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This is more than just another of those moments that warily conservatives point to when President Barack Obama or his defenders insist that no administration has operated stricter border controls or pursued more deportations of illegal immigrants. This is criminal. According to a damning report in The New York Times, the White House recently overturned a ban on allowing a wealthy Ecuadorean woman from entering the United States after her family donated tens of thousands of dollars to Democrats.“The woman, Estefanía Isaías, had been barred from coming to the United States after being caught fraudulently obtaining visas for her...

NEW YORK (RNS) In the latest clash between the Catholic hierarchy and one of the church’s leading anti-abortion crusaders, New York Cardinal Timothy Dolan accused the Rev. Frank Pavone of continuing to stonewall on financial reforms, and Dolan said he is cutting ties with his group, Priests for Life. In a Nov. 20 letter to other U.S. bishops, Dolan said he did not know if the Vatican would now step in to take action against the New York-based priest, who for years has angered various bishops by rejecting oversight of the organization by church authorities and for refusing to sort...

New 2015 Hooters Calendar is out.

The U.S. Air Force has a complicated relationship with its low- and slow-flying A-10 Warthog attack jet. And that’s putting it mildly. The flying branch has tried more than once to retire the ungainly A-10 in favor of speedier planes, only for lawmakers to block the move. But on at least one occasion, the Air Force actually defended the heavily-armored, gun-armed Warthog from an unlikely challenger—a modern version of the World War II P-51 Mustang that Congress for some reason really loved. In 1979, Congress demanded the Air Force test out the tiny Piper PA-48 Enforcer light attack plane—a derivative...

Fans of Seth Rogen and James Franco are going to have a harder time seeing the guys' latest funny film, The Interview, as several movie theaters are refusing to play the movie. The Thursday premiere of The Interview at New York City's Landmark Theater was canceled after threats alluding to attacks of 9/11 were made by hackers responsible for the leaks of private Sony documents. Rogen and Franco's new comedy is about two journalists who set out to assassinate the North Korean president, and since the recent promotion of the movie, Sony Pictures has faced tremendous pressure to pull the...

A 23-year-old Victoria, Texas, police officer is under investigation after he used a taser on a 76-year-old man twice Thursday following a conversation about a vehicle inspection sticker, which unbeknown to the officer, the man was not even required to have on the vehicle because it belonged to a dealer. Nathanial Robinson’s dash cam captured a portion of the confrontation, which started after he followed Pete Vasquez as he pulled into the car lot. Robinson can been seen walking up to the car, as Vasquez exits the vehicle. Robinson apparently questioned Vasquez about the vehicle’s lack of a valid inspection...

I’ve never been a fan of Bill Nye “the Science Guy.” Partly it’s because I’m from a different generation. I grew up with Isaac Asimov and Carl Sagan as my introduction to science, and Nye always struck me as a cheap substitute. I find something condescending in his hyperkinetic manner, as if science couldn’t actually be interesting and exciting in its own right, as if it could only be interesting if the guy trying to explain it to us is bouncing off the walls. It all seems like Science for People with Attention Deficit Disorder. So you get travesties like...

By most accounts, he was an incredibly arrogant ####, among other unflattering adjectives. When his former classmates at Princeton and Harvard were interviewed, certain words kept repeating. One was a nice thing -- that he's very smart. The others, not so much...

VICTORIA, TX -- A Victoria police officer has been placed on administrative duty after his dashboard camera caught him Tasering an elderly man. In the video obtained by the Victoria Advocate, Officer Nathanial Robinson is seen arresting 76-year-old Pete Vasquez, when he suddenly throws Vasquez onto the hood of the car, pulls him to the ground and Tasers him. Vasquez said the cop acted more like a pit bull than a police officer. "I turn around and he pulled that Taser and he shot me with it, and you know it looked like he's enjoying that," Vasquez said.

Tyler Durden 12/17/2014Great news: The prices consumers pay dropped 0.3% MoM in November - the biggest deflation since Dec 2008. Of course, The Fed will be in "considerable" panic mode at this data and may choose to crush the hope of so many that rate hikes are coming in mid-2015 as definitive evidence that the US economy is well on the road to recovery. Ex-Food-and-Energy, prices rose 1.7% YoY - slightly missing expectations of +1.8%. Of course, a big driver of this 'transitory' disinflation is a 10.5% YoY drop in Gasoline and 6.6% MoM drop in November. Despite this huge...

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Held for five years in Cuba, 65-year-old American contractor Alan Gross has been released from prison and is en route to U.S. soil, ABC News has learned exclusively. In a landmark humanitarian prisoner exchange to be announced by President Obama shortly at the White House, the agreement was reached following more than a year of secret back channel talks at the highest levels of both governments. Today’s release of Gross, who is said to be in poor physical condition, represents a first step toward normalizing relations with the neighbor just 90-miles off the Florida coast. Gross was convicted of espionage...

In an article published by the Guardian, Jess Zimmerman suggested that all men should be murdered. In the same article, she stated that prejudice against men is a good thing. The article, called “No, we don’t literally want to ban men. But 2014 was the year women got even,” begins with a sarcastic opening paragraph mocking males. It quickly descends further into madness. In the second paragraph, Zimmerman states that “misandry (the hatred of men) had a big year, too, but it looked a little different. For us, it was a tool to help create a less oppressive future.” Zimmerman...

Oil producers in North Dakota don't seem ready to give up their rail cars just yet. Enterprise Product Partners has shelved plans for a pipeline out of the prolific Bakken Shale after the company was unable to secure enough crude shipment deals along the route to make the project viable. The proposed 340,000 barrel-per-day line would have run 1,200 miles from the oil fields of North Dakota to the nation's largest oil transportation hub in Cushing, Okla. Houston-based Enterprise Product Partners originally announced that it would solicit shipping commitments from Sept. 4 to Oct. 17 - a process called an...

English director Ridley Scott is evidently fond of what Hollywood calls “period pieces.” He has had little trouble getting funding for such unlike other directors, no doubt because of his track record with Alien (1979), the cult classic Blade Runner (1982), and Thelma and Louise (1991). The suits felt sufficiently rewarded after they let Scott get into the time machine to make Gladiator (2000), Kingdom of Heaven (2005), and Robin Hood (2010) to let him try again. However, for Exodus: Gods and Kings, now playing at your neighborhood multiplex, Scott had to travel quite a bit farther back. If...

The drop in gasoline prices is a wonderful Christmas present for U.S. consumers.  It's great up here, but keep an eye on Venezuela.  The country could collapse if prices keep dropping. TIME magazine has a good summary about the mess in Caracas: The economic dysfunction and falling price of oil leaves Maduro in a tough spot. He lacks both the political will and popularity to push through meaningful reforms to push Venezuela’s economic house in order. At the same time, he is being increasingly squeezed by the weakness in the oil price. Hugo Chávez was luckier. At the height of...

Atticus Finch is a monster. Sure, he’s one of history’s most beloved literary characters (he was even played by Gregory Peck in a film adaptation) but he’s also, to use the parlance of our time, history’s greatest rape apologist. Glenn Reynolds, a law professor at the University of Tennessee and pundit, first observed Finch’s new standing in the world on Twitter in early December:

* Hundreds of displaced Iraqis, forced to evacuate their towns, will celebrate Christmas in this refugee camp in Erbil * They represent a tiny fraction of over three million Iraqi people 'internally displaced' - many of them in Kurdistan * The autonomous region in Northern Iraq is being pushed to breaking point by sheer number of new settlers * Families are safe, for now, from any immediate danger but dropping temperatures pose another serious threatThese beautiful pictures of Christmas prayers and glowing nativity scenes hide a much darker reality. Hundreds of Iraqi Christians, who now occupy these makeshift tents in...

The Obamas talked with People magazine about dealing with their "own racist experiences," as the magazine described. Michelle Obama told one story that recently took place, even as she was first lady of the United States. "I tell this story – I mean, even as the first lady – during that wonderfully publicized trip I took to Target, not highly disguised, the only person who came up to me in the store was a woman who asked me to help her take something off a shelf. Because she didn't see me as the first lady, she saw me as someone...

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