In America today there is a new fad called Designer Christianity. Cherry-picked Christian ideology has zero to do with God’s Word and everything to do with the moral relativism that now pervades modern philosophy. It is a pick-and-choose brand of religion where a person selects exactly what they want to believe, misinterprets and takes Scripture out of context, and then labels those who object to that sacrilege as mean-spirited, un-Jesus-like, and anti-Christian.

It’s a mentality that says a personal interpretation of Scripture trumps the canon of God’s Word and anything can be justified because God is much bigger than small-minded, fundamentalist-style thinking.  Rather than align with truth, designer Christians mistakenly believe that God is eager to conform to public opinion and expectations.

Using Scripture to justify one’s own desires or beliefs is the highest form of opportunism. The truth is that when it comes to misusing Christianity, Barack “Audacity” Obama issues edicts against religious organizations one day and then quotes Scripture to justify forcing Christians to support abortion the next.

This year at the National Prayer Breakfast, President Barack Obama spoke on Jesus’ behalf and claimed “support from on high to defend two of his most controversial legislative achievements” – one being healthcare reform, an aspect of which includes funding abortion on demand.

Good Samaritan Barack Obama must believe Christian charity includes supplying free abortions and contraceptives to everyone in America, because just as he said, God knows “far too many neighbors in our country have been hurt and treated unfairly over the last few years.” Over breakfast, President Obama shared the importance of obeying God’s commandment to “love thy neighbor as thyself.” What he didn’t mention was that he makes an exception to that rule for women seeking an abortion, because “Thou shalt not kill” doesn’t apply when the victim is in utero.

The President even provided the National Prayer Breakfast attendees with mental imagery of himself as Jacob wrestling with God and prevailing when he reportedly said that he often “falls to his knees in prayer,” and where he “emphasized the role of his religious values in determining where to lead the country.” One wonders whether it was during one of those prayer sessions the President managed to convince the Lord to change His mind and give dispensation to government to force Catholic institutions, against their beliefs, to provide coverage for contraceptives, sterilization, and ultimately abortion.

We’ll never know, but nonetheless, while speaking to the prayer breakfast crowd the President, in the name of God, also maintained that he is “call[ing] for the wealthiest to give up their tax breaks…out of economic necessity, but also in line with biblical teachings.”  Could it be that Barack Obama is suggesting mixing church and state together? After all, Jesus did say to “Render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s, and unto God what is God’s.” Is Barack Obama now suggesting that paying taxes to the government fulfills our responsibility to both Caesar and God? 

Waxing homiletic, Obama invited America into the solitude of his prayer closet when he said, “And I think to myself, if I’m willing to give something up as somebody who’s been extraordinarily blessed, and give up some of the tax breaks that I enjoy, I actually think that’s going to make economic sense.” 

Then, pulling a pick-and-choose maneuver, the President followed that up by saying, “But for me as a Christian, it also coincides with Jesus’ teaching that ‘for unto whom much is given, much shall be required.’”

The Obama doctrine is such that, to the President – to whom we all know ‘much has been given’ – caring for the poor in the name of Jesus Christ includes monetary extortion. Furthermore, Barack’s dogma obviously adheres to the heretical belief that neither he nor his congregants will be required to explain exactly how caring for the least among us includes supporting abortion.

In “defense” of the innocent, the President defends either himself, or a policy that further enhances his largely government-driven religious convictions. In a stunning example of his typical cluelessness, Obama “defended foreign aid from assault, noting that it not just enhances the nation’s security,” – and here’s where it gets really good – “but fulfills the biblical requirement to look out for those who cannot speak for themselves.”

When referencing foreign aid, Uganda, and human trafficking, the President said, “It’s also about the biblical call to care for the least of these – for the poor; for those at the margins of our society. To answer the responsibility we’re given in Proverbs to ‘Speak up for those who cannot speak for themselves, for the rights of all who are destitute.’”  Interestingly enough, another translation of that Proverb reads: “Speak up for those who cannot speak for themselves; ensure justice for those being crushed.”

But never mind all that “justice for those being crushed” talk, because once again at yet another National Prayer Breakfast, Barack Obama attempted to maintain his religious credibility while employing a pick-and-choose form of Christianity.  He shared with the faithful that he gains spiritual insight and values through a unique interpretation of the Bible and “private moments of prayer.” In other words, the President seeks divine approval to administer policy for the common good and to do ‘God’s work’ in the form of providing unlimited funding and unfettered access to abort those Americans “who cannot speak for themselves.”

Read more: http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2012/02/barack_obama_using_scripture.html#ixzz1lLGbsqzn

Like many leftists, President Obama has deep contempt for Christianity and democracy. This is why his administration has declared war on the Catholic Church and religious liberty.

Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius recently went ahead and approved last year’s decision to mandate that many religious organizations provide health insurance plans to their employees that include contraception, abortion-inducing drugs and sterilization coverage – and this must be done without charging a co-pay. In other words, Mr. Obama has done something that is ominous and unprecedented: compelling religious groups to embrace and subsidize free birth control. Catholic universities, hospitals and charities must either betray their fundamental social teachings or drop insurance coverage for their employees, thereby triggering massive financial penalties under Obamacare. The choice is simple: Abandon Catholic doctrine or go out of business.

The ruling will not simply devastate the Catholic heath care system and elaborate social network, which includes soup kitchens, adoption centers, immigrant services and parochial schools. It directly assaults and violates the conscience rights of Catholics. The church teaches that contraception is a sin, an immoral attempt to obstruct God’s will of when and whether human life should be created. It is the ultimate embodiment of pride: man trying to act as God. That is why opposition to birth control is at the heart of the Catholic faith.

The church teaches that the primary purpose of sexual activity within the sacred bonds of marriage is procreation – to perpetuate humanity from one generation to the next. For nearly 1,500 years, such thinking underpinned the Christian West. That was then; this is now. Since the 1960s, modern society is obsessed with contraception, abortion and sexual hedonism. The results have been declining birth rates and shrinking native populations. Literally, the West is dying. As the late Pope John Paul II put it, we are in the grips of “a culture of death.” Birth control is a key pillar. It is a seminal aspect of the socialist drive to establish a secular utopia – smash the traditional family by relentlessly advancing the sexual revolution. The pill and the condom are the hammer and sickle of cultural Marxism. Decades ago, the Vatican warned that birth control eventually would lead to the West’s demise. A civilization unable – and unwilling – to reproduce itself is doomed.

Yet even if one does not care a scintilla about the church’s stance on contraception, the ruling should frighten everybody – Christian and non-Christian. America was founded upon one key principle: religious freedom. The Pilgrims fled religious persecution. Our Founding Fathers deliberately created a republic banning an established church, such as England’s Anglican Church, and championed a nation where different religious denominations could exist – and flourish – without government harassment. Religious liberty lies at the core of American freedom. In fact, the Founders considered it so important that it comes before all other rights enshrined in the First Amendment. James Madison, the primary author of the Constitution, said, “Conscience is the most sacred of all property.” The Obama administration is telling Catholics that their conscience rights can be trampled with impunity. The state has the power to coerce people to support and pay for practices they find morally repugnant and contravene their fundamental religious beliefs. This is tyranny.

Mr. Obama is the most radical president in our history. He is spearheading a liberal social revolution, not just an economic one. He supported partial-birth abortion – the heinous procedure of killing babies just before they are to be delivered. His administration refuses to uphold the Defense of Marriage Act. He has enabled homosexuals to serve openly in the military, transforming the armed forces into a vast laboratory for social engineering. His signature legislation, Obamacare, allows for the federal funding of abortion. Hence, Christians will be forced to have their tax dollars subsidize the mass murder of unborn children – a direct attack on their most basic religious tenets. He is making Christians complicit in infanticide.

To commemorate the 39th anniversary of Roe v. Wade, Mr. Obama made a remarkable and revealing statement. He said legalized abortion is indispensable “to ensure that our daughters have the same rights, freedoms and opportunities as our sons to fulfill their dreams.” In other words, being pregnant is a burden – an obstacle – to be overcome. That a human life is destroyed is irrelevant to him and the feminist left. Murder, it appears, is sometimes necessary to achieve liberalism’s much-vaunted goal of personal liberation.

“Religion is the opiate of the masses,” Karl Marx said. This is why Marxists and their fellow travelers have sought to eradicate religious faith – especially Christianity. Tens of millions of Christians were slaughtered by Vladimir Lenin, Josef Stalin and Mao Zedong. At its core, communism is based on anti-Christian bigotry (just as national socialism is infused with anti-Semitism).

Mr. Obama is a militant secularist. His aim is to purge religion from the public square, forcing it to retreat into the private sphere – making it nothing more than a personal lifestyle choice. He wants us to leave our faith at the door when engaging in civic life. Yet religion is natural to human beings. The only way radical progressives can forge a secular social order is through a repressive state.

The Obama administration is eroding the First Amendment, assaulting the conscience rights and religious liberties of Catholics and waging a relentless campaign to destroy America’s Judeo-Christian values. Catholics must engage in civil disobedience. Otherwise, Mr. Obama will succeed in dismantling our republic. Today, he is coming for us. Tomorrow, it will be you.

Jeffrey T. Kuhner is a columnist at The Washington Times and president of the Edmund Burke Institute.

Sponsored Link: Have you heard about a little-known way to own real silver bullion for around 3 bucks? Surprisingly, it’s an investment opportunity created by the U.S. government. And it has nothing to do with stocks, options, ETFs, or even uncirculated bullion coins. Click here to learn more

The deficit-slashing supercommittee left Congress with quite the mess to mop up in 2012.

With each day that ticks by, the nation becomes a bit closer to a painful round of automatic budget cuts that the 12-member supercommittee failed to prevent because of its members’ inability to agree on a $1.2 trillion deal to cut the deficit.

So, despite a veto threat from President Barack Obama, congressional Republicans and a handful of Democrats have vowed to somehow unravel the spending cuts this year — which are scheduled to hit defense and domestic programs equally in January 2013.

“I’m very concerned about the defense cuts in sequestration, but it’s also the cuts to nondefense discretionary [that] are also devastating,” Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) told POLITICO. “Ultimately, I think there’s a very strong feeling that it’s not going to go into effect.”

It’s easy to see why there’s such an appetite on Capitol Hill to blunt the budget ax.

If the defense cuts, including the trigger, go on as planned, it could lead to more than 1 million job losses in just one year, according to a study conducted by Stephen Fuller of George Mason University. And the domestic side of the ledger will also be hit hard — for instance, the National Education Association has estimated that more than 71,000 education-related jobs would disappear in 2013 under sequestration, the formal term for the $1.2 trillion in the automatic, across-the-board cuts.

“The Department of Defense just can’t sustain additional cuts beyond what they’ve already taken without seriously jeopardizing … the national security capability,” said Cord Sterling, vice president of legislative affairs for the Aerospace Industries Association, a group that has been talking with lawmakers and staffers on the impact of sequestration. “It will [also] have a very serious and negative impact on the U.S. manufacturing industry.”

But how it ultimately shakes out is the question mark looming over Capitol Hill this year.

House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) has said “no one really wants to go there” on the spending cuts and that Obama needs to work with Congress to find a way to avoid them. And a handful of legislative proposals to block the cuts are already circulating in Congress.

California Republican Buck McKeon, the powerful chairman of the House Armed Services Committee and a Boehner ally, has introduced a bill that would trim the federal workforce and use those savings to offset one year of automatic cuts to both defense and domestic programs.

McKeon’s measure, which has 25 co-sponsors, would prevent federal agencies from hiring more than one worker for every three who leave until the workforce slims down by 10 percent. As he introduced his bill in December, McKeon said the first round of budget cuts to the Pentagon had already cleared “a lot of waste, fat and even muscle out of the military” and that further reduction “cuts us to the bone.”

On the Senate side, Republicans John McCain and Jon Kyl of Arizona, Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, Kelly Ayotte of New Hampshire and Marco Rubio of Florida are putting together a bill that would package various spending cuts identified by the supercommittee and deficit negotiations led by Vice President Joe Biden with some smaller nontax revenue-raisers to prevent the defense cuts. That measure is expected to be released sometime this month.

Legislation targeting domestic spending cuts hasn’t gathered as much attention, but one measure, circulated by Rep. Edolphus Towns (D-N.Y.), would shield hospitals and other health care providers from the cuts that are set to hit Medicare.

Meanwhile, Lieberman teamed up with four Republican senators on a bill that would fast-track through Congress any deficit-cutting plan that has the support of 12 senators and 30 representatives — split evenly between Democrats and Republicans. The proposal would have to equal at least $1.5 trillion in deficit reductions but ideally reach closer to $4 trillion, and would replace the automatic cuts.

The other way out is for lawmakers to come up with and pass a $1.2 trillion plan to cut the deficit — exactly what the supercommittee was tasked to do. Saying there will be “no easy offramps on this one,” Obama said he’ll veto any measure to override those cuts unless Congress gives him a “balanced” plan to cut the deficit — a stance backed up by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) and a majority of House Democrats.

But it’s difficult to see how 535 lawmakers could come to a consensus when 12 members, after months of private negotiations, couldn’t.

“That’s the challenge, isn’t it? I didn’t say it would be easy,” said Rep. Mike Simpson (R-Idaho), who helped spearhead the so-called Go Big effort that pushed for a deficit deal that reached $4 trillion or higher. “It’s going to be more difficult in an election year, but I don’t think we can afford to wait.”

“I don’t see how we get a fair deal in that with the overwhelming majority of the House being Republican,” added Connecticut Rep. John Larson, who leads the House Democratic Caucus.

Lieberman also predicted that any movement on the cuts would most likely be pushed off until after the November elections.

Scan to sign up to receive great stories

ANOTHER MUSLIM HONOR KILLING – THIS TIME SEVEN DEAD IN TEXAS
01-02-2012 2:56 pm – Americans United for Freedom
Grapevine Texas Real Estate agent Aziz Yazdanpanah was suffering the worst kind of humiliation possible for a Muslim man: his house was in foreclosure, his wife had left him, and she was raising “his” family in the Western, modern fashion – even allowing their children to celebrate Christmas and date non-Muslims. In proper Islamic tradition, Yazpanpanah did what any obedient Muslim should do – perform honor killings – and murdered his entire family to preserve the family’s Muslim “faith” and “good name.”

On Christmas morning, Yazdanpanah dressed in a Santa suit, invaded his estranged family’s apartment and shot all family members dead, leaving their broken bodies strewn among festive Christmas wrapping paper, before shooting himself as well.

THIS IS SHARIAH LAW IN ACTION.

Tragically, the warning signs were all there, but in this day of political correctness, none dared utter the words Shariah – and the promise of justice and freedom failed this young family fleeing medieval persecution. Friends of Nona Yazdanpanah (pictured at the top pof the article), the daughter murdered by Aziz, say that Nona was terrified of her father. She frequently came to school sobbing and describing how her father had installed video cameras throughout the house to monitor his family’s activities, and that Aziz had even nailed his daughter’s bedroom window closed to prevent possible escapes. Nona was reportedly relieved when her mother left Aziz and spirited Nona and her younger brother Ali to an apartment. Nona was reportedly excited about “starting her new life.”

But all that ended Christmas morning, when Aziz “reclaimed” his family’s honor in time-honored Islamic fashion, slaughtering them in cold blood.

TELL CONGRESS – STOP SHARIAH LAW IN AMERICA – SUPPORT HR 973

The arguments are endless of where and how Islam specifically authorizes “honor killing,” which has been practiced by Muslims since their prophet walked the earth. However, “not subject to retaliation” is “a father or mother (or their fathers or mothers) for killing their offspring, or offspring’s offspring.” (‘Umdat al-Salik o1.1-2.) The Shafi’i manual of Islamic law ‘Umdat al-Salik, is certified by Al-Azhar University in Cairo as a reliable guide to Sunni Muslim orthodoxy and interpretation of the hadith, or words of the prophet Muhammad. Hadith are regarded by traditional Islamic schools of jurisprudence as important tools for understanding the Quran and in matters of Islamic law, or Shariah.

ALL the hallmark signatures of Islamic “honor” killing are there. Yet Grapevine police are adamantly refusing to publicly offer Islamic Shariah as the motive, and the politically correct media are twisting the facts to ensure their reports never breathe a word that might implicate that the fanatical, bloody Islamic agenda is being carried out right here in America.

Recently, we have seen honor killing after honor killing as successful, friendly and seemingly “moderate” Muslims murder their families in the name of “honor.”

In Buffalo, NY a successful businessman beheaded his wife when she requested a divorce.

In Arizona Faleh Almaleki murdered his daughter for, (as he admitted to prosecutors), being too westernized and therefore “bringing shame upon his family.”

Actress Afshan Azad, of Harry Potter fame, was recently brutalized and nearly killed by her father and brother in another attempted Islamic honor killing.

Bloody honor killings are being carried out with alarming frequency and in the tolerant, civilized West, our media as well as our criminal justice system refuses to call it what it is – Shariah Law.

TELL CONGRESS – STOP SHARIAH LAW IN AMERICA – SUPPORT HR 973

To ignore the facts is not only insane, it is suicide, for this bloody Islamic creed is a program for violent suppression of liberty and human equality that seeks to permeate, then subjugate, America until we are free no more.

I beg you, defend justice and the rule of law in the West. Support HR 973 – Put a STOP to Shariah Law in America.

TELL CONGRESS – STOP SHARIAH LAW IN AMERICA – SUPPORT HR 973

God bless America,

Editors
Americans United for Freedom
PO Box 1310
Herndon, VA 20172

To write a comment you need to be registered
Register New
01-04-2012 4:10 am – Comment by kristinmak
Do NOT support this HR Bill. It is part of the big lie, this poor man was no part of any “sharia law” that the LIARS would like you to believe. Did you bother listening to the 911 call, made by the shooter? He was screaming help me, help me! I am shooting people!

The big scare the American people (ignorant ones) are being fed is of the guns/terrorist BS. or, “Sharia” bs. There is no such thing as “Sharia Law”.

In 2005, just ahead of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) recovered a box of Kinestik explosives from the home of Terry Nichols, the convicted co-conspirator of Tim McVeigh in the Oklahoma City bombing. An affidavit from Oklahoma City conspirator Nichols about the explosives should have sent out shockwaves when it was filed in November of 2007:

I was asked to . . . disclose the location of the box of explosives . . . that I had taken from Roger Moore’s home in Arkansas. This was the same box of explosives recently discovered at my Herington, Kan. home and seized by the FBI. McVeigh had used this Kinestik as a detonator for his bomb. McVeigh said that when Moore furnished the Kinestiks, Moore had told McVeigh that he knew McVeigh “would put them to good use.” I responded by telling Mr. Selby [Michael Selby, an attorney for the government—Ed.] that I could “give” him Roger Moore. Mr. Selby’s reaction to my offer, however, was not what I had expected. Mr. Selby essentially said “no deal.” Mr. Selby told me that Roger Moore was “untouchable.”

Attached to that affidavit was a “302” (FBI witness statement) filed by Selby, who came to Nichols that day in the Florence, Colo. prison in 2005 on an “off the-books mission” authorized by the highest levels of the Justice Department.

Moore was the Arkansas gun dealer and FBI informant who worked with Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) informant Andreas Strassmeier, the man widely believed to have originally given McVeigh the idea of bombing the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City. Both were handled by FBI agent Larry Potts, a senior FBI official who had allegedly personally ordered the murder of members of the Randy Weaver family at Ruby Ridge, Idaho.

Moore was being “run” by two FBI agents—known as Ross and Hayes—from the Hot Springs, Ark. office. But the Elohim City operation was not a two-bit FBI sting; it was authorized by top Justice officials.

At the time of the bombing, our current U.S. attorney general, Eric Holder, was managing FBI sting operations as U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia —and sitting in line to take over as deputy attorney general, which he did in 1997. One of Holder’s first jobs was to cover up the FBI’s role in the bombing.

“I think they put together this harebrained idea . . . to lure in all these militia groups under the pretense of teaching them how to . . . attack the federal government, and I think they planned to catch them in the act,” stated Jesse Trentadue, a Salt Lake City attorney who has been investigating the OKC bombing through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit.

But the operation went terribly wrong when the explosives that the FBI authorized Moore to provide to McVeigh ended up being used in the actual bombing. The fingerprints of the two agents running the Elohim City operation were later found on the explosives discovered in 2005 at Nichols’s home.

“The Department of Justice, through the FBI and ATF informants, was involved in the Oklahoma City bombing,” said Trentadue.

After Holder’s appointment as deputy attorney general in 1997, he met directly with members of Congress, including Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah), and persuaded them not to look into the string of suspicious deaths of those in custody connected with the Oklahoma City investigation. At the time, Holder knew that the FBI had provided the explosives used by McVeigh. He also knew that the FBI had failed to locate the portion of the explosives that had not been used. The fact that Holder knew this in 1997, and that the FBI went searching specifically for the explosives in 1995, proves that the FBI knew that the explosives had been provided and also that an amount of them had not been used.

“When you look at these documents, that this was being monitored, this search for the box of explosives at the highest levels within the Department of Justice, right up to and including the White House I think, I mean, this wasn’t your local FBI office handling this,” said Trentadue. “This was being run right out of the Justice [Department] in Washington, D.C.”

Trentadue’s brother, Kenneth Michael Trentadue, was tortured to death in the Oklahoma City Transfer Center because he resembled a man named Richard Lee Guthrie, a bank robber believed to have assisted Moore, McVeigh and Nichols. Guthrie was murdered in his prison cell the day before he was scheduled to tell federal law enforcement officers of his role in the bombing, which was financed by a string of bank robberies that were conducted with the knowledge, assent and involvement of the FBI and the SPLC of the notorious Morris Dees. And a prison mate of Kenneth Trentadue, convicted serial killer Alden Baker, who gave a deposition stating he saw prison guards torture and murder Trentadue, similarly died just days before he was scheduled to testify.

“[There was] a wide-ranging and cynical scheme, run directly by Mr. Holder, to quash my family’s efforts to have my brother’s murder investigated,” said Trentadue. Court records indicate that scheme included murder of those who “knew too much.”

Attorney General Holder Tied to OKC Bombers

By the Staff at AFP

Eric Holder, current attorney general of the United States, managed an FBI operation that provided explosives to Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols just prior to the bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Building in Oklahoma City on April 19, 1995, according to official documents released during the ongoing investigation into government foreknowledge of the supposed terrorist attack.

According to the documentation provided in the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit brought against the Department of Justice by Salt Lake City attorney Jesse Trentadue, the Oklahoma City bombing had aspects of being an FBI sting operation that went out of control. Holder had authorized the FBI to provide explosives to Nichols and McVeigh, then lost track of both the explosives and their targets. McVeigh went on to detonate some of the explosives outside the federal building, an act that was designed to help anti-terrorism legislation pass Congress. But an additional case of explosives was unaccounted for.

After the bombing, when the FBI learned the location of the explosives, Holder reportedly sent emails to FBI agents ordering them to recover the explosives before they could be found by some other branch of the government. FBI agents failed to spot the additional, unexploded explosives during an initial search of Nichols’s home and offered to spare him the death penalty if he would help them recover them.

The case of explosives was, however, recovered by another law enforcement agency and was later determined to have the incriminating  fingerprints of two FBI agents, as well as fingerprints of McVeigh and Nichols.

Shortly after the bombing, Kenneth Trentadue, a government informant, was murdered in his prison cell. His family has been pursuing legal action against the federal government ever since.

In 2001, in a bid to avoid a full release of documents, the Federal Bureau of Prisons paid a settlement of $1.1 million to several members of Trentadue’s family, but his brother refused to drop the investigation and filed a FOIA lawsuit for the missing documents. That suit has been ongoing in the Salt Lake City federal courthouse.

Alabama’s unemployment rate fell at a record pace in November amid stepped-up efforts by President Barack Obama’s deputies to frustrate enforcement of the state’s popular new immigration reform.

The state’s unemployment rate fell 0.6 percent in November to 8.7 percent, according to new state reports, partly because the state’s employers opened up jobs to Americans after shedding illegal immigrants.

The unemployment rate is far below October’s rate of 9.3 percent and September’s rate of 9.8 percent.

“The continued drop is proof that people — American Citizens [and] legal migrants, have suffered at the hands of politicians who choose politics over economics,” said Chuck Ellis, a council member in Northern Alabama’s Marshall County.

“What’s really amazing is that in Marshall County, a county of 95,000 residents, 30,000 workforce eligible, there are over 600 people who now have jobs that they didn’t have 6 months ago,” he said.

In November the county’s unemployment rate dropped 0.7 percent, from 8.1 percent to 7.4 percent.

“Is that a difference of great significance? Ask those families for an answer as they undertake the Christmas season,” Ellis said.

Department of Justice officials, including civil-regulation chief Tom Perez, have repeatedly visited the state to invite people to make claims of discrimination.

Perez is pushing ahead with a lawsuit intended to gut the reform, which was supported by members of both parties, and by both white and African-American legislators.

Perez’s efforts have been broadcast by many established media outlets, many of which have also highlighted the reform’s painful impact on illegal immigrants. Few outlets, however, have detailed the beneficial impact of the state’s falling unemployment rate.

Administration officials have cracked down on immigration enforcement by several states in partial exchange for promises by the Hispanic lobbies to spur turnout by Democratic-leaning Hispanic voters in 2012.

The lobbies had sought a federal amnesty, but rising public opposition has deterred Democrats from seriously promoting any amnesty since Obama’s 2008 election.

In compensation for their inaction, the federal government and allied Hispanic lobbies have already sued several other states, including New Mexico, South Carolina, Georgia and Arizona.

On Thursday, Perez also announced a litany of complaints about the sheriff of Maricopa County, Ariz. Perez, who opened his Thursday press conference by saying “Buenos Dias,” also said he would stop helping the sheriff enforce federal immigration laws.

“We’re going to fight back, we’re going to show the politics involved. … The president wants to get the Hispanic vote,” Sheriff Joe Arpaio said in a Fox interview Dec. 16.

The Alabama reform copied federal immigration laws, making it more difficult for local entrepreneurs and businesses to hire or trade with illegal immigrants. Top state officials, including Gov. Robert Bentley, have said they’ll make some trims to the law in the new year to defeat the legal challenges by Obama’s deputies, business lobbies and immigration advocates.

In October, Alabama was ranked 37th-worst in the nation for unemployment. November’s numbers pushed the state up to 30th place, based on the October rankings.

In a complex economy, “it’s certainly plausible that immigration enforcement — and the subsequent drop in the number of illegals — enabled unemployed Americans to find work,” said Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies, a D.C. -based advocacy group.

“Americans with the highest unemployment rates — young workers, less-educated workers, minority workers — are the ones facing the greatest job competition from illegal aliens, and thus would benefit the most from the departure of those illegal aliens,” he added.

The state’s new immigration reform gets much of the credit from local boosters, although stepped-up Christmas hiring likely played some role. However, Alabama reduced its unemployment much more than the adjacent states of Mississippi and Georgia.

In Georgia, the unemployment rate fell to 9.9 percent in November, down from 10.2 percent in October and 10.3 percent in September.

In Mississippi, the November numbers have not been released, but the state’s unemployment rate stayed steady at 10.6 percent in October and 10.6 percent in September.

In Alabama, the unemployment rate is lower in northern counties.

For example, Madison County’s rate was 6.9 percent in November, down from a September level of 8.2 percent, according to the state’s Department of Industrial Relations.

The highest rate of unemployment are in the southern, majority-black districts of WIlcox, Perry, and Bullock. In November, their unemployment rates were 15.5 percent or greater.

Read more: http://dailycaller.com/2011/12/18/alabama-jobless-rate-falls-amid-immigration-reform/#ixzz1hHfmkQRs

The burning question for most Americans since the 2008 election has been, what is the “change”  – that candidate Barack Obama promised us — going to look like? 

I was suspicious when I heard Mr. Obama say that he wanted to fundamentally change America because I think we have great fundamentals like, life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness, equality, a free enterprise system, a constitution that allows us to right our wrongs, etc. I never thought we needed fundamental change anywhere but in Washington, D.C. 

The good hard-working folks all over this great nation have always done just fine when Washington stops over burdening them with taxes and regulations. It’s not our fundamentals that need changing it’s our incidentals like our tax code and our restrictions on business as well as our out of control spending on entitlement programs and our misguided attempts to save snail darters and spotted owls to the degree that we harm people’s ability to earn a living.

Watch Ray Stevens’ song “Mr. President, Mr. President. What Are You Going to Do?“

President Obama’s promise of change has proven to be nothing more than the same old Washington left wing, progressive, social-engineering that has brought our economy to the brink of Depression yet again. 

The only change is, it’s President Obama doing it instead of one of the other usual suspects. He is, however, the most divisive public servant that I have personally ever seen and that’s a change. 

He has also spent more of our money in less time than any other president in history and that’s a change. 

He makes no attempt to be the president of all the people and that’s different because others in the past have at least pretended from time to time. 

He ignores Congress and finds the Constitution out of date and limiting to his ability to do whatever he wants whenever he wants, but Mr. President, that’s what the founding fathers had in mind. I guess you forgot what you learned in school. 

So now the questions have been clearly answered as to what he’s going to do: He is going to throw extravagant parties at the White House, play golf regularly, vacation often on Martha’s Vineyard or Hawaii with the beautiful people, take Air Force One across America on fund raising trips, buy multi-million dollar presidential buses made in Canada for him to ride in while he goes out and makes speeches about creating jobs in America, apologize for America ad nauseum and make speeches. — Lord will the man ever stop with the speeches?

President Obama was only been trained to be elected and he’s been very good at it…so far. He knows how to smile, talk in a smooth manner, look concerned and read what someone else wrote for him on a TelePrompter. 

Yes, we know now exactly what he’s going to do for the next year or so but I wonder what he’s going to do after inauguration Day in January of 2013. Actually I really don’t wonder because I really don’t care but I know exactly what I’m going to do if President Obama isn’t reelected… CELEBRATE!

Ray Stevens is a two time Grammy award winner, multi-platinum, multi-gold recording artist who has sold over 25 million albums. His new song and video “Mr. President, Mr. President (What Are You Going to Do?)” can be seen on YouTube or at www.raystevens.com.    

Read more: http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2011/12/12/only-thing-president-obama-has-been-trained-for/print#ixzz1gQh4iD6l

A Democratic senator called this week for an investigation into a $433 million government contract for a smallpox drug amid questions over the necessity of the drug and the way the contract was approved. 

Sen. Claire McCaskill, D-Mo., who chairs a subcommittee on the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, said there are “serious questions” about the contract, according to the Los Angeles Times. 

The senator reportedly requested an investigation in a letter to Daniel Levinson, the inspector general for the Department of Health and Human Services. 

The request comes after the Times reported earlier this month that U.S. officials took unusual steps to award the contract to Siga Technologies. Democratic donor Ronald Perelman has the controlling share of the company. 

The article cited emails showing the Obama administration replaced the lead negotiator on the project following complaints from Siga, which was apparently concerned about the government’s objections to how much money Siga would make off the deal. 

Earlier, in December, the government also reportedly blocked other companies from bidding on the contract in a second round. 

Siga ultimately won the contract in May, but some questioned the price of the drug — approximately $255 per dose — and the practicality of the project. 

The government already has a smallpox vaccine on reserve. Siga’s pill is meant to help people diagnosed too late for the vaccine to be effective, according to the Times. 

But the drug has not yet been approved by the Food and Drug Administration, and there are limits on how it can be tested. 

But Nicole Lurie, the Department of Health and Human Services official in charge of biodefense, told the Times the contract was granted on merit. And she cited a 2004 study showing a “material threat” that smallpox could be a biological weapon. 

A Perelman representative also told the newspaper that his political donations merely represent “his right” to support candidates.

Read more: http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2011/11/26/sen-mccaskill-requests-probe-into-433m-smallpox-drug-contract/print#ixzz1f6UGeFMz

Read more: http://www.foxbusiness.com/industries/2011/11/16/fannie-freddie-execs-defend-pay-packages/#ixzz1dtM2M2l9

Imagine a high-speed train zooming down hundreds of miles of glistening train track stretching across sunny California, connecting Anaheim to San Francisco. It’s a bullet train dream, and it’s a prime example of President Barack Obama’s latest plan to create jobs in America. The trouble is that this dream is far from reality.

The Los Angeles Times reported this week that the California high-speed train–which is funded in part by $3 billion in federal grants from President Obama’s stimulus–is now expected to cost $98 billion, twice what was expected, and will take an additional 13 years to complete, extending the project to 2033. Questions remain about where the funding will come from, whether the project is viable, and whether the projected ridership will even materialize.

But projects like these are central to President Obama’s plan to put Americans back to work. Speaking yesterday from Georgetown Waterfront Park in Washington, D.C., Obama declared that his plan will “put hundreds of thousands of construction workers back on the job rebuilding our roads, our airports, our bridges and our transit systems.” And that is, of course, all at the expense of the American taxpayers.

The President once called these projects “shovel ready,” meaning that as soon as money arrived from the federal government, workers could be on the job. He made it sound as easy as flipping a switch, but unfortunately it didn’t work as planned. Despite a $787 billion stimulus package, America’s economy continues to languish with 14 million out of work and a 9.1 percent unemployment rate. The President joked, “Shovel-ready was not as shovel-ready as we expected.” Though he didn’t use the phrase “shovel-ready” in his remarks yesterday, the implication was still there. If Congress approves his jobs plan, he argued, all the construction workers sitting on the sidelines will be put back to work overnight.

But that’s not the way things work in the real world. Associated Press and Congressional Research Service reports show that infrastructure spending does not create jobs and, in fact, can even have a negative effect. Heritage’s Patrick Knudsen explains:

Building and repairing roads and bridges neither creates net job growth nor boosts the economy in the near term.

First, increasing government spending on these projects simply moves resources from one place to another — it may employ construction workers, but only by reducing jobs in other sectors. Further, the money never gets out the door soon enough to promote near-term job growth.

And then there’s the President’s flawed argument that since others are doing it, the United States should be, too. “How do we sit back and watch China and Europe build the best bridges and high-speed railroads and gleaming new airports, and we’re doing nothing?” he asks. It’s not a new line of argument from the President, and it leaves out some very important facts.

Dating all the way back to the 2008 presidential campaign, Obama spoke of the need to “invest” in infrastructure in order to be competitive with the likes of China. At the time, Jim Geraghty reported at National Review Online that while Obama puts China on a pedestal, he entirely overlooks some serious problems with transportation in China–namely, stories of severe power shortages affecting the country’s exports, an episode where 500,000 train passengers were left stranded for days, and outbreaks of violence where airplane travelers were left grounded without accommodation. And that’s not to mention the working conditions under which China builds its infrastructure.

Meanwhile, Europe, which heavily subsidizes its passenger rail systems, receives a poor return on its investment. Heritage’s Ron Utt explains that despite massive spending, passengers are opting for more efficient transportation in the air:

In Europe as a whole (EU-27), rail accounted for only 6.1 percent of passenger travel in 2007, including travel by air and sea. Buses accounted for 8.3 percent of the market, and air travel accounted for 8.8 percent. Despite Europe’s huge investment in passenger rail, its market share declined from 6.6 percent in 1995 to 6.1 percent in 2007. Over that same period, commercial air increased its share from 6.3 percent to 8.8 percent. By providing faster service and competitive prices, it took passengers away from rail, buses, and autos.

But to hear President Obama tell the story, building a European- or Chinese-style infrastructure is the key to the future–and to creating new jobs. Workers are ready to go, and all they need is your money to get started. But this is something we tried once already with the last stimulus, it didn’t work, and it’s not going to work this time, either. Obama’s infrastructure plan is a train that shouldn’t leave the station, headed for a bridge to nowhere, and jobs are the last thing that it will deliver.

Quick Hits:

• Thousands of Occupy Wall Street protesters rioted in Oakland yesterday evening — shutting down a busy port, taking over abandoned buildings, setting fires, burning American flags, and destroying ATMs.
• Europe’s leaders threatened to halt aid to Greece until after it votes on a referendum to meet its commitments to the Eurozone. Meanwhile, Greece’s government is reportedly “on the brink of collapse.”
• The Obama Administration considered bailing out solar company Solyndra just before it went bankrupt. The Energy Department would have taken on some of its debt in return for a partial stake in the company.
• Amazon.com is offering to process sales-tax collection for merchants who sell products through its site all for a fee equal to 2.9 percent of the taxes collected. Previously, Amazon lobbied against the imposition of sales taxes on online transactions.
• The State Department has purchased more than $70,000 worth of President Barack Obama’s two books for Christmas “gratuities” and stocking of “key libraries” abroad.