County law gives special rights to those with 'gender identity' issues
Nearly 30,000 petition signatures are being delivered to officials in Montgomery County, Md., demanding that a public vote be held to allow citizens to decide on a law providing special rights to people with "gender identity" issues, including apparently the choice of whether to use men's or women's locker rooms and other public facilities.
Officials with Maryland Citizens for a Responsible Government told WND that the organization had counted 28,000 signatures ready for delivery Monday night, and several thousand more had arrived today.
The new county law states, "Gender identity means an individual's actual or perceived gender including a person's gender-related appearance, expression, image, identity or behavior, whether or not those gender-related characteristics differ from the characteristics customarily associated with the person's assigned sex at birth."
The law, when being proposed, at one point included a specific exemption for facilities such as locker rooms, but it was deliberately removed before adoption. A county spokesman earlier told WND that he didn't think it necessary to state such issues specifically.
Michelle Turner, a spokeswoman for the citizens group that has had as many as 200 volunteers spending their weekends at shopping ...   more »

The Moon will turn an eerie shade of red for people in the western hemisphere late Wednesday and early Thursday, recreating the eclipse that saved Christopher Columbus more than five centuries ago.
In a lunar eclipse, the Sun, Earth and Moon are directly aligned and the Moon swings into the cone of shadow cast by the Earth.
But the Moon does not become invisible, as there is still residual light that is deflected towards it by our atmosphere. Most of this refracted light is in the red part of the spectrum and as a result the Moon, seen from Earth, turns a coppery, orange or even brownish hue.
Lunar eclipses have long been associated with superstitions and signs of ill omen, especially in battle.
The defeat of the Persian king Darius III by Alexander the Great in the Battle of Gaugamela in 331 BC was foretold by soothsayers when the Moon turned blood-red a few days earlier.
And an eclipse is credited with saving the life of Christopher Columbus and his crew in 1504.
Stranded on the coast of Jamaica, the explorers were running out of food and faced with increasingly hostile local inhabitants who were refusing to provide them ...   more »

There's a bold new political and cultural push on in America to make everyone dependent on government.
You don't need guns to defend yourself and your family, just call 911.
You don't need to prepare for disasters, just call 911.
You don't need to worry about paying for health care yourself, just call 911.
There isn't anything government can't do for you.
That's what we're being told.
We're all going to live in brand new utopian world, according to the swirling rhetoric of Barack Obama and the shrill demands of Hillary Clinton. We'll just tax the rich, then the rest of us will be on Easy Street. All our basic needs will be met. We'll live in a just and fair society.
It's amazing so many people actually believe this stuff – especially after social experiments like this have failed miserably over the last century – resulting in massive suffering and deaths numbered in the hundreds of millions.
But believe they do.
I'm not sure there's any way to reason with people who are intellectually dysfunctional – whose own greed and envy motivate them to resemble the French revolutionaries far more than our own American revolutionaries.
Having said that, let's ...   more »

When the Great War comes, said old Bismarck, it will come out of "some damn fool thing in the Balkans."
On June 28, 1914, Gavrilo Princip shot the archduke and heir to the Austrian throne, Franz Ferdinand, in Sarajevo, setting in motion the train of events that led to the first world war.
In the spring 1999, the United States bombed Serbia for 78 days to force its army out of that nation's cradle province of Kosovo. The Serbs were fighting Albanian separatists of the Kosovo Liberation Army, or KLA. And we had no more right to bomb Belgrade than the Royal Navy would have had to bombard New York in our Civil War.
We bombed Serbia, we were told, to stop the genocide in Kosovo. But there was no genocide. This was propaganda. The United Nations' final casualty count of Serbs and Albanians in Slobodan Milosevic's war did not add up to 1 percent of the dead in Mr. Lincoln's war.
Albanians did flee in the tens of thousands during the war. But since that war's end, the Serbs of Kosovo have seen their churches and monasteries smashed and vandalized and have been ethnically cleansed in the scores of ...   more »