Tag Archives: Progressivism

News

ACORN registration workers charged with felony voter fraud

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Story from Fox News. (H/T Dad)

Excerpt:

Five Wisconsin residents, including two who worked for community organizing group ACORN, were charged Monday with election fraud relating to the 2008 presidential election.

State Attorney General J.B. Van Hollen announced felony charges against Maria Miles, Kevin Clancy, Michael Henderson, Herbert Gunka and Suzanne Gunka.

Miles and Clancy worked for the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now and are accused of submitting multiple voter registration applications for the same individuals, including each other, to meet voter registration quotes imposed by the community organizing group.

Henderson is charged with one count of voting by a disqualified person and providing false information to election officials. The allegation claims he was on a felony probation and prohibited from voting at the time.

Herbert and Suzanne Gunka are each charged with double voting — a felony — by allegedly absentee voting and then going to the polls to vote.

Michele Bachmann catalogs some more, as she struggles to block federal funding of ACORN:

Stanley Kurtz at National Review wrote the definitive article on Obama’s connections to ACORN.

News

Obama golfs in Hawaii as Iran seeks uranium and murders protesters

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Story here from Fox News. (H/T Hot Air)

Excerpt:

At least 15 people were killed during massive anti-government protests in Tehran when opposition supporters clashed with security forces in the streets, Iranian state television reported Monday.

The report said 10 people killed during Sunday’s fierce clashes in the Iranian capital were members of “anti-revolutionary terrorist” groups, apparently referring to opposition supporters.

The other five who died were killed by “terrorist groups” in a “suspicious act,” the report said, without elaborating.

Iranian security forces stormed a series of opposition offices on Monday, rounding up at least seven prominent anti-government activists in a new crackdown against the country’s reformist movement, opposition Web sites and activists reported.

And in the UK Telegraph:

In the six months that have followed, Barack Obama’s high-risk engagement strategy has simply encouraged more repression from the Mullahs, as well as ever greater levels of defiance over Iran’s nuclear weapons programme. As Con Coughlin noted in an excellent piece for The Wall Street Journal last month, Obama’s Iran diplomacy isn’t working:

“Iranian human-rights groups say that since the government crackdown began in late June, at least 400 demonstrators have been killed while another 56 are unaccounted, which is several times higher than the official figures. The regime has established a chain of unofficial, makeshift prisons to deal with the protesters, where torture and rape are said to be commonplace. In Tehran alone, 37 young Iranian men and women are reported to have been raped by their captors.”

Now once again huge street protests have flared up on the streets of Tehran and a number of other major cities, with several protesters shot dead this weekend by the security forces and Revolutionary Guards, reportedly including the nephew of opposition leader Mir Hossein Mousavi, and dozens seriously injured. And again there is deafening silence from the Commander-in-Chief as well as his Secretary of State. And where is the president? On vacation in Hawaii, no doubt recuperating from his exertions driving forward the monstrous health care reform bill against the overwhelming will of the American public and without a shred of bipartisan support.

Iran is also attempting to import 1350 tons of uranium – enough to make many weapons of mass destruction. (H/T ECM)

Excerpt:

Iran is close to clinching a deal to clandestinely import 1,350 tons of purified uranium ore from Kazakhstan, according to an intelligence report obtained by the Associated Press on Tuesday. Diplomats said the assessment was heightening international concern about Tehran’s nuclear activities.

And as Muddling Towards Maturity notes, Iraq’s Christians are facing persecution.

Excerpt:

…Iraq’s dwindling Christian communities are still being targeted on the basis of their faith. That is especially the case in Mosul, long the most lawless and violent place in Iraq. By an unhappy coincidence, Mosul is also located in the ancestral heartland of Iraqi Christianity, and is thus the last refuge (short of exile) for Christians fleeing targeted violence in Baghdad, Basra, and other places.

Mosul is therefore a target-rich environment. In December alone, at least seven churches, convents, and schools have been bombed, claiming dozens of lives, including the latest holy innocent, an eight-day-old baby girl. Iraq’s central government deserves credit for dispatching some 3,000 additional police after a similar spate of bombings and attacks in October, but their presence has brought little improvement as Christians continue to flee Mosul for overcrowded and underdeveloped villages such as Qaraqosh in the adjacent Nineveh plain. Meanwhile, the situation around Kirkuk, also in northern Iraq, remains nearly as dire for Christians caught up in the Arab-Kurdish struggle for control of the area’s oil fields.

While the Iraqi government has belatedly taken some modest steps to ease the suffering of Iraqi Christians, the U.S. government’s consistent policy of studied and shameful indifference forms rare common ground between the Bush and Obama administrations. It is an indelible stain on American honor that two administrations did nothing to assist, much less protect, a beleaguered religious minority.

It’s a dangerous world. This is not the time for playing golf in Hawaii.

News

How PBS uses your tax dollars to distort the evidence for evolution

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Evolutionists believe that the embryos of different mammals look similar in the earliest stages of development because the mammals share a common ancestor. And they believe that as the embryos develop, they begin to look less similar. This theory was invented by Ernst Haeckel, who believed that”ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny”.

With that mind, consider this post by embryologist Jonathan Wells at Evolution News, in which he describes PBS’s latest effort to use taxpayer dollars to push evolution on children, without any presentation of opposing views.

Excerpt:

On the website for its December 29 special, PBS offers an interactive “Guess the Embryo” exercise featuring four different vertebrate embryos: an 8 day-old mouse, a 5 day-old quail, a 17 day-old turtle, and a 40 day-old bat. The purpose of the exercise is to convince viewers that “embryos of different species can appear startlingly similar to one another.” A discerning viewer, however, will notice that the turtle embryo already has a rudimentary shell on its back—thus distinguishing it clearly from the others. A discerning viewer might also notice that the bat embryo bears little resemblance to the mouse embryo, even though both are mammals. What viewers may not know—and PBS does not tell them—is that the interactive exercise shows embryos midway through development. The earliest stages are systematically omitted. Perhaps this is because in their earliest stages vertebrate embryos are striking different from each other. They follow a pattern that embryologists call the “developmental hourglass”—wide at the top, narrow in the middle, and wide at the bottom. In other words, vertebrate embryos start out very different from each other, become superficially similar midway through development, then diverge again as they mature. Like Darwin’s German disciple Ernst Haeckel, PBS distorts vertebrate development to make it seem to provide evidence for Darwin’s theory.

As Wells notes, the embryological evidence actually shows that mammal embryos are different in the earliest stages, and similar in the middle stages of development. So embryological development Darwinian fundamentalist Ernst Haeckel’s embryo drawings were discredited as a fraud in the 19th century. The drawings also showed intermediate stages of embryo development – not the earliest stages.

Wells’ Ph.D in Biology is from the University of California at Berkeley. His area of specialization is embryology, in which he has conducted post-doctoral research.