County Clerk Refuses to Follow Judge’s Order to Issue Marriage License to Lesbian Couple (+video)

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Photo Credit: Getty Images

Photo Credit: Getty Images

New Mexico state law takes no definitive stance on gay marriage, and while multiple counties have started issuing marriage licenses to gay couples, one county clerk is refusing to do so even in the face of a judge’s order.

Sharon Shover, who serves in Los Alamos county, this week refused to follow a judge’s order to give a marriage license to two women. Shover, a Republican, is publicly standing up to the order, saying she believes the decision to change the definition of marriage should be made by the state’s Supreme Court or by the legislature, The Albuquerque Journal reported.

Shover’s move comes after First Judicial District Judge Sheri Raphaelson ordered her to issue the permit to the couple, Janet Newton and Maria Thibodeau. If the clerk refused, the justice said she would need to show up in court to argue why such an allowance was denied. Standing firm, Shover is slated to appear Wednesday to make her case.

Albuquerque’s KOB-TV has more:

“Piecemeal litigation in courts across New Mexico is not good governance. County clerks need a comprehensive and clear answer from the state of New Mexico addressing this issue,” Shover said in a statement. “We all need to be issuing the same marriage license and following the same laws.”

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U.S. Mulls the Future of Military Aid to Egypt

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Photo Credit: Reuters

Photo Credit: Reuters

The U.S. government faces billions of dollars in potential costs if it decides to cancel foreign military aid to Egypt, a senior Pentagon official told Reuters on Wednesday.

Richard Genaille, deputy director of the Pentagon’s Defense Security Cooperation Agency, said he hoped the Obama administration reached a decision soon on whether to continue $1.23 billion in U.S. military assistance to Egypt, given the large number of weapons shipments in the pipeline.

“We’re kind of antsy about that,” Genaille said after a speech at the ComDef industry conference in Washington. “There’s a whole bunch of contracts out there. The bills keep coming in and we’ve got to be able to pay them somehow otherwise we go in default.”

Washington is reviewing the U.S. military aid to Egypt and an additional $241 million in economic aid after the country’s military ousted the Muslim Brotherhood-backed government on July 3 and then cracked down on protesters last month.

Washington has already halted deliveries of four F-16 fighters built by Lockheed Martin Corp, and must decide soon on several other large weapons shipments, according to U.S. government officials. Some smaller items covered by the foreign military assistance have been allowed to proceed.

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Liz Cheney Sees Herself in Winston Churchill

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Photo Credit: Reuters

Photo Credit: Reuters

Liz Cheney compared herself to “Winston Churchill standing up to [Adolf] Hitler” on Tuesday night when declaring her opposition to American airstrikes in Syria — the latest in a series of Liz-Cheney-thinking-rather-highly-of-Liz-Cheney moments. She was speaking to about 150 Tea Party members when she rejected President Obama’s call to strike Syria, calling his national security policy “amateurish.” It seems Obama is Hitler in this scenario. We might note that more often, Obama has been compared to another British politician, Neville Chamberlain, who appeased Hitler.

However, you might not want to trust these reports, as they come from a newspaper that Cheney thinks deserves to die. She railed against the Jackson Hole News & Guide during her talk: “We have media outlets in the valley that are not fair and balanced.” Per a reporter at the Guide who was in the audience:

She blamed the newspaper’s editor. “His name is Angus,” Cheney said. Editor Angus Thuermer Jr. wrote an article last week about Cheney posting a $220 bond for the “high misdemeanor” of swearing a false oath to obtain a Wyoming resident fishing license.

In addition to her foreign policy instincts, Cheney puts a lot of faith in her news instincts. She suggested that voters would be better off to turn to her own campaign as a trusted source in news, and not the local paper. Cheney urged members of the crowd to tell 10 friends about her campaign rather than read the newspaper. “Newspapers are dying, and that’s not a bad thing,” she said. “We’re not depending on the Jackson Hole News & Guide to get the news out. We’re depending on ourselves. We’re going to go over their heads.”

It seems Cheney was aware that a Guide reporter was in the audience, but she wasn’t bothered.

Read more from this story HERE.

Georgia School District Mulls Placing Rifles in School Offices

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Photo Credit: AP

Photo Credit: AP

A school system in north Georgia is considering a proposal that would allow district police to store rifles in school offices in case they’re needed to defend students in a school shooting.

Gainesville City Schools Superintendent Merrianne Dyer said school resource officers would have access to rifles placed at Gainesville High School, Gainesville Middle School and Wood’s Mill Academy.

“These things happen quickly, they happen unexpectedly and in places and locations where we can’t anticipate. Any lapse of time to get a weapon would be detrimental in an emergency,” Dyer told MyFoxAtlanta.com.

Dyer said the weapons would be locked inside safes in the offices of school resource officers. She said all school resource officers are armed, but recent training showed that handguns they carry would not be effective in long hallways or corridors.

Gainesville Lt. Jay Parrish told MyFoxAtlanta.com that officers should not be required to leave a school during an emergency to retrieve certain types of weapons.

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Missouri Liquor Store Clerk (Iraq War Veteran) Shuts Down Armed Gunman

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Photo Credit: NEWS-LEADER

Photo Credit: NEWS-LEADER

A would-be thief picked the wrong liquor store to rob.

Clerk Jon Lewis Alexander, a 54-year-old military veteran, was working on Sunday at Beer 30 in Marionville, Mo., when the wannabe tough guy swaggered through the door, puffing a cigarette.

Alexander told the man smoking wasn’t allowed inside. “He just took another puff and looked me dead in the eyes, like he was Billy Badass,” Alexander told the Daily News.

The man’s mistakes began piling up from that second on. “You need to give me all your f–king money,” the crook demanded.

A surveillance video shows the thief start to raise his pistol, but Alexander is quicker. He covers the man’s gun with one hand and swings his own pistol to the thug’s face with the other.

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President Obama: America’s Credibility on the Line in Syria (+video)

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Photo Credit: Washington Examiner

Photo Credit: Washington Examiner

President Barack Obama warned Wednesday that the international community’s credibility — though not his — is at risk if there’s no response to the use of chemical weapons in Syria, though he expects Congress to agree to take military action against Bashar Assad’s regime.

“My credibility is not on the line. The international community’s credibility is on the line,” Obama said at a press conference in Stockholm, Sweden. “And America and Congress’s credibility is on the line.”

Obama’s comments came during a joint appearance with Swedish Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt, ahead of his brief trip to the G20 summit in Russia, where he’s expected to continue pushing for international support for intervention in Syria, even with Russian President Vladimir Putin, who remains allied with Assad.

The president deflected attention from his own role in potential action against Syria as Secretary of State John Kerry and Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel headed into a second day of public and private consultations on Capitol Hill, including an open hearing before the House Foreign Affairs Committee.

Obama said he is confident that Congress will authorize military involvement — and despite some vocal opposition, there were signs Wednesday that the Senate Foreign Relations Committee will pass a Syria resolution.

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Introducing a Flu Vaccine You Give Yourself

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Photo Credit: Purdue University

Photo Credit: Purdue University

What if getting a flu vaccine no longer involved getting a shot?

Researchers at Georgia State University have spent the past few years working on a microneedle patch that dissolves into the skin for patients to easily and painlessly self-administer vaccines. Now, they’ve developed a flu vaccine using the system that, when tested on mice, proved to be 100 percent effective more than a year after the mice were vaccinated.

As they report in the September 2013 issue of the journal Clinical and Vaccine Immunology, the influenza vaccine uses dry virus-like particles (VLP) instead of a liquid with the dead or attenuated virus. The VLPs coat the micronneedle patch alongside a stabilizing agent, so that the patches won’t necessarily need to be refrigerated.

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KKK and NAACP Secret Meeting Ends with Membership Ties

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Photo Credit: Alan Rogers

Photo Credit: Alan Rogers

In what’s being billed as a historical first, the president of the Casper, Wyo., NAACP met recently behind closed doors with an organizer of the KKK chapter from Great Falls, Mont. — and the meeting actually ended with a crossover membership.

The Ku Klux Klan organizer actually paid $50 to join the NAACP, in order to learn more about the civil rights group’s views, The Associated Press reported.

The Southern Poverty Law Center and the United Klans of America said on Tuesday that the meeting — between Jimmy Simmons of the NAACP with John Abarr of the KKK — was the first of its kind in history.

Mr. Abarr said to the AP that he actually filled out a membership card to the NAACP and paid the $30 enrollment fee — and tacked on a $20 donation.

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Ted Cruz: US is Not ‘Al-Qaeda’s Air Force’ (+video)

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Photo Credit: Reuters

Photo Credit: Reuters

On Tuesday, Sen. Ted Cruz distilled the current debate over possible military action in Syria to its essential dilemma. While Syrian President Bashar Assad is certainly a ruthless dictator, the forces aligned against him are dominated by jihadis and elements of terrorist organizations. Cruz noted that Americans didn’t enlist in the military to “serve as Al-Qaeda’s Air Force.”

“We certainly don’t have a dog in the fight,” Cruz said, calling it a civil war in Syria. “We should be focused on defending the United States of America. That’s why young men and women sign up to join the military, not to, as you know, serve as Al Qaeda’s air force.”

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Obama’s Sneak Attack on Military Surplus Guns Goes Unnoticed

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Photo Credit: Examiner

Photo Credit: Examiner

With the national — and most local — news organizations breathlessly covering President Barack Obama’s slow march to war against Syria, he managed on Thursday to find time to perform what he believes is his primary duty: not disarming Bashar al-Assad’s forces or the al-Qaeda rebels killing and maiming innocent Syrians, but disarming law-abiding Americans and US businesses who sell firearms, according to a number of firearms legal experts and police advisors.

The White House surprised the so-called “gun lobby” with two new executive actions, that include a measure that targets the import of military surplus weapons which is the raison d’être of many gun collectors in America, former police firearms instructor Jeff Kingridge told Law Enforcement Examiner.

“Without evidence of one case in which a legitimate military gun collector’s firearms purchased from a military-surplus store were used in a homicide, our current president has taken it upon himself to pass laws that are constitutionally questionable with input from congress, said Kingridge.

“Vice President Joe Biden was chosen to make the announcement about the new rules, which Obama added to the list of actions the White House already determined the president may take without congressional approval,” he added.

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