Scrolling around...November 1, 2012

New York state asks Washington to cover all storm costs
New York state on Wednesday asked the U.S. federal government to pay all the costs of cleaning up and repairing damage from massive storm Sandy that tore through the Northeast this week and crippled New York City....

New Yorkers in fuel scramble as storm-hit pumps dry up
Drivers and homeowners scrambled to secure fuel for their cars and generators in the U.S. Northeast on Wednesday as storm-hit gasoline stations started to run dry.

More than half of all gasoline service stations in the New York City area and New Jersey were shut because of depleted fuel supplies and power outages, frustrating attempts to restore normal life, industry officials said...

Report: September Jobs Numbers Inflated
So you were suspicious about those September job creation numbers touted by the Obama Administration? You had good reason to be.
The payroll data firm ADP, which recently became partners with Moody’s Analytics, revised their estimate of the September jobs created down from 162,000 to 88,200. That new number is considerably less than the Labor Department’s count of 114,000, which included 104,000 from the private sector...

CDC: U.S. Birth Rate Hits All-Time Low; 40.7% of Babies Born to Unmarried Women

Report: Enough Spent on Welfare Programs in 2011 to Write Every Poor Household a $59,523 Check
...If each of the estimated 16.8 million households with income below the poverty level were to have received an equal share of the total welfare spending for fiscal year 2011, they each would have received $59,523...

Germany: Crack Appears In Opposition To Homeschoolers
For the second time in less than a week, a crack has appeared in what has been a largely unified condemnation of homeschooling by officials in Europe, and this time it’s coming from the radically anti-parent government in Germany.
Norbert Blum, a prominent member of Angela Merkel’s German CDU party who served as Helmut Kohl’s minister of labor for 16 years, has said Germany’s modern education system is “usurping” children and ignoring the important role parents must play in education...

‘Baby box’ opens in Russia to save abandoned kids
A box in which parents can leave their babies anonymously without any legal risk opened Wednesday in a town in northwestern Russia — part of an effort that activists hope will save many young lives.

The baby box in Kirishi, an industrial town 60 miles (100 kilometers) east of St. Petersburg, is the tenth such facility in Russia. Experts think that’s just a fraction of what is needed...

Muslim Candidates Vow Islamic State After Belgium Win
Two Muslim candidates vowed to establish an Islamic state in Belgium based on Sharia law, after winning local elections in Brussels two weeks ago.
Air Jeddig L’Houcine and Redouane Ahrough, both from the fledgling Islam Party, handily won seats in two major districts of the Belgian capital Brussels, Molenbeek and Anderlecht, respectively. The election was held on October 14.
“Islam is compatible with the laws of the Belgian people,” the two councilors assured skeptics during an October 25 press conference in a tea room in Brussels...

Christians persecuted throughout the world
Imagine the unspeakable fury that would erupt across the Islamic world if a Christian-led government in Khartoum had been responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Sudanese Muslims over the past 30 years. Or if Christian gunmen were firebombing mosques in Iraq during Friday prayers. Or if Muslim girls in Indonesia had been abducted and beheaded on their way to school, because of their faith.

Such horrors are barely thinkable, of course. But they have all occurred in reverse, with Christians falling victim to Islamist aggression. Only two days ago, a suicide bomber crashed a jeep laden with explosives into a packed Catholic church in Kaduna, northern Nigeria, killing at least eight people and injuring more than 100. The tragedy bore the imprint of numerous similar attacks by Boko Haram (which roughly translates as “Western education is sinful”), an exceptionally bloodthirsty militant group...

Holder’s family papers over his ties to abortion doctor
Eric Holder Jr.’s family is moving fast and furiously to bury the U.S. Attorney General’s ties to one of Georgia’s most notorious abortion doctors.

Just cleared by an internal report in the “Fast and Furious” gunrunning debacle, the nation’s top lawman now faces allegations that his connection to Dr. Tyrone Cecil Malloy is a conflict of interest that helps explain Holder’s failure to prosecute abortion providers who run afoul of federal law

Critics say it may also explain why Holder has been eager to prosecute pro-life advocates who counsel women outside abortion clinics...

Only a Few Examples of Censorship on Campus?
...Something that some readers couldn’t seem to understand — and I find this puzzling for a constitutionally-oriented law blog — is that even when they’re not enforced, speech codes are a harm in and of themselves. If you have a policy like the one they used to have at Drexel University, which banned “inappropriately directed laughter,” the very existence of the policy sends a message to students that they should really watch what they say or even laugh about. This is the so-called “chilling effect,” and is the part of the rationale for why laws that violate the First Amendment can be found facially unconstitutional without having to prove that they have been enforced...