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.

Read more from this story HERE.

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.

Read more from this story HERE.

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.”

Read more from this story HERE.

‘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.”

Read more from this story HERE.

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.

Alaskan Polar Bears Threatened…By Too Much Spring Ice

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Photo Credit: U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service / AP

Photo Credit: U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service / AP

Five meters of ice– about 16 feet thick – is threatening the survival of polar bears in the Southern Beaufort Sea region along Alaska’s Arctic coast, according to Dr. Susan J. Crockford, an evolutionary biologist in British Columbia who has studied polar bears for most of her 35-year career.

That’s because the thick ice ridges could prevent ringed seals, the bears’ major prey, from creating breathing holes they need to survive in the frigid waters, Crockford told CNSNews.com.

“Prompted by reports of the heaviest sea ice conditions on the East Coast ‘in decades’ and news that ice on the Great Lakes is, for mid-April, the worst it’s been since records began, I took a close look at the ice thickness charts for the Arctic,” Crockford noted in her Polar Bear Science blog on April 18th.

“Sea ice charts aren’t a guarantee that this heavy spring ice phenomenon is developing in the Beaufort, but they could be a warning,” she wrote, noting that they “don’t bode well” for the Beaufort bears.

“What happens is that really thick ice moves in because currents and winds from Greenland and the Canadian islands push it against the shore,” Crockford told CNSNews.com.

Read more from this story HERE.

Miller: It’s Not Federal Overreach, It’s Tyranny (+video)

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Screen Shot 2014-04-27 at 1.57.34 AMThis past Friday, I joined the two other candidates vying for the Republican nomination to the U.S. Senate in the first televised forum of the campaign season. One of the questions put to us at the “Alaska Asks” forum, which aired on the local NBC affiliate, addressed the role the federal government should play in our state. I said, in contrast to my opponents, we are not dealing merely with an issue of federal overreach, but a form of tyranny.

The Constitution does not authorize the federal government to control over two-thirds of Alaska’s land, nor approximately 85 percent of Nevada’s. The stand-off in that state and the government shutdown last fall, during which Alaskans were denied the opportunity to hunt and provide for their families on these lands as an act of political retaliation, highlighted a federal government that exercises far too much control over our daily lives and livelihoods.

The federal government’s continued stranglehold on Alaska’s resource development, as other states like North Dakota boom economically, is unacceptable. The EPA’s armed raid of a family mining facility in Chicken, Alaska last fall demonstrates just how out of control Washington is. 

We need fundamental reform. Tweaking at the margins and increasing the go-along-to-get-along caucus in the Senate will do nothing to address the daunting challenges we face. 

Ronald Reagan said nearly 50 years ago, “Freedom is a fragile thing and is never more than one generation away from extinction.” 

Let us do our part to ensure America remains the land of “the free and the home of the brave” in our time, and let us set an example for generations yet to come.

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It the highlights below, the candidates field questions concerning the federal government’s blocking of resource development in Alaska, Senator Rand Paul’s “Life at Conception” Act, and the constitutional issues raised by the surveillance state.

 

This Mom Obliterates Bizarre Common Core Math Question

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Photo Credit: Eagnews

Photo Credit: Eagnews

The litany of bizarre Common Core-aligned math worksheets never ends. In recent weeks, though, kids and parents have begun to fight back in creative ways.

In the most recent instance, New York parent Deanne Knight addressed a confusing Common Core-aligned math question, EAGnews.org reports.

Knight and her daughter, who is in first grade, encountered the question when it appeared on a worksheet from the New York Department of Education’s EngageNY lesson plan website.

The worksheet contains the words “NY’s Common Core Mathematics Curriculum.”

Read more from this story HERE.

Ala. Supreme Court: ‘Unborn Child Has Inalienable Right to Life From its Earliest Stages’

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Photo Credit: CNS News

Photo Credit: CNS News

In a case about a pregnant woman who used cocaine and endangered her unborn child, the Alabama Supreme Court affirmed (8-1) that the word “child” includes “an unborn child,” and that the law therefore “furthers the State’s interest in protecting the life of children from the earliest stages of their development.”

In his concurring opinion, Alabama Chief Justice Roy S. Moore wrote that “an unborn child has an inalienable right to life from its earliest stages of development,” and added, “I write separately to emphasize that the inalienable right to life is a gift of God that civil government must secure for all persons – born and unborn.”

The court decision on April 18 was in reference to Sarah Janie Hicks v. State of Alabama. Hicks had been charged in 2009 with violating Alabama’s chemical-endangerment statute, which in part says that a “person commits the crime of chemical endangerment” by “knowingly, recklessly, or intentionally causes or permits a child to be exposed to, to ingest or inhale, or to have contact with a controlled substance, chemical substance, or drug paraphernalia,” a felony.

In Hicks’ case, she was charged with using cocaine while pregnant. Her child, “J.D.,” tested positive for cocaine “at the time of his birth,” reads the court document. (See Hicks v. Alabama.pdf)

In January 2010, Hicks pleaded guilty to the crime but also “reserved the right to appeal the issues” she and her attorneys had presented earlier in trying to get the charges dismissed. Hicks got a three year suspended prison sentence and was placed on probation.

Read more from this story HERE.