Good Morning,
I think the pressure is getting to Obama and co. Did you catch the latest blunder…Despite 41 months of 8%+ unemployment, 13 million unemployed, 49 million in poverty, the POTUS is “too busy to meet w/jobs council” according to Jay Carney. Yup priorities people – O is too busy – golfing, attending 106 fundraising events (since his last jobs council meeting alone!), going on what – 16 vacations – its hard work and time consuming people trying to get reelected! As if that isn’t enough – he told supporters yesterday that – get ready for this –
Official eye roll please! Ok moving on….
New unemployment claims rise almost 10%. Three years of Obama’s focus on jobs has proven disastrous. He SAYS he cares about jobs but his policies and agencies continue to destroy jobs at an alarming pace. And now he wants to further harm the economy by a tax increase which he even said would hurt the economy. This is economic suicide.
Are you sick and tired of hearing about demands for tax returns? Nancy Pelosi is sick of hearing about it and thanks to a great catch/report by the McClatchy News report showing that only 17 of 535 members of Congress have released their tax returns, she said and I quote “Maybe the people writing these stories should release their tax returns…” Aww humor – do as I say not as I do.
As to Mitt’s return – golly, I’m sure there is information hidden in Mitt’s tax return to justify our $15T in debt – don’t you?? The picture below sums it up best. We’re witnessing the Dumb & Dumber show!
Breitbart writes: As the Obama campaign continues its attacks on Romney’s tenure at Bain Capital and his tax returns, it has argued that the focus is justified because Romney made his business background his “calling card” for his presidential run. They argue, not unreasonably, that Romney’s use of his business experience as the centerpiece of his candidacy warrants close scrutiny of that experience. Okay, but what about what was, in 2008, Obama’s main “calling card”, his successful academic career? Doesn’t that warrant similar vetting?
During the 08 campaign, Obama and his supporters touted his editorship of the Harvard Law Review and his position as a “constitutional law professor” at University of Chicago as significant achievements. His academic rise through Occidental, Columbia, and Harvard Law School were prima facie evidence of his brilliance. No other modern candidate for President has used his academic achievements as his chief “calling card” for the Presidency. And yet, while many candidates have released or had leaked their academic transcripts, we have almost no information on Obama’s. It was damn near the sum-total of his “qualifications” to be President, and we know nothing about it.
Mind you, I really don’t care about his grades. Even if, as some suspect, Obama benefited from some institutional nudges to get into these elite schools, he graduated from them. I’m sure he was a decent enough student. No, I’m more interested in what courses he took. What disciplines did he study? Which ideas was he exposed to? This is especially important in Obama’s case, because we have almost no other information about who he is or what makes him tick. Sure, we have his memoirs, but those are unreliable, because we know he painted “composites” of people and events. Knowing the courses he took would fill in much needed information about his worldview.
This came into even starker relief last week. Speaking in Virginia, Obama asserted both that success was a question of luck and that a person’s success was usually due to someone else, generally the government. “If you’ve got a business. You didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen.” Obama’s line betrays a belief unlike anything held by the overwhelming majority of Americans. It shows a profound disdain for individual achievement and a warm embrace of collective action in all things. Where in the world did that idea come from?
Its a far more important question than how much money Romney made or what his exact rate of tax was. Absolutely, Romney’s exact tenure at Bain should be scrutinized. He has, after all, made his business experience his “calling card.” But, Obama made his academic career one of his signature “calling cards.” We have a right to know what’s on that card.
The Obama campaign has made a compelling case for the release of his college transcripts. Someone should follow up on their advice.
Well, if you watch CNN, NBC, and ABC you learned (2 days after the fact) of O’s line ‘If you’ve got a business – you didn’t build that – somebody else made that happen’. Better late than never I suppose. The Left has taken to claiming that conservatives are taking Obama’s words “out of context.” One of the Washington Post’s in-house liberal bloggers, Greg Sargent, is one of many advancing that case. But the Examiner’s Phil Klein is having none of it, pointing out that the full context of Obama’s comment actually reinforces the thesis over which Romney is battering Obama: http://townhall.com/tipsheet/guybenson/2012/07/19/no_conservatives_arent_taking_you_didnt_build_that_out_of_context
Charles Krauthammer responds to the ludicrous statement too:
And who might that somebody else be? Government, says Obama. It built the roads you drive on. It provided the teacher who inspired you. It “created the Internet.” It represents the embodiment of “we’re in this together” social solidarity that, in Obama’s view, is the essential origin of individual and national achievement.
To say that all individuals are embedded in and the product of society is banal. Obama rises above banality by means of fallacy: equating society with government, the collectivity with the state. Of course we are shaped by our milieu. But the most formative, most important influence on the individual is not government. It is civil society, those elements of the collectivity that lie outside government: family, neighborhood, church, Rotary club, PTA, the voluntary associations that Tocqueville understood to be the genius of America and source of its energy and freedom.
Moreover, the greatest threat to a robust, autonomous civil society is the ever-growing Leviathan state and those like Obama who see it as the ultimate expression of the collective.
Obama compounds the fallacy by declaring the state to be the font of entrepreneurial success. How so? It created the infrastructure — roads, bridges, schools, Internet — off which we all thrive.
Absurd. We don’t credit the Swiss postal service with the Special Theory of Relativity because it transmitted Einstein’s manuscript to the Annalen der Physik. Everyone drives the roads, goes to school, uses the mails. So did Steve Jobs. Yet only he created the Mac and the iPad.
Obama’s infrastructure argument is easily refuted by what is essentially a controlled social experiment. Roads and schools are the constant. What’s variable is the energy, enterprise, risk-taking, hard work and genius of the individual. It is therefore precisely those individual characteristics, not the communal utilities, that account for the different outcomes.
The ultimate Obama fallacy, however, is the conceit that belief in the value of infrastructure — and willingness to invest in its creation and maintenance — is what divides liberals from conservatives.
More nonsense. Infrastructure is not a liberal idea, nor is it particularly new. The Via Appia was built 2,300 years ago. The Romans built aqueducts, too. And sewers. Since forever, infrastructure has been consensually understood to be a core function of government.
The argument between left and right is about what you do beyond infrastructure. It’s about transfer payments and redistributionist taxation, about geometrically expanding entitlements, about tax breaks and subsidies to induce actions pleasing to central planners. It’s about free contraceptives for privileged students and welfare without work— the latest Obama entitlement-by-decree that would fatally undermine the great bipartisan welfare reform of 1996. It’s about endless government handouts that, ironically, are crowding out necessary spending on, yes, infrastructure.
What divides liberals and conservatives is not roads and bridges but Julia’s world, an Obama campaign creation that may be the most self-revealing parody of liberalism ever conceived. It’s a series of cartoon illustrations in which a fictional Julia is swaddled and subsidized throughout her life by an all- giving government of bottomless pockets and “Queen for a Day” magnanimity. At every stage, the state is there to provide — preschool classes and cut-rate college loans, birth control and maternity care, business loans and retirement. The only time she’s on her own is at her grave site.
Julia’s world is totally atomized. It contains no friends, no community and, of course, no spouse. Who needs one? She’s married to the provider state.
Or to put it slightly differently, the “Life of Julia” represents the paradigmatic Obama political philosophy: citizen as orphan child. For the conservative, providing for every need is the duty that government owes to actual orphan children. Not to supposedly autonomous adults.
Beyond infrastructure, the conservative sees the proper role of government as providing not European-style universal entitlements but a firm safety net, meaning Julia-like treatment for those who really cannot make it on their own — those too young or too old, too mentally or physically impaired, to provide for themselves.
Limited government so conceived has two indispensable advantages. It avoids inexorable European-style national insolvency. And it avoids breeding debilitating individual dependency. It encourages and celebrates character, independence, energy, hard work as the foundations of a free society and a thriving economy — precisely the virtues Obama discounts and devalues in his accounting of the wealth of nations.
Speaking of the lunacy of the left… Chik-fil-A is in the news – again – and personally as God is my witness, if I had the money I’d buy 10,000 billboards across America spouting their greatness. Chicks on the Right wrote a great piece on the latest attack from the left (you know those ‘fair’ pushers who do nothing but work to take down those who stand on principles and values) on this Christian Conservative Food Chain that by the way – is VERY successful. (Oh and by the way – the horrific shooting in Colorado last night has resulted in Aurora’s Chick-fil-A Giving Free Meals to Police Working the Case – just sayin’):
Here’s something odd – Janet Napolitano has removed Immigration Enforcement Success Stories From the Homeland Security Website: http://tinyurl.com/74qd5vb
On a side note Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa) thanked Department of Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano Thursday for making her first appearance before the House Judiciary Committee since she announced a new deportation policy on young undocumented immigrants last month. She told him she won’t be rescinding that policy. He told her he’d see her in court. “I accepted the prosecutorial discretion when it dealt with individuals. I do not when it deals with groups of people that are created by a memorandum, and I do not when it deals with a work permit that’s ordered to be issued that doesn’t exist in the United States code and that is the province of Congress,” he said. “So I thank you for being here today, but we will see each other down the line in litigation.”
Okay – we’re going to take a huge left turn here and discuss Iran and the ‘End of Days’. The Trumpet.com writes:’ There’s infinitely more at stake in the Middle East than oil and geopolitics by Brad Macdonald
Tension is rising in the Middle East again. The civil war in Syria is worsening, Western sanctions on Iran are intensifying, large-scale military exercises by both Tehran and the West are on the cards. This is all worrying and cause for alarm.
Yet, it is an unprecedented, largely ignored national address by Iran’s supreme leader that is most alarming. On Friday, July 6, a number of Iranian state-run media outlets ran stories highlighting remarks by Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. In his address, Khamenei warned his people all over the world that Iran must prepare for war, and that we are now living in “the end of times.”
More specifically, Khamenei warned of the imminent return of the Mahdi, or the 12th imam. “The issue of Imam Mahdi is of utmost importance, and his reappearance has been clearly stated in our holy religion of Islam,” he said. “We must study and remind ourselves of the end of times and Imam Mahdi’s era. … We must prepare the environment for the coming so that the great leader will come.”
The belief of a returning Mahdi, or 12th imam, is a defining doctrine within the most populous group of Shiites known as Ithna Ashari, or “Twelvers.” In addition to Iran’s supreme leader, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad also belongs to this influential group. According to Twelver theology, the Mahdi’s return will be precipitated by planet-engulfing wars, the likes of which will destroy one third of the world’s population, and another third as a result of widespread hunger, disease and social unrest. Finally, the destruction will be capped with the annihilation of the Jewish state and the killing of all infidels, after which the seed of Islam will be planted in the four corners of the Earth.
Here in the West, most people mistakenly ignore this theology and the depth of commitment Khamenei, Ahmadinejad and their followers have to it. This is to our own peril. Twelvers don’t just believe the Mahdi will soon return: They consider it a personal responsibility to create the apocalyptic conditions that will surround his return.
Frankly, ushering in the Mahdi is the guiding principle of Iran’s foreign policy!
As Joel Rosenburg, former aide to Benjamin Netanyahu, put it, “[I]n order to bring about this Islamic messiah, the Mahdi, the 12th imam, Islamic leaders need to hasten his coming by destroying little Satan, Israel, and the great Satan, the United States. … [T]he leaders actually believe they need to create bloody carnage, the death of millions of people in order to create the conditions for the Mahdi to bring peace” (emphasis added throughout).
Indeed, as Khamenei recently told his people: “We must prepare for the coming. Since we consider ourselves the warriors of the 12th imam, we must fight.”
Khamenei has created several centers in Iran devoted to the research of the coming of the Mahdi, and there’s even an annual conference on Mahdiism. In 2004, during his tenure as mayor of Tehran, Ahmadinejad constructed a “grand avenue” in preparation for the Mahdi’s return. When he became president in 2005, he allocated $17 million for a blue-tiled mosque in Jamkaran (south of the capital), closely associated with mahdaviat. Inside Iran, both Khamenei and Ahmadinejad have been quite literally preparing the place to which they believe the Mahdi will return.
Ahmadinejad’s conviction is so strong, he even stood in front of a room full of United Nations leaders in New York and prayed for Allah to help him hasten the Mahdi’s return—which he could only do by precipitating a holocaust-type event!
Citing Iranian news media, the Journal of Turkish Weekly last week reported that the regime in Tehran is even distributing a booklet titled The Last Six Months. According to Reza Kahlili (a pseudonym for a former ciaoperative in Iran’s Revolutionary Guards), “the material admonishes the Revolutionary Guards and the Basij paramilitary forces that they must be prepared to do their duties during the expected war.”
One can hardly overstate the influence of Twelver theology on Iranian national and foreign policy. “From redressing the gulf between rich and poor in Iran, to challenging the United States and Israel and enhancing Iran’s power with nuclear programs, every issue is designed to lay the foundation for the Mahdi’s return,” wrote Scott Peterson.
Amir Mohebian, political editor of the Islamic Resalat newspaper, noted the effect of Ahmadinejad’s religion on his leadership: “This kind of mentality makes you very strong. … If you think these are the last days of the world, and [the Mahdi] will come [again], this idea will change all your relations.” Putting himself in Ahmadinejad’s shoes, Mohebian stated, “If I think the Mahdi will come in two, three or four years, why should I be soft? Now is the time to stand strong, to be hard.”
Here’s how Charles Krauthammer summed up Iran under Ahmadinejad not long after he was elected in 2005: “[A] Holocaust-denying, virulently anti-Semitic, aspiring genocidist, on the verge of acquiring nuclear weapons of the apocalypse, believes that the end is not only near but nearer than the next American presidential election. … This kind of man would have, to put it gently, less inhibition about starting Armageddon than a normal person.”
When you read these statements, you begin to grasp exactly what is at stake right now in the Middle East!
Problem is, too few are paying any attention to these facts!
If you’ve been reading the Trumpet, you may recognize some of the similarities between Ayatollah Khamenei’s belief in the return of the 12th imam, and the Trumpet’s long-standing prophecy about the return of Jesus Christ. In reality, the Twelver doctrine is a twisted counterfeit of more than a few biblical prophecies, all of which were canonized long before the emergence of Islam. In Matthew 24:21-22, for example, Jesus Christ Himself describes the events that surround His return.
That passage reads, “For then shall be great tribulation, such as was not since the beginning of the world to this time, no, nor ever shall be. And except those days should be shortened, there should no flesh be saved [“saved alive,” the Moffatt translation says]: but for the elect’s sake those days shall be shortened.” Notice, Jesus Christ will return and shorten those days!
Here’s what Trumpet editor in chief Gerald Flurry wrote about this: Ahmadinejad “believes that by using nuclear bombs, he speeds the return of his messiah and saves his Muslim cohorts. … [T]he mission of their revolution is to pave the way for this return of his messiah—and he can hasten that by nuking people. … Ahmadinejad’s god is on the side of the nuclear bomb throwers. His god somehow delights in him nuking other nations, of all things. What a diabolical concept!”
“The motive of his god is the exact opposite of what Christ will do,” Mr. Flurry wrote.
The Bible clearly reveals that Christ will have to intervene to prevent the full-scale annihilation of mankind that Ayatollah Khamenei dreams about. Mr. Flurry continued: Jesus Christ “would have to cut time short, or those in the spirit of Ahmadinejad would annihilate all human life on this planet! … Christ will return to stop the use of nuclear bombs forever and save humanity alive. These are two extremely different scenarios. One is the act of monstrous hatred; the other, an act of unparalleled godly love.”
If you haven’t read it already, or even if you read it when it was first published back in 2008, take a few moments to read Mr. Flurry’s article “Nuclear Iran Means Nuclear War.”
*Take a drive around your towns and counties this weekend and take note of how many mosques are popping up. Time to pay attention people.
LOCAL:
Posted on facebook and Twitter yesterday: Grills are hot! Stop by Bradhurst Park for a free hamburger and hotdog! Newsflash Senator Ball – Nothing is Free – we, the taxpayers, know we paid for those burgers and dogs. Ugg I am so tired of this ‘free’ business! Please, in the future, refer to your ‘free bbq’s’ as ‘You deserve a thank you bbq’ with ‘you’ meaning US. Thanks!
Keep Talking – Keep Thinking – have a great day!
Lisa
Reblogged this on Boudica BPI Weblog.