Hasta La Gadget!

If not for Philadelphia School District budget cuts, one father thinks his child may still be alive.

Daniel Burch said his daughter, 12-year-old Laporshia Massey, died from asthma complications on Sept. 25, according to local Fox outlet WTXF-TV. While Massey, a sixth-grader at Bryant Elementary School, began to feel sick earlier that day, she did not have the option of visiting a school nurse.

As a result of district budget cuts, the school can only afford to have a nurse on Thursdays and Fridays. It was a Wednesday.

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WASHINGTON — Organizing for Action, the political nonprofit formed from the 2012 Barack Obama reelection campaign, raised $7.7 million in the third quarter of 2013, according to numbers provided to The Huffington Post.

Overall, the organization backing the president’s agenda has raised $20.8 million from more than 355,000 donors since it was formed at the beginning of the year. In the last three months, OFA has spent the majority of its resources promoting the Affordable Care Act to the public as the Oct. 1 rollout of the health insurance exchanges approached.

“At the end of our third quarter, 98% of OFA’s contributors are grassroots donors with an average donor contribution of under $59 making this truly a grassroots funded operation,” an OFA official said in a statement.

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WASHINGTON — Radio host Sandy Rios on Friday said the characterization of Matthew Shepard’s brutal 1998 murder as an anti-gay hate crime was “a total fraud,” and that Shepard, who was beaten to death by two men near Laramie, Wyo., was being used as “propaganda” by gay activists.

Speaking at the annual Values Voter Summit, a gathering of conservative Christians in Washington, Rios painted a picture of a nation under siege by homosexuals.

Rios, the former president of the conservative Christian group Concerned Women of America, referenced a recent story in The Advocate, a national magazine geared toward LGBT readers, that challenges the narrative of the Matthew Shepard story. The article examines a new book by Stephen Jimenez, The Book of Matt, which suggests Shepard’s murder was drug-related.

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Welcome to Oakland.

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The Food and Drug Administration has been forced to suspend all routine food safety inspections for the duration of the government shutdown, FDA spokesman Steven Immergut confirmed to The Huffington Post on Friday afternoon. Until funding is restored, the FDA will be inspecting only those facilities that it has cause to believe “present an immediate threat to public health.”

While it has been clear for weeks that the FDA would not be sending its own employees on food safety inspections during a federal shutdown, agency officials had suggested that state officials would be conducting some inspections on the FDA’s behalf. FDA budget documents [pdf] show that state employees inspected 9,736 of the 21,169 facilities screened for food safety in fiscal year 2012, so it seemed reasonable to suppose that about half of the normal number of routine food safety inspections would continue during the shutdown.

But the FDA normally pays state agencies a contractually dictated fee for each inspection its employees conduct. (While the amount varies from state to state, the budget documents suggest that the average was about $1,300 in fiscal year 2012.) Funding for these state-contracted inspections was eliminated as part of the shutdown. A few states have leftover money from the FDA’s contract last year, though most do not.

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