Christmas for Obama Bundlers

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Merry Crony-mas! It’s time to pass out the goodies. While President Obama’s lips champion the middle class, his administration’s old hands are preparing to lavish rewards on the creme de la campaign creme: his wealthiest political donors.

Several media outlets reported this week that the White House is considering fashion doyenne Anna Wintour for a possible appointment as U.S. ambassador to Great Britain or France.

The rumored short list also includes Obama campaign finance chairman Matthew Barzun and investment banker Marc Lasry. The three share one common, er, “qualification”: Each raked in more than $500,000 for Team Obama 2012.

As previously reported in this column, Wintour held multiple million-dollar fundraisers for Obama in Hollywood, New York, London and Paris — raking in the fourth highest amount for the Man of the (Glamorous) People. Wintour’s $40,000-per-plate dinners attracted Hollywood’s biggest leftist celebs.

She went further than just passing around the fashion plate, though. Before Election Day, the fashion world buzzed over the British-born Vogue editor’s behind-the-scenes campaign to intimidate designers into spurning GOP women. Such Chicago-style diplomacy will fit in perfectly with the brass-knuckle-wielder-in-chief.

Read more from this story HERE.

Touching Video: Cerebral Palsy Sufferer Wins Wrestling Match

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With one heartwarming gesture of sportsmanship, a teenage boy has become an internet sensation after letting a severely disabled opponent defeat him in a wrestling match.

Video posted online shows cerebral palsy sufferer Jared Stevens, 13, fulfill his dream to fight in a competitive wrestling match and beat big-hearted Justin Kievit in front of his cheering classmates in Nolensville, Tennessee. With over 100,000 views on YouTube and Facebook so far, the video shows the moment the two boys meet for the first time and show the ‘bigger message’ according to Phil Stevens, Jared’s father.

‘It’s what — a minute, minute and a half maybe?’ said Jared’s dad, Phil Stevens to The Tennessean. ‘But it’s the echoes of it that make the difference.’

Physically, Jared is equivalent to a six-month old but intellectually he has no difficulty and the teen practices with the Sunset Middle School wrestling team every day – but has never competed until now.

‘The first time he met Jared was when he shook hands with him before the match. So it really was spontaneous. They just picked this kid,’ said Craig Kievit, Justin’s father. ‘If you watch the video, he just did an amazing job. There’s not many adults comfortable putting hands on a disabled kid, much less another 13-year-old.’ Read more from this story HERE.

New Poll Shows . . . Senator Herman Cain?

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photo credit: gage skidmore

Georgia Senator Saxby Chambliss is theoretically very vulnerable to a primary challenger in 2014: it’s just a question of whether any of the folks interested in taking him on can run a strong enough campaign to take advantage of that vulnerability.

Only 38% of Republican primary voters say they want Chambliss to be their nominee next year, compared to 43% who would prefer someone more conservative. But Chambliss stomps most of the people who’ve shown the most interest in taking him on. He leads Congressman Paul Broun by a 57/14 margin in a head to head, has a 50/22 advantage over Congressman Tom Price, and leads former Secretary of State Karen Handel 52/23.

By far and away the Republican who would pose the greatest threat to Chambliss in a primary, if he changed his mind about running, is Herman Cain. Cain would lead Chambliss 50-36 in a hypothetical match up. Cain has a 68/20 favorability rating with GOP primary voters, which compares quite favorably to Chambliss’ 45/36 approval spread. Other long shot candidates we tested against Chambliss were Allen West, who trails 47/26, and Erick Erickson who trails 51/22.

Chambliss is extremely weak with Republicans describing themselves as ‘very conservative.’ 61% of them would like to replace him, compared to only 23% who would like to see him nominated again. He would trail Cain 68/19 with that group of voters.

Read more from this story HERE.

School Removed God Reference From First-Grader’s Poem

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photo credit: kevin dooley

An elementary school in North Carolina censored a first-grade student’s Veterans Day poem by removing a line that referenced her grandfather’s belief in God.

The West Marion Elementary School student was supposed to read the poem at a Nov. 8 Veterans Day ceremony to honor her grandfather, a Vietnam veteran.

The deleted line read: “He prayed to God for peace, he prayed to God for strength.”

An attorney for the Alliance Defending Freedom, which advocates for religious rights and freedoms, criticized the school’s decision.

“America’s public schools should encourage, not restrict, the constitutionally protected freedom of students to express their faith,” said Matt Sharp, legal counsel for the Alliance Defending Freedom, in a statement. “Students should not be censored when speaking about their faith or honoring those who valiantly served to protect our freedoms. … The censorship of this young student’s poem about her grandfathers is repugnant to the First Amendment rights of all students and sends an impermissible message of hostility towards religion.”

Read more from this story HERE.

Federal Appeals Court Likely to Invalidate Obama’s Recess Appointments

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President Barack Obama made headlines months ago when he installed controversial nominees to key government positions, bypassing the U.S. Senate by declaring the Senate in recess so that Senate confirmation was not needed. Today a federal appeals court signaled that it might rule Obama’s move unconstitutional, and remove those officials from power.

The U.S. Constitution says that Congress can by statute allow minor government players—“inferior officers”—to be appointed by the president, by Cabinet officers, or by the courts. But high-level administrative officials—called “principal officers”—must be nominated by the president, then confirmed by the U.S. Senate.

But the Senate isn’t always around; for part of each year, senators are back in their home states. So the Framers of the Constitution included the Recess Appointments Clause, allowing presidents to make temporary appointments during Senate recesses. Such appointments last until the end of the following calendar year, meaning appointments made in January 2012 last through December 2013.

Starting in December 2011, the U.S. Senate officially adjourned for only three days at a time—which the Constitution allows the Senate to do without going into recess—and did so specifically to prevent Obama from using his recess power. Democratic senators did this a few years ago to block George W. Bush from making recess appointments. Although it’s frustrating when the branches block each other, the reality is the Constitution allows it. And besides, this is just the political pushback to presidents using their recess power to get around the Senate in recent years.

But on Jan. 4, 2012, this president did something no president in American history ever attempted. Obama declared that the Senate was actually in recess because there were not enough senators physically present to do regular business, and thus that he had the constitutional power to make appointments unilaterally. He then appointed three members—a controlling majority—of the five-member National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), as well as the first director of the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

Read more from this story HERE.

49% of Republicans Believe 2012 Election Was Stolen

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photo credit: charlesfettinger

Yes, we lost. But I don’t think it’s necessarily fair to say that ACORN stole the election, do you?

PPP’s first post election national poll finds that Republicans are taking the results pretty hard…and also declining in numbers.

49% of GOP voters nationally say they think that ACORN stole the election for President Obama. We found that 52% of Republicans thought that ACORN stole the 2008 election for Obama, so this is a modest decline, but perhaps smaller than might have been expected given that ACORN doesn’t exist anymore.

Some GOP voters are so unhappy with the outcome that they no longer care to be a part of the United States. 25% of Republicans say they would like their state to secede from the union compared to 56% who want to stay and 19% who aren’t sure.

One reason that such a high percentage of Republicans are holding what could be seen as extreme views is that their numbers are declining. Our final poll before the election, which hit the final outcome almost on the head, found 39% of voters identifying themselves as Democrats and 37% as Republicans. Since the election we’ve seen a 5 point increase in Democratic identification to 44%, and a 5 point decrease in Republican identification to 32%.

Read more from this story HERE.

New Lawsuit Claims Boy Scouts Failed to Stop Pedophile in Midwest

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CHICAGO – A former Boy Scout who says he was sexually assaulted when he was 10 by his now-imprisoned former troop leader sued the Boy Scouts of America on Tuesday, citing recently released files the group secretly maintained on suspected molesters in its ranks.

The lawsuit claims that the Boy Scouts allowed Thomas Hacker, a Scout leader barred from the group after a 1970s felony sex abuse conviction in Indiana, to rejoin as a volunteer in Illinois in the 1980s, and he went on to molest more boys, including the plaintiff.

Hacker was arrested in 1988 and convicted in 1989 of the aggravated sexual assault of an 11-year-old member of his troop in the southwest suburbs of Chicago.

Now 75, Hacker is serving two concurrent 50-year prison terms as a result of his conviction. His defense attorney in the 1989 case called him “a classic pedophile – and sick beyond that,” according to a Chicago Tribune story at the time.

The lawsuit filed Tuesday by a man identified only as John Doe claimed that Hacker sexually assaulted him when he was 10 years old — after Hacker re-joined the Scouts in Illinois.

Read more from this story HERE.

Video: Climate Nazis Claim Exxon ‘Hates Your Children’

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photo credit: qnr

Two liberal groups hope to gain momentum for ending taxpayer backing of fossil fuel production by making a very strong allegation about the nation’s largest oil company.

“Here at Exxon, we hate your children,” states a faux-Exxon official in a new ad from the groups Oil Change International and The Other 98%. “We all know the climate crisis will rip their world apart, but we don’t care, because it is making us rich.”

The groups are raising money to buy TV time for the 30-second video.

As the “executive” speaks, viewers see images of extreme weather, such as violent storms and wildfires, that scientists say climate change will intensify.

The ad buy is slated to begin next week, but the locations and scope will depend on the online fundraising campaign, said Steve Kretzmann, the executive director of Oil Change International.

Read more from this story HERE.

Looming Catastrophe: Syria Mixes Chemical Weapons to Bomb Civilians? (+video)

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Syrian forces have mixed chemical weapons and loaded them into bombs in preparation for possible use on President Bashar Assad’s own people, Fox News confirms.

A senior U.S. official told Fox News that bombs were loaded with components of sarin gas, a deadly nerve gas. Syrian forces have 60 days to use these bombs until the chemical mixture expires and has to be destroyed.

NBC News, which first reported this latest escalation in the Syrian civil war, cited sources saying bombs filled with a sarin component have not yet been loaded onto planes, but the Syrian military is prepared to use these chemical weapons against civilians pending orders from Assad.

The sarin could be delivered in several ways but is believed to have been placed in fracturable canisters that can be dropped from planes, according to a senior US military source.

“We think they have it in aerosol form,” the source told Fox News.

Read more from this story HERE.

Women’s Group: Obama’s Cabinet ‘Clearly’ Needs To Be 50-percent Female

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As President Barack Obama finalizes his second-term cabinet picks, the nation’s leading feminist group is pushing for more female appointments.

Currently, the president, who garnered 55 percent of the women’s vote on Election Day, has eight females in his 23-member cabinet. According the National Organization for Women, that number isn’t nearly high enough.

NOW president Terry O’Neill, in an interview with The Daily Caller, explained that she would like to see complete gender parity in Obama’s second-term cabinet.

“I think that if half of the cabinet were women and half of the Supreme Court and half of Congress were women, we would see a lot more policies for expanding education and health care and social services that allow communities to thrive,” O’Neill explained. “We’d see a lot less spending on military weapons systems, and we would also see a lot less of the most powerful, moneyed people not paying their fair share.”

While O’Neill said Obama’s inner circle needs more gender diversity, she praised the president for nominating women and minorities to other posts, joking that Obama doesn’t “need binders” to pick top females.

Read more from this story HERE.