Pope On Gay Marriage: ‘People Dispute the Idea That They Have a Nature’

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VATICAN CITY (AP) — The pope pressed his opposition to gay marriage Friday, denouncing what he described as people eschewing their God-given gender identities to suit their sexual choices — and destroying the very “essence of the human creature” in the process.

Benedict XVI made the comments in his annual Christmas address to the Vatican bureaucracy, one of his most important speeches of the year. He dedicated it this year to promoting traditional family values in the face of gains by same-sex marriage proponents in the U.S. and Europe and efforts to legalize gay marriage in places like France and Britain.

In his remarks, Benedict quoted the chief rabbi of France, Gilles Bernheim, in saying the campaign for granting gays the right to marry and adopt children was an “attack” on the traditional family made up of a father, mother and children.

“People dispute the idea that they have a nature, given to them by their bodily identity, that serves as a defining element of the human being,” he said. “They deny their nature and decide that it is not something previously given to them, but that they make it for themselves.”

“The manipulation of nature, which we deplore today where our environment is concerned, now becomes man’s fundamental choice where he himself is concerned,” he said.

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Electors Doubt Obama’s Eligibility

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Some of the electors assigned by their states to cast the official votes for president of the United States are expressing doubts about Barack Obama’s eligibility.

Capitol Media Services reported that three of Arizona’s 11 Republican Electoral College electors who cast their ballots for Mitt Romney expressed concern that Obama didn’t meet the Constitution’s “natural born citizen” requirement.

“I’m not satisfied with what I’ve seen,” Tom Morrissey, chairman of the Arizona GOP said. “I think for somebody in the president’s position to not have produced a document looks more legitimate, I have a problem with that.”

The actual vote for president is not the popular vote that was held Nov. 6, but the Electoral College vote in state capitals. States are given one Electoral College vote for each member of Congress, and they vote, depending on varying state laws, for the candidates their state residents choose by popular vote.

The doubt about Obama’s eligibility arose before his first election. His father never was a U.S. citizen, and many contend that alone makes him ineligible. At the time of the nation’s founding, a “natural born citizen” likely was considered to be the offspring of two U.S. citizens.

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House Republicans Circulate Plan to Oust Boehner from Speakership

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Several conservative House Republican members are contemplating a plan to unseat Speaker John Boehner from his position on January 3, Breitbart News has exclusively learned. Staffers have compiled a detailed action plan that, if executed, could make this a reality.

The Republicans, both conservatives and more establishment members alike, are emboldened after the failure of Boehner’s fiscal cliff “Plan B” on Thursday evening. Dissatisfaction with Boehner is growing in the House Republican conference, but until now there hasn’t been a clear path forward.

Those members and staffers requested anonymity from Breitbart News at this time to prevent retaliation from Boehner similar to what happened to those four members who were purged from their powerful committee assignments a few weeks ago. Their expressed concern is that if Boehner knew who they were, his adverse reaction toward them would be much more brutal than losing committee assignments, such as a primary challenge in 2014 by a leadership-sponsored candidate.

The circulated plan is a comprehensive multi-step process.

According to the plan as drafted, the first step is to re-establish the election of the Speaker of the House by secret ballot, rather than by a public roll call vote. That’s because the members who would oppose Boehner, if there ended up not being enough votes to achieve their desired result or if Boehner scared via threat or coaxed via prize some of the opposition into voting for him, would be sitting ducks for retaliation in the near future.

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Ten Year Old Boy With Terminal Cancer Sworn In to Army

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A ten-year-old boy with terminal cancer received the surprise of his young life this week when his dreams of becoming a U.S. soldier came true.

Khalil Quarles, from Baltimore, had longed to enlist in the army for years before an aggressive form of soft tissue cancer attacked his leg and spread to his lungs in 2011.

And so as a special surprise, troops from the 200th Military Command out of Fort Meade paid him a visit on Wednesday to make the boy an honorary serviceman in the United States Army.

Khalil wore a look of awe and shock as he pledged his allegiance. Earlier in the day, while Skyping with a soldier stationed in Kuwait, he had thought things couldn’t get better.

But as he hobbled outside on his crutches and saw the crowd assembled on his front lawn, the dreams of this little boy with an incurable disease in that moment came true.

The boy’s mother, Cypress Mason told WBal TV of his long battle against the cancer and the multiple rounds of surgery, chemotherapy and radiation he had endured. ‘We decided to just stop the treatment so that Khalil could have the best quality of life that’s possible, being a 10-year-old child, to get to enjoy his life,’ she said.

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Video: Santa Distributes Needles, Condoms in NYC

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A Bronx health clinic is promoting its services with a new video featuring Santa Claus distributing free needles and condoms.

CitiWide Harm Reduction (CitiWide) posted the video, titled “Santa Passes Out Clean Needles for Christmas,” on its website for the holiday season.

The video features not only Santa, but also clinic workers dressed like elves dancing to José Feliciano’s “Feliz Navidad” with various needles, drug kits and condoms.

CitiWide is a needle-exchange program that offers drug users clean needles and other products to help combat HIV and hepatitis C.

Read more from this story HERE.

Herman Cain: The New York Times is Racist

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Former Republican presidential candidate Herman Cain came out swinging Friday against a New York Times op-ed that claims Republicans strategically use black politicians to “undermine black interests.” The Wednesday op-ed specifically dismisses South Carolina Republican Rep. Tim Scott, who will soon join the Senate, as one of the Republicans’ “cynical tokens.”

Cain declared the New York Times a “racist newspaper” for running the column, which was penned by University of Pennsylvania political science professor Adolph Reed Jr. and titled “The Puzzle of Black Republicans.”

“Any newspaper that would publish a piece denigrating blacks as needing the benevolence of big government in order to serve their interests is obviously racist and deserves widespread censure for making such an insensitive and racially biased editorial decision,” Cain wrote at his website, CainTV.

In the op-ed, Reed argues black Republicans are “tokens” meant primarily not to attract blacks to the GOP, but to allow whites to vote Republican without feeling racist. He further claims that politicians like Scott — with “little that connects these men to mainstream black politics or to the country’s first two black senators” — are used to actually “undermine black interests.”

“The trope of the black conservative has retained a man-bites-dog newsworthiness that is long past its shelf life. Clichés about fallen barriers are increasingly meaningless; symbols don’t make for coherent policies,” Reed added. “Republicans will not gain significant black support unless they take policy positions that advance black interests. No number of Tim Scotts — or other cynical tokens — will change that.”

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Barney Frank on Balancing the Budget: ‘I Don’t Think Balance is Logical’

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(CNSNews.com) — Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.) does not think it is “logical” to achieve a balanced federal budget “from the standpoint of a whole economy” because the relationship between budget and government is different from that of budget and individual.

At the U.S. Capitol on Thursday, CNSNews.com asked Frank about the “fiscal cliff” talks between President Barack Obama and House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio): “During these ongoing negotiations would you like to see an attempt to balance the federal budget? And if so,in what year?”

Frank said, “I don’t think balance is logical from the standpoint of a whole economy. One of the problems with balancing the budget, if you’re talking about a private individual you get credit for the things you report and that you own, your assets. The federal government has enormous assets. We have buildings and roads and ships.”

“So I think that you ought to be able to get to a point, 7 or 8 years from now, where in a good economic year you can hit a balance,” he said. “It’s important to reduce the deficit but the analogy between an individual entity and the federal government makes no sense.”

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Satire: Obama calls Canadian Prime Minister Harper a “large lump”

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Diplomatic tensions rose today after a Fox News camera caught President Barack Obama talking to one of his press aides and making some very undiplomatic comments about Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper after the two met briefly at a Washington international benefit event.

As Obama and Media Relations Director Clive Leonard walked away from reporters, the Fox newsfeed clearly picked up the conversation.

LEONARD: “The Prime Minister is requesting a 15-minute meeting Mr. President.”
OBAMA: “What’s with that guy?”
LEONARD: “Sir?” (coughs)
OBAMA: “He’s shifty…he’s never standing where his voice seems to be coming from.”
LEONARD: “Ummm…”
OBAMA: “And he’s a large lump isn’t he? All pudge and hair.”

The comments were aired after a one-second tape delay before Fox News began repeating them in their entirety with added commentary. White House officials immediately asked Fox to stop airing the embarrassing comments but the network’s leading political commentator Bill O’Reilly responded to the request live on air with “Yeah right!”

Other news outlets quickly began running the footage with CNN’s Wolf Blitzer (not his real name) stating that the President’s harsh words were “school-yard” and could damage relations between the two countries at a time when cross-border issues such as the Keystone Pipeline are already causing friction. However, Wolf could be seen snickering when Obama was shown saying Harper is all pudge and hair.

Read more from this satirical story HERE.

Don’t Place Scientists on a Moral Pedestal, They’re People Too

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In our culture, we idolize scientists. Often John Q. Public fails to question what scientists are doing or the money they ask for because there is the assumption that scientists are altruistic. Even more often, anyone who does question the ethics of the research or the public policy that provides money to ethically-suspect research is labeled “anti-science.”

We have no problem believing that CEOs or bankers would commit fraud, but put on a white coat and that becomes a difficult sell. Venerating scientists like they are rock stars, doesn’t help.

And yet fraud in the scientific community is a problem. The Scientist outlines the “Top Science Scandals of 2012.” A fascinating read filled with made-up data and fictional patients. One Japanese scientist fabricated data in 172 papers over his career. A particularly clever fraud perpetrated by scientists, was to refer journal editors back to themselves for reviews of their papers:

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UN General Assembly Targets Israel with 22 out of 26 Resolutions in 2012

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By the end of this week the current 2012 UNGA session will have adopted 22 country-specific resolutions targeting Israel – and only four on the rest of the world combined, one each for Syria, Iran, North Korea and Burma, according to UN Watch.

On Tuesday alone The U.N. General Assembly adopted nine resolutions on ”Palestinian rights and the Golan,” sharply criticizing Israel yet making no mention of Sunday’s massacre of Palestinian Arabs by Syrian warplanes firing missiles into a mosque in a refugee camp near Damascus.

On the UN Watch’s website Hillel Neuer, executive director of UN Watch, underscored the absurdity of the resolution tally. “The U.N.’s disproportionate assault against the Jewish state undermines the credibility of what is supposed to be an impartial and respected international body, and exposes the sores of politicization and selectivity that eat away at its founding mission, eroding the U.N. Charter promise of equal treatment to all nations large and small,” he said.

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