Pro-life teen called 'domestic terrorist' in petition supporting professor of feminism

(Bailey) Instead of this professor pushing her own political agenda, why doesn't  she do what she is paid to do and that is to teach? A supposedly grown woman against a 16 year old, really?

Dueling petitions involving a pro-life teen and a professor charged with attacking her are circulating at the University of California at Santa Barbara, and the student body is backing the teacher.
Students at the University of California at Santa Barbara are circulating the petitions, one in support of feminism Prof. Mireille Miller-Young, and another backing Thrin Short, the 16-year-old pro-lifer whose March 4 demonstration was allegedly broken up by Miller-Young. The one backing the professor, who has been charged with battery and vandalism, has more than 2,000 signatures, while the one in support of Short has 150, according to The College Fix.

“They talk about prioritizing the safety of our campus involving activists, yet it’s our professor that attacks somebody.”- Katie Devlin, UCSB student

“The last thing we need are these people invading our community,” UCSB sophomore Katherine Wehler, a theater and feminist studies major, told the site.
She said pro-lifers with graphic images of aborted fetuses such as Short and her sister carried are like “domestic terrorists.”
However, another petition making its way around the student body calls for Miller-Young’s termination.
“This is about someone who violated the law in several ways, disregarded the idea of freedom of speech, and tarnished the image of the UCSB,” it reads, before emphasizing that it is not a petition in support of the pro-life movement, but one advocating freedom of speech.
“They talk about prioritizing the safety of our campus involving activists, yet it’s our professor that attacks somebody,” UCSB student Katie Devlin told The College Fix. “I think it’s just the contrast that she is a feminist professor and stands for protecting women, yet she attacks a young girl.”
Thrin told FoxNews.com that she and her older sister Joan, 21, were holding signs and demonstrating in a free speech zone on the UCSB campus with other pro-life activists when the feminist studies professor -- who teaches one course on campus titled “Black Women in Pornography” -- approached the group.
“Before she grabbed the sign, she was mocking me and talking over me in front of the students, saying that she was twice as old as me and had three degrees, so they should listen to her and not me,” Thrin Short wrote in an email to FoxNews.com earlier this month. “Then she started the chant with the students about ‘tear down the sign.’ When that died out, she grabbed the sign.”
The professor snatched the sign and then allegedly walked through two campus buildings as Short, her sister and two UCSB students followed her. Short said Miller-Young pushed her at least three times as she tried to stop the elevator door from closing and get back her sign.
Miller-Young was charged last month by the Santa Barbara County district attorney's office with misdemeanor counts of theft, battery and vandalism. She pleaded not guilty last week.

Mozilla

Boehner: Lawmakers to weigh criminal case against Lerner for 'misleading the Congress'

House Speaker John Boehner confirmed to Fox News’ Megyn Kelly Monday that lawmakers plan to press the Justice Department to consider a criminal case against ex-IRS official Lois Lerner for “misleading the Congress.”
Boehner also said if Lerner does not cooperate soon by providing information on the IRS targeting scandal, the House would hold her in contempt of Congress.
“Somebody at the IRS violated the law,” Boehner said on “The Kelly File.”
“Whether it was Lois Lerner or not, we’ll find out.”
A meeting of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee to consider contempt is set for Thursday.
But before that, the House Ways and Means Committee will meet Wednesday to prepare a letter to the Justice Department citing possible criminal activity by Lerner.Formal notice was given Monday night by the committee to Attorney General Eric Holder about the referral for possible criminal prosecution of Lerner “based on evidence the Committee has uncovered in the course of investigation of IRS abuses.”
Fox News has learned the letter will argue Lerner violated the constitutional rights of citizens, gave misleading information to investigators and inappropriately released private taxpayer information.
The accusations generally relate to the scandal over the agency's practice of singling out conservative groups seeking non-profit status for extra scrutiny.
Boehner told Kelly that any criminal case against Lerner would be for “misleading the Congress.”
He said at the Ways and Means Committee’s Wednesday session, “they will go over this letter that they have put together outlining names of taxpayers who’ve been harmed and aggrieved and lay out a case for how Ms. Lerner misled the committee.”
He said he also expected that after Easter recess, Congress would take up a contempt resolution against Lerner. He added, “if she’s not going to tell us the truth, we are going to hold her in contempt. The House will vote. The House will hold her in contempt.”
Republicans argue that Lerner played a key role in the agency's practice of singling out conservative groups seeking non-profit status for extra scrutiny as head of the Exempt Organizations Division.
Criminal referrals from Congress to the Justice Department are rare -- and the Justice Department is under no obligation to pursue such a case.
The last major effort of this sort was in 2008, when the leaders of the House oversight committee sent a criminal referral to the Justice Department after they claimed baseball star Roger Clemens failed to tell the truth during a hearing about performance-enhancing drugs.
In that case, the department accepted the referral and prosecuted Clemens. He was eventually exonerated in court.
Asked for comment Monday on the latest pending referral, IRS Commissioner John Koskinen said: "They're doing what they think is right, and I'm sure the Department of Justice is doing what they think is right."
Lerner, speaking before the House oversight committee last year, defended herself against the allegations in the IRS case.
"I have not done anything wrong. I have not broken any laws. I have not violated any IRS rules or regulations," she said.
Lerner, though, refused to answer questions from the committee, and did so again last month.
In his interview with Fox News, Boehner also said House Republicans had not expanded ObamaCare last week with a voice vote to expand coverage choices for small businesses -- a departure from their strategy to try to dismantle or repeal the 2010 health care law.
Asked by Kelly about 2014 midterm election prospects, Boehner said he thought the GOP had a “a real good opportunity” to take the Senate and also to pick up seats in the House.
Fox News' Chad Pergram contributed to this report.

OBAMACARE

Gallup survey suggests sign-ups under ObamaCare not as high as White House says

A major new Gallup survey suggests the ObamaCare sign-up numbers are not as soaring as the White House claims. 
The massive survey, released on Monday, shows the number of uninsured indeed has fallen to its lowest level in years, likely thanks to the Affordable Care Act. The Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index measured the share of adults without health insurance. That shrank from 17.1 percent at the end of last year to 15.6 percent for the first three months of 2014. 
The decline of 1.5 percentage points would translate roughly to more than 3.5 million people gaining coverage. 
But the numbers, released a week after the close of the health law's first enrollment season, also suggest a far more modest impact on coverage than statistics cited by the Obama administration. 
The administration says 7.1 million have signed up for subsidized private plans through new insurance markets, while 3 million previously uninsured people gained coverage through the law's Medicaid expansion. 
Why the huge difference? For starters, the administration's numbers include people who switched or were dropped from their previous coverage, as well as people who have not paid their first month's premium, and who would therefore still be uninsured. 
The administration is also counting sign-ups dating back to October, though enrollment in the first few months was relatively low. 
According to Gallup, the number of uninsured has fallen by a greater amount since the start of open enrollment on Oct. 1. Gallup shows the percentage spiked to 18 percent at the end of the third quarter. But the spike could be attributed in part to people being kicked off their prior coverage, due to changes in the health care law. A look back at mid-2013 shows the percentage of uninsured, before the run-up to open enrollment, was also at 17.1 percent. So the number of people gaining coverage since then would still be roughly 3.5 million. 
Still, it's not quite an apples-to-apples comparison. Gallup is counting just adults, while the administration figures include children as well. 
It may take much of the rest of the year to get a true bottom line of the health care law's impact on coverage. The Gallup survey noted that those signing up for coverage during an extended enrollment period could further drive down the number -- though some enrollees will ultimately choose not to pay their premiums, which would drive the number up. 
But Gallup's numbers do show an improving trend. The share of Americans without coverage is at its lowest since late 2008, before Obama took office, the survey found. 
That's independent validation for the White House, and shows the country at least is not suffering from a net loss of insurance coverage due to cancellations. 
Some feared the cancellations of more than 4.7 million policies that didn't measure up to the law's standards would actually swell the ranks of uninsured people. That created huge political problems for Obama, who had promised Americans they could keep their insurance if they liked it. 
About half the states authorized extensions belatedly granted by the White House. 
Gallup found the biggest insurance gains were among lower-income people and among African-Americans. 
Among people with household incomes of less than $36,000 a year, the share of uninsured shrank by 3.2 percentage points from levels at the end of 2013.
African-Americans saw their uninsured rate drop by 3.3 percentage points. 
Although the proportion of Hispanics without coverage fell by 1.7 percentage points, Latinos remained more likely than any racial or ethnic group to lack access, with 37 percent uninsured. 
Gallup found gains in coverage among all age groups, but not much evidence of a late surge of younger people that the administration had hoped for to help keep premiums in check. 
Results were based on telephone interviews conducted Jan. 2 -March 31 with a random sample of 43,562 adults 18 and older living in all 50 states and Washington, D.C. For results based on the total sample of national adults, the margin of sampling error is plus or minus 1 percentage point at the 95 percent confidence level. 
The Associated Press contributed to this report.

Huckabee

Huckabee: After 14 months Mass. responds to Pelletier family
Apr. 06, 2014 - 4:01 - After overwhelming response to case, parents get answers
 http://video.foxnews.com/v/3438391939001

Obama imposes his policies directly on federal contractors, in 'year of action'

President Obama is imposing his policies directly on federal contractors.
This week, he will sign an executive order that would prohibit federal contractors from retaliating against employees who discuss their pay with each other. The prohibition on the wage "gag rules" is similar to language in a Senate bill aimed at closing a pay gap between men and women. That legislation is scheduled for a vote this week, though it is not likely to pass.
In addition, Obama on Tuesday will direct the Labor Department to adopt regulations requiring federal contractors to provide compensation data based on sex and race. The president will sign the executive order and the presidential memo during an event at the White House where he will be joined Lilly Ledbetter, whose name appears on a pay discrimination law Obama signed in 2009.
This week's steps showcase Obama's efforts to take action without congressional approval and illustrate how even without legislation, the president can drive policy on a significant segment of the U.S. economy. At the same time, it also underscores the limits of his ambition when he doesn't have the backing of Congress for his initiatives.
Republicans maintain that Obama is pushing his executive powers too far and that he should do more to work with Congress. His new executive orders are sure to prompt criticism that he is placing an undue burden on companies and increasing their costs.
Federal contracting covers about one-quarter of the U.S. workforce and includes companies ranging from Boeing to small parts suppliers and service providers. As a result, presidential directives can have a wide and direct impact. Such actions also can be largely symbolic, designed to spur action in the broader economy.
"This really is about giving people access to more information both to help them make decisions at the policy level but also for individuals," said Heather Boushey, executive director and chief economist at the Washington Center for Equitable Growth who has been working with the administration to get compensation information about the nation's workforce.
"This is definitely an encouraging first step," she said.
Federal contractors, however, worry that additional compensation data could be used to fuel wage related lawsuits, said James Plunkett, director of labor policy at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.
What's more, he said, such orders create a two-tiered system where rules apply to federal contractors but not to other employers. Those contractors, knowing that their business relies on the government, are less likely to put up a fight, he said.
"Federal contractors ultimately know that they have to play nicely to a certain extent with the federal government," he said.
Separately, on Monday, Obama will also announce the 24 schools that will share in more than $100 million in grants to redesign their schools to better prepare high school students for college or for careers. The awards are part of an executive order Obama signed last year. Money for the program comes from fees that companies pay for visas to hire foreign workers for specialized jobs.
The moves represent a return to economic issues for the president after two weeks devoted almost exclusively to diplomacy and the final deadline for health insurance coverage. A trip to Asia in two weeks is sure to change the focus once again.
Still, Obama has declared this a year of action, whether Congress supports him or not.
In February, Obama signed an executive order increasing the hourly minimum wage for federal contractors from $7.25 per to $10.10. While White House officials estimated such an increase would affect only a small percentage of federal contract workers, they said the move could encourage states or individual businesses to act on their own to increase workers' wages.
Obama has also pushed his workplace initiatives beyond just federal contractors where possible. Last month he instructed the Labor Department to come up with new workplace overtime rules for all employers, a power the administration has under the Fair Labor Standards Act.
But presidents have most direct power over the workforce that is paid with taxpayers' money.
Obama's go-it-alone strategy is hardly new. The most enduring workplace anti-discrimination laws began with an executive order signed by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt in June 25, 1941, outlawing discrimination based on race, color, creed and national origin in the federal government and defense industries.
President John F. Kennedy broadened that in 1961 with an order that required government contractors to take affirmative action to ensure hiring "without regard to their race, creed, color or national origin."
President George W. Bush also acted on his own when he ordered federal contractors to ensure that their workers were in the country legally by requiring the use of an electronic employment-verification system.
By employing such executive actions, however, Obama has also drawn attention to areas where he has chosen not to act on his own.
The White House has resisted pressure from gay rights advocates who want have Obama to sign an anti-discrimination executive order that would protect gays and lesbians working for federal contractors. The White House wants the House to approve a Senate-passed bill extending those protections to all Americans.
On Friday, the Human Rights Campaign, the nation's largest gay rights group, criticized the White House for saying such an executive order would be redundant if Congress were to pass a White House-supported bill. It's an argument the White House has not made when it comes to minimum wage or anti-gag rule orders imposed on federal contractors.

Fuzzy math from administration over ObamaCare?

By Jim Angle

Published April 04, 2014

FoxNews.com

Although the president and his aides trumpeted the ObamaCare enrollment figures as a success, the administration did not always see those numbers as something to brag about.
In his Rose Garden appearance this week, Obama seemed elated to proclaim "7.1 million Americans have now signed up for private insurance plans through these marketplaces."
But it remains unclear how many of those sign ups have paid premiums in order to be officially enrolled, or how many were previously uninsured.
In addition, even though officials are celebrating the 7 million mark,the White House once minimized numbers twice that large-- the 14 million people in the individual insurance market who were facing cancellations because their policies did not have all the required benefits of ObamaCare.
That created a huge political backlash, in part because the president had promised everyone could keep their plans and doctors "no matter what" -- so the president and his aides played the numbers down as just a small group.
In a news conference last November, Obama portrayed the individual market as a small portion of the insurance market, saying "Keep in mind that the individual market accounts for five percent of the population."
White House spokesman Jay Carney made the same statement repeatedly, including the next day, saying "Five percent of the country (is) in the individual insurance market, a portion of that five percent is affected by the cancellation notices."
Because of the public uproar, Obama asked state officials to allow those policies to be extended.
Twenty-one states, however, including California and New York, flatly refused. California alone had 900,000 individual policies cancelled, adding to a national total of several million.
Doug Holtz-Eakin, former head of the Congressional Budget Office, says "if you look at the 7 million and you shave off the 20 percent who probably haven’t paid, you've got about 5 and a half million people and that's roughly the number of people that were in the individual market and started having their policies cancelled."
That 20 percent number who don't pay has often been cited by insurance sources. Blue Cross/Blue Shield this week confirmed that up to 20 percent of those enrolled by February 1 still have not paid a premium.
As far as the potential cancellations, Carney referred to the 14 million as a "sliver" of the population, even though it's double the number of current signups.
“You need to look at the 7 million in the context of the U.S. population, and that's about 330 million people," says Dan Mendelson of Avalere Health, a non-partisan consulting and analysis firm. "So, this, this program is going to insure about two percent of the total folks who live in the United States."
So while the administration portrayed that two percent as victory, the five percent facing cancellations was minimized, leading Holtz-Eakin to observe that " it can’t be the case that, you know, five percent is no big deal and signing up two percent is a triumph, those two can’t stand simultaneously."
Some of those who were cancelled were forced into ObamCare, which added to the enrollment numbers, even though they only needed insurance because their policies had been cancelled, not because they were uninsured.
Jim Angle currently serves as chief national correspondent for Fox News Channel (FNC). He joined FNC in 1996 as a senior White House correspondent.