Something tells me they don’t have much to worry about.

(The Hill) — Climate change is one of the greatest challenges facing young people, President Obama said in a recent interview with young reporters from Scholastic News.

“Another big challenge that your generation is going to face is the environmental challenge,” Obama said in an interview with Scholastic News Press Corp. that was conducted in July but posted online this month.

“Although we’ve made big improvements over the last 20 or 30 years in making our air clean and our water clean, there are some big challenges around climate change.”

Obama said climate change is caused by “pollution that we’re sending up into the air, the carbon that we’re releasing.”

The president’s comments come as Republican presidential candidates, including Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.) and Texas Gov. Rick Perry (R), are questioning climate science on the campaign trail.

Chicago Jesus.

President Barack Obama addresses the American Legion Annual Conference at the Minneapolis Convention Center in Minneapolis, Tuesday, Aug. 30, 2011. (AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster)

(Fox News) — Acting ATF Director Kenneth Melson has been reassigned to a lesser post in the Justice Department and the U.S. attorney for Arizona was also pushed out Tuesday as fallout from Operation Fast and Furious reached new heights.

Melson’s step down from his role as head of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives to the position of senior adviser on forensic science in the Department of Justice’s Office of Legal Programs is effective by close of business Tuesday, administration officials announced. U.S. Attorney for the District of Minnesota B. Todd Jones will replace Melson.

U.S. Attorney for Arizona Dennis Burke, one of the officials closely tied to Fast and Furious, is also a casualty in a shakeup tied to the botched gun-running program. Burke was on the hot seat last week with congressional investigators and, according to several sources, got physically sick during questioning and could not finish his session.

The purge of those responsible for the firearms trafficking scandal continued as new documents reveal a deeper involvement of federal agencies beyond ATF.

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I think he meant to say only racists would blame Obama.

Well, you will see what the President proposes to enhance growth, enhance hiring, and you will judge then what’s different about the new ideas that are contained within it as well as ideas that you’ve heard about. But I can’t let the premise go uncommented on when you talk about the amount of job loss in the time since the President took — was sworn into office. I don’t think anybody except the most fervent partisan would suggest that the 8 million jobs lost because of this recession were lost because of actions that this President took. Those jobs were lost within the four months — in the months prior to his swearing-in, his inauguration, and in the months thereafter.

HT: CNS

I’m assuming they thought nobody would notice . . . they thought wrong.

(Newsmax) — Government watchdogs are blasting the Obama campaign’s decision to name its 2012 voter-registration initiative “Project Vote” — the same name as a group closely linked to the discredited ACORN organization.

Members of ACORN were caught on undercover video giving two supposed clients detailed instructions on how to commit fraud, and ACORN faced a number of voter-registration fraud cases following the 2008 election.

Use of the Project Vote name by the Obama campaign is “truly astonishing,” Tom Fitton, president of the conservative Judicial Watch good-government group, tells Newsmax. “We knew President Obama was the president from ACORN. And if this isn’t an indication of it, we don’t know what is.”

ACORN-linked Project Vote is a Washington, D.C.-based 501c3 nonprofit organization that supports voter-registration drives in “historically underrepresented communities.”

He calls Project Vote “the branch of ACORN that’s most notorious for voter fraud.”

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Priorities.

WASHINGTON — The White House kicks back into campaign mode on Tuesday as Vice President Biden raises money for Democrats in the South.

Biden is due in Tulsa, Okla., in the evening for a Democratic National Committee event. That’s after he heads west to speak at a clean energy conference in Las Vegas.

A review of Biden’s public schedules for recent weeks shows that he hasn’t spoken at a DNC fundraiser since July 25, when he raised money at a Washington hotel during the deficit negotiations. Obama last spoke at a fundraiser on Aug. 8, at the same place — the St. Regis Hotel.

Community organizers, mount up.

(WaPo) — Under fire from some black lawmakers for not directly addressing rising unemployment in their communities, President Obama appeared Tuesday morning on a popular African-American-oriented radio show to assure listeners that he understands their concerns.

“Well, because the key always is if the American people are mobilized, then change happens. When they’re not mobilized, then special interests, lobbyists, the folks who put party ahead of country — those folks are going to benefit.

And that’s why, Tom, your doing political education outreach, making sure that folks understand what’s at stake right now, that’s going to be critical not just during election time, but that’s critical all the time.”

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Stunning.

(Washington Examiner) — It’s not enough for President Obama’s National Labor Relations Board to target the Boeing plant in South Carolina. Now the NLRB thinks it can tell a church school when it’s not religious enough.

Most people have heard by now of NLRB’s unprecedented decree that Boeing Co. cannot build a new airline production facility in South Carolina.

But Obama’s NLRB is also claiming the authority to dictate labor policies and order union elections at Catholic universities if they are not religious enough.

St. Xavier University was founded in 1846, the oldest Catholic school in Illinois. Its corporate member is a Catholic body with the “powers for the governance of” St. Xavier, that “links the University to the [Catholic] Church and makes it an officially recognized member of the Church.”

St. Xavier’s Board of Trustees must have at least four nuns from the order that founded the school, and, according to its bylaws, its governing body must “ensure [St. Xavier] continues its educational and religious mission.”

After quoting these sources and many others, NLRB’s regional director concluded in true Orwellian fashion that “the evidence establishes” that St. Xavier is “a secular educational institution or university.”

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But Bush was president when she asked so it’s different or something.

(Houston Chronicle) — Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano said today that Texas Gov. Rick Perry should ask Congress — and not the Obama administration — for money to cover the cost of incarcerating illegal immigrants.

At a breakfast meeting with reporters hosted by the Christian Science Monitor, Napolitano, a former federal prosecutor and Arizona governor, said she sympathizes border state governors who are seeking to offset some of the costs of illegal immigration. But she added that Congress must supply the funding to transfer money to the states — and the GOP-controlled House and Democratic-controlled Senate have been unwilling to do just that.

“This is not something Congress has been willing to appropriate for,” she said.

Napolitano said she made a similar reimbursement request of the George W. Bush administration when she, too, was running a border state a few years ago.

“I think he copied our letter when I was governor of Arizona,” she said.

Of course she isn’t, those are likely Dem voters.

(Washington Whispers) — Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano indicated today that the U.S. doesn’t need to boost the annual number of illegal immigrant deportations, now 400,000 annually, because she’s grabbing most of the criminals and sending them home.

“If we come to the point where we are unable to remove everybody we know has a threat to security or has a criminal record, violated criminal laws, or that we’ve caught right at the border, or is a fugitive, or has multiple reentries and we don’t have the resources to remove those, then the Congress should look at the resources they give us,” she told Washington Whispers during a roundtable interview sponsored by the Christian Science Monitor.

Napolitano, who recently changed the priorities on who gets the boot, said that the focus will now be more on criminals. Currently, the annual 400,000 deportations are split evenly between those with criminal records and those with no record.

But she didn’t downplay the threat illegal immigrants, estimated at 12 million, are to the nation.

“Let’s not minimize. Almost half of the 400,000 people we deported last year had a criminal record of some sort. So that’s a fairly robust [statistic],” she said. What’s more, under the controversial new rules changes, she said that “the composition of who we deport is going to be changing and going in that direction over time. That’s what it’s designed to do, turning the ship” to kick out more criminals.

Via Beltway Confidential:

“As the ravages of age have taken their toll, I needed a new prescription. So I threw in new frames, as well. I thought they were sort of retro-nerdy.” says White House Press Secretary Jay Carney about his new ‘hipster’ glasses.

Hey Carney, Rachel Maddow called, she wants her glasses back.

Sickening.

(Daily Mail) — A Libyan father killed his three daughters after they were raped by Gaddafi’s troops to lift the shame on his family, a human rights group said today.

The girls, aged 15, 17 and 18 were allegedly assaulted by soldiers at a school in the town of Tomina, near the war-shattered city of Misrata, during a two-month siege.

When they returned home, their father slit their throats in a so-called honour killing, according to Physicians for Human Rights (PHR).

The horrific story was one of a number to emerge from Misrata after the group sent in a team of interviewers in June to catalogue human rights abuses just after Libyan forces expelled Gaddafi loyalists.

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Give it a rest.

Via The Foundry:

Jay Angoff, special adviser to HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, drew parallels between the two contentious efforts during a panel presentation in Baltimore. He said pushback from state governors over implementation of the law mirrors the acrimony held by many state lawmakers decades earlier when they had to adopt the civil rights package.

“The states fought the civil rights bill,” he said. “When we see some of the opposition to this law, we really ought to go back and remember the opposition to the civil rights law in the ’60s to see what we’ve come through and to see that the fight’s worth it.”

The comments were made Monday at a briefing with health care providers organized by Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-Md.).

“I don’t want to say that the health care law is as important as the civil rights law,” Angoff said. “But there really are some analogies.”

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Via MRC TV:

Get ready for class warfare “All you f**cking tea-party-baggers,” warns a protester from the Red & Anarchist Action Network at a Wisconsin Capitol singalong.

Ann Althouse captured the protester on camera warning the Tea Party class warfare is on its way. “It’s coming! Get ready! All you f**king tea-party-baggers. It’s coming. Get ready!”, says the man.

The Red & Anarchist Action Network (RAAN) has a history of street protests and union pickets which turn violent. A timeline of events the organization has been involved with boasts of getting into scuffles with police, smashing windows of banks, and attacking and vandalizing an office of the Republican Party in Kentucky.

Keep reading…

Even worse, Team Mittens is claiming her campaign might be pushing the rumor to help raise additional funds.

(NYP) — Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney is facing a new challenge: He’s having trouble raising money from some Jewish donors who mistakenly believe one of his opponents, Michele Bachmann, is Jewish.

Some Jewish donors are telling fund-raisers for Romney, a Mormon, that while they like him, they’d rather open their wallets for the “Jewish candidate,” who they don’t realize is actually a Lutheran, The Post has learned.

“It’s a real problem,” one Romney fund-raiser said. “We’re working very hard in the Jewish community because of Obama’s Israel problem. This was surprising.”

Like other Republicans, Romney is trying to capitalize on President Obama’s waning support among Jewish voters, who are upset with his administration’s policies toward Israel.

Now, with this latest hiccup among Jewish donors, some in Romney’s camp have been wondering whether Bachmann and her allies are pushing the “Jewish” rumor to help their own fund-raising, sources said.

She has enjoyed strong popularity among Jewish voters and often talks about her stay on a kibbutz during the summer of 1974, when she was a teenager.

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The main reason for CAIR’s existence has just been blown out of the water.

(JPost) — With the 10th anniversary of the al-Qaida attacks on New York and the Pentagon approaching, the Pew Research Center found that most Muslims felt ordinary Americans were friendly or neutral toward them.

In contrast to the majority of the general public dissatisfied with the nation’s direction, 56 percent of the estimated 2.75 million American Muslims said they are satisfied, the survey showed.

“On a variety of measures, Muslims in America are very content with their own lives and with the communities where they live,” Pew researcher Greg Smith said in an interview.

Four out of five Muslim Americans surveyed were satisfied with the way things are going in their lives and rated their communities very positively as places to live.

Since 2007, there has been little change in how Muslim Americans see how they are viewed by the rest of America, with 28 percent saying other Americans viewed them suspiciously and 22 percent saying they had been called offensive names. Only 6 percent said they had been threatened or attacked, while 38 percent were bothered by their sense that they were singled out for increased government surveillance.

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DUBAI (AFP) — A senior Saudi member of Al-Qaeda warned the interior minister that he should expel non-Muslims from the kingdom, among other demands to stop considering him a target, in an online audio message.

Ibrahim al-Rubeish, a former Guantanamo detainee, addressed Prince Nayef bin Abdulaziz with seven measures which he considered essential for “reform” in the ultra-conservative Gulf state and for the prince’s own safety, SITE Intelligence reported on Monday.

The measures included expelling non-Muslims from the Arabian Peninsula, repealing all man-made laws and instituting (Islamic) sharia-based governance, the US-based monitoring service said.

They also included releasing prisoners, allowing preachers to speak with impunity and removing themselves as obstacles to those who wish to support Muslims in Iraq and the Palestinian territories, it added.

“This is the path if you wish to survive. If you do this, I will guarantee that the mujahedeen will not prepare another trap for you and that you will sleep safely in your bed and you will go as you please without fearing anyone,” Rubeish said.

He was alluding to an incident earlier this month when a gunman fired at Prince Nayef’s palace near the Saudi Red Sea city of Jeddah.

Civil war.

(Politico) — If there’s anything close to a political certainty in 2012, it’s that Barack Obama will get more than 90 percent of the African-American vote.

But that doesn’t mean every black Obama supporter will vote for him happily – nor does it guarantee that turnout will approach the stratospheric levels of 2008, even though Obama needs a huge showing from his base to offset the expected loss of swing voters in states like North Carolina, Virginia and Pennsylvania.

With that in mind, prominent black leaders — fearing Obama is not only taking them for granted but avoiding them in public — have turned up the heat on the nation’s first African-American president, transforming all-in-the-family concerns into open criticism of the president at a time when they had hoped the completion of a monument to Martin Luther King Jr. near the National Mall would bring a moment of unity.

The leaders are tired, they say, of Obama dog-whistling his support for a broad black agenda rather than explicitly embracing the kind of war on racism, poverty and economic segregation embodied by King.

“You can spend a lot of time trying to win over white independents, but if you don’t pay attention to your base, African Americans, if you have not locked up your base yet, you’ve got a serious problem,” said CNN contributor Roland Martin.

In a striking turnabout for a president who has rewritten American racial history, Obama finds himself the target of criticism from the black cultural and political elite that has, for the most part, been leery of airing its disappointment.

The president is reportedly angry that African-American leaders aren’t crediting him for his hard-bought achievements that will especially help communities of color, including health care reform, aid to cities, student aid and protecting Medicaid.

“The whole thing is bull-sh-t… We have met with [black leaders] more than any other group and we are increasing our outreach,” said a person close to Obama.

But Rep. Laura Richardson (D-Calif.), who represents several predominantly-black Los Angeles-area neighborhoods, brings up an issue that African-American leaders repeatedly raise when talking about Obama: They say he’s worried about being too closely identified with the community that gave him inspiration and bedrock support.

“I understand that you’ve got to be president for all people, but this administration has gone just too far, they really don’t even say ‘African-American’ or talk about [our] specific issues,” Richardson told POLITICO.

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