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Ruling Class Continues to Ignore America: 70% of US Oppose Arming Syrian Rebels (+video)

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Photo Credit: Breitbart

Photo Credit: Breitbart

By John Nolte. A Pew poll released Monday shows that our politically divided country is fairly unified on one big issue. A huge majority of 70% oppose President Obama’s announced plan to arm the rebels in Syria currently waging a war to unseat that country’s sitting president, Bashar Assad. Only 20% favor the plan.

When broken down by party, 74% of Independents, 71% of Republicans, and 66% of Democrats are in opposition to the president. The main concern of those polled is the fear that the new boss will be an awful lot like the old boss.

Lessons learned from Egypt, perhaps?

A Gallup poll also released Monday backs up Pew, but the numbers aren’t quite as bad for the president. 54% disapprove of Obama’s decision, with only 37% approving.

Obama fares a little better among those following the situation in Syria closely, but he is still upside down seven points, with only 44% approving and a majority of 51% disapproving. Read more from this story HERE.

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Syrian-Rebel Teens Sing at Al Qaeda Camp: ‘We Destroyed America With a Civilian Airplane’

By Terence P. Jeffrey. An al Qaeda video posted online in late May and translated by the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI) shows masked Muslim teenage boys undergoing military training and indoctrination at an al Qaeda camp inside Syria.

The video shows the teenagers shooting handguns at a large photo of Syrian leader Bashar al-Asad. It also shows them stating that their leader is Abu Bakr al Baghdadi (the head of al Qaeda in Iraq), and then singing joyfully of their desire to overthrow both Asad and his sister Bushra, of the valor of al Qaeda leader Ayman al Zawahiri and of al Qaeda’s success in blowing up the World Trade Center towers.

“We destroyed America with a civilian airplane,” the young Syrian rebels sing. “The World Trade Center was turned into rubble. The World Trade Center was turned into rubble. Read more from this story HERE.

[Editor’s note: our apologies, but the embedded viewer in this article is not compatible with all browsers]

And here is another video from a Syrian rebel group:

Americans’ Confidence in Congress Falls to Lowest on Record

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Americans’ confidence in Congress as an institution is down to 10%, ranking the legislative body last on a list of 16 societal institutions for the fourth straight year. This is the lowest level of confidence Gallup has found, not only for Congress, but for any institution on record. Americans remain most confident in the military, at 76%.

Photo Credit: Gallup

Small business and the police also continue to rank highly, with 65% and 57% of Americans, respectively, expressing “a great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in these institutions. Joining Congress at the bottom of the list are Health Maintenance Organizations (HMOs) and organized labor. Congress’ low position is further underscored when one looks at the percentage of Americans who have little or no confidence in each institution. The slight majority of Americans, 52%, have this level of confidence in Congress, compared with 31% for HMOs.

Americans’ confidence in several institutions measured in the June 1-4 Gallup poll has shifted since last year. Americans have become more confident in banks, organized religion, and public schools, and less confident in the U.S. medical system, the Supreme Court, and Congress.

Read more from this story HERE.

Will the U.S. Even Survive Obama’s Last Term?

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Photo Credit: WND

The rash of scandals facing Barack Obama and his administration in recent days has some people wondering if the president can survive his full term through January 2017.

Britain’s Telegraph newspaper is even running the headline: “You have to wonder: Will Obama see out his full term?”

But U.S. radio giant Rush Limbaugh says that’s the wrong question to ask.

“That’s not the question. The question is: Will America last through Obama’s full term?” Limbaugh said on his program Monday.

He continued:

Will the country survive the implementation of Obamacare? Will the country survive all this spying and all this data collecting? Will the country survive amnesty, will the country survive every plan this man’s got? That’s the question. The question is not will he serve out his second term ’cause that’s a no-brainer. Yet the UK Telegraph, ’cause they live in the real world and think, my gosh, the population of any country learning this about their president, they’d be livid. Not here. Not here. The racial component alone is not gonna permit it. It’s not gonna allow it. That coupled with the basic ignorance of the low-information voter.

There’s no real uptick on jobs. There aren’t any careers being created. People have lost jobs. Jobs are vanishing. Taxes are going up, skyrocketing high. The divide between rich and poor is only gonna get worse. Obamacare’s gonna be fully implemented. If it is, folks, 20 grand for a family to be insured? Then we’re talking immigration, amnesty, 11, 12 million people. Look at what’s on tap. If Obama could he’d wipe out the Second Amendment, if he could. You know who he is; I know who he is; you know where he’s headed. Everybody in this administration’s headed the same way. Look at the IRS scandal. Look at what the FDA is doing and the EPA and the autocratic-like, dictatorial regulations coming out of the various branches and cabinet positions of this administration, and the question is not is Obama gonna survive. The question, will America as founded.

Read more from this story HERE.

Catholic Archbishop: Wake Up! Religious Liberty Under Attack in USA

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Photo Credit: AP Photo/Matt Rourke

Roman Catholic Archbishop Charles J. Chaput is calling on Americans to wake up and recognize that the Founding Fathers’ vision of religious freedom is now threatened by the federal government.

“The day when Americans could take the Founders’ understanding of religious freedom as a given is over,” said the archbishop. “We need to wake up.”

Chaput, who leads the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Philadelphia, pointed to Obamacare’s sterilization-contraception-abortifacient regulation as one example. The regulation, issued by Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, requires almost all health-care plans in the United States to provide coverage for sterilizations, artificial contraceptives and abortion-inducing drugs to all women of reproductive age–even if the person or employer providing the insurance coverage and even if the female beneficiaries themselves do not want the coverage and believe it is morally wrong and violates their religious beliefs.

“[T]he HHS mandate can only be understood as a form of coercion,” the archbishop wrote in a recent column posted on the website of the Archdiocese of Philadelphia. The column is entitled, “Religious Freedom and the Need to Wake Up.”

Last year, the Catholic bishops of the United States unanimously approved a statement describing the HHS regulation as an “unjust and illegal mandate.” The unanimous bishops said the regulation not only violated the religious freedom of religious institutions but also the “personal civil rights” of individual Americans who will be forced to comply with it either as employers or employees.

Read more from this story HERE.

U.S. Gives Saudi Airlines ‘Unrestricted’ Access to American Skies

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Photo Credit: CNS News

The United States and Saudi Arabia have signed an Open Skies agreement that will “permit unrestricted air service by the airlines of both countries between and beyond the other’s territory.”

The agreement means Saudi airlines may fly from any point in the kingdom to any point in the United States, and that U.S. airlines may fly from any point here to any airport in Saudi Arabia.

The deal was signed May 28 in Jeddah by U.S. Ambassador to Saudi Arabia James B. Smith and Dr. Faisal bin Hamad Al-Sugair, Saudi Arabia’s Deputy Director of the General Authority of Civil Aviation.

In addition to permitting each nations’ airlines to provide unrestricted air service to any point in the other country, the agreement also eliminates restrictions on how often the carriers can fly, the kind of aircraft they can use and the prices they charge.

Read more from this story HERE.

Integrity in a Post-Christian America

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Photo Credit: Art ~ 4ThGlryOfGod

America is now called a post-Christian place; its government is overtly attacking Christian beliefs about birth control, abortion, and gay marriage. The threat to these beliefs is a small though telling symptom of the larger social changes that, though little considered, are proceeding as traditional Judeo-Christian integrity departs. The problem is, abandoning America’s traditional religion discards its related moral behavior, too. And societies without a strong moral order are very unpleasant places to live — try Afghanistan, Somalia, or Mexico.

It’s instructive to compare two dictionary definitions of “integrity” from the same source, Merriam-Webster, in 1943 and in 2013.

1943 definition: Moral soundness, honesty, purity, freedom from corrupting influences or practices. (Webster’s New International Dictionary of the English Language, Second Edition, 1943)

2013 definition: Firm adherence to a code of especially moral or artistic values : incorruptibility. (Free Merriam-Webster.com, 2013)

Both definitions agree on the avoidance of corruption. But the older definition implicitly assumes a shared single standard of morality, while the current definition implicitly assumes the existence of more than one such, and thereby equates them. The first was intended to reflect an objective standard applicable uniformly to all; the second, multiple standards of equal validity.

Read more from this story HERE.

Little Recovery from Americans’ Massive $16 Trillion Loss in Wealth

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Photo Credit: Washington Post

American households have rebuilt less than half of the wealth lost during the recession, leaving them without the spending power to fuel a robust economic recovery, according to a new analysis from the Federal Reserve.

From the peak of the boom to the bottom of the bust, households watched a total of $16 trillion in wealth disappear amid sinking stock prices and the rubble of the real estate market. Since then, Americans have only been able to recapture 45 percent of that amount on average, after adjusting for inflation and population growth, according to the report from the St. Louis Fed released Thursday.

In addition, the report showed most of the improvement was due to gains in the stock market, which primarily benefit wealthy families. That means the recovery for other households has been even weaker.

“A conclusion that the financial damage of the crisis and recession largely has been repaired is not justified,” the report stated.

The study is part of a growing body of research on the role of household wealth — or lack thereof — in amplifying the impact of the recession and slowing the rate of recovery.

Read more from this story HERE.

Americans Deserve the IRS

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Photo Credit: Townhall

Individually, Americans do not deserve to be subservient to such a fear-mongering, intimidating and powerful agency as the Internal Revenue Service; but collectively, we do. Let’s look at it.

Since the 1791 ratification of our Constitution, until well into the 1920s, federal spending as a percentage of gross domestic product never exceeded 5 percent, except during war. Today federal spending is 25 percent of our GDP. State and local government spending is about 15 percent of the GDP. That means government spends more than 40 cents of each dollar we earn. If we add government’s regulatory burden, which is simply a disguised form of taxation, the government take is more than 50 percent of what we produce.

In order to squeeze out of us half of what we produce, a government tax collection agency must be ruthless and able to put the fear of God into its citizens. The IRS has mastered that task. Congress has given it powers that would be deemed criminal if used by others. For example, the Constitution’s Fifth Amendment protects Americans against self-incrimination and being forced to bear witness against oneself. That’s precisely what one does when he is compelled to sign his income tax form. However, a Fifth Amendment argument can’t be used as a defense in a court of law. The IRS will counter that you voluntarily provided the information on your tax return.

Read more from this story HERE.

Bill Maher: GOP Guilty of ‘Treason’; Michael Moore: ‘They Hate America’ (+video)

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Photo Credit: david_shankboneOn Friday’s “Real Time” on HBO, two of the most prominent liberal personalities, Bill Maher and Michael Moore, said the Republican Party’s opposition to President Barack Obama at almost every turn amounts to anti-American criminality.

According to Maher, the show’s host, House Republicans’ efforts to repeal Obama’s health care reform and Senate Republicans’ blocking of his judicial nominations go beyond loyal opposition and could rise to the level of treason.

“What about trying to repealing [Obamacare] for the 37th time? Is that a wise use of our resources and time? I mean, at some point obstruction becomes, I don’t know, treason, you know? I mean they’ve also blocked Obama’s head of the EPA. There’s no head of the circuit court in D.C. You know, at some point it just becomes more about hating him than loving your country.”

Read more from this story HERE.

Vote Imminent as Boy Scouts Considers Change to Policy Banning Gays

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Photo Credit: APWith its ranks deeply divided, the Boy Scouts of America is asking its local leaders from across the country to decide whether its contentious membership policy should be overhauled so that openly gay boys can participate in Scout units.

The proposal to be put before the roughly 1,400 voting members of the BSA’s National Council on Thursday, at a meeting in Grapevine, Texas, would retain the Scouts’ long-standing ban on gays serving in adult leadership positions.

Nonetheless, some conservatives within and outside the BSA community have denounced the proposal, saying the Scouts’ traditions would be undermined by the presence of openly gay youth. There have been warnings of mass defections if the ban is even partially lifted.

Read more from this story HERE.