No Worries! Obama Golfs 150th Round as Superstorm Devastates Philippines, Iran Deal Enrages

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Photo Credit: AP/Jacquelyn MartinPresident Obama’s approval ratings may be stuck in a sand trap, but that has not deterred him from sticking to his weekly round of golf.

After teeing off Saturday at the private course in Florida where the movie “Caddyshack” was filmed, Mr. Obama hit the milestone number of 150 golf rounds in less than five years in the White House.

The Secret Service loaded Mr. Obama’s golf bag emblazoned with the presidential seal into the motorcade Saturday morning to head to the private Grande Oaks Golf Club in Davie. Sporting a blue polo shirt, tan slacks and a cap, Mr. Obama spent five hours on the private course with former NBA star Alonzo Mourning, friend Cyrus Walker and former U.S. Trade Representative Ron Kirk.

Mr. Obama wasn’t much of a golfer before he ran for president. His regularity on the greens started April 26, 2009. He played 27 times that first year in office, including seven rounds during his vacations on Martha’s Vineyard and Hawaii.

In his second year as president, Mr. Obama played a little more — 30 rounds. He included a woman for only the second time when Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius joined on Oct. 10, 2010.

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Graham Won’t Lift Nominee-Hold Threat Over Benghazi (+video)

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Photo Credit: Getty ImageSen. Lindsey Graham says he still plans to use Senate holds on President Barack Obama’s nominees until he gets answers on the attack on the U.S. mission in Benghazi, Libya.

Pressed on CNN’s “State of the Union” Sunday, the South Carolina Republican said he hasn’t been able to interview the five survivors of the attack, and so he’ll continue to threaten holds on nominees until he gets to talk to them, as well as relevant CIA officials.

The holds are a last resort, he said.

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Hagel Sends US Troops Into Philippines to Help with Post-Typhoon Humanitarian Efforts

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Photo Credit: REUTERSSecretary of Defense Chuck Hagel on Sunday directed the U.S. Pacific Command to support American humanitarian relief efforts in the Philippines in the wake of Typhoon Haiyan.

Col. Brad Bartelt, a Marine Corps spokesman, said the U.S. military was called in at the request of the Philippines government.

Haiyan struck the island nation Friday, impacted more than 4.2 million people across 36 provinces in the Philippines, according to the Philippine government’s National Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Council.

The death toll has reached 1,000 but the number is projected to climb to 10,000.

Philippine officials say they will have a better idea about fatalities and damage in the coming days as transportation and communications systems are repaired.

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Are Millennials Turning Their Backs on the American Dream?

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Photo Credit: The Daily BeastIn his classic 1893 essay, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” historian Frederick Jackson Turner spoke of “the expansive character of American life.” Even though the frontier was closing, Turner argued, the fundamental nature of Americans was still defined by their incessant probing for “a new field of opportunity.” Turner’s claim held true for at least a century—during that time, the American spirit generated relentless technological improvement, the gradual creation of a mass middle class, and the integration of ever more diverse immigrants into the national narrative.

Yet today, many consider this modern period of “expansiveness” to be as doomed as the prairie frontier culture whose denouement Turner portrayed. Nothing makes this clearer than the perception of a majority of middle class Americans that their children will not do better than them, with as many as pessimistic about the future as are optimistic. Almost one-third of the public, according to Pew, consider themselves “lower” class , as opposed to middle class, up from barely one quarter in 2008.

Are Young Americans Becoming Herbivores?

To some, this dismal outlook is either inevitable, or even positive, as Americans shift from their historically “expansive” view and embrace a more modest déclassé future. Rather than seek new worlds to conquer, or even hope to retain the accomplishments of prior generations, contemporary young Americans seem destined to confront a world stamped by ever narrowing opportunity, class distinction, and societal stagnation. Once a nation of competitive omnivores and carnivores, America could be turning more docile—a country of content, grazing herbivores.

Just such a diminished world view has already taken root in Japan, particularly among that country’s younger males. Growing up in a period of tepid economic growth, a declining labor market, and a loss of overall competitiveness, Japan’s male “herbivores” are more interested in comics, computer games, and Internet socializing than building a career or even the opposite sex. Marriage and family have increasingly little appeal to them, sentiments they share with most women their age.

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Duty, Honor, Country: Gen. Douglas MacArthur’s Last Speech to the West Point Corps of Cadets

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…Duty, Honor, Country: Those three hallowed words reverently dictate what you ought to be, what you can be, what you will be. They are your rallying points: to build courage when courage seems to fail; to regain faith when there seems to be little cause for faith; to create hope when hope becomes forlorn.

Unhappily, I possess neither that eloquence of diction, that poetry of imagination, nor that brilliance of metaphor to tell you all that they mean.

The unbelievers will say they are but words, but a slogan, but a flamboyant phrase. Every pedant, every demagogue, every cynic, every hypocrite, every troublemaker, and I am sorry to say, some others of an entirely different character, will try to downgrade them even to the extent of mockery and ridicule.

But these are some of the things they do: They build your basic character. They mold you for your future roles as the custodians of the nation’s defense. They make you strong enough to know when you are weak, and brave enough to face yourself when you are afraid. They teach you to be proud and unbending in honest failure, but humble and gentle in success; not to substitute words for actions, not to seek the path of comfort, but to face the stress and spur of difficulty and challenge; to learn to stand up in the storm but to have compassion on those who fall; to master yourself before you seek to master others; to have a heart that is clean, a goal that is high; to learn to laugh, yet never forget how to weep; to reach into the future yet never neglect the past; to be serious yet never to take yourself too seriously; to be modest so that you will remember the simplicity of true greatness, the open mind of true wisdom, the meekness of true strength.

They give you a temper of the will, a quality of the imagination, a vigor of the emotions, a freshness of the deep springs of life, a temperamental predominance of courage over timidity, of an appetite for adventure over love of ease. They create in your heart the sense of wonder, the unfailing hope of what next, and the joy and inspiration of life. They teach you in this way to be an officer and a gentleman.

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Conservative U.S. Catholics Feel Left Out of the Pope’s Embrace

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Photo Credit: Kendrick Brinson for NYTWhen Pope Francis was elected in March, Bridget Kurt received a small prayer card with his picture at her church and put it up on her refrigerator at home, next to pictures of her friends and her favorite saints.

She is a regular attender of Mass, a longtime stalwart in her church’s anti-abortion movement and a believer that all the church’s doctrines are true and beautiful and should be obeyed. She loved the last two popes, and keeps a scrapbook with memorabilia from her road trip to Denver in 1993 to see Pope John Paul II at World Youth Day.

But Ms. Kurt recently took the Pope Francis prayer card down and threw it away.

“It seems he’s focusing on bringing back the left that’s fallen away, but what about the conservatives?” said Ms. Kurt, a hospice community educator. “Even when it was discouraging working in pro-life, you always felt like Mother Teresa was on your side and the popes were encouraging you. Now I feel kind of thrown under the bus.”

In the eight months since he became pope, Francis has won affection worldwide for his humble mien and common touch. His approval numbers are skyrocketing. Even atheists are applauding.

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It’s a Game to Obama

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Photo Credit: WND “This isn’t some damn game!”

That was House Speaker John Boehner’s angry reaction to a senior Obama administration official who had boasted, “We are winning. … It doesn’t really matter to us [how long the government shutdown lasts] because what matters is the end result.”

But despite Boehner’s understandable frustration, a “damn game” is precisely what it was.

Just as with the president’s serial “if-you-like-your-policy-you-can-keep-it-period” Obamacare lies, his actions during last month’s government “shutdown” – you know, barring 80- to-90-year-old World War II veterans in wheelchairs from their own memorial, blocking highway turnouts so sightseers couldn’t gaze up at Mt. Rushmore, threatening to arrest Catholic priests if they conducted Mass on military bases – are all part of a carefully calculated, high-stakes game.

In fact, a close and honest examination reveals that Americans have been living through an extended era of games being played on them – not just in fraudulently imposing Obamacare and staging a government “shutdown,” but nonstop, throughout the course of the entire Obama presidency.

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Atheist ‘Mega-Churches’ Take Root Across US, World

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Photo Credit: AP/Jae C. HongIt looked like a typical Sunday morning at any mega-church. Several hundred people, including families with small children, packed in for more than an hour of rousing music, an inspirational sermon, a reading and some quiet reflection. The only thing missing was God.

Nearly three dozen gatherings dubbed “atheist mega-churches” by supporters and detractors have sprung up around the U.S. and Australia – with more to come – after finding success in Great Britain earlier this year. The movement fueled by social media and spearheaded by two prominent British comedians is no joke.

On Sunday, the inaugural Sunday Assembly in Los Angeles attracted several hundred people bound by their belief in non-belief. Similar gatherings in San Diego, Nashville, New York and other U.S. cities have drawn hundreds of atheists seeking the camaraderie of a congregation without religion or ritual.

The founders, British duo Sanderson Jones and Pippa Evans, are currently on a tongue-in-cheek “40 Dates, 40 Nights” tour around the U.S. and Australia to drum up donations and help launch new Sunday Assemblies. They hope to raise more than $800,000 that will help atheists launch their pop-up congregations around the world. So far, they have raised about $50,000.

They don’t bash believers but want to find a new way to meet likeminded people, engage in the community and make their presence more visible in a landscape dominated by faith.

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French MP: If Sanctions on Iran are Loosened, Israel Will Attack (+video)

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Photo Credit: Marc Israel Sellem/Pool/Flash90By Times of Israel Staff.

A French member of parliament telephoned French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius in Geneva at the weekend to warn him that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu would attack Iran’s nuclear facilities if the P5+1 nations did not stiffen their terms on a deal with Iran, Israel’s Channel 2 News reported Sunday.

“I know [Netanyahu],” the French MP, Meyer Habib, reportedly told Fabius, and predicted that the Israeli prime minister would resort to the use of force if the deal was approved in its form at the time. “If you don’t toughen your positions, Netanyahu will attack Iran,” the report quoted Habib as saying. “I know this. I know him. You have to toughen your positions in order to prevent war.”

France’s Fabius is widely reported to have scuppered the finalizing of the emerging deal late Saturday, leading to the halting of the negotiations with Iran, and an agreement to reconvene on November 20.

Explaining his concerns to reporters in Geneva, Fabius said Tehran was resisting demands that it suspend work on its plutonium-producing reactor at Arak and downgrade its stockpile of higher-enriched uranium.

Habib, the deputy president of the Jewish umbrella organization in France, was elected to the National Assembly in Paris in June, to represent the district of southern Europe, which includes French nationals residing in Israel.

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Photo Credit: Daily Caller Iran general: No doubt Israel and America will be attacked

By Reza Kahlili.

Even before the nuclear negotiations between Iran and the 5+1 world powers ended in Geneva early Sunday with no deal, an Iranian general lashed out at America Saturday and warned both the U.S. and Israel that they will be attacked.

According to Fars News Agency, the regime’s outlet run by the Revolutionary Guards, Gen. Massoud Jazayeri, deputy chief of staff of Iran’s armed forces, said “America’s interests and all of Israel are within the range of the Islamic Republic and there is not the slightest doubt among Iran’s armed forces to confront the American government and the Zionists (Israel).”

Jazayeri said Israel is pulling the strings of Washington and “the American government is one of the most hated and evil governments in the world.”

The general mocked President Obama’s position that the military option remains on the table over Iran’s nuclear development. “If America had the ability and the will for war, it would allow no doubt in attacking Syria. America will soon find out that Iran’s power cannot be ignored.”

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CAIR Discussing Establishment of Shariah Divorce System in Michigan

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Photo Credit: WND A leader in a front group for the movement that aims to turn the U.S. into an Islamic state is among the Muslims in the Detroit area talking about establishing religious courts that would grant women a divorce under Islamic law, or Shariah.

About 15 Muslim leaders – including Dawud Walid, executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations’ Michigan chapter – discussed the issue at a monthly gathering Sept. 25.

The discussion was prompted by a story in the Arab American News that described the difficulties that Muslim women experience when their husbands refuse to grant them a religious divorce, noted the blog Creeping Sharia.

The Arab American News article said many are forced to go “imam shopping” and travel across the U.S. to find an imam willing to grant them an Islamic divorce.

The publication commented that many Muslim women are denied a divorce, even when their husbands are physically abusive.

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