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Thursday marked a high point for opponents of Common Core, as Oklahoma Gov. Mary Fallin signed legislation making her state the third to ditch the national educational standards. In a press briefing at the White House on Monday, though, U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan struck back by vaguely suggesting that the federal government may now punish Oklahoma. Duncan asserted that “40 percent of high school graduates” in Oklahoma “have to take remedial classes when they go to college” and only “25 percent of Oklahoma’s eighth-graders in math are proficient.” The Obama administration education chief declared that the Common Core Standards...

Top Oklahoma Republicans are outraged that the Obama administration will begin housing as many as 600 illegal immigrant minors at the Fort Sill Army Base as early as Tuesday—at an estimated cost to taxpayers of $252 per child per day. “Our nation has an immigration problem and a national security crisis, but I don’t believe the answer is for our military facilities to be transformed into a center that houses, feeds, and cares for illegal immigrants,” Sen. Jim Inhofe, the ranking GOP member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, said in a statement on Friday. “This only encourages parents to...

Oklahoma Dumps Common Core as Dominoes Fall In a major victory for opponents of the deeply controversial Common Core, Oklahoma officially dumped the education standards.

Oklahoma Gov. Mary Fallin signed a bill to repeal Common Core standards in the state on Thursday, saying Oklahomans are “capable of developing our own academic standards that will be better than Common Core.” The state is now clear to formulate new English and math standards specifically tailored for Oklahoma students. “Now is the time for Oklahomans – parents, citizens, educators, employers and elected officials – to unite behind the common goal of improving our schools. That begins with doing the hard work of building new, more rigorous Oklahoma standards,” Fallin said

Sometimes when shady plans backfire, they backfire really well. This was definitely the case on Saturday May 31st in Tulsa Oklahoma, as The Oklahoma Open Carry Association met Moms Demand Action for the first time.

Two Oklahoma death row inmates (whose crimes both involved the brutal rape and murder of children) sued the government in order to find out the source of the drugs used in the lethal injection that they would receive. After the Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals gave the go-ahead for the executions, the state’s Supreme Court granted an indefinite appeal to the inmates. However, an Oklahoma House member drafted a resolution to impeach the justices who granted the stay, precipitating a 180 degree turnaround by the OK Supreme Court. From The Guardian: The Oklahoma supreme court has dissolved its stay of...

A cancer survivor that signed up for health insurance on Oklahoma’s federally-run Obamacare exchange was told there isn’t a single doctor that accepts the plan within 400 miles of her, according to KTEN-TX. Janet Grigg, who has survived colon cancer, attempted to use her newly-purchased Blue Cross Blue Care insurance plan at her regular cancer screening, but was turned down. “When I got there they said to me that the [insurance] card would not be accepted, and that they had in fact received a memo,” Grigg told KTEN-TX. She was left to pay for the visit out of pocket, as...

Oklahoma Labor Commissioner Takes On EPA, Federal/State Bureaucracy Like many state and local officials across the country who are struggling against federal EPA regulations that are strangling their economies, Oklahoma Commissioner of Labor Mark Costello is frustrated — and fed up. The New American 30 May 2014 Like many state and local officials across the country who are struggling against federal EPA regulations that are strangling their economies, Oklahoma Commissioner of Labor Mark Costello (shown) is frustrated — and fed up. “They are shutting down a perfectly good [Oklahoma] coal plant,” Commissioner Costello told The New American. “They’re shutting...

Gov. Mary Fallin on Wednesday signed the bill that requires abortion clinics to have a physician with admitting privileges at a nearby hospital present when an abortion is done on an unborn baby. When the state of Texas clamped down on abortion clinics that could not follow basic health and safety standards and failed to ensure abortion practitioners had admitting privileges at local hospitals in cases where women are injured in botched abortions, abortion clinics closed down because they couldn’t comply. As many as 20 Texas abortion clinics have closed or stopping doing abortions. oklalogo4Now, Oklahoma is following suit. The...

And To Pay $303,333 To Muslims The US government has forced the state of Oklahoma to overturn its anti-Sharia bill, after a Muslim man named Muneer Awad sued the state for supposed violations against “freedom of religion.” CAIR also played a role in subverting the bill. Adam Soltani of CAIR said: Sharia is the moral code of conduct for Muslims, and that includes certain aspects of laws, like marital laws, divorce, inheritance, wills…it encompasses part of that, but it’s also the moral code of conduct The state of Oklahoma must now pay $303,333 to Awad for legal fees, costs...

Oil companies say a weeks-old Obama administration ruling that protects a Southwestern prairie bird has already halted oil-drilling operations in Kansas and is costing the U.S. economy tens of millions of dollars, as a GOP congressmen suggests the move is another “job-killing” attack on fossil fuel. The decision by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service that was announced in late March and took effect May 1 includes a provision that should allow federal officials and landowners in the five impacted states -- Colorado, Kansas, New Mexico, Oklahoma and Texas -- to manage conservation efforts. But oil producers say the interim...

Event included discussion of Islamic beliefs, Muhammad, Mecca, prayer, Quran. A panel of federal judges in Denver, in an opinion written by Judge Harris Hartz, found that it is perfectly appropriate for a police chief to order subordinates to attend an Islamic mosque where Muslims “discussed Islamic beliefs, Muhammad, Mecca, and why and how Muslims pray” in addition to encouraging officers “to buy” Islamic books and pamphlets that were for sale. The ruling came on Thursday from the 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in a case brought by Capt. Paul Fields, who had been ordered by Tulsa police officials...

Here is exhibit A of why we don’t trust current Senate leadership to do the right thing if they were to win back the majority; they refuse to block new spending when in the minority. Last week, House leadership decided to pass the “doc fix” bill (H.R. 4302) by voice vote. This bill reimburses healthcare providers for the scheduled 24 percent cut in payments for services rendered to Medicare patients. The bill extends the payments through next March. It also continues some new programs created under Obamacare. They used a hodgepodge of tenuous offsets spread out mainly over the next...

Challengers see themselves in the Texas senator, even in races where their odds of an upset are considered steeper than Cruz’s surprise victory over a GOP establishment figure two years ago. He’s made endorsements in the Oklahoma and Nebraska Senate races, plus the Nebraska gubernatorial race, and sent almost $26,000 to federal candidates through his leadership PAC. “Ted Cruz would be extremely helpful as an endorser and a fundraiser,” said C. Edmund Wright, a consultant to longshot South Carolina Senate hopeful Lee Bright, in an email. “Rand Paul and Mike Lee would be great also.” But, he said, “the reason...

Towson University won the 2014 Cross Examination Debate Association’s national championship on March 24, of this year. The team members inexplicably used the n-word repeatedly and babbled nonsense. Pundit Press posted part of the debate transcript: They say the n*****s always already qu***, that’s exactly the point! It means the impact is that the that the is the impact term, uh, to the afraid, uh, the, that it is a case term to the affirmative because, we, uh, we’re saying that qu*** bodies are not able to survive the necessarily means of the body. Uh, uh, the n***** is not...

LAWTON, OK (May 15, 2014) — The Citizens United Political Victory Fund (CUPVF), the affiliated PAC of Citizens United, issued the following statement today supporting conservative candidate T.W. Shannon in Oklahoma’s U.S. Senate Republican Primary.

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Another Oklahoma Senate poll released on Wednesday has former conservative House Speaker T.W. Shannon with a slight lead over Rep. James Lankford (R-OK), the more moderate candidate in the nation's most conservative state who once led by 35 points before former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin endorsed Shannon.

The Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals agreed Thursday to a six-month stay of execution for a death row inmate while an investigation is conducted into last week's botched lethal injection. The court reset the execution date of inmate Charles Warner to Nov. 13. Warner's attorneys requested the delay, and state Attorney General Scott Pruitt said in a court filing Thursday he wouldn't object. While the stay only applies to Warner, the attorney general and governor have said Oklahoma will not carry out any executions until the investigation is finished, which is expected to take at least eight weeks.

Marijuana reform advocates hope Oklahoma will live up to its nickname – the Sooner State – by becoming the first U.S. jurisdiction to both legalize cannabis for personal use and allow it to be exported as a cash crop. In the best-case scenario for pro-pot campaigners, there will be two initiatives on the November ballot: One that would allow medical marijuana and another more far-reaching initiative that would comprehensively dismantle status quo pot policies. The medical marijuana initiative is further along. On May 18 supporters will begin collecting the required 155,216 signatures for ballot access – if opponents do not...