School Removed God Reference From First-Grader’s Poem

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photo credit: kevin dooley

An elementary school in North Carolina censored a first-grade student’s Veterans Day poem by removing a line that referenced her grandfather’s belief in God.

The West Marion Elementary School student was supposed to read the poem at a Nov. 8 Veterans Day ceremony to honor her grandfather, a Vietnam veteran.

The deleted line read: “He prayed to God for peace, he prayed to God for strength.”

An attorney for the Alliance Defending Freedom, which advocates for religious rights and freedoms, criticized the school’s decision.

“America’s public schools should encourage, not restrict, the constitutionally protected freedom of students to express their faith,” said Matt Sharp, legal counsel for the Alliance Defending Freedom, in a statement. “Students should not be censored when speaking about their faith or honoring those who valiantly served to protect our freedoms. … The censorship of this young student’s poem about her grandfathers is repugnant to the First Amendment rights of all students and sends an impermissible message of hostility towards religion.”

Read more from this story HERE.

Federal Appeals Court Likely to Invalidate Obama’s Recess Appointments

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President Barack Obama made headlines months ago when he installed controversial nominees to key government positions, bypassing the U.S. Senate by declaring the Senate in recess so that Senate confirmation was not needed. Today a federal appeals court signaled that it might rule Obama’s move unconstitutional, and remove those officials from power.

The U.S. Constitution says that Congress can by statute allow minor government players—“inferior officers”—to be appointed by the president, by Cabinet officers, or by the courts. But high-level administrative officials—called “principal officers”—must be nominated by the president, then confirmed by the U.S. Senate.

But the Senate isn’t always around; for part of each year, senators are back in their home states. So the Framers of the Constitution included the Recess Appointments Clause, allowing presidents to make temporary appointments during Senate recesses. Such appointments last until the end of the following calendar year, meaning appointments made in January 2012 last through December 2013.

Starting in December 2011, the U.S. Senate officially adjourned for only three days at a time—which the Constitution allows the Senate to do without going into recess—and did so specifically to prevent Obama from using his recess power. Democratic senators did this a few years ago to block George W. Bush from making recess appointments. Although it’s frustrating when the branches block each other, the reality is the Constitution allows it. And besides, this is just the political pushback to presidents using their recess power to get around the Senate in recent years.

But on Jan. 4, 2012, this president did something no president in American history ever attempted. Obama declared that the Senate was actually in recess because there were not enough senators physically present to do regular business, and thus that he had the constitutional power to make appointments unilaterally. He then appointed three members—a controlling majority—of the five-member National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), as well as the first director of the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

Read more from this story HERE.

49% of Republicans Believe 2012 Election Was Stolen

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photo credit: charlesfettinger

Yes, we lost. But I don’t think it’s necessarily fair to say that ACORN stole the election, do you?

PPP’s first post election national poll finds that Republicans are taking the results pretty hard…and also declining in numbers.

49% of GOP voters nationally say they think that ACORN stole the election for President Obama. We found that 52% of Republicans thought that ACORN stole the 2008 election for Obama, so this is a modest decline, but perhaps smaller than might have been expected given that ACORN doesn’t exist anymore.

Some GOP voters are so unhappy with the outcome that they no longer care to be a part of the United States. 25% of Republicans say they would like their state to secede from the union compared to 56% who want to stay and 19% who aren’t sure.

One reason that such a high percentage of Republicans are holding what could be seen as extreme views is that their numbers are declining. Our final poll before the election, which hit the final outcome almost on the head, found 39% of voters identifying themselves as Democrats and 37% as Republicans. Since the election we’ve seen a 5 point increase in Democratic identification to 44%, and a 5 point decrease in Republican identification to 32%.

Read more from this story HERE.

New Lawsuit Claims Boy Scouts Failed to Stop Pedophile in Midwest

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CHICAGO – A former Boy Scout who says he was sexually assaulted when he was 10 by his now-imprisoned former troop leader sued the Boy Scouts of America on Tuesday, citing recently released files the group secretly maintained on suspected molesters in its ranks.

The lawsuit claims that the Boy Scouts allowed Thomas Hacker, a Scout leader barred from the group after a 1970s felony sex abuse conviction in Indiana, to rejoin as a volunteer in Illinois in the 1980s, and he went on to molest more boys, including the plaintiff.

Hacker was arrested in 1988 and convicted in 1989 of the aggravated sexual assault of an 11-year-old member of his troop in the southwest suburbs of Chicago.

Now 75, Hacker is serving two concurrent 50-year prison terms as a result of his conviction. His defense attorney in the 1989 case called him “a classic pedophile – and sick beyond that,” according to a Chicago Tribune story at the time.

The lawsuit filed Tuesday by a man identified only as John Doe claimed that Hacker sexually assaulted him when he was 10 years old — after Hacker re-joined the Scouts in Illinois.

Read more from this story HERE.

Women’s Group: Obama’s Cabinet ‘Clearly’ Needs To Be 50-percent Female

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As President Barack Obama finalizes his second-term cabinet picks, the nation’s leading feminist group is pushing for more female appointments.

Currently, the president, who garnered 55 percent of the women’s vote on Election Day, has eight females in his 23-member cabinet. According the National Organization for Women, that number isn’t nearly high enough.

NOW president Terry O’Neill, in an interview with The Daily Caller, explained that she would like to see complete gender parity in Obama’s second-term cabinet.

“I think that if half of the cabinet were women and half of the Supreme Court and half of Congress were women, we would see a lot more policies for expanding education and health care and social services that allow communities to thrive,” O’Neill explained. “We’d see a lot less spending on military weapons systems, and we would also see a lot less of the most powerful, moneyed people not paying their fair share.”

While O’Neill said Obama’s inner circle needs more gender diversity, she praised the president for nominating women and minorities to other posts, joking that Obama doesn’t “need binders” to pick top females.

Read more from this story HERE.

Famous Fox News Faces ‘Get Dumped Off Air’

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If you’re used to watching Fox News, you may notice a lot less face time by political analysts Karl Rove and Dick Morris.

New York Magazine is reporting the top-rated cable-news network is doing some “post-election soul searching,” and Roger Ailes, head of Fox News, is changing the characters who appear as talking heads on the air.

“According to multiple Fox sources, Ailes has issued a new directive to his staff,” reports Gabriel Sherman of New York Magazine. “He wants the faces associated with the election off the air – for now. For Karl Rove and Dick Morris – a pair of pundits perhaps most closely aligned with Fox’s anti-Obama campaign – Ailes’s orders mean new rules.”

Among the reported new rules is a mandate from Fox News programming chief Bill Shine that producers receive permission before booking Rove or Morris for an appearance.

Both pundits were on the air in the immediate aftermath of last month’s election, “but their visibility on the network has dropped markedly,” wrote Sherman.

Read more from this story HERE.

Group-Home Staff Took Illiterate, Developmentally Disabled Resident to Vote

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Cecil Pearson is “shocked” his daughter voted for Barack Obama in November, but not for a typical reason: Darlene, Pearson’s daughter, is intellectually disabled and functionally illiterate, and lives with five other women in a group home operated by Easter Seals.

“We are here to support the individual’s rights and we help them exercise their rights as adults,” Jeff Smith, Easter Seals chief communication officer, told The Daily Caller.

“We we were providing the support for those individuals based on their community involvement and desires, and in this case their desire was to vote.”

In the state of North Carolina, Darlene can vote, marry and enter into contracts, despite a court ruling in 1995 declaring her incompetent.

“Its not my role to refute law or otherwise,” Smith told TheDC, “They are individuals and they have the same rights. … They were fully in their right to vote.”

Read more from this story HERE.

Purged Reps Speak Out: ‘Petty’ ‘Vindictive’ Establishment Punishing Members for Voting Conservative

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A day after learning he was yanked from from the Agriculture Committee, Kansas Rep. Tim Huelskamp lit into GOP leaders Tuesday, charging that conservative Republicans are punished for not toeing Speaker John Boehner’s line.

“No good deed goes unpunished,” Huelskamp said at a Heritage Foundation event. “We were not notified about what might occur but it confirms in my mind the deepest suspicions that most Americans have about Washington D.C: it’s petty, it’s vindictive, and if you have conservative principles you will be punished.”

Huelskamp spoke at the briefing with Rep. Justin Amash (R-Mich.), who was booted from the Budget Committee as part of a series of committee moves by Republican leaders that drew criticism from the right. Amash said he still hadn’t been contacted by leadership about what happened, and neither man has been told which committees they’ll be appointed to in the next Congress.

Huelskamp said that when the Republican freshman class of 2010 came in, they were told they had to fundraise for the party and notify leadership how they would vote but could otherwise “vote their conscience and their district.”

His removal, the congressman said, was “not about principle, it was about obedience.”

Read more from this story HERE.

Mark Levin “Goes Nuclear” on Boehner, DeMint Criticizes Him For Wanting to Destroy Jobs

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DeMint Criticizes Boehner’s Deficit-Cut Plan

By Kathleen Hunter and Richard Rubin. House Speaker John Boehner’s proposal to generate $800 billion in new revenue “will destroy American jobs” and Republicans should oppose it, Senator Jim DeMint of South Carolina said today.

The comments from DeMint, co-founder of the Senate’s anti- tax Tea Party caucus, represent a strong indictment of Boehner’s plan from a fellow Republican lawmaker and highlight a divide within the party. Boehner yesterday proposed a $2.2 trillion deficit-cutting proposal that seeks $800 billion in revenue in the next decade from an overhaul of the tax code that would curb some breaks.

“Speaker Boehner’s $800 billion tax hike will destroy American jobs and allow politicians in Washington to spend even more, while not reducing our $16 trillion debt by a single penny,” DeMint said in a statement. “Republicans must oppose tax increases and insist on real spending reductions that shrink the size of government and allow Americans to keep more of their hard-earned money.”

The remarks signify that Boehner will have to tamp down opposition from the anti-spending wing of his conference — and probably rely on some Democratic votes — to advance legislation to avert the so-called fiscal cliff through the House. Unless Congress acts, more than $600 billion in tax increases and spending reductions will begin in January.

“Is John Boehner prepared to bring this measure to a vote with the understanding that it will pass with a bipartisan majority? If he is, let’s press forward in negotiations,” the Senate’s second-ranking Democrat, Richard Durbin of Illinois, said today in an interview. “But if this is just a negotiation to win over the Tea Party Republicans, I am not very hopeful.” Read more from this story HERE.

Mark Levin Goes Nuclear on Boehner

By the Right Scoop. Mark Levin has had enough, saying that Huelskamp was elected by American citizens in his district who sent him there to vote the way he pledged to them he’d vote, and now Huelskamp is being treated like crap from Speaker Boehner because he’s not falling in line? Levin asks “who the hell does Speaker Boehner think he is?” Listen to the audio HERE.

Senate Democrats Want to Take Guns Away From Returning War Vets

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photo credit: jsmjr

A major defense-spending bill hit an unexpected bump on its journey through the U.S. Senate over an amendment on veterans’ gun rights, which devolved into a heated floor debate and foreshadows a potential battle over Democrats’ vows to tweak the filibuster rules in the clubby, traditionally collegial body.

Sen. Tom Coburn, Oklahoma Republican, wants veterans who have been deemed “mentally incompetent” to have their cases adjudicated by a judge — rather than the Department of Veterans Affairs, as happens currently — and argued that veterans who simply cannot support themselves financially are needlessly given the label and, as such, cannot buy or possess firearms.

“We’re not asking for anything big,” Mr. Coburn said Thursday evening on the Senate floor. “We’re just saying that if you’re going to take away the Second Amendment rights … they ought to have it adjudicated, rather than mandated by someone who’s unqualified to state that they should lose their rights.”

The late-night tussle served to pick at the scab of the ongoing debate over Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s bid to reform the chamber’s filibuster rules to place limits on the minority party’s ability to hold up debate on legislation, however.

Sen. Charles E. Schumer, New York Democrat, objected to Mr. Coburn’s proposal once he found out it was part of a package of amendments to the 2013 National Defense Authorization Act the body was to vote on.

Read more from this story HERE.