Vladimir Putin Calls On Russian Families to Have Three Children

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. . . Mr Putin lauded recent measures to give cash payments and other benefits to mothers having a second child. Current birth rates show an average of 1.7 children are born to each Russian woman, but the president urged a huge leap in family-building.

New payments for those having a third child would begin next year, he said. “Demographers affirm that choosing to have a second child is already a potential choice in favour of a third,” he added. “It’s important that families make that step… I am convinced that the norm in Russia should become a family with three children.”

To achieve that goal, he said, women needed to be provided with the opportunity to continue work, so that they “did not fear that having a second and third child would close the path to a career”.

Mr Putin has long equated Russia’s demographic decline over recent decades with a potential threat to security. On Wednesday, he added: “In order for Russia to be a strong and sovereign country, there must be more of us and we must be better in morality, in our competences, our work and our creativity.”

To applause, the president said there were already signs that Russia’s long term demographic decline was reversing, and the population had grown by 200,000 in the first nine months of this year. “The birth rate is at last above the mortality rate,” he said.

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U.S. Terror Agency To Tap Citizen Files

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photo credit: donkey hotey

Top U.S. intelligence officials gathered in the White House Situation Room in March to debate a controversial proposal. Counterterrorism officials wanted to create a government dragnet, sweeping up millions of records about U.S. citizens—even people suspected of no crime.

Not everyone was on board. “This is a sea change in the way that the government interacts with the general public,” Mary Ellen Callahan, chief privacy officer of the Department of Homeland Security, argued in the meeting, according to people familiar with the discussions.

A week later, the attorney general signed the changes into effect.

Through Freedom of Information Act requests and interviews with officials at numerous agencies, The Wall Street Journal has reconstructed the clash over the counterterrorism program within the administration of President Barack Obama. The debate was a confrontation between some who viewed it as a matter of efficiency—how long to keep data, for instance, or where it should be stored—and others who saw it as granting authority for unprecedented government surveillance of U.S. citizens.

The rules now allow the little-known National Counterterrorism Center to examine the government files of U.S. citizens for possible criminal behavior, even if there is no reason to suspect them. That is a departure from past practice, which barred the agency from storing information about ordinary Americans unless a person was a terror suspect or related to an investigation.

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Rand Paul Targets Paul Ryan for ‘Purge’ of House Conservatives

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Add Rep. Paul Ryan to the list of House Republican leaders under fire for removing conservatives from key congressional committees.

A fundraising email sent by Kentucky Republican Sen. Rand Paul urges supporters to sign a petition protesting the move, targeting the party’s 2012 vice presidential nominee and House Budget Committee chairman, as well as Speaker of the House John Boehner.

“The petition urges John Boehner and Paul Ryan to stop purging fiscal conservatives from committee assignments, and to reinstate the four already purged from their positions,” reads the message from RAND PAC, Rand Paul’s political action committee.

Rand Paul noted that “according to news reports, two of the congressmen were purged from the Budget Committee for voting for a five-year balanced budget plan — instead of Paul Ryan’s budget which balanced in 28 years.”

Michigan Republican Rep. Justin Amash and Kansas Republican Rep. Tim Huelskamp both voted against the Ryan budget in committee last year. As a result, the spending blueprint only cleared committee by a narrow 19-18 vote.

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The Evangelists’ Failure

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Somewhere in America this week, Protestant Christ followers will donate money to fund missionaries. The offering for the Lottie Moon fund will be collected. Mission to the World will get a check. The Foreign Mission Board will be funded and prayed for. The Salvation Army bell will be rung.

Around the nation, Evangelical America will, throughout the year, hear tales of their missions, missionaries, and their money at work drawing people in foreign lands and occasional parts of the United States to Christ. They will hear of using their money to rebuild churches and homes after disaster, to care for the homeless, and to fund retirements of past preachers of the Truth. They will get lists of where their missionaries are, some with the word “Sensitive” in place of the name of China or Syria or Cuba. They will pray.

On Monday morning, many in Evangelical America will get up and take their kids off to a church affiliated school, having chosen to remove their children from declining, failing, and secular government schools. Others will wake and teach their children themselves, sometimes combining with other parents to homeschool.

On Sunday morning, many curious new comers will probably go into a church not called a church lest it deter them, where they will experience a Christ who may or may not be as they seek the Christ who is and was when they were young and more open to receiving him The conversion of the flock is not as difficult when done at an early age when the mind is still open to the miraculous. “Truly, I say to you, whoever does not receive the kingdom of God like a child shall not enter it.”

What Evangelical America will most likely not do this week or this Sunday or any week or any Sunday is write a check to send a stranger’s child in a government school to a Christian school. This is one of the greatest failure of the evangelical church in the United States of America.

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Video: Conservative Commentator’s Top 10 Facts Proving Election Was Rigged

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Massive vote fraud throughout the United States? This commentator believes the evidence is overwhelming.

Please accept our sincere apologies as the Molotov video does not work on all browsers.

Republicans Have Failed the Nation

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photo credit: donkey hotey

Over the next couple of years, Barack Obama wants to raise the national debt to $18.9 trillion or so.

John Boehner, Mitch McConnell, and the congressional Republicans want to raise the national debt to $18.4 trillion or so.

The present leadership of the Republican Party has gone from making the case that government is the problem and the American people are the solution to making the case that Democratic controlled government is the problem and Republican controlled government is the solution.

By giving up on making the case that government is the problem and pivoting to “Democrats are the problem,” the Republican Party has failed the American people. Historically, when parties lost, their leadership went and hid for an appropriate amount of time under a rock after an acceptance of blame and a resignation.

The present Republican leaders in Washington, instead of hiding under a rock, have taken to standing on the rock and demanding conservatives self flagellate. Neither John Boehner nor Mitch McConnell are visionaries. They are survivors. They survive by recognizing the biggest threat to them and trying to befriend it or neutralize it.

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Senator’s Office Gone Wild: Sex Offenders, Hookers and Homeland Security

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photo credit: paul lowry

New Jersey Senator Bob Menendez, who allegedly often visits the Dominican Republic to have sex with underpaid hookers at “bunga bunga” style sex parties, employed a sex offender to work as an intern in his office on immigration policy throughout 2012. Zavaleta just so happens to be an illegal immigrant but the Department of Homeland Security instructed ICE agents to postpone deporting him until after Menendez’s reelection in November. You just can’t make this stuff up.

U.S. Sen. Robert Menendez employed as an unpaid intern in his Senate office an illegal immigrant who was a registered sex offender, now under arrest by immigration authorities, The Associated Press has learned.

The Homeland Security Department instructed federal agents not to arrest him until after Election Day, a U.S. official involved in the case told the AP.

Read more from this story HERE.

Jimmy Hoffa Warns Of ‘Civil War’ in Michigan (+video)

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(CNN) – Jimmy Hoffa, president of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, said Tuesday he expects Michigan unions and lawmakers to break out into “civil war” after the state legislature passed right-to-work bills that would weaken unions’ power.

“This is just the first round of a battle that’s going to divide this state. We’re going to have a civil war,” Hoffa said on CNN’s “Newsroom.”

The Republican-controlled state House passed two bills that had already been approved by the GOP-dominated state Senate. Gov. Rick Snyder, also a Republican, . . . sign[ed] the bill, which would allow workers at union-represented employers to forgo paying dues.

As thousands of protestors gathered at the state capitol on Tuesday, Hoffa called the legislation a “tremendous mistake” and “a monumental decision to make” by outgoing lawmakers in a lame duck session.

Watch interview:

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University of Iowa First to Offer ‘Transgender’ Option on Admissions Application

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IOWA CITY, Iowa – The University of Iowa has become the first public U.S. university to include optional questions about sexual orientation and gender identity on its application, a move hailed Wednesday by advocates hoping to improve the college experience for gays and lesbians.

University officials say the move sends a strong signal that they value the diversity that gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender students bring to campus. They say that knowing some students’ sexual orientation will allow them to track their enrollment and graduation rates and promote housing, student groups and programs that might improve their social and academic success.

“This is a question whose time had come,” university admissions director Michael Barron said.

Iowa’s decision was praised by Campus Pride, an advocacy group that has been lobbying colleges to ask the questions so schools can track the progress of LGBT students. Elmhurst College, a private liberal-arts school in suburban Chicago, became the first — and is still the only other — college to do so last year.

Iowa’s new application, which went into use Dec. 1, asks students whether they “identify with the LGBTQ Community.” The item is listed with other optional questions about topics such as their interest in military programs and fraternities and sororities. A second change added “transgender” as an option for an applicant’s gender.

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How Much Taxation Would it Take to Fund the Federal Budget?

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photo credit: marcus demery

To best understand this spending aspect of the current budget negotiations in Washington, we must answer one crucial question: how much taxation on the top income-earners would be required to fully fund the present level of government spending?

To do so, we must first make the unreasonable assumption that the rich will not respond to confiscatory tax rates and hide money from being taxed. This is unreasonable because no scheme of taxation since WW2 has been able to capture more than 21% of GDP. With current spending levels around 23% of GDP, history suggests that no level of taxation we have yet tried would actually fully fund our current level of spending. But if we indulged some “static scoring” and assumed a static tax base, what would a zero-deficit, soak-the-rich taxation scheme look like at current spending levels?

For example, what would a 100% income tax on all those who earn over $10 million amount to? I’m not taking about a wimpy marginal rate, where one might tax only those dollars of income over $10 million (leaving the taxpayer $10 million). No, I’m saying you find all those who made more than $10 million and take every last penny — an absolute tax of 100%.

Using 2009 data, the IRS says that 8,274 tax returns were filed with incomes over $10 million. The total amount of income on those returns was $240.1 billion.

Our federal government alone is spending more than $10 billion a day. Thus, a 100% confiscation of all income of those making more than $10 million would amount to less than 24 days of federal spending.

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