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Steven Ertelt
Life News
8/21/2015
In a victory for the pro-life fight against the HHS mandate, a federal appeals court issued a ruling today saying a Catholic religious order, the Little Sisters of the Poor, does not have to comply with Obamacare’s abortion mandate while its lawsuit against the mandate continues. The mandate compels religious groups to pay for birth control and drugs that may cause abortions.
Without relief, the Little Sisters would face millions of dollars in IRS fines because they cannot comply with the government’s mandate that they give their employees free access to contraception, sterilization, and abortion-inducing drugs.
Previously, the U.S. Supreme Court temporarily protected the Little Sisters from the mandate. The Little Sisters then went before the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals in Denver to extend that protection, but a panel of the appeals court ruled against them. Today, the full appeals court ruled in its favor…
The article continues at Life News.
Blake Seitz
The Washington Free Beacon
8/7/2015
The Environmental Protection Agency, the federal agency committed to protecting “human health and the environment,” jeopardized both Wednesday by accidentally releasing one million gallons of wastewater into Colorado’s Animas River.
EPA bureaucrats were using heavy machinery to nose around the Gold King Mine near Durango, Colorado, when they triggered the release of wastewater containing heavy metals like zinc, iron, and copper.
The Denver Post reported that residents of Durango “gathered along the Animas River to watch as the blue waters turned a thick, radiant orange and yellow just after 8 p.m., nearly 34 hours after the spill started.”…
The article, with video, continues at The Washington Free Beacon.
James Lewis
American Thinker
8/8/2015
…Charles Krauthammer just wrote a column in the Washington Post asking the question, “Who is helping Iran’s hardliners?”
Krauthammer raised that question after Obama effectively accused Republicans of treason – defined as opposing Obama’s “arrangement” with the deceptive mullahs, including two secret side agreements that have never been revealed to the U.S. Senate. Obama is in direct violation of the U.S. Constitution, and nobody dares to say it…
…Public evidence now shows that Obama has actively aided and abetted America’s sworn enemies – the mullahs, the Muslim Brotherhood, and al-Qaeda. We may also be colluding with ISIS, because we are allied with their biggest supporters: Turkey, Qatar, and the Muslim Brotherhood.
No American wants to believe this. But it is true. It has been publicly said by first-rate military and foreign policy experts, including Admiral James (“Ace”) Lyons (USN, ret.) and Clare Lopez (former CIA analyst, and one of the most heroic truth-tellers in this perverted age)…
Read the entire article at American Thinker.
Related: Obama to Jewish Leaders: Lay Off the Iran Deal, and I Will Lay Off You
Obama met with Jewish leaders this week in a private meeting in D.C., followed by a curious speech the next day…
…America’s center of gravity is not its position in the Persian Gulf. Rather, it’s our social cohesion. For all of our many flaws, our petty hatreds, our violence against one another: America works because of the fundamental trust Americans have in their neighbors—black and white and brown and yellow, Christian, Jewish and Muslim—throughout the fifty states. Why is the president putting that at risk? For the sake of comity with an anti-American, anti-Semitic obscurantist regime.
Schumer won’t support Obama’s Iran deal
…His announcement came hours after fellow New York Democrat Kirstin Gillibrand said she would be a supporter.
Schumer’s and Gillibrand’s announcements followed Obama’s impassioned, hour-long speech appealing for congressional support.
Five New York congressional Democrats have already denounced the deal: Reps. Steve Israel, Kathleen Rice, Nita Lowey, Grace Meng and Eliot Engel, who disclosed his decision soon after Schumer’s announcement.
New York Republicans Lee Zeldin and Peter King are also opposed, as are most GOPers.
Nicarama
Weasel Zippers
8/8/2015
…In a letter sent to the U.S. State Department and just filed today with U.S. federal Judge Emmet G. Sullivan, the counsel for Cheryl Mills wrote: “Ms. Mills does not believe that she has paper copies of potential records in her possession.
Following our production on August 10, 2015 [of the defense counsel’s version of the electronic records], we have instructed her to delete any and all electronic records in her possession.”
That is a far stretch from a statement by Ms. Mills under penalty of perjury, and she and her lawyers are planning to delete the emails Judge Sullivan wants produced?
Judicial Watch has made an emergency filing in Judge Sullivan’s court to stop the further destruction of evidence of what may very well be assorted criminal conduct and violations of numerous federal laws…
Read the entire article at Weasel Zippers
Related: Hillary Clinton Emails Take Long Path to Controversy
…Last week, F.B.I. agents showed up at Platte River’s modest brick building, opposite a candy factory. Now that government secrets had been found in Mrs. Clinton’s email, the agents wanted to know about the company’s security measures.
Whether Americans believe Mrs. Clinton’s decision to use only a private email account for her public business is a troubling scandal well worth an F.B.I. inquiry, a pragmatic move blown out of proportion by Republican enemies, or something in between, may depend more on their partisan leanings than the facts of the affair itself.
But the email account and its confusing reverberations have become a significant early chapter in the 2016 presidential race and a new stroke in the portrait of the Democrats’ leading candidate…
Judicial Watch: Blockbuster Court Action on Clinton Email
…Late last Friday, U.S. District Court Judge Emmet Sullivan ordered the U.S. State Department to request that Hillary Clinton and her top aides confirm, under penalty of perjury, that they have produced all government records in their possession, return any other government records immediately, and describe their use of Hillary Clinton’s email server to conduct government business. The court issued the order after holding a status hearing earlier in the day on our Abedin FOIA lawsuit. The text of Judge Sullivan’s order to the State Department is worth reviewing…
Bob Price
Breitbart.com
Breitbart Texas
1 Aug 2015
A Texas farmer finally received land back that was taken from him by a court and given to the U.S. Bureau of Land Management (BLM) more than thirty years ago. The victory puts land back into his undisputed possession and control that has been in his family since 1904. It also brings hope and a pathway to victory for other farmers who stand to lose up to 90,000 acres of land to the BLM.
Tommy Henderson met with BLM officials on the steps of the Clay County Courthouse in Henrietta, Texas, where he was presented a patent from the U.S. government bestowing rights to ownership and use of the property, according to an article by Lynn Walker in the Wichita Falls Times Record News. Henderson told the Times Record he hopes this will pave the way for dozens of other Red River land owners in Texas who are battling to keep their land from being taken by the BLM….
The article continues at Breitbart Texas.
HUD has rewritten the definition of “fair housing.”
Howard Husock
National Review
7/30/2015
Here’s a question for Hillary Clinton: Should a U.S. attorney threaten a county with more than $1 million in fines if it refuses to pressure local officials to approve a housing development?
The issue is not at all hypothetical. It’s front and center right now in Westchester County, N.Y. – and the housing development in question would be built in Chappaqua, the hamlet where Hillary and Bill Clinton live. And it’s of much more than local interest. The action threatened against Westchester officials may presage a similar approach by HUD against the 1,200-plus governments across the country that accept federal community-development funds. Indeed, HUD has announced that it plans to adopt its new interpretation of “fair housing” nationwide…
But it’s not as if Westchester County officials have been standing in the schoolhouse door, as it were, like latter-day George Wallaces. The county has already set in motion construction or financing for some 454 affordable-housing units — and it seemed to be on target to meet an interim goal of 450 units by the end of last year.
But here’s the rub. Twenty-eight of those units are in a proposed development near the commuter rail station in the Clintons’ hamlet of Chappaqua — which (in the complex system of local governance used in New York State) is part of the Town of New Castle (also home to New York governor and former HUD secretary Andrew Cuomo). The Chappaqua Station project has already been promised funding by Westchester County — but, under pressure from Chappaqua residents, New Castle has not approved the required zoning variances. Ironically, there appears to be little overt local opposition to the idea of a subsidized housing project in a town where median income is $180,000 a year. Instead, what many local residents appear to be concerned about is the quality of the new housing from the point of view of its intended residents. That is, they fear that the site would be just a new version of the other side of the tracks — a less than desirable place to live to which the poor are shunted. In other words, opposition comes in part from liberals and involves the very local question of the best location for the new development.
None of that cuts any ice with HUD — or with the Justice Department, acting on HUD’s concerns…
…HUD has a novel idea about fair housing and is using the courts and a federal grant to force Westchester County to accept and, indeed, promote it. This is a long way from the American federalist tradition, in which local residents, as Woodrow Wilson put it, “govern themselves.”…
Read the entire article at National Review.
 
Related: Obama Administration Mandates Diversity In Suburbs
Under a sweeping new federal housing mandate, the Obama administration threatens to withhold funding for cities and counties that fail to remove local zoning laws and other potentially “discriminatory barriers” that restrict low-income housing in wealthy neighborhoods.
More than 1,200 municipalities will be impacted by the highly contested rule, which the Housing and Urban Development Department put into effect Wednesday.
The agency seeks to combat discrimination in affluent suburban areas, while also desegregating poor urban areas where it says too many minorities lack access to good schools and jobs…
 
Update: War on Suburbs: Obama, Julian Castro Rev Up Affirmative Action Housing (video)
…The social engineering in the rule was first proposed in 2013. It was finalized last month after an ideological assist from the Supreme Court’s 5-to-4 Texas Department of Housing and Community Affairs v. Inclusive Communities Project, Inc. decision.
The AFFH rule “gives the federal government a lever to re-engineer nearly every American neighborhood — imposing a preferred racial and ethnic composition, densifying housing, transportation, and business development in suburb and city alike, and weakening or casting aside the authority of local governments over core responsibilities, from zoning to transportation to education,” as National Review’s Stanley Kurtz put it last week…
 
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