Alabama Official Ordered to Issue Marriage Licenses to Homosexual Couples

Photo Credit: IB Times By Reuters. A federal judge on Thursday ordered an Alabama official to comply with her earlier ruling striking down the state’s ban on same-sex matrimony and start issuing marriage licenses to gay couples, while advocates said couples in most counties were still unable to obtain licenses.

U.S. District Judge Callie Granade’s order clarified that Mobile County Probate Court Judge Don Davis should follow her directive despite a contravening order from Alabama Supreme Court Justice Roy Moore that led many state judges to refrain from issuing marriage licenses to gay couples.

The ruling marked the latest twist in the controversy over gay marriage in Alabama, where probate judges have faced conflicting orders from federal and state courts. The resulting disarray has allowed some same-sex couples to marry in places such as Birmingham, while those applying for marriage licenses in dozens of counties were turned away.

Granade’s order applied specifically to Mobile County, where, within an hour of the ruling, same-sex couples who had been waiting in line at a county building began to receive licenses.

Judges in the other 43 of Alabama’s 67 counties that have refused to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples did not immediately begin issuing them in the wake of Granade’s order, advocates said. (Read more from ‘Alabama Official Ordered to Issue Marriage Licenses HERE)

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Here’s What Your State’s View of Homosexual Marriage Is

By Victoria Taft. A new survey shows American tolerance or support of same-sex marriage has increased a whopping 21% between 2003 and 2013.

The Public Religion Research Institute, which routinely polls issues pertaining to abortion and LGBT issues, says the differences are stark from one decade to the next . . .

Here’s what your state’s voters think about same-sex marriage.

(Read more from this story HERE)

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Veterans Group Demands Apology From VA Secretary Who Asked Iraq War Veteran, ‘What Have You Done?’

By Pete Kasperowicz. A key veterans group on Wednesday demanded that Veterans Affairs Secretary Robert McDonald apologize for insulting a member of Congress who just happens to be a 22-year Marine Corps veteran.

McDonald got the attention of Concerned Veterans for America during the day when he got angry at a series of questions from Rep. Mike Coffman (R-Colo.). Coffman was asking about the VA’s failed hospital construction project in his home state, when McDonald stunned the room by trying to shift the blame to Coffman.

“You’ve been here longer than I have,” McDonald said. “If there’s a problem in Denver, I think you own it more than I do.”

McDonald then seemed to imply that Coffman wasn’t qualified to question the VA’s activities, by saying, “I’ve run a large company, sir. What have you done?”

Pete Hegseth, the CEO of Concerned Veterans for America, said McDonald was “disrespectful” of Coffman, who is the only member of Congress to serve in both Iraq wars, and demanded an apology. (Read more about the Veteran group demanding an apology HERE)

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Obama Signs Suicide Prevention Bill

By Bryant Jordan. President Obama signed the Clay Hunt Suicide Prevention for American Veterans Act Thursday that will provide $22 million to help boost programs that look to reduce the veteran suicide rate that has climbed to 22 veterans each day.

The suicide prevention legislation is named for a former Marine who died by suicide in 2011 after losing his battle with mental health issues related to his service in Afghanistan. Hunt was 28.

In remarks before signing the bill at the White House, Obama said Hunt did everything he could to fight against the post-traumatic stress symptoms that plagued him.

He sought help from the VA, got involved in helping other veterans, and even volunteered with a relief organization assisting people in Haiti. He also made a public service announcement encouraging other veterans with mental health issues to get help, Obama said.

But the right combination of help, therapy and medication was not found for Hunt in time, Obama said. (Read more from this story HERE)

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New Research on Same-Sex Households Overwhelmingly Shows Kids Do Best With Mom and Dad

A new study published in the February 2015 issue of the British Journal of Education, Society, and Behavioural Science appears to be the largest yet on the matter of same-sex households and children’s emotional outcomes. It analyzed 512 children of same-sex parents, drawn from a pool of over 207,000 respondents who participated in the (US) National Health Interview Survey (NHIS) at some point between 1997 and 2013.

Results reveal that, on eight out of twelve psychometric measures, the risk of clinical emotional problems, developmental problems, or use of mental health treatment services is nearly double among those with same-sex parents when contrasted with children of opposite-sex parents. The estimate of serious child emotional problems in children with same-sex parents is 17 percent, compared with 7 percent among opposite-sex parents, after adjusting for age, race, gender, and parent’s education and income. Rates of ADHD were higher as well—15.5 compared to 7.1 percent. The same is true for learning disabilities: 14.1 vs. 8 percent.

The study’s author, sociologist Paul Sullins, assessed a variety of different hypotheses about the differences, including comparative residential stability, experience of stigma or bullying, parental emotional problems (6.1 percent among same-sex parents vs. 3.4 percent among opposite-sex ones), and biological attachment. Each of these factors predictably aggravated children’s emotional health, but only the last of these—biological parentage—accounted for nearly all of the variation in emotional problems. While adopted children are at higher risk of emotional problems overall, being adopted did not account for the differences between children in same-sex and opposite-sex households. It’s also worth noting that while being bullied clearly aggravates emotional health, there was no difference in self-reported experience of having been bullied between the children of same-sex and opposite-sex parents.

Vocal critics, soon to emerge, will likely home in on the explanatory mechanism—the fact that two mothers or two fathers can’t possibly both enjoy a biological connection to a child—in suggesting the results of the study reveal nothing of value about same-sex households with children. On the contrary, the study reveals a great deal. Namely, there is no equivalent replacement for the enduring gift to a child that a married biological mother and father offer. It’s no guarantee of success. It’s not always possible. But the odds of emotional struggle at least double without it. Some critics might attribute the emotional health differences to the realities of “adoption by strangers,” but the vast majority of same-sex couples in the NHIS exhibited one parent with a biological relationship with the child.

Even research on “planned” same-sex families—those created using assisted reproductive technology (ART)—reveals the significance of biological ties. (Read more about the research on the same-sex households HERE)

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Conservatives laugh at Charlie Sheen’s ‘Republican’ revelation: ‘Can we throw that one back?’ [+video]

By Nicole Haas. Just when the wacky antics of actor Charlie Sheen seemed to be dying down, he announced that he could run for president – as a Constitutional Republican!

Michael Loftus, the host of “The Flipside,” interviewed Sheen and asked him to name three laws he would pass if he were ‘King of America’ . . .

“Skilled vets in front of our schools, 10 percent tax across the board,” he started with.

“Flat tax? … I’m down with that,” said Loftus . . .

“The third would be, to just stop it, everybody relax. … Put the Constitution back into place. … I’m a Constitutional Republican, I believe in the Constitution, ya know? (Read more on why Conservatives laugh at Charlie Sheen HERE)

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Charlie Sheen: Brian Williams ‘Victim’ of Vile Witch Hunt

By Elizabeth Vanmetre. Charlie Sheen proved to be a big fan of the NBC anchor who was suspended Tuesday night without pay for six months.

Sheen took to Twitter and tweeted, what seems to be some sort of letter in poem form beginning with, “Dear Mr. Williams.”

His tweet, which he had to use the app “TwitLonger” because of its length, thanked the “Nightly News” anchor for his “24 years of inimitable professionalism and top shelf brilliance, as a stone cold passion drive and perfectly fact based journalist.”

“You good sir, are a hero in my “Entire Library,” the actor added.

Maybe the strangest part of the tweet was when he called Williams a “victim of a transparent and vile witch hunt.” (Read more from this story HERE)

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How This Phony CIA Agent Pulled Off a ‘Scam’ While Imposing the Most Expensive EPA Regs in History

Photo Credit: Daily Signal By Kevin Mooney. Remember the EPA bureaucrat who got caught receiving $900,000 in pay without working because he claimed he also was employed by the CIA?

According to a report from the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, the man, former climate policy expert John Beale, “retired” when questions arose about his spotty attendance and expense records.

Only he didn’t file his retirement paperwork and continued to draw an active-duty salary for some time after. His boss at the time in the EPA’s Office of Air and Radiation, now-EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy, knew this for about seven months and did nothing to stop it.

“On March 29, 2012, an OAR official raised concerns about Beale’s retirement when he informed McCarthy that Beale was still on payroll,” the report stated.

“Despite being aware of the fact that one of her subordinates was collecting a paycheck without providing any work product, this arrangement continued for seven more months before McCarthy ever contacted Beale.” (Read more about the phony CIA agent HERE)

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EPA Under Fire for Concealing Controversial Scientific Data, Silencing Skeptics

By Kevin Mooney. For more than 15 years, the Environmental Protection Agency has resisted releasing data from two key studies to the general public and members of Congress. Government regulators used those studies to craft some of the most expensive environmental rules in U.S. history.

When skeptics within the federal government questioned and challenged the integrity of the studies—the Harvard Six Cities Study and an American Cancer Society study known as ACS II—they were silenced and muzzled.

That’s when the Republican staff on the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee stepped in to shine light on the situation, revealing the scope of the scandal in in a report titled, “EPA’s Playbook Unveiled: A Story of Fraud, Deceit and Secret Science.”

The key player in the scandal is John Beale, who was sentenced to serve 32 months in federal prison on Dec. 18, 2013, after pleading guilty to stealing almost $900,000 from U.S. taxpayers.

It was in 1994 that Beale first began to beguile EPA employees and supervisors into believing he worked for the CIA. When he failed to report for work, Beale would enter “D.O. Oversight” on his calendar, which meant he was a director of operations responsible for covert operations at the CIA. (Read more from this story HERE)

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Frank Gaffney’s Center for Security Policy Hosts “Defeat Jihad Summit” with Gen. Boykin, Gov. Jindal, Sen. Cruz, Gingrich (+video)

This week, an extraordinary gathering of freedom-fighters in what might best be described as the War for the Free World convened in Washington, D.C. Their purpose was to anticipate and rebut the thesis of President Obama’s “Countering Violent Extremism Summit” next week – namely, that the United States faces hostile forces whose identity, motivations and capabilities are defined by an opaque euphemism: violent extremism. . .

Highlights of the Summit included:

•A discussion of the nature of our jihadist enemies and the mainstream – not extremist –character of their inspiration: the politico-military-legal shariah doctrine derived from the sacred texts, institutions and authorities of Islam. There was widespread agreement that we must understand and be able to name our foes, not pretend that they and their motivations are unknowable.

•The global jihad takes various forms including: the violent kind; civilization (or cultural, stealthy and subversive) jihad; institutional jihad (employing entities like the multinational Organization of Islamic Cooperation and the United Nations under the OIC’s influence); individual jihad (its perpetrators are mistakenly being described as “lone wolves”); and material support (which, under shariah, is prized as highly as the service of those who take up the sword).

•America urgently needs a strategy for countering all such jihadist endeavors – one that brings to bear all instruments of national power to achieve a decisive correlation of forces and our victory. We face a truly existential threat from the global jihad movement, as do other nations of the Free World now under assault for sharing our values and love of liberty.

(Read more from Frank Gaffney’s Center for Security Policy HERE)

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ISIS’ Christian Victims Speak Out With An Urgent Message On How They’re Being Targeted For Extinction

Photo Credit: IJReview By Justen Charters. Following ISIS’ invasion of Iraq, Christians, Yezidis and other minorities were chased from their homes, murdered, enslaved, or displaced.

Sadly, there isn’t a lot being done to help prevent more marginalized sects from becoming victims of the Islamic State’s massacres.

Disturbed by the reports of ISIS trying to snuff out the flames of Christianity in Iraq, former Congressman Frank R. Wolf co-founded the 21st Century Wilberforce Initiative. The Wilberforce vision states:

There has never been a greater need both in history and scope. The rise of ISIS, the declining freedom of speech and communication globally, and the sheer number of religious prisoners around the world pose a critical threat to all of humanity. 21st Century Wilberforce wants to awaken the church to these atrocities and stir Christians and other religious groups to action.

Wilberforce is taking action to bring to light the importance of stopping Iraq’s minorities from being targeted for extinction. (Read more about the ISIS’ victims who are being targeted for extinction HERE)

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ISIS: Smoking Will Kill You, One Way or Another

By Nabih Bulos. Beheadings have become commonplace in the territories held by the militant Islamic State, but the severed head reportedly found last month in the eastern Syrian city of Al-Mayadeen was nevertheless unusual.

It had a cigarette placed between its lips.

“This is not permissible, Sheikh,” someone had scrawled in Arabic on the decapitated corpse lying nearby, according to an account from the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a pro-opposition monitoring group. The body and head belonged to an Islamic State official, a deputy police chief.

From consuming alcohol to cursing, vices of all types are frowned upon by Islamic State . . .

Shortly after the group’s takeover of large swaths of Deir Elzur province in eastern Syria, Islamic State began to close tobacco shops and shutter the ubiquitous water-pipe cafes. (Read more from this story HERE)

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Ship Company, Engineer Reach Deal in Alaska Pollution Case

A ship company based in Germany and the chief engineer on one of its vessels have agreed to plead guilty to illegally dumping oily water off Alaska.

Federal prosecutors announced Thursday that AML Ship Management GMBH and Nicolas Sassin, the chief engineer on the AML-operated ship City of Tokyo, agreed to plead guilty to violating federal clean water law by knowingly dumping 4,500 gallons of oily bilge water south of the Aleutian Islands.

The company and Sassin, 45, face a separate charge of presenting false pollution oversight records to the U.S. Coast Guard when the vessel docked in Portland, Oregon, prosecutors said.

As part of the plea deal, AML agreed to pay $800,000 in fines and community service payments.

Prosecutors are recommending a six-month jail sentence for Sassin, to run concurrent with any jail time imposed from a conviction in the Oregon case. (Read more about the Alaska pollution case HERE)

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Media Intentionally Fans Flames of Racial Hatred, Skewing Crime Numbers, Suppressing Facts

Photo Credit: Accuracy in Media The media have relentlessly fanned the flames of racial hatred, while engaging in a systematic pattern of misinformation and blatant suppression of facts surrounding the perpetrators and victims of crime. As a result, so-called “criminal justice reform” is now being proposed to release more criminals from jails, supposedly to make amends for the unjust “mass incarceration” of black men.

The figures come quickly but are never subjected to the necessary scrutiny. Last fall, for example, the George Soros-funded ProPublica published a claim that black youths are killed by the police at a rate 21 times higher than white youths. Mass media parroted that claim, but the data are incomplete and biased. They represent just 1.2 percent of police departments nationwide, and most reports come from urban areas, where the population is disproportionately black.

More reliable data from the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) suggest that in 2012, 123 blacks were killed by police using firearms while 326 whites, including 227 non-Hispanic whites, were killed. These data, however are also not entirely reliable, but represent a larger data set than the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR).

CNN’s Marc Lamont Hill, a racial agitator fired by Fox News for defending cop-killers, spread another misleading statistic about police shootings, claiming that “Every 28 hours, an unarmed black person is killed by police.” This too was trumpeted in the media. It became a twitter hashtag, “#every28hours,” and another mantra like “hands up, don’t shoot.” But it is demonstrably false. There were 313 blacks killed by police, security guards and other “vigilantes” in 2012. Dividing 313 into the number of hours in a year (8,760) yields 28. However, 177 of these “unarmed black persons” were actually armed with firearms. That leaves 136. Others may have been technically “unarmed” but were threatening the officer’s life, for example with their car—or as in Michael Brown’s case, attempting to take the officer’s gun. Many more were not the result of shootings, but accidents, e.g., during vehicular chases. Finally, some of the shooters were not police. When the hyperbole is removed, the facts present a much more reasonable explanation. Barring a small number of tragic mishaps, police shootings are usually justified.

Let’s look at the other side now. In 2013 alone, 49,851 officers were assaulted with firearms, knives and other weapons. Over the past 10 years, on average, 150 police officers have been killed in the line of duty every year. Fifty-seven of these were shot, stabbed, strangled or beaten. Of the 509 officers feloniously killed in the past 10 years, 46 percent of the perpetrators were black, despite their representing only 13 percent of the population. Do we call this a black war against the police?

Black Crime & Incarceration

Critics also argue that blacks’ 40 percent share among U.S. prison populations is direct evidence of institutional racism (see table). In a color-blind society, they charge, incarcerated black populations would reflect their 13 percent share of the general population.

However, if black crime rates were the guide, it would seem that blacks are, if anything, underrepresented in prison populations. The table below presents FBI data on homicide offenders. Blacks exceed all other groups in murders committed in 2013. In prior years it was actually worse.

(Read more from this story HERE)

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Four Star Admiral James Lyons Makes Astounding Allegation About Muslim Brotherhood Terrorists and Obama [+video]

Photo Credit: Tea Party News Network By Matthew Burke. Retired 4-Star U.S. Navy Admiral James Lyons, speaking at the National Press Club in January, says that under Obama’s guidance, the Obama Regime has been infiltrated by the Muslim Brotherhood terrorism front group, saying that the radical anti-freedom organization has penetrated every U.S. security agency. Admiral Lyons said that “the transformation of America has been in full swing ever since 2008,” the year Obama was elected based upon his campaign promise to “fundamentally transform America.”

Speaking about Obama’s refusal to attend the recent march in France, reportedly attended by more than 50 world leaders to condemn Islamic terrorism following the gruesome murders of cartoonists who had the audacity to lampoon Islam, Admiral Lyons said that act was a “signal to Islamic Jihadis,” and is “one of many signals he sent over the years while in office.”

“There’s no question we got a hell of a job ahead of us,” Admiral Lyons said. “With the Muslim Brotherhood penetration in every one of our national security agencies, including all our intelligence agencies,” he proclaimed.

(Read more about Admiral James Lyons alleging ties betwee Obama and the Muslim brotherhood HERE)

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Known Jihadist Members at Secret White House Meeting

By Allen West. Last week something happened even more damning for Obama (if that’s possible) — and he doesn’t seem to care. As you might recall, President Obama met with American Muslim leaders at the White House, but the administration was unwilling to reveal who attended the meeting, which was closed to the press.

But as reported by Investors Business Daily, “After complaints, the White House finally released names of the “Muslim leaders” Obama met with behind closed doors a week ago Wednesday. Now we know why it was secret. The list includes members of known jihadist groups. After stonewalling for days about the names of participants at the almost two-hour meeting with the president and his national security advisers — a meeting that was granted at the request of Muslim Advocates, an Islamist group that’s demanded a stop to NYPD surveillance of radical mosques, anti-terrorist drone strikes and Gitmo detentions — the White House quietly attached the list of attendees to the back of its daily press briefing transcript Thursday evening, according to the Washington Times.” (Read more from this story HERE)

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Here are the Names of Some of the Jihadists who Attended Obama’s Secret Meeting

By Investors.com. Among the 14 lucky Muslim luminaries were:

• Imam Mohamed Magid, who preaches at a fundamentalist Northern Virginia mosque that has listed a number of trustees and major donors whose offices and homes were raided after 9/11 by federal agents on suspicion of funding terrorists.

• Azhar Azeez, president of the Islamic Society of North America, a known radical Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas front group that remains on the Justice Department’s list of unindicted terrorist co-conspirators.

• Sherman Jackson, who as the King Faisal Chair of Islamic Thought at USC, once gave a lecture at a conference in Toronto that has been described by “Campus Watch” as a “call to battle” between Muslims and the West.

• Hoda Hawa, national policy adviser of the Muslim Public Affairs Council, which was founded by known members of the Muslim Brotherhood, a worldwide jihadist movement.

(Read more from this story HERE)

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