Sam Adams Beer Commercial Deletes God From Declaration of Independence

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Photo Credit: ep_jhuIn Samuel Adams’ July 4 commercial, a bartender asks, “Why name a beer after Samuel Adams?”

He adds, “Because Samuel Adams signed the Declaration of Independence. He believed there was a better way to live.”

Then the man recites the Declaration of Independence – but he omits “endowed by their Creator” from the segment.

“All men are created equal,” he states. “They are endowed with certain unalienable rights: Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”

He finishes the beer spot with, “Smooth, flavorful. We bow to no kings. Samuel Adams Boston Lager, declare your independence.”

Read more from this story HERE.

New, Creepier “Hail Satan” Video from Pro-Abortion Hecklers at Texas Rotunda

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Photo Credit: YouTube As seen in a video posted earlier this week, the pro-abortion heckling at the Texas state capitol has grown much worse since the second special session was called by Governor Perry.

One of the harassing tactics opponents to the session used was a chant of “Hail Satan,” apparently designed to interrupt and discourage pro-lifers. Even though this chanting was heard all day, the earlier video suggested that pro-lifers had only managed to get one recording of it.

Turns out, another, clearer recording of the sick Satan chants has been found.

In this new video, the pro-abortion “Hail Satan” chanting is very obvious and ominous. It is especially pronounced at about 5:15 of the recording:

Christian Preachers Brutally Beaten at Gay Pride Festival (+video)

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Photo Credit: YouTubeTwo street preachers were brutally beaten — punched and kicked — by a crowd at a gay pride festival in Seattle and the entire melee was captured on video.

The preachers were holding signs reading “Repent or Else” and “Jesus Saves From Sin.” The video shows a group of people initially screaming and threatening the men during Pridefest at the Seattle Space Needle.

Television station KOMO reported that some of the attackers belonged to a group called NOH8.

A group of women tried to steal their signs but were unsuccessful. The video then shows a group of men grabbing onto one of the preacher’s signs and dragging him to the ground. At some point he was punched in the back of the head a number of times while others can be seen kicking the man.

Another preacher was sucker punched in the back of the head.

Read more from this story HERE.

Islamic Fundamentalists Open Fire on Anti-Morsi Demonstrators, Killing at Least 12 in Alexandria (+video)

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Photo Credit: Spencer Platt/Getty ImagesClashes between Egyptian troops, Morsi supporters turn deadly as thousands protest

By Fox News. Clashes between supporters and opponents of ousted president Mohammed Morsi reportedly have left 30 people dead across Egypt in a day that saw tens of thousands take to the streets to rally on both sides.

Emergency services official Amr Salama said 12 people died in the Mediterranean coastal city of Alexandria when hundreds of Islamists descended on a rally by opponents of Morsi, opening fire with guns.

The state news agency MENA confirmed 12 dead in the city, bringing the nationwide toll to 30, AP reported.

In another development, an Interior Ministry spokesman said the deputy head of Morsi’s Muslim Brotherhood, Khairat el-Shater, considered the most powerful man in the organization, has been arrested.

Read more from this story HERE.

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Obama Call for Muslim Brotherhood Role Overtaken in Egypt

By Nicole Gaouette & John Walcott. The Obama administration’s call for an “inclusive” political process in Egypt with a role for the Muslim Brotherhood has been overshadowed by deadly clashes between security forces and supporters of the Islamist group.

Violent protests yesterday in Cairo and elsewhere over the military’s ouster of President Mohamed Mursi raised doubts about prospects for an eventual accommodation that would allow the Brotherhood that supports him to compete in new elections.

While President Barack Obama’s administration has stopped short of condemning the July 3 military takeover, it has called on Egyptian leaders to pursue “a transparent political process that is inclusive of all parties and groups,” including “avoiding any arbitrary arrests of Mursi and his supporters,” Bernadette Meehan, a spokeswoman for the National Security Council, said July 4 in a statement.

The administration has urged the Egyptian military to stop using heavy-handed tactics, according to two U.S. officials who asked not to be identified commenting on private communications. They said the administration is concerned that some in the military may want to provoke the Islamists to violence and provide a rationale for crushing the movement once and for all.

Such a move would fail and probably prompt a shift to al-Qaeda type terrorist tactics by extremists in the Islamist movement in Egypt and elsewhere, the U.S. officials said. Read more from this story HERE.

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Clashes erupt in major pushback by Egypt Islamists

By Lee Keath, Maggie Michael and Sarah El Deeb. Enraged Islamists pushed back against the toppling of President Mohammed Morsi, as tens of thousands of his supporters marched in Cairo on Friday to demand his reinstatement and attacked his opponents. Nighttime clashes raged with stone-throwing, firecrackers and gunfire, and military armored vehicles raced across a Nile River bridge in a counterassault on Morsi’s supporters.

Mayhem nationwide left at least 10 people dead and 210 wounded as Morsi supporters stormed government buildings, vowing to reverse the military’s removal of the country’s first freely elected president. Among the dead were four killed when troops opened fire on a peaceful march by Islamists on the Republican Guard headquarters.

In a dramatic appearance — his first since Morsi’s ouster — the supreme leader of the Muslim Brotherhood defiantly vowed the president would return. “God make Morsi victorious and bring him back to the palace,” Mohammed Badie proclaimed from a stage before a crowd of cheering supporters at a Cairo mosque. “We are his soldiers we defend him with our lives.”

Badie addressed the military, saying it was a matter of honor for it to abide by its pledge of loyalty to the president, in what appeared to be an attempt to pull it away from its leadership that removed Morsi. “Your leader is Morsi … Return to the people of Egypt,” he said. “Your bullets are not to be fired on your sons and your own people.”

After nightfall, moments after Badie’s speech, a large crowed of Islamists surged across 6th October Bridge over the Nile toward Tahrir Square, where a giant crowd of Morsi’s opponents had been massed all day. Battles broke out there at near the neighboring state TV building with gunfire and stone throwing and burning car barricade at an exit ramp. Read more from this story HERE.

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Photo Credit: FARSIran Blames Muslim Brotherhood, Morsi for Coup

By FNA. Chairman of the Iranian Parliament’s National Security and Foreign Policy Commission Alaeddin Boroujerdi said that ousted President Mohamed Mursi and Muslim Brotherhood are to be blamed for the current political crisis in Egypt.

“What happened in Egypt was actually a soft coup staged by the Egyptian army, which was unfortunately the result of repeated mistakes by ousted Egyptian President Mohamed Mursi and Muslim Brotherhood …,” Boroujerdi said on Thursday.

The senior Iranian legislator underlined that Mursi’s repeated mistakes, Muslim Brotherhood’s power grab and their lack of attention to other political groups and prominent political figures who had a part in Egypt’s developments resulted in Mursi’s ouster from power. Read more from this story HERE.

Snowden a Whistleblower, but US Leaders, Press Increasingly Call Him a Traitor as Asylum Offers are Made

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Photo Credit: J Scott Applewhite/APEdward Snowden is a whistleblower, not a spy – but do our leaders care?

By Spencer Ackerman. According to US legislators and journalists, the surveillance whistleblower Edward Snowden actively aided America’s enemies. They are just missing one essential element for the meme to take flight: evidence.

An op-ed by Representative Mike Pompeo (Republican, Kansas) proclaiming Snowden, who provided disclosed widespread surveillance on phone records and internet communications by the National Security Agency, “not a whistleblower” is indicative of the emerging narrative. Writing in the Wichita Eagle on 30 June Pompeo, a member of the House intelligence committee, wrote that Snowden “has provided intelligence to America’s adversaries”.

Pompeo correctly notes in his op-ed that “facts are important”. Yet when asked for the evidence justifying the claim that Snowden gave intelligence to American adversaries, his spokesman, JP Freire, cited Snowden’s leak of NSA documents. Those documents, however, were provided to the Guardian and the Washington Post, not al-Qaeda or North Korea.

It’s true that information published in the press can be read by anyone, including people who mean America harm. But to conflate that with actively handing information to foreign adversaries is to foreclose on the crucial distinction between a whistleblower and a spy, and makes journalists the handmaidens of enemies of the state.

Yet powerful legislators are eager to make that conflation about Snowden. Read more from this story HERE.

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Photo Credit: APVenezuela, Nicaragua offer Snowden asylum

By Hadas Gold and Nick Gass. Nicaragua and Venezuela on Friday night became the first countries to offer National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden asylum.

“As head of state, the government of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela decided to offer humanitarian asylum to the young American Edward Snowden so that he can live (without) … persecution from the empire,” President Nicolas Maduro said, according to the Associated Press.

Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega said he’d be willing to extend the same offer to the 29-year-old, but adding he would only do so “if circumstances allowed it.”

“We have the sovereign right to help a person who felt remorse after finding out how the United States was using technology to spy on the whole world, and especially its European allies,” Ortega said.

Wikileaks announced earlier Friday via Twitter that Snowden has applied for asylum in six more countries. Read more from this story HERE.

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Iceland proposal to grant NSA leaker Snowden citizenship appears to go nowhere

By Fox News. Icelandic lawmakers introduced a proposal in Parliament to grant immediate citizenship to National Security Agency leaker Edward Snowden — but it looks like it’s going nowhere.

Parliament later voted not to debate the measure before the summer recess, Reuters reported.

With his options narrowing daily, WikiLeaks announced Friday the fugitive NSA leaker had applied for asylum in another six countries, in addition to the 12 where he reportedly already has applied. However, WikiLeaks said it could not reveal the new names due to “attempted U.S. interference.”

Ogmundur Jonasson, whose liberal Left-Green Party is backing the Snowden citizenship proposal along with the Pirate Party and Brighter Future Party, put the issue before the Judicial Affairs Committee Thursday, but it received minimal support.

Snowden is believed to be stuck in a Moscow airport transit area. At one point, he told the Guardian newspaper that he was inclined to seek asylum in a country that shared his values — and that “the nation that most encompasses this is Iceland.” Read more from this story HERE.

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Photo Credit: Valda Kalnina/EPANSA leaks: UK blocks crucial espionage talks between US and Europe

By Ian Traynor. Britain has blocked the first crucial talks on intelligence and espionage between European officials and their American counterparts since the NSA surveillance scandal erupted.

The talks, due to begin in Washington on Monday, will now be restricted to issues of data privacy and the NSA’s Prism programme following a tense 24 hours of negotiations in Brussels between national EU ambassadors. Britain, supported only by Sweden, vetoed plans to launch two “working groups” on the espionage debacle with the Americans.

Instead, the talks will consist of one working group focused on the NSA’s Prism programme, which has been capturing and storing vast amounts of internet and mobile phone metadata in Europe. Read more from this story HERE.

Muslim Brotherhood Claims Egypt’s Interim President is a Jew

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Photo Credit: IkhwanOnline.comIkhwanOnline, the official Web site of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood, posted an article on Thursday asserting that the country’s new interim president, Adly Mansour, is secretly Jewish. The article, since taken offline, suggested that Mansour was part of an American and Israeli conspiracy to install Mohamed ElBaradei, a former U.N. official and Egyptian opposition figure, as president.

Mansour, the supreme justice of Egypt’s Supreme Constitutional Court, was sworn in as interim president on Thursday after the military announced that President Mohamed Morsi was no longer in charge. Morsi was a close ally of the Muslim Brotherhood, which has held large demonstrations protesting his ouster. That the Muslim Brotherhood would be suspicious of Mansour, and of the military that toppled Morsi to install him, is not surprising…

The article cited as its source the purported Facebook page of an al-Jazeera Arabic broadcaster, although it’s not clear whether the Facebook page is real. The article claims that Mansour is “considered to be a Seventh Day Adventist, which is a Jewish sect” (in fact, Seventh Day Adventism is considered part of Protestant Christianity). It further claims that Mansour tried to convert to Christianity but was rebuffed by the Coptic pope, a major Egyptian religious figure, who supposedly refused to baptize him.

Read more from this story HERE.

Obamacare: States Want a Delay, Too

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Photo Credit: George Ruhe‘I wish we had one more year:’ States are struggling to launch Obamacare on time

By Sarah Kliff. Facing tight deadlines and daunting workloads, states across the country are scaling back ambitions for implementing the Affordable Care Act.

At a monthly board meeting of Connecticut’s health insurance exchange, members of the standing-room-only crowd got a reminder that they, too, were behind schedule. The insurance marketplace they were working on nights and weekends won’t be completely ready on time.

“It is highly complex, it’s unprecedented and it’s not going to be smooth,” Kevin Counihan, chief executive of the state’s exchange, Access Health CT, told the group.

That’s why Connecticut — like other states across the country — has lowered the bar, doing what it can in the time it has left before the health-care law’s major programs are launched Oct. 1.

Although the states are promising to provide new marketplaces for individuals to compare and buy health insurance plans, the Web portals will be a bare-bones version of what was initially envisioned. Read more from this story HERE.

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Photo Credit: Karen T. BorchersCBO: Obamacare Delay Will Cost Feds Billions

By Tony Pugh. The Congressional Budget Office estimates the federal government will lose $10 billion in employer penalties in 2015 because of the delayed enforcement. Likewise, many expect that federal outlays to help low- and moderate-income people purchase coverage will grow with employers no longer required to provide coverage next year.

“At a minimum, the federal revenue from fines is gone. More realistically, the costs of already bloated insurance subsidies will escalate and the red ink will rise,” said Douglas Holtz-Eakin, president of the American Action Forum, a conservative think tank.

Jon Gruber, an MIT economist who helped design the federal health law, said the decision to forego the $10 billion in penalties was both pragmatic and political.

“Basically, it was their judgment that it was causing too many logistical and political headaches and it wasn’t that essential to the law, so they decided to just delay it a year and live with the revenue loss,” Gruber said Wednesday.

Obama officials said as much on Tuesday, when they announced plans to “revamp and simplify” the process of reporting the status of employee coverage and calculating appropriate penalties. “We will convene employers, insurers and experts to propose a smarter system and, in the interim, suspend reporting for 2014,” said White House special adviser Valerie Jarrett. Read more from this story HERE.

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Photo Credit: Saul Loeb/AFP/GettyObama Skips Past Congress Again With Health Mandate Delay

By Steven T. Dennis and Matt Fuller. President Barack Obama’s latest legal end run around Congress — delaying enforcement of the employer health mandate — has sparked more questions about whether he’s abusing his executive discretion under the Constitution.

The move announced late Tuesday was the latest in a string of decisions where the president, facing a divided Congress unable to get much done beyond keeping the government running, has taken matters into his own hands.

Where a previous president might have asked for a legislative fix if a mandate was proving too onerous for business, the Obama administration put out a couple of blog posts saying that, in listening to the business community, it decided not to enforce a key part of the 3-year-old health law for another year.

The administration notes that parts of laws are delayed in implementation all the time — including various pieces of the tax code.

A Treasury official said the administration has “longstanding administrative authority to grant transition relief when implementing new legislation like the ACA.” Read more from this story HERE.

Catholic Bishop: Supreme Court ‘Giving Legal Protection to an Intrinsic Evil’

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Photo Credit: APBishop Thomas John Paprocki, leader of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Springfield, Ill., says the U.S. Supreme Court is giving “legal protection to intrinsic evil” in its decisions late last month that advanced the cause of legalized same-sex “marriage” in the United States.

“As in the case of Roe v. Wade striking down abortion laws forty years ago, the United States Supreme Court has again usurped its legitimate prerogative through a raw exercise of judicial power by giving legal protection to an intrinsic evil, this time by striking down the Defense of Marriage Act in the case of U.S. v. Windsor and in refusing to take up the defense of Proposition 8 in California in the case of Hollingsworth v. Perry.

“These hollow decisions are absolutely devoid of moral authority,” said the bishop. “It is becoming increasingly and abundantly clear that what secular law now calls “marriage” has no semblance to the sacred institution of Holy Matrimony. People of faith are called to reject the redefinition of marriage and bear witness to the truth of Holy Matrimony as a lasting, loving and life-giving union between one man and one woman.”

Read more from this story HERE.

Disney’s New Lone Ranger Movie: A Lesson in White Guilt

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Photo Credit: io9What makes the Lone Ranger finally embrace the need for his mask, and hence the whole “secret identity” thing? In a nutshell, he realizes his fellow white men are corrupt, and complicit in the mass murder of Tonto’s fellow Native Americans. If he takes the mask off, then he too will wind up becoming complicit. Yes, that’s right — in this film, the Lone Ranger’s mask is made of White Guilt.

And in fact, the only function the Native Americans in this film have, other than Tonto, is to die horribly so that the Lone Ranger will have a catalyst to make him Man Up.

But it’s more than that. We tend to think of superhero movies as power fantasies, in which the use of America’s status as a superpower is reflected by the hero struggling to use his or her power responsibly. But Lone Ranger seems to be making the case that the real seductive fantasy of these stories is absolution from blame — the Lone Ranger gets the Native American seal of approval from Tonto, as long as he’s wearing the mask. He gets surcease from America’s original sin.

That’s the secret of superheroes, according to this film: Peter Parker is a Tool of the Man, but Spider-Man is a free agent. Bruce Wayne is a capitalist running dog, but Batman fights for the little guy.

And that’s why you deserve to suffer. Because a lot of innocent people had to die to make your costume fantasy possible, you bastards.

Read more from this story HERE [caution profanity].

Missouri Governor Vetoes Bill that Nullified Federal Gun Laws

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Photo Credit: Fox NewsGov. Jay Nixon vetoed legislation Friday that would have made it a Missouri crime for federal agents to attempt to enforce federal gun laws in the state and could have landed journalists in jail for publishing the names of gun owners.

The Democratic governor said the bill passed by the Republican-led Legislature violated the supremacy clause of the U.S. Constitution, which generally gives preference to federal laws over conflicting state ones. He said it also infringed in the First Amendment rights of free speech and press.

Some supporters of the legislation had proclaimed it one of the most gun-friendly bills ever passed by a state legislature. Nixon, however, said it could have had extreme consequences.

Read more from this story HERE.