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POPS Creationism vs. atheism: It's on! Was this stunt shrewd or moronic? From the first it's been hard to tell. The plan, innocuously named "Origin Into Schools," was announced this September in a video featuring Kirk Cameron, a former television child star who co-founded a ministry called Living Waters with Comfort. There's something almost pitiable about the way Cameron crows over the scheme; he truly seems to find it ingenious. He points out that the University of California at Berkeley cannot prevent the action because "their own Web site" dictates that "anyone is free to distribute noncommercial materials in any outdoor area of the campus." "Besides," he gleefully adds, "what are they really going to do? Ban 'The Origin of Species'? That would be big news! Especially when their own bookstore sells it for $29.99!"
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POPSRule-of-law extremism engulfs primitive Eastern Europe Last month, newly elected President Dalia Grybauskaite said she had "indirect suspicions" that the CIA reports might be true, and urged Parliament to investigate more thoroughly. * Continue Reading What sort of a newly elected President would get into office and then start demanding that actions From the Past -- rather than the Future -- be investigated, just because they might be "criminal"? This deeply irresponsible Lithuanian leader apparently doesn't care about inflaming partisan divisions, and worse, appears blind to the dangers of criminalizing policy disputes. Even more outrageously, Lithuania faces one of the steepest recessions in all of Europe; obviously, this is a time, more than ever, that Lithuanians should be Looking to the Future, Not the Past.
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POPSSmall Town To Liz Cheney: We Want Gitmo Detainees, Not Your Fearmongering But Standish’s City Manager tells us that local leaders and residents want the facility, and dismissed Cheney’s efforts as “fearmongering.” Cheney is “certainly not representing the views of our community,” the City Manager, Michael Moran, told our reporter, Amanda Erickson. While some local residents do appear to have expressed mixed feelings or opposition to the plan, Moran says that they’re an isolated minority that Ms. Cheney’s video elevates out of proportion in a way that’s “off base.” What’s more, the Standish city council recently passed a unanimous resolution expressing support for bringing Gitmo detainees, citing job losses in the wake of the closing of the facility. Seems that the good people of Standish just don’t have Liz Cheney’s understanding of the nature of the threat.
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POPSCIA Secret 'Torture' Prison Found at Fancy Horseback Riding Academy "The new members of NATO were so grateful for the U.S. role in getting them into that organization that they would do anything the U.S. asked for during that period," said former White House counterterrorism czar Richard Clarke, now an ABC News consultant. "They were eager to please and eager to be cooperative on security and on intelligence matters."
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POPS'Fearmonger in Chief' Beck goes militia, warns of impending 'New World Order' That certainly is an interesting "scale of insane things," isn't it? Especially considering how insane you have to be to believe we've actually progressed beyond "recession." Insane, indeed. Anyway, Beck then brings on the capital-investment adviser who sent Beck completely around the bend with his snippet on CNBC speculating that the ultimate solution to the economy would be "global government": Damon Vickers of Nine Points Capital Partners. Vickers is a longtime nutcase who in fact was coming fresh off the Alex Jones show earlier this week, expounding on this same theory. (Fun note: A year ago, Vickers predicted Microsoft was "going nowhere but down." That was when its stock price was at 13. Now it's above 30.) There's a reason the ADL officially dubbed Beck our national "Fearmonger in Chief" this week. And there's a reason militias are springing up like mushrooms everywhere.
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POPSRogue Palin: She ain't afraid of no Vietcong king The book also fails to expose Mrs. Palin's intellectual brilliance and keen grasp of foreign policy issues. Why wasn't the text of her recent speech in Hong Kong included? Although it remains secret, it's rumored that she viciously rebuked the Vietcong king for his assault on the Empire State Building. That's a speech we've been waiting for nearly 75 years to hear. It's big news and should have been included. As you read other reviews of this book, please remember that Mrs. Palin has many enemies who are eager to pan her work. The Palin family's most potent nemesis, Levi's johnston, is no dpubt fully erect and ready to spew globs of misfortune upon them for a third time. And reason-adoring intellectuals are certain to point out that an interview on Good Morning Topeka doesn't qualify as a policy summit in the Far East.
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POPSPro-Israel lobby group bankrolling Tories, film claims The programme also describes how David Cameron allegedly accepted a £15,000 donation from Poju Zabludowicz, a Finnish billionaire who chairs Bicom (the Britain Israel Communications and Research Centre). Zabludowizc, the film reveals, has business interests in an illegal West Bank settlement. He also gave £50,000 to Conservative Central Office. Zabludowicz says his contributions "are a matter of public record". William Hague allegedly accepted personal donations from CFI board members totalling tens of thousands of pounds after being appointed shadow foreign secretary. More than £30,000 from CFI supporters went to the campaign funds of members of Cameron's team who were first elected in 2005, the film claims, using publicly available information. The programme-makers say that while this is legal, it is not well-known.
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POPSCountdown Goes To Free Clinic: 'Hard To Believe I Was In America' Eighty-three percent of the patients they see are employed, they are not accepting other government help on a large scale, not "welfare queens" as some would like to have us believe. They are tax-paying, good, upstanding citizens who are trying to make it and give their kids a better life just like you and me. Ninety percent of the patients who came through Saturday's clinic had two or more diagnoses. Eighty-two percent had a life-threatening condition such as cardiovascular disease, diabetes, or hypertension. They are victims of a system built with corporate profits at its center, which long ago forgot the moral imperative that should drive us to show compassion to our fellow men and women.
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POPSThe Pledge of Allegiance is un-American Ironically, the Pledge of Allegiance, which today is most fiercely defended by white conservative Southerners whose Confederate ancestors tried to destroy the United States in the 1860s, was written by a Yankee socialist from New York in the 1890s. Francis Bellamy was a progressive Baptist minister and a Christian socialist who composed the pledge for the 400-year Columbus anniversary in 1892 and published it in a youth magazine. His cousin Edward Bellamy, a socialist from Massachusetts (Glenn Beck, are you taking notes?), was the author of the 1888 bestselling utopian novel "Looking Backward: 2007-1887," which described a collectivist America in 2007 in which everyone is drafted in an "industrial army" and dines in public kitchens. (Instead of an industrial army, the United States in 2007 had a reserve army of the unemployed and working poor, and instead of public kitchens we had Starbucks.)
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POPSBeck's Guest List Included White Supremacists, Other Extremists Another Beck guest with a controversial past is Larry Pratt, the president of Gun Owners of America. Pratt appeared on the Fox News program on February 16, 2009. A Second-Amendment rights enthusiast, Pratt may be best known for being forced to resign as co-chair of Pat Buchanan's 1996 presidential campaign because of ties to white supremacist and extremist groups. The same year, the Southern Poverty Law Center reported that Pratt was contributing to an anti-Semitic periodical titled "United Sovereigns of America." Gun Owners of America, meanwhile, was discovered donating money to a white supremacist attorney's group.
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POPSCamp Lejeune whistle-blower fired But instead of being praised for preventing what might have been another Fort Hood massacre, Manion was fired by the contractor that hired him, NiteLines Kuhana LLC. A spokeswoman for the firm says it let Manion go at the Navy's behest. The Navy declined to comment on this story. Manion says the April incident with the two Marines was just one of a series of disturbing events and serious problems with mental healthcare he saw at Camp Lejeune, a base that may be best known for a water contamination scandal that led to high rates of cancer and birth defects among Marines and their families who lived there. He was particularly concerned to see that troubled Marines were stricken with the overwhelming impulse to commit suicide or murder, telltale signs of severe combat stress.
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POPSGates Bars Torture Photos' Release 
The administration first sought to change FOIA in June, shortly after deciding to contest a ruling by the Second Circuit Court of Appeals that ordered the photos' release. The resulting bill, championed by Sen. Joseph Lieberman (I-Conn.), was specifically designed to nullify the effect of the appeals court's ruling. Since the court had ruled that the photos couldn't be withheld under an existing FOIA exemption, the Obama administration simply asked Congress to carve out a new exemption. Despite objections from liberal members of the House, Congress obliged. The new exemption's requirements are stunningly lax. In order to withhold the photos, Gates simply had to certify, as he did in the court filing, that "public disclosure of these photographs would endanger citizens of the United States, members of the United States Armed Forces, or employees of the United States Government deployed outside the United States." In other words, their release had to endanger someone, somewhere. And i
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POPSKeeping Extremisms Out of the U.S. Military Consider the growing infiltration of neo-Nazi groups within the armed services. In 2006 and again in 2009, the Southern Poverty Law Center, a group which monitors racist and right-wing militia groups, concluded: A decade after the Pentagon declared a zero-tolerance policy for racist hate groups, recruiting shortfalls caused by the war in Iraq have allowed "large numbers of neo-Nazis and skinhead extremists" to infiltrate the military, according to a watchdog organization... The report quotes Scott Barfield, a Defense Department investigator, saying, "Recruiters are knowingly allowing neo-Nazis and white supremacists to join the armed forces, and commanders don't remove them from the military even after we positively identify them as extremists or gang members." That zero-tolerance policy was put in place in the aftermath of the devastating Oklahoma City bombing which killed 168 Americans, the largest death toll from a terrorist attack on the U.S. homeland before 9/11.
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