Tag Archives: Topic: White House

BuzzFeed: In a filing at the Supreme Court today, the ACLU asked the Court to hear the New York case of a woman who was forced to pay massive estate taxes after her wife’s death.

Helen Alvare at Public Discourse: Against what social science tells us about human happiness, the government is promoting sexualityism—a commitment to uncommitted, unencumbered, inconsequential sex—as the answer.

Reuters: An ailing 83-year-old lesbian asked the Supreme Court on Monday to hear her legal challenge against a federal law that defines marriage as a union between a man and woman, attempting to place her case on a fast-track to the top court. | ACLU press release: Supreme Court Asked to Review Edie Windsor’s Challenge to “Defense of Marriage Act”

Alex Newman at The New American: The United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) is under heavy fire after an investigation by the Population Research Institute (PRI) showed yet again that the UN is working with the communist dictatorship ruling mainland China to enforce its barbaric “one-child” policy — complete with forced abortions, involuntary sterilization, kidnapping of “illegal” children, and other brutal tactics.

Nate Kellum at the American Thinker: The Obama administration’s recent end-around provision of nearly $400,000 to a Planned Parenthood clinic in Memphis reminds us that the battle between life and death in this country still rages . . . Life is much harder to defend when Planned Parenthood enjoys nearly unfettered access to the national pocketbook. Nate Kellum is senior counsel with Alliance Defending Freedom and is director of its Memphis Regional Service Center in Tennessee.

The Hill: The cautious approach by the administration reflects the unease that some lawmakers have about the Muslim Brotherhood, which has been linked to violence in the past. A handful of GOP lawmakers immediately called for ending America’s $1.3 billion annual military assistance to Egypt after Morsi won the presidency in June.

Politico: NPR crunches the numbers on President Obama’s endorsement of same-sex marriage in May and finds that his reelection campaign raised almost $9M in the three days after his endorsement . . .

Daniel Pipes at National Review: The Russian and Chinese actions point to these alliances shaping the foreign policies of outside powers, too. Whereas the European Union and the U.S. government are increasingly sympathetic to Islamism, in part as a way to tame their own Muslim populations, Moscow and Beijing have a history of open conflict with their Muslim populations and therefore adopt policies more hostile to Islamism in the Middle East.

One News Now: The Coalition of African American Pastors (CAAP) is demanding a meeting with President Barack Obama or Attorney General Eric Holder to discuss the president’s endorsement of homosexual “marriage.”

AP: Attorney General Eric Holder is charging that he’s become a “proxy” for Republican attacks against President Barack Obama in an election year.

CNSNews (includes video): “Because ultimately, these are not just political issues – they are moral issues,” she said. “They’re issues that have to do with human dignity and human potential, and the future we want for our kids and our grandkids.”

ABC (includes video): “It’s a penalty, because you have a choice. You don’t have a choice to pay your taxes, right?” Carney told reporters aboard Air Force One. President Barack Obama was on his way to Colorado to view the response to the worst wildfires in the state’s history.

Breitbart.com: As legal scholars study the Supreme Court’s decision in the Obamacare case, more and more are concluding that Justice Anthony Kennedy’s dissenting opinion, striking down the law in its entirety, was once the majority opinion–and that Chief Justice John Roberts switched his vote at a late stage. If so, it would appear that the Chief Justice may have succumbed to the bullying meted out by President Barack Obama, who attacked the Court in the aftermath of oral arguments in March, when Obamacare seemed headed for certain defeat.

AP: Now that the politically potent National Rifle Association is keeping score, some Democrats may join House Republicans if there’s a vote to hold Attorney General Eric Holder in contempt of Congress in a dispute over documents related to a botched gun-tracking operation.

AP: Obama’s claim broadly covers administration documents about the program called Operation Fast and Furious, not just those prepared for the president.

The God and Country Blog reports and embeds the official poster for the event.

Townhall: A Boy Scouts of America national board member, James Turley, who is also global chairman and CEO of the accounting firm Ernst & Young, recently said he “will work from within to seek a change” to overturn the BSA policy that bans gay Scouts and leaders. But is Turley working on his own initiative, or has the White House prodded him with perks and favors?

The Hill: Thirty-one Republican senators have signed a letter calling on Attorney General Eric Holder to immediately appoint a special counsel to investigation national-security leaks from the executive branch.

LifeNews (includes video): On the campaign trail in Durham, New Hampshire yesterday, pro-abortion President Barack Obama once again promoted the nation’s biggest abortion business. This time, he plugged Planned Parenthood in a speech to high school students.

CNN has this report and video.

Gary Bauer at Human Events: The trend in recent decades toward more power being concentrated in the executive branch has reached its high point in the Obama White House. Obama’s first three and a half years have resurrected the title “the imperial presidency,” a term that captures how much Obama’s presidency has exceeded its constitutional limits.

Christian Science Monitor: The UN’s Rio+20 earth summit set only modest goals, but sparked controversy over the Vatican’s successful effort to remove reference to ‘reproductive rights’ from the final document. Hillary Clinton vowed the US would ensure ‘those rights are respected.’

The Hill: “The United States congratulates Dr. Mohamed Morsi on his victory in Egypt’s Presidential election, and we congratulate the Egyptian people for this milestone in their transition to democracy,” said White House press secretary Jay Carney in a statement.

AP: Germany’s finance minister is rejecting U.S. President Barack Obama’s calls on Europe to move faster in fighting its debt crisis, telling him to get the American deficit under control instead.

Weekly Standard (includes photo): Last Friday, an attaché of important gay people from Philadelphia made a trip to Washington D.C. as invited guests of President Barack Obama for the White House’s first-ever gay pride reception . . .

More Photos

God Discussion: Liz Margolies was against the institution of marriage before Scout, a trans male, proposed to her, but at the White House Gay Pride reception things suddenly changed.

Religion Clause Blog: The New York Times reported earlier this week that the school voucher program for Washington, D.C. school children will be renewed for another year under an agreement that House Speaker John Boehner and Senator Joseph Lieberman have reached with the Department of Education.

PressTV: “The authority the United States claims today could be used tomorrow by nations with fair less respect for the right to life in particular and human rights in general,” ACLU National Security Project Director Hina Shamsi warned. Shamsi said the U.S. had failed to establish any legal justification for the killings.

The Hill: Commerce Secretary John Bryson has resigned from his Cabinet post, less than two weeks after taking medical leave from the job.

Washington Times: Until now, everyone believed that the decisions regarding ‘Fast and Furious’ were confined to the Department of Justice. The White House decision to invoke executive privilege implies that White House officials were either involved in the ‘Fast and Furious’ operation or the cover-up that followed.

The Hill: A House panel voted Wednesday to place Attorney General Eric Holder in contempt of Congress for his failure to comply with a subpoena, defying an assertion of executive privilege from President Obama.

The Hill: “How can the president assert executive privilege if there was no White House involvement? How can the president exert executive privilege over documents he’s supposedly never seen?” Grassley said in a statement. “Is something very big being hidden to go to this extreme?”

Washington Post: The White House has reversed course and agreed to continue funding private school vouchers for a select number of children in the District of Columbia.

CNN: As my companion and I passed through security on a gorgeous Washington afternoon Friday, invited by President Barack Obama to join hundreds of openly lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender folks at the White House for a reception celebrating LGBT Pride Month, I couldn’t help but reflect back.

Washington Post: This summer, the Pentagon will salute them, marking June as gay pride month just as it has marked other celebrations honoring racial or ethnic groups . . . “Now that we’ve repealed ‘don’t ask, don’t tell,’ he feels it’s important to find a way this month to recognize the service and professionalism of gay and lesbian troops,” said Navy Capt. John Kirby, a spokesman.

CNSNews: Chinese human-rights activist Harry Wu said he was “very disappointed in Obama,” and he also said the U.S. State Department, by excluding chapters on religious freedom for the first time in its human rights reports on various countries this year was ignoring the problem of religious repression in Communist China.

Breitbart embeds the CNBC interview with Trump. The last quarter of the interview discuss the international oil situation and this story.

Baltimore Sun: “We’re moving forward to a country where we treat everybody fairly and everybody equally, with dignity and respect,” Obama said according to a transcript of the speech. “And here in Maryland, thanks to the leadership of committed citizens and Governor O’Malley, you have a chance to reaffirm that principle in the voting booth in November. It’s the right thing to do.”

Heritage Foundation: The U.S. government will lose about $23 billion on the 2008-2009 bailout of General Motors and Chrysler. President Obama emphatically defends his decision to subsidize the automakers, arguing it was necessary to prevent massive job losses. But, even accepting this premise, the government could have executed the bailout with no net cost to taxpayers. It could have—had the Administration required the United Auto Workers (UAW) to accept standard bankruptcy concessions instead of granting the union preferential treatment. The extra UAW subsidies cost $26.5 billion—more than the entire foreign aid budget in 2011. The Administration did not need to lose money to keep GM and Chrysler operating. The Detroit auto bailout was, in fact, a UAW bailout.

Jacob Sullum at Reason: “If you believe the matter should be left to the states,” Stanford law professor Michael McConnell recently told The Washington Post, “that means you think the Constitution permits the states to take a different view. I don’t see how that can be squared with Attorney General Holder’s claim.” In fact, Holder and Obama implicitly have staked out a stronger position against state bans on gay marriage than the 9th Circuit did.

Business Insider: The poll finds that Mitt Romney would get 20 percent of the African-American vote if the election were held today, compared with 76 percent for Obama.

Washington Examiner: While Obama took 67 of the union vote, according to 2008 election night polling by Peter Hart for the AFL-CIO, Gallup discovered that just 58 percent of union members back the president now. Some 35 percent support Mitt Romney

Thomas Sowell at the Examiner

Religion Clause Blog: Terry Jones, pastor of the small Gainesville, Florida Dove Outreach Center, who gained notoriety in 2011 for burning a copy of the Qur’an (see prior posting), has now created another controversy.

LA Times: Congressional GOP leaders launched an orchestrated round of attacks on President Obama’s assessment that private companies are doing “fine” in the sluggish economy, essentially ridiculing the White House’s assertion that it is the public sector that needs government support to keep teachers, firefighters and other employees on the job.

The Hill: If anyone needs more ammunition for the argument that Hillary Clinton is planning to run for president, add her silence on the issue of gay marriage as the subject monopolized the news last week.

The Advocate (“authoritative coverage of LGBT news”): The Advocate has confirmed that Secretaries Hilda Solis at Labor, Kathleen Sebelius at Health and Human Services, John Bryson at Commerce, and Timothy Geithner at Treasury all support same-sex marriage.

Stanley Kurtz at National Review: n the evening of January 11, 1996, while Mitt Romney was in the final years of his run as the head of Bain Capital, Barack Obama formally joined the New Party, which was deeply hostile to the mainstream of the Democratic party and even to American capitalism. In 2008, candidate Obama deceived the American public about his potentially damaging tie to this third party. The issue remains as fresh as today’s headlines, as Romney argues that Obama is trying to move the United States toward European-style social democracy, which was precisely the New Party’s goal.

NY Daily News: Bill Clinton confirmed Tuesday night for the first time longtime speculation that he offered then-Gov. Mario Cuomo a spot on the U.S. Supreme Court.

CNN: A CNN analysis of President Obama’s biggest fundraisers, known as bundlers, shows that at least 33 — or about one in every 16 bundlers — is openly gay. Together, they have raised at least $8 million for the campaign between January and the end of March.

The Hill: The Defense Department is looking for a little help from its friends overseas as the Pentagon and White House try to break Senate opposition to an international treaty on maritime law.

The Text of the Proclamation is posted on the White House Website.

Washington Times: “I can promise you personally, as an organizer of the civil rights movement in Nashville, I did not march one inch, one foot, one yard for same-sex marriage,” said Rev. William “Bill” Owens Sr., founder of the coalition and organizer of the letter.

Paul Kengor at Townhall: In short, this is an amazing turnabout. What’s going on? Why this sudden conversion by Castro and communist Cuba? Does this make sense? Yes, it does. The root of the answer, once again, is the Marxist/communist assault on marriage.

Politico: I don’t think that we ought to get into the position where we say ‘This is bad work. This is good work,’” Clinton said. “The man who has been governor and had a sterling business career crosses the qualification threshold.”

Bloomberg: Drugmakers led by Pfizer (PFE) Inc. agreed to run a “very significant public campaign” bankrolling political support for the 2010 health-care law, including TV ads, while the Obama administration promised to block provisions opposed by drugmakers, documents released by Republicans show.

LifeNews: President Barack Obama appears to oppose the ban on sex-selection abortions that the House of Representatives debated yesterday and will be voting on today.

Wall Street Journal (subscription required): With the swearing in of a seventh Federal Reserve board member, the panel is operating at full strength for the first time since 2006, amplifying the activist stamp of President Barack Obama.

WTAM.com: President Obama awarded radical open border advocate Dolores Huerta with the Medal of Freedom, the highest honor a civilian can receive.

Alan E. Sears at the Christian Post: And right now, homosexual behavior is culturally fashionable. Of that there is no doubt. The culture is dancing to the tune played non-stop by those promoting a homosexual legal and political agenda – it’s a tune called “equality.” And the music is supposed to drown out the truth that homosexual behavior is wrong.

Religion Clause Blog: The U.S House of Representatives last week passed, and sent to the Senate, HR 4310, the 2013 National Defense Authorization Act (full text.)  The bill contains two provisions relating to same-sex unions and to broader issues of conscience rights in relation to gays and lesbians.  Section 536 of the bill provides in part:

ABC: Eight months after a repeal of the military’s “don’t ask , don’t tell” policy, the U.S. Air Force Academy today graduated its first group of openly gay cadets.

Christian Post: A new Washington Post/ABC News Poll survey finds that the percentage of African-Americans who support gay marriage jumped almost 20 points after President Obama’s announcement that he now backs same-sex marriage. One pastor doesn’t believe the poll is representative of the nation’s black Christians.

Detroit News: President Barack Obama’s re-election campaign is beginning to express some confidence that the president’s historic, yet politically risky, embrace of gay marriage may not hurt him in the November election.

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AP: Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and the nation’s top military leaders pleaded Wednesday for Senate approval of a long-spurned high seas treaty, arguing that the pact will boost U.S. national security and create much-needed American jobs.

The Hill: Four in ten Democratic voters chose someone other than President Obama on Tuesday in primaries in Arkansas and Kentucky.

AZ Republic: A Hawaii official sent Bennett’s office verification of birth for President Obama on Tuesday, according to both Bennett and Hawaii officials.

Politico: Quinnipac’s latest poll of the Sunshine State finds that 25 percent of voters say Obama’s endorsement of gay marriage makes them less likely to vote for him.

WorldNetDaily: As Arizona officials contemplate whether or not Barack Obama’s name will appear on a ballot this year, the state is being flooded with emails from concerned citizens urging the attorney general to make sure the president is constitutionally eligible to hold the office.

Washington Post: And a recent independent poll showed Obama running just seven points ahead of Wolfe in the southern Arkansas 4th district, which covers one-quarter of the state.

CBS: To date, Log Cabin Republicans have not made a decision as to who to endorse for the general election. An automatic endorsement from the group for the GOP nominee is not a slam dunk, as the group has deferred from endorsing candidates in the past.

Demetrius Minor at Townhall: On Saturday, May 19, the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People) officially came out and declared their support for same-sex marriage. According to USA TODAY, the organization saw the issue has comparable to civil rights. Ironically, this stance fails to comply with a large sector of the African-American population . . .

CBSNews (includes video): The spat between Catholic leaders and the Obama administration over its contraception policies is heating up again, with one of the nation’s most prominent Catholic leaders charging that the White House is “strangling” the church over the matter . . . “We’re like, wait a minute, when did the government get in the business of defining for us the extent of our ministry,” Dolan said.

WhiteHouse.gov: Today, President Obama nominated Thomas M. Durkin to serve on the United States District Court for the Northern District of Illinois.