Hoax: Heartbreaking Story of Notre Dame Linebacker Manti Te’o’s Dead Girlfriend, the Most Inspirational Story of the College Football Season

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Notre Dame’s Manti Te’o, the stories said, played this season under a terrible burden. A Mormon linebacker who led his Catholic school’s football program back to glory, Te’o was whipsawed between personal tragedies along the way. In the span of six hours in September, as Sports Illustrated told it, Te’o learned first of the death of his grandmother, Annette Santiago, and then of the death of his girlfriend, Lennay Kekua.

Kekua, 22 years old, had been in a serious car accident in California, and then had been diagnosed with leukemia. SI’s Pete Thamel described how Te’o would phone her in her hospital room and stay on the line with her as he slept through the night. “Her relatives told him that at her lowest points, as she fought to emerge from a coma, her breathing rate would increase at the sound of his voice,” Thamel wrote.

Upon receiving the news of the two deaths, Te’o went out and led the Fighting Irish to a 20-3 upset of Michigan State, racking up 12 tackles. It was heartbreaking and inspirational. Te’o would appear on ESPN’s College GameDay to talk about the letters Kekua had written him during her illness. He would send a heartfelt letter to the parents of a sick child, discussing his experience with disease and grief. The South Bend Tribune wrote an article describing the young couple’s fairytale meeting—she, a Stanford student; he, a Notre Dame star—after a football game outside Palo Alto.

Did you enjoy the uplifiting story, the tale of a man who responded to adversity by becoming one of the top players of the game? If so, stop reading.

Manti Te’o did lose his grandmother this past fall. Annette Santiago died on Sept. 11, 2012, at the age of 72, according to Social Security Administration records in Nexis. But there is no SSA record there of the death of Lennay Marie Kekua, that day or any other. Her passing, recounted so many times in the national media, produces no obituary or funeral announcement in Nexis, and no mention in the Stanford student newspaper.

Read more from this story HERE.

Anonymous Likens Obama Gun Control Policy to Hitler (+video)

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Hacktivist group Anonymous has now spoken out against President Barack Obama’s intentions to enact wider gun control in the U.S.

In a 15-minute YouTube video, which first appeared on the social network two weeks ago, Anonymous criticized the Obama administration’s leveraging of violent gun crime to achieve its goal to control guns.

“Throughout history, authoritarian governments have used gun violence as an excuse to take people’s firearms and control their population,” said Anonymous.

“This is exactly what Adolf Hitler did to disarm the German people and look at the atrocities his administration did. Obama has been working hard to try and ban all semi-automatic weapons and shot guns while at the same time increasing the weapons and firepower that police and government agencies have.”

The video, which continued on to list various violent crimes and criticize the lack of media attention drawn to those instances, has since been replicated and posted on a number of other user accounts in recent days in anticipation over Obama’s executive actions for greater gun control.

Read more from this story HERE.

Governor Rick Perry: ‘Disgusted’ By President’s Use of Child Massacre ‘To Advance a Pre-Existing Political Agenda’

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Gov. Rick Perry released the following statement regarding President Obama’s executive actions:

“The Vice President’s committee was appointed in response to the tragedy at Newtown, but very few of his recommendations have anything to do with what happened there.

“Guns require a finger to pull the trigger. The sad young man who did that in Newtown was clearly haunted by demons and no gun law could have saved the children in Sandy Hook Elementary from his terror.

“There is evil prowling in the world – it shows up in our movies, video games and online fascinations, and finds its way into vulnerable hearts and minds. As a free people, let us choose what kind of people we will be. Laws, the only redoubt of secularism, will not suffice. Let us all return to our places of worship and pray for help. Above all, let us pray for our children.

“In fact, the piling on by the political left, and their cohorts in the media, to use the massacre of little children to advance a pre-existing political agenda that would not have saved those children, disgusts me, personally. The second amendment to the Constitution is a basic right of free people and cannot be nor will it be abridged by the executive power of this or any other president.”

Visit the Governor’s website HERE.

Islamic Terrorists With Believed Al Qaeda Links Take U.S. Hostages in Algeria (+video)

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Militants with possible links to al Qaeda seized about 40 foreign hostages, including several Americans, at a natural-gas field in Algeria, posing a new level of threat to nations trying to blunt the growing influence of Islamist extremists in Africa.

As security officials in the U.S. and Europe assessed options to reach the captives from distant bases, Algerian security forces failed in an attempt late Wednesday to storm the facility.

A French effort to drive Islamist militants from neighboring Mali that began with airstrikes last week expanded on Wednesday with the first sustained fighting on the ground. France’s top target, al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, or AQIM, claimed responsibility for the Algeria kidnappings, calling it retaliation. The claim couldn’t be verified, although AQIM has its origins in Algeria and operates across a swath of Africa.

Defense Secretary Leon Panetta said the U.S. would take “necessary and proper steps” in the hostage situation, and didn’t rule out military action. He said the Algeria attack could represent a spillover from Mali.

U.S. and European officials said Wednesday that they received reports that three Americans had been kidnapped, out of a total of nine U.S. staff working at the site, a gas field in east-central Algeria, along the Libyan border operated by BP BP.LN -0.41%PLC, Norway’s Statoil ASA STL.OS -0.56%and Algerian energy company Sonatrach.

Read more from this story HERE.

The War Between the Amendments

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The horrific Newtown, Conn., mass shooting has unleashed a frenzy to pass new gun-control legislation. But the war over restricting firearms is not just between liberals and conservatives, it also pits the first two amendments to the U.S. Constitution against each other.

Apparently, in the sequential thinking of James Madison and the Founding Fathers, the right to free expression and the guarantee to own arms were the two most important personal liberties. But now these two cherished rights seem to be at odds with each other and have caused bitter exchanges between interpreters of the Constitution.

Many liberals believe there is no need to own semiautomatic assault rifles, magazines that hold more than ten bullets, or even semi-automatic handguns. They argue that hunters and sportsmen don’t need such rapid-firing guns to kill their game — and that slower-firing revolvers and pump- or bolt-action rifles are sufficient for home protection.

Implicit in the liberal argument for tighter gun control is the belief that the ability to rapidly fire off lots of bullets empowers — or indeed encourages — mass murderers to butcher the innocent.

Most conservatives offer rebuttals to all those points. Criminals will always break almost any law they choose. Connecticut, for example, has among the tightest gun-control laws in the nation. A murderer can pop in three ten-bullet clips in succession and still spray his targets almost as effectively as a shooter with a single 30-bullet magazine. Like a knife or bomb, a gun is a tool, and the human who misuses it is the only guilty party. An armed school guard might do more to stop a mass shooting on campus than a law outlawing the shooter’s preferred weapon or magazine.

Read more from this story HERE.

Obama Unveils $500 Million Gun Control Package

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WASHINGTON (AP) – Braced for a fight, President Barack Obama on Wednesday unveiled the most sweeping proposals for curbing gun violence in two decades, pressing a reluctant Congress to pass universal background checks and bans on military-style assault weapons and high-capacity ammunition magazines like the ones used in the Newtown, Conn., school shooting.

A month after that horrific massacre, Obama also used his presidential powers to enact 23 measures that don’t require the backing of lawmakers. The president’s executive actions include ordering federal agencies to make more data available for background checks, appointing a director of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, and directing the Centers for Disease Control to research gun violence.

But the president, speaking at White House ceremony, focused his attention on the divided Congress, saying only lawmakers could enact the most effective measures for preventing more mass shootings.

“To make a real and lasting difference, Congress must act,” Obama said. “And Congress must act soon.”

The president vowed to use “whatever weight this office holds” to press lawmakers into action on his $500 million plan. He is also calling for improvements in school safety, including putting 1,000 police officers in schools and bolstering mental health care by training more health professionals to deal with young people who may be at risk.

Read more from this story HERE.

The Assault by the Left on Gun Rights is an Assault on Women (+videos)

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As demographic, American women are purchasing firearms at the greatest rate in our nation’s history.

But at the peak, the President and the left, are making a concerted effort to demonize gun ownership and put strict gun controls on law abiding American citizens, which includes women.

One left wing news publication in New York even went so far as to publish the names and addresses of legal gun owners in areas of New York, as if to shame them:

Perhaps they didn’t realize when they published these names that they exposed women who were gun owners trying to keep their identities and residences secret in order to evade stalkers. This publication also outed the names and addresses of women judges and police officers, who were legal gun owners.

The two biggest gun control cities in the US; Chicago and New York City, are already shooting galleries, in spite of their tough gun laws. Law abiding citizens find it difficult to possess a legal firearm, yet the criminals and gangsters are heavily armed….They don’t register their guns and they have high capacity ammunition magazines, in spite of them being illegal.

Just last week, a Georgia woman alone at home with her two young children was terrified to see a man breaking into her house using a crowbar. She gathered up her children and ran upstairs hiding in a crawl space as the man searched the house looking for them. See CBS News story.

The intruder finally opened the door to the hiding space. But instead of finding helpless victims, he was greeted with 6 shots from a pistol. She shot the criminal 5 times in the face and neck, when the hammer came down on an empty cylinder.

The gun was empty, but the criminal didn’t know it. She told him she would keep shooting if he didn’t stop. Although severely wounded he was able to get out of the house and climb into his car and drive away, thinking the woman would shoot again.

If he knew she had no more bullets in her gun would he have harmed her and her children? Suppose there were 2 or more intruders? She would not have had enough ammunition to defend herself and her children.

Of course the police arrived later to take reports…But they weren’t there when they were needed.

Many women live alone and want the security of owning a firearm and know how to safely use it. If they want to own a semi automatic rifle with a high capacity magazine, as long as they are law abiding citizens, let them. President Obama, Mayor Bloomberg, Governor’s Cuomo, or Emmanuel, can’t guarantee law abiding citizens a crime free environment, in spite of all of their laws. These politicians should deal with the criminal and mental health problem that that they refuse to address, before they infringe on the 2nd amendment rights of law abiding citizens.

In spite of the pathetic attempt to wave a magic wand and declare a location a “gun free zone” and make it all better, this has proven to have the opposite effect, as the recent mass shootings have all occurred in “gun free zones.”

Just like many utopian run cities and locations used to proudly boast they were nuclear free zones, they of course would get incinerated just as crisply as their neighboring cities if a nuke went off near them.

Here’s some crime stats Piers Morgan and the major media doesn’t want to discuss:

The 2nd Amendment guarantees American citizens, including women, the right to bear arms and it shall not be infringed upon.

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Ed Farnan is the conservative columnist at IrishCentral, where he has been writing on the need for energy independence, strong self defense, secure borders, 2nd amendment, smaller government and many other issues. His articles appear in many publications throughout the USA and world. He has been a guest on Fox News and a regular guest on radio stations in the US and Europe.

Liberal Paranoia Reigns in New York As Police Lock Down School, Search for Nerf Toy (+video)

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NEW YORK- A lime-green Nerf toy gun caused an hours-long lock-down at a Long Island school on Tuesday.

A 911 caller told Nassau County Police she saw a suspicious teen at about 7:38 a.m. Tuesday wearing a black jacket and carrying a black backpack at Elmont Memorial high School in Elmont.

The caller said he was also carrying a lime green gun.

A SWAT team searched the school room by room.

Read more from this story HERE.

Video: James O’Keefe Busts Media Hypocrites On Gun-Free Zones

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Gun-control advocates claim that if we got rid of all the guns, if we rounded them all up and melted them down to make decorative planters and such, there’d be no more crime. No more guns = no more gun crime. Yay!

When people who actually have some common sense hear this, they retort that disarming law-abiding citizens only makes them more vulnerable to criminals, who don’t obey laws because they’re, y’know… criminals. The Second Amendment doesn’t stop being a right just because someone abuses it, and it’s immoral to punish good people for the actions of bad people.

It’s easy to write an op-ed about gun control, or to spout off about it on TV. But how many of these gun-grabbing pundits and “journalists” would be willing to practice what they preach? How many of them would want everybody in the neighborhoods where they live to know that there are no guns on their premises?

Read more from this story HERE.

Prop-a-palooza: The Use and Abuse of Kiddie Human Shields

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photo credit: usembassynewdelhi

The president of the United States will release a binder full of new gun-control executive orders on Wednesday. Instead of standing alone, bearing full responsibility for the imperial actions he is about to take, President Obama will surround himself with an audience of kids who wrote to him after the Newtown, Conn., school massacre. This is the most cynical in Beltway theatrical staging — a feckless attempt to invoke “For the Children” immunity by hiding behind them.

What has happened to the deliberative process in this country? Public debate in Washington has deteriorated into Sesame Street sing-a-longs. We are already inundated with logical fallacies: argumentum ad populum (it’s popular, therefore it’s true); argumentum ad nauseam (if you repeat it often enough, it’ll become truth); argumentum ad hominem (sabotage the person, sabotage the truth); and argumentum ad verecundiam (if my favorite authority says it’s true, it’s true).

To that list we can now add “argumentum ad filium”: If politicians appeal to the children, it’s unassailably good and true. The Obama White House has shamelessly employed this kiddie human shield strategy at every turn to blunt substantive criticism and dissent.

During the legislative battle that rammed the federal health care takeover through Capitol Hill and down our throats, President Obama and the Democrats piled up youth props around them like bunker sandbags. Nancy Pelosi wore babies like Wonder Woman bracelets, one on each arm, to deflect troublesome questions about costs and constitutional concerns.

Obamacare stage managers paraded 11-year-old Marcelas Owens of Washington state in front of the cameras to make the case for the half-trillion-dollar tax hike plan. The boy’s “qualifications”? Owens’ mother, Tiffany, had died of pulmonary hypertension at the age of 27. A single mother of three, she lost her job as a fast-food manager and lost her insurance. She received emergency care and treatment throughout her illness, but died in 2007.

Read more from this story HERE.