Unprecedented Warning from Joint Chiefs of Staff to Trump: Biden Won, Don’t Invoke Insurrection Act

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In an extraordinary letter made public late Tuesday, eight four-star generals announced that the United States armed forces stood against the “sedition and insurrection” demonstrated by the “actions inside the Capitol building” last week.

They called the protest “a direct assault on the U.S. Congress, the Capitol building, and our Constitutional Process.”

The generals also felt it appropriate to warn that, “Any act to disrupt the Constitutional process is not only against our traditions, values, and oath: it is against the law” and that “the U.S. military will obey lawful orders from civilian leadership. . .”

Finally, they announced that, “President-elect Biden will be inaugurated and will become our 46th Commander in Chief.”

This poorly written letter (see it below) has many scratching their heads: why, in the first time in the Republic’s history, did the Joint Chiefs of Staff find it necessary to weigh in on disputed election? Why the military’s unprecedented warning about “any act to disrupt the Constitutional process”? And why offer the conclusion that Biden “will be inaugurated” on January 20?

Some believe the generals did this for one reason: to prevent President Trump from invoking the Insurrection Act. Given the broad Presidential authority under that 1807 Act, there’s little doubt that many in the Deep State have been worried that Trump would use it to get to the bottom of the 2020 election fraud. But without military leadership to implement any such orders under the Act, the President’s powers are emasculated.

So who pushed the Joint Chiefs take such an unprecedented step? Is it really possible that General Milley came up with this all on his own and compelled the other joint chiefs to join with him? Highly unlikely. These signing generals all survived the Obama purges and have been confirmed to their positions by the corrupt U.S. Senate, the vast majority of whom are owned by the Deep State. None of them seem to care that the election was stolen.

May God save the Republic.

(Here’s the generals’ letter:)

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$14 Trillion in Slavery Reparations

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White Is a Color

Redd Foxx’s character Fred delivered a sly zinger in a Sanford and Son episode when a tone-deaf white police officer asked him whether a criminal suspect was “colored.”

“Yeah,” Fred replied, “white.” It was a funny line, but it was also scientifically correct. The definition of white as an absence of color is exactly wrong.

Sir Isaac Newton proved in a renowned 1666 experiment that white is composed of six visible colors: red, orange, yellow, green, blue and violet. He used a prism to resolve white light into its component colors, which a second prism recombined into a single white light again.

So Harry Belafonte is no more a person of color, optically speaking, than the palest Swedish albino, and arguably less so. It would be more honest for nonwhite racially preoccupied people to call themselves people about color, not people of color.

White Is a Race

Critical race theorists will, of course, dismiss this as quibbling. Their definition of people of color is not intended as a scientific statement of physics, but as an identity of all people who are not racially white. UCLA Professor Efren Perez has tracked use of the phrase in Black and mainstream newspapers since 1960. He found that Black newspapers used the term much earlier and more often than mainstream newspapers. Its increasing frequency coincided with the arrival of large immigrant populations that presented opportunities for political Blacks to recruit a broader nonwhite coalition.

The definition of people of color appears to be noncontroversial. So far as I know, everybody agrees that people of color are just people who aren’t white. This is necessarily negative: their identity is defined by who they are not. It retains its appeal and its coalition-building power only as long as the consensus that whites are villains in our national narrative.

Racial identity is a matter of real importance in a grievance-based economy. There are jobs, promotions, college admissions, government contracts and potential reparations for people who are agile and skilled in the art of racial grievance. The ship has already sailed on most of these policies that overtly disadvantage whites, but racial reparations are still under discussion.

Black billionaire Robert Johnson, founder of the Black Entertainment Network, recently called for $14 trillion in slavery reparations to Black Americans. This dwarfs the Black Panthers’ 1969 demand for $500 million in reparations. Martin Luther King confidante Bayard Rustin said at the time that “if my great-grandfather picked cotton for 50 years, then he may deserve some money, but he’s dead and gone and nobody owes me anything.”

That view is unusual among Blacks nowadays. Polls indicate the majority of Blacks support slavery reparations. The term “slavery reparations” is probably a misnomer, though. The wealth disparity between whites and Blacks, the disproportionate levels of incarceration, and perceived personal indignities are the conditions that most aggrieved Blacks feel justify reparations.

Moynihan’s Scissors

Johnson recited a list of dismal current statistics and concluded that “the pernicious legacy of slavery is the primary factor” in the wealth disparity between Blacks and whites. A Department of Labor sociologist, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, noticed in 1962 that although Black male employment was improving, Black welfare dependency was rising. This contradicted the usual pattern of parallel increases and decreases of unemployment and dependency. It suggested that increasing numbers of Black males had disconnected themselves from the financial outcomes of their families.

This prompted Moynihan to study the matter in more detail, and led to his 1965 report, “The Negro Family: The Case for National Action.” He found what he called “a tangle of pathology” and, like Johnson, said it resulted ultimately from slavery and Jim Crow.

But is that true? Black economist Thomas Sowell has risen to the defense of the dynamic, morally upright, wealth-building generations of freedmen who burst out of slavery after the Civil War. One of the things enslaved Blacks yearned for was the opportunity to form permanent marriages and enduring families, and that’s exactly what they did after emancipation. Their social statistics were comparable or superior to whites’ numbers on divorce, out-of-wedlock births, abandonment and employment rates.

Democrats enacted Jim Crow laws all over the South after they regained power. These were harmful and unjust, but they didn’t destroy families. That, Sowell observes, was the province of the paternalistic welfare state. With the growth of the New Deal and Great Society programs, the Black male lost the capacity to function as an authority figure within his family. Black families became matriarchal. Unwed births skyrocketed. In a sense, millions of matriarchs have married the government.

Fatherless homes, in turn, produced high crime, high rates of incarceration, pervasive academic failure, stubborn unemployment, and economic stagnation. Not to mention excruciating emotional pain and despair. Black attorney and cultural critic Larry Elder says that Black Americans’ main source of torment is not white racism, but fatherlessness. Nobody would tolerate us intruding into their personal relationships and coercing them to be better people, nor do I propose it. But the consequences of stubborn depravity rightly rest on the wrongdoer, the only person who is capable of making the necessary change.

Johnson admitted in his own essay that his number is based, not on a calculation of actual slavery damages, but on his estimate of how much wealth transfer it would take to make whites and Blacks equal. This is what the Mississippi-born Johnson would recognize as making Blacks whole: financial equality. This is a formula no American court would recognize as actual damages. Bill Gates – or Robert Johnson – can fully compensate me after causing a tragic car wreck without us being rendered financially equal. The only legal doctrine Johnson’s formula resembles is exemplary damages, sometimes called punitive (punishing) damages. It’s what you impose, beyond actual damages, to make an example of somebody who has earned the community’s contempt.

If we could get our hands on an actual slave-owner, I think punitive damages would be proper. But to impose the equivalent of punitive damages against random white people who have worked and struggled, taken risks and sacrificed, paid chiropractors and gone to night school to build incremental family wealth? It’s unjust and insulting. We should not be too timid to resist it.

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Staying a Republic

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Republic in Crisis

The Roman republic was on the ropes in 458 BC. A slave rebellion had captured Capitoline Hill itself, and gangsters were calling the tune in the Temple of Jupiter. Foreign raiders brought trade and supply to a standstill, and negotiated with compromised rich merchants to fund the invasion. A neighboring rival, Aequi, had broken its truce with Rome, and was running roughshod over Rome’s demoralized army.

Lucius Quinctius Cincinnatus had already washed his hands of the political hardball in Rome that had taken his son’s life, and retired to family property west of the Tiber River. He was at the plow when a delegation from the Roman Senate came out to speak to him.

“Is everything all right?” he asked the worried visitors. They requested he dress in his ceremonial Senate toga, to receive an official communication from the supreme council of the Roman state. Cincinnatus sent his wife to their house to bring back his toga, then received the unwelcome news that the Senate had appointed him Dictator of the crumbling republic.

He moved quickly. Step one was universal conscription. On the morning after he crossed the river back into Rome, he ordered all men of military age to assemble on the Field of Mars that very day. The draftees were ordered to pack five days’ rations, although many felt they were marching to their death far sooner than five days.

Roman soldiers customarily brought a vallum, a sharpened pole or stake used to fortify camps during campaigns in hostile territory. But Cincinnatus told his cavalry commander to order the men to bring 12 stakes apiece instead of one.

There was grumbling, and despair. But they came. While other Roman generals dithered and procrastinated, Cincinnatus marched hard, directly at the Aequi invaders on Mount Algidus where they had cornered a desperate Roman army. After his forces located the Aequi army and evening came, their work was just beginning.

Cincinnatus besieged the besiegers. He ordered his men to drive in their 12 stakes overnight to constrict the enemy’s movement and prevent their escape. The Aequi invaders would have to fight for their lives, or surrender. They tried to break out, but the drafted Romans repeatedly beat them back.

With the surrendered Aequi men at their mercy, the Romans plundered their belongings but there was no mass slaughter. As a condition of amnesty, Cincinnatus required that they execute three of their worst instigators, and that they surrender their leaders to the Romans. These surely wished they had been fortunate enough to be be executed with the others.

The vanquished Aequi invaders were required to march under a long row of crossed swords held by the triumphant Roman draftees, held low enough that the warlike Aequi men had to stoop in unmistakable submission to the shopkeepers and laborers who had defeated them against all odds.

There were triumphal parades through Rome, with captured Aequi leaders on display before their penalties were executed. And I like to think the Romans had something special for those rich merchants who were willing to help the invaders destroy their republic.

Fifteen days after the unsmiling Senate delegation waved to Cincinnatus across his field, he disbanded his army, sent his men home to their families and resigned as Dictator. On the 16th day, he was back at his plow.

It goes without saying that there are revisionist scholars who dispute some of the specifics of this story. Some deny it in its entirety. It’s the nature of social science scholarship, especially history, that you need to make bold claims contradicting conventional beliefs. It’s how you get job stability (academic tenure), how you avoid academic oblivion.

I don’t pretend to have any special expertise on ancient Rome, and so I offer no opinion on any of the revisionism. All I can say is that it’s a very hopeful story 2,478 years later. It suggests that even when the cause appears to be lost, purposeful citizens in a republic can mobilize under the right plan to reclaim their sovereignty, repel their invaders and overcome the sloth of their allies to subdue evil-doers. That’s great news in 2020.

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Epstein’s Ghislaine Maxwell’s Troubling Connections to Murkowski REVEALED; All the Places Maxwell Was Rumored to Be Laying Low

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Curiously, Jeffrey Epstein’s girlfriend, Ghislaine Maxwell, is connected to Alaska and its troubled Senator, Lisa Murkowski. Alice Rogoff, perhaps Murkowski’s biggest political supporter second only to VECO’s convicted felon, CEO Bill Allen, was a close friend of Maxwell’s. The former publisher of the Anchorage Dispatch News and ex-wife of the Carlyle Group’s billionaire David Rubenstein attended many Alaskan events with Maxwell including the Iditarod. They were involved with Artic Circle events, and Maxwell was reportedly hiding out with one of Murkowski’s close associates just a few months ago.

Why Maxwell was so involved with Alaska and close associates of Alaska’s senior senator is anyone’s guess. And isn’t it strange that the former VECO CEO, Lisa Murkowski’s biggest donor source for years, was also apparently involved in child sex trafficking in Alaska? Many suspect that federal-informant Allen was using the underage girls to compromise Alaska legislators. Multiple state legislators, most (if not all) colleagues and friends of Lisa Murkowski, were ultimately convicted of bribery connected with the Bill Allen corruption scandal.

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Maxwell Arrested in New Hampshire Estate

By Fox Business. Ghislaine Maxwell was hiding out in a $1 million New Hampshire estate before authorities arrested her Thursday on charges of trafficking minors for sex and perjury, DailyMail.com reported.

Maxwell, the former girlfriend of Jeffrey Epstein who’s accused of recruiting and grooming underage girls for abuse, was living in a luxurious home called Tuckedaway she bought last year near Bradford, New Hampshire, according to the report. The gated property sits on a hilltop up a steep dirt road.

The home and its secluded 156-acre property sold for $1.07 million in December, according to Zillow. The 4,635-square-foot timber frame home includes four bedrooms, four bathrooms and “is an amazing retreat for the nature lover who also wants total privacy,” according to former listing details.

The 2002-built home includes a large fireplace, cathedral ceiling and an open concept floorplan, according to the defunct listing. It’s got a ground floor master suite. There’s also a separate two-bedroom guest house “with a fabulous barn for hoedowns, square dances and hay rides.”

(Read more from “Jeffrey Epstein ‘Madam’ Ghislaine Maxwell Arrested” HERE)

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All the Places Ghislaine Maxwell Was Rumored to Be Laying Low

By New York Post. The reports of Ghislaine Maxwell’s whereabouts have been greatly exaggerated. . .

She was rumored to be shacking up with modeling mogul Jean-Luc Brunel in Brazil, as far off as New Zealand and Israel, and in March filed a legal claim in the US Virgin Islands for a piece of Epstein’s estate.

Rumors swirled that she popped up in Paris last month, and a photo emerged in August of her reportedly at a Los Angeles fast-food joint following Epstein’s arrest in July on federal sex trafficking charges in New York. . .

Britain’s Mirror said in February that a wild new theory suggested that Maxwell was hiding out in a submarine, reporting that she has a license to pilot “submersible vehicles.”

A friend of the socialite’s told Fox News in January that another rumored hideout — a safe house somewhere in the Midwest, guarded by US Special Forces operatives — was bogus. (Read more from “All the Places Ghislaine Maxwell Was Rumored to Be Laying Low” HERE)

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Measles Outbreak Spreads to Three More States; Should the Feds Force Childhood Vaccinations?

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Editor’s note: the measles outbreak is continuing to spread throughout the U.S. Many vaccination advocates are using this as an opportunity to attack parents who refuse vaccinations or decide to vaccinate on a different schedule than what some public health officials direct. On the left, activists are suggesting that vaccinations should be forcibly imposed on all children, notwithstanding any parental objections.

But some of these objections stem from legitimate religious objections. For example, Merck’s Measles, Mumps, Rubella, and Chickenpox vaccine is produced from an aborted fetal cell line. The idea of injecting cells produced from murdered babies is deeply unsettling to some.

It is outrageous to suggest that parents should be forced to vaccinate their children using such products. But it is also outrageous that those advocating for mandated vaccination would ignore one of the major causes of the outbreaks of formerly-eradicated diseases in the United States: the third world, illegal alien.
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By Lenny Bernstein. The measles outbreak spread to three more states and Washington D.C. last week, affecting 19 additional people, according to an update posted Monday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The highly contagious disease is now in 18 jurisdictions, with 121 people affected. The vast majority of the cases are part of the large outbreak that began in Southern California Disney theme parks in late December, the health agency said . . .

Authorities have said the resurgence is mostly caused by the growing number of people who are declining to vaccinate their children for personal reasons, or delaying the vaccinations.

“This is a teachable moment for this country,” former U.S. Rep. Henry Waxman said at a conference Monday at Johns Hopkins University’s Bloomberg School of Public Health. “When we see a disease that was almost eliminated in the early 1980s now come back with a jolt all around this country, we have to ask ourselves what’s going on. (Read more about the measles outbreak HERE)

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Emperor Obama’s Parlor Games

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Photo Credit: National Review

Photo Credit: National Review

‘One thing I’m proud of,” cultural icon Barack Obama boasted to MSNBC’s crack team of sycophants in 2006, “is that very rarely will you hear me simplify the issues.” On this, he has certainly been true to his word. Brevity and candor, shall we say, are not among our smartest president’s strengths nor, outside the abstract, is he much of a salesman.

Nevertheless, as gauche as it might sound to those who make a living being inscrutable, sometimes in politics questions really do have simple answers. Yesterday, speaking to journalists at the G20 summit in Russia, Obama was asked again and again what he planned to do if Congress refused to authorize action in Syria. The president brushed away the question as if it were an irrelevance. “You’re not getting a direct response,” he told journalists. When they pushed him anyway, he termed the matter a “parlor game.”

If you’re thinking that it is little short of breathtaking that a man who is content to talk at length to the press about a gay basketball player could have the temerity to characterize a question about the constitutional order of the United States as an intrusion, you’re absolutely right. What the president should have said is: “This is straightforward. If Congress refuses to authorize me to order action, I will not order any action.” This would not only have comported admirably with his own on-the-record profession that it remains illegal for the executive branch to order “military action” sans the blessing of the legislative branch, but it would also have been the only possible answer that tallies with his having asked for permission in the first place.

It will no doubt prove easy for the keener apologists of the fast-waning Obamacult to convince themselves that their much-assailed hero is merely being magnanimous. Indeed, we have already heard such spin: The president is admitting to Congress an “unprecedented” “consulting” role; or he is “democratically” recruiting a skeptical public to take part in his difficult decision; or — most amusingly, perhaps — he is trying finally to reverse the long and checkered history of executive military usurpation . . . which includes his unilateral decision to bomb Libya in 2011.

Read more from this story HERE.

Christianity Is Under Attack, But the Bible Series Proves its Great Popularity Persists

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Photo Credit: IrishCentral

Roma Downey and her husband Mark Burnett are setting records with their extraordinary Bible mini series. The series takes stories from the bible, beginning with the book of Genesis and it will end in the book of Revelation finale Easter Sunday.

The series outperforms all other television shows on Sunday nights, reaching close to 80 million viewers with its first three installments alone. As interest grows worldwide, it is expected the audience will expand exponentially.

“Roma and I continue to be grateful for the overwhelming global enthusiasm for The Bible series,” says executive producer Mark Burnett. Ireland native, Roma Downey says “The audience reaction says so much about what people are looking for these days, we are just thrilled that we were able to bring these stories to life.”

In April, the series will be released on Blu-ray and DVD which should sweep the world…It will be an extraordinary commercial success…But even more extraordinary, are the resounding testimonies for Christianity, whose religious institutions and faith have been under fire around the world.

For the past several years, anti Christianity has intensified as the Arab Spring was ushered into the Middle East and North Africa, ancient homelands to Christians. Alarming stories of persecutions fill the newswires as Christians are harassed and either driven out of their ancient homelands, or transcended into second class citizens.

It has also been fashionable to attack and ridicule Christianity in the entertainment industry under the guise of being cutting edge, as comedians and entertainers mock Christianity. Although it is painfully obvious these same artists lack the courage to browbeat Islam, a religion that will actually fire back at them.

Higher education got caught with its pants down last week, when a college professor at Florida Atlantic University, assigned his students to write the name of Jesus on a piece of paper, then put it on the ground and stomp on it. See Fox News story.

Institutions of Christianity have gone astray over the millennium and that invites the criticism. Man lead institutions can always go astray into evil and mischief and Christianity has suffered many a black eye for those sins in the past.

But Jesus Christ is easily the most important figure that has ever appeared in the history of mankind. However he is regarded, his teachings have influenced the course of human history more than any other human who has ever lived. From his Beatitudes, to his Sermon on the Mount, his teachings have left mankind a blueprint to live by, unparalleled by any other and that’s what is resonating with the public as the Bible Series comes to a conclusion this Easter.

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Ed Farnan is the conservative columnist at IrishCentral, where he has been writing on the need for energy independence, strong self defense, secure borders, 2nd amendment, smaller government and many other issues. His articles appear in many publications throughout the USA and world. He has been a guest on Fox News and a regular guest on radio stations in the US and Europe.

Murkowski, the Blame Game, and GOP Irrelevance

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It’s hard to believe we are now two years removed from the historic 2010 election in which our senior senator, Lisa Murkowski, won a disputed write-in victory with one of the most vicious and underhanded campaigns of the modern era. I’m quite sure it would have made David Axelrod blush, that is, if he wasn’t involved.

That Murkowski triumphed in such a brazenly dishonest and cynical way is still shocking to my sensibilities, though I must confess that I always have been guilty of putting too much faith in my fellow man.

If that wasn’t bad enough, what came next should outrage every liberty-loving American and self-respecting Republican. Murkowski returned to Washington defiant and un-chastened, only to side with the defeated and discredited Barack Obama on every major piece of his lame duck agenda: ‘Don’t ask, don’t tell’ allowed gays to serve openly in the military for the first time in American history (over the objections of an overwhelming majority of service men and women in the field); The Dream Act would have allowed millions of illegal aliens to be granted amnesty, providing ‘anchors’ for millions more; The START Treaty unilaterally disarmed American weapons in the face of a growing nuclear threat the world over; and the tax compromise that struck down a permanent extension of the Bush era tax cuts. Fiscal cliff, anyone?

Murkowski was the only Republican to vote for all four pieces of legislation. But she didn’t stop there. She continued her ‘war on the Republican party’ by obstructing efforts to cut federal spending. Planned Parenthood funding was apparently an indispensable government expenditure, and was NPR, etc. Paul Ryan’s budget was too extreme. Tea Partiers were out-of-touch absolutists. The Republican Party was engaged in a ‘war on women.’ Radical activist judges could not be opposed. And the debt ceiling negotiations had to be given over to the appropriators. Just let the President pretty much spend as much as he wants. Yep, that’s our senior senator.

In siding with Barack Obama, Murkowski offered bipartisan legitimacy to a president who was essentially down for the count. Had he plowed forward to pass his agenda without some Republican support, it would have only dug him in deeper. But Lisa Murkowski is for nothing, if not for a hand out. So she offered her hand to Obama and helped him back onto his feet.

For almost two weeks now, conservatives have sat by and listened as luminaries from the Republican establishment have bloviated about how tea party insophisticates, social conservative morons, and Ron Paul libertarians are to blame for the epic failure of their golden boy, one Willard ‘Mitt’ Romney.

The Anchorage airwaves have been filled with talk of ‘adult conversations’ that must take place with the above mentioned villains, replete with sneers and bony fingers pointing in every direction, except in the mirror. Fact is, Anchorage talk radio is populated almost exclusively with Murkowski supporters. And for the record, not one has offered to sit down and have that ‘adult conversation’ since election night.

Just last week, a Murkowski groupie pontificated in the Anchorage Daily News about those embarrassing social conservatives and their outdated obscurantism. She even suggested that they (we) should be kicked to the curb for a new, and presumably more enlightened, center-left alliance. The all-new ‘Murkowski Republican Party'(good luck with that).

Just when I thought we were starting to move past the blame game, imagine my astonishment last night to stumble unto yet another missive in the mainstream press about the ‘civil war’ raging inside the Republican Party. I expect that coming from the likes of Rove, Jesmer, Schmidt, and their ilk.

But this time it wasn’t the supercilious Karl Rove, or the ubiquitous hung-over punditry inside the beltway still tipsy from months of hitting on the Romney Kool-Aid. It was none other than the nameless, faceless eunuchs inside the United States Senate who wished to be identified only as ‘Republican Senators.’ Sounds officious, doesn’t it? (If you’re going to wage war on us, at least come out of the shadows and show your face.)

Their agenda: ‘Read my lips; no more Todd Akins!’

The hubris of such a statement hardly even needs commentary. Yet it betrays their utter lack of even a nodding acquaintance with reality. The folks they so despise are, none other than the very ones who offered them the trust of elective office, only to be kicked to the curb when folly had run its full course.

Click HERE for the powerful conclusion.

Hamas Missile Strike Gets Personal

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Like many of us, I’ve been carefully watching operation “Pillar of Cloud” launched by Israel against the forces of darkness. Israel is the last country on the planet that would attack its neighbors without an enormously just cause. It’s the last country in the world that would launch a massive aerial strike against anyone, unless its very survival was in the balance. I know because I grew up there. My entire family is still there, many of whom are under constant daily missile attacks, attacks which have been haunting them for more than a decade.

With that being said, this article is not an attempt to analyze the war, nor is it an attempt to coin a superficial solution to the almost-eternal battle between good and evil. Rather, I would like to tell a personal story, which just so happens to have involved not just myself, but also 2010 US Senate candidate Joe Miller.

I was fortunate to have had the opportunity to travel with Joe and his son Jacob all over Israel in October of 2011. Although I was born in Israel and lived there half of my life, Joe and I still managed to tour many sites around the country which I had never been to before. From the Golan Heights in the north, to Masada and the Dead Sea in the south, we tried to cover as much ground as we could during the two weeks we were in country.

One of the places on our tour map was the city of Sderot. For those of you who aren’t familiar with Sderot, it is the closest Israeli city to the Gaza Strip, literally, only a few hundred meters from the border fence. The residents of Sderot have only 10 to 15 seconds to find the nearest bomb shelter when the sirens go off, indicating another missile from Gaza is on its way.

As it turned out, a personal friend of mine who lives in Israel, and who has some connections around the country, managed to arrange for a personal tour of Sderot for us. We were graciously hosted by the Sderot Media Center and its director, Noam Bedein. We toured much of the town and were briefed on the unique issues the city is facing in light of its extremely close proximity to Gaza.

One of the spots we arrived at was a small hill overlooking the Gaza Strip. The hill itself wasn’t more than 20 or 30 yards away from the nearest family homes behind us. Immediately in front of us, near the bottom of the hill, was the borderline fence between Gaza and Sederot.

Looking at the proximity of Gaza, along with the pock-marked walls of many of the nearby buildings, helped us appreciate what the brave residents of Sderot have been dealing with for the past 12 years. But we could only start to imagine what it is like to always worry about being 15 seconds away from the nearest bomb shelter, or what it feels like for Sderot’s children to be shocked awake in the middle of the night by the missile siren, and then try to run for their lives to a bomb shelter. It is truly something that most Americans can’t even begin to comprehend.

While we were standing on that hill, Noam Bedein gave us a very detailed explanation about the surrounding areas, the security issues facing the residents of Sderot, and the unbearable circumstances affecting everyone’s daily routines. He also explained how the Sderot Media Center attempts to inform the outside world about what is going on in Sderot.

So why this anecdote of our trip to Sderot? In part because the current Gaza war is being waged just 5 minutes outside of Sderot and many Hamas missiles are raining down on its people.

But what really spurred me to write this article is the following fact: the exact spot where Joe, his son Jacob, I and Noam were standing while looking at Gaza and listening to Noam’s overview suffered a direct missile hit less than 24 hours ago. [The picture above is Joe standing at that spot, overlooking Gaza]

It is one thing to hear about the missile strikes on Sderot, not knowing the terrain, but it’s a totally different experience when you know and understand that if the missile would have hit just another 20 yards behind where we had been standing, it likely would have wiped out an entire family.

This is the life the people of Sderot have to live, while the world watches, yawns, and goes about its way. The world only wakes up when Israel retaliates and drops bombs on the missile launchers, trying to prevent the indiscriminate missile strikes against its civilians.

It is my hope and prayer that one day, Joe, I, or anyone else who feels like it, can stand on top of that small hill in Sderot – or anywhere else in Israel, for that matter – in peace and safety.

But the answer is not pacifism.

Golda Meir, one of Israel’s Prime Ministers once said, “If the Arabs laid down their arms today, there will be peace tomorrow. If Israel laid down her arms today, there will be no Israel tomorrow.”

Truer words have never been spoken.

White House Petition Frenzy: New Petition to Strip Citizenship of Secession Signers Gains Steam (+video)

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On President Barack Hussein Obama’s WhiteHouse.gov petition website, a new petition has been posted that seeks to strip the citizenship of all citizens who have signed secession petitions. Created on November 12, the petition now has 7,917 signatures.

To meet the White House’s 25,000 signature threshold for consideration, the petition requires – at the time of this posting, an additional 17,083 by December 12, 2012. At the current rate of over 4,000 signatures per day, it seems pretty apparent that this petition will reach its signature goal.

The creator of this most recent petition is “Douglas H.” from Escondido, California.

This new petition – as well as the secession petitions that have been filed since last week’s election – stand little chance of going anywhere despite the Obama administration’s attempt to create false expectations by citing to successful petitions relating to the women’s right to vote, slavery, and civil rights under the link, “History of Petitions.” The White House conveniently leaves out that such “petitions” required constitutional amendments and/or congressional action as well.

Other disappointing features of the WhiteHouse.gov petition site include the “We the People” wording on the headers of each page as well as the shaded “TAX CUTS” phrase immediately above “We the People.” The Obama administration likely got some real humor out of the inclusion of both phrases, given its antipathy to both Tea Party “We the People” ideals as well as tax cuts.

Here’s what the White House itself says about its petition process: