Rubio Has Long History of Blocking Immigration-Enforcement

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Photo Credit: Daily Caller Sen. Marco Rubio blocked numerous immigration-enforcement bills when he served as speaker in the Florida House of Representatives from 2007 to 2009.

“Rubio blocked any efforts to deal with the problems of illegal immigration on the local or state level,” one former politician from South Florida, who has known Rubio since his city councilman days in West Miami, told The Daily Caller.

“He said it was because we had bigger things to deal with on the state level. Maybe that’s true. But he didn’t even let bills to the floor when they sailed through committees,” the politician, who declined to speak on the record, added.

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Socialist French Government Takes Steps to Ban Rightwing Party

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Photo Credit: agaw.dilimThe French government is taking steps to ban an extreme far-right movement believed to be planning violence at demonstration against gay marriage in Paris on Sunday.

The Interior Minister, Manuel Valls, said today that he was “studying” ways of banning Printemps Français [French spring], a group linked to a xenophobic writer who committed suicide at the altar of Notre Dame cathedral on Tuesday.

The nebulous movement, which loosely links a number of ultra-nationalist and Nazi-sympathising groups, is accused of making recent threats to public figures – including Frigide Barjot, the more moderate leader of anti-gay marriage protests.

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Planetary Alignment Peaks with Celestial Show this Weekend

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Photo Credit: George M. GroutasVenus and Jupiter, the two brightest planets in the sky this month, will be joined by tiny Mercury for a rare celestial show this weekend.

Typically, Venus, the second-closest planet to the sun, and Jupiter, which orbits beyond Mars, are tens of millions of miles apart. But they have been cycling together while moving ever closer to each other this month, joined by the innermost planet Mercury.

The celestial show peaks on Sunday when the trio will appear as a bright triangle of light in the western sky beginning about 30 minutes after sunset.

Triple conjunctions are relatively rare, according to NASA. The last one was in May 2011 and the next one will not occur until October 2015.

“This triple is especially good because it involves the three brightest planets in May’s night sky,” the U.S. space agency said on its website.

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A Farmers’ Rebellion Lifts the California GOP

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Photo Credit: Bill Mahon Democrats were writing obituaries for California’s GOP after winning a supermajority in the state legislature last November, thus gaining veto-proof power to raise taxes. But their legislative lock may have slipped after this week’s special election in which Republican farmer Andy Vidak appears to have defeated a Democrat—in a heavily Democratic senate district—who had championed high-speed rail and a higher minimum wage.

If Mr. Vidak wins an outright majority—late Friday, he led with 49.8% of the vote and provisional ballots were still being counted—his victory would put Republicans two senate seats short of reclaiming their veto on tax hikes. But more important, the election has exposed the Democrats’ soft underbelly in California’s Central Valley—a no man’s land in state politics—and given Republicans a rallying point.

“This is the shot in the arm that shows that we are doing some things right,” California Rep. Kevin McCarthy, the House GOP whip, says.

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Black Spanish Teacher Claims She was Fired for Using the Word ‘Negro’ in Class

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Photo Credit: Getty images In the annals of political correctness run amok in American schools, this story — if true — is easily an all-timer.

A junior-high school Spanish teacher has filed a lawsuit alleging that she was fired from P.S. 211 in the Bronx in March 2012 because of a misunderstanding over the word “negro.”

The non-tenured teacher, 65-year-old Petrona Smith, maintains that she was instructing her class about how to say the various basic colors in Spanish, reports the New York Post. The word “negro” naturally came up because “negro” is the Spanish word for “black.”

A seventh-grade student in the class took offense at the term, however, believing the word to be a racial slur. It’s not clear if Smith directed the term at the student. Whatever the case, he reported the incident to school officials.

But, wait. It gets better. Smith, a native of the West Indies, is black. And to top it all off, P.S. 211 is bilingual.

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ACLU: ‘Never Before has the Government Argued that Newsgathering is Illegal’

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Photo Credit: APWhile Attorney General Eric Holder is taking heat for his department’s seizure of reporter records, the U.S. attorney who is personally overseeing those investigations is himself starting to face complaints that he’s gone too far in pursuing leaks.

Ronald Machen Jr., the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, was nominated by President Obama in 2009 and now runs the biggest federal prosecutor office in the country. His hundreds of attorneys handle everything from gang violence to corruption.

But in recent years, leak investigations have become a hallmark of his portfolio. And his dogged pursuit of the squeaky wheels in government has led him into the tenuous — and some say unprecedented — territory of lumping in leakers with journalists.

“What’s astonishing here is that never before has the government argued that newsgathering — in this case, asking a source to provide sensitive information — is itself illegal,” Gabe Rottman, legislative counsel at the American Civil Liberties Union, told FoxNews.com.

Machen was an early and frequent campaign donor to Obama during the 2008 election, giving close to the maximum amount allowed by law. He gave $2,300 in the general election and nearly as much during the primary.

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IRS Official Who Refused to Resign or Testify before Congress, Signed Orwellian Tea Party Letters in 2012

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Photo Credit: scott*ericThe IRS official who refused to testify this week — while claiming she had done nothing wrong — signed letters to Tea Party groups a year ago that asked them to turn over everything from printouts of their Facebook pages to the credentials of speakers who participated in their events.

A group representing more than a dozen Tea Party groups now suing the IRS released a sample of one of the letters overnight, after the official Lois Lerner was placed on administrative leave. According to one lawmaker, she was only placed on leave after she refused to resign.

Jay Sekulow, chief counsel with the American Center for Law and Justice, said the March 2012 letters show a “paper trail” that reveals her “direct involvement in sending intrusive and harassing questionnaires.”

“It appears Lerner did nothing to stop the abusive conduct. And our evidence suggests she was actively participating in the improper targeting in March 2012,” he said in a statement.

It was no secret that Lerner, as head of the exempt organizations division, was aware of the program that had developed in the Cincinnati office under her watch. A timeline provided in the inspector general’s report on the practice showed she was first briefed in June 2011.

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John McCain Tears Into Mike Lee on Senate Floor, Lee Responds (+videos)

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Photo Credit: YouTubeSen. John McCain provides yet another reason why many feel the “old bull” should be put out to pasture when he tore into fellow Republican Sen. Mike Lee on the Senate floor Thursday over Lee’s objection to negotiate the debt limit increase as part of the budget resolution.

“Perhaps the senator from Utah doesn’t know about that — the fact that even if they did raise the debt limit, it could not become law because it doesn’t go to the president of the United States,” McCain said.

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Bernanke Out by August, QE Ends, Rates Up; Prepare for Crash Now Because Easy Money Will Dry Up

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Photo Credit: Getty ImagesHis clue? Consumer sentiment: “Harris estimates that in the next five years, catch-up consumption will boost annual consumer spending growth by a half point to above 3% from about 2%.”

Reassuring? No, wishful thinking. Be very skeptical. As Robert Kuttner, author of the new “Debtors’ Prison: The Politics of Austerity Versus Prosperity” once wrote in BusinessWeek, “What do you call an economist with a prediction? Wrong.”

Harris is bucking the headwinds of history. As Jeremy Grantham, chief strategist of the $100 billion GMO money managers, recently told InvestmentNews, the newspaper of record for America’s 90,000 professional investment advisers, “3% annual GDP growth is history.”

Here’s why you better be preparing today for a crash dead ahead. As Pimco’s Bill Gross warned in his recent newsletter: “You’re going to lose money investing … because the central banks say so.” That’s right, this is a Fed-driven rally. Soon the Fed will be forced to stop printing cheap money.

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Pregnant Woman Dies, Gives Birth, Comes Back to Life

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Photo Credit: FoxWhen a pregnant teacher in Texas collapsed, her coworkers rushed to help. The woman technically died, gave birth and then was brought back to life.

Erica Nigrelli, an English teacher at Elkins High School in Missouri City, Texas, collapsed in a co-worker’s classroom when she was 36 weeks pregnant.

“Apparently I told her, ‘I feel very faint,’ and I put my head down and I essentially just passed out,” Erica Nigrelli said.

Erica’s husband, Nathan, is also a teacher at Elkins.

“I opened the door and walked in and Erica was laying on the floor,” he said.

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