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Did the Obama family skip church services this Christmas? The White House readout of the President’s activities on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day makes no mention of church services – although the President and the First Lady made time to visit service members of the United States Military at the Marine Corps Base in Hawaii. Below is the text of the White House release to the press: Last night, the President made holiday telephone calls to US service members, then sat down with his family for Christmas Eve dinner. This morning, the family gathered around 8AM to open their Christmas...

CBS) Advocates of medical marijuana say pot has all sorts of health benefits. Maybe so, but a new study from Australia suggests that smoking pot can drive some people crazy - or at least make them go crazy sooner than they would have if they had never picked up the pipe. The study, published online in "Archives of General Psychiatry," shows that potheads develop severe mental illnesses like schizophrenia about 2.7 years earlier than people who don't use marijuana.

In another victory for pro-life advocates challenging the pro-abortion HHS mandate in Obamacare, a pro-life Catholic group has won a legal battle in court to get an exemption from having to comply with the mandate. The new mandate compels religious employers to pay for and refer employees for birth control, abortion-causing drugs and contraception in violation of employers’ religious beliefs. On Thursday, pro-life attorneys Robert Muise and David Yerushalmi presented oral argument in the United States District Court for the Eastern District of New York (Brooklyn) in support of Priests for Life’s request that the court immediately halt the enforcement...

... Obama is cutting short his vacation in the Pacific state of Hawaii and will return to Washington to resume talks with congressional leaders aimed at reaching agreement on a deficit reduction package before the year ends. The White House says Obama will leave Wednesday and is expected to arrive back in Washington early Thursday. Early last week,the president said he and Republican House Speaker John Boehner were relatively close to an agreement on a compromise to avert what is being called a "fiscal cliff" -- $500 billion in mandated spending cuts and tax increases that would affect almost all...

Since the election: (Updated 12/25/12 at 7:30 PM PST) Layoffs and closures. Number of jobs lost listed where reported. USA only Week of to # Laid off Running total Notes 11/7 11/13 21,164 21,164 11/14 11/20 35,247 56,411 11/21 11/27 3,630 60,041 Thanksgiving week 11/28 12/4 6,138 66,179 12/5 12/11 17,882 84,061 12/12 12/18 7,551 91,612 12/19 12/25 3,264 94,876 Merry Christmas! Organization Location # Laid off Running total Sector Notes Date Brevard Schools Brevard Co, FL 400 400 Education 12/19/12 Capital Jewelers Carson, NV 400 Retail Closure, no number reported 12/19/12 Office Max Cerritos, CA 400 Retail Closure, no...

A Christmas celebration - Obama style...

Secretary of State nominee John Kerry, with 20 years of concern about climate change, is expected to push the issue to center stage as a slow-motion crisis in need of a global solution. When he sought to defeat President George W. Bush in 2004, the Democratic senator from Massachusetts made a point of challenging the Bush administration's backtracking on the issue and rejection of climate science. In contrast, he told the nation, he “believes in science.”

As if Superstorm Sandy and the looming fiscal crisis weren't enough, a potential strike by thousands of dock workers from Boston to Houston threatens to shock the economy as early as this weekend. Business groups and state officials in recent days have called on President Obama to intervene, and use emergency powers to "avoid a coast wide port shutdown." They warn it could cost billions, citing estimates that a 10-day port lockout in 2002 cost $1 billion a day -- and caused a major backlog in shipments. Florida Gov. Rick Scott is the latest to enter the fray and call...

I decided to go check out the movie for myself thanks to the ringing endorsement by Senators Feinstein, Levin, and McCain: “I thought it was terrible,” said Feinstein, one of a handful of lawmakers to see the film ahead of its limited release this week. “It is a combination of fact, fiction and Hollywood in a very dangerous combination.” Despite concerns on the right that the movie was serving as a political propaganda piece for Team Obama, in actuality, the movie is rather apolitical, playing it pretty much straight down the middle. The movie does its best to avoid political...

Although President Obama supports setting a path to citizenship for many illegal immigrants, his administration deported a record 1.5 million of them in his first term. In addition, the latest data released by the government in recent days show that an unprecedented 409,849 people were deported for the fiscal year that ended Sept. 30. The increase from the previous year occurred despite policy changes ordered by Obama to reduce the deportations of otherwise law-abiding illegal immigrants. Roughly 55 percent, or more than 225,000 people, deported in the past year were convicted of crimes such as drug offenses and driving under...

Today the National Journal reported that Obama is reconsidering his decision to appoint Chuck Hagel Secretary of Defense. As I wrote in my previous post, there is no chance that Obama will appoint a supporter of a strong Israel to any senior foreign policy post because he wouldn't appoint someone who doesn't share his basic animosity towards Israel. But in Hagel, he chose someone even more outspoken in his animus towards the Jewish state than Obama. Hagel's looming appointment provoked angry responses from many leading Jewish voices in the US. Whether this opposition made a difference in driving Obama to...

WHEN thinking about the state of the Republican Party, I defer to a point that the Democratic consultant James Carville made the other day: “When I hear people talking about the troubled state of today’s Republican Party, it calls to mind something Lester Maddox said one time back when he was governor of Georgia. He said the problem with Georgia prisons was ‘the quality of the inmates.’ The problem with the Republican Party is the quality of the people who vote in their primaries and caucuses. Everybody says they need a better candidate, or they need a better message but...

Budget: Plan Boehner — also known as Plan B — has failed in the House because the Republican speaker couldn't get the Republican members to follow him. So what should they do now? Wait until next year. [snip] Not that a vote would have mattered: Harry Reid's do-nothing Senate — it hasn't passed a budget in more than three years — would not have even taken up the bill. [snip] Let him send his budget to Congress in February, as required by law, and show his plans for escaping the cliff. {snip}After all, won't Obama be responsible for the tax...

Relations between Bahrain and the United States have come under increasing strain amid the Shi’ite revolt in the Gulf Cooperation Council kingdom, a report said. The Washington Institute for Near East Policy said that Bahraini leaders were expressing dismay over what they determined was Washington’s failure to support Manama in the campaign against Shi’ites backed by Iran. The institute cited veiled criticism of the administration of President Barack Obama during the Manama Dialogue in early December. The United States sees political reform as compatible with maintaining the historical security relationship, while the royal family views Shi’ite leaders with suspicion, believing...

While the shooting at Connecticut’s Sandy Hook Elementary School has prompted a national gun control debate, President Barack Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder will still push to allow immigrants to purchase firearms more easily. Normally, the Department of Justice’s Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) requires legal aliens to live in a state for 90 days before buying a gun. The ATF does this through a rule attached to the Gun Control Act of 1968. In June, Holder’s DOJ proposed to eliminate that 90-day residency requirement rule. “This rule would finalize the interim final rule published on...

Politics 2012: It hasn´t been two months since Barack Obama won re-election, but already we´re finding out things that were kept from us during the campaign. Expect to hear more in the coming months. lElections are clarifying events, we´re told. But sometimes what they clarify is merely the gap between what we were told during the campaign and the reality on the ground. Often, the two don´t match. That´s certainly true with Obama. How often in recent weeks have we learned that what we heard on the campaign trail from the Obama camp, and which were echoed by

Some interesting news has broken in the wake of the latest push for gun control by President Obama and Senate Democrats: Obama sends his kids to a school where armed guards are used as a matter of fact. The school, Sidwell Friends School in Washington, DC, has 11 security officers and is seeking to hire a new police officer as we speak. If you dismiss this by saying, "Of course they have armed guards -- they get Secret Service protection," then you've missed the larger point. The larger point is that this is standard operating procedure for the school, period....

Gun control advocates' loudest voices are most heavily protected by guns. Andrew Cuomo, Michael Bloomberg, Barack Obama, Rahm Emanuel and other gun grabbing politicians are protected with secret service and/or security details that carry guns. If their argument is right, that guns kill people, it is more than appropriate that they disarm their security and themselves to demonstrate that they can live the way they are both proposing and legislating that the rest of the 99%, (not in the political 1% elite) live. If the Political 1%ers do not shed their armed protection for themselves and their own families then...

One of my favorite commentators on television is CNBC’s Rick Santelli. And today, he made a great point: when the Senate wanted to pass Obamacare, they met on Christmas eve, 2009. Somehow, the fiscal cliff isn’t that important to the Senate or House this time around. We know that President Obama is perfectly happy to let tax rates automatically increase on everyone (or at least those households earning $250,000 has above). And payroll taxes rise 2% regardless of the fiscal cliff or not. Then there are the 10+ Obamacare taxe, mostly hitting the top 2% of earners. But President Obama...

Random thoughts on the passing scene: When I was growing up, an older member of the family used to say, "What you don't know would make a big book." Now that I am an older member of the family, I would say to anyone, "What you don't know would fill more books than the Encyclopedia Britannica." At least half of our society's troubles come from know-it-alls, in a world where nobody knows even 10 percent of all. Some people seem to think that, if life is not fair, then the answer is to turn more of the nation's resources over...