Daily Archives: May 12, 2015

05/12/15

American Thoughts

By: T F Stern
T F Stern’s Rantings

ConstitutionIt all starts with:

When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed…

How much of this is taken for granted or, in many cases, ignored?  Is there any consensus on our nation’s relationship with Nature’s God, our Creator, or have we drifted so far from our foundation as to make God irrelevant in the workings of government?

The founders of this country were, for the most part Christians, with teachings of the Lord from the Bible as their starting point for setting the standard of government.

Christians, regardless of denomination, believe in God, maker of Heaven and Earth and in all things above and below; but how many Americans actually believe our nation was the result of divine intervention?

My reason for asking is to establish common ground whereupon a proper discussion of America can be carried forward.

The creation story is found in the book of Genesis; but its interpretation is up for grabs depending on who you talk to.  Some claim God made everything out of ‘nothing’, a divine magic trick; but it is my belief that God organized existing matter and formed this Earth as a place for His children to enjoy mortality.  All aspects of the creation were considered as part of the necessary environment for mankind.  If you chose to believe otherwise, have at it; but my beliefs (*) trump yours as long as I’m writing.

And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness…So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.

Renaissance ArtYou have to ask, why would God fashion man after his own image?

We, each one of us regardless of the color of our skin or where we began mortality here on this spinning planet, each of us is a child of God.  He is our Eternal Father, our Creator.  Laws in the universe are eternal in nature; gravity, physics, math, chemistry and so on; they are constant and unchanging…the same as God; the same yesterday, today and forever.

So why is it important we recognize God as our Eternal Father; and beyond that, why is it important we recognize Him when talking about being an American?

I read an article by John Pratt many years ago, Did God Write the Laws of Physics?   He started off with a speculative line, “Did God write the laws of physics or are they self-existent and God just follows them perfectly?”   I don’t claim to have the answer; but isn’t that a wonderful way to start a discussion?  Would any of the answers offered by John Pratt add to your comprehension of the Creation?  Just wondering…

God . . . hath given a law unto all things, by which they move in their times and their seasons; And their courses are fixed, even the courses of the heavens and the earth, which comprehend the earth and all the planets.  Doctrine and Covenants 88:41-43 (but read the entire section)

If we’re going to give God credit for the Creation; perhaps a better choice of words is in order…  If we are going to show gratitude to God for having created all of this, and ‘all of this’ isn’t an exaggeration; then at some point we have to accept that He had some eternal plan for ‘all of this’, to include each and every individual ever born.

The New Testament provides a simple and all encompassing answer to the Creation.

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.  The same was in the beginning with God.  All things were made by him; and without him was not any thing made that was made.   John 1: 1-3

Modern scripture provides a fairly compact answer for why everything was created.  It’s found in The Pearl of Great Price, Moses 1:39.  (It should be pointed out that the Bible, the word of God as recorded by men, has lost many plain and precious passages over the years which have altered or lost important doctrine.  Modern revelation has been provided to restore original doctrine.  (See *)

For behold, this is my work and my glory—to bring to pass the immortality and eternal life of man.

Our Father in Heaven has great hope for each of His children; those who lack this important piece of information as pertains to their relationship with God might contend that life is finite; there is nothing beyond a cold grave, that’s it.  How much brighter would our outlook be if we were aware of and took to heart the Great Plan of Salvation; the challenges of life would be so much easier to bear.

Is this important when considering how each of us should live our lives?  Was this important to those men we call Founding Fathers of this nation?

If you responded, “Hey, don’t bother me; it’s time for another hour of Dancing with the Stars”, then you found this article by mistake.  For the rest of you, the journey toward appreciating citizenship in this particular nation becomes a little more important.

(Read between the lines and consider the unrest in Ferguson or Baltimore; what, if anything, do rioters and thugs know about the Creation and how we fit in as individuals?)

The Heavens didn’t assemble themselves randomly; they were organized with purpose of thought.  America didn’t happen by coincidence either.

The courts consider Intelligent Design (ID) nothing more than Creationism or pure religion being foisted on the public.  This is the result of a concerted effort to remove religion from the public square, schools and government institutions.

ID or Creationism isn’t permitted because of the ‘wall of separation between church and state’ which the Supreme Court manufactured from thin air based on their interpretation of the 1st Amendment along with a letter Thomas Jefferson wrote containing that combination of words… as no such wording is found in the Constitution.

I’m getting off topic; but how can we share our love of country with each successive generation, our appreciation of how we’ve been blessed by our Creator when important parts of that history are now considered unfit to teach because it requires religion or faith?

This land was reserved for a righteous people by that same Being who created everything.  This information is recorded in The Book of Mormon for those willing to invest some effort.

If you exhibit a particle of faith, even as a mustard seed, and accept the possibility that The Book of Mormon is true then you will advance to the next logical progression of thought, If the Book of Mormon is the word of God then Joseph Smith Jr. was a prophet of God, a modern day Moses if you will, because only a man hand picked by God could have translated such a book.

It then follows that other modern day scriptures were intended to enlighten God’s children; the Doctrine and Covenants and The Pearl of Great Price being classified as modern scripture.  Don’t take my word for any of this; ask your Father in Heaven.

If any of you lack wisdom, let him ask of God, that giveth to all men liberally, and upbraideth not; and it shall be given him.  John 1:5

Our nation was the result of God’s divine providence and our founding documents were brought about through selected individuals with a willingness to do His work.  Having men of integrity and faith becomes more important historically as we consider how we must continue in their footsteps even in our day.

And for this purpose have I established the Constitution of this land, by the hands of wise men whom I raised up unto this very purpose, and redeemed the land by the shedding of blood.   Doctrine and Covenants 101:80 

A short review is in order… We are children of our Eternal Father in Heaven who created us in His own image for the express purpose of giving each individual a chance to advance through the eternities as we follow the same eternal laws He does in order to become as He is, having perfected immortal bodies with eternal life.

Our Creator did this as part of a grand plan which required organizing chaotic matter floating about the universe in such a way as to permit our tiny planet the ability to sustain life in all its glorious forms.

(I place no time limits on the Creation and accept that the Lord’s time is not the same as our time.)

Knowing the nature of His children, Jesus Christ was sent as an Atoning sacrifice or not one of us would be worthy to return.  A small portion of the planet, the land we now call the United States of America, was reserved as a safe haven, a place where men might live the laws of God without the yoke of servitude under kings and despots and eventually return to Him.   This is the promise of America and our experiment in self governance.

The French historian Alexis de Tocqueville recognized America’s goodness a couple of hundred years ago when he wrote:

“I sought for the greatness and genius of America in her commodious harbors and her ample rivers, and it was not there; in her fertile fields and boundless prairies, and it was not there; in her rich mines and her vast world commerce, and it was not there. Not until I went to the churches of America and heard her pulpits aflame with righteousness did I understand the secret of her genius and power. America is great because she is good, and if America ever ceases to be good, America will cease to be great.”

Sadly, too many of my fellow citizens have either forgotten or ignored the goodness of America Tocqueville observed.  How else can we explain current events which portray so many individuals embracing evil and showing contempt for all the blessing showered down on us?

To find America we need only look to our Creator and follow His commandments.  A simple solution; it starts with each individual doing what is right, not with someone in government mandating our actions.

This article has been cross posted to The Moral Liberal, a publication whose banner reads, “Defending The Judeo-Christian Ethic, Limited Government, & The American Constitution”.

05/12/15

This one policy has correlated with higher unemployment, more bankruptcies and greater inequality. Can you guess what it is?

By: Benjamin Weingarten
TheBlaze

In a new book titled “The Floating Kilogram,” former long-time Wall Street Journal editor and founder of the New York Sun Seth Lipsky makes an impassioned, reasoned, common sense case for returning America to sound money in the form of the gold standard.

Much like Steve Forbes and Jim Grant with whom we have touched on this issue before, as Seth and I discussed during an in-depth interview, Lipsky believes there is significant economic and moral merit to backing currency with a tangible asset, with benefits for all Americans.

One of his more interesting and overlooked arguments concerns some of the devastating consequences for the country since we officially severed the link between the dollar and gold under President Nixon in 1971. Lipsky explains:

From 1947 when [the] Bretton Woods System really got operating to 1971, when the dollar was convertible into gold at a 35th of an ounce, unemployment in America averaged 4.7 percent. And then we got rid of the Bretton Woods system — we defaulted on it — we went to fiat money, and in the years from 1971 to today, unemployment has averaged significantly above 6 percent. Low unemployment: gold standard. High unemployment: fiat money.

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But it’s not just unemployment. The bankruptcy rate which Elizabeth Warren likes to focus on was one point something per thousand for years, and suddenly it shot up. When did it do that? The mid-1970s when we went off the gold standard and moved to the age of fiat money.

And you’ve no doubt read about this economic Thomas Piketty who likes to warn about the inequality rate. It was trending gently downward for years and suddenly it began to shoot up. That was the mid-1970s when we abandoned the gold standard and went to a system of fiat money.

So there are a lot of reasons to start looking at this and to see whether the absence of a sound dollar is the root cause of our system of growing inequality and high unemployment and lack of jobs and high bankruptcy rate, and to see whether something can be reformed so as to bring us back to a system of sound money. [Links ours]

The title for Lipsky’s book, “The Floating Kilogram,” reflects an editorial published in 2011 in his New York Sun, in which Lipsky asked the question, “Why don’t we let the kilogram float?” The implication is that if weights and measures are no longer defined, why shouldn’t the kilogram — a man-made measure which the New York Times noted may have been losing mass — fluctuate just as a dollar fluctuates in value. Lipsky wrote:

[H]ere in the modern age, the members of the Federal Reserve Board don’t worry about how many grains of silver or gold are behind the dollar. They couldn’t care less. And when the value of a dollar plunges at a dizzying rate, the chairman of Federal Reserve, Ben Bernanke, goes up to Capitol Hill and, in testimony before the House, declares merely that he is “puzzled.” No “new urgency” to redefine the dollar for him. The fact is that we’ve long since ceased to define the dollar, and it can float not only against other currencies but against the 371 ¼ grains of pure silver.

So why not the kilogram? After all, when you go into the grocery to buy a pound of hamburger, why should you worry about how much hamburger you get — so long as it’s a pound’s worth. A pound is supposed to be .45359237 of a kilogram, of course. But if the Congress can permit Mr. Bernanke to use his judgment in deciding what a dollar is worth, why shouldn’t he — or some other PhD from Massachusetts Institute of Technology — be able to decide from day to day what a kilogram is worth?

During our interview which you can listen to in full below, we discuss the fundamental flaws in and immorality of floating fiat money and several other topics including:

Note: The link to the book in this post will give you an option to elect to donate a percentage of the proceeds from the sale to a charity of your choice. Mercury One, the charity founded by TheBlaze’s Glenn Beck, is one of the options. Donations to Mercury One go towards efforts such as disaster relief, support for education, support for Israel and support for veterans and our military. You can read more about Amazon Smile and Mercury One here.

05/12/15

Author exposes the ‘cabal’ of leftists and corporatists unwittingly supporting jihad through U.S. refugee resettlement

By: Benjamin Weingarten
TheBlaze

Recently there have been several stories published regarding secretive American refugee resettlement programs under which a disproportionately high percentage of Muslim immigrants are being dispersed across the United States, an issue that Rep. Trey Gowdy of South Carolina has brought to the State Department with respect to a town in his Congressional district.

Ann Corcoran, a patriotic citizen living out on a farm in rural Maryland has been the providing oversight that Congress has not on this issue for years via her blog, Refugee Resettlement Watch.

Based on her findings, Ms. Corcoran has recently published a book, the subject of our in-depth interview, titled “Refugee Resettlement and the Hijra to America.”

In the book, Ms. Corcoran makes the case that the federal government at the urging of the United Nations is accepting thousands of immigrants each year, including from Muslim-majority countries hostile to the U.S., without concern for assimilation or any of the national security implications of such decisions. Corcoran believes that these programs aid and abet those individuals seeking to fulfill an element of jihad of hijra, in a bid to ultimately spread Islam and Shariah law in America.

Corcoran explains:

The hijra … is the Islamic doctrine of immigration. And Muhammad instructed his followers that one of the five responsibilities … that Muslims are supposed to do — one of them is to migrate and that migration is a form of jihad. And the refugee resettlement program as it is now constructed in the United States is now bringing large numbers of Muslims into the country from countries that hate us. We’ve brought over 100,000 Somalis, we have brought over 100,000 Iraqis — and most of the Iraqis … are Muslim. We’re about to admit potentially 11,000 Syrians, 93% so far that have come into the country are Muslim — into the country that the United Nations have picked for us. And thus, I’m making the case that the refugee resettlement program — that is by the way where the UN picks our refugees, U.S. State Department distributes them around the country is in fact a significant contributor to the hijra to America.

While Americans may be aware of the fact that as Corcoran argues during our interview, there are refugees being resettled all over the country with little to no local control over such programs or federal oversight — assisted by leftist religious groups that are taxpayer funded — perhaps less noticed is an alliance between leftist activists and big business enabling jihadists to come into the country, as we have seen for example in the Somali population of the Minneapolis area.

Corcoran explains:

… [T]he financial driving factor behind this … is cheap labor, which goes across all of these immigrant areas. The meat packers out in places like Minnesota have enormous power. And they’re working with left-wing foundations to convince local elected officials that this is all just a wonderful thing, diversity is a wonderful beautiful thing, but there’s really — money is driving this… And of course there’s the ideology, and the need for Democrat voters, or the wish for more Democrat voters… But there’s a big money component to all of this. And that’s why you see these elite Republicans supporting this program because it involves big money, big business, I call it “big meat” for example.

Corcoran continues:

… I should mention that for example with the meat packers, they were using illegal immigrant labor for the longest time. Well first off, they used to pay I’m told by people who worked in the meat industry, that they used to pay very well, good wages to American workers. Then they discovered the illegal alien. Well that didn’t work out so well because they were getting busted. And then the next thing they discovered was the refugees as a source of cheap labor. And it’s especially mean to the refugees I think because the refugees are captive essentially — they can’t just walk away from the job or go back to their home country or anything, so they’re really captive cheap labor… So there’s a big driving force there behind it. And it’s a convenient thing — you’ve got the hard leftist who wants the Democrat voters joining forces with the elite Republicans who with big business and financial backers — and it’s a terrible combination that’s a juggernaut essentially against the average American citizen worker.

As a microcosm of what is occurring, Ms. Corcoran told us about a situation she is studying that has recently come to light in St. Cloud, Minnesota:

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… There’s a couple of men out in Minnesota near St. Cloud who did some research on their own, and here’s what they found … St. Cloud by the way is part of [former Rep.] Michelle Bachmann’s district … [T]here’s apparently a foundation called the Blandin Foundation — a left-wing foundation — that takes elected officials, and it’s hooked up with I’m told The Hormel Foundation which is a meat company foundation, and they take elected officials and community leaders and they train them for a week with this diversity training and then they send them back to their communities expecting them to carry the water on how wonderful diversity is for the community. And as a reward, the community gets little grants for little things that they might need … the community might get a new soccer field if they’re sufficiently welcoming… So there’s this cabal of foundations — left-leaning foundations, the meat industry and elected officials — all working together to shove diversity down the throats of their communities, and the community is rewarded with grant money if they’re sufficiently welcoming to the new Somalis. But then there’s this other factor in there: The local cronyism kicks in and the local builder gets the job of building the new subsidized housing facility that they’re gonna put the Somalis in. And the car dealer is happy to get money selling cars to the new refugees, so that there’s this money component that flows through the whole thing. In the meantime the average citizen out there who says “Whoa whoa whoa, this is changing the culture of our community,” is shoved out by this combination of supposed Republicans in some cases, and foundations, left-leaning foundations and big business… And of course they don’t care about the jihad aspects of all of this… It’s all about money I’m sorry to say.

During our interview, which you can find in full below, we also had a chance to discuss several other issues including:

  • How Ms. Corcoran became an activist on the issue of refugee resettlement
  • The theological background of “hijra”
  • The size and scope of America’s refugee resettlement programs
  • The danger of diversity visas
  • The complicity of leftist religious groups with the government in perpetuating these programs
  • The states rights issues at play
  • And much much more

Note: The links to the book in this post will give you an option to elect to donate a percentage of the proceeds from the sale to a charity of your choice. Mercury One, the charity founded by TheBlaze’s Glenn Beck, is one of the options. Donations to Mercury One go towards efforts such as disaster relief, support for education, support for Israel and support for veterans and our military. You can read more about Amazon Smile and Mercury One here.

05/12/15

Pamela Geller — America’s Churchill

By: Joan Swirsky
RenewAmerica

When Adolf Hitler published “Mein Kampf” in 1926, he spelled out his vision for Germany’s domination of the world and annihilation of the Jews. Germany would not have lost WWI, he wrote, “if twelve or fifteen thousand of these Hebrew corrupters of the people had been held under poison gas.”

In 1933, Hitler’s Nazis took power. The few people who had read Hitler’s manifesto and took him seriously fled in time to save their lives. But most – including most Jews – didn’t. Comfortable, often prominent, and fully accepted, they believed in German society and could not fathom that a madman actually meant what he said and intended to fully carry out his malevolent vision.

Even as things grew increasingly menacing – through Kristallnacht, book burnings, the stultifying restriction of civil liberties, the expulsion of Jewish children from schools, the construction of Dachau, Auschwitz, Treblinka, and other death camps – there were Jews and others who downplayed Hitler’s ominous threat. Worse, they derided and vilified those who took him seriously, calling them fear-mongers and haters and liars. Sound familiar?

Today, the entire world faces the threat of galloping Islamic terrorism. We see this every day in every newscast – grisly individual and mass beheadings, people chained in cages and set on fire, hundreds of schoolgirls kidnapped, raped, and worse; Christian churches burned to the ground with their desperate congregants locked inside; innocent cartoonists shot dead and their colleagues gravely injured in France, Jewish babies murdered in their cribs and strollers. Increasingly, we see “honor killings” in the United States, as well as other freedom-smothering manifestations of Sharia law.

What happened in Germany in the 1930s and ’40s is happening in America today, except the assault on our system is not coming from Nazism, but rather from radical Islam. The mullahs in Iran and their surrogates around the world stand at podiums and declare boldly: Death to America, Death to Israel! They tell us outright that their goal is to create a caliphate in which Sharia law is the law of the land, in which all infidels – anyone who does not practice or has not converted to Islam – are relegated to second-class citizenship, draconian taxes, and groveling servitude, if not outright enslavement. Some of our own elected officials echo their words. All of them, like Hitler, rely on apologists who flagrantly lie about this escalating threat. Shame on them!

During WWII, Winston Churchill was the proverbial canary in the coal mine, repeatedly issuing the earliest warnings to the Western world of Hitler’s psychotic megalomania and evil intentions. Again, few listened, while prominent, educated, and sanctimonious types derided and vilified Churchill and called him a fear-monger and a hater and a liar. Sound familiar?

Since 2004, when she founded the Atlas Shrugs website (now PamelaGeller.com), Pamela Geller has been our Winston Churchill, warning of the increasingly aggressive actions of radical Islamists, the terrifying acts they commit, and their fervent goal to eviscerate our Constitution and Bill of Rights – you know, those little documents that afford us spoiled Americans the right to say what we want, be it in speech, drawings, art, movies, and music, without fear of being murdered!

That is why, as journalist Jonah Goldberg points out, the First Amendment applies to things that people find offensive, for instance Andreas Serrano’s “Piss Christ,” in which the “artist” urinated in a glass and then placed a plastic icon of Jesus on the cross into it, or the Brooklyn Museum of Art’s exhibition of a portrait of the Virgin Mary, which was partly comprised of pornographic pictures and elephant dung.

As I recall, all the holier-than-thou hypocrite who are calling for Geller’s head were bleating their support of “free speech” back then.

That is also why people who cherish the First Amendment agreed that it was okay to have a loathsome Nazi contingent walk the streets of Skokie, Illinois (with its formidable Jewish population) in the mid 1970s, and why other protest movements have been so powerful and important: for instance Patrick Henry’s bold declaration, “Give me liberty or give me death”; the Yo No rebellion in Cuba against its repressive government; the Boston Tea Party’s “no taxation without representation” protest; Susan B. Anthony’s “illegal” vote for women’s suffrage; Henry Thoreau’s demonstrations against slavery; the history-changing actions of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Rosa Parks against racial discrimination…the list of heroic people sounding the alarms is endless.

Throughout history, all of these crusaders for freedom have been insulted by the cowardly accommodators among us, the appeasers, the apologists, and the deluded masses who thought, as Churchill said, that “the crocodile [of tyranny, fascism, murder, even genocide] would eat them last.”

Pamela Geller succeeded in literally flushing out the enemy within, two of the many jihadists in our midst. Only days after their failed assassination attempt, ISIS claimed credit for the attack and embarrassed our Department of Homeland Security into increasing security conditions at U.S. military bases and elevating the threat level in the U.S. to BRAVO – not the highest level, but pretty damn high!

But instead of praising Geller for her foresight and courage, cowards and apologists on both the left and right used the tactics of radical Saul Alinsky (described in his own manifesto, “Rules for Radicals”), which are to: “Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.” Hurling gratuitous epithets and insults and lying are also in their repertoire.

But in spite of it all, Geller is not intimidated, because like Churchill she has truth on her side! She awarded First Place to a graphic artist who left Islam for the freedom that the First Amendment offers.

Still, it is clear that few people have learned the lessons of September 11th and the 14 years that have followed about the increasingly urgent need for vigilance against a deadly serious enemy, and for the equally compelling need to thank and to celebrate people like Pamela Geller for risking everything to protect our priceless freedoms.

As journalist and author Mark Steyn reminds us, “you’ve heard them a zillion times this last week: ‘Of course, I’m personally, passionately, absolutely committed to free speech. But…and the minute you hear the ‘but,’ none of the build-up to it matters.”

“…all the nice respectable people are now telling us,” Steyn adds, what Mohammed Atta told the passengers on 9/11: “Stay quiet and you’ll be okay.”

05/12/15

Phony “Conservatives” and Britain’s Cultural Collapse

By: Cliff Kincaid
Accuracy in Media

The usually astute Heritage Foundation commentator Nile Gardiner calls the win by the Conservative Party in Britain a defeat for socialism. Yet, Conservative Party head David Cameron ran on a platform boasting that “we have protected the National Health Service, with 9,500 more doctors and 6,900 more nurses, and ensured generous rises in the State Pension.”

Based on this precedent, we can anticipate that Republican Party politicians here in America will one day run on a platform of making Obamacare more affordable, rather than seeking to abolish it. This, then, will be defined as the “conservative” position.

The coverage of the recent British elections has demonstrated that the term “conservative” has lost much of its meaning. It’s time to take a hard look at what the term has come to mean in Britain and how it is being distorted and transformed here.

In addition to the Conservative Party’s embrace of socialist programs, the Cameron government, which has ruled Britain for five years, has embraced Islamic immigration to Britain, going so far as to pay more deference to global Islam than traditional Christianity. Demonstrating this bias, the supposedly “conservative” government in Britain banned American anti-Jihad activists Pamela Geller and Robert Spencer from the country. Geller and Spencer had intended to rally opposition to the Islamization of the West. Spencer called Cameron, who has labeled Islam “a religion of peace,” as the “dhimmi appeaser.” The term means a non-Muslim who accepts Muslim dominance.

Cameron and his Conservative Party have also embraced the legalization of homosexual marriage. The Conservatives’ 2015 manifesto says: “Our historic introduction of gay marriage has helped drive forward equality and strengthened the institution of marriage. But there is still more to do, and we will continue to champion equality for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender people.”

We can easily anticipate the Republican Party going down this road in the United States. In fact, the publication Politico notes that GOP presidential candidate Jeb Bush is among those trying to “have it both ways” on homosexual marriage. “While he publicly maintains his opposition to same-sex marriage, reaffirmed over the weekend by a surrogate he sent to Iowa, Bush is sending signals that he may be more accepting of ‘marriage equality’—the strongest signal, perhaps, coming when he referred to the issue using that term favored by LGBT advocates—than he’s able to let on,” the publication reported.

It noted that Bush has hired a communications director, Tim Miller, who is openly gay, and his inner circle of staffers “have all expressed strong support for marriage equality, including Mike Murphy, hired to run his messaging shop, who wrote about the GOP’s need to evolve on policy following Romney’s defeat in 2012.”

Jeb Bush is shaping up as the David Cameron of the Republican Party.

In Britain the changes keep coming, now at an astounding rate. Andrea Williams of the British group Christian Concern says the Cameron government has not only “destroyed marriage” by redefining it to include homosexual couples, but it is also pursuing liberal policies in other areas. For example, she says the government has liberalized abortion and refused to outlaw abortions on the basis of the sex of the fetus. She says that in Britain nurses and teachers have been suspended for wearing Christian crosses, judges have been replaced for refusing to place children in homosexual relationships with two fathers or two mothers, and Christian street preachers are being jailed for “offensive” comments. “We have no leader at the helm of any of our main parties, whether it’s the Liberal Democrats, the Labor Party or the Conservative Party, who are speaking a moral vision,” she says.

Another British group, the Christian Institute, confirms these ominous trends and warns that “…here in the UK religious liberty is being increasingly challenged…Street preachers have been arrested. Christians have lost their jobs for answering questions about their faith or for taking an ethical stand. Christians in business have come into conflict with equality laws and faced fines for holding to the belief that marriage is between a man and a woman.”

Commentator Charles Moore had warned in March 2015: “Socially conservative moral views are now teetering on the edge of criminality, and are over the edge of disapproval by those who run modern Britain.”

In arguing that “Britain is at heart still a conservative country,” Gardiner of the Heritage Foundation was talking about a country that no longer exists. His only reference to Britain’s cultural collapse came in his observation that Cameron had “alienated many grassroots supporters with highly controversial ‘modernizing’ policies such as backing gay marriage and increasing spending on foreign aid, both deeply unpopular with the Conservative base.” In fact, as we have seen in the statements quoted above, the conservative base has been betrayed on a host of issues. Today, even free speech is at risk in Britain.

In the U.S., it appears that big money is driving the Republican Party to the left, along the same path taken by Britain. The Politico article quoted earlier noted the influence of hedge fund billionaire Paul Singer, who has decided that since his own son is gay, the Republican Party should embrace the homosexual lifestyle and homosexual marriage. The publication said that Bush is determined to win Singer’s personal support, and added that “other billionaire bundlers like Seth Klarman and Dan Loeb, another hedge funder known for asking any candidate who enters his office where they stand on gay rights,” are also looking for Republicans to finance and push their pet causes.

As these developments unfold, it will be up to conservatives in the media and the think tanks to shine a light on the attempted takeover of the Republican Party. That will be much harder to do if the conservative media become part of the problem and go AWOL on the need for a moral vision to save the country.

In this context, Guy Benson, the political editor of its conservative Townhall.com website, has announced that he is a practicing homosexual. Benson, a supporter of homosexual marriage, is a Fox News contributor who appeared on Megyn Kelly’s Fox News show to discuss coming out of the closet through a footnote in his new book. “I think it’s very brave,” Kelly told him.

Fox News has been a major financial backer of the National Lesbian & Gay Journalists Association, a group that featured a male stripper at its recent New York City fundraiser. However, Townhall.com’s parent company is a Christian firm, Salem Media Group, which has refused comment on whether Benson will retain his influential position within the company. The company describes its mission as “targeting audiences interested in Christian and family-themed content and conservative values.”

05/12/15

AIM’s 10th Annual Reed Irvine Awards to Judge Jeanine Pirro, Chris Plante, and Rep. Lamar Smith

Accuracy in Media

A biased and corrupt news media have enabled the Obama administration to present itself as modestly successful, relatively scandal free, and advancing American interests and values at home and abroad. Nothing could be further from the truth, as Accuracy in Media (AIM) has been documenting for the past six years. Most of what is generally considered to be the mainstream media have been spinning agenda-driven falsehoods and obscuring the facts. However, some in the media continue their efforts to combat this liberal bias and inform the public about issues the mainstream media deliberately omit, spin, or suppress. As part of its 2015 Reed Irvine Award ceremony, held on April 21st, AIM championed the efforts of a few of these voices for truth and accountability, and awarded them for their ongoing efforts.

roger-aronoff-judge-jeanine-pirro-don-irvine“It’s about truth and justice, right and wrong. It’s about evidence,” said Fox News’ Judge Jeanine Pirro describing how she runs her show, “Justice with Judge Jeanine.”

“And the most disappointing part of all this, folks, is the fact that nobody really cares about the truth anymore,” she observed. She later continued, “And when the mainstream media is more concerned about an ideology, about politics, than truth and right and wrong, I’m telling you folks we are in real trouble.”

Judge Pirro came from an average family in Elmira, NY. She has served as both a judge and District Attorney, and hosted her own Emmy winning court show before finding a home at Fox News. She received AIM’s prestigious Reed Irvine Award for Investigative Journalism.

“This award means a great deal to me,” she said. “What was amazing was when he [Reed Irvine] started coming on the scene, people were saying well, ‘We really do have enough conservative people on television,’ as if enough of you over there, we don’t need any more of you.”

Chris Plante, host of WMAL’s “The Chris Plante Show,” spent 17 years at CNN and said that while he did good honest work there, in the end it was embarrassing.

roger-aronoff-chris-plante-don-irvine“It’s so unbalanced, it’s so unfair, and it’s never been worse than it is now with Barack Obama and now Hillary Clinton jumping into the fray,” he said. “We’re going to see a new a layer, a new level. But the coverage of President Obama over the last six years has been deplorable. It’s been Third World, it’s been Soviet-style reporting.”

Irvine founded AIM in 1969 to combat biased media coverage, particularly coverage of the Vietnam War. Irvine felt that Walter Cronkite, in particular, “contributed a great deal to our defeat in Vietnam.”

“Walter Cronkite actually came over to the house a couple of times when I was a kid, and I thought, ‘Gee, it’s Uncle Walter. What a great guy,’” observed Plante. “Now, in retrospect, I’m not very impressed with the news media.”

Plante said that his Reed Irvine Award for Excellence in Journalism would be “displayed prominently and proudly because of Reed Irvine’s legacy and the importance of what he started.” He talked about the award a couple of days later on his show: [click on play button below]

A biased media actually stand in the way of stewarding our effective democracy, argued Representative Lamar Smith (R-TX), founder and Chairman of the Media Fairness Caucus.

rap-lamar-smith-don-irvine“We rely upon the media to tell us what the facts are and if they don’t give us the facts, the American people can’t make good decisions,” he said. “And if the American people can’t make good decisions that’s when we lose our form of democracy.”

The caucus says to the media “give the American people the facts” and “don’t tell them what to think,” Rep. Smith said, calling AIM a “stalwart ally.” He received AIM’s Reed Irvine Award for Accountability in Journalism.

Here is an edited version of the comments that night from the three Reed Irvine Award winners:

05/12/15

Our Weasel Of The Week Nominees!! – 05/12/15

The Watcher’s Council

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It’s time once again for the Watcher’s Council’s ‘Weasel Of The Week’ nominations, where we pick our choices to compete for the award of the famed Golden Weasel to a public figure who particularly deserves to be slimed and mocked for his or her dastardly deeds during the week. Every Tuesday morning, tune in for the Weasel of the Week nominations!

Here are this weeks’ nominees…

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FBI Director James Comey!!

The Noisy Room: FBI Director James Comey for knowing that Elton Simpson was interested in heading to Garland, Texas, before he and his ISIS companion, Nadir Soofi, opened fire at the Mohammed cartoon contest. Comey told reporters that the FBI had alerted the police in Garland, Texas, shortly before the event. Officers on the ground never saw the warnings, however, and no attempt was made to warn the organizers or their security team of the threat.

Not only that, he says there may still be others out there that they ‘missed.’ The FBI and DHS have still not been in touch and have not answered communication attempts by Pamela Geller, the organizer of the Garland, Texas event.

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Senate Majority Leader And RINO Supreme-o Mitch McConnell!!

The Independent Sentinel: Mitch McConnell is actually proud of himself for giving the senate away to the Democrats at the expense of the party.

“A lot of folks like to joke about the odd couple that was Ted Kennedy and Orrin Hatch,” McConnell said, referring to the late Massachusetts Democrat and the Republican senator from Utah. “But I think Mitch McConnell and Barack Obama may have them outdone. I had to warn reporters not to faint last week before offering the president some praise on trade. I’m even getting handwritten notes from the president these days. He sent one the other day to thank me for supporting the nomination of Loretta Lynch.”

McConnell was thrilled about his thank you notes from Obama.

If this TPP deal is so loved by Obama it must be awful.

“A real sense of renewal is taking hold in the Senate,” said McConnell.

In other words, nothing has changed.


Failed Lawyer, Racist, Palestinian Apologist And Far Left ‘Comedian’ Dean Obeidallah!!

Nice Deb: Dean Obeidallah a liberal “comedian” (using the term loosely) earned a nomination for Weasel of the Week this week for completely missing the point of Pamela Geller’s ‘Draw Mohammed’ contest.

Obeidallah seems to think the contest was put on by “Islamophobes” for the purpose of insulting Muslims. As Geller has explained umpteen times since the the event in Texas was attacked by Jihadists, the point was to defend free speech.

In an interview with Newsweek, Geller said, “if they had announced that they were going to kill non-Muslims for not obeying any other element of Shariah law, we would have made our stand on that. They are trying to intimidate free people into submitting to Shariah blasphemy laws by killing over the cartoons, so it was over the cartoons that we had to make a stand.”

By holding his own contest hitting back at “Islamophobes,” Obeidallah is suggesting that he believes the motivating factor behind Geller’s contest was to ridicule all Muslims. But he couldn’t be more off the mark if he tried. Geller’s event was designed to stand up for free speech while lampooning those who would kill over a cartoon.

And the Jihadists who attacked proved her point that such events are necessary.

I’m not sure what Obeidallah’s point is other than to angrily lash out at people he disagrees with.

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The Internal Revenue Service, AKA ‘Them ##@#!! Revenooers!’

Don Surber: This outraged me:

The IRS did not fire those federal employees who did not pay all their taxes. The IRS gave them promotions.

From the Wall Street Journal:

IRS reform legislation adopted in 1998 said that the agency must fire any employee who violates tax laws, unless the agency decides to soften the punishment.

The new report found that over a 10-year period starting in 2003, 1,580 IRS employees were found to be willfully noncompliant with tax laws. Of that total, 620 or 39% were terminated, resigned or retired. The remaining 61% got lesser penalties such as suspensions, reprimands or counseling.

Specific violations included overstatement of expenses, claiming of a first-time homebuyer tax credit without buying a home, and failure to timely file tax returns. Some employees had “significant and sometimes repeated tax noncompliance issues, and a history of other conduct issues,” according to the report.

Under President Obama, federal taxes no longer are collected to run the federal government. The politicians run it on borrowed money, and taxes collected to punish his political foes, such a the Tea Party.

Well, there it is. What a despicable group of  Weasels… ANY OF THEM COULD WIN! Check back Thursday to see which Weasel walks off with the statuette of shame!

Make sure to tune in every Monday for the Watcher’s Forum.

And remember, every Wednesday, the Council has its weekly contest with the members nominating two posts each, one written by themselves and one written by someone from outside the group for consideration by the whole Council. The votes are cast by the Council and the results are posted on Friday morning.

It’s a weekly magazine of some of the best stuff written in the blogosphere and you won’t want to miss it… or any of the other fantabulous Watcher’s Council content.

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