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Just days before Pope Francis lands in America for a three-city tour, a Vatican official stressed the Holy See approves of Obama’s highly controversial Iran nuclear deal, believing it will bring peace to the world.Archbishop Paul Gallagher, who serves as the Vatican’s secretary for relations with states, addressed the 59th General Conference of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) in Vienna on Monday, and explained that the Vatican wholeheartedly supports America’s nuclear deal with Iran.“We hope that the full implementation of [the nuclear deal] will ensure the peaceful nature of Iran’s nuclear program under the [Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty] and will...

323 The organization that has released nine videos exposing the scandal of Planned Parenthood selling aborted babies and their body parts has released a new undercover video today with another shocking discovery. This latest video catches the nation’s biggest abortion business selling specific body parts — including the heart, eyes and “gonads” of unborn babies.The video also shows the shocking ways in which Planned Parenthood officials admit that they are breaking federal law by selling aborted baby body parts for profit. The 10th video by The Center for Medical Progress features several top-level Planned Parenthood executives discussing the organization’s secretive...

On September 14, Democratic presidential hopeful Martin O’Malley indicated that gun control is part of his plan for restoring the “American dream.” O’Malley pledged that his gun control policies are designed to “[cut] all deaths from gun violence in half—homicides, suicides, and accidents—within 10 years.”

AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka told Hardball host Chris Matthews, “I don’t know what the difference is between a Democratic Socialist and a Democrat.” During an appearance on the MSNBC program last week, Trumka was asked by Matthews about Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders. […] “I don’t think people care,” Trumka replied. “I don’t know what the difference is between a Democratic Socialist and a Democrat. I don’t really know what the difference is and I think most voters don’t care.” …

Monday, September 14, 2015 Government workers outnumber manufacturing workers in Illinois By Michael Lucci / Illinois Policy Institute - The top-producing states of the Midwest’s manufacturing powerhouse are Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Ohio and Wisconsin. But Illinois is the only one of the Great Lakes states where government workers dramatically outnumber manufacturing workers, according to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. As of June 2015, Illinois had only 574,000 factory workers, compared with nearly 750,000 state and local government workers. That means Illinois had only 3 manufacturing workers for every 4 state and local government workers. http://illinoisreview.typepad.com/illinoisreview/2015/09/government-workers-outnumber-manufacturing-workers-in-illinois.html

The head of the Democratic Party keeps refusing to say how her party differs from socialists. Why? Because she doesn't want to publicly admit the truth.

Virginia Governor Terry McAuliffe (D) brought his own armed guards to a Washington DC anti-gun rally sponsored by Michael Bloomberg’s anti-gun advocacy group Everytown for America. The Governor saw no irony or hypocrisy in his action. “First of all, DC is a very dangerous place with a high rate of gun related violence,” McAuliffe said. “It would be foolhardy for me to expose myself without having some sort of protection. Second, a governor is no ordinary, expendable average schmo. My elevated position of power makes me a target. I have a right to defend myself against anti-government radicals.” McAuliffe also...

Dozens of House Democrats are calling for the Obama administration to dramatically increase the number of Syrian refugees allowed into the U.S. In a letter on Friday, 72 lawmakers said that the country could easily support the resettlement of as many as 100,000 refugees — a 10-fold increase from the White House’s plan. The U.S. should “resettle a minimum of 200,000 refugees by the end of 2016, including 100,000 Syrian refugees,” they wrote to the White House. That would be in line with a recommendation from a coalition of 20 refugee organizations called Refugee Council USA. “It is our moral...

Congress is finally having its say on the Iran deal. It will be an elaborate charade, however, because, having first gone to the U.N., President Obama has largely drained congressional action of relevance. At the Security Council, he pushed through a resolution ratifying the deal, thus officially committing the United States as a nation to its implementation — in advance of any congressional action. The resolution abolishes the entire legal framework, built over a decade, underlying the international sanctions against Iran. A few months from now, they will be gone. The script is already written: The International Atomic Energy Agency,...

Washington (AFP) - President Barack Obama's Democrats staved off a united Republican effort to sink the Iran nuclear deal Thursday, handing him a welcome foreign policy victory. As expected, US senators fell two votes shy of the 60 needed to advance a resolution disapproving of the international accord, meaning the legislation aimed at sabotaging the deal is essentially dead. "The Senate has spoken with a clarion voice and declared that the historic agreement to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon will stand," Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid said after Democrats cleared the way for the accord.

If Hillary Rodham Clinton’s new apology for her private email server fails to reassure jittery supporters, it could amplify the chatter among some Democrats who have been casting about for a potential white knight to rescue the party from a beleaguered Clinton candidacy. Vice President Joseph R. Biden, Secretary of State John Kerry, Senator Elizabeth Warren, former Vice President Al Gore: Each has been discussed among party officials in recent weeks as an alternative to Mrs. Clinton if she does not regain her once-dominant standing in the 2016 presidential field and instead remains mired in the long-running email controversy, with...

Jim Crow laws touched every part of life When All in the Family made its big splash back in the 1970s, I couldn’t see why it was supposed to be a comedy when it reflected the home I grew up in so closely. I looked for cameras outside our windows. Yet I bought into MLK’s vision of a color-blind America. I wanted and still want to see a land where people are judged by the content of their character instead of by any arbitrary circumstances, skin color, social class, nationality, or anything else. In the segregated South and the bigoted...

David Brock’s war against the New York Times just went nuclear — and the paper is responding with equal fury. Brock, the former right-wing journalist-turned-pro-Clinton crusader, takes aim at a top New York Times editor in a soon-to-be released book obtained by POLITICO. In the book, titled "Killing the Messenger: The Right-Wing Plot to Derail Hillary Clinton and Hijack Your Government,” Brock accuses senior politics editor and former Washington bureau chief Carolyn Ryan of helping to turn the paper into a “megaphone for conservative propaganda” by unfairly targeting former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. The founder of liberal watchdog groups...

Some of the most strident opponents of the nuclear accord with Iran are invoking memories of the Holocaust in an effort to defeat the agreement, arguing the deal could enhance Iran’s ability to build a bomb, leading to the destruction of Israel. Those arguments, however, failed to sway two senators who grew up hearing stories of the Holocaust firsthand, despite fierce opposition to the deal from Israeli leaders and some Jewish groups. “My parents told me at a young age what it was like to live in fear,” said Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore. “For German Jews, the fear was always...

Republican presidential front-runner Donald Trump said that while it was too bad Kentucky county clerk Kim Davis was put in jail over her refusal to grant marriage licenses to same-sex couples, people have to abide by the Supreme Court's ruling on the matter. "Well, you know, she was released and that was good, and it was too bad that she had to be put in jail, and I'm a very, very strong believer in Christianity and religion, but I will say that this was not the right job for her," Mr. Trump said on Tuesday evening's "The O'Reilly Factor" on...

2016: Presidential candidates, both announced and prospective, used Labor Day to fire off some pretty harsh criticisms of President Obama's economy. That's not news. What is news is who was doing the firing.

Is the white vote returning to American politics? Four recent national polls all confirm what is likely to be the galvanizing force of the GOP presidential primary season at least through next spring and what is almost certainly behind Donald Trump's "Make America Great Again" surge: an effort to bring disaffected white voters back to voting booths. Nearly every political and social scientist in America has predicted for years that demographics are shifting inexorably against the Republican Party nationally -- that growing numbers of Hispanic and Millennial voters will join black voters in keeping the GOP from capturing the White...

The battle for control of the Senate rests on the outcome of the presidential race, strategists in both parties say. Since 1860, no party has been able to climb out of the minority to capture the Senate during a presidential election year without also winning the White House. Strategists say 2016 won’t be any different. If Hillary Clinton, the current Democratic front-runner, doesn’t win the White House, there’s little chance New York Sen. Charles Schumer (D) will become Senate majority leader in 2017. Democrats appear well-positioned to knock off two Republican incumbents, but whether they can stretch the number of...

There seems to be a creeping pathos among the political commentariat these days as one poll after another indicates that no matter how many rotten eggs you throw at Donald Trump he somehow continues to turn them into delicious omelets which he serves up to the faithful. Over the course of the summer this was viewed as a primarily (pun intended) Republican problem. Democrat supporters were content to leave it to the GOP as to how they should clean up their own house and evict the unwelcome guest. But now even the most die-hard are forced to acknowledge that...

A little-noticed lawsuit brought by a Maryland man challenging the state's contorted congressional districts will be heard this fall by the Supreme Court — where it has the potential to open a new line of constitutional attack for opponents of gerrymandering. Stephen M. Shapiro, a former federal worker from Bethesda, argues that the political map drawn by state Democrats after the 2010 census violated the First Amendment rights of Republicans by placing them in districts in which they were in the minority, marginalizing them based solely on their political views. The issue before the Supreme Court is whether a lower...