This video summarizes the events around the US today to memorialize 9-11:
This video is a collage of emotionally-charged images and audio from 9-11:
Finally, this controversial video from ReasonTV asks, “When Did Honoring the Dead Become an Occassion for Fleecing the Living?”:
“People are saying a lot of bad things and boycotting my restaurant,” Scott Van Duzer, 46, told POLITICO. “There’s no middle line anymore, and that’s exactly what’s wrong with our country right now.”
The owner of Big Apple Pizza & Pasta Restaurant in Fort Pierce, Fla., said that both Democrats and Republicans are welcome in his store. But he also said he thinks Mitt Romney’s running mate Rep. Paul Ryan — whose
sculpted abs are thanks to intense P90X training sessions — would lose to the president in a workout battle.
“I think Obama could take him,” Van Duzer said, laughing. “Obama looked pretty fast and pretty quick on his feet.”
So is Van Duzer. For a guy who biked 1,148 miles in 31 days from Florida to Washington D.C., lifting Obama was a piece of cake — err, a slice of pizza. And Van Duzer says he wasn’t even warmed up.
“I don’t work out that much, man. Usually, it’s about two days per week. The bike ride was my big thing,” Van Duzer said. “I’m starting to go back to the gym right now. I need to start maintaining.” Read more from this story HERE.
Here’s the video of the “hug”:
The ‘Killing Them Softly’ actor is protective of his fiancee Angelina Jolie, and the children they raise – Maddox, 11, Pax, nine, Zahara, seven, Shiloh, six, and four-year-old twins Knox and Vivienne – and feels owning a weapon is ‘in his DNA’ as an American.
He told the Daily Mail’s Live magazine: ‘America is a country founded on guns. It’s in our DNA. It’s very strange but I feel better having a gun. I really do. I don’t feel safe, I don’t feel the house is completely safe, if I don’t have one hidden somewhere.
‘That’s my thinking, right or wrong.’
Brad, 48, points out how he was exposed to guns from an early age but still turned out to be a responsible adult.
He added: ‘I got my first BB gun when I was in nursery school. I got my first shotgun by first grade, I had shot a handgun by third grade and I grew up in a pretty sane environment.’
Read more from this story HERE.
The California Senate passed a bill September 6 that would make it legal for non-physician medical professionals such as midwives to perform abortions under a statewide training program. The measure now awaits Democratic Governor Jerry Brown’s signature. (Gov. Brown pictured to the left of the state seal, Sen. Christine Kehoe to the right.)
According to LifeSiteNews.com, the bill (S.B. 623), introduced by Democratic State Senator Christine Kehoe, “extends a program run by the University of California at San Francisco [UCSF], in which nurse practitioners, midwives, and doctors’ assistants are trained to perform abortions without any further training in medicine. Kehoe argues the bill is necessary because there aren’t enough doctors performing abortions in California.”
The Sacramento Bee reported that the bill extends a UCSF program, begun in 2007, that “evaluates the safety and effectiveness of allowing certain non-doctor medical providers to provide abortions…. The goal is to increase access to the procedure in parts of the state where doctors are scarce.” Kehoe noted that the program is “an existing study that’s been extended several times, [and] this is an additional extension. Otherwise the study would cease at the end of this month and the practitioners participating in the city would no longer be able to perform this procedure.”
The Life Legal Defense Foundation (LLDF), a California-based pro-life group that has been pressuring the UCSF for its records on the controversial program, explained that the measure was hidden in an unrelated bill at the end of the state’s legislative session after previous attempts to pass it had failed. “This bill was originally created to regulate boat paint,” Dana Cody, LLDF’s executive director, said of the bill carrying the abortion measure. “Now it’s regulating and destroying human lives.”
The Bee noted that several Republican lawmakers criticized the bill, hidden in the boat paint measure, as a last-minute “gut and amend” bill. “I don’t understand the germaneness” of boat paint and training for abortions, confessed Republican State Senator Bob Dutton, one of the bill’s opponents. “I’m questioning whether this is even appropriate to be brought up.”
Read more from this story HERE.
Photo credit: US Department of Labor
In a report issued by the Department of Labor, the number of Americans counted as “not in the civilian labor force” in the month of August reached a record high figure of 88,921,000.
CNS News explains, “The Labor Department counts a person as not in the civilian labor force if they are at least 16 years old, are not in the military or an institution such as a prison, mental hospital or nursing home, and have not actively looked for a job in the last four weeks.”
Those considered by the Department of Labor to be “in the civilian labor force” meet the same characteristics but either have a job or have been actively pursuing a job in the last four weeks.
Between the month of July and August, 368,000 Americans dropped out of the labor force and did not look for a job. In August, there were 119,000 fewer Americans employed then there were in the month of July.
Read more from this story HERE.
The first homicide in the Disney-developed community of Celebration, Florida, grabbed headlines around the world. While the Walt Disney Company had largely divested control of its model town by Thanksgiving weekend 2010, when Matteo Patrick Giovanditto was found murdered in his condominium, Celebration was still widely seen as existing in a Disney bubble. With its picture-perfect streets, lined with homes fronted by porches, picket fences, and manicured lawns, Celebration is, by design, bathed in nostalgia, almost an extension of Disney World’s idealized Main Street U.S.A., which stretches out a few miles away.
Any murder would likely have pierced the bubble. But the lurid violence of the town’s first killing was especially shocking. Giovanditto, 58, was a retired teacher who had a longtime love of all things Disney; according to neighbors, he claimed to be counseling troubled youth. David-Israel Zenon Murillo, a 30-year-old transient who is currently awaiting trial on charges of first-degree murder, told police that Giovanditto approached him and offered him money to wash his Corvette. Murillo said Giovanditto gave him a beer and that Murillo then fell asleep, awaking to find Giovanditto “on top of me,” attempting to sexually assault him as he lay face down. Believing, because he felt groggy, that the beer had been laced with drugs, Murillo told police he became enraged. He said he discovered an ax in a closet, which he used to bludgeon Giovanditto three times before strangling him with a shoelace to ensure that he was dead.
I never met Giovanditto, but I know many people who were his students in the early 1980s. Giovanditto, always known as Mr. G at school, was raised in Boston. He began his teaching career at the now defunct Villa Oasis boarding school in Eloy, Ariz., in the 1970s. He relocated to Florida in 1981 and began teaching 7th- and 8th-grade social studies at Lehrman Day School, a private Jewish school in Miami Beach. From there he became headmaster at the Crossroads School, now the Kentwood Preparatory School, which was for kids with ADHD and was located in Davie, Fla.
I am a Miami Beach native, and several of my friends at Miami Beach Senior High came to the school from Lehrman, which went up to eighth grade. I remember hearing about Mr. G with a mixture of wonder and envy as they described a fun-filled—and toy-filled—classroom and weekend trips with their teacher to Disney World and the Everglades. Students who received top grades were invited to sleepovers at Mr. G’s house at the end of the semester and on outings to concerts, amusement parks, video arcades, and go-carting courses. Girls, however, were rarely part of these adventures.
One of my friends, Peter Klein, was Giovanditto’s student at Lehrman, and was later his faculty colleague at Crossroads: Klein, now a journalist, taught math and science at the school after graduating from college. He remembers Giovanditto as “a wonderful, inspiring teacher,” but says that as years passed, he was troubled when he looked back on the time and attention Giovanditto lavished on his students. “Once you become an adult and you’re in a role similar to his, I could never imagine anything close to the kinds of trips and relationships he had with kids,” he said. “And that made me uneasy.” Klein also wondered about his background, with Giovanditto’s fancy sports cars and frequent travel suggesting an income source beyond a private-school salary. Over the years, Klein was unable to find any information about Giovanditto online—strange, since Giovanditto was an early adopter to home computing. A couple of times, Klein also “checked the sex registry to see if he popped up.”
Read more from this story HERE.
A “terrible price” will be paid for the euro zone crisis eventually, whether the European Central Bank (ECB) embarks on mass bond purchases or not, Jim Rogers, investor and co-founder of the Quantum Fund with George Soros, told CNBC Monday.
Rogers said: “These guys have been saying the same old garbage for a long time. It’s not a game-changer – it’s good for the market for maybe a month. The debt keeps going higher and higher and eventually we’ll all going to pay a terrible price.”
He warned that the market rally, which many have seen as an opportunity to get back into riskier assets, would only be a short-term rebound.
“It’s not an opportunity to make money for me. This is not good for the market and it’s not going to last. Every three or four months they have a summit and they say: Ok guys, everything is ok now. The market goes up. But we’re getting a little tired of this and the market is getting a little tired of this,” Rogers argued.
There should be some opportunity to make money in the short term, Peter Toogood, director of investment, Old Broad Street Research, said. “There is a little window for risk trade – not a sustainable one, but there’s some stability to the short-term outlook,” he argued. He pointed out that ECB President Mario Draghi “has already been expanding the balance sheet through disguises.”
Read more from this story HERE.
Sheryl Harris, a voluble 52-year-old with a Virginia drawl, voted twice for George W. Bush. Raised Baptist, she is convinced — despite all evidence to the contrary — that President Barack Obama, a practicing Christian, is Muslim.
So in this year’s presidential election, will she support Mitt Romney? Not a chance.
“Romney’s going to help the upper class,” said Harris, who earns $28,000 a year as activities director of a Lynchburg senior center. “He doesn’t know everyday people, except maybe the person who cleans his house.”
She’ll vote for Obama, she said: “At least he wasn’t brought up filthy rich.”
White lower- and middle-income voters such as Harris are wild cards in this vituperative presidential campaign. With only a sliver of the electorate in play nationwide, they could be a deciding factor in two southern swing states, Virginia and North Carolina.
Read more from this story HERE.
Photo credit: storyvillegirl
Times are still tough in Bibb County. Some 20 percent of the residents live below the poverty line, and its public schools are among the lowest performing in the state. About half the kids don’t graduate from high school.
But the county has just embarked on a bold plan to have all its children fully bilingual — in English and Mandarin — by the time they graduate from high school. In recent weeks, children from pre-kindergarten through third grade began mandatory Mandarin classes, part of a curriculum that in three years will include middle school and high school students.
“Students who are in elementary school today, by 2050 they’ll be at the pinnacle of their career,” the school superintendent Romain Dallemand said in an interview that aired Saturday on NPR. “They will live in a world where China and India will have 50 percent of the world GDP. They will live in a world where, if they cannot function successfully in the Asian culture, they will pay a heavy price.”
The new curriculum has had some pushback, to say the least, and the word communism has often been raised. Jane Drennan, a deputy superintendent, told a TV station in Macon, the county seat, that she and other school officials had heard from many parents who said, “I don’t want my kid learning Chinese.”
Read more from this story HERE.
Photo credit: upyernoz
It’s happening fast.
Doing as the Soviets did in the 1980s, Iran’s been creating alliances with America’s enemies and setting up networks of Hezb’allah operatives in places along critical smuggling routes – such as Nicaragua. Last week, Israeli Radio reported a new Hezb’allah base for 30 terrorists in the country, financed by Iran. Any ideas what those bases are really there for?
Not only is Iran bringing its act to our hemisphere, it has advantages the Soviets never did: a wealthy reliable ally in Venezuela’s anti-American Hugo Chavez – who has allowed his country to become a narcotrafficking state and has given Hezb’allah another base of operations, as well as links to Mexico’s drug cartels, whose tentacles extend deep into the U.S. through our unguarded border aided by the Obama administration’s refusal to enforce immigration laws. Cartels are present in 1800 U.S. towns and cities, according to U.S. lawmen and Hezb’allah has made connection with the cartels. Today’s news shows that three Hezb’allah operatives were arrested in Merida, Mexico – a first, because Mexican authorities have long denied the presence of terrorists in their country.
Read more from this story HERE.