Tax Dollars at Work: Sculpture of Bare-Breasted Woman ‘Sexting’ is Put on Display in Family Park (+video)

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A bronze statue of a young topless woman who appears to be taking a sexting-style picture of herself has caused outrage in a Kansas City Park.

The bare breasted, headless female figure in Overland Park Arboretum is pointing a camera at herself and the American Family Association of Kansas and Missouri has said that it is obscene and promotes sexting in a venue where families take children.

This week the group collected 4,700 signatures, 1,000 more than is needed to compel a judge in Johnson County to convene a grand jury to investigate whether the work ‘Accept and Reject’ by Chinese sculptor Yu Chang is unacceptable.

In June, local resident and mother Joanne Hughes started a campaign to have the statue removed out of the sight of children and was joined in her efforts by the conservative American Family Asssociation soon after.

‘Well it’s the venue,’ said petitioner Joanne Hughes about why she feels the artwork should be moved. ‘I have been to Florence, Italy, I have seen the statue of David and its beautiful, he is not taking a picture of himself. The venue is where kids go on school field trips, their parents aren’t with them.’ Read more from this story HERE.

Here’s a video regarding the ongoing controversy:

Retired Detective Drew Peterson Convicted of Murder

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Retired Bolingbrook police officer Drew Peterson was found guilty Thursday of murdering his third wife, Kathleen Savio, the verdict eliciting a gasp from a packed Will County courthouse and ending a case that for years has received salacious tabloid news coverage.

Peterson showed no emotion as the verdict was read. He was shackled, said “Good job” to his attorneys and was led off. Sentencing has been set for Nov. 26. Savio’s family and supporters hugged and cried along with witnesses who testified for the state.

“I knew it,” said Savio’s brother-in-law, Mitch Doman. “Now I can go out there and say he’s a murdering bastard. You can print that. You can put it in a headline.”

Nick Savio, Kathleen Savio’s brother, choked up outside the courthouse as he called the verdict “bittersweet.”

“It’s better than a White Sox World Series win,” he said, his face quivering with emotion. “This has been a very long time coming.”

He read a brief statement from the Savio family saying Kathleen can “now rest in peace.”

Read more from this story HERE.

Fact Check: Michelle Obama Lies About Early Financial Struggles

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First Lady Michelle Obama’s pitch to voters last night relied on the premise that she and her husband understand what it is to struggle to make ends meet. She spoke movingly about their early years–about how a young Barack Obama drove a car that was “rusted out” and found his furniture “in a dumpster,” how they both came from families that had to “scrape by.” Her fairy tale–however well-delivered–was one great, big, colorful lie.

Both Michelle Robinson and Barack Obama began their adult lives with a leg up on the rest of America. They attended elite schools: Michelle went to Whitney Young, the public magnet school for Chicago’s upper class, while Barack attended Punahou, the private prep school for the top stratum of Hawaiian society. They were accepted to Ivy League schools despite undistinguished credentials, and both attended Harvard Law School.

“[B]elieve it or not, when we were first married, our combined monthly student loan bills were actually higher than our mortgage,” Michelle said. That sounds like a raw deal–but in fact reflects their fortunate circumstances. They had both just graduated from a very expensive law school, and their combined income from cushy law firm jobs dwarfed the repayments. Barack also soon enjoyed a second salary from the University of Chicago.

They had expensive tastes, reflected in the $277,500 two-bedroom condo they bought in 1993–a high price even by today’s standards. Several years later, they moved into their $1.65 million mansion in Hyde Park–with the help of fraudster Tony Rezko. Barack often told a story of hardship on the campaign trail in 2008 about having his credit card declined–once. The fact that he thought this counted as real hardship speaks volumes.

As her husband moved onto the national political stage, Michelle Obama began to enjoy a lavish lifestyle at taxpayer expense, directly and indirectly. When Barack Obama was elected to the U.S. Senate, he obtained a $1 million earmark for the University of Chicago Hospital–and his wife’s salary as Vice President for Community Affairs jumped from $121,910 to $316,962. Her job: pushing poor, uninsured patients to other hospitals.

Read more from this story HERE.

Obama’s (un)American Auto Bailout (+video)

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By Michelle Malkin. Cue “Fanfare for the Common Man” and rev up the Government Motors engines. Wednesday is Great American Auto Bailout Day at the Democratic National Convention. Party propagandists have prepared a prime-time-ready film touting the “rescue’s” benefits for American workers. UAW President Bob King will sing the savior-in-chief’s praises.

But like all of the economic success stories manufactured by the White House, the $85 billion government handout is a big fat farce.

“I said I believe in American workers, I believe in this American industry, and now the American auto industry has come roaring back,” Obama bragged on the campaign trail. Here’s the inconvenient story they won’t tell you:

GM is once again flirting with bankruptcy despite massive government purchases propping up its sales figures. GM stock is rock-bottom. Losses continue to be revised in the wrong direction. According to The Detroit News, “The Treasury Department says in a new report the government expects to lose more than $25 billion on the $85 billion auto bailout. That’s 15 percent higher than its previous forecast.”

The claims that GM paid back its taxpayer-funded loans “in full” — a story peddled in campaign ads narrated by Hollywood actor Tom Hanks — were debunked by the Treasury Department’s TARP watchdog this summer. GM still owes nearly $30 billion of the $50 billion it received, and its lending arm still owes nearly $15 billion of the more than $17 billion it received. Bailout watchdog Mark Modica of the National Legal and Policy Center adds: “In addition to U.S. taxpayers anteing up, Canada put in over $10 billion, and GM was relieved of about $28 billion of bondholder obligations as UAW claims were protected. That’s an improvement of almost $90 billion to the balance sheet, and the company still lags the competition.” Read more from this story HERE.

The Romney Campaign has finally figured out that this false story about the GM bailout is just smoke and mirrors. See the campaign’s new ad, just released yesterday:

Bill Clinton: Please don’t judge Obama by the standards he set

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Campaigning in 2008, Barack Obama set the very highest goals for his presidency. He would not only bring about economic recovery, he would lay the foundation for a new economy, bring Americans together, reduce the rancor of political debate, and even slow the rise of the oceans. Now, as he runs for re-election, Obama is caught in a trap of his own making: Many Americans who voted for him, particularly independents, are judging him not so much by what he has done in office as by what he promised to do. If voters hold Obama to that standard on Election Day, he will lose.

What Obama desperately needs to do in the campaign’s last two months is to lower expectations, to bring the high hopes of 2008 in line with the reality of 2012. That might be an impossible job, but Team Obama realized there was just one Democrat capable of even giving it a shot: Bill Clinton. So the former president was given the spotlight at the Democratic convention in Charlotte Wednesday night, his assignment to convince voters that the standards Obama set for himself in ’08 were unrealistic.

Clinton argued that the economic crisis Obama inherited was so serious that “No president — not me, not any of my predecessors, no one could have fully repaired all the damage that he found in just four years.” Obama will need eight years to finish the job, and even if people don’t see things getting better now, they will if they’ll just vote for Obama. “He has laid the foundation for a new, modern, successful economy of shared prosperity” Clinton said, “and if you will renew the president’s contract, you will feel it.”

“I believe that with all my heart,” Clinton added. He said it with such apparent conviction that it’s likely some longtime Clinton watchers immediately assumed it was not true. And it’s probably not. But with Clinton, who knows? Everyone knows he and Obama have had a difficult relationship. Everyone knows what happened in the 2008 Democratic primaries. But Clinton remains a Democrat, and he said what he needed to say.

Sincerity aside, there’s no doubt Clinton can make the case for Barack Obama’s re-election far better than Obama himself. At age 66 and nearly a dozen years removed from the White House, Clinton remains the best simplifier, the best explainer, in American politics. Obama can’t touch him.

Read more from this story HERE.

The Real Tragedy Of ObamaCare Has Yet To Be Felt By The Poor

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One of the most tragic failings of ObamaCare is that it will make it harder for many of the most vulnerable citizens – patients with no option but Medicaid – to get care.

Medicaid is cumbersome, complex, and wasteful – already the worst health care program in the country. But rather than making changes to improve or modernize this program designed to finance care for the poor, the Obama administration is trying to convince states to add at least 16 million more people to Medicaid, including families making more than $30,000 a year.

That means the poorest and most vulnerable patients enrolled today will be competing with millions of new Medicaid patients for appointments to see a limited number of physicians. Those who have the greatest need and nowhere else to go are likely to have the hardest time getting care.

In its ruling in June, the Supreme Court made it optional for states to expand Medicaid to cover new enrollees. Even with generous federal funding, several states have said flatly they cannot afford the expansion, which would cost states at least $118 billion through 2023.

They are resisting not only because of budget concerns but also because this large Medicaid expansion could have catastrophic effects on those who provide society’s health care safety net.

Read more from this story HERE.

Insanity: Federal Judge Orders Sex-Change Surgery for Convicted Murderer

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A federal judge on Tuesday ordered state prison officials to provide a taxpayer-funded sex-reassignment surgery to a transgender inmate serving life in prison for murder.

U.S. District Judge Mark Wolf ruled in the case of Michelle Kosilek, who was born as a man but has received hormone treatments and lives as a woman in an all-male prison. Robert Kosilek was convicted of murder in the killing of his wife in 1990.

Judge Wolf is believed to be the first federal judge to order prison officials to provide the surgery for a transgender inmate.

Kosilek first sued the MassachusettsDepartment of Correction 12 years ago. Two years later, Judge Wolf ruled that Kosilek was entitled to treatment for gender-identity disorder but stopped short of ordering surgery. Kosilek sued again in 2005, arguing that the surgery is a medical necessity.

In his ruling Tuesday, Judge Wolf found that surgery is the “only adequate treatment” for Kosilek’s “serious medical need.”

Read more from this story HERE.

Democrats Drop “God” From Party Platform

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Photo credit: kevin dooley

Guess what? God’s name has been removed from the Democratic National Committee platform.

This is the paragraph that was in the 2008 platform: “We need a government that stands up for the hopes, values, and interests of working people, and gives everyone willing to work hard the chance to make the most of their God-given potential.”

Now the words “God-given” have been removed. The paragraph has been restructured to say this: “We gather to reclaim the basic bargain that built the largest middle class and the most prosperous nation on Earth – the simple principle that in America, hard work should pay off, responsibility should be rewarded, and each one of us should be able to go as far as our talent and drive take us.”

The Brody File has calls into DNC to explain why God’s name has been dropped from the platform. Some critics will suggest that when you have planks in your platform that support abortion rights and gay marriage then it’s no wonder that God’s name would be dropped as well.

Delegates will vote on the platform on Tuesday.

Read more from this story HERE.

New York Times Proves Clint Eastwood Correct – Obama Is a Lousy CEO

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The New York Times story is called “The Competitor in Chief — Obama Plays To Win, In Politics and Everything Else.” It is devastating.

With such a title, and from such a friendly organ, at first I thought Jodi Kantor’s piece would be a collection of Obama’s greatest political wins: His rapid rise in Illinois, his win over Hillary Clinton in the 2008 Democratic primaries, the passage of health care, and so on.

But the NYT piece is not about any of that. Rather, it is a deep look into the two outstanding flaws in Obama’s executive leadership:

1. How he vastly overrates his capabilities: “But even those loyal to Mr. Obama say that his quest for excellence can bleed into cockiness and that he tends to overestimate his capabilities. The cloistered nature of the White House amplifies those tendencies, said Matthew Dowd, a former adviser to President George W. Bush, adding that the same thing happened to his former boss. “There’s a reinforcing quality,” he said, a tendency for presidents to think, I’m the best at this.”

2. How he spends extraordinary amounts of time and energy to compete in — trivialities: “For someone dealing with the world’s weightiest matters, Mr. Obama spends surprising energy perfecting even less consequential pursuits. He has played golf 104 times since becoming president, according to Mark Knoller of CBS News, who monitors his outings, and he asks superior players for tips that have helped lower his scores. He decompresses with card games on Air Force One, but players who do not concentrate risk a reprimand (“You’re not playing, you’re just gambling,” he once told Arun Chaudhary, his former videographer). His idea of birthday relaxation is competing in an Olympic-style athletic tournament with friends, keeping close score. The 2009 version ended with a bowling event. Guess who won, despite his history of embarrassingly low scores? The president, it turned out, had been practicing in the White House alley.”

Read more from this story HERE.

Host of Young Turks and Al Gore’s Cable Network is a Holocaust Denier

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Photo credit: z@doune

Apparently, the Young Turk’s Cenk Uygur’s “Turkish pride” has short-circuited his own brain cells to the point that he actually denies the Armenian holocaust – that other great, ethnically driven genocidal catastrophe of the 20th century.

Though Uygur has not made much of his unusual (and, shall we say, historically indefensible) convictions during his time at MSNBC or Current, he’s held them for a very long time, the record shows.

Back in 1999, Uygur wrote a letter to the editor of Salon disputing the Armenian genocide as a fabrication of self-deluded Armenian historians.

“I am a Turkish-American, and I am sure my views will also be looked upon with a certain wariness, but I do not subscribe to the idea that I am disqualified from objectivity by my ethnicity,” Uygur wrote about an earlier article in the online magazine. “First, at the very beginning of the article, you seem to reach a conclusion – ‘The central Armenian experience of the 20th century, after all, was the death of as many as 1.5 million Armenians …’ and ‘Every neutral scholar agrees that the Turkish position is propaganda.’”

Like other holocaust-deniers – including those of the anti-Semitic variety – Uygur explains that the Christian Armenian deaths at the hands of the Muslim Turks was all just a matter of war propaganda – in this case World War I that brought an end to the Ottoman Empire. The U.S. was behind it all, Uyger wrote, just “as it [was] with Germany.” The other problem, he said, was that there weren’t enough “Turkish-Americans to combat the insinuations of savagery.”

Read more from his story HERE.