Issues
Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) the leftist majority leader from the President’s corrupt home state, believes the United States may soon abandon the Constitution’s requirement that the President be a natural-born citizen of the United States.
If Durbin believes the remarks he made during a hearing of the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Immigration, Refugees and Border Security on his renewed DREAM Act, the massive amnesty bill for illegal-alien children, then the requirement is no longer necessary.
A story by Terence P. Jeffrey of CNSNews.com tells the tale. The story’s accompanying video shows Durbin telling the assembled illegal aliens, whom he and other leftists consider “DREAMers,” that one of them might become the President.
Thanks to a massive grassroots pro-life campaign, lawmakers in Poland have cast an initial vote in favor of legislation that would ban all abortions in that country. As reported by the website LifeNews.com, the effort was headed by the Polish pro-life group PRO Foundation, which organized a grassroots campaign to lobby members of Parliament to support the measure. Additionally, noted the pro-life website, “the nation’s Catholic bishops have also played an integral role in advancing the legislation.” AFP News reported that Poland’s lower house of Parliament, the Sejm, voted 254-151 to send the bill on to a committee for further consideration, following an effort by the liberal Democratic Left Alliance to derail the measure. The committee will include its findings in a subsequent version of the bill, which it will present to Parliament in September.
If the Obama administration gets its way, you can kiss your next SUV — and possibly your life, if you're involved in an automobile accident — goodbye. The administration is proposing a doubling of current federal gas mileage standards by 2025. New cars manufactured in that year would be required to meet a Corporate Average Fuel Efficiency (CAFE) standard of 56.2 miles per gallon, which the New York Times calculates “would require increases in fuel efficiency of nearly 5 percent a year from 2017 to 2025.”
According to the Newspaper of Record, these new standards will “reduce global warming emissions by millions of tons a year and cut oil imports by billions of barrels over the life of the program,” “sav[e] consumers billions of dollars at the pump,” and create “a truly global automobile market” by aligning U.S. standards with those of Europe, China, and Japan.
Several veterans groups in Houston, Texas, are joining an area pastor in suing the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs for religious discrimination, charging that at least one VA official banned prayers and certain religious terms during funerals for veterans at the Houston National Cemetery. The latest charges follow a Memorial Day controversy in which the cemetery’s director, Arleen Ocasio, censored a prayer that the Rev. Scott Rainey had planned to deliver during a service at the cemetery, removing the name of Jesus from the prayer. As reported by The New American, Rainey filed suit, and a federal judge granted a temporary restraining order against the VA, ruling that Rainey’s prayer qualified as free speech protected under the First Amendment, and allowing him to proceed with his original prayer.
When California Governor Jerry Brown signed into law that state’s latest attempt to collect Internet sales taxes from retailers outside the state, he surely must have known he would be hurting, perhaps eliminating altogether, at least 25,000 small businesses. But the opportunity to collect an estimated $200 million in uncollected taxes overrode that consideration.
Amazon.com, with gross sales of $34 billion annually, generates much of its revenues through affiliates who offer the opportunity to their customers to “click through” their websites and purchase products from Amazon. In an email sent to its California affiliates on Tuesday, Amazon said:
The homosexual lobby vigorously opposes any sort of discrimination against its members. And it has persuaded politicians across the country, most recently in New York, that homosexuals must be permitted to “marry.” But if you aren’t homosexual and want to play poofter softball, forget about it.
That’s the upshot of a story in the New York Times detailing a federal lawsuit filed against the North American Gay Amateur Athletic Alliance, an organization that promotes homosexual-only sports. It focuses on softball.
The NAGAAA sponsors the Gay Softball World Series. But the NAGAAA isn’t much on tolerance. When it learned that at least three players on the second place team in 2008, were, oddly enough, “straight,” it took the team’s honor away.
Did Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan, in her Senate confirmation hearings, tell the truth with regard to her involvement in formulating a defense of ObamaCare while serving as President Barack Obama’s Solicitor General? Furthermore, was she involved in it to such an extent that federal law demands that she recuse herself from any ObamaCare-related cases that come before the Supreme Court? Forty-nine members of Congress want to know.
To that end, they have sent a letter to Rep. Lamar Smith (R-Texas), Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, and Rep. John Conyers (D-Mich.), ranking member on the committee, asking the committee “to promptly investigate the extent to which … Kagan was involved in preparing a legal defense of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA) during her tenure as Solicitor General.”
John Quincy Adams, Secretary of State in the administration of President James Monroe, offered a toast to his native America on July 4, 1821. The Republic was yet young, just 45 years after declaring its independence of Great Britain. The glories of its destiny were mainly to come. But the glories foreseen by Adams, the son of America’s second President and destined to be its sixth, were not triumphs of conquest, but rather the majesty of a nation leading truly by the force of example instead of the example of force.
For America, said Adams, with the same voice by which it spoke itself into existence, similarly held forth to other lands the “hand of honest friendship, of equal freedom, of generous reciprocity. She has uniformly spoken among them, though often to heedless and often to disdainful ears, the language of equal liberty, of equal justice and of equal rights. She has in the lapse of nearly half a century, without a single exception, respected the independence of other nations while asserting and maintaining our own.”
In the American holiday calendar no day is more significant than the Fourth of July, in which we celebrate the signing of the Declaration of Independence in 1776. That Declaration proclaimed to the world our separation from Great Britain and our emergence as a new sovereign nation, as we state in the pledge to our flag, "under God, with liberty and justice for all."
The Declaration stated unequivocally: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, and that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these Rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just Powers from the Consent of the Governed."
Columbus, Ohio hosted the first We the People Convention this weekend, attracting nearly one thousand pro-liberty, anti-Obama and anti-establishment guests. The event boasted an array of prominent speakers, including Republican hopeful Herman Cain, former Democratic strategist Dick Morris, and John Birch Society President John McManus.
According to the event’s website, the event’s purpose was to “educate and train citizens about the political process and to encourage involvement in that process at the grassroots level.” For two days, from July 1 to July 2, the convention hosted educational breakout sessions that included a wide range of conservative speakers.
