Yes, You Will Be Made to Care

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Photo Credit: au.ibtimes

Photo Credit: au.ibtimes

You will be made to care about gay marriage. You may think it does not affect you or will not affect you or you can support it and leave well enough alone, but you cannot. The secular left and aggressive gay rights activists will not allow you to.

You must either fully embrace it or be shunned. You may think it does not affect your marriage, your life, or anything else, but you will be made to care — you will not be allowed to accept that others can disagree on the issue due to their orthodox faith. The slow march toward the destruction of the marital institution now picks up pace with Anthony Kennedy’s decision in Windsor. What is, at its heart, a tax case, became a vehicle for Kennedy to declare malicious intent on the preservation of marriage.

That’s clear from the decision. In the 90′s, the Defense of Marriage Act was enacted to preserve and recognize the traditional marital structure that the United States had had since its founding. But Anthony Kennedy declared that the purpose was ill will toward gays — ignoring that activists were seeking to upend the order of things as they had been.

This decision will be used to advance on the states. A muddled equal protection message will be used to force accommodations some are not willing to make and some cannot make because of their religion.

Luckily, we have been given time to erect firewalls. The Court’s decision leaves in place the portion of DOMA that allows states to refuse recognition to gay marriages performed in other states. That will fall in the next few years. Once that happens, there will be an even messier culture war designed to treat traditionalism as a noxious notion of a bygone era — the equivalent of Jim Crow.

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How to Curb Obesity: Tax Calories, Study Says

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calorie taxThere may be an economic cure for the nation’s obesity: Hike the price of food.

Raising the price of a calorie for home consumption by 10 percent might lower the percentage of body fat in youths about 8 or 9 percent, according to new research from the National Bureau of Economic Research.

“An increase in the price of a calorie regardless of its source would improve obesity outcomes,” according to a working paper that three researchers prepared for the private, nonprofit bureau.

As the nation confronts an epidemic of flab, many experts have pointed a finger at low food prices as a cause, leading to proposals for taxes on sugary drinks, fast-food and junk food, as well as reductions in government farm subsidies.

The new research, which focused on youths, reinforces the idea that prices affect obesity and that raising fast-food prices would help, although pushing up the prices of healthy foods, such as fruits and vegetables, might hurt.

Read more from this story HERE.

Hollywood: Hey, This Obamacare Thing is Going to be Pretty Costly and Complicated For Us

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Photo Credit: AtomicPope

Photo Credit: AtomicPope

Not even the kind of cash Hollywood donated to President Obama can protect them from unintended consequences.

Three letters have been giving the payroll-services industry fits for several months now: ACA. That’s the semi-acronym for the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, better known as Obamacare, and it’s up to the payroll industry — which cuts checks to production workers and offers related financial services to TV and film studios — to help educate its clients on the rules before a good portion of the law kicks in Jan. 1.

“It’s a morass of regulations and requirements, and everyone’s trying to figure out what their exposure is,” says Eric Belcher, president and CEO of Cast & Crew Entertainment Services. Adds Mark Goldstein, CEO of Entertainment Partners, which has held 16 seminars to help studios understand ACA: “It’s going to be a very big deal.”

Determining the exact nature of the new laws has been difficult, given that many ACA terms have yet to be worked out. Hollywood productions, for instance, might find it irksome simply trying to categorize employees as full- or part-time, seasonal or variable, and it’s important that they get the classifications right lest they face hefty fines. “ACA is thousands of pages, and it wasn’t written with this industry in mind,” says Belcher.

In fairness, who could have possibly guessed that a top-down solution from Washington and thousands of pages of regulations would cause problems for businesses with unorthodox work schedules, scads of part-time, contract, union and non-union employees from different fields, and the need for flexibility?

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Iranian Official Signals No Scaling Back in Nuclear Activity

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Photo Credit: Reuters

Photo Credit: Reuters

Iran will press ahead with its uranium enrichment program, its nuclear energy chief said on Friday, signaling no change of course despite the victory of a relative moderate in the June 14 presidential election.

Fereydoun Abbasi-Davani, head of the Islamic Republic’s Atomic Energy Organization, said production of nuclear fuel would “continue in line with our declared goals. The enrichment linked to fuel production will also not change.”

Speaking through an interpreter to reporters at a nuclear energy conference in St Petersburg, Russia, he said work at Iran’s underground Fordow plant – which the West wants Iran to close – would also continue. Iran refines uranium at Fordow that is a relatively close technical step away from weapons-grade.

Iran says it is enriching uranium to fuel a planned network of nuclear energy power plants, and also for medical purposes.

But enriched uranium can also provide the fissile material for nuclear bombs if processed further, which the West fears may be Tehran’s ultimate goal.

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License-Plate Readers Let Police Collect Millions of Records on Drivers

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Photo Credit: Michael Katz-Lacabe

Photo Credit: Michael Katz-Lacabe

When the city of San Leandro, Calif., purchased a license-plate reader for its police department in 2008, computer security consultant Michael Katz-Lacabe asked the city for a record of every time the scanners had photographed his car.

The results shocked him.

The paperback-size device, installed on the outside of police cars, can log thousands of license plates in an eight-hour patrol shift. Katz-Lacabe said it had photographed his two cars on 112 occasions, including one image from 2009 that shows him and his daughters stepping out of his Toyota Prius in their driveway.

That photograph, Katz-Lacabe said, made him “frightened and concerned about the magnitude of police surveillance and data collection.” The single patrol car in San Leandro equipped with a plate reader had logged his car once a week on average, photographing his license plate and documenting the time and location.

At a rapid pace, and mostly hidden from the public, police agencies throughout California have been collecting millions of records on drivers and feeding them to intelligence fusion centers operated by local, state and federal law enforcement.

With heightened concern over secret intelligence operations at the National Security Agency, the localized effort to track drivers highlights the extent to which the government has committed to collecting large amounts of data on people who have done nothing wrong.

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Inspector General Finds Park Police Lost Track of Weapons

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Photo Credit: Getty Images

Photo Credit: Getty Images

The U.S. Park Police, the law enforcement agency responsible for safeguarding the National Mall and critical American landmarks, has lost track of a large supply of handguns, rifles and shotguns, according to a harshly critical report issued Thursday.

In the report, the Inspector General’s Office of the Department of Interior faults staff at the agency for having no idea how many weapons they control and says the department has no clear policies or procedures for investigating missing weapons. The office says top managers, including the police chief, have shown a “lackadaisical attitude toward firearms management.”

While surveying Park Police field office armories, investigators found more than 1,400 extra and unassigned weapons that were intended to be destroyed. They also found 198 handguns that were transferred from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives and stored in an operations facility firearms room without being recorded in an inventory system.

There are also instances of officers storing service weapons at their homes, according to the report.

“We found credible evidence of conditions that would allow for theft and misuse of firearms, and the ability to conceal the fact if weapons were missing,” deputy inspector general Mary Kendall wrote to Jonathan Jarvis, the director of the National Park Service, in a letter that accompanies the report.

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NC Becomes 1st State To Drop Federal Jobless Funds

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Photo Credit: CESAR MANSO/AFP/Getty Images

Photo Credit: CESAR MANSO/AFP/Getty Images

With changes to its unemployment law taking effect this weekend, North Carolina not only is cutting benefits for those who file new claims, it will become the first state disqualified from a federal compensation program for the long-term jobless.

State officials adopted the package of benefit cuts and increased taxes for businesses in February, a plan designed to accelerate repayment of a $2.5 billion federal debt. Like many states, North Carolina had racked up the debt by borrowing from Washington after its unemployment fund was drained by jobless benefits during the Great Recession.

The changes go into effect Sunday for North Carolina, which has the country’s fifth-worst jobless rate. The cuts on those who make unemployment claims on or after that day will disqualify the state from receiving federally funded Emergency Unemployment Compensation. That money kicks in after the state’s period of unemployment compensation — now shortened from up to six months to no more than five — runs out. The EUC program is available to long-term jobless in all states. But keeping the money flowing includes a requirement that states can’t cut average weekly benefits.

Because North Carolina leaders cut average weekly benefits for new claims, about 170,000 workers whose state benefits expire this year will lose more than $700 million in EUC payments, the U.S. Labor Department said.

Lee Creighton, 45, of Cary, said he’s been unemployed since October, and this is the last week for which he’ll get nearly $500 in unemployment aid. He said he was laid off from a position managing statisticians and writers amid the recession’s worst days in 2009 and has landed and lost a series of government and teaching jobs since then — work that paid less half as much. His parents help him buy groceries to get by.

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Scalia: ‘High-Handed’ Kennedy Has Declared Us ‘Enemies of the Human Race’

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Photo Credit: AP

Photo Credit: AP

Dissenting from this morning’s opinion on the Defense of Marriage Act, Justice Antonin Scalia – as expected – holds nothing back.

In a ripping dissent, Scalia says that Justice Anthony Kennedy and his colleagues in the majority have resorted to calling opponents of gay marriage “enemies of the human race.”

But to defend traditional marriage is not to condemn, demean, or humiliate those who would prefer other arrangements, any more than to defend the Constitution of the United States is to con- demn, demean, or humiliate other constitutions. To hurl such accusations so casually demeans this institution. In the majority’s judgment, any resistance to its holding is beyond the pale of reasoned disagreement. To question its high-handed invalidation of a presumptively valid statute is to act (the majority is sure) with the purpose to “dis- parage,” “injure,” “degrade,” “demean,” and “humiliate” our fellow human beings, our fellow citizens, who are homo- sexual. All that, simply for supporting an Act that did no more than codify an aspect of marriage that had been unquestioned in our society for most of its existence— indeed, had been unquestioned in virtually all societies for virtually all of human history. It is one thing for a society to elect change; it is another for a court of law to impose change by adjudging those who oppose it hostes humani generis, enemies of the human race.

Scalia says that the court’s holding – while limited to the Defense of Marriage Act – is a sure sign that the majority is willing to declare gay marriage a constitutional right.

It takes real cheek for today’s majority to assure us, as it is going out the door, that a constitutional requirement to give formal recognition to same-sex marriage is not at issue here—when what has preceded that assurance is a lecture on how superior the majority’s moral judgment in favor of same-sex marriage is to the Congress’s hateful moral judgment against it. I promise you this: The only thing that will “confine” the Court’s holding is its sense of what it can get away with.

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Man Faces 13 Years in Jail for Criticizing Big Banks with Sidewalk Chalk Messages

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Photo Credit: Scripps Media

Photo Credit: Scripps Media

By Marie Coronel. The case against a North Park man who wrote anti-big bank messages on city sidewalks with chalk will go to trial, a judge decided Tuesday.

Jeff Olson is charged with 13 counts of vandalism and is facing 13 years in jail, as well as $13,000 in restitution fees.

Olson calls the charges heavy-handed and describes what he did as free speech.

“I was encouraging folks to close their accounts at big Wall Street banks to transfer their money local nonprofit, community credit unions,” said Olson.

Surveillance pictures showed him writing on the sidewalks of banks using children’s chalk to promote anti-big bank websites. Olson told 10News he did this more than a dozen times at three different locations in Hillcrest and North Park. Read more from this story HERE.

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big banksJudge Won’t Allow Bank-Protester to Claim First Amendment Protections for Chalk Messages

By Dorian Hargrove. The First Amendment has no place in Superior Court Judge Howard M. Shore’s courtroom, not when it comes to vandalism with water soluble chalk.

Today the trial began in the case of a San Diego man who is being charged with 13 counts of vandalism for writing anti-big-bank slogans with washable children’s chalk on a sidewalk outside of three Bank of America branches in Mid-City.

On one side sat Jeff Olson, the 40-year-old political activist who protested against the bailout of the big banks early last year. On the other side was Deputy City Attorney Paige Hazard and law student and city attorney employee William Tanoury. Also accompanying Hazard were two other representatives from the City Attorney’s side.

For Olson, and any free-speech advocates and political activists, the day couldn’t have gone much worse.

Judge Shore granted Hazard’s motion to prohibit Olson’s attorney Tom Tosdal from mentioning the First Amendment, free speech, free expression, public forum, expressive conduct, or political speech during the trial. Read more from this story HERE.

Zimmerman Murder Trial: State’s Key Witness Damaged; Trayvon Friend Says Screams on Tape Weren’t His (+video)

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Photo Credit: orlando sentinel

Photo Credit: orlando sentinel

From the witness stand Wednesday, the state’s star witness in the George Zimmerman murder trial, Rachel “Diamond” Jeantel, gave her account of Trayvon Martin’s last seconds — and they were dramatic.

While on the phone with Trayvon, he told her a man was following him, someone he described as a “creepy-ass cracker,” Jeantel said. He got close enough to Trayvon that she could hear the man say, “‘What are you doing around here?'”

Jeantel then heard a “bump,” followed by something she described as “grass sound.” Trayvon said, “Get off. Get off,” then the phone went dead, she testified.

Jeantel’s account, though, was nearly lost amid the problems and spectacle she created. She used street slang, was sometimes defiant and talked so fast and so softly that it was often impossible to make out her words.

The court reporter interrupted her a dozen times, asking her to repeat herself. Jurors interrupted, too, although not as often, and stopped when Circuit Judge Debra S. Nelson told them, “You can’t ask questions. If you can’t understand, just raise your hand.”

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