Pin Drop! Obama Lawyer Stuns Supreme Justice

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Photo Credit: WND

Photo Credit: WND

By Greg Corombos.

In a dramatic moment at the Supreme Court Tuesday, Solicitor General Donald Verrilli told justices that U.S. business owners have no religious freedom to reject government mandates forcing them to cover abortions.

Justices and lawyers also sparred over whether businesses actually have religious freedom and whether striking down the Obamacare mandate makes women second-class citizens.

The notable abortion exchange between Verrilli and Justice Anthony Kennedy came during oral arguments in Sebelius v. Hobby Lobby and Conestoga Wood Specialties v. Sebelius, two cases linked by the companies’ owners objecting to the Department of Health and Human Services requirement that businesses fully cover the contraception costs for their employees. That mandate includes coverage of abortafacient drugs, also known as the “morning-after pill.”

Family Research Council Senior Fellow for Legal Studies Cathy Ruse was in the gallery during oral arguments and said that was the most remarkable moment in the court session Tuesday.

“This was actually the most exciting part of the oral argument this morning, when Justice Kennedy asked the government’s lawyer, ‘So under your argument, corporations could be forced to pay for abortions, that there would be no religious claim against that on the part of the corporation. Is that right?’ And the government’s attorney said yes,” Ruse said.

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Photo Credit: WND

Photo Credit: WND

Company Owners Refuse To ‘Sacrifice Our Obedience To God’

By Alana Cook.

Advocates of religious freedom and family values who had gathered outside the Supreme Court today greeted the Hahn and Green families of Conestoga Wood Specialties and Hobby Lobby as they came to the building’s snow-capped steps to give statements after the court heard oral arguments in their high-profile cases.

“Rather than sacrifice our obedience to God, my family, the Green family, and many others have chosen to take a stand to defend life and freedom against government coercion,” declared Anthony Hahn, CEO of Conestoga Wood Specialties, a Mennonite.

The two cases, Sebelius v. Hobby Lobby Stores Inc. and Conestoga Wood Specialties Corp. v. Sebelius, challenge the Affordable Care Act’s mandate that employers provide a health-care insurance plan that includes no-cost access to all forms of contraception, including emergency abortifacients such as Plan B and ella.

“We didn’t choose this fight,” Hahn said. “Our families would have been happy to just continue providing good jobs and generous health-care benefits. But the government forced our hand.”

Hahn said the “choice that the government has forced on us is out of step with the history of our great nation founded on religious freedom.”

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Eleven Dumbest Common Core Problems

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Photo Credit: National Review

Photo Credit: National Review

The Common Core State Standards Initiative is widely denounced for imposing confusing, unhelpful experimental teaching methods, involving test problems that lack essential information and sometimes make no sense whatsoever.

Some 45 states and the District of Columbia have so far adopted Common Core standards, leaving students all around the United States to puzzle over Common Core’s mysterious logic and language.

Here are eleven Common Core–compliant problems that have caused parents, students, and even teachers to scratch their heads or respond in outrage:

1. Starting with an easily solvable problem, New York takes the simple “7+7″ and complicates it with something called “number bonds.”

Common Core 1

2. Not willing to ruin addition alone, Common Core takes aim at subtraction as well, forcing students to make visual representations of numbers in columns.

Common Cor 2.

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Ted Cruz: Iran Move Is ‘Slap In The Face,’ Raises Question Of Obama Administration ‘Naivete’

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Photo Credit: AP Photo / Houston Chronicle, Michael Paulsen

Photo Credit: AP Photo / Houston Chronicle, Michael Paulsen

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) said Iran’s selection of Hamid Aboutalebi as its ambassador at the United Nations is a “slap in the face.”

During a Thursday appearance on Fox News, Cruz called the appointment “dismaying” and said it’s “another indication of how radical, how extreme, how anti-American Iran is.”

“This is not an accident, that they nominate and name, an admitted terrorist, someone who participated in holding Americans hostage for 444 days, and they propose to send him as their ambassador to the U.N., to live in New York City, in Manhattan,” Cruz said. “It’s designed to be a slap in the face.”


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What Happened to Chicago’s Murder Rate After Illinois Upheld Concealed Carry and Why it Matters

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Photo Credit: IJ Review

Photo Credit: IJ Review

In July of 2013, Illinois became the last state in the union to enact a concealed carry law. In January of this year, the state began accepting applications for permits. This week, Chicago police announced that the city’s first quarter murder rate was the lowest since 1958.

Via ABC-affiliate Eye Witness News in the Windy City:

– The first three months of the year saw 6 fewer murders than the same time frame in 2013–a 9 percent drop–and 55 fewer murders than 2012, according to a statement from Chicago Police.

– There were 90 fewer shootings and 119 fewer shooting victims, drops of 26 and 29 percent respectively, according to police statistics.

– Compared to the first quarter of 2012, there have been 222 fewer shootings and 292 fewer shooting victims. Overall crime is down 25 percent from last year, and police said more than 1,300 illegal guns were recovered in the last three months.

Coincidence? Hard to say. And too early to tell. Although, I doubt that the anti-gun crowd is celebrating the good news.

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Palin on Budget: Rep. Paul Ryan Has ‘More Faith in Politicians Than I Do’ (+video)

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Photo Credit: Fox News

Photo Credit: Fox News

Former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin is standing firm in her objection to Rep. Paul Ryan’s (R-Wis.) budget proposal, which she told Sean Hannity will raise spending over 10 years nearly $1.2 trillion.

“That’s trillion with a T, and that stands for trouble. Trouble for our nation because it still is involving deficit spending, increasing debt and we can’t afford that,” Palin told Hannity.

Hannity told Palin that he’d had Rep. Paul Ryan on his radio show, and Ryan was adamant that Palin would come around to his budget if he could only explain it to her.

“Bless his heart. He probably has more faith in politicians than I do, because I’ve been in this political arena on the local, state and now national level for a long time,” Palin said.

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Woman, 73, Accused of Operating Drug Tunnel Uncovered Under Mexican Border

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Photo Credit: Fox News

Photo Credit: Fox News

Tucked inside one of a string of warehouses, hidden behind boxes of televisions and plastic three-wheel toys, under a concrete slab and down a 70-foot shaft, is a tunnel Mexican drug dealers hoped to use to move hundreds of pounds of marijuana and cocaine into the U.S.

But on Friday, agents for Immigration and Customs Enforcement announced Tuesday’s discovery of the tunnel and arrested the woman accused of overseeing its construction, 73-year-old Glennys “Gladys” Rodriguez, of Chula Vista, Calif. Authorities had been watching the warehouse for months.

“Here we are again, foiling cartel plans to sneak millions of dollars of illegal drugs through secret passageways that cost millions of dollars to build,” said U.S. Attorney Laura Duffy. “Going underground is not a good business plan. We have promised to locate these super tunnels and keep powerful drug cartels from taking their business underground and out of sight, and once again, we have delivered on that promise.”

This was the sixth cross-border passageway discovered in the San Diego area in less than four years. A seventh was found Thursday nearby. If laid end-to-end, the seven tunnels would extend a distance of nearly two miles.

Agents from the San Diego Tunnel Task Force uncovered the two sophisticated smuggling tunnels in an area known as Otay Mesa, an industrial park surrounded by rolling hills, desert and several major freeways connecting the U.S. to Tijuana and large manufacturing plants south of the border.

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Bill Maher: “There Is A Gay Mafia — If You Cross Them, You Do Get Whacked”

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Photo Credit: AP

Photo Credit: AP

By Real Clear Politics.

In the online-only “Overtime” portion of his HBO show Real Time, host Bill Maher weighed in on the Mozilla controversy, and did not react in a way that you would think. Maher seemed to disagree with gay rights activists for targeting Mozilla CEO Brendan Eich because of a 2008 donation to support a ballot initiative that would ban same-sex marriage in California.

“Well, and he gave it when President Obama was still against gay marriage. So, I don’t think it’s very fair,” guest panelist fmr. Rep. Tom Davis (R-VA) said.

Read more from this story HERE.

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Photo Credit: Sammy James Dodds / Flickr

Photo Credit: Sammy James Dodds / Flickr

It’s Complicated: When A CEO’s Personal Position Becomes Public

By Elise Hu.

The Mozilla controversy that played out over the past two weeks bursts with ironies. And this one is perhaps the most prominent: The free speech that Mozilla co-founder Brendan Eich spent his life’s work defending and enabling — and an open-Web revolution Eich helped lead — drove his unseating. It raises questions about how a company leader’s personal convictions should be judged.

After a public, pitched debate over whether Eich was fit to lead given his 2008 donation to California’s Proposition 8, which defined marriage as only between a man and a woman, Eich decided for himself that he wasn’t. He resigned Thursday despite many Mozillians who came to his defense, in response to other Mozillians who called for his ouster.

The Web as it is today might not exist without the brilliant technologist Eich. He invented JavaScript, was an early architect of the Web and co-founded Mozilla, the company and foundation behind the popular Internet browser Firefox. His passion for the Web and its users has always been clear. In a late 2013 interview, he described his charge as “working on the Web and working on making sure the user is king or queen of their experience.”

At Mozilla, putting users first, openness and inclusiveness are core to the organization’s beliefs — and operations. Mozilla’s technology is created in public — in stark contrast to its competitors like Microsoft and Google — and as it became clear when Eich was named CEO, its internal debates are quite public, too.

“This is an organization that is extremely transparent, where a number of employees had said, I don’t feel comfortable being led by this person,” says Anil Dash, a technology startup founder and a longtime Mozilla community member. “It’s been polarizing because this seemed in contradiction to a lot of the values of openness that the organization helped create has espoused.”

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Congressman’s Lament: $174,000 Isn’t Enough To Make Ends Meet

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Photo Credit: J. Scott Applewhite / AP

Photo Credit: J. Scott Applewhite / AP

In what world does an annual salary of $174,000 meet the definition of underpaid?

That would be in the nation’s capital, where soon-to-be-retired Rep. Jim Moran, D-Va., said Americans should know that their members of Congress — as the board of directors for the “largest economic entity in the world” — are underpaid.

The longtime congressman made his comments Thursday after the House voted for the sixth straight year to deny members an automatic cost-of-living raise they’re entitled to under law.

Not surprisingly, reaction to Moran’s assertion was swift and derisive.

“Tone deaf,” wrote Daniel Doherty at the conservative Town Hall website.

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Watchdog: State Department Can’t Fully Account for $6B Worth of Contracts

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Photo Credit: AP

Photo Credit: AP

The State Department has a “serious” problem accounting for how it has spent billions of dollars on contracts all over the world, according to the official watchdog that oversees the sprawling department.

The Office of Inspector General, in a March 20 “management alert” to department leaders, said the department has failed to provide all or some of the files for $6 billion worth of contracts in the last six years.

“The failure to maintain contract files adequately creates significant financial risk and demonstrates a lack of internal control over the Department’s contract actions,” the memo said.

This apparently is not a new or isolated problem. The memo said investigators and auditors have found “repeated examples of poor contract file administration” and have called this one of the department’s “major management challenges” for several years.

The alert cited one example where contracting officials could not provide dozens of files for contracts supporting the U.S. Mission in Iraq. The value of the contracts in the missing files? $2.1 billion.

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DHS Official: US Not ‘Routinely’ Notified When Sex Offenders Enter the Country (+video)

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Photo Credit: AP / Elaine Thompson

Photo Credit: AP / Elaine Thompson

A Homeland Security Department official testified Friday before the House Homeland Security Subcommittee on Border and Maritime Security that U.S. authorities are not “routinely” notified when foreign sex offenders enter the United States.

“We can receive information on foreign criminal records, and in fact the NCB (National Central Bureau) is the vehicle through which 190 countries can communicate, and there are … registered sex offenders, but routinely, that information actually would not come unless there’s a specific case or a specific law enforcement inquiry,” Alan Bersin, Assistant Homeland Security Secretary of International Affairs and Chief Diplomatic Officer, told the subcommittee.

The hearing was called to examine the issue of passport security in light of the recent revelation that two Iranians boarded missing Malaysian Airlines Flight 370 using stolen passports.

Rep. Candice Miller (R-Mich.) asked whether INTERPOL would be alerted if a sex offender from Germany, for instance, flew into the U.S.

Read more from this story HERE.