Repealing the First Amendment: Just Way Too Easy (+video)

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Photo Credit: euthmanActivist and author Mark Dice in the past has convinced people to sign a petition to increase the rate of inflation and tried to sell a $1,000 gold coin for $5 to America’s unsuspecting, and apparently sometimes unthinking, public.

This time he’s convincing them, most quite easily, to sign a petition to repeal the First Amendment…

“If you’re disagreeing President Obama, you’re obviously a racist of some kind,” he spouts. “So we’re going to repeal their First Amendment”…

“This will repeal the First Amendment so that those rightwingers can’t say hateful things about Obama”…

When he tells one signer, “Thank you for helping to support repealing the First Amendment,” the signer says, “No worries man. Have a good one.”

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Zimmerman’s Defense Attorney: Before I Knew Him, I Thought George Was Racist (+video)

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Thanks to the media’s habit of showing beatific, outdated photos of Trayvon Martin, many Americans who only casually followed the trial of George Zimmerman incorrectly believed Martin to have been younger than he actually was at the time of his death. In a Friday interview, Zimmerman’s lead defense attorney, Mark O’Mara admitted that he was one of them.

Speaking with CNN correspondent Martin Savidge, O’Mara denounced what he called a “wonderfully created and crafted public relations campaign” by the attorney for Martin’s family, Benjamin Crump and his allies. According to O’Mara, had they not injected a racial element into the story, Zimmerman would never have been tried.

Such was the power of the narrative of a bruising white man deliberately gunning down a small boy out of racial malice that even O’Mara, a seasoned defense attorney very familiar with media sensationalism, bought into it.

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Rand Paul: Hillary Probably Perjured Herself

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Photo Credit: WNDSen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., told a radio interviewer today he doubts former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s claims about not having knowledge of weapons transfers when asked about the matter during sworn testimony in a Senate hearing on Benghazi.

During the hearing in March, in response to a question from Paul, Clinton stated she did not know whether the U.S. mission in Libya was procuring or transferring weapons to Turkey and other Arab countries.

Those weapons transfers were allegedly intended to arm the rebels fighting in Syria.

Yet a New York Times report claimed that since early 2012, the CIA has been helping Arab governments and Turkey obtain and ship weapons to the Syrian rebels.

“I’m concerned about the veracity of how she responded,” Paul told “Aaron Klein Investigative Radio” on New York’s WABC Radio.

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Obama’s Military Ignorance in Full Display: Unlawful Command Influence Taints Numerous DoD Trials

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Photo Credit: Doug MillsWhen President Obama proclaimed that those who commit sexual assault in the military should be “prosecuted, stripped of their positions, court-martialed, fired, dishonorably discharged,” it had an effect he did not intend: muddying legal cases across the country.

In at least a dozen sexual assault cases since the president’s remarks at the White House in May, judges and defense lawyers have said that Mr. Obama’s words as commander in chief amounted to “unlawful command influence,” tainting trials as a result. Military law experts said that those cases were only the beginning and that the president’s remarks were certain to complicate almost all prosecutions for sexual assault.

“Unlawful command influence” refers to actions of commanders that could be interpreted by jurors as an attempt to influence a court-martial, in effect ordering a specific outcome. Mr. Obama, as commander in chief of the armed forces, is considered the most powerful person to wield such influence.

The president’s remarks might have seemed innocuous to civilians, but military law experts say defense lawyers will seize on the president’s call for an automatic dishonorable discharge, the most severe discharge available in a court-martial, arguing that his words will affect their cases.

“His remarks were more specific than I’ve ever heard a commander in chief get,” said Thomas J. Romig, a former judge advocate general of the Army and the dean of the Washburn University School of Law in Topeka, Kan. “When the commander in chief says they will be dishonorably discharged, that’s a pretty specific message. Every military defense counsel will make a motion about this.”

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Populism is the Answer, Not Amnesty

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Photo Credit: APSean Trende, RealClearPolitics.com’s senior elections analyst, rattled Washington this month when he challenged the conventional wisdom that the Republican Party must give citizenship to current illegal immigrants if it ever hopes to win a national election again.

Trende argued that instead of pandering to every demographic group, Republicans should instead adjust their agenda to better appeal to Reagan Democrat/Perot Independent voters who stayed home last November.

“Ultimately, the basic prescription for the GOP is a healthy dose of economic populism,” Trende writes. “This includes a lot of changes Democrats would presumably enjoy, such as jettisoning the pro-big business, Wall Street-style conservatism that characterized the Romney campaign.”

Here is what such an agenda might look like:

– Rollback the surveillance state: The government is collecting too much information on law-abiding citizens. The National Security Agency must be reined in…

– Break up the banks: Big banks are not a product of the free market. They are a product of over-regulation and regulatory capture. Dodd-Frank has only made the banks bigger. It’s time to cut them down to size.

Read more from this story HERE.

Judge Michael McConnell: Obama Suspends the Rule of Law

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Photo Credit: David G. KleinPresident Obama’s decision last week to suspend the employer mandate of the Affordable Care Act may be welcome relief to businesses affected by this provision, but it raises grave concerns about his understanding of the role of the executive in our system of government.

Article II, Section 3, of the Constitution states that the president “shall take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed.” This is a duty, not a discretionary power. While the president does have substantial discretion about how to enforce a law, he has no discretion about whether to do so.

This matter—the limits of executive power—has deep historical roots. During the period of royal absolutism, English monarchs asserted a right to dispense with parliamentary statutes they disliked. King James II’s use of the prerogative was a key grievance that lead to the Glorious Revolution of 1688. The very first provision of the English Bill of Rights of 1689—the most important precursor to the U.S. Constitution—declared that “the pretended power of suspending of laws, or the execution of laws, by regal authority, without consent of parliament, is illegal.”

To make sure that American presidents could not resurrect a similar prerogative, the Framers of the Constitution made the faithful enforcement of the law a constitutional duty.

The Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, which advises the president on legal and constitutional issues, has repeatedly opined that the president may decline to enforce laws he believes are unconstitutional. But these opinions have always insisted that the president has no authority, as one such memo put it in 1990, to “refuse to enforce a statute he opposes for policy reasons.”

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Homosexuals Organize Blood Drive to Circumvent FDA’s Safeguards Against Spread of AIDS

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Photo Credit: Getty ImagesActivists are organizing the first national gay blood drive Friday in an effort to combat the Food and Drug Administration’s ban on blood donations from gay and bisexual men.

The FDA bans donations from men who have had sex with other men since 1977, saying there is an increased risk of exposure to and transmission of infectious diseases — including HIV — in male-to-male sexual encounters.

“FDA uses multiple layers of safeguards in its approach to ensuring blood safety,” the government agency’s website says. The FDA screens all potential blood donors based on risk factors and signs of infections.

Blood banks have been instructed to ask male donors if they have ever had sex with a man. If the potential donor responds “yes,” he is instantly removed from the donor pool for life.

The policy started in the 1980s when people didn’t know how the deadly virus that causes AIDS spread. At the time, there wasn’t a good test to detect whether HIV was present in donated blood, and HIV was getting into the nation’s blood supply. Scientists also knew that a disproportionate number of gay men were affected by the virus.

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Chechens Call for Terrorist Attacks on Russian 2014 Winter Olympics

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Photo Credit: WNDThe head of the Chechen Islamist militants has put out a call to all North Caucasus militants to begin planning attacks to disrupt the February 2014 Winter Olympics to be held at the Russian Black Sea resort in Sochi, according to report from Joseph Farah’s G2 Bulletin.

Doku Umarov, who wants to establish a Caucasus Emirates in the North Caucasus region that includes the predominantly Muslim Russian provinces of Chechnya, Ingushetia and Dagastan, has issued the call to “do their utmost to derail” the games.

Umarov’s call is the realization of Moscow’s worst fear, since it sees security of the games as one of its highest priorities. It is estimated that Moscow will spend more than $51 billion to make a success of the games which it sees as a showpiece for its economic and technological achievements.

Umarov’s call is a reversal of his previous position that he would not launch attacks on civilian targets, although his group’s previous attacks on the Moscow subway a few years ago was a sign of that change.

The location of the 2014 Winter Olympics at Sochi butts up against those predominantly Muslim provinces which Umarov has declared constitute the Caucasus Emirates.

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Live TV Newscast Shaken as House Blast Creates Huge Shock Wave (+video)

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Photo Credit: CNNResidents of a Corpus Christi, Texas, neighborhood had the kind of wake-up call no homeowner wants to get.

An early morning explosion Friday shook the area, sparking a fire that rushed through the neighborhood. In the end, three homes were flattened and about 70 others were damaged, the Red Cross told CNN affiliate KIII.

Two people injured were in critical condition Saturday night. They were first taken to a local hospital and then flown to the burn unit at San Antonio’s Brooke Army Medical Center, according to the Corpus Christi Fire Department.

KIII news anchors, in the studio nearly two miles away from the blast site, were in the middle of their live morning newscast Friday when they — and their viewers — heard a loud boom. The room appeared to shake slightly.

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Study: Home Ownership Not the Key to Happiness

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Photo Credit: Patrick GeorgeIf trying to buy an apartment in New York City has been making you miserable, consider this: actually getting that home may not make you happy.

A growing body of research suggests that spending money on real estate doesn’t necessarily mean investing in contentment. Indeed, the conventional advice to cut back on vacations, restaurant meals and other extras in order to save money for a home may actually be detrimental to felicity. Experts in happiness — an increasingly popular field focused on the scientific understanding of emotional well-being — say that people are happier when they spend money on experiences instead of material goods, whether it be a new car or a bigger apartment.

“People are making so many trade-offs in order to have that home,” said Elizabeth Dunn, an associate professor of psychology at the University of British Columbia who studies consumerism and happiness. She recently explored the impact of housing on people’s happiness while compiling studies for a new book, “Happy Money: The Science of Smarter Spending,” which she wrote with Michael Norton, who teaches at the Harvard Business School.

The recession forced many people to curb their spending habits and re-evaluate their overall lifestyles. But after saving money for years, buyers encouraged by low mortgage rates are re-entering the housing market. They find the pickings slim. In Manhattan, the number of apartments for sale for the second quarter was at a 13-year low, stoking competition and driving up prices.

Now there is research like Dr. Dunn’s, emphasizing that when it comes to your overall happiness, “there are a lot of better things you could be putting your money toward” than real estate.

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