Starbucks' First LGBT Ad Features Drag Queens

Photo Credit: AP / Alik Keplicz

Photo Credit: AP / Alik Keplicz

Starbucks is putting its support for the gay lifestyle into its marketing campaign with the release of an ad featuring drag queens.

“Well, here’s one place we certainly didn’t think we’d see the ‘RuPaul’s Drag Race Girls’ pop up,” James Nichols wrote in an article for the Huffington Post’s Gay Voices section.

The ad features two men dressed as women who were featured in Season Six of the television series “Drag Race,” Adore Delano and Bianca Del Rio.

The “girls” in the video are fighting in line over who gets served first, but in the end the Starbucks server gives them both their order at the same time.

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'Population Control?' Kenyan Bishops Accuse WHO and UNICEF of Implementing Program

Needle3201Some potentially disturbing news out of Kenya: A statement signed by the 27 bishops of the Kenya Conference of Catholic Bishops alleges that the World Health Organization and UNICEF are injecting Kenyan women with a tetanus vaccine that has been laced with a hormone that causes miscarriages and renders some women sterile.

The bishops make it clear in their statement that they are not opposed to vaccines, but are instead troubled that there are several inconsistencies with this vaccination program (such as batch numbers and administration protocol), and that testing results have shown the presence of Beta-HCG hormone, which is not normally present in tetanus vaccines.

Dear Kenyans, due to the direction the debate on the ongoing Tetanus Vaccine campaign in Kenya is taking, We, the Catholic Bishops, in fulfilling our prophetic role, wish to restate our position as follows:

1. The Catholic Church is NOT opposed to regular vaccines administered in Kenya, both in our own Church health facilities and in public health institutions.

2. However, during the second phase of the Tetanus vaccination campaign in March 2014, that is sponsored by WHO/UNICEF, the Catholic Church questioned the secrecy of the exercise. We raised questions on whether the tetanus vaccine was linked to a population control program that has been reported in some countries, where a similar vaccine was laced with Beta- HCG hormone which causes infertility and multiple miscarriages in women.

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Mitch McConnell's Freighted Ties to a Shadowy Shipping Company

Photo Credit: Shanghai Mulan Education Foundation

Photo Credit: Shanghai Mulan Education Foundation

Before the Ping May, a rusty cargo vessel, could disembark from the port of Santa Marta en route to the Netherlands in late August, Colombian inspectors boarded the boat and made a discovery. Hidden in the ship’s chain locker, amidst its load of coal bound for Europe, were approximately 40 kilograms, or about ninety pounds, of cocaine. A Colombian Coast Guard official told The Nation that there is an ongoing investigation.

The seizure of the narcotics shipment in the Caribbean port occurred far away from Kentucky, the state in which Senator Mitch McConnell is now facing a career-defining election. But the Republican Senate minority leader has the closest of ties to the owner of the Ping May, the vessel containing the illicit materials: the Foremost Maritime Corporation, a firm founded and owned by McConnell’s in-laws, the Chao family.

Though Foremost has played a pivotal role in McConnell’s life, bestowing the senator with most of his personal wealth and generating thousands in donations to his campaign committees, the drug bust went unnoticed in Kentucky, where every bit of McConnell-related news has generated fodder for the campaign trail. That’s because, like many international shipping companies, Chao’s firm is shrouded from public view, concealing its identity and limiting its legal liability through an array of tax shelters and foreign registrations. Registered through a limited liability company in the Marshall Islands, the Ping May flies the Liberian flag.

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President, VP May Differ on Immigration Strategy: 'Obama Angrily Cut Biden Off'

Photo Credit: AP / Charles Dharapak

Photo Credit: AP / Charles Dharapak

President Obama and Vice President Biden might not see eye-to-eye on immigration strategy. A hint of an apparent disagreement was on display during Obama’s lunch with congressional leaders on Friday at the White House.

“The meeting was tense at times, according to a senior House Republican aide. The aide was not authorized to describe the back-and-forth publicly by name and spoke only on condition of anonymity,” the Associated Press reports.

“Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid, about to lose his grip on the upper chamber, barely said a word. The aide said at one point as House Speaker John Boehner was making an argument on immigration, Obama responded that his patience was running out and Vice President Joe Biden interrupted to ask how long Republicans needed. Obama angrily cut Biden off, the aide said.”

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FEMA Asking Disabled, Elderly Residents to Repay Aid from Superstorm Sandy

Photo Credit: AP / Kathy Willens

Photo Credit: AP / Kathy Willens

The residents of Belle Harbor Manor spent four miserable months in emergency shelters after Superstorm Sandy’s floodwaters surged through their assisted-living center on New York City’s Rockaway peninsula.

Now, the home’s disabled, elderly and mostly poor residents have a new headache: The Federal Emergency Management Agency has asked at least a dozen of them to pay back thousands of dollars in disaster aid.

Robert Rosenberg, 61, was among the Belle Harbor Manor residents who recently got notices from FEMA informing them that they had retroactively been declared ineligible for aid checks they received two years ago in the storm’s immediate aftermath. The problem, the letters said, was that the money was supposed to have been spent on temporary housing, but that never happened because the residents were moved from one state-funded shelter to another.

FEMA gave Rosenberg until Nov. 15 to send a refund check for $2,486 or file an appeal.

“We’re on a fixed income. I don’t have that kind of money!” said Rosenberg, who suffers from a spinal disability and other chronic health problems. He said he spent the aid money long ago on food and clothing, both of which were in short supply after the storm.

Read more from this story HERE.

Amnesty and Impeachment

Photo Credit: National Review

Photo Credit: National Review

There is high anxiety over President Obama’s impending unilateral amnesty order for millions of illegal aliens. How many millions? The estimates vary. On the low end, 3 to 8 million, assuming some correlation to the potential beneficiaries of the president’s already existing amnesty decrees (including DACA or Deferred Action on Childhood Arrivals). On the high end, as many as 9 to 34 million, factoring in likely categorical expansions of amnesty and their ramifications over the next several years.

The anxiety stems from a remorseless truth that no one — most especially Mr. Obama’s most ardent detractors — wants to confront. It is the truth I have addressed, to much groaning and teeth-gnashing, in Faithless Execution, my recent book on presidential lawlessness.

It is this: The nation overwhelmingly objects to Obama’s immigration lawlessness, but it has no stomach for the only effective counter to it — the plausible threat of impeachment.

To hear the demagogue-in-chief tell it, the controversy over how to deal with the approximately 12 million illegal aliens currently in the U.S. is a Manichean debate between enlightened humanitarians and vulgar xenophobes. (To be fair to the president, he is far from alone in peddling this smear.) But objections to Obama’s reckless immigration policies — indeed, to his policies in general, as this week’s historic election reaffirmed — cut across party and philosophical lines.

To be sure, the most intense protest is heard in “restrictionist” circles and among those for whom rule-of-law and national-security concerns trump sympathy for the plight of legions of decent but unlawfully present non-citizens (some of whom were brought here as children and are blameless for their illegal status). There are also, however, many enthusiasts of immigration amnesty — the euphemism is legislative “reform” — who recognize that the president’s sweeping, dictatorial approach is angering the public. That damages not just the cause but the career prospects of those who’ve made the cause their own.

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Iraqi Officials Say ISIS Leader Wounded in Airstrike

Photo Credit: AP / Militant video

Photo Credit: AP / Militant video

Iraqi officials said Sunday that the head of the Islamic State group, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, was wounded in an airstrike in western Anbar province. Pentagon officials said they had no immediate information on such an attack or on the militant leader being injured.

Iraq’s Defense and Interior ministries both issued statements saying al-Baghdadi had been wounded, without elaborating, and the news was broadcast on state-run television Sunday night.

The reports came at a time when President Barack Obama said the U.S.-led coalition was in a position to start going on the offensive against the Islamic State militants.

Al-Baghdadi, believed to be in his early 40s, has a $10 million U.S. bounty on his head. Since taking the reins of the group in 2010, he has transformed it from a local branch of al-Qaida into an independent transnational military force.

He has positioned himself as perhaps the pre-eminent figure in the global jihadi community. His forces have seized large parts of Syria and Iraq, killed thousands of people, beheaded Westerners and drawn the U.S. troops and warplanes back into the region, where Washington is leading a campaign of airstrikes by a multinational coalition.

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Colorado Residents Get A "Marijuana Tax" Refund

Photo Credit: TownHall

Photo Credit: TownHall

Thanks to TABOR, Colorado’s taxpayer bill-of-rights law, tax revenue that comes in over a certain threshold is mandated to be returned to the taxpayers. Colorado is expecting excess revenue this year, as Governor John Hickenlooper has said, and a rebate will be in order.

Why? Well, partly because taxes raised from the sale of marijuana have fueled the government’s coffers above and beyond what had been expected:

Gov. John Hickenlooper’s proposed $26.8 billion Colorado budget, unveiled Monday afternoon, includes two rebates for taxpayers.

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Democratic Domination of Coal Country Over?

train cars in coalIt sure seems that way to Politico after the midterm elections. The writing has been on the wall since the Democratic Party nominated and elected a President who declared that his energy policies would “bankrupt” coal operators in a 2008 interview, but the cycle didn’t complete itself until after Barack Obama’s EPA began to pursue those policies in earnest. What used to be the heart of Democratic working-class union strength has now flipped entirely red, and probably permanently:

The Republicans’ romp this week may have permanently turned coal country from blue to red.

Coal-heavy districts in West Virginia, Kentucky and Illinois that had been steadily moving away from Democrats in recent elections appear to have completed that shift Tuesday, when they overwhelmingly backed Republicans who vowed to oppose what they call President Barack Obama’s “war on coal.” …

In West Virginia, once a long-time Democratic stronghold, Republicans will take control of both houses of the state legislature for the first time since 1931. Republicans picked up seven seats in the state Senate to bring the balance to 17-17, and then Democrat Daniel Hall switched parties Wednesday to give the majority to the GOP.

Voters there also elected Rep. Shelley Moore Capito as their first GOP senator in 56 years, and Republicans won three congressional contests, even kicking out 38-year incumbent Rep. Nick Rahall.

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Observers Decry Muslim Silence Over Murder of Christian Couple in Pakistan

Photo Credit: AFP

Photo Credit: AFP

Rufin Anthony, the bishop of Islamabad, has denounced the culpable silence of Muslim leaders who have failed to forcefully condemn what is being called “the worst religiously motivated hate crime in Pakistan’s history”—the recent murder of a Christian couple in Pakistan.

Summary executions of religious minorities accused of blasphemy in Pakistan has met with complacency and even approval, says Anthony. “In the past,” he said, when vigilantes have taken the law into their own hands, “religious leaders have carefully refrained from expressing words of condemnation. In fact, they have practically encouraged personal vendettas.”

Anthony said that the blame for current problems falls to those who have countenanced it earlier. “If appropriate measures had been taken in the past,” he said, “this barbarism could have been averted.”

On November 4, Shahzad Masih and his pregnant wife Shama Bibia, the parents of four children, were stoned and then burned alive at a brick kiln in Pakistan. The two victims were killed by an angry mob of hundreds of people stirred up by a local religious leader for allegedly burning pages of the Qur’an.

Many have begun asking how a blasphemy law that justifies killing in the name of religion can exist in today’s world.

Read more from this story HERE.