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President Barack Obama, who favors legalized same-sex marriage and whose Justice Department is arguing in the Supreme Court that children need neither a father nor a mother, said today in a weekly address celebrating the Father’s Day weekend that “there will never be a substitute for” a father and that he still wishes he had had a father around when he was a child. Obama also said in the address that he wanted to use his presidency to “encourage marriage” and that he would work with “faith” groups to encourage “fatherhood.” … Obama then made clear he was directing his...

With the White House closing its doors to public tour groups in order to save money for the sequester, it's worth remembering some of the other costs the White House incurs annually.Like the "Chief Calligrapher," Patricia A. Blair, who has an annual salary of $96,725, and her two deputies, Debra S. Brown, who gets paid $85,953 per year, and Richard T. Muffler, who gets paid $94,372 every year.In all, the White House appears to employ 3 calligraphers for a yearly total of $277,050.Despite sequestration, there's been no announcement of the White House scaling back on calligraphers. 

His name is Rachid Ghannouchi and he is perhaps the most prominent political leader in Tunisia these days. He has been recognized by western media outlets as a moderate voice of Islam, someone who should have been cheered on during the Arab Spring. Just a couple of months ago, in fact, TIME suggested that Ghannouchi’s brand of Islam shouldn’t be cause for concern: In the aftermath of the Arab Spring, Ghannouchi has emerged as the most influential voice of political Islam. As Islamist parties have won elections across North Africa and the Middle East, his message — that Islam is...

I just love Washington-speak which offers heartfelt phrases such as “baseline spending,” “debt ceiling,” “drop dead dates,” and my ultimate favorites, “the cut,” “to cut,” “a cut,” or just simply “cuts.” Like the phrase “beauty is in the eye of the beholder,” a “cut” means different things to different people. Let me explain by first discussing common-speak, which is very easy to understand. When someone takes a cut in pay, it could mean going from $20 per hour to $15 per hour. Or, they’re paid $30,000 per year for a job that used to pay $35,000 per year. To most...

In the opening scene of Woody Allen's 1983 film Zelig, F. Scott Fitzgerald is seen to observe a curious little man as he chats with socialites at a sumptuous bash, speaking adoringly of President Coolidge and the Republican Party -- all in an upper class Boston accent. Then, an hour later, the renowned novelist is stunned to see the same man speaking to the kitchen help. Only now he claims to be a Democrat, and his accent has become coarse as if he were one of the crowd. This scene comes to mind when observing the incessant, ideological acrobatics of...

Politcal correctness - the idea of subsituting certain words or thoughts with others deemed to be "acceptable" - is destroying America. The phrase came about, according to Bill Lind in an address ten years ago, in a comic strip. We laugh at the idea of political correctness, but as Lind points out, it is deadly serious. He calls it the: ...great disease of our century, the disease that has left tens of millions of people dead in Europe, in Russia, in China, indeed around the world. It is the disease of ideology. PC is not funny. PC is deadly serious....

EXCERPT- Knowing very well most Americans objected to the "end of life" measure in the new health care legislation due to fears it could eventually give doctors a government financial incentive or even mandate to encourage severely ill patients to make life ending decisions too prematurely, Congressman Blumenauer thumbed his nose to the masses. It must be painfully obvious to Mr. Blumenauer that Americans did not want his end-of-life measure, so the Oregon Congressman decided to run around the will of the people by bureaucratic fiat. Instead, he and his fellow Democrats eventually omitted the measure from the bill only...

Hanukkah may have ended over 2 weeks ago, Kwanzaa week may have just begun, and New Years may still be 6 days away, but major retailers have once again started their "After Holiday" sales on December 26. Retailers that went to great lengths to avoid using the word Christmas, in favor of the more inclusive term "Holidays", now seem to not care that many holidays are still to come while others ended long ago. Companies such as Barnes and Nobel as well as Old navy/Gap went to such extremes to avoid using the term Christmas that they ended up being...

Though the group is barely formed, two things seem patently obvious. First, since elite liberals have failed in branding themselves as “liberal” and then “progressives” in a country that is center-right, No Labels seems to be another center-left attempt at re-branding the movement. Taken in this light, the group’s deciding not to have a label says a lot about how poorly any group or policy that has an overt center-left tag performs in the center-right political marketplace. Second, No Labels, which purportedly seeks consensus on a range of issues, accomplished its primary goal of bringing together the left, right, and...

Open Letter to FCC Calling for Real Net Neutrality More than 80 grassroots organizations, consumer groups, civil rights organizations, innovative businesses, technology experts and public interest advocates filed a letter with the Federal Communications Commission on Friday, signaling broad support for strong Network Neutrality rules. The letter highlighted five key areas in which rules proposed by FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski must be improved to protect the free and open Internet. The Commission is slated to vote on Net Neutrality on Dec. 21. FCC_Letter_Real_Net_Neutrality.pdf freepress = reform media. transform democracy.

Journalist and author Fareed Zakaria has made some grave accusations against those who oppose the building of the Islamic center near Ground Zero, and has predicated his own approval of the project on the moderateness of Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf. Zakaria wrote that Abdul Rauf “has said one or two things about American foreign policy that strike me as overly critical — but it’s stuff you could read on The Huffington Post any day.” Yes, indeed — you are likely to read similar “stuff” on the Huffington Post, since Rauf has written there. But how can that possibly constitute a...

Is the Obama Administration preparing the ground for a Ministry of Truthiness? The President's latest wide-ranging speech at Hampton University made a halt at a very strange outpost, before moving on to education. Obama, it seems, is vexed by the idea of conspiracy theories. Apparently people aren't thinking the right thoughts. Obama's internet Yoda, Professor Cass Sunstein*, is also besotted with the idea. Two years ago, Sunstein proposed what you might call an 'active government solution' to conspiracies. The best way to counter conspiracy theories, Sunstein and co-author Adrian Vermeule argued, is with the "cognitive infiltration of extremist groups". This...

The White House released these excerpts of President Obama's prepared remarks on health care, to be delivered around 1:45 p.m.: “I don’t believe we should give government bureaucrats or insurance company bureaucrats more control over health care in America. I believe it’s time to give the American people more control over their own health insurance. I don’t believe we can afford to leave life-and-death decisions about health care to the discretion of insurance company executives alone. I believe that doctors and nurses like the ones in this room should be free to decide what’s best for their patients. The proposal...

Way down deep inside, Barack Obama has to know the bloom is off the rose. Indeed, as he prepares to deliver his first State of the Union address two nights from now, he must be feeling a bit like Willy Loman, the mythical salesman who lamented how tough it is out there “with just a shoeshine and a smile,” trying to peddle a product no one wants to buy. Just 14 months ago, adored by multitudes who jammed Grant Park in Chicago to cheer his victory speech, Obama was at the zenith of a mountaintop experience, proclaiming, “If there is...

Brother Tariq: The Doublespeak of Tariq Ramadan, by Caroline Fourest; foreword by Denis MacShane (Encounter Books, 262 pp., $23.95) In the 1990s, Western liberals, alarmed at the presence of Islamic fundamentalists in their midst, turned in desperation to Muslims whom they dubbed “reformers” or “modernizers.” They hoped that these figures would have a moderating influence on disaffected Muslim youths who refused to integrate into Western society. One such “reformer” is Tariq Ramadan, a Swiss-born academic. Ramadan has won the confidence of many in the West, including the British government, which asked him to serve on its task force for...

Magicians succeed by waving or otherwise moving one hand, thereby distracting you from watching the hand that is about to perform some trick. President Obama and his economic team are performing a similar act, concentrating attention on their macroeconomic policies -- stimulus, deficits, growth rates, unemployment -- to distract attention from their microeconomic regulatory policies. It comes down to this: Borrow and spend to create jobs, regulate to destroy them. The original $787 billion stimulus package is due for a supplement that will bring the total to around $1 trillion. Spending so far has created or "saved" between 1.7 million...

OREM, Utah -- Boyd J. Petersen told the Utah Valley University conference on "outmigration" about how Hugh Nibley -- and other Mormons -- coped with the divided sense of self that minorities often experience in the larger society. Petersen, author of "Hugh Nibley: A Consecrated Life," spoke on Nov. 6 about how members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints live with contradictory public images. "They are both revered and reviled, feared and revered," Petersen said. Outmigrants, those Mormons who have left Utah, "have this divided sense of ourselves." Mormons have their own sense of themselves and their...

To begin know it is said amongst the knowledgeable North Carolina is sprinkled with a number of “sweet spots” where a fellow can stand in an open field and box the compass in four opposite directions (North,East,South and West) for a few hundred yards and find himself under four conflicting sets of hunting regulations........... The leading (current) contender for complete Alice-In-Wonderland-Mad-Hatter “the law is ours to know and yours to find out” bureaucracy is DUPLIN COUNTY.......

There was a time, not so long ago, when the term "Internet Freedom" actually meant what it implied: a cyberspace free from over-zealous legislators and bureaucrats.... Those days are now gone; the presumption of online liberty is giving way to a presumption of regulation. A massive assault on real Internet freedom has been gathering steam for years and has finally come to a head. Ironically, victory for those who carry the banner of "Internet Freedom" would mean nothing less than the death of that freedom.... Here is the reality: Because of the steps being taken in Washington right now, real...

Tell us, where is everyone? Where did all the people who demonstrated against Israel’s brutality in Operation Cast Lead, in the Second Lebanon War, in Operation Defensive Shield, or even in The Hague, when we were dragged there unwillingly after daring to build a separation barrier between us and the suicide bombers, disappear to? We see demonstrations here and there, but these are mainly Iranian exiles. Europe, in principle, is peaceful and calm. So is the United States. Here and there a few dozens, here and there a few hundreds. Have they evaporated because it is Tehran and not here?...