Photo Credit: Washington Examiner
The recent change “eliminated a cap on deductibles for small group policies offered inside the law’s health care exchanges as well as outside,” the Associated Press explained.
Read more from this story HERE.
Photo Credit: U.S. Army
The word came as officials announced findings of their ongoing investigation, which included interviews with more than 1,100 people and a recreation of the shooting last Wednesday, which left four dead including Lopez, and 16 injured.
“We only have one suspect,” said Chris Grey, spokesman for the Army’s Criminal Investigation Command. “We are fully committed to this investigation and we will continue to pursue investigatively all leads.”
Grey, who was flanked by other law enforcement officials, did not take questions at the brief Monday news conference, and said he would not divulge any information that could jeopardize the investigation. But confirmation that an argument of a request for leave had immediately preceded the shooting seemed to further put to rest prior speculation that the 34-year-old Army specialist’s Lopez’s spree may have been related to Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. Although he had reportedly been treated for mental issues including depression, military officials had expressed skepticism that his four-month tour in Iraq as that war wound down could have caused PTSD.
One complicating issue in the probe is the sheer size of the crime scene, Grey said, noting that it was comparable to two city blocks. The spree began in one building of the sprawling complex, where Lopez, who was 34, first pulled his .45-caliber Caliber Smith & Wesson handgun and killed one, injuring 10.
Read more from this story HERE.
Photo Credit: News 12 New Jersey
Ethan Chaplin, a 7th-grader at Glen Meadow Middle School in Vernon Township, was twirling around a pencil with a pen cap on it when a student behind him yelled, “He’s making gun motions, send him to juvie!” a local news station reported.
The school suspended Ethan and ordered him to undergo a physical and psychological evaluation, his father, Michael Chaplin, told the station.
“I’m absolutely livid,” he said. “I think it’s gross misconduct at its finest. They took something so minimal and took it so far over the edge.”
Read more from this story HERE.
Photo Credit: AP
The ruling by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second District is just the latest twist in a legal saga pitting the Bronx Household of Faith against the NYC Board of Education. The court found that New York City’s ban on renting schools to churches for weekend worship services did not violate the First Amendment right to free expression.
“The opinion uses the establishment clause as an excuse to treat people of faith worse than everybody else,” said the Bronx Household of Faith’s attorney, Jordan Lorence of Alliance Defending Freedom.
Circuit Judge John Walker was the lone dissenter in the 2 to 1 ruling on Thursday. He said the board of education “plainly discriminates against religious belief and cannot be justified by a compelling government interest.”
“Shutting the door to religious worship services in such a setting where every other activity is permitted strikes at the clause’s core,” he wrote in the dissent. “Of the 50 largest school districts in the United States, New York city alone entirely excludes religious worship from its facilities.”
Read more from this story HERE.
Photo Credit: Anonymous
Residents of King Cove, Alaska, were outraged in December when Interior Secretary Sally Jewell nixed a plan for a land swap that would have allowed the building of an unpaved road between the small town and the airport at Cold Bay.
Environmentalists had lobbied the Interior Department to stop the proposal, arguing that a road through the Izembek National Wildlife Refuge could jeopardize the world’s largest known bed of eelgrass, which is used as fodder by migratory birds.
“In just the last several weeks, serious health-related evacuations have shown just how critical a road for medical evacuations is for residents,” the Republican governor said in a statement.
“The State continues to explore all potential avenues to help the people of King Cove. The notice of intent to sue relates to one option the State is evaluating, but the fastest and surest way to provide emergency medical access for King Cove residents is for Secretary Jewell to reconsider her decision placing the possible temporary disturbance of birds above the health and safety of Alaskans.”
Read more from this story HERE.
Photo Credit: Getty Images
This morning the Supreme Court rejected Elane Photography’s appeal to overturn a 2006 New Mexico ruling which said that the Christian business owners violated the state’s anti-discrimination laws by refusing to photograph a lesbian wedding ceremony.
Family Research Council President Tony Perkins spoke out against the Supreme Court for its failure to protect First Amendment rights, saying:
Read more from this story HERE.
Photo Credit: Alamy
Shafqat Emmanuel and Shagufta Kausar, from the eastern town of Gojra, were sentenced after what the couple’s lawyer said was a case motivated by a personal grudge.
Maulvi Mohammed Hussain, a Muslim leader from a mosque in Gojra, lodged the complaint last year, claiming that Mr Emmanuel had used his wife’s mobile phone to send the offending message. Nadeem Hassan, the couple’s lawyer, said that the couple denied the offence and that the text message originated from a mobile phone that had been lost beforehand.
Read more from this story HERE.
Photo Credit: AP
Veteran foreign policy and national security reporter Bill Gertz warns that a culture of “trivialization” about foreign policy and national security is growing in the U.S. — and it’s leading to an ignorant complacency about America’s precarious position in the world.
“There’s been somewhat of a kind of trivialization in Americans especially among younger people who seem less interested in world affairs and national security affairs,” Gertz said in an exclusive interview with The Daily Caller. ”I think that changed back in 2001, with the 9/11 attacks, but it’s been 13 years since then… and because the media is not really focused on the threats facing the country, I think a lot of people are really unaware of what’s going on. ”
Read more from this story HERE.
_________________________________________________________________________________
Award-winning journalist Bill Gertz dismantles Obama’s provocative policies of appeasement
By Ginni Thomas.
In an increasingly dangerous world where most Americans are distracted by busy lives and domestic politics, an award-winning national security reporter, Bill Gertz, is watching a radical, progressive transformation of America’s image and capabilities.
And Gertz is underwhelmed with Republican efforts to challenge, expose or stop the changes that are already underway.
He has spent 30 years in the news business and now works as a senior editor of the Washington Free Beacon, a online site for investigative reporting, and as a national security columnist for the Washington Times. An author of six books with significant contacts and experience, he is known for breaking important national security and intelligence news.
He agreed to speak with The Daily Caller to connect the dots between America’s threats and an array of utopian Obama policies that put Americans at greater risk. To Gertz, Obama is “remaking America into a European socialist power.”
In this two-part video interview, Gertz says Obama’s statecraft can best be summarized as “appeasement-oriented policies.”
Read more from this story HERE.
Photo Credit: Wilfredo Lee / AP
The comments came during an event marking the 25th anniversary of the presidency of George H. W. Bush at the library and museum that bears the name of the Bush patriarch. The event was closed to reporters, but moderated by Fox News anchor Shannone Bream and portions of the event were later broadcast on the Fox News Channel.
Asked about immigration, Bush started by saying that a bipartisan bill passed by the Senate last year made “a good effort” at proposing ways to ensure that people overstaying visas leave the country.
“A great country ought to know where those folks are and politely ask them to leave,” he said, adding later that properly targeting people who overstay visas “would restore people’s confidence” in the nation’s immigration system.
Read more from this story HERE.
Photo Credit: National Review
The word “liberal” has taken a beating over the last few days: A Mozilla executive was hounded out of his position at the firm he co-founded by left-wing campaigners resolved to punish him for having made a donation to a successful California ballot initiative that defined marriage in traditional terms; Adam Weinstein, whose downwardly mobile credibility has taken him from ABC to Gawker, called for literally imprisoning people with the wrong views about global warming, writing, “Those malcontents must be punished and stopped”; Mr. Weinstein himself was simply forwarding a dumbed-down-enough-for-Gawker version of the arguments of philosophy professor Lawrence Torcello; Katherine Timpf, a reporter for Campus Reform, faced a human barricade to keep her from asking questions of those attending a feminist leadership conference, whose organizers informed her that the group was “inclusive” and therefore she was “not welcome here”; Charles Murray, one of the most important social scientists of his generation, was denounced as a “known white supremacist” by Texas Democrats for holding heterodox views about education policy; national Democrats spent the week arguing for the anti-free-speech side of a landmark First Amendment case and the anti-religious-freedom side of a case involving the Religious Freedom Restoration Act; Lois Lerner, the Left’s best friend at the IRS, faces contempt charges related to her role in the Democrats’ coopting the IRS as a weapon against their political enemies; Harry Reid, a liberal champion of campaign-finance reform, was caught channeling tens of thousands of dollars to his granddaughter while conspicuously omitting her surname, which is also his surname, from official documents, cloaking the transaction, while one of his California colleagues, a liberal champion of gun control, was indicted on charges of running guns to an organized-crime syndicate.
The convocation of clowns on the left screeched with one semi-literate and inchoate voice when my colleague Jonah Goldberg, borrowing the precise words of one of their own, titled a book Liberal Fascism. Most of them didn’t read it, but the ones who did apparently took what was intended as criticism and read it as a blueprint for political action.
Welcome to the Liberal Gulag.
That term may be perverse, but it is not an exaggeration. Mr. Weinstein specifically called for political activists, ranging from commentators to think-tank researchers, to be locked in cages as punishment for their political beliefs. “Those denialists should face jail,” he wrote. “You still can’t” — banality alert! — “yell ‘fire’ in a crowded theater. You shouldn’t be able to yell ‘balderdash’ at 10,883 scientific journal articles a year.” “Balderdash” — a felony. At the risk of being repetitious, let’s dwell on that for a minute: The Left is calling on people to be prosecuted for speaking their minds regarding their beliefs on an important public-policy question that is, as a political matter, the subject of hot dispute. That is the stuff of Soviet repression.
Read more from this story HERE.
_____________________________________________________________________________
Photo Credit: Reuters
By Warner Todd Huston.
Gay advocacy groups have been attacking tech company Mozilla for appointing a new CEO who once donated $1,000 to a 2008 campaign for traditional marriage in California. In only a week that new CEO has stepped down, prompting some to wonder if supporting traditional marriage is now a “boardroom crime” and if gay advocates have “overstepped.”
At the end of March, Mozilla, maker of the popular web browser Firefox, appointed Brendan Eich as its newest CEO. Eich is the inventor of Javascript – a code that most web browsers need to operate – and a co-founder of Mozilla. However, as soon as he was chosen gay activists began to attack Mozilla because it had been revealed that he donated $1,000 to California’s Prop 8, a measure to secure special status for traditional marriage.
Only a week later, gay fanatics won their battle, with Eich now announcing that he will step down and refuse the role of CEO.
This state of affairs prompted Andrew Sullivan, a gay author and columnist, to essentially accuse gay activists of quashing Eich’s First Amendment rights: “The whole episode disgusts me – as it should disgust anyone interested in a tolerant and diverse society,” he wrote. “If we are about intimidating the free speech of others, we are no better than the anti-gay bullies who came before us.”
Michael Barbaro, a reporter for The New York Times, tweeted that Sullivan was calling this “the moment the gay rights movement overstepped,” and himself was moved to tweet this: “This is giant news, and makes me wonder, is opposition to gay marriage now a boardroom crime?”
Read more from this story HERE.