Obama administration won't let Hobby Lobby decision apply to Religious groups, says just closely held corporations can exercise religious freedom

It seem pretty clear that the Obama administration is just being punitive and make religious organizations bear the legal costs of going to court.  From Fox News:

The Obama administration says faith-based nonprofits should comply with ObamaCare’s birth-control mandate because they have more leeway than the corporations that won a Supreme Court ruling on the issue last year. 

Government attorneys made the argument on Thursday to the Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, after pro-life ministry Priests for Life asked the court to reconsider a ruling it made last fall that requires religious nonprofits to object in writing to regulations that require employer health care plans to insure contraceptives . . .

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Terrorist attacks that almost occurred -- the lesson is that there are a lot of possible targets

If there is one lesson from these news stories is that there are a lot of targets for terrorists to hit.  Before going through the newest stories here is a bit of a review.

We are living in a new era.  In May, four people were shot dead at the Jewish Museum in Brussels.  In September, there were beheadings in Oklahoma and London.  October was even worse: a car attack in Quebec, a shooting in Ottawa, a hatchet assault in New York City, and a knife attack that left five dead at an Israeli synagogue.  This is but a sample.  

Now this week we have these stories:

From Fox News:

An alleged sympathizer of the Islamic State terror group was arrested in Ohio on Wednesday after authorities learned that he was plotting a shooting and bombing attack on the U.S. Capitol. 

Christopher Lee Cornell, 20, of Green Township, considered members of Congress as "enemies," and planned to travel to Washington to kill employees and officers working in and around the U.S. Capitol, according to a criminal complaint. Authorities said he had two semi-automatic rifles and about 600 rounds of ammunition, and planned to build and detonate pipe bombs at and near the U.S. Capitol. . . .

Meanwhile in Oklahoma a police chief was killed by another ISIS sympathizer.

An Oklahoma police chief survived being shot several times because he was handed a bulletproof vest just moments before entering the home of the suspect who posted statements about ISIS on social media. 

NewsOK.com reported that the Sentinel Police Chief Louis Ross was responding to the home linked to an earlier bomb threat. While police cleared out the house, they were confronted in one of the bedrooms and shots were fired. 

Ross was hit several times in the chest and arm. A man and his wife were arrested.
Authorities described the shooting suspect as a man in his 30s who posted statements on social media about ISIS. . . .

Also in Belgium:

Belgian authorities were searching for clues early Friday after police killed two in raids aimed at jihadists returning from Syria who were planning to launch a "Belgian Charlie Hebdo" attack, officials said. 

Police were searching in Verviers, where the raid took place, and the greater Brussels area as part of a weeklong investigation that started well before the terrorism spree last week that led to 17 deaths in the Paris area. The Belgian operations had no apparent link to the terrorist acts committed in France. 

And, unlike the Paris terrorists, who attacked the office of a satirical newspaper and a kosher grocery store, the suspects in Belgium were reportedly aiming at hard targets: police installations. . . . 

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Papa John's lets pizza delivery woman who shot armed robber keep her job, Police: "She had no other choice"

As the police say, the pizza delivery woman "had no other choice" and she would have been in real danger if she hadn't had her concealed handgun permit.  From Fox News:

The employee was making a delivery in Decatur, Ga., Sunday night when a man approached her vehicle, forcing her onto the ground at gunpoint, according to the DeKalb County Police Department. The woman, who had a gun in her pocket, was able to fire at the man while on the ground -- striking the alleged assailant, identified as 24-year-old Donquaz Stevenson, in the face. 

Stevenson was later found in a neighbor's yard and arrested, according to police, who said the pizza delivery might have been a setup. Local media outlets reported that a second suspect carjacked the delivery woman's silver 2000 Honda Accord and remains on the run. 

Stevenson was charged with armed robbery and was being treated for a gunshot wound at Grady Memorial Hospital in Atlanta. 

The delivery woman's mother had told WSB-TV her daughter is worried she may lose her job because she was carrying a firearm at work for protection. . . . 

"She had no other choice. She must have been in fear for her life and she reacted," Capt. Stephen Fore with the DeKalb County Police Department told WSB-TV.  . . .

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Leading European Rabbi calls for Jews to be able to carry handguns

Putting 10,000 French soldiers in front of Jewish facilities will offer little protection as terrorists have control over where and when they attack.  Terrorists have important strategic advantages in picking the time and place for attacks.  Putting uniformed guards at places mean that terrorists will either kill these guards first or wait for them to leave an area before an attack occurs. From Israel National News:

A prominent European rabbi has called on governments to relax gun-licensing legislation to allow Jews to carry firearms for self-defense, following last week's deadly Paris attacks and amid rising anti-Semitism on the continent. 

Rabbi Menachem Margolin wrote to the governments of all EU-member states urging a change in the law to allow special gun permits for Jews at risk. 

In the letter Rabbi Margolin, who is director general of the Rabbinical Centre of Europe (RCE) and the European Jewish Association (EJA), wrote:  

"We hereby ask that gun licensing laws are reviewed with immediate effect to allow designated people in the Jewish communities and institutions to own weapons for the essential protection of their communities, as well as receiving the necessary training to protect their members from potential terror attacks." 

In a statement to Newsweek, which obtained a copy of the letter, Rabbi Margolin added that he believes that "as many people within the Jewish community as possible" should carry weapons. . . .

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Gun control advocates attack American Hero Chris Kyle

What could possibly justify these vicious comments?  Will gun control advocates keep this movie from "the Oscar spotlight"?  From Fox Nation:

. . . The Washington-based Coalition to Stop Gun Violence has given critics of the upcoming movie a Facebook outlet to rant about the subject of the movie, sniper Chris Kyle, killed after the leaving the military and while he was at a gun range with a vet suffering from PTSD. 

“Good Riddance,” wrote one. “What goes around comes around,” sneered another. 

Kyle is an American hero, a sniper so effective in Iraq that terrorists put a bounty on his head. But the movie is a liberal’s nightmare and the anti-gun coalition’s supporters have been eager to condemn it and keep it out of the Oscar spotlight. . . .

Chris Kyle's widow has her reaction to the new movie here. 

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Note that the places Al Queda has discussed attacking in the US are places where few permitted concealed handguns are allowed

From Yahoo News:

Al Qaeda militants in Syria are plotting attacks to inflict mass casualties in the West, possibly against transport systems or "iconic targets", the head of Britain's MI5 Security Service said on Thursday.Speaking after gunmen killed 12 people in an assault on a French satirical newspaper, MI5 boss Andrew Parker warned a strike on the United Kingdom was highly likely. . . .

From the Daily Beast:

In the Spring 2014 issue, for example, Inspire proposed attacking cities and military facilities in northern Virginia, the site of the U.S. Open tennis tournament, and targets in Los Angeles and Chicago. . . .

 In Los Angeles, there are only about 240 concealed handgun permits in an adult population of about 8 million people.  In Chicago, it costs about $500 to go through the process of getting a concealed handgun permit.

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Newest piece in Investors' Business Daily: "Do Blacks Really Feel Especially Distrustful Of Cops?"

My newest piece in Investors' Business Daily starts this way:

With chants of "NYPD, KKK" and signs saying "Stop Racist Police Terror" up until days before Christmas, protesters in New York made it clear that they don't trust the police.

New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo's second inaugural address was blunt: 

"The truth is the justice system does need review. The truth is there are troubling questions that have been raised which must be answered." 

But despite the overwhelming political and media rhetoric and the polls, there is strong evidence that blacks trust police at least as much as whites do. 

If you looked only at recent polls by Gallup and Pew, there is no question: blacks clearly don't trust police. 

Blacks were asked to explain why black males go to prison so much. Compared to other Americans, blacks were 29% more likely to say it was more a matter of racial discrimination than it was about the disproportionate number of crimes committed by black males. Blacks are much more likely to say that police treat blacks less fairly than whites. Blacks are also more likely to believe that the police are dishonest. 

The media have also bombarded people with "evidence" that blacks are discriminated against. Take the widely reported false claim that black men between the ages of 15 and 19 are 21 times as likely as whites to be killed by a police officer. Few note that these numbers are based on just 1.2% of police departments and that the ones that do report represent very heavily black urban areas. 

Politicians have supported these fears. After the Ferguson grand jury verdict, President Obama emphasized that the anger about the verdict was "an understandable reaction" and blacks' distrust of police is "rooted in realities." 

But what people say and what they do are often very different. 

A great many blacks say that Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown were innocent and unarmed. But that doesn't mean that they act like that they all believe it. . . .

The rest of the piece is available here.

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