When the DOJ (Department of Justice) Became the DOGA (Department of Gay Activism)

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In 2014, Attorney General Eric Holder invited attorneys-general across America to not defend laws banning same-sex “marriage” if they could not do so in good conscience, stating that he would not have defended segregation laws in the past if he had been required to.

This pattern continued when the DOJ petitioned the Supreme Court to redefine marriage in the Obergefell v. Hodges case last year to the point that current Attorney General Loretta Lynch issued a congratulatory statement on June 26, 2015, after the Court took it upon itself to change the very definition of marriage.

Lynch closed her statement with these words: “The Justice Department is proud to have been a part of this journey, from Attorney General Eric Holder’s unwavering leadership in advancing the cause of equality to the groundbreaking progress we have witnessed today. Going forward, we are committed to standing on the side of equality — and standing with the LGBT community — to keep up the fight for safety, opportunity, dignity and justice for all.”

What the DOJ has now made clear is that in its aggressive solidarity with the LGBT community, it will wage war against the rights of everyone else. Be aware and be on guard, conservative Americans and people of faith. The DOJ might soon be targeting you.

This past Wednesday, May 4th, “U.S. Justice Department officials repudiated North Carolina’s House Bill 2 on Wednesday, telling Gov. Pat McCrory that the law violates the U.S. Civil Rights Act and Title IX — a finding that could jeopardize billions in federal education funding.” In the typical fashion of bullies, the DOJ’s letter gave North Carolina five days to respond “by confirming that the State will not comply with or implement HB2.”

Should North Carolina refuse to bow to this pressure, it could risk losing $4.5 billion in federal aid to its 17 universities, all because the state ruled that men should not be able to use women’s locker rooms and bathrooms in public facilities.

Talk about an outrageous example of government overreach. Talk about Big Brother in action.

In response, Gov. Pat McCrory said to North Carolina business leaders that the DOJ letter is “something we’ve never seen regarding Washington overreach in my lifetime. “This is no longer just a N.C. issue. This impacts every state, every university and almost every employee in the United States of America. All those will have to comply with new definitions of requirements by the federal government regarding restrooms, locker rooms and shower facilities in both the private and public sector.”

Lt. Gov. Dan Forest had even stronger words for the Obama administration, saying, “To use our children and their educational futures as pawns to advance an agenda that will ultimately open those same children up to exploitation at the hands of sexual predators is, by far, the sickest example of the depths the … administration will stoop to (to) ‘fundamentally transform our nation.’”

As for Title IX, which the Department of Education (DOE) claims requires schools to allow transgender-identified students to use the bathrooms and locker rooms that correspond with their gender identity rather than their biological sex, a new lawsuit filed by the Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) and the Thomas More Society demolishes this faulty reasoning — the very reasoning that is behind the DOJ’s attack on North Carolina.

The suit has been filed “in federal court against School District 211 and the Department of Education (DOE) on behalf of 51 district families who rightly claim that the district and the Department of Education ‘trample students’ privacy’ rights and create an ‘intimidating and hostile environment’ for girls who are being forced to share the girls locker room and restrooms with a boy who wishes he were a girl.”

In the words of ADF Legal Counsel Matt Sharp, “No government agency can unilaterally redefine the meaning of a federal law to serve its own political ends. The Department of Education is exceeding what it is legally and constitutionally allowed to do. In fact, at least five other federal and state courts have rejected the DOE’s interpretation of Title IX.”

It is critical that these matters be pressed in the courts, and we need to publicize this new lawsuit as loudly and widely as we can. Justice and sanity and common sense and fairness must prevail, otherwise the nation will completely unravel. And while these cases are being litigated, it is imperative that families, schools, churches, businesses, cities, and states stand up to the bullies and expose their illicit tactics. Only then will the bullies back down.

In my 2011 book A Queer Thing Happened to America, I devoted more than 50 pages and 138 endnotes to the topic of “Big Brother Is Watching and He Really Is Gay,” noting that, “The really frightening thing is that it would be easy to write an entire book focusing on the subject matter of this chapter alone, and the book could be much longer than this present book — and this is one long [700 page] book!”

Just four years later, in Outlasting the Gay Revolution, I cited scores more examples, noting that here too I was only scratching the surface. What is coming next?

This much is sure. With the DOJ’s latest actions, we can safely say that we have moved from “Big Brother Is Watching and He Really Is Gay” to “Big Brother Is Taking Action, He’s Radically Pro-Gay, and He’s Coming Your Way.”

To be forewarned is to be fore-equipped. (For more from the author of “When the DOJ (Department of Justice) Became the DOGA (Department of Gay Activism)” please click HERE)

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Bathrooms Are Just the Beginning: A Scary Look Into the Trans Movement’s End Goals

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The battle over men accessing women’s bathrooms and vice versa has little do with bathrooms or even transgenderism, a well-known LGBT activist admitted last week. It has everything to do with re-working society and getting rid of the “heterobinary structure” in which we live—eliminating distinctions between “male” and “female” altogether.

Riki Wilchins, who has undergone “sex change” surgery and is a far-left social change activist, wrote in the gay publication The Advocate last week that social conservatives and many LGBT activists are missing the point when it comes to the transgender bathroom debate . . .

People should be able to enter whatever bathroom “fits their gender identity,” Wilchins wrote, but the fact that we even have “male” and “female” bathrooms reflects something about society that needs to change . . .

Transgenderism presumes that a man can be “trapped” inside a woman’s body and a woman can be “trapped” inside a man’s body. It encourages men “becoming” women to embrace femininity and wear dresses and make-up. Similarly, transgenderism encourages women “becoming” men to make themselves more masculine through hormones and by altering their appearances, reinforcing the notion that men look and act a certain way.

“The long-term goals of many LGBT activists are actually not just access to the restrooms of their preferred gender identity, but actually destroying the concept of gender or the separation of the genders altogether,” Peter Sprigg, Senior Fellow for Policy Studies at the Family Research Council, told LifeSiteNews. Sprigg noted that when LGBT activists are appealing to a mainstream audience, they “are accepting or implicitly accepting the separation of male and female facilities” like bathrooms. (Read more from “Bathrooms Are Just the Beginning: A Scary Look Into the Trans Movement’s End Goals” HERE)

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What Really Happens to Your Body on a Flight

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From oxygen deprivation and cosmic radiation to loss of taste, your body can suffer some worrying effects during air travel. But how can they be avoided? . . .

Dr Richard Dawood, Telegraph Travel’s travel health expert, says the “virtually moisture-free” conditions inside a plane cabin increase your vulnerability to airborne infection. You’re more susceptible to colds and respiratory infection, and viruses which are known to thrive in conditions of low-humidity.

The findings of Auburn University in Alabama in 2014 revealed that disease-causing bacteria can survive for up to a week inside plane cabins, on surfaces such as seat pockets, tray tables, window shades and armrests. Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA), a bacteria that could cause infections, skin disease, pneumonia and sepsis, lived the longest (168 hours). Escherichia coli (E. coli), which can cause urinary tract infection, respiratory illness and diarrhoea, was found to survive for 96 hours . . .

Aircraft cabins are pressurised to 75 per cent of the normal atmospheric pressure, a recent study claimed. Lower levels of oxygen in your blood can lead to hypoxia, which can leave you feeling dizzy, fatigued and with headaches . . .

A third of your taste buds are said to become numb at high altitudes, while dryness and cabin air pressure also affect your ears, sinuses and sense of taste, according to the latest research. (Read more from “What Really Happens to Your Body on a Flight” HERE)

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Obama Scolds Press on Trump Coverage: This Is Not a Reality Show [+video]

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President Barack Obama gave his review of the presidential election on Friday during a press conference in the White House and warned that it is not for a reality show . . .

“But most importantly, and I speak to all of you in this room as reporters, as well as the American public, I think, I just want to emphasize the degree to which we are in serious times and this is a really serious job. This is not entertainment. This is not a reality show. This is a contest for the presidency of the United States and what that means is that every candidate, every nominee, needs to be subject to exacting standards and genuine scrutiny.”

The comments about the campaign being a reality show can be interpreted as being referenced to Trump’s former reality show, The Apprentice.

“It means that you got to make sure that their budgets add up. It means that if they say they’ve got an answer to a problem, that it is actually plausible and that they have details for how it would work. And if it’s completely implausible and would not work, that needs to be reported on and the American people need to know that,” Obama said. “If they take a position on international issues that could threaten war or has the potential of upending our critical relationships with other countries or would potentially break the financial system, that needs to be reported on. (Read more from “Obama Scolds Press on Trump Coverage: This Is Not a Reality Show” HERE)

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Internationalist Koch Bros., Bush’s Apparently Think Hillary Is Better Than Trump

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By Newsmax. In a political jaw-dropper that would have been inconceivable just six months ago, billionaire industrialists and conservative GOP donors Charles and David Koch are weighing supporting Hillary Clinton in her battle with Donald Trump for the White House.

Politico reports that representatives of Koch brothers warn that they “could sit out the presidential campaign entirely — or even back Hillary Clinton.”

The Koch brothers’ discontent with Trump’s aggressive campaign style first emerged last month when Charles Koch told ABC News it was “possible” Clinton, the Democratic presidential front-runner, would make a better president than Trump.

On Wednesday, Politico says, the Kochs would not rule out supporting the former secretary of state. (Read more from “Internationalist Koch Bros., Bush’s Apparently Think Hillary Is Better Than Trump” HERE)

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George W. Bush Sitting out Election With H.W., No Plans to Endorse Trump

By Clyde Hughes. George W. Bush and his father, George H. W. Bush, will be sitting out the presidential election and have no plans to endorse Donald Trump, a spokesman said on Wednesday.

The Washington Post reported that it is the first time in five presidential election cycles that Bush 41 is not endorsing the Republican nominee.

A spokesman for his son, Bush 43, made a statement Wednesday evening after Ohio Gov. John Kasich followed U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz to the exit, noted The Guardian.

“President George W. Bush does not plan to participate in or comment on the presidential campaign,” said the spokesman for the two-term president before President Barack Obama. (Read more from “George W. Bush Sitting out Election With H.W., No Plans to Endorse Trump” HERE)

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Head of Holocaust Research Group Reveals New Shocking Testimony From Warsaw Ghetto

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The oft-repeated notion that Jews went willingly to the slaughter during the Holocaust is completely unfounded, a Holocaust commemoration activist told The Algemeiner on Thursday, citing a number of documents which were recently uncovered by his organization detailing eye-witness accounts of Jews fighting back.

Jonny Daniels, founder and executive director of From the Depths, which works with Holocaust survivors, Jewish communities in Eastern Europe and the Polish government to preserve the memory of the Holocaust, said that one of several projects he is engaged in includes translating first hand accounts that have sat untouched for years in Poland’s governmental archives.

Daniels said his organization has “uncovered remarkable documentation that shows thousands of accounts of ‘fighting back’ from eyewitnesses” throughout the Holocaust, which he is working on cataloging, translating and publishing . . .

Daniels shared the story publicly for the first time with The Algemeiner:

A group of Jewish boys blockaded themselves in a building inside the ghetto and were shooting at Nazis walking past. One of the little known ways the Nazis would enter the buildings of the ghetto was by using a human shield, a Jew. One of the survivors told of the time that while blockaded inside the room, they suddenly heard a knock on the door. Sitting quietly, the boys heard the sweet old voice of an elderly Jewish man calmly call out to them in beautiful, poetic Yiddish: ‘My children, the time has come. I am knocking on this door asking for safe passage. Alas, behind me stands a group of Amalek (evil people). Shoot me and then kill them. Better I die by the bullet of Jewish heroes then by the bullet of evil.’ The young men did just that. By giving his life, the old pious Jew saved those young Jews fighting, allowing them to live another day.

(Read more from “Head of Holocaust Research Group Reveals New Shocking Testimony From Warsaw Ghetto” HERE)

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Clinton, Trump Both Have Goldman Sachs Alums in Key Jobs

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Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump have at least one thing in common: they’re both turning to former Goldman Sachs executives to help lead their campaigns.

Trump announced Thursday that he has hired Steve Mnuchin as his national finance chairman, citing in part his “extensive and very successful financial background.”

Mnuchin currently heads his own private investment firm, Dune Capital Management, but spent 17 years at Goldman Sachs. His father, Robert, was also a longtime fixture at the Wall Street giant.

One year ago, Clinton announced that her campaign’s chief financial officer would be Gary Gensler, who rose to Goldman’s co-head of finance after 18 years with the firm.

Before joining the campaign, Gensler was actually a Wall Street watchdog, serving as the head of President Obama’s Commodity Futures Trading Commission. There, he gained a reputation as one of the administration’s toughest regulators, making his selection primarily seen as an effort to calm Wall Street skeptics to Clinton’s left. (Read more from “Clinton, Trump Both Have Goldman Sachs Alums in Key Jobs” HERE)

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The Era of Bush and Romney Comes to a Close

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The Bush clan previously announced they will not engage in the 2016 presidential race, and the Romney clan have now joined them.

Via ABC –

The Republican National Convention in July is going to be missing some of the party’s most recognizable faces. All of the living former Republican nominees for president said they are skipping the Cleveland convention with the exception of Bob Dole, the 1996 GOP nominee.

An aide to Mitt Romney, the 2012 GOP nominee, confirmed to ABC News that he “has no plans to attend the convention.”

Romney has been one of Trump’s most scathing critics. In March, he gave a speech urging the party to reject the real estate mogul, calling him “a phony, a fraud.” The news that he is not attending this year’s convention was first reported by The Washington Post.

On Wednesday, the last two Republican presidents, George W. Bush and his father, George H.W. Bush, also said they had no plans to back Donald Trump, the party’s presumptive nominee.

(For more from the author of “The Era of Bush and Romney Comes to a Close” please click HERE)

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The Insane Hidden Tax Burden Quietly Eating up Your Paycheck

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There are few things I dislike more than paying taxes. As Americans, a third of all your hard earned dollars is confiscated by the U.S. government. Most of us get to determine what we do with our money – but not when it comes to taxes.

However, there is the argument that taxes are a function of our democratic system. Those taxes are the result of laws implemented by freely elected representatives. If anything, we — the voters — are as much to blame for the muddied tax codes as are the nitwit politicians we elect.

But not all taxes feel Constitutional, and not all taxes are the result of our representative government — particularly the taxes paid in the form of regulatory costs. Regulations increase the cost of everything — including the cost of our housing, clothing and food. In fact, they even impact our wages. What makes this form of tax so nefarious is that rarely do our elected representatives get to have a say in the matter; rather, America’s regulatory state is overseen by an authoritarian administrative state, ruled by unelected bureaucrats.

Nobel Prize economist, F.A. Hayek lamented the dangers of these unelected bureaucrats, which he called the “public administration movement,” in his book The Constitution of Liberty. Hayek believed these bureaucrats were often antagonistic, if not ignorant of, the rule of law, directing “[T]heir heaviest attacks against the traditional safeguards of individual liberty, such as the rule of law, constitutional restraints, judicial review and the conception of a “fundamental law.””

These bureaucrats have designed a labyrinth of rules and regulations that silently consume our life, and our paychecks, with little repercussion or accountability. Bureaucrats don’t follow laws, they make them. If you don’t like some new Washington regulation – too bad.

Recently, the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) released a regulatory study called Ten Thousand Commandments that analyzed the cost of regulations. The report finds that federal regulations cost the U.S. economy over $1.9 trillion. To put that into perspective, if you add up the federal income taxes we pay, or $1.62 trillion, our regulatory tax is nearly $300 billion more!

20160505HiddenTax1

For most of us, the word “trillions” is often left out of your every day vernacular. But we shouldn’t be naïve to the punitive burden this cost levies on each American. CEI helps illustrate the severity of that burden. They took the total regulatory costs in the U.S. and compared them to the entire economies of other countries.

The results show that if U.S. regulations were its own country, it would rank ninth in the world. That means Americans face a regulatory burden that is just behind the entire economy of India, but larger than all the productivity of Russia.

Economic thinking ultimately assumes these costs get passed onto individuals and consumers – you! Therefore, CEI analyzed the regulatory burden for each individual U.S. household. In doing so, they determined the “cost” to each household was $14,842 per year. That is roughly 22 percent of the average income in the United States.

CEI also demonstrates how this impacts the family budget. In the U.S., housing is the costliest expense to each household. After that, you would think it was food or clothing, perhaps transportation and health care. But you would be wrong; instead it is regulations.

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Most troubling is the the nature of our regulatory system. They are designed by rogue and unelected bureaucrats. Regulations effectively become laws with little oversight or accountability.

This isn’t a small problem. Take for example your elected representatives in Congress. In 2015, CEI finds that Congress enacted 114 laws (that’s probably too many). However, unelected bureaucrats issued 3,410 rules in that same year. In other words, the “fourth” branch of government that is unaccountable issued 30 regulatory decrees for every one law passed by Congress. That’s simply insane.

In total, there are 178,277 pages in the Code of Federal Regulations which outline the 94,000 rules currently on the books. The cost to enforce all these regulations comes at a massive price. CEI finds that federal agencies spent $63 billion in taxpayer dollars to administer and police this regulatory enterprise.

As bad as this seems, it’s about to get worse. There are currently 3,297 new regulations in the implementation phase. Of this total, CEI finds that 218 are considered “economically significant,” a definition the government uses when a regulation will have an economic impact of $100 million or more.

The hidden regulatory tax is becoming dangerous to American democracy. The regulatory apparatus is out of control. Over the past 23 years, the number of regulations has increased by 2,060 percent. Individuals that are not elected, or confirmed by elected representatives, should not have such great authority and power over our lives.

The idea of living in a constitutional republic ruled by an unaccountable administrative state is an oxymoron. Nowhere in the Constitution are administrative agencies granted legislative privilege to create rules and enforce them by limiting the people’s rights and liberties, or to exact taxes upon the populace.

It’s time we take back our government from bureaucrats; it’s time we put an end to this crushing hidden tax. (For more from the author of “The Insane Hidden Tax Burden Quietly Eating up Your Paycheck” please click HERE)

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The Next Employment Crisis Is Here: Job Cuts at U.S. Companies Jump 35 Percent in April

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Should we be alarmed that the number of job cuts announced by large U.S. companies was 35 percent higher in April than it was in March? This is definitely a case where the trend is not our friend. According to Challenger, Gray & Christmas, U.S. firms announced 65,141 job cuts during April, which represented a massive 35 percent increase over the previous month. And so far this year overall, job cut announcements are running 24 percent higher than for the exact same period in 2015. Meanwhile, on Thursday we learned that initial claims for unemployment benefits shot up dramatically last week. In fact, the jump of 17,000 was the largest increase that we have seen in over a year. Of course the U.S. economy has been slowing down for quite a while now, and many have been wondering when we would begin to see that slowdown reflected in the employment numbers. Well, that day has now arrived.

At this point, U.S. firms are laying off people at a rate that we have not seen since the last financial crisis. Here is what Zero Hedge had to say about these latest numbers…

While one can debate the veracity of the BLS’ seasonally adjusted data, one thing is certain: when a company announces it will layoff thousands, it will. So for all those who suggest that all is well with the US jobs picture based on initial claims reports, here is the latest report from Challenger according to which the pace of downsizing increased in April jumped by 35% to 65,141 during the month of April, from the 48,207 layoff announcements in March.

Looking further back, in the first four months of 2016, employers have announced a total of 250,061 planned job cuts, up 24% from the 201,796 job cuts tracked during the same period a year ago. This represents the highest January-April total since 2009, when the opening four months of the year saw 695,100 job cuts in the aftermath of the biggest financial crisis in modern history.

So what is causing this?

Why are firms laying off so many people all of a sudden?

My readers are very well aware of the pain that the energy industry is experiencing at the moment, but surprisingly it was not the energy industry that announced the most job cuts in April…

Computer firms announced 16,923 job cuts during the month; the highest total among all industries. That total includes 12,000 from chipmaker Intel, which is shifting away from the traditional desktop and laptop market and toward the mobile market. To date, computer firms have announced 33,925 job cuts, up 262 percent from a year ago, when job cuts in the sector totaled just 9,368 through the first four months of the year.

Yes, the U.S. energy industry has lost well over 100,000 good paying jobs since the beginning of last year, but the downturn is so much broader than that. All over America corporate earnings are down, and when earnings fall it is inevitable that layoffs will follow.

As I have written about previously, earnings for companies listed on the S&P 500 have fallen a total of 18.5 percent from their peak in late 2014, and it was being projected that corporate earnings overall would be down 8.5 percent for the first quarter of 2016 compared to the same period a year ago.

And in the chart that I have posted below, you can see that corporate profits after tax have been falling precipitously since peaking in mid-2015…

As this new economic downturn intensifies, the layoffs will accelerate.

In plain English, that means that a whole lot more people will be losing their jobs.

Unfortunately, a very large percentage of Americans didn’t learn anything from the last crisis and are living on the financial edge. In fact, the Federal Reserve says that 47 percent of all Americans cannot even pay an unexpected $400 emergency room bill without borrowing the money or selling something.

So just like back in 2008, we are going to see huge numbers of people unable to pay their bills when they lose their jobs. Foreclosures are going to skyrocket, and lots and lots of families are going to be put out into the street.

This is why I have been preaching the importance of having an emergency fund for years. It is absolutely imperative to have an emergency fund that can cover your bills for at least six months in the event that there is a job loss or some other sort of major disaster strikes.

If you have not done this already, you are probably already too late.

The cold, hard reality of the matter is that it would take most families quite a while to save up a six month emergency fund if they are starting from zero.

So if you are in this position and you lose your job, you may have to move in with family or friends when your money runs out.

I don’t mean to be cold, but this is the situation that we are facing. The next employment crisis is already here, and it is going to get much, much worse. No matter who becomes “the next president”, job cuts are going to accelerate and good jobs are going to become exceedingly difficult to find.

I am certainly not advocating that anyone give up. If you still have a good job for the moment, tighten your belt and use this time to feverishly prepare the very best that you can.

Sadly, tens of millions of Americans believed that this bubble of false prosperity would keep on rolling, and so they wasted immense amounts of precious time and resources. Now the day of reckoning is here, and vast numbers of our fellow citizens are going to discover the horror of being unprepared. (For more from the author of “The Next Employment Crisis Is Here: Job Cuts at U.S. Companies Jump 35 Percent in April” please click HERE)

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