The City That Offers Sharia-Compliant Loans to Muslim Business Owners

/4 Comments/in , /by

Photo Credit: Minnesota Public Radio / Jeffrey ThompsonInside the Karmel Square shopping mall in southwest Minneapolis, women wearing headscarves paint customers’ feet with henna. Others sell beaded caftans in narrow stalls. On the first floor, shopkeepers kneel toward Mecca to pray.

Somali entrepreneurs in the neighborhood have transformed an abandoned machinery warehouse into this bustling indoor bazaar. Karmel Square is one of several commercial districts they’ve revived in recent years with support from an unexpected ally: the city.

Since 2006, Minneapolis has loaned more than $1 million to Muslim business owners through a program that complies with sharia law, which prohibits Muslims from paying or earning interest in a financial transaction. The program, which is operated in partnership with the African Development Center, makes Minneapolis the only city in the country to offer Islamic financing at a time when states are trying to ban sharia from the courts. “Minneapolis is a very welcoming city,” says Kristin Guild, the city’s business development manager. “Because [Somali immigrants] wear headscarves, they are visible as entrepreneurs and people see that they are setting up businesses in our town and creating jobs.”

Minnesota is home to the country’s largest Somali community, which is predominantly Sunni Muslim. An estimated 32,000 people of Somali ancestry live in the state, and about one-third of them live in the Minneapolis-St. Paul metro area, according to the latest census figures.

In the past 10 years, North African immigrants have opened teashops, pharmacies, and child-care centers in southwest Minneapolis storefronts that were once boarded up. But many of these entrepreneurs struggled to grow their businesses because Islamic law forbids Muslims from earning or paying interest, known as riba. So they couldn’t take out loans or participate in the city’s low-interest financing program for small businesses.

Read more from this story HERE.

EPA Rule Could Ruin Fourth Of July

/1 Comment/in , /by

Photo Credit: Daily Caller While Americans get ready for the thousands of fireworks shows that will be occurring across the country this weekend, Republicans are warning that pending federal water regulations could ruin fireworks displays next year.

The Environmental Protection Agency is trying to expand its authority under the Clean Water Act. Republicans warn that the agency’s proposal to expand the definition of “waters of the United States” could allow the EPA to regulate bodies of water on private property.

Republicans are now warning that EPA water rules could threaten fireworks by allowing environmental activists to sue and shut down shows across the country.

“If the proposed ‘waters of the United States’ rule becomes final and serves as the eventual basis for future citizen suits against those who organize fireworks shows, we fear fewer homeowners, communities, or local organizations will be able to conduct fireworks displays as they have for decades or longer,” wrote Republican Senators, including David Vitter of Louisiana and John Barrasso of Wyoming, in a letter to the EPA.

Environmentalists have already been using litigation to stop fireworks shows from happening near or over federally protected waters. In Lake Tahoe, California environmentalists sued the city, alleging their fireworks show violated the Clean Water Act.

Read more from this story HERE.

Hillary Clinton Shows She Has No Idea What the Hobby Lobby Ruling Was About

/0 Comments/in , /by

Photo Credit: LifeNews Hillary Clinton is the clear frontrunner at this very early point in the 2016 presidential race and, after the midterm elections, the pro-life movement will undoubtedly bring up a laundry list of her pro-abortion actions and comments. Here is something that will undoubtedly be added to the list.

The potential presidential candidate proves in her response to the Supreme Court’s decision protecting Hobby Lobby from the Obama HHS mandate that she really has no fundamental understanding of what the case was about.

John McCormack of the Weekly Standard breaks it down:

On Monday evening, Hillary Clinton said that she found the Supreme Court’s ruling in the Hobby Lobby case “deeply disturbing.” Clinton added that “it’s very troubling that a salesclerk at Hobby Lobby who needs contraception, which is pretty expensive, is not going to get that service through her employer’s health care plan because her employer doesn’t think she should be using contraception.”

Contrary to Clinton’s assertion Hobby Lobby’s owner “doesn’t think [women] should be using contraception,” the family-owned business covers the entire cost of 16 out of 20 FDA-approved contraceptives under its insurance plan. The company’s owners simply objected to covering pills or devices that may cause the death of a human embryo.

Read more from this story HERE.

Facebook's Psychological Experiments Connected to Department of Defense Research on Civil Unrest

/2 Comments/in , /by

Photo Credit: SCG News There has been quite a bit of chatter this past week after it was revealed that a recent Facebook outage was the result of a psychological experiment that the company conducted on a portion of its users without their permission. The experiment, which was described in a paper published by Facebook, and UCSF, tested the contagion of emotions on social media by manipulating the content of personal feeds and measuring how this impacted user behavior.

Over 600,000 users were used as guinea pigs without their consent, which raises a number of serious ethical and legal questions (particularly due to the fact that this study received federal funding), however there is an even more disturbing angle to this story. It turns out that this research was connected to a Department of Defense project called the Minerva Initiative, which funds universities to model the dynamics, risks and tipping points for large-scale civil unrest across the world.

In the official credits for the study conducted by Facebook you’ll find Jeffrey T. Hancock from Cornell University. If you go to the Minerva initiative website you’ll find that Jeffery Hancock received funding from the Department of Defense for a study called “Cornell: Modeling Discourse and Social Dynamics in Authoritarian Regimes”. If you go to the project site for that study you’ll find a visualization program that models the spread of beliefs and disease.

Read more from this story HERE.

Critics Who Claim Voter ID Laws Are Racist Won’t Like the Results of This Study

/2 Comments/in , /by

Photo Credit: APIf there was a hidden agenda behind North Carolina’s voter ID law to suppress minority turnout – as the law’s opponents claim – it hasn’t worked, based on a study showing not only more voters overall, but an increase in black voter turnout especially, after the law’s implementation.

The findings came before a scheduled hearing next week where the U.S. Justice Department will ask a U.S. District Court for an injunction against the law going into the November midterms. The Obama administration has argued that such a law will make it more difficult for minorities to vote.

Comparing May 4, 2010 North Carolina primary election data with the May 14, 2014 primary data, the study found that voter turnout increased across the board, but particularly among black voters, where it increased by 29.5 percent, compared to an increase of white voter turnout of 13.7 percent. The findings were based on Census Bureau data and public names who signed the voter rolls.

Judicial Watch, a conservative watchdog group, commissioned the study and included the findings in an amicus brief for the July 7 hearing. Judicial Watch was joined in its legal brief by the Allied Educational Foundation and by former Buncombe County commissioner candidate Christina Kelley Gallegos-Merrill.

Read more from this story HERE.

This Standard Is One Reason the Price of Gas Will Increase

/0 Comments/in , /by

Photo Credit: Daily SIgnal Not thinking things through is a chronic problem with policy-makers in Washington. Superficial and easily sound-bite-able policies dominate the thoughtful-but-complex ones. For instance mandates for biofuel use would seem to be driven by basic supply and demand—more domestic fuel would lead to lower fuel prices for consumers. But the reality is more complex.

On June 26, the Congressional Budget Office released a study on the impacts of the Renewable Fuels Standard and found that, if unchanged, the RFS will increase gasoline prices by 13 to 26 cents per gallon and increase the price of diesel fuel by 30 to 51 cents per gallon by 2017. Part of the popular, bi-partisan and totally misguided Energy Independence and Security Act, the RFS promoted increased production of various forms of ethanol and biodiesel with a host of mandates and subsidies.

The failure of advanced biofuels—especially cellulosic ethanol—to meet targets,along with the constraints of blend walls and consumer rejection of E85 gasohol, would force the oil industry to pay fines for producing fuels consumers do want and take huge losses on forced production of fuels consumers don’t want.

The chart below, from the CBO report, illustrates how miserably the mandate-it-and-they-will-make-it energy policy is failing. Proponents assured Congress and the president that commercially viable production of cellulosic ethanol made from non-edible plant material was just around the corner. Not only were they wrong, but as we see from the chart, there is no end of the tunnel in sight.

Read more from this story HERE.

DEACE: GOP’s Other Mississippi Senator Finds Race-Baiting Other Republicans Funny

/3 Comments/in , /by

Photo Credit: Washington Times While many conservatives across the country are still fuming about the Obama/Alinsky race-baiting tactics the Republican Party establishment used to help K-Street corporatist puppet Thad Cochran win the Mississippi U.S. Senate runoff last week, the Magnolia State’s other GOP senator has a different reaction.

It turns out Sen. Roger Wicker finds this whole potential voter-fraud thing funny…

A post-runoff survey of Mississippi Republicans found 9 out of 10 McDaniel voters want potential voter fraud investigated, 79 percent of McDaniel voters would support him in the general if he ran as an independent, and 74 percent of McDaniel voters said they would support him as a write-in candidate. There is some precedent for write-in spoilers. Just ask the GOP establishment.

After my buddy Joe Miller won the Alaska Republican Senate primary fair and square in 2010, those sanctimoniously now crying “unity” did not hesitate to run establishment proxy Lisa Murkowski back then as a write-in candidate in the general.

By the way, last year Murkowski scored 36 percent on the FreedomWorks scorecard — the second-worst among Republicans in the U.S. Senate. For what it’s worth, Cochran wasn’t that far behind her, with a paltry 41 percent. Murkowski and Cochran each score poorly on the Heritage Foundation’s scorecard as well. Now you know why the corporatist wing of the GOP went scorched earth to keep each of them in power.

Read more from this story HERE.

New Allegations Point to Cochran Campaign in Mississippi Senate Vote Buying Scandal

/4 Comments/in , /by

Photo Credit: Red StateAn audio interview has surfaced in which the interviewee claims that he was to be paid by the Cochran camp to grease voters in the Mississippi GOP Senate runoff election. The audio interview, which coincides with a separate audio recording and batch of evidence produced by the newly launched GotNews.com, a project by Charles C. Johnson, alleges that the Cochran campaign conspired with a Mississippi Reverend to buy the votes of African American voters, who happen to be democrats.

Before I get into the weeds of what is in the audio interview and transcript, which are both below, let me set up the stage a bit. What is alleged to have occurred is illegal and very serious business. Under Mississippi law the alleged crimes could lead to Thad Cochran being removed from the Senate. Everything that follows comes from sources either on the ground in Mississippi, or those working closely with them.

Reverend Fielder has claimed to have evidence that would prove illegal activity took place in the Mississippi GOP Senate run off election. Furthermore, the evidence he claims he has would implicate the Barbour machine and a staffer to Cochran’s Senate campaign. The motivations of the Reverend are not those of a saint. As is made clear throughout the interview and in the transcript, this Reverend is looking to get paid to provide information, just as he sought to get paid to deliver votes by illegal means. Reverend Fielder claims that Cochran’s people were supposed to pay him approximately $15,000 for his efforts, but failed to do so after the incumbent Senator had achieved victory in the run off.

With all of that said, if the evidence is produced and validated, I don’t know how much longer Thad Cochran will be a Senator.

Read more from this story HERE.

Texas Gun Store’s Latest Sign Looks A Lot Like A Challenge To The Gun Control Crowd

/0 Comments/in , , /by

This week’s sign, which manages to pack in a Biblical scripture as well as a clever quip under it, is no exception. From our friends at Young Conservatives:

Read more from this story HERE.

11 Things You Didn’t Know You Could Buy With Food Stamps

/0 Comments/in , /by

Photo Credit: Joe Raedle / Getty ImagesFood stamps have become a major facet of the American system. And as the number of welfare recipients increases, so does the number of items that can be purchased with a food stamp Electronic Benefit Transfer (EBT) card.

Government assistant programs have been on a steady recipient incline for the last 50 years. For the FY 2013, a record number of Americans were receiving Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits. In 2008, 28.2 million Americans were on food stamps, and an additional 19.4 million have been added in the last five years. Today, 47 million Americans are on food stamps.

Over the past few years, EBT has been used for some “questionable” items. Here are 11 questionable items that you can (or will soon be able to) purchase with an EBT card.

Quesarito: Taco Bell is one of many fast food restaurants that accept EBT cards. Guacamole is extra? Who cares? It’s on the taxpayer.

Bail: Convicted felons – like drug dealer Kimball Clark – have reportedly used their EBT as bail money. Clark reportedly instructed someone to go to an ATM to withdraw money from his EBT for bail. Because it’s difficult to trace ATM abuse, many speculate this problem is more widespread and not just found in isolated incidents.

Read more from this story HERE.