Photo Credit: YouTubeDinesh D’Souza, the director of 2016: Obama’s America, confronted his rival on the virtual set of “Between Two Ferns,” the Funny or Die bit hosted by Hollywood comedian Zach Galifianakis. Of course, Obama had taken time out to meet with Galifianakis just a few weeks ago, so why not D’Souza?
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Photo Credit: DOD / Helene C. StikkelDonald Rumsfeld, who served as U.S. Defense Secretary under President George W. Bush, blames poor diplomacy by the Obama administration for the current strained relations with Afghan President Hamid Karzai.
“Our relationship with Karzai and with Afghanistan was absolutely first-rate in the Bush administration,” Rumsfeld told Fox News’s Greta Van Susteren on Monday. “It has gone down hill like a toboggan ever since the Obama administration came in.”
Rumsfeld pointed to the fact that the Obama administration has failed to get Karzai to sign an agreement that would allow some U.S. troops to remain in Afghanistan after 2014, when combat ends.
The U.S. has status of forces agreements with more than a hundred countries, Rumsfeld noted. “A trained ape can get a status of forces agreement,” he said. “It does not take a genius. And we have so mismanaged that relationship.”
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Photo Credit: National Review Will Hillary Clinton be elected America’s next president? The polls suggest she will.
Recent polls compiled by Real Clear Politics show her winning 67 percent of the vote in Democratic primaries, with no other candidate above 11 percent. General-election polling shows Clinton with an average lead over various possible Republican nominees of 51 to 39 percent.
But an election isn’t over until it is over, and this one hasn’t started. For one thing, no one is sure whether Clinton will actually run. She turns 69 in 2016 (the same age as Ronald Reagan when he was first elected in 1980) and she may consider that her achievements in eight years as first lady and U.S. senator and four years as secretary of state are enough for one lifetime.
Her achievements in that last office may look less impressive than they did in the first Obama term when majorities expressed approval of the president’s foreign policy. Clinton’s proudly proclaimed “reset” with Russia suddenly looks less like a triumph than a misfire.
She’s also had health scares: a blood clot behind her right knee in 1998 and another in her skull in December 2012.
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Photo Credit: Andrew Winning/ReutersThe crashed Malaysia Airlines flight gave one last unexplained signal eight minutes after its final “ping”, possibly the result of the plane entering its “catastrophic phase” as it plunged into the Indian Ocean, investigators have said.
As families of its 239 passengers demanded “proof” of the plane’s demise, Malaysian authorities presented analysis by Inmarsat, the British telecommunications company, of satellite data to explain its conclusion that the plane crashed into remote waters 18 days ago and left no survivors.
No confirmed wreckage from the plane has been found during a multinational air and sea search in waters about 1,500 miles south-west of Perth, Western Australia. The search was temporarily called off on Tuesday due to adverse weather.
In unprecedented scenes, up to 100 angry relations of flight MH370’s Chinese passengers descended on the Malaysian embassy in Beijing, hurling water bottles and chanting for two hours until a diplomat emerged to accept a letter of protest at the lack of information.
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Photo Credit: KUSA-TVA Colorado 9-year-old was not allowed in class Monday because she violated the school’s dress code. Her offense? Shaving her head as an act of compassion to support a friend battling cancer.
Kamryn Renfro, who attends Caprock Academy, a public charter school in Grand Junction, told KUSA-TV she “felt it was the right thing to do.”
“I was really excited I would have somebody to support me, and I wouldn’t be alone with people always laughing at me. I would at least have somebody to go through it all,” 11-year-old Delaney Clements, Kamryn’s friend who recently started chemotherapy, told KDVR-TV.
The school said in a statement that its dress code policy was “created to promote safety, uniformity and a non-distracting environment for the school’s students.”
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The recent Twitter kerfuffle between Matt Drudge and the Obama/media/academic complex over the ObamaCare tax demonstrates in plain view and without question something many of us have known for years: while the organized left insist that they are the only ones smart enough to run the world, they remain astonishingly ignorant of how it works. They’re even ignorant of how the most fundamental parts of laws that they champion operate.
In case you missed it, Drudge tweeted, “Just paid the Obamacare penalty for not ‘getting covered’… I’M CALLING IT A LIBERTY TAX” shortly after filing his first quarterly installment for 2014 as a self-employed person. Apparently unaware of how self-employed people pay taxes – which is neither new nor a secret – liberals at the White House, Talking Points Memo, the Huffington Post, and the National Journal all responded immediately by calling Drudge either a liar or ignorant, or both. After all, the liberal reasoning went, Drudge could not possibly have paid a cent toward his 2014 ObamaCare “penalty” because it’s not 2015 yet.
Yes, these wizards who would organize everything and everyone lack even a cursory familiarity with the most basic of tax realities.
What is it Bill Engvall says? Oh yeah: “Here’s your sign.” These liberals really didn’t need Engvall’s sign at all. They tweeted their own “I’m stupid” signs. Some wrote full-fledged low-information articles, including TPM’s Dylan Scott and the HuffPo’s Jeffrey Young.
In none of these attacks on Drudge did it occur to these media maestros how self-employed people are impacted by the tax ramifications of ObamaCare. If Drudge figures he’ll owe, say, ten million in federal income taxes for 2014 (it’s probably a lot more), he is required to send in a quarter of that now. He would also be compelled to include charming little IRS add-ons in his payment, like the ObamaCare penalty. Or is it a fee? A tax, maybe? Whatever John Roberts decided to call it, Drudge and other self-employed quarterly filers have indeed started paying it.
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Photo Credit: Getty ImagesA Second Amendment fight is brewing in Connecticut over new legislation that turned tens of thousands of gun owners into potential felons.
The law, passed last April in response to the Sandy Hook Elementary School shootings, put in place bans on magazines that carry more than 10 rounds of ammunition and on many types of weapons, including those that simply have the cosmetic appearance of assault weapons.
The law also requires residents to undergo mental and criminal background checks and to register certain types of guns with authorities.
The pro-gun group Connecticut Carry “calls on every state official, every senator, every representative to make the singular decision: Either enforce the laws as they are written and let us fight it out in court, or else repeal the 2013 gun ban in its entirety. We say: Bring it on,” the group said on its website in a memo intended to rally members.
A challenge to the law has already been shot down, although U.S. District Judge Alfred Covello acknowledged in his ruling that the text of the gun law was fuzzy and that legislators hadn’t written it “with the utmost clarity.”
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A President Obama-aligned group trying to drum up enrollment for ObamaCare is giving away bumper stickers that spoof the Gadsden flag — a symbol informally adopted by the Tea Party movement and, for that reason, long derided by Democrats.
Photo Credit: OFAThe stickers are a marketing ploy by Organizing for Action, an advocacy group which helped Obama win reelection in 2012. The stickers feature a doctor’s stethoscope, instead of the coiled rattlesnake on the original golden-colored flag.
“This is for everyone who’s tired of hearing the other side talk smack about health care reform that is helping millions of Americans get affordable, quality care,” OFA Executive Director Jon Carson said in announcing the free stickers through Facebook…
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Photo Credit: Eve Edelheit/Tampa Bay Times/ZUMAPRESS.comA provision in a Michigan teachers’ union contract calling for “special consideration” to be given to “minority” job applicants including “those of the non-Christian faith” was removed by the Ferndale School District this week after the language was identified as a violation of the Federal Civil Rights Act.
Michigan Capitol Confidential reported on the union contract which, for teachers applying for promotions to vacant positions, read: “Special consideration shall be given to women and/or minorit[ies] defined as: Native American, Asian American, Latino, African American and those of the non-Christian faith.”
On both the state and federal level, the Civil Rights Act prohibits religious discrimination in employment. Consequently, it is illegal to ask job applicants about their religious affiliation—a law violated by the “non-Christian” language in the teachers’ union contract.
According to The Detroit News, the decades-old contract was revised after the discriminatory language was brought to the district’s attention. Ferndale Schools spokeswoman Shelley Rose acknowledged, “nobody was really aware of” the language, which “was there much to our embarrassment.”
“Please note that the district does not discriminate in hiring on the basis of religion or other related issues,” Rose affirmed.
This story was produced by The Foundry’s news team. Nothing here should be construed as necessarily reflecting the views of The Heritage Foundation.
This article originally appeared at Heritage.com and is re-published in full with the Heritage Foundation’s permission.
Photo Credit: REUTERS/Jason ReedNew York Times reporter James Risen called the Obama administration “the greatest enemy of press freedom that we have encountered in at least a generation” on Friday, explaining that the White House seeks to control the flow of information and those who refuse to play along “will be punished.”
Poynter reports that Risen made the remarks while speaking at Sources and Secrets conference — a meeting of journalism , communication and government professionals held in New York City. The foreign policy reporter, who is currently fighting a fierce court battle with the federal government over his protection of a confidential source, warned that press freedom is under serious attack in today’s America.
In a speech kicking off the conference, Risen claimed that the Obama administration wants to “narrow the field of national security reporting” and “create a path for accepted reporting.” Those who stray from that path, he cautioned, “will be punished.”
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