News

Obama’s Department of Justice shuts down FBI investigation of Clinton Foundation

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Hillary Clinton look bored about the deaths of 4 Americans who asked for her help
Hillary Clinton look bored about the deaths of 4 Americans who asked for her help

The Federalist reported on the latest revelation from the Clinton e-mail investigation:

Newly released emails reveal President Obama’s Justice Department rejected the FBI’s request to investigate the Clinton Foundation’s relationship with the State Department.

The FBI asked the DOJ to open an investigation into a potential pay-for-play relationship between the State Department and the Clinton Foundation, which spends a very small fraction of its funds on actual charity work, but the DOJ wasn’t interested — saying it had tried and failed to probe the organization in 2015, CNN reports.

Earlier this week, Judicial Watch, a non-profit integrity group,released a batch of emails revealing that top State Department aides did favors for Clinton Foundation bigwigs during Hillary Clinton’s tenure as secretary of State.

[…]The DOJ’s refusal to probe the Clinton Foundation’s use of the State Department seems to be more than just a lack of evidence at hand, as U.S. Attorney Loretta Lynch has a special relationship with the Clintons.

Hillary Clinton is reportedly planning to keep Lynch as attorney general, if Clinton wins the election. In late June, Bill Clinton secretly met with Lynch aboard a private plane on the tarmac of a Phoenix airport just before she announced the DOJ wouldn’t press charges against Clinton for using a private, unsecured email server while serving as secretary of State. The curious timing of these developments led many to believe there is an underlying conflict of interest at play.

The Daily Wire explains what there is to investigate:

The State Department and Clinton Foundation clearly colluded. The Clintons used Teneo, an advisory business, as a go-between; the firm hired Huma Abedin even as Abedin worked at the State Department. Teneo’s Chief Executive Declan Kelly worked as a special envoy for Hillary at the State Department. Former Clinton Foundation head Doug Band “formed the Teneo consulting firm” in June 2011, with “Bill Clinton as the paid honorary chairman.”

And, of course, the Clinton Foundation had corrupt dealings with countries and figures all over the world, trading favors from Hillary Clinton’s State Department for cash donations and speaking fees for Bill.

The New York Post concludes:

Hillary Clinton put the State Department up for sale, with top aides pulling strings and doing favors for fat-cat donors to the Clinton Foundation — including a shady billionaire, according to smoking-gun emails released Tuesday.

The stunning revelations include how wealthy contributors seeking influence or prestigious government gigs could fork over piles of cash to get access to Clinton’s inner circle, including top aides Huma Abedin and Cheryl Mills.

It’s pretty clear what needs to be investigated, but I noticed that the mainstream media is studiously ignoring the Clinton scandals in order to cover Donald Trump’s stupidity. They’re not lying, they’re just choosing not to cover anything that makes Clinton look bad, and everything that makes Trump look bad.

Newsbusters explains:

The liberal “Big Three” networks seemed to try everything in their power to not mention Hillary Clinton’s latest e-mail controversy Wednesday. Throughout all of their news programs, both morning and evening, they gave the e-mails a total of 6 minutes 59 seconds. In stark contrast, they dragged out Trump’s “Second Amendment people” comment with a whopping 25 minutes 54 seconds of coverage. “One day after Donald Trump used the second amendment to shoot himself in the foot, Hillary Clinton used her first amendment right to speak out against him,” touted anchor Scott Pelley on CBS Evening News.

ABC’s World News Tonight had the largest disparity in coverage of the two stories Wednesday evening. The network dedicated a mere 38 seconds to the e-mail controversy, as they mixed it in with other coverage of Clinton.  “Today, the Clinton campaign saying, “Hillary Clinton never took actions as Secretary of State because of donations to the Clinton Foundation,” reported Cecilia Vega, “But Trump says the e-mails exposed pay for play connections.” ABC gave Trump’s comment 3 minutes 24 seconds that evening.

38 seconds.

That’s why nobody trusts the mainstream media to report accurately on politics. They have their candidate, and they are backing her all the way to the White House.

Videos

Stephen C. Meyer: does the Big Bang cosmology disprove the existence of God?

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Christianity and the progress of science
Christianity and the progress of science

Here’s the 66-minute video featuring Dr. Stephen C. Meyer, who holds the Ph.D in philosophy of science from Cambridge University, and other degrees in the hard sciences.

The lecture starts really, really slowly. You can just fast-forward to the 12 minute mark, or you might die of boredom.

Topics:

  • Up until the the last 100 years or so, everyone agreed that the universe was eternal
  • This is at odds with the traditional Christian view that God created the universe
  • Materialism, the view that matter is all there is, requires eternally existing matter
  • Discovery #1: Hubble discovers that the universe is expanding (redshift observation)
  • The expanding universe was resisted by proponents of the eternal universe, like Einstein
  • Some naturalists even proposed speculative static models like the steady-state model
  • However, not of the speculative models fit with observations and experimental results
  • Discovery #2: Penzias and Wilson discover the cosmic microwave background radiation
  • Measurements of this background radiation confirmed a prediction of the Big Bang theory
  • The steady-state theory was falsified of by the discovery of this background radiation
  • The oscillating model was proposed to prevent the need for an absolute beginning
  • But the oscillating model is not eternal, it loses energy on each “bounce”
  • A paper by Alan Guth and Marc Sher from 1982 proved that our universe will not bounce
  • In addition, experiments reveal that the universe will expand forever, and not contract
  • The beginning of the universe is more at home in a theistic worldview than an atheistic one
  • The beginning of the universe fits in well with the Bible, e.g. – Genesis 1, Titus 1, etc.

In case you are wondering about what the evidence is for the Big Bang, here are 3 of the evidences that are most commonly offered:

Three main observational results over the past century led astronomers to become certain that the universe began with the big bang. First, they found out that the universe is expanding—meaning that the separations between galaxies are becoming larger and larger. This led them to deduce that everything used to be extremely close together before some kind of explosion. Second, the big bang perfectly explains the abundance of helium and other nuclei like deuterium (an isotope of hydrogen) in the universe. A hot, dense, and expanding environment at the beginning could produce these nuclei in the abundance we observe today. Third, astronomers could actually observe the cosmic background radiation—the afterglow of the explosion—from every direction in the universe. This last evidence so conclusively confirmed the theory of the universe’s beginning that Stephen Hawking said, “It is the discovery of the century, if not of all time.”

By the way, Dr. Meyer also does a great job of explaining the problem of proteins, DNA and the origin of life in this lecture. And you can hear him defend his views in this debate podcast with Keith Fox and in this debate podcast with Peter Atkins. He does a great job in these debates.

Positive arguments for Christian theism

News

Do government-run public schools succeed at educating children?

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CNS News compares per-pupil costs to the taxpayer to student proficiency levels in a variety of Democrat-dominated cities.

Excerpt:

In Philadelphia, where the Democratic Party held its national convention, the public schools spent a total of $18,241 per student in the 2011-2012 school year, according to the U.S. Department of Education.

In Detroit… the public schools spent a total of $18,361 per student that year.

In Washington, D.C., where the federal government makes its home, it was $23,980.

What did these schools produce while spending more than $18,000 per student? Not well-educated children.

In the Philadelphia public schools in 2015, according to the National Assessment of Educational Progress scores published by the Department of Education, 80 percent of eighth graders were not grade-level proficient in math. Eighty-four percent were not grade-level proficient in reading.

In the Detroit public schools, 96 percent of eighth graders were not grade-level proficient in math. Ninety-three percent were not grade-level proficient in reading.

In the District of Columbia public schools, 83 percent of the eighth graders were not grade-level proficient in math. Eighty-one percent were not grade-level proficient in reading.

If you pay federal taxes — no matter where you live and no matter where you send your children to school — you help subsidize the public schools in Philadelphia, Detroit and Washington, D.C.

In fact, if you pay federal taxes you help subsidize the public schools all across America.

What I have noticed about American education is that whenever anything is said about the poor performance of the government-run public schools, the teacher unions and school administrators all cry that the problem is not enough money.

But as you can see, we have been spending more and more money on these schools, but not getting any return on the investment:

Education spending has tripled since 1970
Education spending has tripled since 1970

Where is all that money going? A lot of it is donated to Democrats:

Political contributions by the American Federation of Teachers union
Political contributions by the American Federation of Teachers union

(Source)

The Democrats repay the teacher unions by protecting them from competition from private schools and homeschoolers. Democrats shut down every attempt by Republicans to reform public school education to make it more responsive to parents.

In the free market, there is no protection for businesses that fail to perform. They have to shape up or shut down. Maybe instead of shoveling taxpayer money into a bottomless pit, we should give money for each child’s education directly to the parents, and let theparents choose schools that actually focus on the job of educating the children in valuable skills?

The CNS News article continues:

The cost and the poor performance of public schools in the United States should inspire Congress to do two things: Shut down the federal Department of Education and enact legislation creating complete school choice for families that reside in the District of Columbia.

Voters in states and local communities elsewhere in the country can then decide for themselves whether or not to replace the relatively small percentage of local school revenue that now comes from the federal government.

But the right decision would be for states and local communities to stop giving their education money exclusively to government-run schools.

Instead, they should give that money to parents — and let parents decide where to send their children to school.

Communities should grant every child in their jurisdiction a voucher worth the same amount of money currently spent per pupil in the local government schools. Then they should let families decide whether they want to send their children to one of those government schools or to a private school.

Attaching the money to the child makes the parents the consumer, and empowers them to buy the right school – the school that does the job that they want the school to do. Instead of focusing on global warming, gay rights, transgender bathrooms and putting condoms on cucumbers, the schools should be focused on math, engineering, technology and science. STEM is where the money is – not in liberal crybaby indoctrination.