University Allegedly Kicks Christian Club Off Campus Over ‘Non-Discrimination Policy’

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Photo Credit: Asian InterVarsity/Todd StarnesClashes between Christian clubs and college campuses have been heating up across the country, with numerous schools telling evangelical groups that they cannot require their members and leaders be believers. The latest debate is erupting at the University of Michigan, where the college is being accused of booting an InterVarsity Christian Fellowship chapter off campus for requiring its leaders to be Christians.

According to Greg Jao, InterVarsity’s field director, the university gave the Asian chapter of the group two options — either reverse its constitution to be in compliance or leave campus. The problem apparently began last December when group members were brought before officials to discuss a problematic part of the Asian InterVarsity group’s constitution. The document required club leaders to sign a statement affirming their Christian faith — something the university said was a violation of its non-discrimination policy.

While students were given an option to submit a new constitution that complied with these rules, they decided to refrain from doing so and to stick with their values. From a practical standpoint, it is understandable why a faith-based club would want its leaders to share theological values, something that a statement of faith would ensure.

“The university is sending the message that religious voices are suspect and should be marginalized,” Jao told Fox News’ Todd Starnes. “I think it sends the message that the university does not understand the nature of religious beliefs and the convictions of religious students.”

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Karl Rove Declares War On Tea Party

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The battle for the heart and soul of the Republican Party has begun. On one side is the Tea Party. On the other side stand Karl Rove and his establishment team, posing as tacticians while quietly undermining conservatism.

Yesterday, the New York Times reported that the “biggest donors in the Republican Party” have joined forces with Karl Rove and Steven J. Law, president of American Crossroads, to create the Conservative Victory Project. The Times reports that this new group will dedicate itself to “recruit seasoned candidates and protect Senate incumbents from challenges by far-right conservatives and Tea Party enthusiasts who Republican leaders worry could complicate the party’s effort to win control of the Senate.” The group points to candidates like Christine O’Donnell in Delaware and Richard Mourdock in Indiana as examples of Tea Party primary picks going sideways in major Senatorial battles.

But it is American Crossroads and its ilk that have run the GOP into the ground. Spending millions of dollars on useless 30,000-ft. advertising campaigns during the last election cycle, training candidates to soften conservatism in order to appeal to “moderates,” blowing up the federal budget under George W. Bush as a bipartisan tactic – all of those strategies led the party to a disastrous defeat in 2012. The Tea Party, which may nominate losers from time to time, also brought the Republicans their historic 2010 Congressional victory. If Tea Party candidates lose, it’s because they weren’t good candidates; if GOP establishment candidates lose, it’s because they weren’t good conservatives. The choice for actual conservatives should be easy.

But it isn’t. The Bush insider team that helped lead to the rise of Barack Obama insists that they, and only they, know the path to victory.

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Sign Of The Times: Congressional Appropriations Assignments Are No Longer Coveted

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As the story goes, when President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1942 asked Sen. Kenneth McKellar, then the ranking member of the Appropriations Committee, to quietly provide $2 billion for a secret weapons lab, the Tennessee Democrat had a brief and quick response.

“Mr. President, I have just one question. Where in Tennessee do you want me to hide it?” McKellar said, according to congressional lore about Tennessee’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory, a key part of the Manhattan Project.

It was just one instance among countless cases on Capitol Hill where appropriators — the lawmakers who hold the prized positions closest to the federal purse — found a pressing national priority fitting in neatly with local interests for economic development and the jobs that come with it.

From the funds longtime appropriator John P. Murtha, a Democrat, funneled to his hometown of Johnstown, Pa., by locating the National Drug Intelligence Center there to the federal dollars Harold Rogers, a Republican and now the House Appropriations chairman, steered toward the anti-drug nonprofit Operation Unite, which he helped found in his southern Kentucky district, the appropriations story has been one of political clout executed through the federal spending process.

That’s why legislators such as McKellar and Murtha would have been shocked at the decision Sen. Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio, made at the start of the 113th Congress, when he gave up the chance to move up the seniority ladder on Appropriations for a seat on the tax-writing Finance Committee.

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Lawsuit Forces Chicago To Accept Anti-Jihad Bus Ads

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Photo Credit: AP Photo/Kiichiro SatoThe Chicago Transit Authority has agreed to display plain-spoken anti-jihad ads on city buses, following a lawsuit by the American Freedom Law Center.

City officials initially rejected the American Freedom Defense Initiative’s anti-jihad ads, even after the city accepted bus ads that advertized a sanitized portrayal of jihad as exercise and education rather than warfare. The ads will be attached to 20 buses for $10,000.

Each ad includes a tagline “That’s his Jihad. What’s yours?”

The tagline is a direct response to a series of bus ads posted by a group of people affiliated with the Council on American-Islamic Relations.

Their December 2012 “MyJihad” public-relations campaign portrays Islamic war — jihad — as a peaceful exercise.

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NRA Chief: Public Cannot ‘Trust’ White House On Gun Control

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Photo Credit: DUCKofD3ATHThe head of the National Rifle Association (NRA) said Sunday the public should not trust the White House to pursue limited changes to gun-control laws.

Wayne LaPierre, chief executive of the NRA, accused the Obama administration of wanting to seek more restrictions on guns than they currently are saying, arguing that the White House was similarly deceptive on the president’s healthcare law.

“I think what they’ll do is they’ll turn this universal [background] check on the law-abiding into a universal registry on law-abiding people,” he said on “Fox News Sunday.”

When pressed by host Chris Wallace on the fact that the White House has said nothing about a universal registry, LaPierre responded, “And ‘ObamaCare’ wasn’t a tax until they needed it to be a tax. I don’t think you can trust these people.”

LaPierre was referring to the administration arguing the healthcare law amounts to a tax before the Supreme Court — an argument the high court agreed with in upholding the individual-mandate portion of the law as a valid use of taxing power.

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Second Amendment Takes Center Stage as Conservatives Rally Around the Republic

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Photo Credit: Fox NewsCONCORD, N.H. – An immigration debate is raging and a budget crisis looms in Congress, but the conservative activists gathered outside the New Hampshire Statehouse had just one thing on their minds: guns.

“The Second Amendment is there to protect us from losing the rest of them,” said Adam Brisebois, 34, of Hudson, who cradled his 3-year-old daughter on his right shoulder and a rifle on the left. “If we don’t fight, we’ll lose our rights.”

Thursday’s rally, organized by tea party leaders, drew nearly 500 people, many of them waving signs and carrying loaded weapons, to the state capital. Conservative leaders elsewhere report a wave of similar protests as grass-roots activists from Florida to Colorado seize on a new rallying cry for a tea party movement, which is trying to recover from a painful 2012 election season.

Many activists aren’t happy with the GOP’s sudden embrace of more lenient immigration proposals and they’re monitoring the approaching congressional deadline to avoid massive cuts to military programs. But for now at least, the debate over guns and the perceived threat of losing them tops their list.

It’s an “organic” movement with little coordination from national conservative organizations, according to Amy Kremer, chairman of the Tea Party Express. “It’s happening by itself,” she said.

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Conservative Groups Mock Crossroads’ Efforts to Nominate RINOs in 2014 Primary

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Photo Credit: PoliticoTwo powerful conservative groups reacted with scorn Sunday to a newly unveiled American Crossroads initiative, dubbed the Conservative Victory Project, that plans to work against Republican primary candidates it views as unelectable.

Crossroads president Steven Law told the New York Times that Crossroads allies are creating the new organization to oppose candidates such as former Missouri Rep. Todd Akin, who lost a once-competitive Senate race last year. “There is a broad concern about having blown a significant number of races because the wrong candidates were selected,” Law said.

Both the Club for Growth and the Senate Conservatives Fund – two of the most prominent groups that have boosted candidates on the right – mocked the new initiative as yet another hapless establishment-side attempt to muzzle the GOP base.

Matt Hoskins, executive director of the Senate Conservatives Fund, branded it the “Conservative Defeat Project.”

“The Conservative Defeat Project is yet another example of the Republican establishment’s hostility toward its conservative base. Rather than listening to the grassroots and working to advance their principles, the establishment has chosen to declare war on the party’s most loyal supporters,” Hoskins said. “If they keep this up, the party will remain in the wilderness for decades to come.”

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Obama Calls on Boy Scouts to Welcome Homosexuals

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Photo Credit: tedeytanPresident Obama called on the Boy Scouts to open their ranks to homosexuals.

His response came during an interview ahead of Super Bowl XLVII. CBS News’ Scott Pelley asked the president if scouting should be open to gays.

“Yes,” the president replied. “Gays and lesbians should have access and opportunity the same way everyone else does.”

BSA national leaders are meeting this week in Dallas to discuss lifting a ‘no-gay’ ban on both members and leaders.

On Monday a group of 42 religious groups will publish a half-page ad in USA Today calling on the Scouts to resist political and economic pressures to lift the ban.

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Famed Navy SEAL Chris Kyle Murdered at Gun Range in N. Texas

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Photo Credit: G Laury PhotographyGLEN ROSE, Texas — A former U.S. Navy SEAL who gained recognition during the Iraq War was one of two people fatally shot southwest of Fort Worth on Saturday, KHOU 11 News has learned.

Sources close to the investigation identified the former SEAL as Chris Kyle, 39, author of the New York Times bestselling book, “American Sniper.”

Kyle was shot point-blank while helping another soldier who was recovering from post traumatic stress syndrome, officials said. The murders happened at a shooting range near the town of Glen Rose, about 53 miles southwest of Fort Worth.

The Erath County Sheriff’s Office issued an alert for the arrest of the suspect, who was later identified as Eddie Routh, 25. Officials warned that Routh was traveling in a Ford F-150 pickup with large tires and rims. They said he was believed to be highly trained with military experience.

Routh was reportedly later captured in Lancaster, south of Dallas.

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Obama’s Radical Friends: OFA 2.0 Considering Merger with Radical Left-Wing Groups

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The new Obama advocacy nonprofit Organizing for Action is reportedly considering a merger with a left-wing umbrella group whose financiers have ties to Palestinian terrorists and Central American Marxists.

The Common Purpose Project (CPP), an affiliation of left-wing activist groups, may merge with Organizing for Action, the new 501(c)4 iteration of the Obama campaign’s 527 group, Organizing for America.

The Common Purpose Project held periodic meetings attended by top liberal groups during President Barack Obama’s first term. Top White House officials regularly attended the meetings and the president himself has even attended one.

Erik Smith and Laura Burton Capps—CPP’s founder and the group’s managing director, respectively—have reportedly attended at least 50 “planning sessions” at the White House.

Among CPP’s donors are Sandor and Faye Straus, founders of the left-wing Firedoll Foundation. The couple has funneled money to a host of radical organizations through Firedoll.

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