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SALEM, OR – An incident is being investigated where a police officer in Oregon was harassing a man who was sitting down reading a book at a local transit mall. The officer grabs the man’s skateboard, throws it and tells him to put his hands behind his back. The man stands up and begins to walk away, pulling out his cell phone to make a call, causing the officer to deploy the taser in the man’s back. At the moment there has been no information from the local police released as to the motive for the officer’s attack on the...

1. MTV MTV’s Chairman is on the board of CeaseFire, Inc. Not only are they corrupting society one raunchy music video at a time, they’d also love nothing more than to disarm the public. 2. Staples The office supply mogul frequently bans gun companies from entering their business contests – even though the contests are supposed to be open to “any and all” businesses. Sounds just like our tolerant friends on the left to make such a move. 3. Bank of America Turned down the business of McMillan Group simply because they are a gun company. 4. Google The world’s...

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Next Tuesday, the Supreme Court will hear oral arguments concerning constitutional challenges to Obamacare’s contraception mandate brought by Hobby Lobby Stores and Conestoga Wood Specialties … Neither company objects to birth control, per se. Indeed, both provide coverage to their employees for most types of contraception. Yet civilization as we know it will collapse if the justices rule in their favor, according to the increasingly shrill prognostications of panicky liberals. Such a decision, progressives shriek, would constitute a victory for the dark forces behind the “war on women,” erode employee protections against discrimination, and dramatically reduce access to health care...

I promise I will not spend the next 232 days - between now and election day - writing about how the mid-terms are going to turn out. You know my record for prognostication. It's dreadful. Nevertheless, here is what I Tweeted yesterday afternoon: @richgalen Gallup Obama Approval 3-day track = 39-55. One year ago was 50-43. Reason enough for Dems to worry. http://bit.ly/6v3JWW There is not much statistical difference between an approval rating of 42 and 39 (and it is likely to bounce within that range) but, the psychology of one being in the 40s and the other in the...

In 2007, in my 60th post on SWP, I wrote a post about Putin and the Euros, titled “A Man in a Hurry.” If you look at Putin’s aggression in Ukraine, and the utterly pusillanimous European response to this aggression, that post from more than 7 years ago is quite clearly prophetic, to the last jot and tittle. The closing paragraph: **** I think that most Europeans, and those few Americans who seem to pay much attention to these issues, are nonplussed by Putin’s audacity in large part because they are projecting their attitudes onto him. They cannot envision why...

I was reading a blog at another site, and came upon this excellent post. With full permission of the author I repost it here. Enjoy! It's long but worth the time IMHO. It's also the most sense out of The Ninth Circuit that I've ever seen. By California Lawyer | Friday, January 24, 2014 at 4:23 pm What First Amendment protections are afforded a blogger sued for defamation? This was the question presented recently in a case just decided in the most liberal appellate court jurisdiction in the USA, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals. The issue was one of...

A federal appellate court ruled Friday that the author of a blog post deserves the same treatment in a defamation case as "institutional media." The three-judge panel of the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals held unanimously that there is no difference between a journalist for a media outlet and another speaker when it comes to First Amendment protections. The case stems from a series of blog posts published in 2010 by a woman accusing a financial advice firm of fraud and corruption. One of the firm's principals was appointed as the bankruptcy trustee to a company that had misappropriated client...

As spotted by Steve Goddard, and linked to by Climate Depot: In 1974, Time Magazine blamed the cold polar vortex on global cooling. ‘Scientists have found other indications of global cooling. For one thing there has been a noticeable expansion of the great belt of dry, high-altitude polar winds —the so-called circumpolar vortex—that sweep from west to east around the top and bottom of the world.’Another Ice Age? – TIME Forty years later, Time Magazine blames the cold polar vortex on global warming ‘But not only does the cold spell not disprove climate change, it may well be that global...

t seems apropos to mention something controversial about Santa Claus, given the recent furor over his skin pigmentation. (Because, ya know, early Catholic Bishops and German folklore characters are traditionally such a multicultural crowd.) But, my controversial comment about old Saint Nick has little to do with his racial identification. You see, I have given it many hours of thought (no… I have no life), and I am convinced that Kris Kringle is (undoubtedly) a member of the Republican Party. Wait! Hear me out! He may not be a Gadsden-flag-waving member of the tea party, but he definitely belongs to...

Hashim Nzinga, the man who issued a $10,000 bounty for George Zimmerman before he was acquitted in the death of Trayvon Martin, now has assumed leadership of the New Black Panther Party. It was in March 2012 when Nzinga issued the bounty even before Zimmerman was charged for the death of Martin. Nzinga never has called off the bounty. Journalist and author Jack Cashill, who covers the Zimmerman controversy in his upcoming book “If I Had a Son: Race, Guns, and the Railroading of George Zimmerman,” said the fact that Nzinga has risen to lead the radical black nationalist organization...

It'll Take More Than Words

Demanding a change to the way business is done in Washington, President Barack Obama on Thursday urged lawmakers to ignore lobbyists, bloggers, "talking heads on radio" and "the professional activists who profit from conflict."

Thought experiment: Imagine you are a national security reporter, covering the release of a massive, 2,000-page report on domestic intelligence gathering activities and future threat assessment from the National Security Agency. But instead of issuing the full report, the NSA issues a 30-page “Summary for Policymakers” (SPM) written by political appointees at the Justice Department, promising that the full 2,000-page report will be released a few days later. Would you print a front-page story based only on the 30-page summary, or would you demand to see the full report? If you’d go with the politically massaged summary, then congratulations​—​you too...

Polling shows more Americans blame the GOP than Barack Obama. I think this means the GOP is winning. You’ll need to let me explain. Republican leaders have lived in abject fear for the last two months that there would be an overwhelming backlash against them. In 1995, public opinion ran against the GOP 2 to 1. Bill Clinton consistently got the better of the GOP. With that history in mind, the GOP leadership in Washington, when no fundraising off Ted Cruz’s hard line, has been soiling itself afraid the GOP might actually go along with him. And the party did....

Over the past few weeks, Democrats have indicated that they have no intention of negotiating over Obamacare, opting instead to shut down the government. They are justifying their obstinacy by asserting that Obamacare is the law of the land. Well, if that is the game they want to play, we should return the favor with the debt ceiling. The debt ceiling, pursuant to the Second Liberty Bond Act of 1917, is the law of the land. And it has been so for far longer than Obamacare. Throughout this debate over funding Obamacare in the budget bill, House GOP leaders have...

"It is now quite clear that President Obama is managing the shutdown of 17% of the government to inflict pain, while sparing himself and his family any discomfort. Although his media lickspittles will not publicize the worst abuses, social media offers us the chance to spread the word of his peculiar priorities. Today, we learn that the Amber Alert website, which helps rescue kidnapped children, has been taken down "due to the lapse in federal funding."

The leftist media’s attempts to portray themselves as credible journalists in pursuit of the truth are laughably transparent. But the presence of Al Sharpton on the national news scene represents demonstrable proof not just of the unseriousness of the mainstream media, but of their vile race-baiting for ratings. So why are major advertisers like Ritz Crackers helping pay Sharpton's salary? In any rational world, Sharpton would certainly not have a primetime slot on MSNBC. From his Tawana Brawley hoax to his defense of Duke lacrosse accuser Crystal Mangum, from his fanning of racial flames during the Trayvon Martin incident to...

No one is quite sure yet what happened last night at the Jacksonville airport last night, but two arrests have been made, and at least one “destructive device” has been found. Security shut down the airport for several hours and evacuated it while dealing with two suspicious packages, one of which may have been the real thing:

The vote was 13-5 for a compromise defining a "covered journalist" as an employee, independent contractor or agent of an entity that disseminates news or information. The individual would have been employed for one year within the last 20 or three months within the last five years. It would apply to student journalists or someone with a considerable amount of freelance work in the last five years. A federal judge also would have the discretion to declare an individual a "covered journalist," who would be granted the privileges of the law.