initial set of cases, three more came from evacuation flights, and 42 were from the Diamond Princess ship that was quarantined by Japanese health authorities earlier this month. (Read more from “Trump Says Coronavirus Vaccine Coming Along ‘Rapidly'” HERE)
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