71% of Americans Believe Nation’s Founders Would Be Disappointed With US

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As the United States celebrates Independence Day, most of its adult residents continue to say they are proud to be an American, including 57% who are extremely proud and 28% who are very proud. This high level of pride in being an American has varied only moderately over the past 12 years since the question was first asked, but has been lower since 2005 than it was in the years prior…

Conservatives and Republicans are also slightly more likely to say they are proud than are liberals and Democrats…

Despite their widespread national pride, Americans evince a much more negative response when asked if the signers of the Declaration of Independence would be pleased or disappointed by the way the United States has turned out. Seventy-one percent of Americans say the signers would be disappointed, while 27% say they would be pleased.

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National Guard Troops and Staff to be Furloughed

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Photo Credit: APMore than 1,100 National Guard soldiers and airmen in Hawaii — and thousands in other states — will be living with 20 percent less pay over the next three months as the Defense Department carries out automatic federal budget cuts.

Guard members will be furloughed for one day a week starting Monday, so helicopter pilots and mechanics, pay and finance clerks and others who keep the guard operating will have eight hours less each week to do their jobs.

It’s not clear precisely what effects the unprecedented cuts will have. They could, however, make it more difficult for the guard to fly helicopters to help put out wildfires or rush to the scene of natural disasters in trucks.

“Our general sense is that short-term, it’s going to be a terrible hardship for those soldiers, airmen and their families. But if it goes on for any length of time, that may have a negative impact on our readiness and our ability to respond,” said Hawaii National Guard spokesman Lt. Col. Chuck Anthony.

The military’s furloughs were only supposed to involve civilians, but large numbers of National Guard members who wear Army and Air Force uniforms full-time will experience them as well. The National Guard added military technicians to the furlough list in May, after Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel gave official notice to begin furloughs for civilians.

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Liberal Nonprofit that Pressed IRS Commissioner to Target Conservatives Houses his Wife’s Group

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Photo Credit: Daily CallerThe progressive nonprofit organization Common Cause urged then-IRS commissioner Douglas Shulman to investigate activities of conservative donors despite housing the campaign-reform group that employs Shulman’s wife.

In 2012, Common Cause urged Shulman and fellow embattled IRS official Lois Lerner, director of the agency’s tax-exempt organizations division, to investigate the Koch Brothers’ attempted takeover of the libertarian think tank the Cato Institute.

“Common Cause respectfully requests that the Internal Revenue Service initiate an investigation into whether attempts by Charles G. Koch and David H. Koch, shareholders of the Cato Institute, to take control of and manipulate the Cato Institute for partisan political purposes expose a flaw in the Cato Institute’s structure that jeopardizes its tax exempt status under 26 U.S.C. 501(c)(3),” Common Cause president Bob Edgar wrote in a letter to Shulman and fellow IRS official Lois Lerner dated March 9, 2012.

Edgar, who died in April of this year, described “grave questions about whether the Kochs are exploiting Cato’s corporate structure to transform the Cato Institute from its longstanding, storied reputation as a nonpartisan, libertarian think tank into a partisan organization in contravention of its educative and charitable purpose.

“For these reasons, the Internal Revenue Service should open an investigation into the impact of the Kochs’ attempt to control the Cato Institute to advance their own political and economic interests, and whether Cato can maintain its charitable, tax-exempt status without changing its ownership structure,” Edgar wrote.

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Pro-Abortion Activists in Texas Threaten Lawmakers, Want Their Daughters Raped

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Photo Credit: National Review By Betsy Woodruff. Pro-life legislators in the Texas statehouse have faced threats and abuse from pro-choice protesters, prompting at least one to bring in extra volunteers to help with security.

State representative Jonathan Stickland tells NRO that being vocally pro-life has made him a target for abuse and threats from some of the pro-choice protesters in Austin. The night before state senator Wendy Davis’s filibuster, she requested that people send her stories about the importance of abortion rights that she could read during the filibuster. Stickland tells me that inspired him and a few other representatives from Tarrant County (part of which is in Davis’s senate district) to send in 84,160 pieces of blank pink and blue paper to represent the number of abortions in Texas last year.

“We delivered them to her office so that she could read the untold stories of all the kids who were aborted last year,” he says, adding that the gesture made him the target of intense vitriol, including thousands of tweets. Many were “very, very hostile,” he says.

“My favorite one was probably this female who said that she couldn’t wait to see Representative Stickland so that she could pummel my face in,” he tells me…

State senator Donna Cambell [has] received Facebook messages and e-mails saying, “I hope you’re raped” and “I hope your daughter’s raped”…Read more from this story HERE.

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Texas Committee Passes Bill to Ban Abortions at 20 Weeks

By Steven Ertelt. The House State Affairs Committee last night passed a pro-life bill to ban abortions in the state after 20 weeks of pregnancy and hold abortion facilities accountable for obeying health and safety laws.

The last attempt to pass the bill was halted in the state Senate with a pro-abortion filibuster but state Sen. Wendy Davis says she will not filibuster the bill a second time.

The bill would ban abortions after 20 weeks and hold abortion clinics accountable by making them meet basic health and safety standards that have closed facilities in other states that are unable to comply. The bill also requires all abortion clinics to meet the same health and safety regulations as an ambulatory surgical center, requires a doctor providing abortions to secure admitting privileges at a nearby hospital, and lastly, requires a doctor to personally administer the abortion-inducing drugs to the patient.

The hearing saw the halls packed with over 2,100 people wanting to testify on the bill — with most of them pro-life and supporting it. The final count on the bill was 3,543 who registered a position with the Texas government computer system — 2,181 supporting the bill and 1,335 against it.

“In terms of witnesses, the system has never seen overload like this,” said Rep. Helen Giddings, the vice chairwoman of the House State Affairs Committee. Read more from this story HERE.

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Pro-Abortion Mom Makes Child Hold “Stay Out of My Womb” Sign With F-Bomb

Photo Credit: Life News

Outrage: Immigrants Account For ALL Job Gains Since 2000, While Native-Born Americans’ Employment Has Fallen

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Photo Credit: APImmigrants — both legal and illegal — have accounted for all of the job gains in the U.S. labor market since 2000, according to a report that highlights the stiff competition for jobs in a tight economy as Congress debates adding more workers to the mix.

The Center for Immigration Studies report, which is being released Wednesday, says 22.4 million immigrants of working age held jobs at the beginning of this year, up 5.3 million over the total in 2000. But native-born workers with jobs dropped 1.3 million over that same period, from 114.8 million to 113.5 million.

Meanwhile, the number of Americans who aren’t in the labor force at all has jumped by almost 13 million to reach 48.6 million — a finding the report’s authors say signals profound changes in the American job market and challenges conventional wisdom that immigration is good for the economy.

“The last 13 years, or even the last five years, make clear that large-scale immigration can go hand-in-hand with weak job growth and declining rates of work among the native-born,” the authors, Steven A. Camarota and Karen Zeigler, say in their report. “Given the employment situation in the country, the dramatic increases in legal immigration contemplated by the Gang of Eight immigration bill seem out of touch with the realities of the U.S. labor market.”

Whether immigrants compete for jobs is a heated topic — though the Senate all but ignored it during the chamber’s debate on its bill to legalize most illegal immigrants and create opportunities for new immigrants and temporary workers to enter the U.S.

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Establishment Betrayal, Other Factors Leading Republicans to Abandon Party Label

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Photo Credit: legalinsurrectionThis week, The Frontier Lab published the results of months of research into why some Republicans are refusing to go by the label “Republican,” choosing to identify as anything but. I was the Research Director for this study, which applied a research approach called “Behavioral Event Modeling,” which essentially reverse engineers and maps all events that precede an individual’s disaffiliation…

The results were fascinating; after combining the flowcharts from individuals who share conservative or moderate views and no longer will use the label “Republican” to describe themselves, we ascertained four core patterns that they had in common:

1. Rejection of the “Lesser of Two Evils” argument;
2. Articulation of “Loss of Hope” in the GOP;
3. Affiliation with a new community, and
4. Incident of perceived betrayal by the GOP establishment.

…Disaffiliation from the Republican label is not only, or even primarily, a matter of philosophical differences. Rather, the perception of former Republican adherents that their party has personally attacked them, continued to present choices as a “lesser of two evils,” select candidates and principles unpalatable to voters to the point where they retain “no hope,” and failed to provide the sense of community that other outlets like talk radio and the Tea Party provide, reveal that ideology takes a back burner to what is essentially a hollow brand for those disaffiliating.

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IRS’s Lois Lerner Who Claimed She “Did Nothing Wrong,” Wants Full Immunity to Testify

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Photo Credit: APEmbattled IRS official Lois Lerner will not testify before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee unless she’s given immunity from prosecution, her lawyer told POLITICO Tuesday.

“They can obtain her testimony tomorrow by doing it the easy way … immunity,” William W. Taylor III said in a phone interview. “That’s the way to resolve all of this.”

The comments reflect the hard-line approach Lerner, the former head of the IRS division that scrutinized conservative groups, and her legal team are taking in defending her role in the agency’s scandal.

Taylor, a founding partner of Zuckerman Spaeder LLP, is even shrugging off the possibility that the full House might vote to hold Lerner in contempt.

“None of this matters,” he said. “I mean, nobody likes to be held in contempt of Congress, of course, but the real question is one that we’re fairly confident about, and I don’t think any district judge in the country would hold that she waived.”

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Arizona Schools Getting $465k Grant from Islamic Group With Muslim Brotherhood, Terror Ties

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Photo Credit: YouTubeLast week, the governing board of the Tucson Unified School District asked the school board to accept a $465,000 curriculum grant from the Qatar Foundation International, a global philanthropic organization with strong ties to the Muslim Brotherhood, the parent organization of the terrorist group Hamas.

The grant money is intended to implement “innovative curricula and teaching materials to be used in any Arabic language classroom,” reports the Arizona Daily Independent.

Two Tucson schools, Safford K-8 Magnet School and Cholla High Magnet School, will be the recipients of the infusion of the terror-infested cash, according to Tucson News Now.

About 100 students at Cholla High Magnet School are learning Arabic. At Safford K-8 Magnet School, 125 students are learning the language.

Last year’s grant for Arabic language from the Qatar Foundation was $55,000.

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House Republicans Launch Investigation Into Employer Mandate Delay

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Photo Credit: LifeNews

Photo Credit: LifeNews

House Republicans said Wednesday they are launching an investigation into the Obama administration’s decision to delay the “employer mandate” provision in the new health care law.

Members of the Energy and Commerce Committee argued the White House’s consultations with business leaders ahead of Tuesday’s announcement were conducted in secret and raise questions about the administration’s ability to carry out other facets of the Affordable Care Act.

“Just as the law was crafted out of sight from the American people, the administration is again taking care of some interests behind closed doors while struggling Americans are left to pay for the looming rate shock and grapple with the law’s complex mandates,” said committee Chairman Fred Upton, Michigan Republican.

The employer mandate required businesses with more than 50 workers to offer insurance to all full-time employees, or else pay a fine of $2,000 per worker. Business lobbied heavily against the mandate, and now it will not go into effect until after the 2014 mid-term elections.

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NSA Accused of Breaking More Rules to Spy on Citizens

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Photo Credit: WND

Photo Credit: WND

Much like some of the nation’s biggest gangsters have been taken down by the fine print – tax rules and the like – over the generations, it now appears that the National Security Agency’s massive spy-on-citizens scheme could unravel because officials reportedly failed to follow the rules.

The challenge is being raised by the Electronic Privacy Information Center, which started protesting the NSA surveillance plans a few weeks ago, and promises to renew the protest every week until something happens.

It points out that the NSA’s search and copy functions regarding Americans and their telephone or other records, “also constitutes a legislative rule that ‘substantively affects the public to a degree sufficient to implicate the policy interests animating notice-and-comment rulemaking.”

What that means is that the organization believes the Administrative Procedures Act requires the NSA to open up its surveillance strategy for a public comment period – before it legally could begin those search and copy functions.

“Accordingly, the NSA’s collection of domestic communications, absent the opportunity for public comment, is unlawful,” the letter to NSA chief Keith Alexander and Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel explains.

Read more from this story HERE.