Tuesday October 18 proved to be an important day in the slow march towards justice for the families of murdered federal agents Brian Terry and Jaimie Zapata.

First, the U.S Senate unanimously voted in favor of an amendment prohibiting funds from going to any future gun-walking type operations. Senator John Cornyn (R-TX) introduced the amendment in direct response to the 2009 Fast and Furious debacle. The bipartisan consensus prompted Senator Barbara Mikulski (D-MD) to join Cornyn in his demand for answers from Attorney General Eric Holder.

When I look at what happened in Operation Fast and Furious, I was fast to be furious about the bungled, botched occurrences that occurred. It was poorly planned, poorly executed, had flawed leadership, and it was definitely of questionable integrity and value.

The southwest border is America’s border. Anything that happens down at your border affects us. That’s the way we need to think about ourselves, we’re all Americans, we all need to look out for one another.

Second, ABC’S Jake Tapper became the latest mainstream media reporter to focus on what he called “a big scandal.” In a Nightline interview Tapper confronted President Obama on the controversy surrounding the “Justice Department, the ATF moving guns tied to crime scenes.” Obama once again denied any prior knowledge of Fast and Furious.

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 Read  More at American Thinker By M Catharine Evans, American Thinker

(CNSNews.com) — Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano told the Senate Judiciary Committee on Wednesday that under the administration’s policy of exercising “prosecutorial discretion” in the enforcement of the immigration laws, her department is currently authorizing some illegal aliens to work in the United States.

Sen. Charles Grassley (R-Iowa), the ranking member of the Judiciary Committee, asked Napolitano: “According to the information from your department, some individuals who are given relief will obtain work authorizations. So people with no right to be in the country will be allowed to work here. Is that correct?”

Napolitano said: “Well, senator, since around 1986 there has been a process where those who are technically unlawfully in the country may apply for work authorization. This goes to CIS [Citizenship and Immigration Services]. It’s not an ICE [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] or CBP [Customs and Border Protection] function. And those cases are reviewed by CIS in a case-by-case basis. So there’s no change in that process. Like I said, that goes back to the mid-80s that is contemplated now.”

Sen. Grassley then asked, “But yes, some of them could have an opportunity to work here even though they are here illegally?”

“Well, that happens now, senator,” said Napolitano.

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 Read More at cnsnews.com By Edwin Mora, cnsnews.com

If you’re not an earth-worshipping, tree-hugging Al Gore acolyte you probably missed the “Rights of Nature Activist Strategy Summit” held in San Francisco in July of this year.

Most of us have jobs and don’t consider the earth a living being with “rights,” but those who attended this summit have a different viewpoint.

These individuals actually believe that the earth, plants, etc., have a “right to exist, persist, and maintain and regenerate its vital cycles.”

What in the world does this mean?

According to a summary of the conference posted on the Global Exchange web site, it means that “nature” has rights apart from those of individuals and corporations. It means that these activists are working to implement “nature rights-based ordinances” throughout the U.S. and the world to stop the exploration of oil, natural gas, coal and the cutting down of trees. After all, a tree has just as much of a right to live as you do. You’re a murderer if you cut down a tree to build, say, a house for humans to live in.

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 Read More at epaabuse.com By Frank York, epaabuse.com

I’m a denier for several reasons. There is no substantive evidence that the planet has warmed significantly or that any significant warming will occur in the future. If any warming does occur, it likely will be concentrated at higher latitudes and therefore be beneficial. Climate research has largely degenerated into pathological science, and the coverage of global warming in the media is tendentious to the point of being fraudulent. Anyone who is an honest and competent scientist must be a denier.

Have you ever considered how difficult it is to take the temperature of the planet Earth? What temperature will you measure? The air? The surface of the Earth absorbs more than twice as much incident heat from the Sun than the air. But if you measure the temperature of the surface, what surface are you going to measure? The solid Earth or the oceans? There is twice as much water as land on Earth. If you decide to measure water temperature, at what depth will you take the measurements? How will the time scale on which the deep ocean mixes with the shallow affect your measurements? And how, pray tell, will you determine what the average water temperature was for the South Pacific Ocean a hundred years ago? How will you combine air, land, and sea temperature measurements? Even if you use only meteorological measurements of air temperature, how will you compensate for changes in latitude, elevation, and land use?

Determining a mean planetary temperature is not straightforward, but an extremely complicated problem. Even the best data are suspect. Anthony Watts and his colleagues have surveyed 82.5 percent of stations in the U.S. Historical Climatology Network. They have found – shockingly – that over 70 percent of these stations are likely to be contaminated by errors greater than 2 deg C [3.6 deg F]. Of the remaining stations, 21.5 percent have inherent errors greater than 1 deg C. The alleged degree of global warming over the past 150 years is less than 1 deg C. Yet even in a technologically advanced country like the US, the inherent error in over 90 percent of the surveyed meteorological stations is greater than the putative signal. And these errors are not random, but systematically reflect a warming bias related to urbanization. Watts has documented countless instances of air temperature sensors located next to air conditioning vents or in the middle of asphalt parking lots. A typical scenario is that a temperature sensor that was in the middle of a pasture a hundred years ago is now surrounded by a concrete jungle. Urbanization has been a unidirectional process. It is entirely plausible – even likely – that all of the temperature rise that has been inferred from the data is an artifact that reflects the growth of urban heat islands.

The “denier” is portrayed as a person who refuses to accept the plain evidence of his senses. But in fact it is the alarmist who doesn’t know what they are talking about. The temperature of the Earth and how it has varied over the past 150 years is poorly constrained. The person who thinks otherwise does so largely because they have no comprehension of the science. Most of these people have never done science or thought about the inherent difficulties and uncertainties involved.

And what is “global warming” anyway? As long ago as the fifth century BC, Socrates pointed out that intelligible definitions are a necessary precursor to meaningful discussions. The definition of the term “global warming” shifts with the context of the discussion. If you deny global warming, then you have denied the existence of the greenhouse effect, a reproducible phenomenon that can be studied analytically in the laboratory. But if you oppose political action, then global warming metamorphoses into a nightmarish and speculative planetary catastrophe. Coastal cities sink beneath a rising sea, species suffer from wholesale extinctions, and green pastures are turned into deserts of choking hot sand.

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 Read More at lewrockwell.com By David Deming, lewrockwell.com

During the recent Fox News and Google presidential debate, Ron Paul opined to the crowd, “You ought to have a right to opt out of the public system if you want.” Although he could have been drawing comparisons between Obamacare and European socialized medicine, the congressman was actually referencing America’s socialized educational system. It was a brilliant point. Just as the “public option” is merely a different term for socialized medicine, public education is simply a euphemized phrase for socialized education.

In the early 1900s, Horace Mann led a movement to replace America’s community and parent-controlled school model with Prussian-style public schools. He believed that free education was a right and demeaned religious institutions that already made education available.

Mann’s vision was originally met with strong resistance, as parents were reluctant to cede control of their children’s education to government bureaucrats. Ultimately, a compulsory attendance mandate was passed — not unlike the individual mandate found in Obamacare. Shortly afterward, private schools began to close.

Three-time New York City teacher of the year John Taylor Gatto notes that archetypal Americans like George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, and Thomas Edison were leading productive, fulfilled lives by the time they were in their teens, and yet “[t]hey were too unpredictable and insufficiently pliable. What better way to (change this) than by removing children from the steadying influences of their families, and placing them instead in the hands of (free government) schools[?] Just in case parents were unwilling to comply, the powers that be committed school attendance into law.”

However, as we all know, “free education” isn’t free, but subsidized through tax levies on all citizens — even those with no school-age children and those who have chosen to educate their children privately. Herein lies the genius of the left: by dictating the funding of government-run education and health care programs, millions of families are left with few alternatives outside the government’s control. Although the right to enroll their children in private schools remains, this “right,” for all practical purposes, often cannot be exercised due to income limitations. The reality is that many middle- and lower-income families cannot afford to pay taxes towards our public schools while also sending their own children to schools of their choice. The same holds true for health insurance policies — thus, freedom of choice is suddenly available only to the elite and wealthy.

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Read More at American Thinker By Josiah Cantrall, American Thinker