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What Conservatives Did to Pull off Religious Liberty Win in California

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California conservatives won a surprise victory this week, changing a state assembly bill that would have curtailed the freedom of private religious colleges.

“We literally were able to see tens of thousands of people mobilize to make calls and to write their legislators, and to participate in the political process,” William Jessup University President John Jackson told The Daily Signal in a phone interview.

“We were hearing from legislators who said that they had gotten hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of phone calls on just this one piece of legislation,” he added. “And I think that’s a tremendous, tremendous encouragement to me for the health of our state.”

It’s a victory that they hope will prove a bellwether for institutional liberty fights to come.

Facing a maelstrom of grassroots controversy, state Sen. Ricardo Lara, a Democrat, said Wednesday that he would remove the portions of his bill, SB 1146, that would have harmed the right of religious colleges to operate according to their principles.

Under the previous wording, SB 1146 would have ultimately blocked low-income students from receiving Cal Grants, California’s system of need-based education aid, if they attended colleges with policies such as bathroom use based on biological sex that violated the state’s LGBT policies. It also would have enabled students who feel discriminated against in light of these policies to bring a lawsuit against their college.

“Without a doubt, the unmodified version [of the bill] would have jeopardized Christian institutions and egregiously penalized all students of faith, especially Latino and African-American individuals,” Samuel Rodriguez, president of the National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference, said in a statement.

Conservatives who opposed the measure say they are relieved by this change, but some stressed that the current version of the bill, while less concerning, may still negatively impact religious colleges. Jackson mentioned a new amendment that would make religious colleges release data on expelled students—ostensibly to ensure they were not expelled for discriminatory reasons.

“What we’ve indicated to the senator [Lara] is that we’ll have to review the bill and compare it to [Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act] regulations,” Jackson said.

But religious liberty activists say they are pleased to have an effective blueprint for success as that battle progresses, a blueprint that involves building national coalitions focused on preserving the rights of religious Americans.

In addition to grassroots mobilization, conservative nonprofits also played a pivotal role in the controversy.

The Becket Fund for Religious Liberty publicized the fact that three of four students affected by the loss of Cal Grants would be low-income minority students, circulating a petition that quickly garnered 100,000 signatures.

With an open statement, Andrew Walker’s, the director of policy studies at the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, commission publicly opposed the bill with the support of a diverse group of advocates and thinkers both on the ideological left and on the right. Notable signatories included law professors, administrators at religious colleges, Hispanic and Islamic leaders, seminary presidents, Christian denominational authorities, intellectuals at think tanks (including three from The Heritage Foundation), and conservative magazines.

The statement was publicly released on Tuesday. On Wednesday, Lara announced that he was changing the provisions.

“I just think that this was a multifaceted effort that really showed what effective communication and strategy can result in,” Walker told The Daily Signal in a phone interview. “You get your national coalitions working with your people on the ground, coupled with strong messaging—and religious liberty, we found out, is not dead in California.”

Continued defeats on issues of individual conscience, Walker said, showed that advocates of religious freedom still have a long way to go. But as lawmakers nationwide begin to bicker over the limits of freedom of conscience for religious institutions, the changes to SB 1146 represent a heartening opening salvo.

“There’s one discussion about private citizens engaged in commercial acts, like the bakers and the florists and the photographers, but what we see here is that the ability to protect religious institutions and their religious integrity remains very intact and very strong,” he said. “We’re going to have to turn especially and fight on all fronts, and that includes institutionally. We had a large institutional win in California.”

Jackson and Walker also stressed that conservatives must remain vigilant to oppose similar encroachments in the future.

“The sponsor of this bill has said that he intends to study this issue at further depth, and possibly reintroduce legislation like this next year,” Walker said. “We’re not naïve to the fact that this is an ongoing battle.” (For more from the author of “What Conservatives Did to Pull off Religious Liberty Win in California” please click HERE)

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California Refuses to Admit Its Voter Fraud Problem

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Hollywood has always loved making films about the walking dead, but in Southern California it appears they have a real life problem with “zombie” voters.

An investigation by CBSLA2 and KCAL9 found that hundreds of deceased persons are still on voter registration rolls in the area, and that many of these names have been voting for years in Los Angeles.

For example, John Cenkner died in 2003 according to Social Security Administration records, yet he voted in the 2004, 2005, 2006, 2008 and 2010 elections. His daughter told the station that she was “astounded” and couldn’t “understand how anybody” could get away with this.

Another voter, Julita Abutin, died in 2006 but voted in 2008, 2010, 2012, and 2014. According to CBS, the county confirmed they have “signed vote-by-mail envelopes” from Abutin since she passed away. So either someone has been forging her signature or her ghost has quite an earthly presence.

The investigation revealed that 265 deceases persons voted in Southern California, 215 of them in Los Angeles County. Thirty-two were repeat voters, with eight posthumously-cast ballots each. One woman who died in 1988 has been voting for 26 years, including in the 2014 election.

This report comes twenty years after the contested election of Rep. Loretta Sanchez. D-Calif., from this same area. An investigation by a U.S. House committee found that hundreds of illegal ballots were cast by noncitizens and improper absentee ballots.

In that 1996 election, when she defeated incumbent Bob Dornan, a winning margin of 979 votes was whittled down to only 35 votes or fewer when that voter fraud was factored in. In cases like these, where elections are decided by only a small number of votes, the harmful effects of voter fraud are most obvious.

Yet here, two decades later, California has still not taken the necessary steps to ensure the reliability of its electoral system.

As a result of the investigation, L.A. county supervisors called for an investigation into the findings. Even if these particular zombie voters did not change the outcome of an election, each fraudulently cast ballot stole and diluted the vote of a legitimate voter.

Cases like these and many others show that voter fraud is a real phenomenon and a potential threat to the integrity of the election process.

The Los Angeles county registrar pointed to the 1200-2000 voter registrations removed every month to update records and told reporters, “There’s really no way to connect a person whose death is recorded with a person who is registered to vote unless we get some kind of notification from the family.”

But that is plain nonsense. Other states do frequent comparisons between their voter registration lists and the death databases maintained by the Social Security Administration, and other state agencies consult vital records departments in order to remove voters who have died.

The CBS investigation shows both that voter fraud exists and that this type of fraudulent voting is detectable through proper investigation.

CBS reports that California is the only state that does not comply with the Help America Vote Act of 2002, something the Obama administration has basically ignored.

The Help America Vote Act establishes mandatory minimum standards of accuracy for state voter registration lists and requires states to engage in regular maintenance and updates to remove ineligible voters who die or move away.

California is obviously not complying with these requirements. (For more from the author of “California Refuses to Admit Its Voter Fraud Problem” please click HERE)

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FBI Investigating Reports of 17 Men Chanting, Firing off Shots in California

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The FBI on Tuesday continued to investigate an incident in which 17 men were detained for reportedly firing off hundreds of rounds in a remote part of Apple Valley.

San Bernardino County Sheriff’s deputies and an FBI agent responded to the scene Sunday morning and detained the men – reportedly all of Middle Eastern descent – who were camping out in the Deep Creek Hot Springs area Sunday morning, authorities said.

A 911 caller reported hearing over 100 shots fired and seeing five to seven men wearing turbans and shooting “assault rifles, handguns, and shotguns,” according to a Sheriff’s Department statement…

Police scanner traffic posted online by the Victor Valley News Group described “a large group of subjects wearing turbans and chanting” at the scene.

“They were up all night chanting ‘Allah akbar’-type stuff,” an unidentified officer is heard saying on the audio recording. (Read more from “FBI Investigating Reports of 17 Men Chanting, Firing off Shots in California” HERE)

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FBI Pulls Items from Lake in San Bernardino Terrorism Investigation

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FBI investigators on Friday recovered several items from a San Bernardino lake as they looked for electronics and other items left by the shooters in the most deadly terrorist attack on U.S. soil since 9/11, according to law enforcement sources.

The source did not say what was found, but officials expect the search of Seccombe Lake and the canvassing of the surrounding neighborhood will continue.

Investigators received a tip that the shooters may have visited the area on the day of the attack, according to David Bowdich, assistant special agent in charge of the FBI’s Los Angeles field office.

Meanwhile, more details emerged about the investigation into married couple Syed Rizwan Farook and Tashfeen Malik.

Two congressmen, after receiving an intelligence briefing Thursday, said neighbors of the shooters told investigators they witnessed “suspicious activity” at the couple’s home before the attack but did not report it to authorities. (Read more from “FBI Pulls Items from Lake in San Bernardino Terrorism Investigation” HERE)

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San Bernardino Shooter’s Mother Active in US Branch of Pro-Caliphate Islamic Group

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Rafia Farook, the mother of San Bernardino terrorist Syed Rizwan Farook, is an active member of the Islamic Circle of North America (ICNA), a Muslim organization that promotes the establishment of a caliphate and has ties to a radical Pakistani political group called Jamaat-e-Islami.

Farook’s affiliation with ICNA was revealed on Friday when MSNBC and other new outlets scoured the Farooks’ apartment in Redlands, Cal. An MSNBC reporter found a certificate of appreciation presented to Safia Farook last summer by ICNA’s sisters’ wing.

Malik reportedly posted a comment to Facebook during the attack stating her allegiance to ISIS. Farook is also believed to have communicated with known terrorists based overseas.

Though ICNA has not been named as a target in the ongoing investigation into Wednesday’s attack, the group has been associated with many others who have engaged in terrorism or plotted to do so.

Al-Qaeda recruiter Anwar al-Awlaki has spoken at the group’s events. He spoke at an ICNA event in Baltimore in 2002, though the group has said that al-Awlaki was not radicalized at that time. Al-Awlaki exchanged emails with Nidal Hasan, the Army major who killed 13 people in a terrorist attack at Fort Hood in Nov. 2009. Al-Awlaki was killed by a U.S. drone strike in 2011 in Yemen. (Read more from “San Bernardino Shooter’s Mother Active in US Branch of Pro-Caliphate Islamic Group” HERE)

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FBI Neglect of San Bernardino Crime Scene Fits in a Pattern

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The shocking sight of journalists storming into the apartment of the San Bernardino terrorists, less than 48 hours after the attack, was apparently allowed by the FBI, which handed the apartment back over to the landlord, who let the media in with a crowbar.

CNN had a reporter on the scene, but its own analyst Harry Houck was shocked, calling it a “screw-up.”

While the journalists’ behavior was disturbing, it fit a pattern: the Obama administration is careless about, or is reluctant to find, evidence of terrorism.

For example, the government has done almost nothing with the treasure trove of intelligence information it recovered during the raid on Osama bin Laden’s compound in May 2011. Stephen F. Hayes of the Weekly Standard has waged a lonely battle to force the government to take the intelligence seriously–intelligence that could disrupt terror networks and prevent future attacks around the world. “They haven’t done anything close to a full exploitation,” perhaps only 10%, he quoted one analyst in May 2015. (Read more from “FBI Neglect of San Bernardino Crime Scene Fits in a Pattern” HERE)

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San Bernardino Terror: The Islamic Jihadists Among Us

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How many deaths are socially acceptable before we stop the suicidal political correctness and the self-immolation of our immigration policies?

Once again, we appear to have a homegrown jihadist who was a devout adherent to Sharia, perpetrating a terror attack on American soil. Over the past few weeks, I’ve written dozens of articles detailing the shocking amount of immigrants and foreign students we have admitted over the past two decades and, in particular, the past few years. This terror attack serves as the latest example of why it is nothing short of suicidal to continue importing more Sharia-adherents fresh from the Middle East to our shores without first dealing with the problems we already have from homegrown Islamic supremacism. And it also demonstrates how this runs much deeper than vetting immigrants for direct ties to ISIS.

The two suspects were an American Muslim, Syed Farook, and his wife, Tashfeen Malik. While we have yet to learn the ethnicity of Syed Farook, media reports have indicated Tashfeen Malik is a foreign national of Pakistan. The authorities have been amazingly slow to release the information on Malik, but the LA Times is indicating she was from Saudi Arabia.

How in the world are we going to empower moderate Muslims and stamp out radical Islam at home if we are bringing in 680,000 immigrants from the Middle East and hundreds of thousands of foreign students from the Middle East every few years?

The Left is so focused on violating the Constitution by pursuing a gun control policy that doesn’t work and banning inanimate objects under the guise of eliminating “assault weapons.” Yet, they refuse to use the perfectly legitimate constitutional tool of not bringing in ‘assault people’ to our country in the first place.

This terror plot, from the information we know thus far, proves the point many of us have been making for a number of years. The growing importation of Muslims into western countries in conjunction with the success of cyber jihad has transcended any natural progression of assimilation and has posed an existential threat to western civilization. Farouk was not a disadvantaged youth. He evidently had a good government job as an “environmental specialist” that even offered paternity leave. He was born in this country. What are we to expect from a number of Islamic immigrants who have recently arrived in this country?

The fact that this attack was likely not planned by a terror organization makes this even more ubiquitously dangerous and proves our broader point. You could theoretically vet professionally trained terrorist infiltrators to a certain extent but you can never vet the mentality of so many of these Sharia-adherent immigrants we have brought to our shores. And you can’t count on them assimilating with the assumption that the American Dream would allure them away from Jihad. This couple was said to have been living the American Dream. We also learn from here that we cannot assume the problem of Jihad is limited to Muslim males.

The Homegrown Muslim Brotherhood Problem

There’s another important ingredient to dissect in this case. Why did CAIR, which is an unindicted co-conspirator in the Holy Land Foundation terror case and designated as an arm of Hamas by the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals, jump out ahead of the FBI and give a bizarre and creepy press conference? And how did they get ahold of the brother-in-law of Farook so quickly? And why did they bring the brother-in-law if he was unwilling to answer basic questions about his relationship with the suspect?

That we would have an arm of Hamas deliver the first major press conference should scare all Americans. Having groups affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood serve as the spokesgroup for American Muslims instead of shutting them down will go a long way in fostering the homegrown radicalization and marginalizing legitimate moderates. Muzammil Siddiqi, one of the attendees at the CAIR presser, once hosted a lecture by Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman, the “blind sheikh” who was involved in planning the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. Talk about the fox guarding the hen house!

Our nation will soon be on the fast path to Europe if we don’t contain the problem by calling for a cool off period on new immigration from the Middle East and work on rooting out the jihadists who already live here. The latter agenda item would mean that all non-citizen immigrants who are preaching hatred towards American should be deported and all citizens who give material support to terrorists should be stripped of their citizenship through due process. This is not, at its heart, a foreign policy problem, it’s a political correctness and immigration problem. Our political class will either learn this lesson now or after the problem is already immutable as it is in some European countries.

Shortly after the terror attack, Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT), thinking that this was about guns and not Islamic terror, scoffed at those who were praying and asserted that the only prayers that should be offered are by those who refuse to take action.

While his comments are certainly repulsive, he inadvertently stumbled upon one truth. It is time for our politicians to take action on behalf of our Sovereignty, Security, and Society.

Let’s roll. (For more from the author of “San Bernardino Terror: The Islamic Jihadists Among Us” please click HERE)

Watch a recent interview with the author below:

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Lives Cut Short: The 14 Victims of the San Bernardino Massacre

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They were a young father of six and the cousin of an NFL player, a passionate defender of Israel who enjoyed debates and a community worker who dressed up as Santa Claus, some 14 victims in all, representing a tapestry of the multicultural American family, all gathered for what seemed the safest of occasions: a holiday party.

The San Bernardino, Calif. Sheriff’s Department late Thursday released the names of those who died Wednesday night when a heavily armed man and woman burst into the room where they were enjoying a county health department banquet and opened fire. The male gunman, Syed Farook, presumably knew at least some of those he mowed down since he worked for the same department. The New York Post even reported that colleagues there had thrown him a baby shower earlier this year.

The victims ranged in age from 26-60 and included eight men and six women.

The list of fatalities as provided by the Sheriff’s Department:

Shannon Johnson, 45, Los Angeles (DOB: 03/06/70)
Bennetta Bet-Badal, 46, Rialto (DOB: 03/08/69)
Aurora Godoy, 26, San Jacinto (DOB: 02/01/89)
Isaac Amanios, 60, Fontana (DOB: 06/29/55)
Larry Kaufman, 42, Rialto (DOB: 08/12/73)
Harry Bowman, 46, Upland (DOB: 06/08/69)
Yvette Velasco, 27, Fontana (DOB: 04/03/88)
Sierra Clayborn, 27, Moreno Valley (DOB: 06/15/88)
Robert Adams, 40, Yucaipa (DOB: 05/02/75)
Nicholas Thalasinos, 52, Colton (DOB: 10/14/63)
Tin Nguyen, 31, Santa Ana (DOB: 04/06/84)
Juan Espinoza, 50, Highland (DOB: 06/24/65)
Damian Meins, 58, Riverside (DOB: 02/02/57)
Michael Wetzel, 37, Lake Arrowhead (DOB: 04/29/78)

(Read more from “Lives Cut Short: The 14 Victims of the San Bernardino Massacre” HERE)

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Who Were California Shooters Syed Rizwan Farook and Tashfeen Malik?

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By Saeed Ahmed. Police say they’ve identified the couple who massacred 14 people at a holiday party in San Bernardino, California, and while the killers’ specific motives remain unclear, sources Thursday said the husband was in touch with terrorists and may have had workplace grievances.

Syed Rizwan Farook and Tashfeen Malik, who were killed Wednesday in a shootout with police, committed the deadliest U.S. mass shooting since the December 2012 rampage at Sandy Hook, authorities say.

Here is what we know about them: . . .

Farook, an American citizen, was an environmental health specialist with the San Bernardino County health department, which was hosting the holiday party at the Inland Regional Center where the attack took place . . .

On Thursday, law enforcement officials told CNN that Farook had been in touch via phone and social media with more than one international terrorism subject whom the FBI was investigating. (Read more from “Who Were California Shooters Syed Rizwan Farook and Tashfeen Malik?” HERE)

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California Shooter Wrote of Spending His Free Time at Mosque and ‘Memorizing the Quran’

By Chuck Ross. Syed Rizwan Farook was heavily involved in his local mosque and focused his energies on memorizing the Quran, he wrote in a short-lived dating profile in 2013.

“I spend much of my free time in the masjid,” Farook, then 28, wrote on his profile for the dating site, BestMuslim.com. He also enjoyed “memorizing the quran and learning more about the religion,” he added.

Farook and his wife, 27-year-old Tashfeen Hakim, killed 14 people at a holiday party being held for county workers at Inland Regional Center in San Bernardino, Cal. on Wednesday. Farook worked as a health inspector for the county and had been at the party before he and Hakim began their attack.

The couple was killed during a shootout with police later on Wednesday. They had four guns, investigators have said. And though authorities have not officially classified the attack as terrorism, more evidence is pointing in that direction.

Farook reportedly had contact with known terrorists in the Middle East. He has also traveled to the Middle East and to Pakistan multiple times. It has also been reported that Farook viewed ISIS propaganda online. Investigators found a heavy arsenal of guns, ammunition and pipe bombs at their house in Redlands, Cal. (Read more from “California Shooter Wrote of Spending His Free Time at Mosque and ‘Memorizing the Quran'” HERE)

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Actor Blasts Media’s ‘Blatant HYPOCRISY’

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Actor James Woods has noticed a double standard at the New York Daily News . . .

However, after a December 2 shooting in San Bernadino, California, the Daily News ran a headline saying “GOD ISN’T FIXING THIS.” While the coverage of the #PrayForParis campaign was positive, the December 3 cover story was critical of politicians who are praying for the California victims, the Daily News arguing that “cowards who could truly end gun scourge continue to hide behind meaningless platitudes.”

(Read more from “Actor Blasts Media’s ‘Blatant HYPOCRISY'” HERE)

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