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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McConnell to Newsmax: Defunding Obamacare Not ‘Waste of Time’ for GOP

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mcconnell64283Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell told Newsmax in an exclusive interview on Friday that Republicans weren’t fighting a lost cause to defund Obamacare as part of legislation to prevent the federal government from shutting down next week.

“I don’t think it was a waste of time,” the Kentucky Republican said. “The American people do fully understand that still, not a single Republican in the House or Senate favors this awful new law — and if they will send us enough additional new members to get rid of it, we will.”

The Senate voted 54-44 along party lines on Friday to temporarily finance the government through mid-December and pay for the troubled healthcare law for the next year. Independents Angus King and Bernie Sanders voted with the Democrats. Republicans Orrin Hatch and Jeff Flake did not vote.

The vote came after an amendment was approved to remove the language that defunded Obamacare, on the same party-line vote.

The House of Representatives had sent the legislation — a “continuing resolution” — to the Senate last week. The House bill included language to defund the Affordable Care Act.

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Senate Backs Cloture Over Cruz’s Objections – 18 Stand With Cruz (+video)

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Photo Credit: Daily Caller

Photo Credit: Daily Caller

Texas Republican Sen. Ted Cruz’s latest battle to get the Senate to defund Obamacare came to an abrupt halt Friday afternoon, when a large majority of senators voted in favor of the procedural move that Cruz had been opposing as the last barrier against the health-care law.

Over Cruz’s objections, Senators voted 79-19 in favor of invoking cloture on the House-passed resolution to fund the federal government past Monday, when the current funding resolution expires. Voting on cloture is a procedural vote that allows the Senate to move forward with consideration of the bill.

Cruz was joined by just 18 of his fellow Republicans: Sens. Mike Crapo of Idaho, Mike Enzi of Wyoming, Deb Fischer of Nebraska, Chuck Grassley of Iowa, Dean Heller of Nevada, James Inhofe of Oklahoma, Mike Lee of Utah, Jim Moran of Kansas, Rand Paul of Kentucky, Rob Portman of Ohio, Jim Risch of Idaho, Pat Roberts of Kansas, Marco Rubio of Florida, Tim Scott of South Carolina, Jeff Sessions of Alabama, Richard Shelby of Alabama, Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania and David Vitter of Louisiana.

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Romney Decries the ‘Political Dysfunction’ in Washington

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romney_bigotryMitt Romney thinks Obamacare is a bad law and would like to see it “go away,” but said Friday he disagrees with how conservatives are trying to engineer that.

In an interview with CNN, the 2012 Republican presidential nominee said using the the Affordable Care Act in the debate over a funding bill and debt ceiling rise is not effective — and counterproductive.

“We’re more effective tactically not to use a shutdown of some kind to pursue the … anti-Obamacare objective,” he said. “I don’t think that will be as effective.”

“The tactic of using a government shutdown to try and push that will be counterproductive politically, that it’s going to end up hurting our party, and it could well – it could be inconvenience, and hurt some individuals as well, and checks are late, and so forth,” said Romney.

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Kansas School Board Brings Back Student-Led Prayer

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Photo Credit: Biz Pac Review

Photo Credit: Biz Pac Review

A rural Kansas School Board courageously defied 50 years of U.S. Supreme Court rulings by allowing student-led prayer at all school activities, even broadcasting them on the school’s public address system.

What began as an unscheduled, impromptu suggestion at a Monday ISD No. 480 School Board meeting ended up as a motion that was immediately seconded, discussed and unanimously approved, according to the Leader and Times.

“I think that’s one of the greatest things we’ve ever done,” said Board Member Tammy Sutherland-Abbott, who seconded Board Member Nick Hatcher’s motion.

Hatcher had spontaneously introduced the idea.

“I would like to see us bring prayer back to the games,” he told his fellow board members. “I have struggled with that — not having prayer at our activities — because it’s ‘not the thing to do,’ but if the board thought it was important enough that they would support it, and defend it if the time came, I’d like to ask that we do that at our next meeting.”

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