Royal Baby: For Once the Entire World Knows a Baby is a Baby

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Photo Credit: LifeNewsKate Middleton, the Duchess of Cambridge, gave birth to a baby boy as the entire world waited with breath that was bated.

As the days turned into hours and the hours turned into minutes, people around the world awaited the birth of the “#RoyalBaby” — using that popular Twitter hashtag to engage in discussions about the birth of the child. But, as Christian writer Eric Metaxas pointed out during Middleton’s pregnancy, the world finally, for once, settled on the fact that a baby before birth is a human baby.

While abortion activists normally call a child in the womb anything but a baby or a child, this was one rare occasion where “Royal Baby” won out over “Royal Fetus.”

As Metaxas notes: “The battle over human dignity is waged not just at the local abortion clinic or crisis pregnancy center, nor merely in the halls of Congress or the Supreme Court. It is also carried out in our choice of words.”

The war on the sanctity of human life relies on bullets of deception and warheads of untruth—in short, on what George Orwell called “political language,” which he said “is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.”

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Charles Krauthammer Takes On Sally Kohn: Detroit is Not A GOP Failure, ‘It’s Been Run by The Democrats for 60 Years’ (+video)

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Photo Credit: YouTubeBy Jason Howerton. Charles Krauthammer hit back at liberal pundit Sally Kohn after she claimed conservatives will “try to use Detroit falsely as an example to push more austerity.” Kohn’s comments fall in line with those of a number of liberal and progressive commentators who are seemingly attempting to pin Detroit’s collapse on GOP policies, despite the fact that the city has been run by Democrats and progressives for decades.

That’s the point that Krauthammer hammered home.

Read more from this story HERE.

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Photo Credit: ReutersDetroit bankruptcy raises concerns about other US cites under huge retiree debt

By Fox News. The recent bankruptcy filing in Detroit is raising red flags about other major U.S. cities also dealing with billions in under-funded retiree benefits, prompting the question — who might be next?

Just last week, Chicago’s credit rating was downgraded as a result of its $19 billion in under-funded pension liabilities.

Moody’s Investors Service called the liabilities “very large and growing” and warned that Chicago, the country’s third-largest city, faces a “tremendous strain’’ in trying to meet future funding requirements and public safety demands.

A similar scenario, though decades in the making, largely doomed Detroit, whose average police response time has grown to more than 50 minutes.

And like Michigan, which appears in no position to bail out Detroit, Illinois is dealing with its own $97 billion pension shortfall. Read more from this story HERE.

Southwest Flight Crash-Lands At New York’s LaGuardia Airport (+video)

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Ten injured as plane crash lands without after nose landing gear COLLAPSES as it lands at New York’s LaGuardia Airport

By Michael Zennie. A jetliner has crash-landed at New York’s LaGuardia Airport after its nose landing gear collapsed as it touched down on the tarmac this evening.

Ten people aboard the Southwest Airlines Boeing 737-700 were hurt. Six had to be taken to a local hospital. The rest were treated at the scene. The extent of their injuries were not known, though they are believed to have been minor. Four passengers also suffered panic attacks after the landing.

Southwest Flight 345 was bound for New York City from Nashville, Tennessee. It was carrying 144 passengers – including a baby – and six crew members.

Aviation officials halted all takeoffs and landings at LaGuardia after the crash about 5.45pm on Monday. The Federal Aviation Administration said held all flights to LaGuardia for over an hour – delaying thousands of fliers.

Read more from this story HERE.

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Photo Credit: Reuters NYC Public Advocate threatens to prevent Saudi Arabian Airlines from landing at JFK

By Fox News. New York City Public Advocate Bill de Blasio tells FoxNews.com that he’ll work to prevent Saudi Arabian Airlines from landing at JFK and other American airports if the carrier does not change its policy of barring Israelis from flying — even when passengers are simply looking to transfer in Saudi Arabia to another country.

“When Saudi Airlines flies from our airports, it needs to follow our laws. Discrimination based on national origin is illegal. We’re going to take steps to see Saudi Airlines’ lease at JFK pulled until it respects the rights of Israeli nationals,” said de Blasio, a mayoral candidate who first helped expose the airline’s practices.

Federal law says an “air carrier or foreign air carrier may not subject a person in air transportation to discrimination on the basis of race, color, national origin, religion, sex or ancestry.” Conditions of the airline’s leases and agreements to operate at airports, such as JFK, could be terminated if the law is broken.

For its part, Saudi Arabian Airlines is citing lack of diplomatic relations between the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and Israel for the airline barring Israeli passengers. Read more from this story HERE.

Conservatives, Beware the Hatch Effect

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Photo Credit: RedStateIn 2014, several prominent Republicans in the House and Senate are going to be challenged by people more conservative than the incumbents in area where a more conservative person can still win. Leading up to these challenges, conservatives must beware of the Hatch Effect.

In 2012, many conservatives in print, radio, and television came out quickly and endorsed Orrin Hatch against Dan Liljenquist. Hatch had been a conservative warrior for a long time, he sounded conservative, and we’d need him in the fight against amnesty. He made the rounds on television, radio, and had references in various op-ed columns. Outside groups went to work for Orrin Hatch.

Those who fretted that Hatch might return to the ways of Ted Kennedy’s best friend on the right were drowned out by a near unified conservative front — one that did not include RedState.

In a debate against Dan Liljenquist, Hatch hit all the right notes on immigration.

[W]e won’t be able to solve these problems until we secure the borders, and we have to do that. Every other large nation in the world knows how to secure their borders, why can’t we secure ours? And second, we can no longer grant amnesty. I fought against the 1986 Simpson-Mazzoli bill because they granted amnesty to 3 million people. They should have to get in line like anybody else if they want to come into this country and do it legally.

Read more from this story HERE.

General: US Military Intervention in Syria Would Create ‘Unintended Consequences’

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Photo Credit: J Scott ApplewhiteThe top US military officer warned senators on Monday that taking military action to stop the bloodshed in Syria was likely to escalate quickly and result in “unintended consequences”, representing the most explicit uniformed opposition to deeper involvement in another war in the Middle East.

Alluding to the costly, bloody occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan, General Martin Dempsey, chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, said that once the US got involved militarily in the Syrian civil war, which the UN estimates to have killed about 93,000 people, “deeper involvement is hard to avoid”.

“We have learned from the past 10 years, however, that it is not enough to simply alter the balance of military power without careful consideration of what is necessary in order to preserve a functioning state,” Dempsey wrote to senators John McCain and Carl Levin on Monday. “We must anticipate and be prepared for the unintended consequences of our action.”

Dempsey’s letter came after McCain announced he would block the general’s reappointment to chair the joint chiefs of staff, the most senior position in the US military, until Dempsey provided the Senate with his assessment of the merits of US military action in Syria.

McCain is the leading congressional advocate of using direct US military force to tip the balance of power against Assad, an Iranian ally. Dempsey’s public comments about Syria over two years have been skeptical of the wisdom of greater US military involvement.

Read more from this story HERE.

GOP Allows NSA, Syria Debate

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Photo Credit: APA long-delayed Pentagon appropriations bill is heading to the floor after the House Rules Committee voted Monday night to allow a structured debate including amendments related to NSA surveillance at home and the flow of military aid overseas in the Mideast.

Altogether, 100 amendments are promised consideration, but those affecting the NSA — funded in the bill — and military aid to anti-government forces in Syria are clearly the most sensitive politically for the Republican leadership.

Indeed, conservatives led by Rep. Justin Amash (R-Mich.) had threatened to defeat the rule if votes were not permitted on a bipartisan proposal to narrow the ability of the NSA to collect private call records and metadata on telephone customers in the U.S.

“It’s not a partisan issue. It’s something that cuts across the entire political spectrum,” Amash told the Rules panel. And he argued that the amendment seeks only to rein in the NSA’s “blanket authority” under the PATRIOT Act to collect records and the metadata.

Read more from this story HERE.

Your Place in the Database

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Photo Credit: American ThinkerRegarding the American surveillance state, it seems that the truth comes out a little at a time. We learned about the FBI’s Carnivore in the 1990s, which the copied internet data of people whom the agency deemed “reasonably suspicious.” In September 2001, we saw the worst attacks on America since Pearl Harbor. September 11 left a unified country in its wake, but unfortunately, it was also a country more acquiescent than ever to big government. The PATRIOT Act was quickly shuttled through the lawmaking process, and life went on. We found out about NSA domestic wiretapping from a brave AT&T whistleblower in 2006. The program was given the formality of legality (though not constitutionality) in 2007. Would it have been had no one blown the whistle?

The surveillance state became even more unsettling with the Change of 2009, no less after political campaigning by the victor against domestic spying. We found out in 2009 that returning veterans were being targeted as possible extremists by the “Vigilant Eagle” program, a name positively Orwellian in its irony. The floodgates opened in 2013 once Obama’s re-election was secured. We found out that our government scans all domestic cell phone metadata (phone numbers, recipients, times), all letter and package labels are scanned and saved, and the NSA has agreements with every major internet provider to provide backdoor access to customers’ information (see PRISM). Even our credit card activity is analyzed. Of course, those are just high points. The entire last decade we have heard warnings from whistleblowers such as William Binney, as well as periodic admissions from U.S. officials of intelligence oversteps, which they falsely claim are immediately corrected.

One must wonder how the people of this nation would have reacted had all of this come out at once. Perhaps it is wishful thinking to hope that we would have shown a tenth the gumption of the Egyptians, who in July 2013 unceremoniously flung their Islamist government to the side. They took to the streets in outrage against tyrants at just the time we learned of the sickening scope of our national government’s spying. We meekly sat by. As each little bit of this diabolical system is leaked, it is palatable enough to warrant only a minor outrage, and then life goes on, albeit with a new normal. Tiny violations of our 4th-Amendment right against unreasonable search and seizure, and our 5th-Amendment right against self-incrimination, keep piling up, until it seems that those rights have bled to death from a thousand cuts. If Americans are the proverbial frog in the pot of water, the temperature has been ratcheted to a near-boil.

The Relational Database

For me, the most stomach-churning signpost on our nation’s road to tyranny has been the completion of the Utah Data Center. The center holds data on the scale of yottabytes. One yottabyte could account for 30 million gigabytes per U.S. man, woman, and child. It’s a staggering capacity. Now, for Americans, the camera is always rolling, creating a record of our every digital move. It reminds one of The Truman Show, a movie in which Jim Carrey’s entire life was filmed and broadcast as entertainment without him knowing it.

Because of the power of relational databases, and the laws governing internet service provider record-keeping, anything stored in the data centers (there are many across the nation, the Utah Center being the largest and most recent) can be tied to us directly. When tied to other sources of government data, it’s a more complete picture of our life than most of us could even provide about ourselves. The websites we browse, the comments we make, the e-mails we send, the phone calls to friends, the internet purchases, the Facebook associations, and most everything else you can think of are easily tied together.

Read more from this story HERE.

How the Media Has Distorted a Tragedy (+MUST SEE video)

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Photo Credit: Allison HargerA week after George Zimmerman’s acquittal in the fatal shooting of black teenager Trayvon Martin, the backlash continues, with nationwide protests and calls to boycott Florida. President Obama spoke some undeniable truths when he noted that the African-American community’s reaction must be seen in the context of a long, terrible history of racism. But there is another context too: that of an ideology-based, media-driven false narrative that has distorted a tragedy into a racist outrage.

This narrative has transformed Zimmerman, a man of racially mixed heritage that included white, Hispanic and black roots (a grandmother who helped raise him had an Afro-Peruvian father), into an honorary white male steeped in white privilege. It has cast him as a virulent racist even though he once had a black business partner, mentored African-American kids, lived in a neighborhood about 20 percent black, and participated in complaints about a white police lieutenant’s son getting away with beating a homeless black man.

This narrative has perpetuated the lie that Zimmerman’s history of calls to the police indicates obsessive racial paranoia. Thus, discussing the verdict on the PBS NewsHour, University of Connecticut professor and New Yorker contributor Jelani Cobb asserted that “Zimmerman had called the police 46 times in previous six years, only for African-Americans, only for African-American men.” Actually, only six calls—two of them about Trayvon Martin—had to do with African-American men. At least three involved complaints about whites; others were about such issues as a fire alarm going off, a reckless driver of unknown race, or an aggressive dog.

In this narrative, even Zimmerman’s concern for a black child—a 2011 call to report a young African-American boy walking unsupervised on a busy street, on which the police record notes, “compl[ainant] concerned for well-being”—has been twisted into crazed racism. Writing on the website of The New Republic, Stanford University law professor Richard Thompson Ford describes Zimmerman as “an edgy basket case” who called 911 about “the suspicious activities of a seven year old black boy.” This slander turns up in other left-of-center sources, such as ThinkProgress.org.

Read more from this story HERE.

Bill Co-Sponsored by Mike Lee to Require Search Warrants for Fed’s Access to Your Email Gaining Steam

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Photo Credit: Social BIz SolutionsThe chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee is pushing to fast-track legislation that would require police to obtain a warrant before accessing emails and other private online messages.

Sen. Patrick Leahy’s (D-Vt.) goal is for the Senate to unanimously approve his bill before the August recess, according to one of his committee aides. Any opposition could delay a vote until after Congress returns in the fall.

He has secured unanimous support from his fellow Democrats and is in negotiations with Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), the Judiciary Committee’s ranking member, and other Republicans to address their concerns.

Leahy’s aide claimed that even if a floor vote is delayed until after the recess, they are already “way past” the 60 votes they would need to overcome a filibuster and approve the bill, which is co-sponsored by Republican Sen. Mike Lee (Utah).

Gregory Nojeim, a senior counsel for the Center for Democracy and Technology and a supporter of stronger privacy protections, said that the news of the National Security Agency’s surveillance programs has given Leahy’s bill a new boost of momentum.

Read more from this story HERE.

Sen. Cruz Downplays Talk of 2016 POTUS Run, Leaves Eligibility Question to Others

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Photo Credit: Gage SkidmoreTexas Sen. Ted Cruz, a rising GOP star, downplayed speculation over a possible 2016 presidential bid, saying he was focused on his job in the Senate.

“We are having a national debate about which direction the country should go…and what I am doing now is trying to participate in that national debate,” Cruz told ABC News in an interview aired Sunday. “I’m not focused on the politics…the last office I was elected to was student council. So this has been a bit of a whirlwind”…

Cruz, though, was born in Canada, leading many to question his constitutional eligibility for the Oval Office…

“I can tell you where I was born and who my parents were. And then as a legal matter, others can worry about that. I’m not going to engage,” he added.

Read more from this story HERE.