Baby Bird Takes Comfort in the Arms of a Loving Cat | Faith.com

Baby Bird Takes Comfort in the Arms of a Loving Cat | Faith.com

Student expelled for refusing spychip

Student expelled for refusing spychip
A student in a Texas school district has been told she is to be expelled for refusing to wear a student ID badge that essentially places her in an “electronic concentration camp.”
“Regimes in the past have always started with the schools, where they develop a compliant citizenry,” John Whitehead, president of the Rutherford Institute said. “They are getting students used to living in a total surveillance state where there will be no privacy, wherever you go and whatever you text or email will be watched by the government. This is where everything is headed.”

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WND previously reported on the case of Andrea Hernandez, a student at John Jay High School in the Northside Independent School District in San Antonio, Texas. This year, the school implemented a new program requiring students to wear badges containing an RFID chip, which would be used to track them anywhere they went, including the restrooms. Hernandez refused to wear the chip, citing privacy and religious issues.
The RFID card is part of a pilot program called the “Student Locator Project” at John Jay and Anson Jones Middle School, which the district hopes to expand to cover all of its 112 schools, with a total student population of 100,000.
The primary intent of the tracking cards is not to increase student safety but to increase state funding to the district.
WOAI-TV in San Antonio reported district spokesman Pasqual Gonzalez said the two schools have a high rate of truancy, and the district could gain $2 million in state funding by improving attendance.
Despite the schools having 290 surveillance cameras, officials apparently believe that is not enough to keep track of students attending the schools.
After her refusal to wear the tracking chip, Hernandez was warned in a letter that there would “be consequences.” Following through on its threats, the district sent Hernandez a letter informing her she would expelled effective Nov. 26.
The Rutherford Institute intends to file a request for a temporary restraining order this week that would prohibit school officials from expelling Hernandez.
“She is a great achiever academically and she worked hard to get here. She should not be expelled for simply standing up for her First Amendment rights,” Whitehead said.
For Hernandez, the issue is the ID card but the RFID chip. The district subsequently offered to permit her to wear a card identical to those with the chip that did not contain the tracking device.
Whitehead said that while the offer may appear to be a reasonable compromise, it misses the point.
“Forcing her to wear a badge that essentially says she endorses the trackers when she doesn’t would be like requiring a Jewish student to wear a badge endorsing the Holocaust,” he said.
Hernandez has drawn national attention to the district’s policy. Because of this, Whitehead said, the district is singling her out for punishment. Hernandez is not the only student who has refused to wear the chip, however, she is the only one to face expulsion.
“She has become a thorn in their side and has been singled out,” Whitehead said. “The easiest way to solve the problem of a thorn is to remove it. I have been working on these types of cases for over 40 years, and the government either tries to sweep these problems under the rug or remove the person causing the problem.”
He said the case is important, because the district is attempting to show students that they will be punished for exercising their constitutional rights.
Prior to the expulsion letter, Hernandez faced other consequences. She was refused the right to vote for homecoming king and queen because she did not have the proper ID. Hernandez was using her old school-issued ID card at the time.
Whitehead said the argument by government officials is that a person has no expectation of privacy in a public school or on the sidewalk outside the building. However, he doesn’t accept that line of thinking.
“If a student is walking down the hallway and talking to his girlfriend, should the school have the ability to read their lips to see what they are talking about?” he asked. “What’s the difference between that and being an animal in a zoo?”
He warned that while it may seem like an isolated incident in a single school district, the tracking chips will eventually be implemented across the country.
“The forces behind this are very strong so people need to get ready for it,” Whitehead said. “We are moving into a time where we are going to be in an electronic concentration camp wherever we go.”

GOP legally barred from fighting vote fraud

GOP legally barred from fighting vote fraud


Voting machines suspiciously defaulting to Barack Obama? Buses loaded with strangers appearing at polling stations? Even ballots turning out 100 percent for one candidate in precinct reports?
In short, suspicions of vote fraud?

That’s too bad, because a race-based consent decree negotiated by Democrats against the Republican National Committee a generation ago still has tied the RNC’s hands, and GOP officials could be cited for contempt – or worse – if they try to make sure American elections are clean.
Impossible?
No. Fact.
The case is the Democratic National Committee vs. the Republican National Committee, originally from 1982.
Democrats alleged Republicans were trying intimidate minority voters in New Jersey and brought the legal action. The RNC, inexplicably, decided to agree to a consent decree before a Democrat-appointed judge rather than fight the claims.
The judge, Dickinson Debevoise, appointed by Jimmy Carter, later retired but decided he would continue to control the case. The decision requires the RNC – but not the DNC – to “refrain from undertaking any ballot security activities in polling places or election districts where the racial or ethnic composition of such districts is a factor in the decision to conduct, or the actual conduct of, such activities there and where a purpose or significant effect of such activities is to deter qualified voters from voting; and the conduct of such activities disproportionately in or directed toward districts that have a substantial proportion of racial or ethnic populations shall be considered relevant evidence of the existence of such a factor and purpose.”
The rest of the agreement essentially requires the RNC to follow applicable state and federal election laws.
But the section cited above has been used for decades to warn off Republicans from any challenge to evidence of voter fraud in districts with “racial or ethnic populations.”
The law has remained, even though the RNC recently challenged it at the appellate level only to be turned down by Judges Joseph Greenaway Jr., appointed by Bill Clinton; Dolores Sloviter, appointed by Carter; and Walter Stapleton, appointed by Ronald Reagan, in the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.
It now is pending before the U.S. Supreme Court.
But two election veterans both told WND it still is hurting the fight against voter fraud in the United States.
Attorney James Bopp of the James Madison Center said the threat that the RNC has faced is that someone will allege a violation of the decree, and party officials will be standing in a courtroom on Election Day.
Bopp’s organization was founded to protect the First Amendment right of all citizens of free expression and “to support litigation and public education activities in order to defend the rights of political expression and association by citizens and citizen groups as guaranteed by the First Amendment of the United States Constitution.”
Bopp himself has taken part in more than 60 election-related cases, including recounts, redistricting and constitutional law challenges to state and federal election laws.
He said the agreement even today, amid reports of fraud across the country, prevents the RNC from doing any anti-voter fraud activity on Election Day.
“It is way too restrictive,” he said. “It prevents the RNC from working with state parties in conducting voter integrity activities. It has been used by the DNC to harass the leadership of the RNC with false allegations of violations of the consent decree.”
He said the reason why the RNC originally agreed to the decree, rather than fight the allegations, was unclear. But he said he investigated the issue.
“It was very troubling that the RNC’s effort to ensure the integrity of the vote would be undermined,” he told WND.
While there have been periods in U.S. history in which there have been concerns about minority voting, the restrictions today, he said, are “completely unjustified.”
“It’s become absurd,” he said, noting that besides a president who had a black father, and a black attorney general, the GOP also has had a black chairman.
Voters, he said, would be best served to have both political parties watching for vote fraud.
Also responding to questions about the issue was Cleta Mitchell of the Washington firm of Foley & Lardner.
Mitchell is on the firm’s political law practice team and has 30 years of experience in law, politics and public policy, advising candidates, campaigns and others on state and federal campaign finance law, election law and compliance issues. She practices before the Federal Election Commission.
“The RNC has been completely prohibited from doing anything in ballot security since 1982,” she told WND. “The Democrats repeatedly over the years have gotten the RNC officers into court on the weekend before the election.
“What it means is that for 30 years there has been no way to institutionalize, to help train state parties, to work with candidates [on vote fraud prevention issues],” she said.
Problems can be caused by malfunctioning equipment, programming errors, or “sheer incompetence” of local elections officials, she said. And sometimes by vote fraud.
“The problem is there’s nothing that the RNC can do in that regard because of that consent degree,” Mitchell said.  “A lot of things need to be done to improve state laws. … Democrats are able to be involved as they want to be.”
Republicans have tried to change the decree since 2009, after Obama took office. But Debevoise has ruled that they failed to show that conditions in the U.S. had changed since 1982.
Debevoise said that since most minority voters support Democrats, the RNC still has an incentive to suppress minority votes.
He dismissed the idea of voter fraud and extended his own supervision of the case until 2017.
In March, the 3rd Circuit issued its affirmation of Debevoise’s decision.
At one political blog, called Politijim, the suspicion flowed.
“Obama only won by 400,000 votes in four states. ALL of which showed Romney ahead in the days leading up to the election, but losing by a substantial margin. All of which have precincts that inexplicably went 99 percent for Obama and had voter registrations that exceeded their population. ALL of which have public statements of problems with voting machines changing Romney votes to Obama,” the blog accused.
WND recently has reported on allegations of voter fraud, including a claim by a poll watcher in Pennsylvania who said votes reverted to Obama by default, no matter who the voter selected.
The incident took place in the state where officials claimed Obama received a total of 19,605 votes in 59 voting divisions to zero for Mitt Romney and not far from the 100 precincts in Ohio in which Obama got 99 percent of the vote.
With evidence mounting that the vote tabulation did not reflect the true choices of voters, talk-radio icon Rush Limbaugh declared: “Third-world, tin-horn dictators don’t get [these percentages]. I mean, the last guy that got this percentage of the vote was Saddam Hussein, and the people that didn’t vote for him got shot. This just doesn’t happen. Even Hugo Chavez [of Venezuela] doesn’t get 100 percent or 99 percent of the vote.”
It was in Upper Macungie Township, near Allentown, Pa., where an auditor, Robert Ashcroft, was dispatched by Republicans to monitor the vote on Election Day. He said the software he observed would “change the selection back to default – to Obama.”
He said that happened in about 5 percent to 10 percent of the votes.

Now White House petition seeks Obama’s birth certificate

Now White House petition seeks Obama’s birth certificate

Now many states want to secede from U.S.

Now many states want to secede from U.S.
Since WND first reported that residents in the state of Louisiana were petitioning to secede from the U.S., residents in 19 more states have filed requests with the White House to peaceably break from the union.
Furthermore, the Louisiana petition has topped 14,000 signatures, more than halfway to the threshold needed after which the White House has pledged to respond.

And for Texas, one of the new states to join the fray, the signature count now tops 20,000.
The White House’s We the People website explains that once a petition reaches 25,000 signatures, it will be placed on a queue for response from the administration. The website also maintains a page for previous petitions that have received a White House response.
Joining Louisiana now are Arkansas, South Carolina, Georgia, Missouri, Tennessee, Michigan, New York, Colorado, Oregon, New Jersey, North Dakota, Montana, Indiana, Mississippi, Kentucky, Florida, North Carolina, Alabama and Texas.
The Louisiana petition, which has served as a pattern for  many of the new states, reads as follows: “We petition the Obama administration to: Peacefully grant the State of Louisiana to withdraw from the United States of America and create its own NEW government.”
It continues, “As the Founding Fathers of the United States of America made clear in the Declaration of Independence in 1776: ‘When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.’”
The petition concludes with a further quote from the Declaration of Independence: “‘Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, that whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or abolish it, and institute new Government.’”

Screen capture of White House petition page for Louisiana secession

Residents of other states, however, have chosen different wording.
The Texas petition explains itself this way: “The U.S. continues to suffer economic difficulties stemming from the federal government’s neglect to reform domestic and foreign spending. The citizens of the U.S. suffer from blatant abuses of their rights such as the NDAA, the TSA, etc. Given that the state of Texas maintains a balanced budget and is the 15th largest economy in the world, it is practically feasible for Texas to withdraw from the union, and to do so would protect it’s citizens’ standard of living and re-secure their rights and liberties in accordance with the original ideas and beliefs of our Founding Fathers, which are no longer being reflected by the federal government.”
A petitioner from Tillamook, Ore., identified by the site as Kristopher W, worded his state’s petition this way: “Allow Oregon to vote on and leave the union peacefully and remain an ally to the nation.”
He continues, “With the federal government increasing it’s size much larger than our Founding Father’s intended, and it’s abuse of power trumping over the rights of state constitutions, and the forcing of unconstitutional laws over it’s own citizens, the people of Oregon would like the chance to vote on leaving the Union immediately. The federal government has imposed policies on Oregon that are not in Oregon’s best interests, and we as citizens would respectively and peaceably separate ourselves from a tyrannical government who cares nothing about creating a sustainable future for our children. At any time that the citizens of Oregon [should feel] the federal government was no longer imposing on the Constitution, we could re-vote to again join the union under a new agreement.”
As WND reported, the first of the petitions was filed the day after the 2012 election by Michael E. (full last name not provided) of Slidell, La.
The White House created the “We the People” petition site ostensibly as a way of giving all Americans “a way to engage their government on the issues that matter to them.”
“The right to petition your government is guaranteed by the First Amendment of the United States Constitution,” the page reads. “We the People provides a new way to petition the Obama Administration to take action on a range of important issues facing our country. We created We the People because we want to hear from you. If a petition gets enough support, White House staff will review it, ensure it’s sent to the appropriate policy experts, and issue an official response.”
The page also explains, “You have just 30 days to get 25,000 signatures in order to get a response from the White House.”
Once the White House does draft a response, it has pledged to send it via email to everyone who has signed the petition (registration on the site with a valid email address is required to sign petitions).
To view or even sign one of the petitions, click here.

The American Spectator : Doomed Beyond All Hope of Redemption

The American Spectator : Doomed Beyond All Hope of Redemption

 

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Doomed Beyond All Hope of Redemption

By Robert Stacy McCain on 11.7.12 @ 6:11AM

Dark thoughts on the meaning of a catastrophic election.

GAHANNA, Ohio -- Late Tuesday night, the pundits on TV began jabbering incomprehensibly along the lines of, "What does it mean?"
The American people -- or, at the very least, a sufficient plurality of them -- decided that they want another four years of clumsy policy failures and vengeful "progressivism," as Democrats nowadays describe their agenda for wrecking what remains of our constitutional republic. Even before the unmitigated political disaster of November 6, 2012, a date that will live in infamy, the prospects of salvaging the United States were not particularly hopeful. Now, however, we are permanently and irretrievably screwed.
Let's not mince words, eh? It was one thing, obviously, for the electorate to choose Barack Obama in 2008, when Bush-era "brand damage" was still a fresh irritant in the wounds of a war-weary nation. Four years ago, Obama was untested and enshrouded in the glowing mantle of Hope. No intelligent person could possibly believe that "Lightworker" crap anymore, but then again, it's been a long time since any intelligent person believed anything a Democrat said. The cretins and dimwits have become an effective governing majority, and the question for conservatives at this point is perhaps not, "What does it mean?" but rather, "Why should we bother ourselves resisting it any longer?"
Alas, as always, the duty of the Right is to manfully endure, to survive the defeat and stubbornly oppose the vaunting foe, and so this brutal shock, this electoral catastrophe, must be absorbed and digested. At some point next week or next month or next year, then, we shall recover our morale and plot some new stratagem for the future. In the immediate aftermath of Tuesday's debacle, however, it is difficult to see any glimmer of light amid the encroaching gloom. Surely, there are many Americans who now sympathize with that New York infantryman who, in the bleak winter of 1862, when the Union's Army of the Potomac was under the incompetent command of Gen. Ambrose Burnside, wrote home in forlorn complaint: "Mother, do not wonder that my loyalty is growing weak.… I am sick and tired of the disaster and the fools that bring disaster upon us."
The search for scapegoats always attends political defeat, and Republicans have no shortage of candidates for the role, beginning with Todd Akin, whose ill-considered remarks about "legitimate rape" during an August interview set off a nationwide demand that he quit as the GOP nominee against Sen. Claire McCaskill in Missouri. Akin went down to ignominious defeat Tuesday, as did Indiana's Richard Mourdock, who upset Republican Sen. Richard Lugar in the primary but then imploded after making Akin-esque comments about rape and abortion. Perhaps pro-life groups should sponsor a training session for political candidates, teaching them how to answer "gotcha" questions without either ceding anything to the abortion lobby or offending voters with off-the-cuff comments about rape. But Akin and Mourdock were just two names on a long list of bloodbaths for GOP Senate candidates, a massacre that also defeated Republican candidates in Virginia, Florida, Ohio, Wisconsin, Maine, Massachusetts and elsewhere.
The list of fools who have brought this disaster upon us certainly also will include New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, the gelatinous clown who (a) hogged up a prime time spot at the Republican convention to sing his own praises; (b) embraced Obama as the hero of Hurricane Sandy; and (c) then refused to appear at campaign events in support of Romney's presidential campaign. Good luck with the remainder of your political future, governor. It is unlikely Republicans shall soon forget your perfidious betrayal.
Well, then, what shall we say of Mitt Romney himself? He did not run a bad campaign. He excited the party's conservative base with his choice of Rep. Paul Ryan as his running mate, and Romney's stunning victory in the first presidential debate Oct. 3 ignited a surge of momentum that seemed destined to carry him all the way to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. I fondly recall the night after the debate when, in Fisherville, Virginia, a crowd twice the size of the town turned out to cheer Romney and Ryan at a jubilant rally. A few minutes before 1 a.m. this morning, the TV networks called Obama the winner in Virginia, a result that seemed impossible a month ago. The margin of Romney's defeat in Virginia -- as in the other major battleground states of Florida and Ohio -- was quite slender, but it was a defeat nonetheless.
Romney's campaign staff furiously challenged the fact of their defeat, so that the loser's concession speech was postponed until the wee hours of the morning. One can scarcely blame them for refusing to admit such a grim reality, but the reality could not be escaped. When Romney finally took the stage in Boston, he graciously said, "I pray that the president will be successful in guiding our nation." Prayers notwithstanding, the only success the current president is likely to have is in guiding our nation straight toward a destination that proverbially waits at the end of a road paved with good intentions.
What is left to hope for? That the American people will soon regret their choice? That another four years of economic stagnation and escalating debt will cure them of their insane appetite for charismatic liberals? If four years of endless failure have not rid them of this madness, the disease may well be terminal. Perhaps others will still see some cause for hope, and in another few weeks my friends may persuade me to see it, too. But today I will hear no such talk, and I doubt I'll be in a better mood tomorrow. At the moment, I am convinced America is doomed beyond all hope of redemption, and any talk of the future fills me with dread and horror.

About the Author

Robert Stacy McCain is co-author (with Lynn Vincent) of Donkey Cons: Sex, Crime, and Corruption in the Democratic Party (Nelson Current). He blogs at The Other McCain.

http://spectator.org/archives/2012/11/07/doomed-beyond-all-hope-of-rede

Financial Storm Clouds Gather Over the United States | Wall St. Cheat Sheet

Financial Storm Clouds Gather Over the United States | Wall St. Cheat Sheet