Atlanta Fire Chief: I was fired because of my Christian faith

Kelvin Cochran was five-years-old when he realized that he wanted to be a firefighter.
“My family was very, very poor,” Cochran told me. “We were living in a shotgun house in an alley – three big brothers, two little sisters.”
One Sunday afternoon the Cochran children heard a fire truck stop across from their neighbor’s home. Miss Maddie’s house was one fire.

“It’s a frightening day in the United States when a person cannot express their faith without fears of persecution following,” White told me. “It’s persecution when a godly fire chief loses his job over expressing his Christian faith.”

“That’s the day that God convicted me in my heart that I wanted to be a firefighter when I grew up,” Cochran said. “All I thought about growing up in Shreveport was not being poor and being a firefighter.”
And God granted Kelvin Cochran the desires of his heart. The little boy in the shotgun shack grew up to become the fire chief of Shreveport. He was named the Atlanta fire chief in 2008 – a position he served until 2009 when was called to serve in the Obama Administration as a fire administrator. In 2010 he returned to Atlanta where he was unanimously confirmed to once again be the city’s fire chief.
But now Chief Cochran’s storied career is up in smoke – all because of a book he wrote for a men’s Bible study group at his Baptist church.
CLICK HERE TO FOLLOW TODD ON FACEBOOK FOR CONSERVATIVE CONVERSATION!
Atlanta Mayor Kasim Reed announced Tuesday that Cochran had been fired. The announcement came on the same day Cochran was supposed to return to work following a 30-day suspension. 
“The LGBT members of our community have a right to be able to express their views and convictions about sexuality and deserve to be respected for their position without hate or discrimination,” Cochran told me in an exclusive interview. “But Christians also have a right to express our belief regarding our faith and be respected for our position without hate and without discrimination. In the United States, no one should be vilified, hated or discriminated against for expressing their beliefs.”
Cochran had been suspended in November because of a passage he wrote about homosexuality in a book titled, “Who Told You That You Were Naked?” The book’s theme is about biblical morality.
“This is about judgment,” Mayor Reed said during a Tuesday press conference. “This is not about religious freedom. This is not about free speech. Judgment is the basis of the problem.”
Last November the mayor posted a public condemnation of the fire chief on his official Facebook page.
“I profoundly disagree with and am deeply disturbed by the sentiments expressed in the paperback regarding the LGBT community,” the mayor wrote. “I will not tolerate discrimination of any kind within my administration.”
The mayor went on to inform the public that Cochran had been suspended without pay and was ordered to complete a sensitivity training class. 
“I want to be clear that the material in Chief Cochran’s book is not representative of my personal beliefs, and is inconsistent with the Administration’s work to make Atlanta a more welcoming city for all of her citizens -- regardless of their sexual orientation, gender, race and religious beliefs,” Mayor Reed wrote.
So what in the world did Cochran write that was so offensive to the mayor and the LGBT community?
According to the GA Voice, a publication that covers the LGBT community, there were two items that caused concern: 
“Uncleanness – whatever is opposite of purity; including sodomy, homosexuality, lesbianism, pederasty, bestiality, all other forms of sexual perversion.”
“Naked men refuse to give in, so they pursue sexual fulfillment through multiple partners, with the opposite sex, the same sex, and sex outside of marriage and many other vile, vulgar and inappropriate ways which defile their body – temple and dishonor God.”
Cochran said he referenced homosexuality on less than a half a page in the 160-page book.
“I did not single out homosexuality,” he said. ‘I simply spoke to sex being created by God for pro-creation and He intended it to be between a man and a woman in holy matrimony – and that any other sex outside of that is sin.”
Cochran told me that someone within the department obtained a copy of the book and took it to openly-gay city council member Alex Wan.  
Wan released a statement supporting Cochran’s termination and said it “sends a strong message to employees about how much we value diversity and how we adhere to a non-discriminatory environment.”
The book caused a firestorm within Atlanta’s LGBT community and there were many calls for him to be fired – a decision the mayor finally agreed to.
“I guess they got what they asked for,” Cochran said.
Georgia Equality Executive Director Jeff Graham told GA Voice Cochran’s “anti-gay” views could result in a hostile work environment.
“This is not about his religious views but his about his ability to lead a diverse work force,” he said. “It’s unfortunate that this had to happen. I feel the mayor has done the right thing to ensure all employees are treated fairly.” 
The allegations against Cochran amount to a he-said, he-said between the fire chief and the mayor.
Reed said that he had no knowledge that Cochran was writing a book. However, Cochran said the director of Atlanta’s ethics office had not only given him permission to write the book, but to also mention in his biography that he was the city’s fire chief.
Cochran said he gave a copy of the book to Mayor Reed in January, 2014 and the mayor told him he planned on reading it during an upcoming trip.
Cochran also admitted that he gave copies of the book to several members of the fire department – individuals with whom he had personal relationships.
The mayor also took issue with Cochran speaking publicly about his suspension. However, Cochran said he honored the mayor’s guidance and did not speak to the media. He did, however, share his testimony in several churches.
“I did not dishonor him in the process,” Cochran told me.
Cochran wants to make clear that he does not hate anyone.
“The essence of the Christian faith is a love without condition, sir,” he told me. “I have demonstrated that love in the fire service for 34 years. There’s not any person of any people group that has interacted with me for any measure of time that can say I have hate or disregard or discrimination in my heart for any people group.”
Cochran’s plight has drawn condemnation from a number of religious groups across Georgia including the influential Georgia Baptist Convention.
“This is appalling,” said Robert White, president of the Georgia Baptist Convention. “This has everything to do with his religious beliefs.”
White told me he believes the mayor succumbed to pressure from the city’s LGBT community.
“It’s a frightening day in the United States when a person cannot express their faith without fears of persecution following,” he told me. “It’s persecution when a godly fire chief loses his job over expressing his Christian faith.”
And the fire chief’s firing could spark public protests and demonstrations from the state’s Christian community.
“We’re past the point of taking a public stand,”  White told me. “Christians must stand up for their rights.”
Cochran told me he is considering his legal options – but one thing is certain. He has no desire to get his old job back.
“I believe God has greater things for me,” the father and grandfather said. “I love the fire services. It’s a childhood dream come true.”
And don’t go feeling sorry for Chief Cochran.
“I’m not discouraged and I’m not downtrodden,” he said. “This is a God thing and He’s going to do great things and He will vindicate me publicly.”

Off to a bad start? McConnell blasts Obama for early veto threat on Keystone

WASHINGTON –  Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell blasted President Obama on Wednesday for vowing to veto the first bill of the new, Republican-controlled Senate -- legislation to approve the controversial Keystone XL oil pipeline. 

In his first major floor speech as majority leader, the Kentucky Republican pushed for bipartisan cooperation on major issues but said it could "only be achieved if, if, President Obama is interested in it." 
He added: "And I assure you, threatening to veto a jobs and infrastructure bill within minutes of a new Congress taking the oath of office -- a bill with strong bipartisan support -- is anything but productive." 
McConnell's top lieutenants echoed his concerns, with Senate Majority Whip John Cornyn, R-Texas, calling the "premature" veto threats "deeply irresponsible and troubling." 
The White House on Tuesday threatened to veto two pieces of legislation being produced by the new Congress -- one related to ObamaCare and the economy, and the other on the Keystone pipeline. On Wednesday, the White House issued formal statements vowing to veto the bills. 
On the Keystone bill, the White House claimed the legislation would prevent "the thorough consideration of complex issues that could bear on U.S. national interests." 
The Obama administration wants to let a separate State Department review process play out, though pipeline supporters complain that process already has been underway for years. 
The veto threat over Keystone sets up a looming showdown between Obama and the GOP-controlled Congress, while underscoring the deep tensions likely to persist as majority Republicans challenge the president's agenda during his final two years in office. 
As the Senate moves ahead with its own legislation -- with sponsors claiming to have more than enough votes to pass it -- the House is set to vote on its version on Friday. 
One of the sponsors, Sen. John Hoeven, R-N.D., told Fox News he expected a veto threat but predicted: "We're going to win on the merits." 
If the legislation passes and Obama vetoes, supporters in Congress would need to muster a two-thirds majority to override -- or try and attach the measure to a separate piece of legislation. 
The $8 billion oil pipeline would run from Canada's oil sands to the Texas Gulf Coast. It has become a symbol of divisions over the country's energy and environmental policy. 
Republicans argue that the project would create jobs and reduce U.S. dependency on oil from the Middle East. 
Obama downplayed the potential benefits of pipeline in late December and claimed it would not lower gas prices for Americans -- but instead would help Canadian oil companies. 
The 1,179-mile project is proposed to go from Canada through Montana and South Dakota to Nebraska, where it would connect with existing pipelines to carry more than 800,000 barrels of crude oil a day to refineries along the Texas Gulf Coast. 
Despite the disagreement over Keystone, McConnell seemed optimistic that both parties in the Senate could work together on other measures such as strengthening Medicare and Social Security, revamping tax laws and working "to balance the budget and put our growing national debt on a path to elimination." 
Meanwhile, the White House threatened to veto legislation that would increase his health care law's definition of a full-time worker from 30 to 40 hours per week. 
Republicans say the health law's 30-hour requirement is encouraging companies to cut workers' hours. The White House said in statement Wednesday there is no evidence the law has caused a broad shift to part-time work. The House plans to debate the measure this week as one of its first orders of business in the new Congress. 
The White House argues the bill would reduce the number of Americans with employer-based health insurance coverage and create incentives for employers to shift employees to part-time work. 
House Speaker John Boehner, like McConnell, lamented the early veto threats. 
"Unfortunately, by threatening two of these bipartisan jobs bills, the president essentially is telling the American people he really doesn't care what they think," he said. 
Amid the dispute over veto threats, Obama visited a Ford assembly plant in Michigan on Wednesday to tout the auto industry's recovery -- as part of the run-up to his State of the Union address. 
Obama declared the worst of the financial crisis "is behind us" and touted that auto companies have repaid taxpayers for the crisis-era bailout. 
"The auto industry has proved that any comeback is possible," Obama said.

French police make anti-terror sweep after 1 of 3 suspects in Paris attack surrenders

France's Prime Minister said Thursday that authorities had made "several detentions" while searching for two suspects in a deadly Islamist terror attack that left 12 dead at the offices of a satirical French magazine. 
Manuel Valls made the remarks in an interview with RTL radio as France prepared to observe a national day of mourning in memory of those killed at the headquarters of Charlie Hebdo, a publication that had been threatened before for its caricatures of the Prophet Muhammed. Valls told the station that preventing another attack is "our main concern."
French authorities have asked for witnesses to help them gather information on the two prime suspects in the attack, brothers Cherif and Said Kouachi, after an overnight search in the city of Reims proved fruitless. Cherif Kouachi was already known to French intelligence services, due to his history of funneling jihadi fighters to Iraq and a terrorism conviction from 2008. A police bulletin said the brothers, both in their early 30s, should be considered armed and dangerous. 
Earlier Thursday, Mourad Hamyd, 18, surrendered at a police station in a small town in the eastern region after learning his name was linked to the attacks in the news and social media, said Paris prosecutor's spokeswoman Agnes Thibault-Lecuivre. She did not specify his relationship to the Kouachi brothers.
France raised its terror alert system to the maximum level after the daylight attack and bolstered security with more than 800 extra soldiers to guard media offices, places of worship, transport and other sensitive areas. A nationwide minute of silence was planned for noon.
Fears had been running high in Europe that jihadis trained in warfare abroad would stage attacks at home. The French suspect in a deadly attack on a Jewish museum in Belgium had returned from fighting with extremists in Syria; and the man who rampaged in the south of France in 2012, killing three soldiers and four people at a Jewish school in Toulouse, received paramilitary training in Pakistan.
One witness to Wednesday's attack said the gunmen were so methodical he at first mistook them for an elite anti-terrorism squad. Then they fired on a police officer.
The masked, black-clad men with assault rifles stormed the offices near Paris' Bastille monument in the Wednesday noontime attack on the publication, which had long drawn condemnation and threats -- it was firebombed in 2011 -- for its depictions of Islam, although it also satirized other religions and political figures.
The staff was in an editorial meeting and the gunmen headed straight for the paper's editor, Stephane Charbonnier, widely known by his pen name Charb, killing him and his police bodyguard first, said Christophe Crepin, a police union spokesman.
Shouting "Allahu akbar!" as they fired, the men spoke in fluent, unaccented French as they called out the names of specific employees.
Eight journalists, two police officers, a maintenance worker and a visitor were killed, said prosecutor Francois Molins. He said 11 people were wounded, four of them seriously.
Two gunmen strolled out to a black car waiting below, one of them calmly shooting a wounded police officer in the head as he writhed on the ground, according to video and a man who watched in fear from his home across the street.
"They knew exactly what they had to do and exactly where to shoot. While one kept watch and checked that the traffic was good for them, the other one delivered the final coup de grace," said the witness, who refused to allow his name to be used because he feared for his safety.
"Hey! We avenged the Prophet Muhammad! We killed Charlie Hebdo," one of the men shouted in French, according to video shot from a nearby building.
One police official, speaking on condition of anonymity because the investigation was ongoing, said the suspects were linked to a Yemeni terrorist network. Cedric Le Bechec, a witness who encountered the escaping gunmen, quoted the attackers as saying: "You can tell the media that it's Al Qaeda in Yemen."
After fleeing, the attackers collided with another vehicle, then hijacked another car before disappearing in broad daylight, Molins said.
The other dead were identified as cartoonists Georges Wolinski and Berbard Verlhac, better known as Tignous, and Jean Cabut, known as "Cabu." Also killed was Bernard Maris, an economist who was a contributor to the newspaper and was heard regularly on French radio.
One cartoon, released in this week's issue and titled "Still No Attacks in France," had a caricature of a jihadi fighter saying "Just wait -- we have until the end of January to present our New Year's wishes." Charb was the artist.
Le Bechec, the witness who encountered the gunmen in another part of Paris, described on his Facebook page seeing two men "get out of a bullet-ridden car with a rocket-launcher in hand, eject an old guy from his car and calmly say hi to the public, saying `you can tell the media that it's Al Qaeda in Yemen."'
In a somber address to the nation Wednesday night, French President Francois Hollande pledged to hunt down the killers, and pleaded with his compatriots to come together in a time of insecurity and suspicion.
"Let us unite, and we will win," he said. "Vive la France!"
Thousands of people later jammed Republique Square near the site of the shooting to honor the victims, waving pens and papers reading "Je suis Charlie" -- "I am Charlie." Similar rallies were held in London's Trafalgar Square as well as Madrid, Barcelona, Berlin and Brussels.
"This is the darkest day of the history of the French press," said Christophe DeLoire of Reporters Without Borders.
Both Al Qaeda and the Islamic State group have repeatedly threatened to attack France, which is conducting airstrikes against extremists in Iraq and fighting Islamic militants in Africa. Charb was specifically threatened in a 2013 edition of the Al Qaeda magazine Inspire, which also included an article titled "France the Imbecile Invader."
Cherif Kouachi, now 32, was sentenced to 18 months in prison after being convicted of terrorism charges in 2008 for helping funnel fighters to Iraq's insurgency. He said he was outraged at the torture of Iraqi inmates at the U.S. prison at Abu Ghraib near Baghdad and "really believed in the idea" of fighting the U.S.-led coalition in Iraq.
A tweet from an Al Qaeda representative who communicated Wednesday with The Associated Press said the group was not claiming responsibility for the attack, but called it "inspiring."

Hybrid Car Cartoon

Catnip for the media: Bill Clinton's tangential tie to an appalling sex scandal

Jeffrey Epstein, a convicted sex abuser, is a billionaire with a lot of celebrity friends.
They included Mick Jagger, Ivana Trump, Mike Bloomberg, Tony Blair, Ehud Olmert…oh, and Bill Clinton.
Who do you think is getting the most media attention?
That’s right, the former president is now “tied” to a guy who allegedly was surrounded by a number of underage girls and spent 13 months in prison for solicitation of prostitution. The Epstein scandal has been drawing big headlines in the British press because one woman charges that she was forced to have sex with Prince Andrew, which Buckingham Palace denies.
“Bill Clinton drawn into Prince Andrew sex scandal,” says a headline in the Sydney Morning Herald.
Now it’s perfectly fair to question Clinton’s judgment in hanging around with a man who turned out to be a sleazebag. Between 2002 and 2005, Clinton sometimes flew on Epstein’s jet to the tycoon’s private Caribbean island, where Epstein is alleged to have kept underage girls as sex slaves, according to press reports that followed a lawsuit against Epstein.
A tantalizing story line—but here are some other details.
Clinton apparently broke off his friendship with Epstein after the police investigation of him was reported, a probe that led to the 2008 conviction.
And the woman who charges that Epstein forced her to have sex with Prince Andrew and other men says she never had sex with Clinton, and doesn’t think anyone else associated with Epstein did.
Still, the salacious tale has led to all kinds of chatter, along the lines of Will This Affect Hillary’s Campaign? And Clinton’s history with the likes of Monica Lewinsky naturally arouses suspicion.
But is it fair for media outlets to imply or insinuate that Bill was up to his old hanky-panky, even if it’s with a wink and a nod? Wthout so much as an allegation to that effect?
Another Epstein friend, Harvard’s Alan Dershowitz, is in a very different situation, since an unnamed woman in the lawsuit (Jane Doe No. 3) alleges that she had sex with him. The high-profile lawyer is filing a defamation suit, denied the allegations on the “Today” show, and told the Wall Street Journal that this was a “totally fabricated, made-up story…I have never had sex with an underage woman. They made up this story out of whole cloth. I’m an innocent victim of an extortion conspiracy.”
Needless to say, there are lots of charges and countercharges flying here. And the British part of the scandal is fascinating.
For instance, it emerged three years ago that Epstein gave Prince Andrew’s ex-wife, Fergie, 15,000 pounds to help pay off her debts.
The digital list of Epstein’s contacts (which includes not just Clinton but 20 of his aides and associates) was used in an attempt to subpoena him for questioning in the lawsuit, but that effort failed.
If a serious allegation against the 42^nd president surfaces in this mess, that is fair game for the press. But we ought to be careful about plunging into guilt by association.

Econ book acclaimed by left based on faulty premise, factual errors, study finds

A book by a French economist who became a darling of 99 percenters and his lefty peers is riddled with errors, cherry-picked data and flawed premises, according to two new studies.
Thomas Piketty's “Capital in the 21^st Century,” which New York Times columnist and Nobel-prize winner Paul Krugman called “the most important economics book of the year — and maybe of the decade,” calls for an 80 percent income tax to stop wealth inequality from increasing. The book earned its author an invitation to the White House to meet with Obama administration Treasury Secretary Jack Lew.
But it contains more than 10 factual errors, according to one new study accepted by the Journal of Private Enterprise and conducted by economists Phillip Magness of George Mason University and Robert P. Murphy of the Institute for Energy Research. The errors they report range from relatively simple mistakes such as getting several historical dates wrong to mis-attributing a massive tax increase to President Franklin Roosevelt that was actually passed by President Herbert Hoover, to incorrectly claiming that the minimum wage never increased under either George W. Bush or George H.W. Bush, who both oversaw increases.
The authors write that they see a pattern in the errors.

“He cherry-picks, the data sometimes don’t match the sources that he cites, and he changes the data to make the charts look better without accurately documenting it.”- Kevin Hassett, American Enterprise Institute

“[The errors] serve to paint ostensibly market-friendly Republican presidents as ogres, while liberal Democrats are the heroes of the working class,” they write.
They also conclude that, in building some of his charts, Piketty switched between data sets in a way that was biased in favor of his argument. In his graph on wealth in the U.S., for instance, Piketty relied on data from one study going up until 1950, then for 1960 he switched to another study, and then for 1970 he went back to relying on the first study again.
The authors conclude that Piketty used “cherry-picked data points to construct a trend line that mirrors his predictions.”
The authors also found that, in one Piketty graph about US historical tax revenue, he only had data going back until 1900; yet he made the graph go back to 1870 by assuming those years were the same as 1900 and by adding or subtracting a seemingly arbitrary number to make the data appear plausible.
Asked about the above issues, Piketty told FoxNews.com that there may be some typos in the book but said he did not think they affected his central conclusion.
“I am really sorry if I attributed one specific tax decision to FDR instead of Hoover, etc.; many readers do mention typos of this sort, and of course they will be corrected in future editions; but I really do not see anything here that's affecting any conclusion,” Piketty told FoxNews.com.
But a new study claims to find errors that affect Piketty’s fundamental premise. It was done by University of California Berkeley economics professor Alan Auerbach and American Enterprise Institute economist Kevin Hassett, and was presented Saturday at a session of the American Economics Association.
Piketty, in his book, makes the case that the rich constantly get richer using a graph that illustrates that it has increased steadily in the United States over the last half-century.
But the study finds that the graph is largely wrong. For instance, when Piketty’s graph refers to the year “1980”, the number actually comes from data from the year 1989. The authors also found that Piketty simply left several data points off of his chart without explanation.
After revising the chart, the economists found that the proportion of wealth owned by the rich “no longer rises without interruption” and that in fact, “inequality appears to be declining at the end [of the graph].”
Piketty told FoxNews.com that, even using the American authors’ graph, his ultimate conclusion remains intact.
“The increase in inequality would look less steady, but it would still be there,” he said. A comparison of the two graphs is on page 6 of the American authors’ study.
Hassett reponds that the new chart makes the case for measures like an 80% tax rate to stop increasing wealth inequality a lot less clear.
“The trend towards higher inequality would look weaker… [inequality] would have fallen from its 1995 peak,” Hassett said.
But Piketty counters that a recent study found that wealth inequality actually rose even faster than he had reported in his book.
“Everybody recognizes that the Saez-Zucman series are indeed the best series on US wealth inequality we have so far, and that they show an even bigger increase than what I report in my book,” he told FoxNews.com.
Yet many economists do not recognize that.
“There are other recent papers, one… by Kopczuk (a co-author of Piketty’s in the past), plus another based on Fed survey data, by Bricker et al., which argue that other methods of analysis are more accurate and do not show such a trend,” Auerbach of UC Berkeley said.
Piketty said he has been up front that more data collection is needed.
“I made perfectly clear in my book and in my presentation on Saturday that we still know too little about income and wealth distribution… and that we need more democratic and financial transparency about income and wealth dynamics,” he said.
The recent criticisms come on top of issues discovered last year by the Financial Times. Hassett says that, in the end, so many things are off in the book that it affects the conclusion.
“He cherry-picks, the data sometimes don’t match the sources that he cites, and he changes the data to make the charts look better without accurately documenting it,” Hassett said.

White House issues veto threat over Keystone pipeline bill

The White House on Tuesday threatened to veto fresh legislation approving the controversial Keystone pipeline, setting up a likely showdown between President Obama and the new GOP-controlled Congress over one of Republicans' top agenda items. 
"If this bill passes this Congress, the president wouldn't sign it," White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest said Tuesday, stressing that the president wants to wait for a State Department review process to finish. 
Republicans, with several Democratic supporters, were introducing the Keystone legislation on Tuesday as their first order of business for the new Congress. 
The White House, which until now had stayed mum about whether President Obama would sign the bill, issued the veto threat within minutes of the 114th Congress convening. 
On the Senate side, sponsors Sen. John Hoeven, R-N.D., and Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., said the bill has 60 co-sponsors, and uses Congress' authority to regulate interstate commerce to green-light the Canada-to-Texas pipeline. They predicted at least 63 senators, and possibly more, ultimately will vote for the bill -- more than enough to pass. 
The House is expected to vote and pass a bill approving the $5.4 billion project, which was first proposed in 2008, on Friday. 
Should the bill pass and face a presidential veto, the big question is whether congressional leaders, then, could muster the two-thirds majority needed to override. Manchin also suggested Congress could respond to a veto by attaching the Keystone measure to another bill. 
Hoeven and Manchin blasted the White House for the veto threat Tuesday afternoon. 
"Instead of a veto threat, the president should be joining with Congress on a bipartisan basis to approve the project for the American people, rather than blocking it on behalf of special interest groups," Hoeven said in a statement. 
Manchin, who is often at odds with the administration, said he was "disappointed that the president will not allow this Congress to turn over a new leaf and engage in the legislative process to improve an important piece of legislation." 
The head of the American Petroleum Institute, Jack Gerard, said Tuesday after his annual speech on the state of U.S. energy that the president had failed to make a simple decision that would put people to work, but he predicted the pipeline would eventually be approved. 
"It doesn't bode well for relationships between the White House and Capitol Hill," Gerard said of the veto threat. 
The bill is identical to one that failed to pass the Senate by a single vote in November, when Democrats were in control and Sen. Mary Landrieu of Louisiana pushed for a vote to save her Senate seat. She lost to Republican Rep. Bill Cassidy, who sponsored the successful House bill approving the pipeline. 
But now the odds of passage are much improved with the Republican takeover of the Senate. The bill will also test Republicans' commitment to more open debate. Hoeven and Manchin said they welcomed additions to the bill, which they hoped would increase support. 
In recent months, Obama has been increasingly critical of the project, and has resisted prior efforts to fast-track the process. At his year-end news conference, Obama said the pipeline would benefit Canadian oil companies but would not be a huge benefit to American consumers, who are already seeing low prices at the pump thanks to oil prices, which on Monday dipped to a nearly six-year low and were sharply down again Tuesday. 
In addition, the outcome of a Nebraska lawsuit over the pipeline's route through that state is still pending. Another challenge to the pipeline is being waged by a South Dakota tribe over renewal of an application for a permit. 
The project by Calgary-based TransCanada would move tar sands oil from Canada 1,179 miles south to Gulf Coast refineries. Supporters say it would create jobs and ease American dependence on Middle East oil. A government environmental impact statement also predicted that a pipeline would result in less damage to the climate than moving the same oil by rail. 
Critics argue that the drilling itself is environmentally harmful, and said much of the Canadian crude would be exported with little or no impact on America's drive to reduce oil imports.

EEOC: School wrong to fire teacher who gave Bible to student

A New Jersey school district violated the law when it fired a teacher who handed a Bible to a student, the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission ruled on December 15, 2014. The ruling was made public Tuesday.
The EEOC determined there was reasonable cause to believe the Phillipsburg School District discriminated against Walt Tutka, a substitute teacher. The EEOC also said religion and retaliation played a factor in Tutka’s firing.

The Phillipsburg School District owes Walt his job, back pay and an apology. They waged a disgusting public war against this fine, upstanding man simply because he gave a child a Bible.

“This is a great indication the EEOC is taking religious liberty seriously and they are going to enforce the law — and in this case make sure Walt’s rights are protected,” Liberty Institute attorney Hiram Sasser told me.
Liberty Institute is a law firm that specializes in religious liberty cases.
“This sends a message to school districts that their natural allergic reaction to religion is misplaced, and not only is it wrong — but it’s also an egregious violation of the law,” Sasser said.
As I first reported, Tutka was working as a substitute teacher on Oct. 12, 2013, when he ran afoul of school policies. He told a straggling student at the end of a line, “The first shall be last and the last shall be first.”
Arm yourself with the truth! Click here to join the conversation on Todd’sFacebook page.
The student asked on a number of occasions where the line was from, and Tutka told him it was from the Bible. When he discovered the child did not have a Bible, Tutka gave him his personal copy. It was not all that unusual because Tutka is a member of Gideons International, a ministry known for providing Bibles to school children across the world.
On Oct. 18, Tutka was summoned to the principal’s office, where he was accused of violating a school policy that bans the distribution of religious materials and another that directs teachers to be neutral when discussion religious material.
He was fired on Jan. 14.
Sasser said he hopes the school district will reinstate Tutka.
“If they don’t do the right thing, they will face some serious consequences,” he told me. “They are going to be liable for damages.”
I reached out to George Chando, the superintendent of the Phillipsburg School District. He declined to return my call.
My advice to him is to do the right thing, or Liberty Institute will go after him like a pit bull going after a pork chop.
Sasser said the EEOC ruling should serve as a warning to other school districts around the nation.
“You can’t just fire people because they happen to hand a Bible to somebody while they are at work,” he said.
Sasser said he believes the school district was out to get Walt because he is a Gideon. I obtained a copy of an email from Phillipsburg Middle School Assistant Principal John Stillo that suggest the school district had an issue with the well-known religious group.
“It has been brought to the administration’s attention that Gideons may be near our campus to distribute literature to our students,” Stillo wrote in a memo to the school’s staff. “Please make sure they DO NOT step foot onto our campus at any time. There will be added police and security presence at dismissal.”
Gideon International has a long history of providing Bibles to public school students, but many districts have banned the religious society in recent years. Ironically, the Gideons are welcome to distribute Bibles and deliver speeches in Russian schools.
The Phillipsburg School District should rehire Walt. And it owes him a big apology. They waged a disgusting public war against this fine, upstanding man simply because he gave a child a Bible. Shame on you, Phillipsburg School District. Shame on you.