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.

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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%.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Limbaugh Rips GOP Leadership: They Gave ‘A Seminar On How To Surrender’

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Rush Limbaugh took a moment on Wednesday to speak about the joint press conference held by the “so-called Republican leadership” — comprised of House Speaker John Boehner, House Majority Leader Eric Cantor and several others. Criticizing the party’s acquiescing on the issue of tax increases on the wealthy, Limbaugh said the Republicans have “conceded.”

“I don’t know why, but they were smiling,” Limbaugh said. “What we got today was a seminar on how to surrender. It was weak. The Republicans have conceded the language, they have conceded the silly notion of baseline budgeting.”

To his point about the language, Limbaugh said that now “deductions are loopholes,” which sets up the premise that 100 percent of income is subject to taxation. The bottom line: “All money is Washington’s.”

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Famous Fox News Faces ‘Get Dumped Off Air’

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If you’re used to watching Fox News, you may notice a lot less face time by political analysts Karl Rove and Dick Morris.

New York Magazine is reporting the top-rated cable-news network is doing some “post-election soul searching,” and Roger Ailes, head of Fox News, is changing the characters who appear as talking heads on the air.

“According to multiple Fox sources, Ailes has issued a new directive to his staff,” reports Gabriel Sherman of New York Magazine. “He wants the faces associated with the election off the air – for now. For Karl Rove and Dick Morris – a pair of pundits perhaps most closely aligned with Fox’s anti-Obama campaign – Ailes’s orders mean new rules.”

Among the reported new rules is a mandate from Fox News programming chief Bill Shine that producers receive permission before booking Rove or Morris for an appearance.

Both pundits were on the air in the immediate aftermath of last month’s election, “but their visibility on the network has dropped markedly,” wrote Sherman.

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Group-Home Staff Took Illiterate, Developmentally Disabled Resident to Vote

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Cecil Pearson is “shocked” his daughter voted for Barack Obama in November, but not for a typical reason: Darlene, Pearson’s daughter, is intellectually disabled and functionally illiterate, and lives with five other women in a group home operated by Easter Seals.

“We are here to support the individual’s rights and we help them exercise their rights as adults,” Jeff Smith, Easter Seals chief communication officer, told The Daily Caller.

“We we were providing the support for those individuals based on their community involvement and desires, and in this case their desire was to vote.”

In the state of North Carolina, Darlene can vote, marry and enter into contracts, despite a court ruling in 1995 declaring her incompetent.

“Its not my role to refute law or otherwise,” Smith told TheDC, “They are individuals and they have the same rights. … They were fully in their right to vote.”

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Video: Calif. Teachers Union Releases Cartoon Clip Featuring ‘The Rich’ Urinating on the Poor

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A new animated video released by the California Federation of Teachers shows the rich “1 percent” urinating on and stealing money from the less fortunate and middle class. The purpose of the video is to explain “economic inequality” and the need for wealthy people to pay their “fair share of taxes.”

The video argues that the rich got richer by evading taxes and using loopholes to hold onto their money. The union claims this is why Congress needs to repeal Bush-era tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans . . .

Here is how CFT summarizes its new cartoon video:

“Tax the rich: An animated fairy tale, is narrated by Ed Asner, with animation by award-winning artist Mike Konopacki, and written and directed by Fred Glass for the California Federation of Teachers. The 8 minute video shows how we arrived at this moment of poorly funded public services and widening economic inequality. Things go downhill in a happy and prosperous land after the rich decide they don’t want to pay taxes anymore. They tell the people that there is no alternative, but the people aren’t so sure. This land bears a startling resemblance to our land. After you watch this video, click here to share with friends, and send an email to your elected officials to let them know they need to restore higher federal tax rates on the wealthy so that we may once more enjoy properly funded public services.”

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