‘Special Consideration’ for ‘Non-Christian’ Job Applicants?

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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.

NYT Reporter: Obama Administration ‘The Greatest Enemy of Press Freedom’ in a Generation

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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.”

Read more from this story HERE.

Indiana Withdrawing from Common Core Standards

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Photo Credit: abdulrahman.stockBy Associated Press.

Indiana is the first state to withdraw from the Common Core reading and math standards that were adopted by most states around the country.

Republican Gov. Mike Pence’s office says he signed a bill Monday pulling Indiana from the program. Legislators earlier approved the measure requiring the State Board of Education to draft new standards outlining what students should be learning in each grade rather than using the Common Core standards.

Read more from this story HERE.

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Michelle Malkin flattens Jeb Bush’s assertion Common Core is ‘truth serum’

By Richard Berkow.

Speaking before 900 people at the annual Broward County Workshop breakfast Friday, former Governor Jeb Bush decried the controversy surrounding Common Core.

Let me tell you something,” he said. “In Asia today, they don’t care about children’s esteem. They care about math, whether they can read in English, whether they understand why science is important, whether they have the grit and determination to be successful,” the Sun-Sentinel reported.

He added that the standards are “benchmarked to the rest of the world…a truth serum for our communities to wake up and realize that we’ve languished far too long,” also berating the critics “who go nuts about it.”

What he did not mention, of course, was the integral role his brother Neil has in the financial success of the project, or the prominent role K Street lobbyists, Bill Gates, George Soros, high-placed Democratic strategists, and other left-wing plutocrats have played in promoting this one-size-fits-all brainwashing agenda, according to Dr. Alison Rampersad, Co-Chair of Eyes on U.S. Education.

Read more from this story HERE.

America in Decline

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Photo Credit: American Thinker When Barack Obama was running for president he promised, some say threatened, to fundamentally change America. The doubters now say he has fundamentally ruined America. Whichever way one views it, America is in serious decline.

For a president that promised to reduce the national debt, Obama has added a massive seven trillion dollars to that debt. Under his presidency, America has accumulated as much new debt as it did in its first 227 years.

He heads an Administration that produces food stamps, pries into people’s private lives, and sets government agencies against political opponents. Obama is following the guidebook of Saul Alinsky, “Rules for Radicals,” and is putting Alinsky’s primer into practice from the White House. The results of his experiment are devastating.

Under Obama, prices and taxes rose while take home pay fell 7%. Government hand-outs increased dramatically as the national debt has exploded. Recent estimates put 50 million Americans on food stamps, and millions without healthcare.

Obama, the community organizer, preferred social justice over a robust market place, but, under his presidency, people are worse off today than they were back in 2009 when he promised them change. By the end of the first quarter of 2014 America had six million people not only unemployed but also not even looking for jobs, the vast majority under the age of 55. This implies they had given up all hope of finding work. More than forty million Americans lived below the poverty line.

Read more from this story HERE.

Cain: If ObamaCare Had Been In Place in 2006, I Would Be Dead

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Photo Credit: Cain TVBy Herman Cain.

Cancer centers opt out, including the one that saved my life.

I saw recently that several cancer centers in this country have decided to opt out of taking ObamaCare-insured patients. One of them is M.D. Anderson in Houston.

That hit home in a very personal way, because it made me realize something. If ObamaCare had been in place in 2006, I would now be dead. (Let’s see if Harry Reid, or Glenn Kessler of the Washington Post, want to try to call me a liar for this.)

Eight years ago this month, I was diagnosed with cancer. The first opinion I received was not encouraging. Not at all. So I sought a second opinion. Fortunately, the nature of my insurance at the time was such that I had the freedom to choose who I would see, and I chose the outstanding Dr. Lloyd at Houston’s M.D. Anderson. He believed I could beat the cancer, and I then had the freedom to begin seeing an Atlanta-based oncologist who helped get me on the path back to health.

Today I am cancer-free.

Now let’s say I had been relying on an ObamaCare insurance policy, which would mandate that all my treatment take place within its own network. In that case, I would not have had the freedom to go to M.D. Anderson and I would never have seen Dr. Lloyd.

Read more from this story HERE.

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Photo Credit: REUTERS/Kevin LamarqueObamacare’s Regulatory Costs More than Double Benefits

By Sarah Hurtubise.

The annual costs of Obamacare regulations come in at $6.8 billion a year so far — around 2.5 times the total benefits of its heavy-handed regulations, according to study released Monday.

The federal government’s estimates of Obamacare’s regulatory “benefits” — what they project in increased efficiency or productivity due to streamlined processes and standards — clock in at just $2.6 billion annually, as opposed to the cost of complying with all those regulations, which is almost $7 billion.

By 2014, when all but those delayed parts of the Affordable Care Act have been implemented, regulations have imposed over $27.2 billion in costs upon the private sector and $8 billion in unfunded state burdens, the report by free-market think tank American Action Forum (AAF) found.

A large portion of the costs come from the paperwork burden that Obamacare places upon states and private companies. Implementing the law takes 159 million paperwork hours a year for state governments and the private sector — an amount that would take close to 80,000 employees, working 50 weeks per year full-time. (That’s 40 hours per week, not Obamacare’s 30-hour work week threshold for full-time.)

Read more from this story HERE.

America Deserves Better than the Clintons

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Photo Credit: WND “What difference does it make?”

Indeed, Madam Secretary, Madam Senator, former first lady and FLOA, it makes a very big difference.

The last time we saw Hillary Clinton as our secretary of state, she was testifying before a congressional committee about Benghazi. During that meeting on Jan. 22, 2013, we heard her shriek, “What difference does it make?”

Earlier, right before one of the presidential debates, on Oct. 15, 2012, Hillary stated during a series of interviews that she, as secretary of state, was responsible for the security of the embassy staff. “The buck stops here.”

I remember being so surprised when I heard it, but I was immediately suspicious.

Read more from this story HERE.

Thomas Frank: When Clinton, Obama Sold ‘Hope,’ They Sold Out Rank-and-File Democrats

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What’s the Matter With Kansas? author Thomas Frank believes the matter with Bill Clinton and Barack Obama as presidential campaigners was that they spent too much time “selling tidy homilies” about “hope” and too little advocating ideas such as single-payer health care. Frank stated his case Sunday in his latest weekly column for the liberal online magazine Salon.

Frank suggests that all the non-ideological rhetoric of hope from Clinton and Obama presaged the sort of lefty-disappointing policies they’ve often yielded (e.g., “Clinton’s deregulations [and] Obama’s spying program”). In that regard, he comments, they’re typical of Democrats over the past three-plus decades:

…Maybe [‘hope’] and these two presidents’ fecklessness actually complement and explain one another. Maybe ‘hope’ is the ideal philosophical doctrine for a party determined to dump its old constituents and chart a brave new course in a marketized world. As a slogan, ‘hope’ is vague and ethereal…but perhaps that is what makes it the consummate brand identity for a party that so often triangulates away the concerns of its rank and file…

Moreover, declares Frank, “this particular platitude is not harmless…To describe politics in terms of ‘hope’…allows [Democrats] to sell us out over and over.”

Read more from this story HERE.

Aborted Babies Incinerated to Heat UK Hospitals

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Photo Credit: AlamyThe bodies of thousands of aborted and miscarried babies were incinerated as clinical waste, with some even used to heat hospitals, an investigation has found.

Ten NHS trusts have admitted burning foetal remains alongside other rubbish while two others used the bodies in ‘waste-to-energy’ plants which generate power for heat.

Last night the Department of Health issued an instant ban on the practice which health minister Dr Dan Poulter branded ‘totally unacceptable.’

At least 15,500 foetal remains were incinerated by 27 NHS trusts over the last two years alone, Channel 4’s Dispatches discovered.

The programme, which will air tonight, found that parents who lose children in early pregnancy were often treated without compassion and were not consulted about what they wanted to happen to the remains.

Read more from this story HERE.

DHS Giving Illegal Immigrant ‘Petty’ Criminals Second Chance in Waiver Application Process

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Photo Credit: REUTERS/Eric ThayerAre you an illegal immigrant whose waiver to stay in the country was denied because of your criminal past? Well, you’re in luck, because the Obama Administration may let you stay in the country anyway.

In a guidance distributed to congressional offices and obtained by The Daily Caller, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services announced that it is reopening cases in which applications for provisional unlawful presence waivers were denied to criminals.

According to the notice, USCIS had determined that applicants should not be denied an I-601A waiver due to a past criminal offense so long as it “falls under the petty offense or youthful offender exceptions or is not considered a crime involving moral turpitude.”Last week, USCIS began reopening waiver applications denied due ‘solely’ to a prior criminal offense before January 24, 2014, “in order to determine whether there is reason to believe the prior criminal offense might render the applicant inadmissible.”

The notice does not specify what types of crimes constitute a “petty offense,” and defines neither “youthful offender” nor “a crime involving moral turpitude.” Neither DHS nor USCIS responded to TheDC’s requests for comment.

The provisional unlawful presence waiver process allows illegal immigrants who are immediate relatives of U.S. citizens to overcome their inadmissibility due to their illegal status so long as they meet all the eligibility requirements outside of being in the country illegally. Prior to 2013, people had to return to their home countries to apply for these waivers.

Read more from this story HERE.

Flight 370: Storm of Emotions Over Lives ‘Lost’ as Storm at Sea Delays Search (+video)

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Photo Credit: AP / Andy WongFor families whose loved ones were aboard the missing Malaysia Airlines plane, the past day has been full of news they were dreading.

First, a grim-faced Malaysian Prime Minister confirmed their worst fears, announcing Flight 370 went down somewhere in the Indian Ocean.

Then, even as investigators seemed closer than ever to finding the plane, stormy weather forced Australian authorities to call off a day of searching for the Boeing 777.

“It’s almost felt like a miniature roller coaster within the day,” said James Wood, whose brother Philip was one of three American passengers on the plane.

Families are stuck in a “holding pattern,” he told CNN’s “AC360.”

Read more from this story HERE.