Surprise! GOP, Dems Playing for Same Team

Photo Credit: WNDMore of America seems to be catching on to the fact that – while we have two political parties – they aren’t in fact the ones that are labeled Republican and Democrat.

Perhaps these two unlabeled parties should be given names. Let’s call them the Potomics and the Outcasts. You know, those inside and outside the moat that surrounds the castles of government in Washington, D.C.

I confess to having been snookered by this game myself on too many occasions. When election time rolls around, the game works like the good-cop, bad-cop routine in crime novels. The two cops drag the suspect into the interrogation room, and the bad cop wants to beat the confession out of the guy.

The good cop is more sympathetic and holds the bad cop at bay. Given the suspect’s circumstances, his actions were entirely understandable, even if they were wrong. But certainly a court would consider leniency in return for a confession. To the suspect, watching the bad cop ranting and raving in the background, this seems like a plan.

And so, most of America has continued to vote Republican or Democrat, because it seemed like a plan. We simply did not recognize that they were both on the same team.

Read more from this story HERE.

Australian March for Babies Turns Violent: U.S. Pro-Life Activists, MPs Assaulted by Pro-Abort Mob

Photo Credit: LifeSiteNews American pro-life activist Bryan Kemper says he is bruised and sore, but recovering, after a mob of pro-abortion counter-protesters attacked him and his team of pro-life activists during the March for the Babies in Melbourne, Australia.

Kemper, the founder of Prolife Stand True Ministries, told LifeSiteNews.com today that he was thrown to the ground and repeatedly kicked. Several other members of his team were also roughed up.

Pro-life Victoria Member of Parliament Bernie Finn also told the press that he was “belted in the head” and pelted with eggs, and that fellow pro-life MP Andrew Elsbury was thrown to the ground and stomped on.

“What we saw today was literally a public mugging on the streets of Melbourne and Victoria Police let it happen,” Finn fumed. “We had people being assaulted, being kicked, being stomped on and they sat back and watched.”

Trouble began brewing even before the march began, said Kemper. When the pro-life activists tried to begin the march, they were blocked by the mob of about 200 pro-abortion protesters.

Read more from this story HERE.

Food Stamp Debate Holds Up Farm Bill

Photo Credit: Rich Pedroncelli/APThe final stage of the long-delayed U.S. farm bill is about to begin, but drafting a legislative compromise between the Senate and House of Representatives is still hampered by deep partisan divisions over cuts in food stamps for the poor.

Lawmakers in the House agreed on Friday to open negotiations with the Senate over a final version of the five-year, $500 billion bill. Its salient agricultural initiative, but one that is mostly not controversial, is an expansion of federally subsidized crop insurance by 10 percent.

The major dispute in the bill is food stamps, which help low-income Americans, mostly children, the elderly or disabled, to buy food. The latest figures show a near-record 47.8 million people received benefits averaging $133 a month.

The Republican-controlled House wants to cut the major U.S. antihunger program by $39 billion over a decade, nearly 10 times the reduction proposed by the Democrat-run Senate. The tighter eligibility rules in the House plan would cut 4 million people from the program in 2014.

House Majority Leader Eric Cantor was the leading proponent of the cuts. Another prominent supporter,Steve Southerland of Florida, was expected to be named one of the House negotiators as a signal of Republican resolve to see major reforms.

Read more from this story HERE.

Dangerous Times: Obama Bows to the Mullahs

Photo Credit: isafmediaIt looks like the fix is in. The mullahs will certainly get their nukes and ICBMs, and neither Israel nor the Saudis (who are scared to death of the mullahs) will rely on American protection as long as Obama is in office. Obama just put out the welcome mat for Mullah Rouhani, the killer of 245 U.S. Marines in Beirut in 1984, and the ultraleft UK Guardian just claimed that its readers voted for Great Humanitarian Rouhani to be the next winner of the Nobel Peace Prize. The post-Stalinist Guardian is not known for telling the truth too often, and nobody knows if that “survey” is real or not. But the Guardian and the BBC are the two biggest hard-left organs of propaganda in Europe, and they have long promoted a kind of Hitler-Stalin Pact between European socialists in the EU and radical Muslims of both stripes in the Middle East. These are politically powerful signals, and they will be read as such around the world.

Here is the way the dominos seem to be falling: We are going back to a binary power split between Russia and the United States, with China dominating Asia. Our former allies like Israel and the Saudis are quickly moving away from us and seeking more trustworthy allies, notably Russia, as this column has pointed out before. Putin successfully protected his ally Assad in Syria against a pathetic Obama, who has systematically sabotaged the Pax Americana of the last seven decades. The U.S. only needed to betray a few allies (like Poland on anti-missile defense and Israel against Iran) to spur on our other allies to get the idea. Japan and South Korea may be drawn to China, and Japan is now said to be developing its own nuclear weapons, seventy years after Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Europeans (who have lost the will to defend themselves) are looking to Russia as well, which is acting like the old Tsarist empire, promising to protect Western civilization against the barbarian hordes of imperial Islam. Vladimir Putin visited Jerusalem last year and sat down to talk with the Israeli Cabinet. He also prayed at a Church of the Holy Sepulchre, where the Russian Orthodox Church has long staked its own claim. Putin says he is a Christian, and is often shown in photos with the ancient Patriarch of Moscow, the equivalent of the Catholic Pope.

Putin has dealt ruthlessly with his own Islamist terror threat from Chechnya, and the Europeans will huddle under any umbrella in the nuclear proliferation storm that is about to break loose. Serious nations defend themselves seriously. In the nuclear missile age, non-serious nations have to buy protection.

Huge discoveries of shale deposits around the world are promising to liberate industrial countries from the chokehold of the Persian Gulf oil — and once that’s gone, who will defend the Sunni Arabs against Iranian aggression? Texas is becoming the biggest oil and gas producer in the world. Both Saudi Prince Bandar and Al Waleed, the richest zillionaire in Arabia, are publicly warning that the price of oil will soon go down as China, Poland, Russia, Germany, Britain and of course the United States are expecting domestic energy to supply their own needs for decades to come.

Read more from this story HERE.

Earthquake In Greece Hits Crete With 6.4 Magnitude Quake

Photo Credit: The InquisitrA Strong earthquake in Greece shook the island of Crete, causing some damage.

The quake had a magnitude of 6.3 on the Richter scale, but early reports indicate that damage is minimal.

The Athens Geodynamic Institute said the quake occurred at 4:12 p.m. (13.12 GMT), 68 kilometers (42 miles) west of the city of Chania, in Crete, and 279 kilometers (172 miles) south of Athens. The epicenter was 23 kilometers (14 miles) under the sea.

Chania deputy mayor Manoussos Lionakis told The Associated Press: “The earthquake was very strong and lasted long… Fortunately, there was no serious damage. The worst I’ve heard was some rock falls in a ravine west of the city. A bus was trapped, but no one was hurt. We have removed the debris.

Read more from this story HERE.

Food Stamp Debit Cards Not Working in 17 States

Photo Credit: clementine gallotPeople in Ohio, Michigan and 15 other states found themselves unable to use their food stamp debit-style cards on Saturday, after a routine check by vendor Xerox Corp. resulted in a system failure.

The electronic benefits system experienced a temporary shutdown during a routine test of Xerox back-up systems, company spokeswoman Jennifer Wasmer said Saturday.

“While the system is now up and running, beneficiaries in the 17 affected states continue to experience connectivity issues to access their benefits. Technical staff is addressing the issue and expect the system to be restored soon,” Wasmer said in an emailed statement. “Beneficiaries requiring access to their benefits can work with their local retailers who can activate an emergency voucher system where available. We appreciate our clients’ patience while we work through this outage as quickly as possible.”

U.S. Department of Agriculture spokeswoman Courtney Rowe underscored that the outage is not related to the government shutdown.

Shoppers left carts of groceries behind at a packed Market Basket grocery store in Biddeford, Maine, because they couldn’t get their benefits, said fellow shopper Barbara Colman, of Saco, Maine. The manager put up a sign saying the EBT system was not in use. Colman, who receives the benefits, called an 800 telephone line for the program and it said the system was down due to maintenance, she said.

Read more from this story HERE.

Nancy Pelosi Joins Women’s Hall of Fame

Photo Credit: APHouse Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi, the late former first lady Betty Ford and Title IX advocate Bernice Sandler are among the nine women set to be inducted into the National Women’s Hall of Fame on Saturday.

The ceremony is being held in Seneca Falls, the western New York village where the first known women’s rights convention was held in 1848.

“I’m absolutely thrilled. I can’t believe it,” Pelosi told The Associated Press this week by phone from Washington before the ceremony. Several of her female congressional colleagues, along with two of her daughters and two granddaughters, plan to attend.

Also being honored are “Sexual Politics” author Kate Millett; horse racing’s most successful female jockey, Julie Krone; Ina May Gaskin, who is known as the “mother of authentic midwifery”; and monetary scholar Anna Jacobson Schwartz, who collaborated with Nobel laureate Milton Friedman on “A Monetary History of the United States, 1867-1960,” published in 1963. She died last year.

The inductees also include the late Mother Mary Joseph Rogers, who in 1912 founded Maryknoll Sisters, the first U.S.-based Catholic missionary congregation of religious women, and 19th-century educator Emma Hart Willard, who advocated for equal education for women in higher education in the early 1800s.

Read more from this story HERE.

Los Angeles School District Wants Teachers to Wear Pro-Gay Badges

Photo Credit: John Deasy/CBS screenshotLos Angeles public schools are encouraging teachers and staff to wear badges that identify them as “LGBT allies” and supporters of the pro-gay movement.

Superintendent John Deasy kicked off the effort Thursday, which he said was necessary to prevent gay kids from being bullied.

“We want all our youth and staff to know that it is safe to be you in LAUSD,” said Deasy in a statement to the Los Angeles Times.

The move is part of the L.A. Gay and Lesbian Center’s “Out for Safe Schools” initiative….

Because nothing deters bullies like having their victims’ specialness publicly praised by authority figures, the L.A. Gay and Lesbian Center applauded the school district for its “groundbreaking” work in applauding gay students.

Read more from this story HERE.

Cruz Slams Immigration Hecklers: ‘They Don’t Want the Truth to be Heard’ (+video)

Photo Credit: ReutersIllegal immigrant advocates interrupted Sen. Ted Cruz’s speech to the Values Voters Summit on Friday more than a half-dozen times, calling on the Texas Republican and potential presidential candidate to support a pathway to citizenship for illegal immigrants.

But the Texas Republican repeatedly deflected the criticism, turning it into an attack against President Obama.

“How scared is the president?” Mr. Cruz said. “Oh, they don’t want the truth to be heard. They definitely don’t want the truth to be heard.”

The crowd also tried to drown out the protestors with chants of “USA! USA!”

The protesters were dragged out by security guards.

Read more from this story HERE.

Ben Carson: Obamacare Worst Thing to Happen to the U.S. Since Slavery (+video)

Photo Credit: Doug Wetzstein/special to The Washington TimesBy Cheryl Wetzstein.

Dr. Ben Carson didn’t mince words: Obamacare is “the worst thing that has happened in this nation since slavery.”

Dr. Carson made the declaration about President Obama’s sweeping health care mandate Friday during a speech at the Values Voter Summit.

“It is slavery because it aims to make all of us subservient to the government,” he said. “It was never about health care. It was about control.”

Read more from this story HERE.

_____________________________________________________

Photo Credit: APBen Carson Warns: ‘Socialized Medicine Is Keystone to Establishment of a Socialist State’

By James Beattie and Michael W. Chapman.

Dr. Ben Carson, the former director of Pediatric Neurosurgery at Johns Hopkins University and Hospital, drew a parallel between Obamacare and “socialized medicine” and cited Communist leader Vladimir Lenin’s support for government-run health care as the “keystone to the establishment of a socialist state.”

Speaking at the Values Voter Summit in Washington, D.C. on Friday, Dr. Carson said that Obamacare “was never about healthcare. It was about control,” and making all Americans “subservient to the government.”

He then commented on why the Democrat-dominant Congress in 2010 moved swiftly to pass the Affordable Care Act, a.k.a. Obamacare.

Read more from this story HERE.