Issues
Only 26 percent of the public approves of President Obama's handling of the economy in the latest Gallup poll, conducted Aug. 11-14, while a whopping 71 percent said they disapproved. That’s down from Obama’s previous low point of 35 percent on this top issue.
The public’s growing dissatisfaction shouldn’t be surprising. Going back to 1890, reports the National Bureau of Economic Research, the only U.S. president with a worse record than Obama in job creation in his first two and a half years in office, measured in terms of percentage change, was Herbert Hoover, presiding over the emergence of the Great Depression.
“Official unemployment is 9.1 percent,” stated a New York Times editorial on August 15, decrying the nation’s jobs picture, “but it would be 16.1 percent, or 25.1 million people, if it included those who can only find part-time jobs and those who have given up looking for work.”
As if the AFL-CIO does not have enough political clout, it has announced its initiative to launch a super Political Action Committee in order to raise money. According to The Blaze, the effort is “part of the federation’s goal to build a year-round political organizing structure instead of ramping up and down based on election cycles.”
The initiative was discussed earlier this month at an AFL-CIO executive council meeting. The proposal is still subject to approval, and will be open for discussion for the next few weeks.
Supporters tout a number of benefits, especially the impact such a committee could have on struggles over state legislation, where unions have been particularly entrenched in recent months.
For example, unions invested millions of dollars this year into the Wisconsin recall elections, which challenged those state legislators who voted in favor of legislation that minimized collective bargaining for public employees. The AFL-CIO alone contributed $5 million to the effort.
A 2010 “Teacher of the Year” in Mount Dora, Florida has been suspended for comments he made on his Facebook page that were critical of homosexual marriage. Jerry Buell, who has taught social studies and history in the Lake County school District for two decades and has, by the district’s own admission, a spotless record, was removed from his teaching duties while officials investigate allegations that his comments were biased against homosexuals.
Buell told FOX News that he was stunned by the allegations against him. “It was my own personal comment on my own personal time on my own personal computer in my own personal house, exercising what I believed as a social studies teacher to be my First Amendment rights,” he said.
But Chris Patton, a spokesman for the district said school officials “took the allegations seriously.
At a meeting in Toronto earlier this month, the House of Delegates of the American Bar Association (ABA) voted to urge Congress to reject all legislative attempts to alter the Fourteenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution and its grant of “citizenship birthrights.”
Given that over half of the 535 members of the Congress (House of Representatives and Senate) are attorneys, the opinion of the ABA is persuasive. Add to that statistic the fact that the organization, founded in 1878, has for decades set the standards for the practice of law to which all attorneys must “voluntarily” conform and its ability to influence legislation and legislators in compounded.
The particular resolution (one of many passed at the confab) is number 303 and reads as follows:
Move over Farmville, Mafia Wars, and Monster World. There’s a new kid on the interactive gaming block. The Journey of Moses was launched in early August on Facebook to join the hundreds of other online games that attract millions of participants on the social media site. The big difference is that this one is Bible-based and designed to introduce players to faith in God.
“Facebook games now have 300 million people who play them on a weekly basis, and yet there were no biblically based games on Facebook,” explained Brent Dusing, CEO of Hexify, the company that designed the game. “So we started building the ‘Journey of Moses’ as a way to build a fun, engaging, entertaining game, but also to have a great message about God’s love and God’s faithfulness.” Dusing said that he and Preston Tollinger, with whom he started Hexify in 2010, “were careful to adhere to the accounts in the Bible and the overarching spirit of the story, even vetting certain aspects with theological leaders.”
Dear Tea Partier,
These are indeed exciting times. Not much more than two-and-a-half years ago, the movement to which you have given life was nonexistent. Since its birth, you have succeeded in arresting the attention of the entire country while acquiring a well deserved reputation for being the most formidable grassroots entity in contemporary politics. At this juncture, at any rate, everyone — Republicans and Democrats; conservatives, libertarians, and “liberals”; “independents” and “moderates”; rightists and leftists — knows that you are a force with which they will have to reckon.
In the summer of 2009, you bombarded the establishment with shock and awe with your “town hall meetings” and massive demonstrations. Considering the ecstatic reception with which Barack Obama’s substantial victory over John McCain was greeted by over half of America, no one, least of all the president and his fellow partisans in congress, could have had any inkling that they would have to contend with such relentless opposition to his gargantuan socialistic schemes.
On May 31, 2011, I reached the age of 85. In other words I’ve lived through 85 summers, 85 winters, 85 springs. It may seem like a lot, but it’s not. 85 is not much of anything. What can you buy for 85 cents? What can you buy for 85 dollars? What is 85 compared to a national debt in the trillions? As the well-known saying goes, “Life is short.” Short, indeed. We should be living for hundreds of years, because it takes more than 85 years to become truly wise. But the good Lord decided that this short life is long enough, even though the Bible speaks of persons living hundreds of years.
What happened to shorten our lives? Maybe it was God’s observation that it doesn’t take long for a human being to make a mess of things. Look at the mess in Washington, all made mostly by people under 60 years of age. Some are just in their 30s and 40s. Maybe God decided that the longer people live, the more stupid and evil they get, and the more damage they can do. People are supposed to mellow with age — but that doesn’t seem to apply to politicians or dictators.
Chances are it has already played at a theater near you, though you may not have noticed. The Undefeated, the Sarah Plain bio-pic, has not been a box office success, grossing only $175,000, according to "Washington Whispers," a political column in U.S. News and World Report. A few dozen have seen it in Iowa, a state Palin has visited a lot lately, just to sort of, you know, reconnect with the grassroots in America's heartland. But the documentary could still be useful as means of introducing the former Alaska Governor and 2008 vice presidential candidate to voters if, as appears likely, she has decided to run for President. On the other hand, if there are any Americans still unaware of Sarah Palin, they are probably living without electricity or portable radios in areas so rural and remote that the mail can't reach them with the videos anyway.
After all this time and all her media exposure, pundits are still reading the tea leaves and perhaps even studying the entrails of owls in trying to determine the political intentions of the inscrutable Palin. She is like the woman in a once ubiquitous TV ad for a product called Lady Clairol. "Does she or doesn't she?" the narrator asked a few dozen times each day, inviting viewers to guess whether the lovely hue and texture of the lady's hair was the gift of Mother Nature or Lady Clairol. "Only her hairdresser knows for sure."
Republican presidential hopeful Ron Paul is most distinguishable, on the debate stage alongside fellow GOP contenders, for his opposition to the U.S. wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and now Libya. Texas Congressman advocates the withdraw of U.S. troops from not only Afghanistan and Iraq, but also elsewhere in the world, such as Germany, Japan, and South Korea.
Rep. Paul has also distinguished himself from other candidates in his consistent statements and beliefs. Unlike most other candidates, he has not flip-flopped — saying now what he has been saying for decades.
Once considered as one of 12 potential leaders of the conservative movement after the age of Reagan, according to the March 1983 issue of Conservative Digest magazine, Ron Paul is now regarded as the Godfather of the Tea Party movement. Still, despite his popularity on the right, and among libertarians, independents, as well as disenfranchised Democrats, Paul is attacked by many due to his foreign policy stance.
Taxpayers in Chicago must cough up at least $30 million and the Chicago Fire Department must hire 111 blacks pursuant to a lawsuit the city lost on appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court. The lawsuit alleged that the city’s written firefighting test was unfair and resulted in discrimination against blacks because whites scored much higher than blacks, the result being that few blacks landed jobs with the department.
The decision could mean a pile of cash for some 6,000 applicants who took the test but didn’t make the fire department’s standard, which was to hire only “well qualified” applicants.
According to NBC Chicago,
A court order, finalized on Wednesday, instructs the Chicago Fire Department to add 111 black firefighters by March 2012.
The order, presented by U.S. District Court Judge Joan Gotschall, stems from a civil rights case that has made its way through trial and federal court. The lawsuit alleged that the Chicago Fire Department used discriminatory practices in its evaluation of scores for a 1995 entrance exam.
