Gun Store Owner Bans Muslims, Then This Happens Immediately [+video]

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In response to the Chattanooga shootings, Andy Hallinan, the owner of Florida Gun Supply in Inverness said he felt threatened by Muslims in his store and that it was his “right” to deny firearms and training to anyone he deems a threat.

As Hallinan says in his video, “I’m not going to be asking every person who walks in what their religious background is. That’s not my business, but I do have the right to deny firearms and training to anyone I deem as a threat.”

“I have a moral and legal responsibility to ensure the safety of all patriots in my community, and so effective immediately, I’m declaring Florida Gun Supply as a Muslim-free zone. I will not arm and train those who wish to do harm to my fellow patriots.”

“I’m not going to be asking every person who walks in what their religious background is. That’s not my business,” he told WFLA. “But I do have the right to deny firearms and training to anyone I deem as a threat.”

Predictably CAIR, the Council on American Islamic Relations, called on the Justice Department to investigate possible federal civil rights violations by the Florida business. They also had their attorney, Jenifer Wicks, send a complaint to then Attorney General Eric Holder when another store owner, Jan Morgan, decided against arming Muslims. (Read more from “Gun Store Owner Bans Muslims, Then This Happens Immediately” HERE)

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Another Obama First: More Children Living in Poverty Now Than During Great Recession

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A higher percentage of children live in poverty now than did during the Great Recession, according to a new report from the Annie E. Casey Foundation released Tuesday.

About 22% of children in the U.S. lived below the poverty line in 2013, compared with 18% in 2008, the foundation’s 2015 Kids Count Data Book reported. In 2013, the U.S. Department of Human and Health Service’s official poverty line was $23,624 for a family with two adults and two children.

“The fact that it’s happening is disturbing on lots of levels,” said Laura Speer, the associate director for policy reform and advocacy at the Casey Foundation, a non-profit based in Baltimore. “Those kids often don’t have the access to the things they need to thrive.” The foundation says its mission is to help low-income children in the U.S. by providing grants and advocating for policies that promote economic opportunity.

The report examined data from several federal agencies ranging from 2008 to 2013 to assess state-by-state trends of 16 factors of children’s well-being, including economics, education, health and family and community. It found that one in four children — a total of 18.7 million kids — lived in low-income households in 2013; low-income families were defined as those who use more than 30% of their pre-tax income for housing.

However, the numbers are from 2013, and Speer said the outcome may be different now that the unemployment rate has lowered to 5.3%; it was 7.5% in June 2013. Speer said more employed parents would naturally lead to fewer impoverished kids, but she doubted it would change the number of children in low-income neighborhoods. (Read more from “More Children Living in Poverty Now Than During Recession” HERE)

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The Metaphysics of Caitlyn and Planned Parenthood

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I had a very of-the-moment experience the other night at bedtime in my hotel room. After reading about the unmitigated horror of Planned Parenthood’s customized cannibalizing of fetal body parts, I toggled over to the ESPN site to watch the propaganda video the network made to set up its awarding Caitlyn Jenner its Arthur Ashe Courage Prize.

I encourage you to watch the clip, which is about 13 minutes long. It is a remarkable piece of work, and profoundly indicative of the deepest metaphysical assumptions of Western culture today. Jenner’s heroism, according to the film, consists in his dramatic refusal of Nature — of imposing his own will and desires on nature so profoundly that he repudiates his own nature as a male. Jenner retains his male genitalia, and, of course, maleness in his genes. In other words, everything about Jenner’s material existence (that is, his existence in his body) is male. But Jenner thinks of himself as female, and presents himself publicly as a female. He believes that what he wishes to believe about himself is who he really is, in terms of his gender. And our culture has decided that someone who wishes to assert that he or she is actually of the opposite gender than his or her body, that not only is that person conforming to the Truth — courageously, against the opposition of tradition, religion, society, and so forth — but that courage in part consists of that very willingness to impose one’s will on Nature, to make it serve our desires.

If you watch the Jenner video, he/she keeps saying things like, “This is who I am” and “I had to be who I really am.” I’m not making fun of this; clearly Jenner believes this quite deeply. The images in the video in which s/he is presented as a lone conquering hero are crushingly sad; Jenner comes across as a defaced person lost in the desert, someone who thinks s/he is free, but who doesn’t seem free at all. The culture now seems to have accepted as self-evidently true that one’s gender is whatever one wants it to be. To assert this implies a metaphysical view that is radically at odds with classical (including Christian) metaphysics, which holds that nature is not mere stuff that we can fashion as we like, and impose our own meaning onto it, but rather that nature in some mysterious way reflects things as they actually are.

In the new edition of the (unfailingly excellent) Mars Hill Audio Journal, Ken Myers interviews philosopher Roger Scruton, who talks about the implicit atheism of contemporary culture, and how we are “defacing” Nature by denying — whether we realize it or not — that there is intrinsic, metaphysical meaning in matter. Driving home from the airport last night, listening to the Journal, a line from Scruton jumped out at me:

“As soon as we begin to understand how the human person, as it were, defines himself apart from the natural order, till we do that, we won’t begin to see exactly where the limits of scientific investigation lie.”

(Read more from “The Metaphysics of Caitlyn and Planned Parenthood” HERE)

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Nuclear Arms Race Begins: We Must Have a Military Nuclear Program Within a Decade

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Following the July 14, 2015 announcement in Vienna of the Iran-P5+1 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, the Saudi press featured numerous articles openly calling for Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states to use the coming decade – the time frame of the JCPOA – to develop their own military nuclear program, against the nuclear threat that they say Iran will constitute after the agreement expires.

There have already been calls for a clandestine Saudi nuclear program to parallel Iran’s, which were backed up by official Saudi sources.

For example, the month before the announcement of the JCPOA, Saudi Ambassador to the U.K. Emir Muhammad bin Nawwaf bin ‘Abd Al-‘Aziz Al-Saud told the Daily Telegraph that if the upcoming nuclear agreement with Iran did not include a serious Iranian commitment to refrain from developing nuclear weapons, then as far as Saudi Arabia is concerned, “all options are on the table.” He emphasized that over the years, his country had opposed the development of nuclear weapons, but that Iran’s policy on the issue “has changed the whole outlook in the region.”

Emir Turki Al-Faisal, former Saudi intelligence chief and Saudi Ambassador to the U.S., made similar statements, on a number of occasions. In April 2014, at a security conference in Bahrain, Al-Faisal called on the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) states to acquire nuclear knowledge to deal with the Iranian danger. The previous year, at the 2013 Arab-U.S. Policymakers Conference, he threatened that if Iran developed nuclear weapons, the GCC would consider acquiring its own “nuclear deterrent.”

Alongside these statements by Saudi officials, there have been various reports in media worldwide on Saudi intentions to establish a military nuclear program, or to acquire nuclear weapons from a third party, meaning Pakistan. (Read more from “Nuclear Arms Race Begins: We Must Have a Military Nuclear Program Within a Decade” HERE)

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Baltimore Mayor Pushed for Publicly Funded Hotel That Has Been Hemorrhaging Money

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In 2008, construction was completed on the 757-room Baltimore Hilton, a $305 million publicly-funded hotel spearheaded by Baltimore’s mayor at the time, Martin O’Malley. The hotel, in seven years of operation, has never turned a profit. The best year of operation saw a $2.9 million loss.

“It’s the biggest boondoggle ever. It’s hemorrhaging money every year and has less-than-stellar performance,” Democratic Maryland state Sen. James Brochin told The Daily Caller.

Originally intended to draw revenue from a supposed untapped convention market in Baltimore, the Hilton Hotel project slowly began losing money when conventions passed on Baltimore for other locations such as Austin, Texas and nearby Washington, D.C.

In July 2005, more than three years after the plan was finalized, it was still facing opposition in the city council. Of the 15 council members, only three said they believed the hotel would actually help the city . . .

After O’Malley pushed the hotel vote to pass with the council, The Sun reported that this, the “costliest public project in Baltimore history” may see the fate of other cities’ failed publicly funded hotel ventures, such as St. Louis, Omaha, and Overland Park, Kan., “all cities that used public money to build hotels. Failing hotels.” (Read more from “O’Malley Pushed for Publicly Funded Hotel That Has Been Hemorrhaging Money” HERE)

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From Sea to Shining Sea: Here Are Examples of Voter Fraud Across America

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It is a stark reality that exists nationwide, from the rural counties of Georgia to the urban centers of New York.

The Heritage Foundation has documented nearly 250 cases where nefarious citizens, officials, candidates and campaign operatives conspired to commit vote fraud, compromising the integrity of our elections to achieve their ideological goals.

That list is just a tiny sampling of voter fraud, and it keeps growing. In May, the Heritage Foundation highlighted several recent cases.

Here are some of the egregious new additions to the voter fraud database: . . .

In eastern Kentucky, Ross Harris and Loren Glenn Turner funneled $41,000 to the 2002 county judgeship campaign of Doug Hays for what the defendants claimed was a lawful operation to pay more than 1,200 people $50 each to drive voters to the polls. (Read more from “From Sea to Shining Sea: Here Are Examples of Voter Fraud Across America” HERE)

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Obama’s Attack on the Suburbs Is an Attack on the American Dream

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The hypocrisy of government “planners” is astounding. Government planners are experts at planning destruction, distancing themselves from the results, and then recommending additional planning to fix what they have destroyed. They have been rearranging society according to their social engineering agenda, redistributive economic theories, cynical “division politics” strategies, and racial quotas for decades and the more planning they do, the more chaos we get.

I have been closely following the Obama Administration’s recently announced plan to racially diversify upper middle income neighborhoods through their recent HUD directive titled “Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing” for some time now, and continue to wonder when the media and curious Americans are going to start asking the hard questions about this incessant drive to socially engineer our lives, and the devastating outcomes they have produced.

Sadly, I doubt the media will delve into the complicated but overwhelmingly negative externalities generated by years of adherence to the liberal social planners’ agenda, and their societal reorganization goals. So it’s our turn to bypass them and ask the hard questions ourselves.

Here’s the critical question for the government planners: Who is in charge of the neighborhoods and cities with significant minority populations, and why are many of these areas struggling?

Of course, the answers are extremely inconvenient for the liberal social planners among us because the correlation between liberal governance and their symbiotic “planning” agenda in inner cities, and economic hardship for its citizens, is high. If the government planners who engineered the negative economic outcomes, housing outcomes, and education outcomes in the inner cities they dominate failed to generate even average outcomes for their citizens, then why would middle-class America be remotely open to the idea of these destructive planners engineering outcomes in their neighborhoods?

The planners, in conjunction with the liberal political and activist class, will, of course, blame the inevitable backlash against this attempt to place government sponsored housing in upper middle income neighborhoods on racism, but Americans are tiring of this old trick. Americans of all races, creeds, and countries of origin want to live in neighborhoods of their own choice and choose these neighborhoods for a variety of reasons. Some choose the convenience of city-living because they dislike long commutes. Others choose the suburbs because they want a yard for their children to play in. And some choose the country because they like the relaxing symphony of the Lord’s sounds of nature at night. Pretending these decisions are the twisted result of a devoutly racist country is an insult to every American who bought their home because it was their piece of the American Dream, not a bullet point in a government master-planning document.

The rank hypocrisy here, which escapes the media spin doctors who are avoiding this story because of its potentially explosive impact on electoral politics, is that it’s the planner’s adherence to the tax-and-spend ideology and zoning regulations which are primary drivers of generational poverty in the very areas many struggling Americans are looking to escape from, and the low income housing crisis in America, respectively. Restrictive zoning and “rent control” policies have long been pointed to as drivers of housing shortages and any Econ 101 student understands that when you restrict the supply of any good or service, the price will rise.

Magnifying the problem is that restrictive zoning requirements add layers of fixed costs to housing construction projects which make the business of building homes profitable and sustainable only if you build high income housing to defray the fixed costs. The Left employs this same hat trick often; first they create a problem, and then they propose more of the poison as an antidote. They created the low income housing crisis through their adherence to heavy zoning, planning, and housing regulation, then they ruined the many inner cities, where they govern unchallenged, forcing people out of those cities to the suburbs, and now they chase those same people to the suburbs following them with legislative and regulatory threats to impose their big government agenda on them, regardless of how far away they move or how desperate they are to escape their grasp.

I know many of you are overwhelmed right now with the avalanche of bad news emanating from the Obama Administration on both the foreign policy and domestic fronts. It’s a challenge to keep up with it all. But, the Obama Administration’s war on the suburbs is an attack on that portion of the unique American Dream which every American cherishes, a small piece of land which we can look at and call “home.”

Conservatives should fight this HUD rule and defund this attack on their constituents’ front door. (Posted with permission of the author, “Obama’s Attack on the Suburbs Is an Attack on the American Dream”, originally appeared HERE)

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Thousands Rally in Times Square to Protest Iran Deal

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Thousands of demonstrators gathered in Times Square Wednesday evening in protest over the recent landmark nuclear deal with Iran.

As CBS2’s Jessica Schneider reported, some ten thousand are rallying in solidarity with signs and voices raised against the nuclear deal.

Protest organizers proclaim: “Washington is prepared to give Iran virtually all that it needs to get to the bomb. To release $150 billion to Iran will result in the expansion of worldwide terror” . . .

In Washington, Secretary of State John Kerry led back-to-back, closed-door briefings, trying to sway lawmakers to approve the deal to curb Iran’s nuclear program.

“We are convinced that the agreement that we have arrived at with world powers is an agreement that will prevent Iran from the potential of securing a nuclear weapon. It will make the region, our friends and allies safer, it will make the world safer,” Kerry said. “And we are convinced that the absence of any viable alternative absolutely underscores that fact.” (Read more from “Thousands Rally in Times Square to Protest Iran Deal” HERE)

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Pope Francis to Be Tried by Sanhedrin

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A re-established and self declared Israeli Sanhedrin, the religious High Court composed of 71 sages, has declared that it is putting Pope Francis on trial unless he retracts his statement that the Jews have no right to the land of Israel or to Jerusalem.

In February 2013, the Vatican officially recognized the “State of Palestine” but more significantly, the Vatican signed a treaty in June with “Palestine” in which the Holy See switched its diplomatic relations from the Palestinian Liberation Organization to the “State of Palestine”. This treaty is the first legal document negotiated between the Holy See and the Palestinian state and as such, constitutes an official recognition.

The trial and judgment will be on September 20th, 2015. If Pope Francis chooses to ignore the summons, he will be judged in absentia.

The Sanhedrin sent a letter to Pope Francis in reaction to the Vatican’s recent support of the Palestinian Authority’s unilateral moves to declare themselves a nation, reported the Hebrew magazine Matzav Haruach on June 24.

The letter stated:

“Because the Vatican recognized the organization known as the Palestinian Authority as a nation, and has begun to refer to it as a nation in its documents. His honor has named the head of said authority as an ‘Angel of Peace’, as was explained by a spokesman for the Vatican, that his intention was to encourage Abu Mazen to advance towards peace. These actions, to our great dismay, are consistent with a long series of actions and stances that are as in the days of the Roman Catholic Religion, that swore to persecute Israel because we refused to accept their Messiah as the Messiah of Israel, and to renounce our faith. The recent announcements and actions of the Vatican are a rebuke to the Jewish Nation and to the Bible, which you use to interpret the prophecies, as if God has abandoned his original Nation of Israel. Reality has proven the opposite to be true.”

“We require from you an apology for your recognizing as a nation those who stole the land, those who are known as the Palestinian Authority, and we are informing the Vatican that the sole God given right to the land of Israel is to the Nation of Israel. If His Honor the Pope, and the Vatican, do not apologize within two weeks of receiving this letter, and if he does not change his ways, we shall judge these actions in the Court of Mount Zion, in a court of 71 Jewish elders of Zion, and enact the prophecy of ‘The liberators will rise up upon Mount Zion, to judge the Mountain of Esau and the kingdom shall be God’s’ (Obadiah 1:21). The court shall judge the Vatican in its presence or in absentia, and it is possible that the Vatican will be found guilty of anti-Semitism, as has been known to be done several times throughout history, and to place responsibility upon the Vatican for all of the outcomes of its actions.”

(Read more from “Pope Francis to Be Tried by Sanhedrin” HERE)

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Illegal Alien Victim’s Mother: ‘We Are at War Right in This Country’

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Choking back tears, parents whose children were slain by illegal immigrants said Tuesday the federal government and so-called sanctuary cities both share blame for their children’s deaths, and pleaded with Congress for an all-out effort to secure the border and deport those who already snuck in.

“I don’t want your sympathy, I want you to do something,” demanded Laura Wilkerson, whose 18-year-old son was strangled, had his throat smashed and his body lit on fire by an illegal immigrant trained in mixed martial arts. “Quit sitting silent because it’s going to help you get a vote.”

The lawmakers, who said they were moved by the testimony of Ms. Wilkerson and a handful of others who recounted their relatives’ murders, vowed to take action and trained much of their criticism on San Francisco, whose sanctuary policy protected an illegal immigrant whom police have accused of killing 32-year-old Kathryn Steinle earlier this month as she walked on Pier 14 with her father . . .

The hearing highlighted a shift in the immigration debate. Over the last few years, immigrant rights advocates have essentially won the public debate, focusing on sympathetic illegal immigrants, and so-called Dreamers in particular, who have made good on their chances of a better life in the U.S. . . .

“I want you to be angry that America’s borders are wide open. America does not know who is in this country. It is time to put Americans first,” Ms. Wilkerson said. “Close the borders, figure out who is really here. Keep statistics. Realize that we are at war right here in this country.” (Read more from “Illegal Alien Victim’s Mother: ‘We Are at War Right in This Country'” HERE)

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