What’s interesting in the news today?

1. Looks like a budget deal been reached.

From TheWashingtonPost  “House and Senate negotiators unveiled an $85-billion agreement late Tuesday to fund federal agencies through the fall of 2015, avoiding another government shutdown and ending the cycle of crisis that has paralyzed Washington for much of the past three years.

In a rare display of bipartisan cooperation, House Budget Committee chairman Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) stood side-by-side in the Capitol with Senate Budget Committee chairman Patty Murray (D-Wash.) to announce the deal, which would cancel half the sharp spending cuts known as the sequester for the current fiscal year.”

“I am very proud to stand here today with Chairman Ryan to say that we have broken through the gridlock,” said Murray, calling the agreement “an important step in helping to heal some of the wounds here in Congress and show we can do something without another crisis around the corner.”

Ryan called the agreement “a clear improvement on the status quo” that protects the Pentagon from fresh cuts set to hit January while trimming deficits by more than $20 billion over the next decade.”

Call me unimpressed.

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2. I told you the other day about Holder’s DoJ was steering settlement money to community organizers. Seems the USDA has a similar program to steer large piles of cash to questionable individuals and groups.

From TheBlaze  “Between 2008 and 2011, the U.S. government awarded roughly $6.12 million in federal farm subsidies to several groups in the Chicago area, including a charity owned by Louis Farrakhan’s The Nation of Islam, according to a report released by government watchdog group Open the Books.

The report, titled “Farm Subsidies and the Big Dogs,” is based on data released by the U.S. Department of Agriculture & information obtained through the Freedom of Information Act. The report examines total farm subsidies that have been paid into selected cities and urban areas.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, federal farm subsidies are being poured into several non-farming metropolitan areas, including New York City and Chicago, according to the report.

Several entities in Chicago, for example, “receive the federal subsidies at their downtown loop office buildings or residential mansions,” the report reads. “Nearly every neighborhood in the city receives federal farm subsidy payments — including the Gold Coast, Downtown — Loop, Lincoln Park, and even the President’s neighbors in Hyde Park.” A total of 930 entities in the Chicago area received farm subsidies between 2008 and 2011.”

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3. A Dem pollster has been shocked to find no racism in Tea Partiers. So they had to make some up. 🙄

From Mediaite  “The Democratic pollster Democracy Corps, commissioning research from Greenberg Quinlan Rosner, recently dug into that foreign species commonly referred to as “the conservative voter.” In a dispatch that reads like the curious field notes Charles Darwin scribbled while observing the natural wonders of the Galapagos, the Democratic pollsters have found that the family Republican is made up of a variety of genera, including moderates, tea partiers and socially conservative evangelicals.”

“We know that Evangelicals are the largest bloc in the base, with the Tea Party very strong as Well,” the memo reads. They feign shock at the notion that Republicans view President Barack Obama as a “liar” and a “manipulator,” two designations that the majority of American voters would agree with but to which the Democratic base’s Pavlovian response is to point and shriek “racism.”

Indeed, the pollsters even confess that they “expected” to find more racism among Republican voters. “We expected that in this comfortable setting or in their private written notes, some would make a racial reference or racist slur when talking about the African American President,” they confess. “None did.”

“But this response by the voters they surveyed is viewed by Democracy Corps pollsters more as a clever evolutionary response to a history of predation. The Republican voter, the pollsters declare, harbors racial consciousness that is only masked by an effective camouflage:”

They couldn’t find any, but just know it’s there. Why else would they be against Obama, right? 🙄

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4. More Common Core indoctrination masquerading as education.

From EAGNews  “Next month, the organization, Creating Balance in an Unjust World, will hold its annual conference on “math education and social justice”.

The conference is sponsored by Radical Math, an organization founded by Jonathan Osler, a math and community organizing teacher at a Coalition of Essential Schools high school in Brooklyn, NY.

The Coalition of Essential Schools (CES) is the progressive education reform movement expanded by President Obama and domestic terrorist William Ayers through their work with the Chicago Annenberg Challenge in the 90′s.”

“Radical Math’s website provides over 700 lesson plans and other resources covering a wide range of political and social issues (with extreme bias), including globalization, the redistribution of wealth, and various ways the poor are discriminated against and oppressed by whites, banks, corporations, the rich, and the government. One such resource, Rethinking Mathematics: Teaching Social Justice by the Numbers, contains chapters titled, “Sweatshop Accounting”, “Racism and Stop and Frisk”, “When Equal Isn’t Fair”, “The Square Root of a Fair Share”, and “Home Buying While Brown or Black”.”

Yeah…..

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5. Hey Canada…. what gives, eh? 🙂

From MyFoxNY  “Canada plans to make a claim to the North Pole in an effort to assert its sovereignty in the resource-rich Arctic, the country’s foreign affairs minister said Monday.

John Baird said the government has asked scientists to work on a future submission to the United Nations claiming that the outer limits of the country’s continental shelf include the pole, which so far has been claimed by no one.

Canada last week applied to extend its seabed claims in the Atlantic Ocean, including some preliminary Arctic claims, but it wants more time to prepare a claim that would include the pole.”

“Countries including the U.S. and Russia are increasingly looking to the Arctic as a source of natural resources and shipping lanes. The U.S. Geological Survey says the region contains 30 percent of the world’s undiscovered natural gas and 15 percent of oil. If Canada’s claim is accepted by the U.N. commission, it would dramatically grow its share.”

Will Santa’s workshop be in the claim too? 😯

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