Feminism May be Dead: 72 Percent of Americans say They’re not ‘Feminists’

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Photo Credit: The Washington TimesIt is likely disappointing news for old school bra-burners and Gloria Steinham-inspired activists.

“Has feminist become a dirty word?”demands a new Economist/YouGov Poll released Wednesday.

“Feminism is a mixed bag in the eyes of most Americans. Overall, 28 percent consider themselves to be feminists, 72 percent do not,” the findings report.

Among women, 38 percent consider themselves feminists. And men do not appear to be very liberated these days either: 18 percent “accept the label” for themselves, the poll reports.

“Democratic and Republicans women see the word differently: 48 percent of Democratic women but just 14 percent of Republican women would label themselves feminist,” the survey says.

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Mayor Bloomberg Launches Vegetarian-Only Public School

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Photo Credit: APBlocked by the courts from banning big sodas in the Big Apple, Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s administration has zeroed in on another target in a quest for healthier lifestyles: Meat.

Public School 244 in the Flushing section of New York’s Queens borough has gone vegan — the first public school in the nation to serve only vegetarian meals for breakfast and lunch.

Cafeteria workers at Active Learning Elementary School have switched out poultry for black beans, tofu and falafel. And the New York Daily News reported the elementary eaters actually like it.

“This is so good,” said 9-year-old Marian Satti of a black bean and cheddar cheese quesadilla served at Tuesday’s lunch, the Daily News said. “I’m enjoying that it didn’t have a lot of salt in it.”

School heads — led by Chancellor Dennis Walcott, a self-claimed fitness guru — tout the healthier eating as pro-kid. Healthy kids make happy students, administrators said in the Daily News report.

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IRS Now Using Technology to Track All Credit Card Transactions

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Photo Credit: US NewsThe Internal Revenue Service relies on technology more than ever to sniff out tax cheats using robo-audits and data mining—but so far it has caught lot of minnows, and big fish are still eluding detection.

Even as millions of people’s accounts are screened online and matched against their digital files elsewhere, the IRS’s data-detection tools come nowhere close to collecting the $400 billion in tax dodges estimated to take place each year. The area in which its robo-audits have had the most impact is on tax returns for low-income taxpayers who try to claim the Earned Income Tax Credit. In total, fraudulent claims totaled $2 billion, just 0.01 percent of the total of individual taxes. The EITC was the biggest single compliance problem cited.

That amount is expected to rise in the tax year ahead as the IRS extends the use of data mining to include the personal data of millions more taxpayers. Its sophisticated data-matching and pattern-recognition technology, largely developed by IBM over the past decade, will reach up the income ladder to include more middle-income and small-business filers who itemize deductions, although it is unlikely to have any impact on the complicated filings of high-net-worth taxpayers in the top 5 percent of income earnings, say tax experts who have studied the IRS plans.

“Real time” audits of electronic tax returns. The IRS’s next phase in high-tech tax collection will be to create a “real-time” check of tax returns to “match them to third party information,” said U.S. Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration J. Russell George in testimony before Congress. Starting this year, the IRS tools will be able to track all credit card transactions, for starters. The agency has also instructed agents on using online sources such as social media and e-commerce sites including eBay, as well as the rich data generated by mobile devices. In one controversial disclosure in April, the ACLU showed documents in which the IRS general counsel said the agency could look at emails without warrants, but the IRS has said it will not use this power.

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The U.S. Has Much, Much More Gas and Oil Than We Thought

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Photo Credit: APThe United States has double the amount of oil and three times the amount of natural gas than previously thought, stored deep under the states of North Dakota, South Dakota, and Montana, according to new data the Obama administration released Tuesday.

In announcing the new data in a conference call, Interior Secretary Sally Jewell also said the administration will release within weeks draft rules to regulate hydraulic fracturing, technology that has come under scrutiny for its environmental impact but that is essential to developing all of this energy.

“These world-class formations contain even more energy-resource potential than previously understood, which is important information as we continue to reduce our nation’s dependence on foreign sources of oil,” Jewell said in a statement.

The formations, called Bakken and Three Forks, span much of western North Dakota, the northern tip of South Dakota and the northeastern tip of Montana. The last time the United States Geological Survey assessed this area for its oil and gas reserves was in 2008. But that assessment did not include the Three Forks formation, which explains the substantial increase in the estimates. USGS estimates that these two formations together hold 7.4 billion barrels of undiscovered—but technically recoverable—oil and 6.7 trillion cubic feet of natural gas.

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Man Grabs Shotgun From Armed Robber in New Orleans (+video)

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Photo Credit: YouTubeWhen a robber armed with a shotgun pointed his weapon in the face of a man in New Orleans at 5am on Saturday morning, he probably was not expecting to be disarmed in a matter of seconds.

CCTV footage released by the local authorities shows the man walking down a street near the French Quarter at about 5am on Saturday morning. He is followed by an armed robber who cocks his weapon as he approaches.

Watch video here:

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Study: Desperate for Attention, White House Reporters Abandon Tough Questions of Obama

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Photo Credit: Pete SouzaA groundbreaking new study of White House press conferences over the past 23 years reveals that the events are in a death spiral, especially under President Obama. Reporters, desperate to keep the press conferences alive, have switched to asking easy questions in a bid to coax the president to host more of them, the study says.

Noting that the days when reporters like Sam Donaldson and Helen Thomas pestered President Reagan are long gone, the study in the authoritative journal American Politics Research said that adversarial questions have become rare as presidents have rebelled at them.

“The press want to encourage presidents to hold more of these direct exchanges to benefit their own reputations and media’s prestige,” said the study provided to Secrets. “The press will be less adversarial in these rare meetings to encourage more of them.”

The trend started with former President Clinton as he, former President George W. Bush and Obama curtailed press conferences and especially cut back on solo meetings with the press. Joint press conferences generally feature the president with a foreign leader and are considered easier to handle, said the study. In his first term, Obama held 38 joint and 27 solo press conferences, according to the study.

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President Obama’s Second Term Shaping up as a Train Wreck

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Photo Credit: APSuccessful presidential second terms have been hard to come by since the end of World War II. Dwight Eisenhower signed the 1957 Civil Rights Act and dispatched federal troops to escort black students to public schools in Little Rock, Ark., but then came Sputnik and the 1958 recession. Richard Nixon resigned in the wake of Watergate early in his second term, Ronald Reagan was distracted by Iran-Contra, Bill Clinton was impeached by the House of Representatives, and George W. Bush was preoccupied by the economic collapse of 2007 and the Great Recession that followed.

So perhaps no one should be surprised that President Obama’s prospects for his second term took a beating in April. Between the growing consensus that implementing Obamacare is a “train wreck” and confirmation that his administration is preventing Benghazi massacre survivors and whistle-blowers from testifying before Congress about what really happened in Libya, the outlines of a second-term collapse could take shape in the next several weeks.

A portent of trouble ahead came early in April when Time magazine’s Joe Klein, normally a reliable Obama enthusiast, warned that “we are now seeing weekly examples of this administration’s inability to govern.” Then the Obamacare train wreck meme flashed across the headlines when Sen. Max Baucus, one of the health reform law’s chief sponsors, told Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius that “I just see a huge train wreck coming down. You and I have discussed this many times, and I don’t see any results yet.” Despite Baucus’ subsequent efforts to walk back his comments, the “train wreck” quickly became a staple of political conversation across the ideological and media spectrum, fueled by growing evidence that health insurance premiums for millions of Americans will soon skyrocket because of Obamacare.

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Obama Campaigns for Immigration Reform . . . in Mexico

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Photo Credit: APPresident Obama will ramp up his calls for comprehensive immigration reform during a trip to Mexico and Costa Rica that comes amid growing obstacles in Washington to his preferred pathway to citizenship for the 11 million illegal immigrants in the United States.

White House officials framed immigration reform as the “backdrop” of the three-day trek that begins Thursday, an attempt by Obama to move the needle on an issue in which he’s left the bulk of negotiations to lawmakers. The president will look to build momentum for the reforms while not jeopardizing talks on Capitol Hill.

The trip takes on even greater importance considering the fragile state of negotiations. Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., widely seen as the most influential conservative in the immigration debate, conceded that the current immigration bill crafted by a bipartisan group of senators would not pass the GOP-controlled House.

Obama, recently dealt a bitter defeat on gun control, is desperate to avoid another high-profile loss. Experts said the trip to Latin America is a crucial opportunity for the White House to allay fears that immigration reform would trigger a new flood of illegal immigrants into the U.S.

“Obama can present a more accurate picture of Mexico, which is extremely important in the domestic debate about immigration,” said Democratic strategist Simon Rosenberg, who attended a meeting this week with Obama and Vice President Biden previewing the presidential trip. “There’s a real concern about recreating the flow of [undocumented immigrants] from Mexico. Mexico has changed, and it’s not something a lot of people in Washington know about.”

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How Did Society Get to Where We Flush Babies Down the Toilet?

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Photo Credit: LifeNewsThe title of this article actually comes from a quote from an abortion facility employee in Bronx, New York. The live report came out thanks to the heroic efforts of the LIVE ACTION team of undercover investigators.

Such reports prove again that surgical abortion is a direct act that employs the use of tools used by the abortion practitioner to end the life of an individual prior to his birth, or as the Gosnell case illustrates, at times just after the baby’s birth. This act is clearly the employment of force designed to render the victim dead.

To my mind, such acts are forms of domestic terrorism, pure and simple.

There are those who will quibble with this comparison. They will argue that abortion is protected by the man-made laws of our nation. My response to that is simple. Abortion is absolutely unlawful according to the natural law and therefore we are well within our rights to use the characterization in this instance.

Further, each of the victims of abortion should be defined as an individual citizen and, in fact, would be if the seven Supreme Court judges who decriminalized abortion had been honest about the actual and scientifically provable humanity of the preborn child. Since these political lapdogs were dishonest in their ruling, the violence of abortion moves forward with nary a gasp from most of us.

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Socialized Medicine So Bad in UK that Brits are turning to Assisted Suicide

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Photo Credit: ALAMYMore than a third of those who said they support a change in the law cited a belief that dying people cannot expect to receive “decent” care at the end of their lives among their reasons.

And while a conviction that people in the 21st century should have a “right to choose” how and when they die dominated the thinking of supporters of assisted dying, only a minority of opponents cited traditional arguments based on life being “sacred”.

The findings emerge from detailed polling of than 4,000 people by YouGov on behalf of the organisers of the regular Westminster Faith Debates.

Overall seven out of 10 people polled agreed with the notion that people with “incurable” illnesses should have the right to ask close friends or relatives to help them commit suicide, without the risk of those people being prosecuted.

Only 16 per cent were actively opposed to the suggestion while 14 per cent were torn.

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