Senator Says Politics Have Reached Civil War Levels (+video)

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Photo Credit: ryanjreilly

Photo Credit: ryanjreilly

As the clock ticks down toward a possible government shutdown, Sen. Tom Harkin, D-Iowa, isn’t holding back.

On the Senate floor before 10 a.m. Friday, the senator gave a speech describing how American politics have reached the level at which “a small group of willful men and women who have a certain ideology”—read: the tea party and Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas—have been able to take over the congressional budget debate in the last week. “Since they can’t get their way,” Harkin said, “they’re going to create this confusion and discourse and hope that the public will be so mixed up in who is to blame for this, that they’ll blame both sides.”

This isn’t just congressional business as usual, Harkin said. It’s much, much more dire:

It’s dangerous. It’s very dangerous. I believe, Mr. President, we are at one of the most dangerous points in our history right now. Every bit as dangerous as the break-up of the Union before the Civil War.

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A Small President on the World Stage

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Photo Credit: Chad Crowe

Photo Credit: Chad Crowe

The world misses the old America, the one before the crash—the crashes—of the past dozen years.

That is the takeaway from conversations the past week in New York, where world leaders gathered for the annual U.N. General Assembly session. Our friends, and we have many, speak almost poignantly of the dynamism, excellence, exuberance and leadership of the nation they had, for so many years, judged themselves against, been inspired by, attempted to emulate, resented.

As for those who are not America’s friends, some seem still confused, even concussed, by the new power shift. What is their exact place in it? Will it last? Will America come roaring back? Can she? Does she have the political will, the human capital, the old capability?

It is a world in a new kind of flux, one that doesn’t know what to make of America anymore. In part because of our president.

“We want American leadership,” said a member of a diplomatic delegation of a major U.S. ally. He said it softly, as if confiding he missed an old friend.

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Photo: Ted Cruz Kneels in Prayer Outside the White House

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Photo Credit: CBN News

Photo Credit: CBN News

Here’s a shot of Sen. Ted Cruz praying in front of The White House yesterday.

No, he’s not praying that Barack Obama will overturn Obamacare and no, he’s not praying that he will occupy the presidency one day. Instead, he’s alongside Rev. Rob Schenck (from Faith and Action) and Rev. Frazier White (a Democrat and Obama supporter) praying for Saeed Abedini, who has been in an Iranian prison for one year. He is being persecuted for his faith to Jesus Christ.

Who says Ted Cruz isn’t bipartisan?

I have not only interviewed Ted Cruz many times, but I have spent time with him and his family. He is true Bible-believing Christian who is not ashamed of the Gospel. Of course the liberals don’t want to hear that nonsense. They’ll now be busy trying to figure out how to distort this picture in Adobe Photoshop.

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DHS Adviser to Persecuted Christians: You Incited Muslims

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Photo Credit: WND

Photo Credit: WND

An adviser to the Department of Homeland Security has used his Twitter profile to defend the Muslim Brotherhood while accusing Egypt’s persecuted Christian minority of inciting against Islam.

Earlier this month, Mohamed Elibiary, who was appointed to the Department of Homeland Security Advisory Council by then-secretary Janet Napolitano in 2010, tweeted that he was reappointed and even promoted.

The Investigative Project on Terrorism reported Elibiary’s tweets about Egypt’s Coptic Christians.

“For decade since 9/11 attack extremist American #Coptic activists have nurtured anti #Islam & anti #Muslim sentiments among AM RT wing,” Elibiary wrote.

Earlier, Elibiary attacked the U.S. Coptic community for its protests against a wave of Muslim attacks on their relatives in Egypt.

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Healing: White House Compares Republicans to Terrorists, Kidnappers, Arsonists (+video)

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Photo Credit: TownHall

Photo Credit: TownHall

If you’re surprised by this administration’s poisonous rhetoric, you haven’t been paying attention. And once again, the self-appointed civility policy are strangely off duty. Go figure. Which brings us to Dan Pfeiffer, one of our beloved Post-Partisan Prince’s spokesmen. Pfeiffer’s name may sound familiar; he’s the brilliant messaging guru who informed the country that “the law is irrelevant” in regards to the ongoing IRS scandal. Now this jackass wants Americans to know precisely how his boss views his political opposition in the current budget disputes:

White House senior adviser Dan Pfeiffer likened House Republicans to suicide bombers, kidnappers and arsonists in a single interview on Thursday. “What we’re not for is negotiating with people with a bomb strapped to their chest,” Pfeiffer told CNN’s Jake Tapper in laying out the president’s refusal to compromise with the GOP to win an increase in the nation’s debt limit…

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Obama: Republicans Would Own Government Shutdown

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Photo Credit: AP

Photo Credit: AP

President Obama on Friday pushed Republicans to pass a spending bill and warned that he would not give in to their demands to defund Obamacare as Washington careened closer to a shutdown.

“If Congress chooses not to pass a budget by Monday, they will shut down the government,” Obama told reporters at a hastily-arranged press conference from the White House briefing room.

Obama said blame for a shutdown would rest solely on Republicans whom he accused of undermining the recovery because they “can’t get their way.”

The White House and Congress are facing an Oct. 1 deadline to keep the government funded and have achieved scant progress on a compromise thus far. In addition to the government-shutdown fight, leaders are up against an Oct. 17 deadline to increase the nation’s borrowing limit.

Conservatives are using the fiscal fights to try to block Obama’s healthcare reform law. Last week the House GOP passed a short-term spending bill that defunded Obamacare.

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Will Obama Fall for Iranian President’s Deception?

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Photo Credit: AP

Photo Credit: AP

He’s been portrayed by the mainstream media as the anti-Ahmadenijad—a pragmatic moderate who’s set to strike a grand bargain with the United States and save the world from a looming military showdown over Iran’s nuclear weapons program.

But as Iranian president Hassan Rowhani takes center stage at the U.N. General Assembly this week, full of reassuring smiles and promises of peace, the Obama administration would be wise to keep a peculiar-sounding Arabic word in mind.

That word is taqiyya (pronounced ta-kee-ah). Translated into English, it means “deception.”

Taqiyya has long been a favorite tactic utilized by radical Shia Islamists—like those that comprise the current Iranian regime—to confound their enemies and lull them into a false sense of security, even complacency.

If President Obama ends up meeting with Rowhani on Tuesday when both men speak before the General Assembly (an encounter White House officials have hinted may take place), expect nothing less than a full-on taqiyya-fest.

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18-Year-Old Girl’s Request for Something So Simple Before She Suddenly Died Becomes Global “Pay-It-Forward” Movement (+video)

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picture - pay-it-forward-AJO-7Earlier this month Alyssa Josephine O’Neill, 18, made what appeared to be an everyday kind of request — she asked her mother to take her out for a pumpkin spice latte the following day. But her request turned out to be anything but everyday. O’Neill died the next day, Sept. 4, of an epileptic seizure…and she never got her latte.

“We were just shocked at the sudden loss and didn’t know what to do,” her father, Jason O’Neill, tells CNN. Alyssa was diagnosed a year ago, notes Deseret News.

“There isn’t a protocol for when you lose a child,” he tells the Erie Times News. “We didn’t know what to do or how to do it. But we knew that lying in bed and crying didn’t feel good. We wanted to feel good and honor Alyssa’s memory…”

Two days after Alyssa’s funeral, her family went to a Starbucks in Erie, Pa., their hometown, and bought lattes for 40 strangers — all O’Neill asked of the store manager was to pen an #AJO hashtag with a purple marker (her favorite color) on each cup in his daughter’s memory….

“It just kind of exploded at that point,” O’Neill recalls. “We had somewhat of a following, but nothing like this.”

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UN Security Council Votes to Eliminate Syria’s Chemical Weapons

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Photo Credit: AP

Photo Credit: AP

The U.N. Security Council voted unanimously Friday night to secure and destroy Syria’s chemical weapons stockpile, a landmark decision aimed at taking poison gas off the battlefield in the escalating 2 1/2-year conflict.

The vote after two weeks of intense negotiations marked a major breakthrough in the paralysis that has gripped the council since the Syrian uprising began. Russia and China previously vetoed three Western-backed resolutions pressuring President Bashar Assad’s regime to end the violence.

“Today’s historic resolution is the first hopeful news on Syria in a long time,” U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon told the council immediately after the vote, but he and others stressed that much more needs to be done to stop the fighting that has left more 100,000 dead.

“A red light for one form of weapons does not mean a green light for others,” the U.N. chief said. “This is not a license to kill with conventional weapons.”

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said the “strong, enforceable, precedent-setting” resolution shows that diplomacy can be so powerful “that it can peacefully defuse the worst weapons of war.”

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Continued Support for Keystone XL Pipeline

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Most Americans (65%) continue to favor building the Keystone XL pipeline, perhaps the most politically contentious energy issue in Barack Obama’s second term. Yet when it comes to another issue making headlines – a proposal to tighten greenhouse gas emissions from power plants – the public favors stricter limits, by exactly the same margin as the Keystone pipeline (65% to 30%).

Opinions on these two hotly debated issues underscore the complexity of public attitudes on U.S. energy policy. Support for increasing energy production from some traditional sources remains strong: 58% favor increased offshore oil and gas drilling in U.S. waters.

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Yet over the past year, opposition to the drilling process known as fracking has increased, as has opposition to nuclear power. Just 38% favor promoting the increased use of nuclear power while 58% are opposed, the highest level of opposition since the question was first asked in 2005.

The national survey by the Pew Research Center, conducted Sept. 4-8 among 1,506 adults, finds that, as with other energy-related issues, there is a sharp partisan divide on the Keystone pipeline. But while an overwhelming majority of Republicans (82%) favor construction of the pipeline, so too do 64% of independents and about half of Democrats (51%).

President Obama’s decision about whether to go ahead with the pipeline is expected in the next few months. Environmental groups staunchly oppose the project, while GOP lawmakers are stepping up pressure on Obama to approve it.

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