A champion for sin

WASHINGTON -- Countering criticism that he's done little on gay rights, President Barack Obama commemorated the 40th anniversary of the birth of the modern movement by welcoming its leaders to the White House and reaffirming his commitment to their top priorities.

"I want you to know: You have our support," Obama told members of the core Democratic constituency as he and first lady Michelle Obama hosted a cocktail-and-appetizer reception in the East Room for gay pride month. It's been some four decades since the police raid on New York City's gay Stonewall Inn that spurred gay rights activism across the country.

As activists work to change minds and change laws, Obama added: "I will not only be your friend, I will continue to be an ally and a champion and a president who fights with you and for you."

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"For this reason God gave them up to vile passions. For even their women exchanged the natural use for what is against nature. Likewise, also the men, leaving the natural use of the woman, burned in their lust for one another, men with men committing what is shameful,and receiving in themselves the penalty of their error which was due." Romans 1:26-27

Sounds like Zelaya was on his way to becoming a dictator

TEGUCIGALPA, Honduras -- A day after Honduras's military ousted President Manuel Zelaya, the country's new government found itself isolated on Monday amid international condemnation of the coup, but said it was acting to defend the country's democracy instead of subverting it.

U.S. President Barack Obama said Mr. Zelaya's ouster was "not legal" and that Mr. Zelaya remains the country's president, the Associated Press reported.

Speaking to reporters in the Oval Office after meetings with Colombian President Alvaro Uribe, Mr. Obama pledged the U.S. would "stand on the side of democracy" and work with other nations and international entities to resolve the matter peacefully...

...The coup stemmed from a bid by Mr. Zelaya, a frequent critic of the U.S., to stay in office past the end of his term in January. Mr. Zelaya wanted to hold a referendum on Sunday asking voters if they wanted to vote at a future date to scrap the constitution. Mr. Zelaya's opponents say his aim was to end the constitution's limit to a single presidential term.

The crisis grew into a full blown confrontation between Mr. Zelaya and the country's other institutions. The Supreme Court had ruled the vote was illegal because it flouted the constitution. The army, Congress, Catholic church and business leaders lined up against the president. The Supreme Court gave the order for the army to arrest the president, who was hauled out of his residence early on Sunday and bundled onto a plane to Costa Rica.

In bed with the president?

Juan Williams comments on the relationship between the press and the Obama Administration:

Even President Obama thinks his relationship with the American media is reaching troubling levels of coziness for a democracy with a supposedly free press.

At last weekend's Radio and Television Correspondents' dinner in Washington he joked that during a sleepless night grappling with a problem "I rolled over and asked [NBC "Nightly News" anchorman] Brian Williams what he thought."

The bada-bing drum roll for that joke was drowned out by self-conscious laughter from an audience that began the night with a cartoon tribute to the President as a Super Hero able to leap tall buildings and zoom across the globe to defeat evil pirates.

The president drew more nervous laughs from the media when he said he didn't mind attending the dinner because "why bother hanging out with celebrities when I can spend time with the people who made me one."

It's time for the press to stop being Obama's toady and treat him with the seriousness he deserves. So far, it's Hollywood on the Potomac all the time for Obama but at some point the press has got to get back to covering him as a serious, political leader. That means covering the manipulations, the flip flops, the failures of the administration. -- Instead of covering him like "Entertainment Tonight" they've got to start covering him more like a reality show -- one like "Jon & Kate." Ultimately, while the administration might be happy with their strategy at the moment, over time the press will lose its credibility and the Obama White House will have no way to deliver important messages to the American people...

...The Pew study concluded that half of all the stories done about President Obama focused on his "personal and leadership qualities" as opposed to his policies. President Bush and President Clinton had only about a quarter of their coverage devoted to non-political news.

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"Fish don't vote"

Recently, a federal judge ordered irrigation sources be turned off in the San Wakin Valley to allegedly save a small minnow (fish) under the Endangered Species Act. Farmers have no irrigation alternatives and 80,000 jobs are in jeopardy.

Here is an interview with Paul Rodriguez on Hannity.

Celebrating LGBT month

President Barack Obama signed a presidential memorandum today that extends many benefits now received by spouses of federal employees to same-sex partners of federal employees.

Family advocates say Obama’s action is a direct violation of the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) and a big step toward redefining marriage.

“The president thumbed his nose at the rule of law and continues to undermine marriage as society’s most pro-child institution,” said Tom Minnery, senior vice president of government and public policy for Focus on the Family Action.

“It’s a settled principle of moral tradition and social science that says children do best with both a mom and a dad who are married to each other. Congress already defined marriage for purposes of federal law in 1996 with the passage of the Defense of Marriage Act.

“Treating same-sex partners as the equivalent of spouses is therefore a direct violation of DOMA and merely Obama's contribution to the clearly-stated, gay-activist agenda of redefining marriage and family.”

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Nationalizing the banks

WASHINGTON -- Setting up a certain fight with big business, President Obama is proposing a new regulatory agency to police lenders and protect consumers in credit, savings and other banking transactions .

The consumer agency and a newly empowered Federal Reserve will be two of the central elements of a broad overhaul of the financial regulatory system that the president will announce on Wednesday, officials said.

Already the nation's central bank, the Federal Reserve would supervise large financial institutions that are considered so big that their failure could undermine America's economy, according to the administration proposal.

Obama's decision to create a consumer agency comes amid criticism that mortgage lenders and credit card companies have taken advantage of unwitting customers and saddled them with debt. The financial crisis was precipitated in part by the preponderance of securities backed by mortgages that went sour when the housing market collapsed.

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And what was the main cause of the housing market collapse? Subprime lending encouraged and regulated by the federal government. Can the same government that has bankrupted Social Security and Medicare regulate the financial markets?

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The noose around liberty tightens

WASHINGTON – No more "light" cigarettes or candy-flavored smokes. Bigger, scarier warning labels. Fewer ads featuring sexy young smokers.

Historic anti-smoking legislation sped to final congressional passage on Friday — after a bitter fight lasting nearly a half-century — and lawmakers and the White House quickly declared it would save the lives of thousands of smokers of all ages. Even more important, they said, the measure could keep countless young people from starting in the first place.

President Barack Obama, admittedly still struggling with his own nicotine habit, saluted passage of the bill, which he will soon sign. He said, "For over a decade, leaders of both parties have fought to prevent tobacco companies from marketing their products to children and provide the public with the information they need to understand what a dangerous habit this is."

Specifically, the measure for the first time will give the Food and Drug Administration authority to regulate what goes into tobacco products, demand changes or elimination of toxic substances and block the introduction of new products.

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When will the spending stop?

WASHINGTON (CNNMoney.com) -- The House on Tuesday waded deeper into the rescue of the troubled auto industry when it passed a $4 billion plan to subsidize new cars sales for consumers who scrap old ones.

By a vote of 298-119, the House approved the "cash for clunkers" program.

The measure would give consumers vouchers worth as much as $4,500 to turn in gas guzzlers and buy new cars that are more fuel efficient.

The legislation now goes to the Senate. President Obama has said he supports such a measure.

Put the pedal to the metal!

President Barack Obama assured the nation his recovery plan was on track Monday, scrambling to calm Americans unnerved by unemployment rates still persistently rising nearly four months after he signed the biggest economic stimulus in history.

Obama admitted his own dissatisfaction with the progress but said his administration would ramp up stimulus spending in the coming months. The White House acknowledged it has spent only $44 billion, or 5 percent, of the $787 billion stimulus, but that total has always been expected to rise sharply this summer.

"Now we're in a position to really accelerate," Obama said.

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Diminishing holiness

Four times in his speech in Cairo, President Obama referred to the Holy Koran: Should a Christian, who proclaims to believe in the Holy Scriptures, refer to any other book as "holy"? Can a book of lies and deceit be holy?

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As the Holy Koran tells us, "Be conscious of God and speak always the truth." That is what I will try to do - to speak the truth as best I can, humbled by the task before us, and firm in my belief that the interests we share as human beings are far more powerful than the forces that drive us apart.

And when the first Muslim-American was recently elected to Congress, he took the oath to defend our Constitution using the same Holy Koran that one of our Founding Fathers - Thomas Jefferson - kept in his personal library.

The Holy Koran teaches that whoever kills an innocent, it is as if he has killed all mankind; and whoever saves a person, it is as if he has saved all mankind.

The Holy Koran tells us, "O mankind! We have created you male and a female; and we have made you into nations and tribes so that you may know one another."

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A little to eager to please

My wife was listening to NPR last night and they said Obama had done a blog interview in Egypt yesterday or the day before. He answered a question telling the questioner that if America was a Muslim-country it would be second or third. They thought that was a bit high, and investigated. Turns out we'd be 35th, behind Turkistan.

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June is officially LGBT Pride Month!

If a Christian is doing this, what will a presidential pagan do?

NOW, THEREFORE, I, BARACK OBAMA, President of the United States of America, by virtue of the authority vested in me by the Constitution and laws of the United States, do hereby proclaim June 2009 as Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Pride Month. I call upon the people of the United States to turn back discrimination and prejudice everywhere it exists.

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Anyone see the 10th amendment lately?

ATLANTA — The Justice Department has rejected Georgia's system of using Social Security numbers and driver's license data to check whether prospective voters are citizens, a process that was a subject of a federal lawsuit in the weeks leading up to November's election.

In a letter released on Monday, the Justice Department said the state's voter verification program is frequently inaccurate and has a "discriminatory effect" on minority voters. The decision means Georgia must halt the citizenship checks, although the state can still ask the Justice Department to reconsider, according to the letter and to the Georgia secretary of state's office.

"This flawed system frequently subjects a disproportionate number of African-American, Asian and/or Hispanic voters to additional, and more importantly, erroneous burdens on the right to register to vote," Loretta King, acting assistant attorney general of the Justice Department's civil rights division, said. King's letter was sent to Georgia Attorney General Thurbert Baker on Friday.

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The kinder, gentler military

GUANTANAMO BAY NAVY BASE, Cuba -- These captives already get to order fast-food takeout from the base and have access to a phone booth for weekly calls. Now some 17 Uighur Muslims awaiting a nation to grant them asylum are about to go high-tech, with laptops and web training.

While awaiting details of President Barack Obama's order to close the prison camps by Jan. 22, commanders here have ordered 20 laptops for the captives of Camp Iguana.

''As you know, detainees are leaving this place,'' said Army Lt. Col. Miguel Mendez, who oversees detainee classes, a multilingual library and now-emerging virtual computer lab. ``We're getting them computer classes to prepare for their return.''

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