White House Aides Define Obama Doctrine: ‘Don’t Do Stupid S**t’

Photo Credit: Getty Images Still trying to figure out what President Barack Obama’s foreign policy doctrine is? Search no more. The White House has got you covered.

“For those pining for an Obama Doctrine victory for the president, here it is: ‘Don’t Do Stupid Shit,’” Politico’s Mike Allen wrote in his daily tip sheet, the Politico Playbook, Saturday. “Playbook rarely prints a four-letter word — our nephews are loyal readers. But we are, in this case, because that is the precise phrase President Obama and his aides are using in their off-the-record chats with journalists.”

Allen went on to point out all the places the phrase has popped up in recent days and weeks.

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Christian on Death Row for Apostasy: Sudan Shoots Down Hopes of Imminent Release

Photo Credit: The TimesA day after a senior Sudanese official told media outlets that Meriam Ibrahim, the Christian woman sentenced to death for apostasy, would be freed within days, Khartoum’s foreign ministry on Sunday clarified that that would happen only if an appeal court rules in her favor.

The conflicting statements were the latest twist in the case of Ibrahim, the wife of an American citizen, who was sentenced to death last month after refused to recant her Christian faith.

Based on its ruling that Ibrahim was a Muslim because her father was a Muslim, the court also determined that her 2011 marriage – to Daniel Wani, a Sudanese Christian and U.S. citizen – was invalid and consequently sentenced her to 100 lashes for “adultery.”

Pregnant at the time of her conviction and sentence, Ibrahim has since given birth in prison to a baby girl, Maya, who is now incarcerated together with her and their son, Martin, a toddler just under two years old. The court said she would be allowed to nurse her baby for two years before the sentence was carried out.

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Sudan Set To Free Woman Sentenced To Death For Refusing To Renounce Her Christian Faith

By Caroline Schaeffer.

Meriam Ibrahim, who gave birth to a daughter while in custody this week, is set to be free, according to foreign ministry officials. Sudanese officials had sentenced the woman to 100 lashings and had given her the death sentence for having abandoned the Islamic faith, the BBC reports.

Ibrahim, 27, was raised as an Orthodox Christian and married an American. A Sudanese judge ruled in May that she should be a Muslim, because it was her father’s faith. The court ruled her marriage void. In the face of all this, she refused to renounce her Christian faith and was sentenced to death by hanging.

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Don’t Argue With Liberals – It Only Encourages Them

Photo Credit: TownHall Non-lawyers often ask me, “What is the best way to argue with a liberal?” This is silly, because there is no best way to argue with a liberal. They’re beyond argument. You might as well argue with your terrier. Take it from someone who argues with his hideous terrier all the time.

But if you do choose to argue with a liberal, understand that your purpose should never be to change the liberal’s mind. You’re not going to change the liberal’s mind. Instead, if you choose to argue with a liberal, you should do it for one of two reasons – to either win over people who have not yet made up their minds, or to support people who already have begun to understand the truth.

The truth is that conservatism is an ideology that is in accord with natural law and basic human decency, while liberalism is merely the summit of a slippery slope leading down to the hellish depths of collectivist misery.

Liberals aren’t going to like to hear this manifest and demonstrable truth. So you’re going to get called “racist,” “sexist” and “homophobic,” even if you’re a conservative black lesbian.

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Surveillance Cam Captures School Security Guard Repeatedly Punching Wheelchair Bound Student in Head

A security guard at a school in Oakland, California, has been arrested for assaulting a student, who has cerebral palsy and is in a wheelchair, after he was found in a hallway after class had started. CBS affiliate KPIX 5 reports:

One security officer then ordered the student, identified as freshman Francisco Martinez, to move along and either Martinez didn’t comply or was slow to do so, according to Abdel-Qawi…

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Obama Must Respond to Jailed Marine’s Petition

Photo Credit: APLast Friday Breitbart Texas reported on Andrew Tahmooressi, a 25-year-old marine who was imprisoned in Mexico for having illegal guns in his car. Tahmooressi claims he was driving to San Ysidro, California to meet a fellow veteran and accidentally took a wrong turn across the border. Crossing into Mexico with the firearms has resulted in his incarceration in a Mexican prison for over two months.

At a border stop in Tijuana, Mexican officials searched the marine’s car. They found three guns which while legal in the United States, are illegal to possess in Mexico. According to Tahmooressi’s lawyer, he is currently being charged with the possession of firearms meant for the exclusive use by the Mexican military. He is currently facing six to 21 years in a Mexican prison.

After serving two tours in Afghanistan Tahmooresi was diagnosed with PTSD. His mother Jill Tahmooressi has repeatedly voiced her concerns that the Mexican jail is not prepared to handle a U.S. veteran with PTSD and has been very active in lobbying for her son’s release. She has appeared on dozens national television and radio programs to tell Andrew’s story and to encourage viewers to sign a WhiteHouse.gov petition she created on his behalf.

Read more from this story HERE.

Duck Dynasty Patriarch Hands GOP Pathway to Victory

Photo Credit: WNDDuck Dynasty patriarch Phil Robertson kicked off the Republican Leadership Conference at the Hilton Riverside Hotel in New Orleans on Thursday with an entertaining speech in which he mixed his faith in Jesus Christ with an admonition to the GOP to return to the Bible and the fundamental principles of freedom upon which the nation was founded.

“You lose your religion, you lose your morality, you lose your freedom,” Robertson said. “You cannot be right for America if you are not right with God.”

In an event the GOP billed as an “unofficial kickoff” of the 2016 presidential campaign, Robertson drew repeated applause and more than one standing ovation by insisting, “If the country does not turn to God at a fairly rapid clip, we are going to lose the United States of America.”

Robertson jokingly suggested, “The GOP must be desperate to call a person like me.”

Looking at the outfit that is now linked with his Duck Dynasty television persona, Robertson insisted, “These clothes are the best I own.”

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Cruz: GOP Can Empower Grassroots by Ditching Consultants, ‘Soviet-Style Campaigns’ (+video)

Photo Credit: AP / Rick Bowmer, FileSen. Ted Cruz said Saturday that the GOP can bolster its appeal by sticking to its conservative principles and embracing a bottom-up campaign model that empowers grassroots voters.

Speaking at the Republican Leadership Conference, Mr. Cruz said the party must ditch the Washington-centric campaign model and stop listening to the political consultants.

“A lot of Republicans tend to have top-down Soviet-style campaigns,” Mr. Cruz said. “It is very odd for a party that believes in free market that they run campaigns through command and control.”

“That is disempowering and it doesn’t inspire,” Mr. Cruz said. “What is far more effective is having a race built on empowering the grassroots.”

Since being elected in 2012, Mr. Cruz has occasionally butted headed with GOP leaders in Washington, and has become a darling of the tea party and grassroots activists around the country.

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VA Cuts D-Day Veteran’s Benefits to $6 a Month

Photo Credit: WNYTAn 89-year-old Navy veteran who came under heavy enemy fire aboard a landing craft on D-Day is accusing bureaucrats at the Department of Veterans Affairs of slashing his veterans benefits to $6 a month from $300.

Joseph Teson, of Watervliet, N.Y., told WNYT-TV he used to get $300 a month in benefits, about a third of which he would donate to veterans groups. He said the VA cut his benefits to recoup an overpayment of more than $3,000 that he never even noticed.

“I don’t know how they did it, but they did it,” Teson, 89, told the Albany station Saturday. “I didn’t say nothing. I just let it go. Everybody else complained but me.”

Teson was notified of the overpayment last year. The VA sent him a letter saying his “entitlement to compensation and pension benefits had changed,” resulting in an overpayment to him of $3,090.

“Since you are currently receiving VA benefits, we plan to withhold those benefits until the amount you were overpaid is recouped,” the VA said in a letter dated June 9, 2013, according to WNYT.

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Photo Credit: APVA Expands Veterans’ Access to Outside Medical Care, In Effort to Clear Long Waits

The Obama administration said Saturday it will allow more veterans to get health care outside Veterans Affairs facilities, following recent revelations about long waits for treatment and purported secret lists that hid backlogs.

The statement was issued by the Department of Veterans Affairs, which said the plan is to expand capacity at VA facilities to increase care, or when not possible increase care in the community through outside facilities.

Officials said VA Secretary Eric Shinseki put the plan into action following President Obama’s national TV address Wednesday on the issue and that it was being implemented by Friday under the direction of the Veterans Health Administration.

“VA has redoubled efforts to provide quality care to veterans and has taken steps at national and local levels to ensure timely access to care,” the department said Saturday in a statement.

Democratic and Republican lawmakers have pressed for the policy change as the VA confronts the allegations about employees falsifying appointment records to cover up delays in care and about veterans dying while awaiting treatment at VA centers.

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Miller: We Don’t Know the Dignity of Their Births; We Know the Nobility of Their Deaths (+video)

This Memorial Day we remember the over one million Americans who laid down their lives in military service to our country. To borrow a phrase from General Douglas MacArthur: we don’t know the dignity of their births, but we know the nobility of their deaths. They died serving in a cause greater than themselves, so that our country, dedicated to securing the peoples’ God-given rights, could move forward towards its high calling.

For all the times America has fallen short over its lifetime of nearly two-and-a-half centuries, none can deny the hope and the opportunity and the freedom this nation has brought forth not only on our shores, but to tens of millions of people around the world. We are blessed to live in such a land; it truly has been a “Shining City on a Hill. “

In a few weeks, we will commemorate the 70th anniversary of D-Day, which was one of the many decisive moments when Americans made the ultimate sacrifice to advance the cause of freedom. In Normandy, the United States and its allies fought to rescue an enslaved Europe from a maniacal dictator hell-bent on dominating the planet and eliminating an entire race of people. The scale of the operation was vast, involving over 5000 ships, 175,000 soldiers, and 10,000 aircraft.

General Dwight Eisenhower stated the mission clearly to his soldiers, sailors, and airmen soon to be engaged in Operation Overlord:

The eyes of the world are upon you. The hopes and prayers of liberty loving people everywhere march with you. In company with our brave Allies and brothers in arms on other fronts, you will bring about the destruction of the German war machine, the elimination of Nazi tyranny over the oppressed peoples of Europe, and security for ourselves in a free world.

In a nationwide radio broadcast that evening, President Franklin Roosevelt asked all Americans to join him in prayer for those in the battle:

Almighty God: Our sons, pride of our Nation, this day have set upon a mighty endeavor, a struggle to preserve our Republic, our religion, and our civilization, and to set free a suffering humanity. Lead them straight and true; give strength to their arms, stoutness to their hearts, steadfastness in their faith….Some will never return. Embrace these, Father, and receive them, Thy heroic servants, into Thy kingdom…Thy will be done, Almighty God.

Thousands gave their lives on Normandy’s shores on June 6th, 1944 and by the time the World War II was over, 400,000 Americans would never be returning home.

While thankfully in our time we have not had to endure that staggering loss of life, none-the-less thousands of homes this day will be missing the smile and the embrace of a father or mother, son or daughter, brother or sister who made the ultimate sacrifice.

As Ronald Reagan so eloquently stated on the 40th Anniversary of D-Day regarding the great heroes who fought for this country, “Strengthened by their courage, heartened by their valor, and borne by their memory, let us continue to stand for the ideals for which they lived and died.”

This beautiful song performed by the West Point Glee Club is a fitting tribute to those whom we have loved and lost in war:

Ronald Reagan’s Boys of Pointe Du Hoc Speech on the 40th Anniversary of D-Day, June 6, 1984:

Arizona Ditches Common Core Testing Consortium

Photo Credit: REUTERS / Joshua LottArizona Gov. Jan Brewer announced Friday that her state is pulling out of a multi-state consortium that is designing a national test that applies new Common Core education standards.

Arizona was an early governing member of the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers, or PARCC, bu Brewer’s office announced that effective June 8 the state would be disassociating itself.

PARCC is one of two major constortia that is trying to create a common test for states that have adopted Common Core national education standards. With Arizona’s withdrawal, 15 states and the District of Columbia are members, though only nine are firmly committed to using PARCC’s tests.

The decision to pull out does not affect Arizona’s current adherence to Common Core, whose implementation will continue as planned. In addition, the decision doesn’t necessarily mean Arizona will not ultimately use PARCC to supply its standardized test, as PARCC will be allowed to submit its tests for possible use.

The government’s statement says the state has no problems with PARCC, but rather must disassociate itself to avoid any conflict of interest as it evaluates different bids to provide standardized tests to more than 1 million Arizona students.

Read more from this story HERE.