A Memorial Day display featuring crosses to honor fallen soldiers was removed from public property in Georgia after someone questioned whether the soldiers were all Christian.
The 79 white, handmade crosses posted on public property along state Highway 92 in Hiram, Ga., were meant to represent the 79 Paulding County residents who died in America’s wars, according to town officials.
But the crosses were abruptly taken down last Friday after someone called Hiram City Hall questioning whether the cross is an appropriate symbol for the memorial.
Hiram Mayor Teresa Philyaw said the cross display, which she approved and planned, was never intended to be religious . . .
“We wanted to make sure that they weren’t forgotten. We also wanted their families to know that our hearts still bleed for them,” she said. “At the time, it never, ever crossed my mind about the religious factor in it.” (Read more from “Memorial Day Crosses Honoring Fallen Soldiers Removed From Public Property After Complaint” HERE)
https://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/WW2_Normandy_American_Cemetery_Rain.jpg10371600Joe Millerhttps://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.pngJoe Miller2016-05-25 21:47:062016-05-26 00:50:15Memorial Day Crosses Honoring Fallen Soldiers Removed From Public Property After Complaint
Leonardo DiCaprio once starred in Blood Diamond, a 2006 thriller that takes place during the Sierra Leone civil war in 1999. According to a synopsis on IMDB, “The film shows a country torn apart by the struggle between government soldiers and rebel forces. The film portrays many of the atrocities of that war …” Those atrocities were often committed in the fight over “blood diamonds” — precious stones whose mining and sales are used to fuel brutal conflicts.
While the Hollywood film reflects the real-life stories in the behind-closed-doors dealings of diamonds and minerals in war-torn areas, what it doesn’t portray are the deep-pocket corporations funding the front-door deals involving the extraction of those diamonds and precious minerals.
According to the Daily Caller, one of those corporations donated $100 million to the Clinton Foundation in 2007.
Richard Pollack writes, “When the Vancouver, Canada-based Lundin Group gave its $100 million commitment to the ‘Clinton Giustra Sustainable Growth Initiative,’ the company had long been cutting deals with warlords, Marxist rebels, military strongmen and dictatorships in the war-torn African countries of Congo, Sudan and Ethiopia.”
The accusations that a donor company was engaged in the often bloody business of precious metal excavation may be of no consequence to the Clinton Foundation, but with the foundation raking in millions from foreign governments, and now corporations with shady business dealings, those questionable donations are now of concern to others, including watchdog groups and humanitarian organizations.
Adolf Lundin, who founded the Lundin Group, reportedly secured mineral rights from the Congo’s brutal dictator Mobutu Sese Seko in 1996 by allegedly donating to Mobutu’s campaign fund, although Lundin reportedly denies it. And in 1997, Pollack writes, the Lundin Group reportedly cut a deal “with Congolese Marxist warlord Laurent Kabila, with a $50 million down payment toward $250 million they would give to the rebels in exchange for mining rights, according to U.N. Inspector Jason K. Stearns. Lundin eventually won majority rights to one of the country’s richest mineral veins.”
Watchdog and humanitarian groups, including Swedwatch, Christian Aid, Enough.org and Human Rights Watch, have all decried abuses for which they say the Lundin Group is responsible. They cite the jailing of journalists, large-scale relocations of entire villages to make way for mining, and starvation of refugees as evidence the mining firm cares more about its business dealings than with humanity as a whole.
The fact the Clinton Foundation received funds from Lundin Group even drew criticism from Washington. Rep. Joe Pitts (R-Pa.) who co-chairs the Tom Lantos Human Rights Commission, told the Daily Caller that “areas with high conflict over minerals are breeding grounds for human rights abuses on a massive scale, and when entities like the Clintons’ Foundation accept donations from these corrupt actors, they are sanctioning the exploitation.” (For more from the author of “Big Donor to Clinton Foundation Linked to ‘Blood Minerals'” please click HERE)
https://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/25976717375_c1d3b70fa1_b-1.jpg6831024Joe Millerhttps://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.pngJoe Miller2016-05-24 22:27:482016-05-25 02:28:12Big Donor to Clinton Foundation Linked to ‘Blood Minerals’
After finding out they were pregnant, Ben and Alyssa Reidhead thought they were going to the doctor to find out the sex of their baby . . .
At 23 weeks, doctors told them their son’s brain was growing outside of his skull . . .
However, when she delivered by C-section last week at Primary Children’s Hospital, the couple was shocked . . .
Their little boy Will has defied the odds.
“He’s not hooked up to anything. He’s breathing fine. He’s lifting his head. He’s moving around. He’s pretty much acting like a completely normal baby,” Alyssa Reidhead said. (Read more from “Infant Survives, Thrives After Being Born With No Skull on the Back of His Head” HERE)
https://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/Sleeping_baby_with_arm_extended.jpg28484272Joe Millerhttps://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.pngJoe Miller2016-05-24 21:13:212016-05-25 01:14:16Infant Survives, Thrives After Being Born With No Skull on the Back of His Head
In the midst of outcries from the transgender community that women don’t face threats in public bathrooms, police in England are looking for a man who allegedly took photos of a 13-year-old girl while she used the bathroom at a McDonalds in Berkshire.
According to police reports, while using the bathroom in an individual stall, the girl heard a click over her head, looked up and saw someone hovering over the cubicle wall. Police say the girl was very upset by the incident, and her family is concerned about what’s going to happen to the photographs and where they might be published.
Police have released photos of the suspect in hopes that someone will be able to identify him. They have asked anyone who recognizes the man to contact them immediately.
This incident has occurred at the same time that transgender activists in America are saying there are no threats to women should transgendered women (i.e., men) be allowed in their bathrooms. The LGBT lobby has been releasing ads in North Carolina that voice opposition to the state’s law requiring people to use public restrooms that match their biological sex. HB2, as the law is known, was designed to help protect the privacy and security of women.
North Carolina has been boycotted by companies and celebrities, who have called the privacy and security law discriminatory against transgender people. Most recently, Elton John wrote an article for The Hill, admonishing N.C. Governor Pat McCrory for being insensitive to transgender people.
Forcing transgender people to use the bathroom of a gender with which they don’t identify isn’t just inconvenient or impractical. For many, especially young students still grappling with their transition, it can be traumatic, and at worse, un safe. The failure of McCrory and other lawmakers to see this is a failure of compassion, a failure to recognize the difficult and frequently unwelcoming world transgender people must navigate every day, stigmatized by the fear and ignorance of others.
John says McCrory and others who oppose letting people use the bathroom according to their perceived, not actual, gender “need a lesson in compassion.” If only they could get to know transgender people on a personal level, they would understand, John says.
Those who support privacy and security laws “need to recognize the existence of trans people,” John writes, “and they need to acknowledge that all people have a fundamental desire — and a fundamental right — to be treated fairly.”
Here’s the thing. Does the 13-year-old girl in England have a fundamental right to privacy? Do all the girls in America who don’t want to shower with boys and men or have them in their bathrooms desire the fundamental right to privacy and security as well? Or do only the desires of mentally ill people, who suffer from a dissonance between their mental state and their physical reality, take precedence over 99.7 percent of the population who aren’t confused about their genitalia?
John and others say laws that require people to use public bathrooms that match their biological sex are somehow unfair. How? Everyone has a bathroom to use that correlates with their biology — the parts that are relevant when using a bathroom. There is no such thing as a third sex. Despite this fact, HB2 takes the compassionate step to accommodate those who are confused about their gender, allowing public agencies to create a third bathroom or shower for this tiny minority.
Clearly, the ones who are compassionate in this scenario are those who are supporting laws like HB2 — laws that won’t make it easier for perverts like the one in England to have free rein in women’s restrooms. Yes, this kind of thing obviously happens even with bathrooms being separated by sex, but what will happen if we throw open the doors to these perverts who make up a larger percentage of the population than transgender people?
Media outlets like the Charlotte Observer have tried to make the case that there have been no statistics of sexual predators benefiting from transgender bathroom policies, but this is nonsensical because the practice hasn’t been in effect for very long. It also flies in the face of common sense that there are predators out there — predators like the one in England — who do prey on women and young girls. Why do we want to put them at greater risk?
The law in Charlotte that forced the North Carolina General Assembly to step in and enact HB2 forced all organizations — public and private — to open their bathrooms to men. A man doesn’t have to dress like a woman or even have surgery to make him externally a woman; all he has to do is “identify as a woman” to use the showers, locker rooms, and restrooms reserved for women.
HB2 says that if someone has had an actual sex change and it’s recorded on their birth certificate, then they can use the bathroom that matches that sex. The original Charlotte law just threw open the bathrooms to everyone, whether they’ve actually had a change or not.
In addition, HB2 does not impose its will on private entities, allowing them to decide for themselves what they want to do with their own bathrooms. Those who oppose the North Carolina law want to dictate to private citizens what they can and cannot do with their bathrooms, threatening lawsuits if they don’t comply.
Elton John and other celebrities are presenting themselves as the truly “compassionate” ones, but this is hardly the case. Compassion extends to private entities that have the right to exercise freedom of choice — a choice people like John want to take away. Compassion also extends to women and girls who don’t want their privacy violated or boundaries removed so predators can take advantage of transgender policies.
I would also like to point out that when it comes to transgender people themselves, the compassionate approach is to refuse to accommodate their body dysphoria and delusions. The help they really need is psychological, not legal or political.
If you want to show transgender people compassion, stand by their side as they work through the difficult journey of treating hormone and neuro-chemical dysfunctions as well as psychological disorders that lead to a crisis of identity. Don’t put other people at risk, infringe on their freedoms, or violate the privacy of young girls and women just to advance a political agenda that really does nothing to help gender-confused people in the long run. That’s the opposite of compassion. That’s cruel. (For more from the author of “Ask This 13-Year-Old Girl If Transgender Bathrooms Pose a Threat” please click HERE)
https://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/14985289434_c3c94c88f4_o.jpg34565184Joe Millerhttps://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.pngJoe Miller2016-05-24 01:52:302016-05-24 01:52:30Ask This 13-Year-Old Girl If Transgender Bathrooms Pose a Threat
By David Martosko. Donald Trump’s latest effort to saddle Hillary Clinton with her husband’s sexual indiscretions hit Instagram like a bomb on Monday.
‘Is Hillary really protecting women?’ Trump tweeted, along with a link to a short video featuring the voices of two of Bill’s sexual-assault accusers, Juanita Broaddrick and Kathleen Willey.
The 15-second video also includes a reference to Clinton’s former White House intern paramour Monica Lewinsky, in the form of a stogie clenched between the former president’s teeth.
Independent Counsel Ken Star wrote in his bombshell report on the Clinton impeachment saga that the then-president sexually pleasured Lewinsky, then in her early twenties, with a cigar.
Broaddrick accused Clinton of raping her in a hotel room when he was the attorney general of Arkansas. Willey has charged that he groped and fondled her against her will in the Oval Office. (Read more from “Trump Slams Hillary Clinton for Not ‘Protecting Women’ in Video Featuring Voices of Bill’s Sex-Assault and Rape Accusers” HERE)
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Leftist Salon: Donald Trump Is Going to Win; This Is Why Hillary Clinton Can’t Defeat What Trump Represents
By Anis Shivani. The neofascist reaction, the force behind Trump, has come about because of the extreme disembeddedness of the economy from social relations. The neoliberal economy has become pure abstraction; as has the market, as has the state, there is no reality to any of these things the way we have classically understood them. Americans, like people everywhere rising up against neoliberal globalization (in Britain, for example, this takes the form of Brexit, or exit from the European Union), want a return of social relations, or embeddedness, to the economy.
The Trump alliance desires to remake the world in their own image, just as the class representing neoliberal globalization has insisted on doing so. The difference couldn’t be starker. Capitalism today is placeless, locationless, nameless, faceless, while Trump is talking about hauling corporations back to where they belong, in their home countries, fix them in place by means of rewards and retribution, like one handles a recalcitrant child.
Trump is a businessman, while Mitt Romney was a businessman too, yet I predict victory for the former while the latter obviously lost miserably. What is the difference? While Trump “builds” things (literal buildings), in places like Manhattan and Atlantic City, places one can recognize and identify with, and while Trump’s entire life has been orchestrated around building luxury and ostentatiousness, again things one can tangibly grasp and hold on to (the Trump steaks!), Romney is the personification of a placeless corporation, making his quarter billion dollars from consulting, i.e., representing economic abstraction at its purest, serving as a high priest of the transnational capitalist class.(Read more from “Donald Trump Is Going to Win: This Is Why Hillary Clinton Can’t Defeat What Trump Represents” HERE)
https://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/16678805005_028e7f98d3_b-2.jpg6831024Joe Millerhttps://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.pngJoe Miller2016-05-23 23:32:052016-05-24 01:31:49Trump Slams Hillary Clinton for Not ‘Protecting Women’ in Video Featuring Voices of Bill’s Sex-Assault and Rape Accusers
By Sarah Westwood. Veterans Affairs Secretary Robert McDonald on Monday compared the length of time veterans wait to receive health care at the VA to the length of time people wait for rides at Disneyland, and said his agency shouldn’t use wait times as a measure of success because Disney doesn’t either.
“When you got to Disney, do they measure the number of hours you wait in line? Or what’s important? What’s important is, what’s your satisfaction with the experience?” McDonald said Monday during a Christian Science Monitor breakfast with reporters. “And what I would like to move to, eventually, is that kind of measure.”
McDonald’s comments angered House Speaker Paul Ryan, who tweeted out Monday afternoon, “This is not make-believe, Mr. Secretary. Veterans have died waiting in those lines.”
This is not make-believe, Mr. Secretary. Veterans have died waiting in those lines. https://t.co/OxfT3AYzTi
McDonald faced questions at the breakfast about the VA’s lack of transparency surrounding how long veterans must wait to receive care at VA facilities around the country. The agency has weathered controversy over the past several years due to its struggle to provide timely care for many patients. (Read more from “VA Secretary: Disney Doesn’t Measure Wait Times, so Why Should VA?” HERE)
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Dying Vietnam Vet Asks for Final Meeting With Beloved Horses Outside Hospital
By Fox News. Vietnam veteran Roberto Gonzalez’s final wish was granted Saturday when he was reunited with his beloved horses — Ringo and Sugar — outside of a Texas VA hospital.
Gonzalez, of Premont, Texas, who was shot and paralyzed during the war, was wheeled outside the front doors of Audie Murphy Veterans Hospital in San Antonio where he was greeted by the horses he had raised for decades, mySA.com reported.
Gonzalez, who was one of the hospital’s first patients when it opened in 1974, had asked his family to see his horses one last time. The family passed along the request to hospital staff who gladly obliged. Ringo and Sugar then made the 150-mile trip to the hospital to see him.
“Horses are his life,” his wife, Rosario Gonzalez, told KABB. “We’ve been training and raising horses for 30, 40 years.”
The South Texas Veterans Health Care System posted a photo of the meeting on its Facebook page on Sunday, calling Gonzalez a great American and identifying him as one of the first patients at the hospital. (Read more from “Dying Vietnam Vet Asks for Final Meeting With Beloved Horses Outside Hospital” HERE)
https://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/SmallWorldTokyo.jpg8451126Joe Millerhttps://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.pngJoe Miller2016-05-23 22:27:372016-05-24 01:26:35VA Secretary: Disney Doesn’t Measure Wait Times, so Why Should VA?
Reps. Joe Kennedy III (D-Mass.) and Bobby Scott (D-Va.) introduced the Do No Harm Act Wednesday, which would amend the 1993 Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA) to specify that religious exceptions should not apply to “protections against discrimination or the promotion of equal opportunity” and “access to, information about, referrals for, provision of, or coverage for, any health care item or service.”
The legislation is intended to “clarify that no one can seek religious exemption from laws guaranteeing fundamental civil and legal rights.”
The bill emphasizes that RFRA should not be interpreted to “authorize an exemption from generally applicable law that imposes the religious views, habits, or practices of one party upon another” or authorize “an exemption from generally applicable law that imposes meaningful harm, including dignitary harm, on a third party.”
Kennedy claimed in announcing the bill that “the Religious Freedom Restoration Act has become a vehicle for those seeking to impose their beliefs on others or claim that the tenants of their faith justify discrimination.”
“The Do No Harm Act will restore the balance between our right to religious freedom and our promise of equal protection under law,” he argued. (Read more from “‘Do No Harm Act’ Would Forbid Christian Doctors Objections to ‘Any Healthcare’ Service” HERE)
https://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/pexels-photo.jpg36665500Joe Millerhttps://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.pngJoe Miller2016-05-23 22:17:242016-05-24 01:04:07‘Do No Harm Act’ Will Force Christian Doctors To Perform Sex Change Operations
First lady Michelle Obama joined with the Food and Drug Administration in announcing the first major change to food labeling requirements in over 20 years on Friday.
The significant changes include increasing the print size, requiring food producers to include “added sugar,” and adjusting the “serving size” listed “to better align with the amount consumers actually eat.”
The new labels will also include both “per serving” and “per package” calorie and nutrition information.
Further, companies are no longer required to place the amount of vitamin C or vitamin A, because deficiencies in either are very rare among Americans. However, vitamin D and potassium have been added to the nutrients that must be shown.
Michelle Obama and the FDA first rolled out the then proposed changes in 2014 as part of the first lady’s “Let’s Move” campaign, aimed at addressing health issues such as obesity and heart disease.
“Our guiding principle here is very simple: that you as a parent and a consumer should be able to walk into your local grocery store, pick up an item off the shelf, and be able to tell whether it’s good for your family,” Obama said at that time. “So this is a big deal, and it’s going to make a big difference for families all across this country.”
FDA Commissioner Robert Califf said in announcing the changes on Friday, “The updated label makes improvements to this valuable resource so consumers can make more informed food choices — one of the most important steps a person can take to reduce the risk of heart disease and obesity.”
“Manufacturers will have until July 26, 2018 to comply with the final requirements, and manufacturers with less than $10 million in annual food sales will have an additional year to make the changes,” the FDA stated in its release. (For more from the author of “Michelle Obama and FDA Announce Major Food Labeling Changes” please click HERE)
https://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/18864960511_7f3253f3f3_b.jpg6831024Joe Millerhttps://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.pngJoe Miller2016-05-22 23:10:232016-05-22 23:10:23Michelle Obama and FDA Announce Major Food Labeling Changes
We don’t know what Bill Clinton did or didn’t do in company with Jeffrey Epstein. But we certainly know what Epstein did and, almost as outrageously, what he got away with doing.
Some of the most shocking allegations against Epstein surfaced only after the conclusion of an FBI probe, in civil suits brought by his victims: for example, the claim that three 12-year-old French girls were delivered to him as a birthday present. But the feds did identify roughly 40 young women, most of them underage at the time, who described being lured to Epstein’s Palm Beach home on the pretense of giving a “massage” for money, then pressured into various sex acts, as well as the “Balkan sex slave” Epstein allegedly boasted of purchasing from her family when she was just 14. More recently, a big cash payment from Mail on Sunday coaxed one of Epstein’s main accusers out of anonymity to describe what she claims were her years as a teenage sex toy. This victim, Virginia Roberts, produced a photo of herself with Prince Andrew in 2001 and reported that Epstein paid her $15,000 to meet the prince. Then 17 years old, she claims that she was abused by Epstein and “loaned” to his friends from the age of 15.
Sex crimes of the kind Roberts alleges took place typically carry a term of 10 to 20 years in federal prison. Yet when all was said and done, Epstein served his scant year-plus-one-month in a private wing of the Palm Beach jail and was granted a 16-hour-per-day free pass to leave the premises for work . . .
It doesn’t help that the Democratic establishment seems to have played a role in getting Epstein a pass on child rape, that Bill Clinton already had rape accusations in his past or that the Clintons had become notorious for their willingness to do favors for criminals in exchange for money . . .
Social conservatives often get a bad rap. But there really is no limit to how low standards can fall when any trace of a moral code vanishes out the window. What did Bill Clinton actually do? Who knows. More importantly these days, who cares. (Read more from “Why Bill Clinton’s 26 Trips on the Lolita Express Child Rape Jet Matter” HERE)
Listen to the following radio commentary – starting at about 2 minutes – regarding Epstein and his apparent blackmail of US politicians:
For more on the Epstein sex scandals and the billionaire’s likely successful efforts to extort politicians, click HERE.
So this guy walks into an OB/GYN clinic and demands a gynecological exam. The doctor, a woman, takes one look at him and says, “That won’t work. You’re a man.” The man, however, “self identifies” as a woman and blasts the doctor for being a bigot. “I self identify as a woman,” he says. “And I demand to be treated as a woman, or I’ll call my civil rights lawyer.”
The doctor, not wanting to be called a bigot, proceeds to give the man a fake gynecological exam, playing into his delusional distortions about his own biology and arguably worsening his mental disconnect with his physical self.
This is what transgenderism and “biological subjectivism” has come to in America today… a politically correct demand that everyone agree to participate in the mental distortions of a few individuals who suffer from a psychological disconnect from their biological realities. Such ideologies stand in complete contradiction to the known science on biology and physical reality, and sadly, this mental distortion is now being thrust onto children as part of a sick, demented political agenda to appease the most lunatic fringe elements of the political spectrum.
That agenda now demands that public schools be turned into transgender child factories, churning out confused, suicidal children who are physically and chemically mutilated by a society that applauds them for denying their biological reality. This entire agenda, now being waged against the children of America by politically motivated cultural arsonists, is nothing less than a crime against children . . .
“Human sexuality is an objective biological binary trait,” explains the American College of Pediatricians. “The American College of Pediatricians urges educators and legislators to reject all policies that condition children to accept as normal a life of chemical and surgical impersonation of the opposite sex. Facts – not ideology – determine reality.” (Read more from “The Transgender Programming of Children Is Child Abuse, Warns the American College of Pediatricians” HERE)
https://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/download.jpg168300Joe Millerhttps://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.pngJoe Miller2016-05-21 23:03:142016-05-21 23:14:32The Transgender Programming of Children Is Child Abuse, Warns the American College of Pediatricians