Robert A. Hall is the actor who plays the coroner on CSI. He is much more than an actor. Read to the end.
This should be required reading for every man, woman and child in the United States of America.
"I'm 63 and I'm Tired" by Robert A. Hall
Except for one semester in college when jobs were scarce and a six-month period when I was between jobs, but job-hunting every day, I've worked, hard, since I was 18. Despite some health challenges, I still put in 50-hour weeks, and haven't called in sick in seven or eight years. I make a good salary, but I didn't inherit my job or my income, and I worked to get where I am. Given the economy, there's no retirement in sight, and I'm tired. Very tired.
I'm tired of being told that I have to "spread the wealth" to people who don't have my work ethic. I'm tired of being told the government will take the money I earned, by force if necessary, and give it to people too lazy to earn it.
I'm tired of being told that I have to pay more taxes to "keep people in their homes." Sure, if they lost their jobs or got sick, I'm willing to help. But if they bought McMansions at three times the price of our paid-off, $250,000 condo, on one-third of my salary, then let the left-wing Congress-critters who passed Fannie and Freddie and the Community Reinvestment Act that created the bubble help them with their own money.
I'm tired of being told how bad America is by left-wing millionaires like Michael Moore, George Soros and Hollywood Entertainers who live in luxury because of the opportunities America offers. In thirty years, if they get their way, the United States will have the economy of Zimbabwe, the freedom of the press of China, the crime and violence of Mexico, the tolerance for Christian people of Iran, and the freedom of speech of Venezuela.
I'm tired of being told that Islam is a "Religion of Peace," when every day I can read dozens of stories of Muslim men killing their sisters, wives and daughters for their family "honor"; of Muslims rioting over some slight offense; of Muslims murdering Christian and Jews because they aren't "believers"; of Muslims burning schools for girls; of Muslims stoning teenage rape victims to death for "adultery"; of Muslims mutilating the genitals of little girls; all in the name of Allah, because the Quran and Sharia law tells them to.
I'm tired of being told that "race doesn't matter" in the post-racial world of Obama, when it's all that matters in affirmative action jobs, lower college admission and graduation standards for minorities (harming them the most), government contract set-asides, tolerance for the ghetto culture of violence and fatherless children that hurts minorities more than anyone, and in the appointment of U.S. Senators from Illinois.
I think it's very cool that we have a black president and that a black child is doing her homework at the desk where Lincoln wrote the Emancipation Proclamation. I just wish the black president was Condi Rice, or someone who believes more in freedom and the individual and less arrogantly of an all-knowing government.
I'm tired of a news media that thinks Bush's fundraising and inaugural expenses were obscene, but that think Obama's, at triple the cost, were wonderful; that thinks Bush exercising daily was a waste of presidential time, but Obama exercising is a great example for the public to control weight and stress; that picked over every line of Bush's military records, but never demanded that Kerry release his; that slammed Palin, with two years as governor, for being too inexperienced for VP, but touted Obama with three years as senator as potentially the best president ever. Wonder why people are dropping their subscriptions or switching to Fox News? Get a clue. I didn't vote for Bush in 2000, but the media and Kerry drove me to his camp in 2004.
I'm tired of being told that out of "tolerance for other cultures" we must let Saudi Arabia use our oil money to fund mosques and mandrassa Islamic schools to preach hate in America, while no American group is allowed to fund a church, synagogue or religious school in Saudi Arabia to teach love and tolerance.
I'm tired of being told I must lower my living standard to fight global warming, which no one is allowed to debate. My wife and I live in a two-bedroom apartment and carpool together five miles to our jobs. We also own a three-bedroom condo where our daughter and granddaughter live. Our carbon footprint is about 5% of Al Gore's, and if you're greener than Gore, you're green enough.
I'm tired of being told that drug addicts have a disease, and I must help support and treat them, and pay for the damage they do. Did a giant germ rush out of a dark alley, grab them, and stuff white powder up their noses while they tried to fight it off? I don't think Gay people choose to be Gay, but I damn sure think druggies chose to take drugs. And I'm tired of harassment from cool people treating me like a freak when I tell them I never tried marijuana.
I'm tired of illegal aliens being called "undocumented workers," especially the ones who aren't working, but are living on welfare or crime. What's next? Calling drug dealers, "Undocumented Pharmacists"? And, no, I'm not against Hispanics. Most of them are Catholic, and it's been a few hundred years since Catholics wanted to kill me for my religion. I'm willing to fast track for citizenship any Hispanic person, who can speak English, doesn't have a criminal record and who is self-supporting without family on welfare, or who serves honorably for three years in our military.... Those are the citizens we need.
I'm tired of latte liberals and journalists, who would never wear the uniform of the Republic themselves, or let their entitlement-handicapped kids near a recruiting station, trashing our military. They and their kids can sit at home, never having to make split-second decisions under life and death circumstances, and bad mouth better people than themselves. Do bad things happen in war? You bet. Do our troops sometimes misbehave? Sure. Does this compare with the atrocities that were the policy of our enemies for the last fifty years and still are? Not even close. So here's the deal. I'll let myself be subjected to all the humiliation and abuse that was heaped on terrorists at Abu Ghraib or Gitmo, and the critics can let themselves be subject to captivity by the Muslims, who tortured and beheaded Daniel Pearl in Pakistan, or the Muslims who tortured and murdered Marine Lt. Col. William Higgins in Lebanon, or the Muslims who ran the blood-spattered Al Qaeda torture rooms our troops found in Iraq, or the Muslims who cut off the heads of schoolgirls in Indonesia, because the girls were Christian. Then we'll compare notes. British and American soldiers are the only troops in history that civilians came to for help and handouts, instead of hiding from in fear.
I'm tired of people telling me that their party has a corner on virtue and the other party has a corner on corruption. Read the papers; bums are bipartisan. And I'm tired of people telling me we need bipartisanship. I live in Illinois , where the "Illinois Combine" of Democrats has worked to loot the public for years. Not to mention the tax cheats in Obama's cabinet.
I'm tired of hearing wealthy athletes, entertainers and politicians of both parties talking about innocent mistakes, stupid mistakes or youthful mistakes, when we all know they think their only mistake was getting caught. I'm tired of people with a sense of entitlement, rich or poor.
Speaking of poor, I'm tired of hearing people with air-conditioned homes, color TVs and two cars call end poor. The majority of Americans didn't have that in 1970, but we didn't know we were "poor." The poverty pimps have to keep changing the definition of poor to keep the dollars flowing.
I'm real tired of people who don't take responsibility for their lives and actions. I'm tired of hearing them blame the government, or discrimination or big-whatever for their problems.
Yes, I'm tired. But I'm also glad to be 63. Because, ;mostly, I'm not going to have to see the world these people are making. I'm just sorry for my granddaughter.
Robert A. Hall is a Marine Vietnam veteran who served five terms in the Massachusetts State Senate.
There is no way this will be widely publicized, unless each of us sends it on! This is your chance to make a difference.
Tuesday, August 31, 2010
Robert A. Hall is the actor who plays the coroner on CSI. He is much more than an actor. Read to the end.
This should be required reading for every man, woman and child in the United States of America.
"I'm 63 and I'm Tired" by Robert A. Hall
Except for one semester in college when jobs were scarce and a six-month period when I was between jobs, but job-hunting every day, I've worked, hard, since I was 18. Despite some health challenges, I still put in 50-hour weeks, and haven't called in sick in seven or eight years. I make a good salary, but I didn't inherit my job or my income, and I worked to get where I am. Given the economy, there's no retirement in sight, and I'm tired. Very tired.
I'm tired of being told that I have to "spread the wealth" to people who don't have my work ethic. I'm tired of being told the government will take the money I earned, by force if necessary, and give it to people too lazy to earn it.
I'm tired of being told that I have to pay more taxes to "keep people in their homes." Sure, if they lost their jobs or got sick, I'm willing to help. But if they bought McMansions at three times the price of our paid-off, $250,000 condo, on one-third of my salary, then let the left-wing Congress-critters who passed Fannie and Freddie and the Community Reinvestment Act that created the bubble help them with their own money.
I'm tired of being told how bad America is by left-wing millionaires like Michael Moore, George Soros and Hollywood Entertainers who live in luxury because of the opportunities America offers. In thirty years, if they get their way, the United States will have the economy of Zimbabwe, the freedom of the press of China, the crime and violence of Mexico, the tolerance for Christian people of Iran, and the freedom of speech of Venezuela.
I'm tired of being told that Islam is a "Religion of Peace," when every day I can read dozens of stories of Muslim men killing their sisters, wives and daughters for their family "honor"; of Muslims rioting over some slight offense; of Muslims murdering Christian and Jews because they aren't "believers"; of Muslims burning schools for girls; of Muslims stoning teenage rape victims to death for "adultery"; of Muslims mutilating the genitals of little girls; all in the name of Allah, because the Quran and Sharia law tells them to.
I'm tired of being told that "race doesn't matter" in the post-racial world of Obama, when it's all that matters in affirmative action jobs, lower college admission and graduation standards for minorities (harming them the most), government contract set-asides, tolerance for the ghetto culture of violence and fatherless children that hurts minorities more than anyone, and in the appointment of U.S. Senators from Illinois.
I think it's very cool that we have a black president and that a black child is doing her homework at the desk where Lincoln wrote the Emancipation Proclamation. I just wish the black president was Condi Rice, or someone who believes more in freedom and the individual and less arrogantly of an all-knowing government.
I'm tired of a news media that thinks Bush's fundraising and inaugural expenses were obscene, but that think Obama's, at triple the cost, were wonderful; that thinks Bush exercising daily was a waste of presidential time, but Obama exercising is a great example for the public to control weight and stress; that picked over every line of Bush's military records, but never demanded that Kerry release his; that slammed Palin, with two years as governor, for being too inexperienced for VP, but touted Obama with three years as senator as potentially the best president ever. Wonder why people are dropping their subscriptions or switching to Fox News? Get a clue. I didn't vote for Bush in 2000, but the media and Kerry drove me to his camp in 2004.
I'm tired of being told that out of "tolerance for other cultures" we must let Saudi Arabia use our oil money to fund mosques and mandrassa Islamic schools to preach hate in America, while no American group is allowed to fund a church, synagogue or religious school in Saudi Arabia to teach love and tolerance.
I'm tired of being told I must lower my living standard to fight global warming, which no one is allowed to debate. My wife and I live in a two-bedroom apartment and carpool together five miles to our jobs. We also own a three-bedroom condo where our daughter and granddaughter live. Our carbon footprint is about 5% of Al Gore's, and if you're greener than Gore, you're green enough.
I'm tired of being told that drug addicts have a disease, and I must help support and treat them, and pay for the damage they do. Did a giant germ rush out of a dark alley, grab them, and stuff white powder up their noses while they tried to fight it off? I don't think Gay people choose to be Gay, but I damn sure think druggies chose to take drugs. And I'm tired of harassment from cool people treating me like a freak when I tell them I never tried marijuana.
I'm tired of illegal aliens being called "undocumented workers," especially the ones who aren't working, but are living on welfare or crime. What's next? Calling drug dealers, "Undocumented Pharmacists"? And, no, I'm not against Hispanics. Most of them are Catholic, and it's been a few hundred years since Catholics wanted to kill me for my religion. I'm willing to fast track for citizenship any Hispanic person, who can speak English, doesn't have a criminal record and who is self-supporting without family on welfare, or who serves honorably for three years in our military.... Those are the citizens we need.
I'm tired of latte liberals and journalists, who would never wear the uniform of the Republic themselves, or let their entitlement-handicapped kids near a recruiting station, trashing our military. They and their kids can sit at home, never having to make split-second decisions under life and death circumstances, and bad mouth better people than themselves. Do bad things happen in war? You bet. Do our troops sometimes misbehave? Sure. Does this compare with the atrocities that were the policy of our enemies for the last fifty years and still are? Not even close. So here's the deal. I'll let myself be subjected to all the humiliation and abuse that was heaped on terrorists at Abu Ghraib or Gitmo, and the critics can let themselves be subject to captivity by the Muslims, who tortured and beheaded Daniel Pearl in Pakistan, or the Muslims who tortured and murdered Marine Lt. Col. William Higgins in Lebanon, or the Muslims who ran the blood-spattered Al Qaeda torture rooms our troops found in Iraq, or the Muslims who cut off the heads of schoolgirls in Indonesia, because the girls were Christian. Then we'll compare notes. British and American soldiers are the only troops in history that civilians came to for help and handouts, instead of hiding from in fear.
I'm tired of people telling me that their party has a corner on virtue and the other party has a corner on corruption. Read the papers; bums are bipartisan. And I'm tired of people telling me we need bipartisanship. I live in Illinois , where the "Illinois Combine" of Democrats has worked to loot the public for years. Not to mention the tax cheats in Obama's cabinet.
I'm tired of hearing wealthy athletes, entertainers and politicians of both parties talking about innocent mistakes, stupid mistakes or youthful mistakes, when we all know they think their only mistake was getting caught. I'm tired of people with a sense of entitlement, rich or poor.
Speaking of poor, I'm tired of hearing people with air-conditioned homes, color TVs and two cars call end poor. The majority of Americans didn't have that in 1970, but we didn't know we were "poor." The poverty pimps have to keep changing the definition of poor to keep the dollars flowing.
I'm real tired of people who don't take responsibility for their lives and actions. I'm tired of hearing them blame the government, or discrimination or big-whatever for their problems.
Yes, I'm tired. But I'm also glad to be 63. Because, ;mostly, I'm not going to have to see the world these people are making. I'm just sorry for my granddaughter.
Robert A. Hall is a Marine Vietnam veteran who served five terms in the Massachusetts State Senate.
There is no way this will be widely publicized, unless each of us sends it on! This is your chance to make a difference.
This should be required reading for every man, woman and child in the United States of America.
"I'm 63 and I'm Tired" by Robert A. Hall
Except for one semester in college when jobs were scarce and a six-month period when I was between jobs, but job-hunting every day, I've worked, hard, since I was 18. Despite some health challenges, I still put in 50-hour weeks, and haven't called in sick in seven or eight years. I make a good salary, but I didn't inherit my job or my income, and I worked to get where I am. Given the economy, there's no retirement in sight, and I'm tired. Very tired.
I'm tired of being told that I have to "spread the wealth" to people who don't have my work ethic. I'm tired of being told the government will take the money I earned, by force if necessary, and give it to people too lazy to earn it.
I'm tired of being told that I have to pay more taxes to "keep people in their homes." Sure, if they lost their jobs or got sick, I'm willing to help. But if they bought McMansions at three times the price of our paid-off, $250,000 condo, on one-third of my salary, then let the left-wing Congress-critters who passed Fannie and Freddie and the Community Reinvestment Act that created the bubble help them with their own money.
I'm tired of being told how bad America is by left-wing millionaires like Michael Moore, George Soros and Hollywood Entertainers who live in luxury because of the opportunities America offers. In thirty years, if they get their way, the United States will have the economy of Zimbabwe, the freedom of the press of China, the crime and violence of Mexico, the tolerance for Christian people of Iran, and the freedom of speech of Venezuela.
I'm tired of being told that Islam is a "Religion of Peace," when every day I can read dozens of stories of Muslim men killing their sisters, wives and daughters for their family "honor"; of Muslims rioting over some slight offense; of Muslims murdering Christian and Jews because they aren't "believers"; of Muslims burning schools for girls; of Muslims stoning teenage rape victims to death for "adultery"; of Muslims mutilating the genitals of little girls; all in the name of Allah, because the Quran and Sharia law tells them to.
I'm tired of being told that "race doesn't matter" in the post-racial world of Obama, when it's all that matters in affirmative action jobs, lower college admission and graduation standards for minorities (harming them the most), government contract set-asides, tolerance for the ghetto culture of violence and fatherless children that hurts minorities more than anyone, and in the appointment of U.S. Senators from Illinois.
I think it's very cool that we have a black president and that a black child is doing her homework at the desk where Lincoln wrote the Emancipation Proclamation. I just wish the black president was Condi Rice, or someone who believes more in freedom and the individual and less arrogantly of an all-knowing government.
I'm tired of a news media that thinks Bush's fundraising and inaugural expenses were obscene, but that think Obama's, at triple the cost, were wonderful; that thinks Bush exercising daily was a waste of presidential time, but Obama exercising is a great example for the public to control weight and stress; that picked over every line of Bush's military records, but never demanded that Kerry release his; that slammed Palin, with two years as governor, for being too inexperienced for VP, but touted Obama with three years as senator as potentially the best president ever. Wonder why people are dropping their subscriptions or switching to Fox News? Get a clue. I didn't vote for Bush in 2000, but the media and Kerry drove me to his camp in 2004.
I'm tired of being told that out of "tolerance for other cultures" we must let Saudi Arabia use our oil money to fund mosques and mandrassa Islamic schools to preach hate in America, while no American group is allowed to fund a church, synagogue or religious school in Saudi Arabia to teach love and tolerance.
I'm tired of being told I must lower my living standard to fight global warming, which no one is allowed to debate. My wife and I live in a two-bedroom apartment and carpool together five miles to our jobs. We also own a three-bedroom condo where our daughter and granddaughter live. Our carbon footprint is about 5% of Al Gore's, and if you're greener than Gore, you're green enough.
I'm tired of being told that drug addicts have a disease, and I must help support and treat them, and pay for the damage they do. Did a giant germ rush out of a dark alley, grab them, and stuff white powder up their noses while they tried to fight it off? I don't think Gay people choose to be Gay, but I damn sure think druggies chose to take drugs. And I'm tired of harassment from cool people treating me like a freak when I tell them I never tried marijuana.
I'm tired of illegal aliens being called "undocumented workers," especially the ones who aren't working, but are living on welfare or crime. What's next? Calling drug dealers, "Undocumented Pharmacists"? And, no, I'm not against Hispanics. Most of them are Catholic, and it's been a few hundred years since Catholics wanted to kill me for my religion. I'm willing to fast track for citizenship any Hispanic person, who can speak English, doesn't have a criminal record and who is self-supporting without family on welfare, or who serves honorably for three years in our military.... Those are the citizens we need.
I'm tired of latte liberals and journalists, who would never wear the uniform of the Republic themselves, or let their entitlement-handicapped kids near a recruiting station, trashing our military. They and their kids can sit at home, never having to make split-second decisions under life and death circumstances, and bad mouth better people than themselves. Do bad things happen in war? You bet. Do our troops sometimes misbehave? Sure. Does this compare with the atrocities that were the policy of our enemies for the last fifty years and still are? Not even close. So here's the deal. I'll let myself be subjected to all the humiliation and abuse that was heaped on terrorists at Abu Ghraib or Gitmo, and the critics can let themselves be subject to captivity by the Muslims, who tortured and beheaded Daniel Pearl in Pakistan, or the Muslims who tortured and murdered Marine Lt. Col. William Higgins in Lebanon, or the Muslims who ran the blood-spattered Al Qaeda torture rooms our troops found in Iraq, or the Muslims who cut off the heads of schoolgirls in Indonesia, because the girls were Christian. Then we'll compare notes. British and American soldiers are the only troops in history that civilians came to for help and handouts, instead of hiding from in fear.
I'm tired of people telling me that their party has a corner on virtue and the other party has a corner on corruption. Read the papers; bums are bipartisan. And I'm tired of people telling me we need bipartisanship. I live in Illinois , where the "Illinois Combine" of Democrats has worked to loot the public for years. Not to mention the tax cheats in Obama's cabinet.
I'm tired of hearing wealthy athletes, entertainers and politicians of both parties talking about innocent mistakes, stupid mistakes or youthful mistakes, when we all know they think their only mistake was getting caught. I'm tired of people with a sense of entitlement, rich or poor.
Speaking of poor, I'm tired of hearing people with air-conditioned homes, color TVs and two cars call end poor. The majority of Americans didn't have that in 1970, but we didn't know we were "poor." The poverty pimps have to keep changing the definition of poor to keep the dollars flowing.
I'm real tired of people who don't take responsibility for their lives and actions. I'm tired of hearing them blame the government, or discrimination or big-whatever for their problems.
Yes, I'm tired. But I'm also glad to be 63. Because, ;mostly, I'm not going to have to see the world these people are making. I'm just sorry for my granddaughter.
Robert A. Hall is a Marine Vietnam veteran who served five terms in the Massachusetts State Senate.
There is no way this will be widely publicized, unless each of us sends it on! This is your chance to make a difference.
JIHAD WATCH
http://www.jihadwatch.org/2010/06/pat-condell-on-ground-zero-mosque-is-it-possible-to-be-astonished-but-not-surprised.html
We all need to really watch this.
Subject: Ground zero mosque
It takes a Brit to put into words what we should be saying. Click the link below ...........Sound ON
http://www.jihadwatch.org/2010/06/pat-condell-on-ground-zero-mosque-is-it-possible-to-be-astonished-but-not-surprised.html
Condell is a British stand-up comedian, but this video isn't comic, it's pure truth, and utterly brilliant.
We all need to really watch this.
Subject: Ground zero mosque
It takes a Brit to put into words what we should be saying. Click the link below ...........Sound ON
http://www.jihadwatch.org/2010/06/pat-condell-on-ground-zero-mosque-is-it-possible-to-be-astonished-but-not-surprised.html
Condell is a British stand-up comedian, but this video isn't comic, it's pure truth, and utterly brilliant.
FROM PROPHECY NEWS WATCH
Obama's Appalling Mistreatment of Israel
Email David Limbaugh
Columnist's Archive Share Buzz 0diggsdigg
Sign-Up As Israeli and Palestinian peace talks are scheduled to resume in Washington in a few days, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu reiterated that Palestinian recognition of Israel as the Jewish homeland is an essential condition for peace. Completely reasonable, yet don't keep your fingers crossed, especially with the Obama administration's attitude toward Israel.
In my new book, "Crimes Against Liberty" (I know, another shameless plug, but you'd do the same in my position), I dedicate an entire chapter to detailing the Obama administration's horrendous and unprecedented mistreatment of Israel. Can you believe we're even having a discussion about Israel's right to the land six-plus decades and numerous wars after the modern Israeli state was restored to the Jews?
It's bad enough when misfit countries oppose Israel's right to existence and always demonize Israel while downplaying the Palestinians' misdeeds, but it's shocking and disturbing when the president of the United States abuses our greatest ally in the Mideast.
It's mystifying to me that so many Jewish people in America have been so tolerant of Obama's behavior toward Israel, almost as if in denial, but what more evidence do we need?
During the campaign, it was widely suspected that Obama had strong ties with pro-Palestinian groups, not to mention his membership in the Rev. Jeremiah Wright's church -- one that is known for its sympathy for the causes of certain terrorist organizations and the Palestinian position.
The Los Angeles Times reportedly possessed and protected a damning video of Obama toasting Rashid Khalidi, a former PLO operative and an outspoken Israel critic who, after the 9/11 attacks, referred to the media's "hysteria about suicide bombers."
Obama's official campaign website, Organizing for America, permitted the posting of a blog entry titled "How the Jewish Lobby Works." Though the post was eventually removed, it's suspicious that someone with posting privileges had these virulently anti-Semitic views. The post said: "No lobby is feared more or catered to by politicians than the Jewish Lobby. If a politician does not play ball with the Jewish Lobby, he will not get elected, or re-elected, and he will either be smeared or ignored by the Jewish-owned major media." NewsBusters cited numerous other links to similar anti-Jewish posts on the website, showing this was not an isolated event. How does one explain away that kind of climate in the bowels of the administration?
Once elected, Obama appointed James Jones as his national security adviser, a man The Lid said is "not known as a friend of the Jewish State." Jones assembled a team that reportedly intended to be tougher and "impose a solution on" Israel. Early in his term, Obama pledged more than $900 million to rebuild Gaza and to shore up the Palestinian Authority. The rationale was to strengthen Palestinian moderates, but many experts warned that much of this money could get into the hands of Hamas and other terrorist organizations.
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton gratuitously denounced Israel's treatment of Palestinians in Gaza while ignoring the many Palestinian sins against Israel. The administration also demanded that Israel negotiate with Syria -- a primary sponsor of Hezbollah -- just two days after Syrian foreign minister Walid Mueller praised a speech by Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad calling Israel "the most cruel and repressive racist regime."
The administration has also applied fierce pressure on Israel to acquiesce on the matter of the creation of a Palestinian state, even to the point of conditioning our efforts to thwart Iran's nuclear ambitions on that Israeli concession. Obama directed our return to the U.N. Human Rights Council, which the Bush administration had left nine months before because the council had incessantly condemned Israel while ignoring the abuses of Mideast dictatorships. Obama snubbed Netanyahu and announced he would discontinue the established practice of hosting Israeli prime ministers when they are in Washington.
Obama's Mideast envoy, George Mitchell, adopted the controversial 2002 Arab Peace Initiative, which called for Israel to withdraw from east Jerusalem, the entire West Bank and Golan Heights and also for Israel to accept the influx of millions of foreign Arabs as Israeli citizens as part of the "right of return." Mideast expert Caroline Glick says this would mean "Israel would effectively cease to be a Jewish state."
Vice President Biden engaged in a public temper tantrum and harshly "condemned" Israel for not bowing to the administration's demands that it discontinue its settlements in east Jerusalem. Rarely does the United States publicly condemn an ally, especially in such harsh terms.
We're just scratching the surface, but surely you get the picture. There is, however, one gratifying development in this ongoing saga. Finally, some Jewish Americans have had enough and are speaking up. As I chronicle in the book, former New York Mayor Ed Koch wrote two scathing editorials against Obama's appalling policies and called out his fellow Jews to speak up against them. Amazingly, Obama's stalwart supporter Sen. Chuck Schumer finally joined Koch in pushing back. Others, not just American Jews, need to wake up.
Email David Limbaugh
Columnist's Archive Share Buzz 0diggsdigg
Sign-Up As Israeli and Palestinian peace talks are scheduled to resume in Washington in a few days, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu reiterated that Palestinian recognition of Israel as the Jewish homeland is an essential condition for peace. Completely reasonable, yet don't keep your fingers crossed, especially with the Obama administration's attitude toward Israel.
In my new book, "Crimes Against Liberty" (I know, another shameless plug, but you'd do the same in my position), I dedicate an entire chapter to detailing the Obama administration's horrendous and unprecedented mistreatment of Israel. Can you believe we're even having a discussion about Israel's right to the land six-plus decades and numerous wars after the modern Israeli state was restored to the Jews?
It's bad enough when misfit countries oppose Israel's right to existence and always demonize Israel while downplaying the Palestinians' misdeeds, but it's shocking and disturbing when the president of the United States abuses our greatest ally in the Mideast.
It's mystifying to me that so many Jewish people in America have been so tolerant of Obama's behavior toward Israel, almost as if in denial, but what more evidence do we need?
During the campaign, it was widely suspected that Obama had strong ties with pro-Palestinian groups, not to mention his membership in the Rev. Jeremiah Wright's church -- one that is known for its sympathy for the causes of certain terrorist organizations and the Palestinian position.
The Los Angeles Times reportedly possessed and protected a damning video of Obama toasting Rashid Khalidi, a former PLO operative and an outspoken Israel critic who, after the 9/11 attacks, referred to the media's "hysteria about suicide bombers."
Obama's official campaign website, Organizing for America, permitted the posting of a blog entry titled "How the Jewish Lobby Works." Though the post was eventually removed, it's suspicious that someone with posting privileges had these virulently anti-Semitic views. The post said: "No lobby is feared more or catered to by politicians than the Jewish Lobby. If a politician does not play ball with the Jewish Lobby, he will not get elected, or re-elected, and he will either be smeared or ignored by the Jewish-owned major media." NewsBusters cited numerous other links to similar anti-Jewish posts on the website, showing this was not an isolated event. How does one explain away that kind of climate in the bowels of the administration?
Once elected, Obama appointed James Jones as his national security adviser, a man The Lid said is "not known as a friend of the Jewish State." Jones assembled a team that reportedly intended to be tougher and "impose a solution on" Israel. Early in his term, Obama pledged more than $900 million to rebuild Gaza and to shore up the Palestinian Authority. The rationale was to strengthen Palestinian moderates, but many experts warned that much of this money could get into the hands of Hamas and other terrorist organizations.
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton gratuitously denounced Israel's treatment of Palestinians in Gaza while ignoring the many Palestinian sins against Israel. The administration also demanded that Israel negotiate with Syria -- a primary sponsor of Hezbollah -- just two days after Syrian foreign minister Walid Mueller praised a speech by Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad calling Israel "the most cruel and repressive racist regime."
The administration has also applied fierce pressure on Israel to acquiesce on the matter of the creation of a Palestinian state, even to the point of conditioning our efforts to thwart Iran's nuclear ambitions on that Israeli concession. Obama directed our return to the U.N. Human Rights Council, which the Bush administration had left nine months before because the council had incessantly condemned Israel while ignoring the abuses of Mideast dictatorships. Obama snubbed Netanyahu and announced he would discontinue the established practice of hosting Israeli prime ministers when they are in Washington.
Obama's Mideast envoy, George Mitchell, adopted the controversial 2002 Arab Peace Initiative, which called for Israel to withdraw from east Jerusalem, the entire West Bank and Golan Heights and also for Israel to accept the influx of millions of foreign Arabs as Israeli citizens as part of the "right of return." Mideast expert Caroline Glick says this would mean "Israel would effectively cease to be a Jewish state."
Vice President Biden engaged in a public temper tantrum and harshly "condemned" Israel for not bowing to the administration's demands that it discontinue its settlements in east Jerusalem. Rarely does the United States publicly condemn an ally, especially in such harsh terms.
We're just scratching the surface, but surely you get the picture. There is, however, one gratifying development in this ongoing saga. Finally, some Jewish Americans have had enough and are speaking up. As I chronicle in the book, former New York Mayor Ed Koch wrote two scathing editorials against Obama's appalling policies and called out his fellow Jews to speak up against them. Amazingly, Obama's stalwart supporter Sen. Chuck Schumer finally joined Koch in pushing back. Others, not just American Jews, need to wake up.
FROM TOWNHALL
Time to START Standing Up for America
Email Phyllis Schlafly
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Sign-Up Among the dangers lurking in Congress's fall session and lame duck session will be Obama's demand that the Senate rush to ratify the treaty called New START, which he signed with the Russians in Prague last April. This treaty is not only a bad idea, it's downright dangerous to U.S. national security.
For the first time in the long record of U.S.-Russian treaties, New START links offensive and defensive weapons. Obama's advocates of ratification say that doesn't matter because the link is only in the preamble and that doesn't bind us.
But this interpretation hasn't been cleared with the Russians, who assert that the preamble puts a binding limit on the U.S. missile defense program. The Russian government issued a statement that the New START treaty "can operate and be viable only if the United States refrains from developing its missile defense capabilities quantitatively or qualitatively."
The Russians are salivating at the thought that the New START proclaims their victory in their long-running battle to kill U.S. missile defenses. For decades, Russia's primary goal was to stop the United States from building any anti-missile capability.
Ronald Reagan's adamant refusal to give up his Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) was the principal reason he won the Cold War (without firing a shot, as Margaret Thatcher said). But now Barack Obama is casually willing to abandon our right to build defensive weapons.
Sen. Jim DeMint, R-S.C., accurately warns that New START revives the Cold War policy known as MAD, a label that famously served as a double entendre. The acronym stands for Mutual Assured Destruction, the policy that was supposed to deter nuclear attack because of the threat that the United States was committed to retaliate and dump massive destruction on the Soviet Union.
In the years of the Cold War, we assumed we were dealing with a rational enemy who, even though dedicated to world conquest, dared not risk such devastating retaliation. That may not be true of today's potential adversaries, who have trained their younger generation to believe that suicide is noble and their key to Heaven.
New START doesn't make nukes obsolete, it just tries to ensure that the U.S. and Russia have an equal capacity to destroy each other. Most important, New START does nothing whatever to protect us from a nuclear Iran or North Korea or Syria or even China.
The U.S. Constitution gives the Senate "advice and consent" power over treaties. But the Obama administration refuses to let senators review the treaty's negotiating documents.
Whatever happened to transparency? Secretary of State Hillary Clinton asserts that it's not customary to allow senators to see the records, but DeMint cited the precedent of two previous U.S.-U.S.S.R. treaties that disprove her claim -- the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty and the 1972 ABM Treaty.
New START bars the U.S. and Russia from deploying more than 1,550 strategic warheads and 700 launchers. To achieve that goal, we will have to destroy some of our missiles and not modernize the ones we keep because the treaty locks us into a permanent comprehensive nuclear test ban.
The State Department admits that Russia has consistently cheated on all its arms-control treaties, including the 1991 START I treaty right up until it expired last December. Russia admits that it cheated on the famous 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty, from which President George W. Bush finally (and thankfully) withdrew the United States.
U.S. intelligence analysts have raised questions about whether Russian cheating can even be detected. But a State Department report to Congress claims that potential Russian cheating on the New START nuclear-arms treaty would not be significant because the benefits of cheating would be "questionable."
Senator John McCain, R-Ariz., said we're all wasting a lot of time if the State Department admits that Russia has consistently cheated on all arms-control treaties as a matter of course and that cheating doesn't matter anyway. McCain believes that cheating does matter.
Another provision where the New START treaty favors Russia is that it fails to limit Russia's massive tactical nuclear weapons for use on the battlefield. They outnumber U.S. tactical nukes by a ratio of 10 to one and can be launched from rockets, submarines and bomber planes.
The New START treaty is based on Obama's foolish notion that the United States can create "a world without nuclear weapons." We have power only to create a world without American nuclear weapons, a condition that would make us a sitting duck for countries that have evil nuclear objectives.
The New START treaty is a big victory for Russia and defeat for the United States. The Senate should reject it.
Email Phyllis Schlafly
Columnist's Archive Share Buzz 0diggsdigg
Sign-Up Among the dangers lurking in Congress's fall session and lame duck session will be Obama's demand that the Senate rush to ratify the treaty called New START, which he signed with the Russians in Prague last April. This treaty is not only a bad idea, it's downright dangerous to U.S. national security.
For the first time in the long record of U.S.-Russian treaties, New START links offensive and defensive weapons. Obama's advocates of ratification say that doesn't matter because the link is only in the preamble and that doesn't bind us.
But this interpretation hasn't been cleared with the Russians, who assert that the preamble puts a binding limit on the U.S. missile defense program. The Russian government issued a statement that the New START treaty "can operate and be viable only if the United States refrains from developing its missile defense capabilities quantitatively or qualitatively."
The Russians are salivating at the thought that the New START proclaims their victory in their long-running battle to kill U.S. missile defenses. For decades, Russia's primary goal was to stop the United States from building any anti-missile capability.
Ronald Reagan's adamant refusal to give up his Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) was the principal reason he won the Cold War (without firing a shot, as Margaret Thatcher said). But now Barack Obama is casually willing to abandon our right to build defensive weapons.
Sen. Jim DeMint, R-S.C., accurately warns that New START revives the Cold War policy known as MAD, a label that famously served as a double entendre. The acronym stands for Mutual Assured Destruction, the policy that was supposed to deter nuclear attack because of the threat that the United States was committed to retaliate and dump massive destruction on the Soviet Union.
In the years of the Cold War, we assumed we were dealing with a rational enemy who, even though dedicated to world conquest, dared not risk such devastating retaliation. That may not be true of today's potential adversaries, who have trained their younger generation to believe that suicide is noble and their key to Heaven.
New START doesn't make nukes obsolete, it just tries to ensure that the U.S. and Russia have an equal capacity to destroy each other. Most important, New START does nothing whatever to protect us from a nuclear Iran or North Korea or Syria or even China.
The U.S. Constitution gives the Senate "advice and consent" power over treaties. But the Obama administration refuses to let senators review the treaty's negotiating documents.
Whatever happened to transparency? Secretary of State Hillary Clinton asserts that it's not customary to allow senators to see the records, but DeMint cited the precedent of two previous U.S.-U.S.S.R. treaties that disprove her claim -- the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty and the 1972 ABM Treaty.
New START bars the U.S. and Russia from deploying more than 1,550 strategic warheads and 700 launchers. To achieve that goal, we will have to destroy some of our missiles and not modernize the ones we keep because the treaty locks us into a permanent comprehensive nuclear test ban.
The State Department admits that Russia has consistently cheated on all its arms-control treaties, including the 1991 START I treaty right up until it expired last December. Russia admits that it cheated on the famous 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty, from which President George W. Bush finally (and thankfully) withdrew the United States.
U.S. intelligence analysts have raised questions about whether Russian cheating can even be detected. But a State Department report to Congress claims that potential Russian cheating on the New START nuclear-arms treaty would not be significant because the benefits of cheating would be "questionable."
Senator John McCain, R-Ariz., said we're all wasting a lot of time if the State Department admits that Russia has consistently cheated on all arms-control treaties as a matter of course and that cheating doesn't matter anyway. McCain believes that cheating does matter.
Another provision where the New START treaty favors Russia is that it fails to limit Russia's massive tactical nuclear weapons for use on the battlefield. They outnumber U.S. tactical nukes by a ratio of 10 to one and can be launched from rockets, submarines and bomber planes.
The New START treaty is based on Obama's foolish notion that the United States can create "a world without nuclear weapons." We have power only to create a world without American nuclear weapons, a condition that would make us a sitting duck for countries that have evil nuclear objectives.
The New START treaty is a big victory for Russia and defeat for the United States. The Senate should reject it.
FROM TOWNHALL
Friend of the Brotherhood
Email Frank Gaffney
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Sign-Up A new Pew Center poll says nearly one-in-five Americans think Barack Obama is a Muslim. Perhaps that is because of reports like the one blared on the cover of the September 6 edition of the tabloid, The Globe, replete with photos of Mr. Obama in Muslim garb: It found "shocking proof" in a Nile TV interview given earlier this year by the Egyptian Foreign Affairs Minister, Ahmed Aboul Gheit, disclosing that "the American President told me in confidence that he is a Muslim."
A better explanation is that more Americans are taking note of the accumulating series of statements and actions by the President that display favoritism, or worse, towards Muslims. That would be troubling enough; after all, no chief executive is supposed to support one subset of us over others.
Growing numbers of our countrymen may be on to something else about the Obama presidency, however, that is even more alarming: In instance after instance, Mr. Obama has seemingly bent over backwards to accommodate not just Muslim-Americans, but a deeply problematic organization - the Muslim Brotherhood (or Ikhwan) - that purports to represent their interests here.
In fact, the Brotherhood seeks to do something most Muslims in this country - and needless to say, the rest of us - do not want: According to the organization's mission statement, it is waging "a kind of grand jihad eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within and ‘sabotaging' its miserable house by their hands and the hands of the believers so that it is eliminated and God's religion is made victorious over all other religions."
One need not believe that the President of the United States has actually embraced this radical goal to be concerned. It is enough that he has repeatedly said and done things that conform to, or otherwise advance, the Ikhwan's agenda as articulated by the Brotherhood's myriad front organizations in the United States.
Consider the following, necessarily partial listing of actions - some symbolic, some substantive - that can legitimately be seen by the Muslim Brothers as evidence of our President's submission (the literally meaning of "Islam" and the goal of all those who, like the Ikhwan, seek to impose shariah worldwide):
* Mr. Obama declared in his inaugural address that, "The United States is a nation of Christians and Muslims, Jews and Hindus and non-believers." The ordering of "Muslims" before "Jews" was clearly deliberate, since the latter have been and are in the United States in far larger numbers than the former and have played a much more important role in the nation's history from its founding. Subsequently, he went even further, describing (inaccurately) America as "one of the largest Muslim countries in the world."
* In his much-ballyhooed address to "the Muslim world" delivered in Cairo in June 2009, Mr. Obama signaled his determination not only to "reach out" to followers of Islam. He also committed himself to an initiative - clearing the way for Muslims to "fulfill their zakat (tithing for charity) obligations" - that would have the practical effect of giving Brotherhood operatives (whose representatives he insisted be in the audience) more latitude to engage in material support for terrorism and, thereby, wage their "civilization jihad" in and from America.
* In September 2009, the Obama administration co-sponsored a United Nations Human Rights Council resolution eagerly sought by the Muslim Brotherhood and its friends. The resolution called on member nations to "prohibit and criminalize" speech that offends Islam and its followers. Such an accommodation would clearly violate the Constitution's First Amendment guarantees of freedom of expression.
* Speaking of the Constitution, the Obama administration is arguing in federal court that the U.S. government's ownership of AIG, which happens to be the largest purveyor of shariah-compliant insurance products in the world, does not violate the Establishment Clause's separation of church and state.
* We recently learned that, according to President Obama, the NASA Administrator's "foremost" priority is to make Muslims feel better about themselves and their history. Job 1 is not assuring U.S. supremacy in space, or even assured access to it; it's Muslim outreach and therapy.
* Then, last month, President Obama endorsed the megamosque near Ground Zero in a White House Iftar dinner attended by prominent Muslim Brotherhood operatives. Subsequent efforts to distance himself from that stance, in the face of intense criticism from the public and politicians of both parties, has only put into even sharper focus his pandering to this community.
* Now, my Center for Security Policy colleague Christine Brim has broken the story of a major new Obama initiative in that vein. In the words of the largest Muslim Brotherhood organization in the country, the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA), "A phenomenal next step has been made where government Iftars become coupled with workshops to provide resources and benefit the Muslim community. The U.S. Department of Agriculture (DOA) and the [Muslim Brotherhood-associated] Coordinating Council of Muslim Organizations (CCMO) have paired the first of such events, scheduled for August 31, 2010."
The latest poll suggests that most Americans do not believe Barack Obama is a Muslim. And for the vast majority of us, it would not matter even if he were - provided he does not subscribe to the Brotherhood's creed: "God is our objective; the Koran is our law; the Prophet is our leader; jihad is our way; and death for the sake of Allah is the highest of our aspirations."
Still, the public is clearly increasingly, and rightly, concerned about Mr. Obama's policies of favoritism and submission towards the worst elements in Islam. Before tax-dollars are spent to that end, we need a national debate about such policies, and the grave dangers posed by their seeming principal beneficiary: the Muslim Brotherhood.
Email Frank Gaffney
Columnist's Archive Share Buzz 0diggsdigg
Sign-Up A new Pew Center poll says nearly one-in-five Americans think Barack Obama is a Muslim. Perhaps that is because of reports like the one blared on the cover of the September 6 edition of the tabloid, The Globe, replete with photos of Mr. Obama in Muslim garb: It found "shocking proof" in a Nile TV interview given earlier this year by the Egyptian Foreign Affairs Minister, Ahmed Aboul Gheit, disclosing that "the American President told me in confidence that he is a Muslim."
A better explanation is that more Americans are taking note of the accumulating series of statements and actions by the President that display favoritism, or worse, towards Muslims. That would be troubling enough; after all, no chief executive is supposed to support one subset of us over others.
Growing numbers of our countrymen may be on to something else about the Obama presidency, however, that is even more alarming: In instance after instance, Mr. Obama has seemingly bent over backwards to accommodate not just Muslim-Americans, but a deeply problematic organization - the Muslim Brotherhood (or Ikhwan) - that purports to represent their interests here.
In fact, the Brotherhood seeks to do something most Muslims in this country - and needless to say, the rest of us - do not want: According to the organization's mission statement, it is waging "a kind of grand jihad eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within and ‘sabotaging' its miserable house by their hands and the hands of the believers so that it is eliminated and God's religion is made victorious over all other religions."
One need not believe that the President of the United States has actually embraced this radical goal to be concerned. It is enough that he has repeatedly said and done things that conform to, or otherwise advance, the Ikhwan's agenda as articulated by the Brotherhood's myriad front organizations in the United States.
Consider the following, necessarily partial listing of actions - some symbolic, some substantive - that can legitimately be seen by the Muslim Brothers as evidence of our President's submission (the literally meaning of "Islam" and the goal of all those who, like the Ikhwan, seek to impose shariah worldwide):
* Mr. Obama declared in his inaugural address that, "The United States is a nation of Christians and Muslims, Jews and Hindus and non-believers." The ordering of "Muslims" before "Jews" was clearly deliberate, since the latter have been and are in the United States in far larger numbers than the former and have played a much more important role in the nation's history from its founding. Subsequently, he went even further, describing (inaccurately) America as "one of the largest Muslim countries in the world."
* In his much-ballyhooed address to "the Muslim world" delivered in Cairo in June 2009, Mr. Obama signaled his determination not only to "reach out" to followers of Islam. He also committed himself to an initiative - clearing the way for Muslims to "fulfill their zakat (tithing for charity) obligations" - that would have the practical effect of giving Brotherhood operatives (whose representatives he insisted be in the audience) more latitude to engage in material support for terrorism and, thereby, wage their "civilization jihad" in and from America.
* In September 2009, the Obama administration co-sponsored a United Nations Human Rights Council resolution eagerly sought by the Muslim Brotherhood and its friends. The resolution called on member nations to "prohibit and criminalize" speech that offends Islam and its followers. Such an accommodation would clearly violate the Constitution's First Amendment guarantees of freedom of expression.
* Speaking of the Constitution, the Obama administration is arguing in federal court that the U.S. government's ownership of AIG, which happens to be the largest purveyor of shariah-compliant insurance products in the world, does not violate the Establishment Clause's separation of church and state.
* We recently learned that, according to President Obama, the NASA Administrator's "foremost" priority is to make Muslims feel better about themselves and their history. Job 1 is not assuring U.S. supremacy in space, or even assured access to it; it's Muslim outreach and therapy.
* Then, last month, President Obama endorsed the megamosque near Ground Zero in a White House Iftar dinner attended by prominent Muslim Brotherhood operatives. Subsequent efforts to distance himself from that stance, in the face of intense criticism from the public and politicians of both parties, has only put into even sharper focus his pandering to this community.
* Now, my Center for Security Policy colleague Christine Brim has broken the story of a major new Obama initiative in that vein. In the words of the largest Muslim Brotherhood organization in the country, the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA), "A phenomenal next step has been made where government Iftars become coupled with workshops to provide resources and benefit the Muslim community. The U.S. Department of Agriculture (DOA) and the [Muslim Brotherhood-associated] Coordinating Council of Muslim Organizations (CCMO) have paired the first of such events, scheduled for August 31, 2010."
The latest poll suggests that most Americans do not believe Barack Obama is a Muslim. And for the vast majority of us, it would not matter even if he were - provided he does not subscribe to the Brotherhood's creed: "God is our objective; the Koran is our law; the Prophet is our leader; jihad is our way; and death for the sake of Allah is the highest of our aspirations."
Still, the public is clearly increasingly, and rightly, concerned about Mr. Obama's policies of favoritism and submission towards the worst elements in Islam. Before tax-dollars are spent to that end, we need a national debate about such policies, and the grave dangers posed by their seeming principal beneficiary: the Muslim Brotherhood.
FROM PROPHECY NEWS WATCH
Massive solar storm to hit Earth in 2012 - could devestate our Digital Society
http://in.news.yahoo.com/
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Astronomers are predicting that a massive solar storm, much bigger in potential than the one that caused spectacular light shows on Earth earlier this month, is to strike our planet in 2012 with a force of 100 million hydrogen bombs.
Several US media outlets have reported that NASA was warning the massive flare this month was just a precursor to a massive solar storm building that had the potential to wipe out the entire planet's power grid.
Despite its rebuttal, NASA's been watching out for this storm since 2006 and reports from the US this week claim the storms could hit on that most Hollywood of disaster dates - 2012.
Similar storms back in 1859 and 1921 caused worldwide chaos, wiping out telegraph wires on a massive scale. The 2012 storm has the potential to be even more disruptive.
"The general consensus among general astronomers (and certainly solar astronomers) is that this coming Solar maximum (2012 but possibly later into 2013) will be the most violent in 100 years," News.com.au quoted astronomy lecturer and columnist Dave Reneke as saying.
"A bold statement and one taken seriously by those it will affect most, namely airline companies, communications companies and anyone working with modern GPS systems.
"They can even trip circuit breakers and knock out orbiting satellites, as has already been done this year," added Reneke.
No one really knows what effect the 2012-2013 Solar Max will have on today's digital-reliant society.
Dr Richard Fisher, director of NASA's Heliophysics division, told Reneke the super storm would hit like "a bolt of lightning", causing catastrophic consequences for the world's health, emergency services and national security unless precautions are taken.
NASA said that a recent report by the National Academy of Sciences found that if a similar storm occurred today, it could cause "1 to 2 trillion dollars in damages to society's high-tech infrastructure and require four to 10 years for complete recovery".
The reason for the concern comes as the sun enters a phase known as Solar Cycle 24.
Most experts agree, although those who put the date of Solar Max in 2012 are getting the most press.
They claim satellites will be aged by 50 years, rendering GPS even more useless than ever, and the blast will have the equivalent energy of 100 million hydrogen bombs.
"We know it is coming but we don't know how bad it is going to be," Fisher told Reneke.
"Systems will just not work. The flares change the magnetic field on the Earth and it's rapid, just like a lightning bolt. That's the solar effect," he added.
The findings are published in the most recent issue of Australasian Science. (ANI)
http://in.news.yahoo.com/
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Astronomers are predicting that a massive solar storm, much bigger in potential than the one that caused spectacular light shows on Earth earlier this month, is to strike our planet in 2012 with a force of 100 million hydrogen bombs.
Several US media outlets have reported that NASA was warning the massive flare this month was just a precursor to a massive solar storm building that had the potential to wipe out the entire planet's power grid.
Despite its rebuttal, NASA's been watching out for this storm since 2006 and reports from the US this week claim the storms could hit on that most Hollywood of disaster dates - 2012.
Similar storms back in 1859 and 1921 caused worldwide chaos, wiping out telegraph wires on a massive scale. The 2012 storm has the potential to be even more disruptive.
"The general consensus among general astronomers (and certainly solar astronomers) is that this coming Solar maximum (2012 but possibly later into 2013) will be the most violent in 100 years," News.com.au quoted astronomy lecturer and columnist Dave Reneke as saying.
"A bold statement and one taken seriously by those it will affect most, namely airline companies, communications companies and anyone working with modern GPS systems.
"They can even trip circuit breakers and knock out orbiting satellites, as has already been done this year," added Reneke.
No one really knows what effect the 2012-2013 Solar Max will have on today's digital-reliant society.
Dr Richard Fisher, director of NASA's Heliophysics division, told Reneke the super storm would hit like "a bolt of lightning", causing catastrophic consequences for the world's health, emergency services and national security unless precautions are taken.
NASA said that a recent report by the National Academy of Sciences found that if a similar storm occurred today, it could cause "1 to 2 trillion dollars in damages to society's high-tech infrastructure and require four to 10 years for complete recovery".
The reason for the concern comes as the sun enters a phase known as Solar Cycle 24.
Most experts agree, although those who put the date of Solar Max in 2012 are getting the most press.
They claim satellites will be aged by 50 years, rendering GPS even more useless than ever, and the blast will have the equivalent energy of 100 million hydrogen bombs.
"We know it is coming but we don't know how bad it is going to be," Fisher told Reneke.
"Systems will just not work. The flares change the magnetic field on the Earth and it's rapid, just like a lightning bolt. That's the solar effect," he added.
The findings are published in the most recent issue of Australasian Science. (ANI)
FROM PROPHECY NEWS WATCH
Gallup: Obama’s Approval Highest Among Muslims—78 Percent
http://cnsnews.com/
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
While President Barack Obama’s overall approval rating averaged 48 percent for the first seven months of 2010, it was 78 percent among Muslim Americans, according to the Gallup Poll. That gave the president a higher approval rating among Muslims than among any other religious category reported by the poll.
Members of other non-Christian religions (not including Judaism) gave Obama his second highest approval rating at 64 percent, according to Gallup, and people who described themselves as having no religion, or being agnostics, or atheists gave Obama a 63 percent approval rating.
Mormons gave Obama his lowest approval rating among the religious groups reported by Gallup. In the first seven months of 2010, only 24 percent said they approved of the job Obama was doing. He ranked next lowest among Protestant Americans, who gave him a 43 percent approval rating, then Catholic Americans, who gave him a 50 percent approval rating, and then Jewish Americans, who gave him a 61 percent approval rating.
Despite President Obama’s high approval rating of 78 percent among Muslim Americans during the first seven months of 2010 that was nonetheless still not as high as the approval ratings the president won from Muslim Americans last year. In the first half of 2009, Muslim Americans gave Obama an approval rating of 86 percent. In the second half of 2009, they gave him an approval rating of 83 percent. In all three periods, President Obama's approval rating among Muslim Americans was higher than among any of the other religous groups reported by the Gallup survey.
http://cnsnews.com/
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
While President Barack Obama’s overall approval rating averaged 48 percent for the first seven months of 2010, it was 78 percent among Muslim Americans, according to the Gallup Poll. That gave the president a higher approval rating among Muslims than among any other religious category reported by the poll.
Members of other non-Christian religions (not including Judaism) gave Obama his second highest approval rating at 64 percent, according to Gallup, and people who described themselves as having no religion, or being agnostics, or atheists gave Obama a 63 percent approval rating.
Mormons gave Obama his lowest approval rating among the religious groups reported by Gallup. In the first seven months of 2010, only 24 percent said they approved of the job Obama was doing. He ranked next lowest among Protestant Americans, who gave him a 43 percent approval rating, then Catholic Americans, who gave him a 50 percent approval rating, and then Jewish Americans, who gave him a 61 percent approval rating.
Despite President Obama’s high approval rating of 78 percent among Muslim Americans during the first seven months of 2010 that was nonetheless still not as high as the approval ratings the president won from Muslim Americans last year. In the first half of 2009, Muslim Americans gave Obama an approval rating of 86 percent. In the second half of 2009, they gave him an approval rating of 83 percent. In all three periods, President Obama's approval rating among Muslim Americans was higher than among any of the other religous groups reported by the Gallup survey.
FROM PROPHECY NEWS WATCH
'Son of Hamas' warns U.S. fatally falling for lies
http://www.wnd.com/
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
As the son of a Hamas co-founder who became a Christian, a spy for Israel and a consultant to the Holy Land Foundation terror-finance trial, Mosab Hassan Yousef offers a rare perspective on the Egypt-based Muslim Brotherhood – at one time the spawn of nearly every major Islamic terrorist group and of "mainstream" operatives in the U.S. such as the Council on American-Islamic Relations.
Yousef, who recently was granted asylum in the U.S. after the Department of Homeland Security tried to deport him, told WND in a telephone interview Americans must understand that the ultimate goal of the highly influential Brotherhood is not terrorism but to establish a global Islamic state over the entire world.
"If they can establish this in a peaceful manner, that's fine," he said. "But they are required by the Quran to establish this global Islamic state on the rubble of every civilization, every constitution, every government."
The Holy Land Foundation trial in Dallas in 2008 – the largest terror-finance case in U.S. history – presented evidence of the Muslim Brotherhood's "100-year plan" to gradually destroy the U.S. and Western civilization from within "so that it is eliminated and Allah's religion is made victorious over all other religions."
"This is not a doctrine of some freak Muslim," Yousef observed. "It's the doctrine, the requirement, of the god of Islam himself and his prophet, whom they praise every day."
One of the Brotherhood's prime strategies to help achieve its ultimate aim is to spin off groups such as the Washington, D.C.-based Council on American-Islamic Relations, or CAIR, that attempt to give Islam a positive face, he pointed out.
CAIR, casting itself as a human rights organization, has often been called on by government and media to represent Muslims in the U.S. But it's origin as a front group for the Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas is now widely documented, including in the WND Books best-selling expose "Muslim Mafia: Inside the Secret Underworld That's Conspiring to Islamize America"
CAIR and some of its leaders were confirmed by the Justice Department as unindicted co-conspirators in the trial of the Texas-based Holy Land Foundation, which was convicted of helping fund Hamas. An FBI letter to lawmakers in April 2009 explained the bureau suspended all formal contacts with CAIR because of evidence the group was founded as a front in the U.S. for Hamas. Among numerous government relationships, CAIR leaders had regular meetings with top FBI brass on security issues and helped lead FBI Muslim "sensitivity training" sessions.
At the Holy Land Foundation trial, the FBI presented a transcript from a wiretap of a 1993 meeting in Philadelphia in which Hamas supporters sought to establish Muslim organizations in the U.S. "whose Islamic hue is not very conspicuous." CAIR was soon founded by two Palestinian participants in the Philadelphia meeting, Omar Ahmad and Nihad Awad.
Wiretaps revealed Ahmad argued for using Muslims as an "entry point" to "pressure Congress and the decision makers in America" to change U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. One FBI official quoted in "Muslim Mafia" says CAIR and the other Muslim Brotherhood front groups differ from al-Qaida only in their methods.
"The only difference between the guys in the suits and the guys with the AK-47s is timing and tactics," the official explained.
CAIR, meanwhile – which has more than a dozen former and current leaders with known associations with violent jihad – is trying to keep alive a lawsuit against WND and two investigators behind "Muslim Mafia."
While CAIR repeatedly has denied it receives foreign support, the covert operation that produced "Muslim Mafia" obtained video footage that captured CAIR spokesman Ibrahim Hooper boasting of his ability to bring in a half million dollars of "overseas money," including from Saudi Arabia.
Money continues to flow in the other direction, as well, Yousef said.
He noted the FBI documented that the Holy Land Foundation sent $12.4 million from the U.S. to Hamas committees. But based on his 10 years of experience as a spy for the Israeli internal security service Shin Bet, he believes many times that amount has been smuggled to Hamas in cash.
As an example, Yousef cited the case of a Palestinian terror operative he met in prison who was arrested transporting $100,000 after Shin Bet provided information to law enforcement authorities.
"I guarantee you that there still people who collect money in mosques that go directly to Hamas in cash," Yousef said. "And this is a problem that the government doesn't have control over. Obama doesn't have control over this money."
'Hamas is the Muslim Brotherhood'
Hamas itself was formed in 1987 as part of the Muslim Brotherhood's strategy to advance the movement by spinning off new organizations, Yousef said.
"If they have a confrontation with Israel as the Muslim Brotherhood, they are going to pay a very high price," he explained. "So they choose people like my father, from the Muslim Brotherhood originally, and they ask them to establish an independent movement that shares the same exact doctrine."
As WND reported, Yousef worked alongside his father, Sheik Hassan Yousef, in the West Bank city of al-Ghaniya near Ramallah while secretly embracing Christian faith and serving as a Shin Bet spy. Since publicly declaring his faith in August 2008, he has been condemned by an al-Qaida-affiliated group and disowned by his family.
"Hamas is the Muslim Brotherhood," Yousef said. "It's the same organization."
The Muslim Brotherhood, founded in the 1920s in the wake of the collapse of the Ottoman Turkish empire, considers itself an instrument of the charge Muslims have been given since Islam's founding 1,400 years ago – to make the Quran and Allah's authority supreme over the entire world.
Along with CAIR, prominent U.S. organizations launched by Muslim Brotherhood leaders include the Muslim Students Association, North American Islamic Trust, the Islamic Society of North America, the American Muslim Council, the Muslim American Society and the International Institute of Islamic Thought.
"Before we start to listen to their lies," Yousef said, "we have to ask ourselves all the time, what is the goal of the Muslim Brotherhood? Ask them, 'What do you want?'"
He said the Muslim Brotherhood "will keep the hope and the ultimate goal very clear in the eyes of every Muslim who belongs to the organization that one day [we will] establish an Islamic state and establish Shariah law."
In unusually candid moments, CAIR leaders have expressed that aim.
CAIR founder Ahmad was reported telling a Muslim group in the San Francisco Bay area that Islam isn't in America to be equal to any other faith, but to become dominant and that the Quran should become the highest authority in America and Islam the only accepted religion on Earth. CAIR spokesman Hooper indicated in a 1993 interview with the Minneapolis Star Tribune he wants to see the U.S. become a Muslim country "through education."
The West, Yousef said, has fallen for the "lie" that there are two types of Islam, radical and moderate. While there may be individual Muslims who are radical or moderate, Islam itself is not moderate, he contends.
"Let's learn what Islam says about itself," Yousef said. "Forget about what the Muslim Brotherhood, what al-Qaida, what Hezbollah – what even Americans or Westerners say about Islam. Let's study and see what Islam says about itself, then we will understand why we have this problem."
'Buying the lie'
American foreign policy, especially under President Obama, he said, has "bought the lie of Muslim groups who are trying to make Islam look good in the eyes of Westerners."
Because of that approach, he said, Muslim leaders such as Feisal Abdul Rauf have developed "the courage to come forward with a very aggressive symbol" of Islamic authority, the proposed Islamic center and mosque near the site of the 2001 World Trade Center attacks.
"If it was any other American president, we wouldn't have this aggressive step," Yousef contended.
He noted the State Department has designated Rauf an ambassador to the Muslim world despite the imam's unwillingness to condemn Hamas as a terrorist group.
"Of course, he cannot condemn Hamas, because he knows that Hamas is an organization that is doing the will of Allah," Yousef said. "How can he condemn an organization that serves the same god that he worships every day five times?"
Yousef pointed out Rauf has claimed Obama based his highly publicized Cairo speech to the Muslim world last year on a chapter from the Arabic version of Rauf's book, "A Call to Prayer From the World Trade Center: Islamic Dawah in the Heart of America Post-9/11."
Obama asserted in the speech that violent extremists have exploited tensions between Muslims and the West, insisting Islam was not part of the problem but part of promoting peace.
'This is the red line'
Defenders of the proposed Ground Zero mosque cite American Muslims' First Amendment freedoms to practice their religion.
But Yousef makes a distinction between Islam and other religions, arguing Islam is a subversive system that threatens America's very existence.
"Even if it's a religion, and 1.5 billion people around the world believe in it, this doesn't mean that they are right; and this doesn't mean that we compromise with them," he said. "We tell them, 'You're accepted, but guess what? This is the red line: We don't compromise with your god. We don't compromise with your belief system.'"
Yousef reasoned that he certainly would not be allowed to create a religion in which he demanded that his followers kill everyone who doesn't embrace his beliefs.
"Will I be able to register this religion here and build my symbols for this religion in this country?" he asked. "I will go to jail for that – and all my followers as well."
'A matter of life and death'
No one in the Middle East has the courage or the power to confront Islam, he said, but transformation can start in the most powerful country in the world.
"Instead of giving Islam credit, this is the country where we can start to fight – not against Muslims, against the bad teachings of Islam."
Americans can begin, he said, by "understanding the real nature of Islam."
"I am telling you, this is not a matter of politics," he said. "It's a matter of life and death. It's a matter of hundreds of millions who have been killed because of this deadly ideology of Islam that has been here 1,400 years."
"This is the time" to speak out, he said, "especially here in America. This is the time to stand firm and strong against this crazy, big system."
Yousef said that while some may want to "scare people about Islam" for some kind of financial or personal profit, he is speaking out because of his concern for America and as "a person who loves my people."
"I cannot wait for them to be liberated," he said of his fellow Palestinians and Muslims worldwide. "And when I see the example of liberty and freedom in this country, I want this to go to my people."
If America leads the way in confronting Islam, change can come, he said.
"But if the country of liberty and freedom welcomes a radical and violent belief that wants to destroy everything, we won't be able to defeat them," he said.
"This is why we need to work all together. This is not for America only. This is for the world. This is for the future of humanity."
Mosab Yousef is one of the featured speakers on the Strategic Perspectives Conference available from Prophecy News Watch here:
http://www.prophecynewswatch.com/donation.html
http://www.wnd.com/
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
As the son of a Hamas co-founder who became a Christian, a spy for Israel and a consultant to the Holy Land Foundation terror-finance trial, Mosab Hassan Yousef offers a rare perspective on the Egypt-based Muslim Brotherhood – at one time the spawn of nearly every major Islamic terrorist group and of "mainstream" operatives in the U.S. such as the Council on American-Islamic Relations.
Yousef, who recently was granted asylum in the U.S. after the Department of Homeland Security tried to deport him, told WND in a telephone interview Americans must understand that the ultimate goal of the highly influential Brotherhood is not terrorism but to establish a global Islamic state over the entire world.
"If they can establish this in a peaceful manner, that's fine," he said. "But they are required by the Quran to establish this global Islamic state on the rubble of every civilization, every constitution, every government."
The Holy Land Foundation trial in Dallas in 2008 – the largest terror-finance case in U.S. history – presented evidence of the Muslim Brotherhood's "100-year plan" to gradually destroy the U.S. and Western civilization from within "so that it is eliminated and Allah's religion is made victorious over all other religions."
"This is not a doctrine of some freak Muslim," Yousef observed. "It's the doctrine, the requirement, of the god of Islam himself and his prophet, whom they praise every day."
One of the Brotherhood's prime strategies to help achieve its ultimate aim is to spin off groups such as the Washington, D.C.-based Council on American-Islamic Relations, or CAIR, that attempt to give Islam a positive face, he pointed out.
CAIR, casting itself as a human rights organization, has often been called on by government and media to represent Muslims in the U.S. But it's origin as a front group for the Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas is now widely documented, including in the WND Books best-selling expose "Muslim Mafia: Inside the Secret Underworld That's Conspiring to Islamize America"
CAIR and some of its leaders were confirmed by the Justice Department as unindicted co-conspirators in the trial of the Texas-based Holy Land Foundation, which was convicted of helping fund Hamas. An FBI letter to lawmakers in April 2009 explained the bureau suspended all formal contacts with CAIR because of evidence the group was founded as a front in the U.S. for Hamas. Among numerous government relationships, CAIR leaders had regular meetings with top FBI brass on security issues and helped lead FBI Muslim "sensitivity training" sessions.
At the Holy Land Foundation trial, the FBI presented a transcript from a wiretap of a 1993 meeting in Philadelphia in which Hamas supporters sought to establish Muslim organizations in the U.S. "whose Islamic hue is not very conspicuous." CAIR was soon founded by two Palestinian participants in the Philadelphia meeting, Omar Ahmad and Nihad Awad.
Wiretaps revealed Ahmad argued for using Muslims as an "entry point" to "pressure Congress and the decision makers in America" to change U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. One FBI official quoted in "Muslim Mafia" says CAIR and the other Muslim Brotherhood front groups differ from al-Qaida only in their methods.
"The only difference between the guys in the suits and the guys with the AK-47s is timing and tactics," the official explained.
CAIR, meanwhile – which has more than a dozen former and current leaders with known associations with violent jihad – is trying to keep alive a lawsuit against WND and two investigators behind "Muslim Mafia."
While CAIR repeatedly has denied it receives foreign support, the covert operation that produced "Muslim Mafia" obtained video footage that captured CAIR spokesman Ibrahim Hooper boasting of his ability to bring in a half million dollars of "overseas money," including from Saudi Arabia.
Money continues to flow in the other direction, as well, Yousef said.
He noted the FBI documented that the Holy Land Foundation sent $12.4 million from the U.S. to Hamas committees. But based on his 10 years of experience as a spy for the Israeli internal security service Shin Bet, he believes many times that amount has been smuggled to Hamas in cash.
As an example, Yousef cited the case of a Palestinian terror operative he met in prison who was arrested transporting $100,000 after Shin Bet provided information to law enforcement authorities.
"I guarantee you that there still people who collect money in mosques that go directly to Hamas in cash," Yousef said. "And this is a problem that the government doesn't have control over. Obama doesn't have control over this money."
'Hamas is the Muslim Brotherhood'
Hamas itself was formed in 1987 as part of the Muslim Brotherhood's strategy to advance the movement by spinning off new organizations, Yousef said.
"If they have a confrontation with Israel as the Muslim Brotherhood, they are going to pay a very high price," he explained. "So they choose people like my father, from the Muslim Brotherhood originally, and they ask them to establish an independent movement that shares the same exact doctrine."
As WND reported, Yousef worked alongside his father, Sheik Hassan Yousef, in the West Bank city of al-Ghaniya near Ramallah while secretly embracing Christian faith and serving as a Shin Bet spy. Since publicly declaring his faith in August 2008, he has been condemned by an al-Qaida-affiliated group and disowned by his family.
"Hamas is the Muslim Brotherhood," Yousef said. "It's the same organization."
The Muslim Brotherhood, founded in the 1920s in the wake of the collapse of the Ottoman Turkish empire, considers itself an instrument of the charge Muslims have been given since Islam's founding 1,400 years ago – to make the Quran and Allah's authority supreme over the entire world.
Along with CAIR, prominent U.S. organizations launched by Muslim Brotherhood leaders include the Muslim Students Association, North American Islamic Trust, the Islamic Society of North America, the American Muslim Council, the Muslim American Society and the International Institute of Islamic Thought.
"Before we start to listen to their lies," Yousef said, "we have to ask ourselves all the time, what is the goal of the Muslim Brotherhood? Ask them, 'What do you want?'"
He said the Muslim Brotherhood "will keep the hope and the ultimate goal very clear in the eyes of every Muslim who belongs to the organization that one day [we will] establish an Islamic state and establish Shariah law."
In unusually candid moments, CAIR leaders have expressed that aim.
CAIR founder Ahmad was reported telling a Muslim group in the San Francisco Bay area that Islam isn't in America to be equal to any other faith, but to become dominant and that the Quran should become the highest authority in America and Islam the only accepted religion on Earth. CAIR spokesman Hooper indicated in a 1993 interview with the Minneapolis Star Tribune he wants to see the U.S. become a Muslim country "through education."
The West, Yousef said, has fallen for the "lie" that there are two types of Islam, radical and moderate. While there may be individual Muslims who are radical or moderate, Islam itself is not moderate, he contends.
"Let's learn what Islam says about itself," Yousef said. "Forget about what the Muslim Brotherhood, what al-Qaida, what Hezbollah – what even Americans or Westerners say about Islam. Let's study and see what Islam says about itself, then we will understand why we have this problem."
'Buying the lie'
American foreign policy, especially under President Obama, he said, has "bought the lie of Muslim groups who are trying to make Islam look good in the eyes of Westerners."
Because of that approach, he said, Muslim leaders such as Feisal Abdul Rauf have developed "the courage to come forward with a very aggressive symbol" of Islamic authority, the proposed Islamic center and mosque near the site of the 2001 World Trade Center attacks.
"If it was any other American president, we wouldn't have this aggressive step," Yousef contended.
He noted the State Department has designated Rauf an ambassador to the Muslim world despite the imam's unwillingness to condemn Hamas as a terrorist group.
"Of course, he cannot condemn Hamas, because he knows that Hamas is an organization that is doing the will of Allah," Yousef said. "How can he condemn an organization that serves the same god that he worships every day five times?"
Yousef pointed out Rauf has claimed Obama based his highly publicized Cairo speech to the Muslim world last year on a chapter from the Arabic version of Rauf's book, "A Call to Prayer From the World Trade Center: Islamic Dawah in the Heart of America Post-9/11."
Obama asserted in the speech that violent extremists have exploited tensions between Muslims and the West, insisting Islam was not part of the problem but part of promoting peace.
'This is the red line'
Defenders of the proposed Ground Zero mosque cite American Muslims' First Amendment freedoms to practice their religion.
But Yousef makes a distinction between Islam and other religions, arguing Islam is a subversive system that threatens America's very existence.
"Even if it's a religion, and 1.5 billion people around the world believe in it, this doesn't mean that they are right; and this doesn't mean that we compromise with them," he said. "We tell them, 'You're accepted, but guess what? This is the red line: We don't compromise with your god. We don't compromise with your belief system.'"
Yousef reasoned that he certainly would not be allowed to create a religion in which he demanded that his followers kill everyone who doesn't embrace his beliefs.
"Will I be able to register this religion here and build my symbols for this religion in this country?" he asked. "I will go to jail for that – and all my followers as well."
'A matter of life and death'
No one in the Middle East has the courage or the power to confront Islam, he said, but transformation can start in the most powerful country in the world.
"Instead of giving Islam credit, this is the country where we can start to fight – not against Muslims, against the bad teachings of Islam."
Americans can begin, he said, by "understanding the real nature of Islam."
"I am telling you, this is not a matter of politics," he said. "It's a matter of life and death. It's a matter of hundreds of millions who have been killed because of this deadly ideology of Islam that has been here 1,400 years."
"This is the time" to speak out, he said, "especially here in America. This is the time to stand firm and strong against this crazy, big system."
Yousef said that while some may want to "scare people about Islam" for some kind of financial or personal profit, he is speaking out because of his concern for America and as "a person who loves my people."
"I cannot wait for them to be liberated," he said of his fellow Palestinians and Muslims worldwide. "And when I see the example of liberty and freedom in this country, I want this to go to my people."
If America leads the way in confronting Islam, change can come, he said.
"But if the country of liberty and freedom welcomes a radical and violent belief that wants to destroy everything, we won't be able to defeat them," he said.
"This is why we need to work all together. This is not for America only. This is for the world. This is for the future of humanity."
Mosab Yousef is one of the featured speakers on the Strategic Perspectives Conference available from Prophecy News Watch here:
http://www.prophecynewswatch.com/donation.html
VI. Religion and the Federal Government
[ PART 1 ] [ PART 2 ]
THE STATE BECOMES THE CHURCH:
JEFFERSON AND MADISON
It is no exaggeration to say that on Sundays in Washington during the administrations of Thomas Jefferson (1801-1809) and of James Madison (1809-1817) the state became the church. Within a year of his inauguration, Jefferson began attending church services in the House of Representatives. Madison followed Jefferson's example, although unlike Jefferson, who rode on horseback to church in the Capitol, Madison came in a coach and four. Worship services in the House--a practice that continued until after the Civil War--were acceptable to Jefferson because they were nondiscriminatory and voluntary. Preachers of every Protestant denomination appeared. (Catholic priests began officiating in 1826.) As early as January 1806 a female evangelist, Dorothy Ripley, delivered a camp meeting-style exhortation in the House to Jefferson, Vice President Aaron Burr, and a "crowded audience." Throughout his administration Jefferson permitted church services in executive branch buildings. The Gospel was also preached in the Supreme Court chambers.
Jefferson's actions may seem surprising because his attitude toward the relation between religion and government is usually thought to have been embodied in his recommendation that there exist "a wall of separation between church and state." In that statement, Jefferson was apparently declaring his opposition, as Madison had done in introducing the Bill of Rights, to a "national" religion. In attending church services on public property, Jefferson and Madison consciously and deliberately were offering symbolic support to religion as a prop for republican government.
"A WALL OF SEPARATION"Jefferson Attacked as an Infidel
During the presidential campaign of 1800, the Federalists attacked Thomas Jefferson as an infidel, claiming that Jefferson's intoxication with the religious and political extremism of the French Revolution disqualified him from public office. In this cartoon, the eye of God has instigated the American eagle to snatch from Jefferson's hand the "Constitution & Independence" of the United States before he can cast it on an "Altar to Gallic Despotism," whose flames are being fed by the writings of Thomas Paine, Helvetius, Rousseau, and other freethinkers. The paper, "To Mazzei," dropping from Jefferson's right hand, was a 1796 letter that was interpreted by Jefferson's enemies as an indictment of the character of George Washington.
The Providential Detection.
Etching by an unknown artist, c. 1800
The Library Company of Philadelphia (159)
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Jefferson's Opinion of Jesus
In the 1790s, Thomas Jefferson, influenced by the writings of Joseph Priestly, seems to have adopted a more positive opinion of Christianity. In this letter to his friend Benjamin Rush, Jefferson asserted that he was a "Christian, in the only sense in which [Jesus] wished any one to be." In an attached syllabus, Jefferson compared the "merit of the doctrines of Jesus" with those of the classical philosophers and the Jews. Jefferson pronounced Jesus' doctrines, though "disfigured by the corruptions of schismatising followers" far superior to any competing system. Jefferson declined to consider the "question of [Jesus] being a member of the god-head, or in direct communication with it, claimed for him by some of his followers, and denied by others."Thomas Jefferson to Benjamin Rush, April 21, 1803
[page one] - [page two] - [page three]
Manuscript Division, Library of Congress (160)
Thomas Jefferson's reply of January 1, 1802, to an address of congratulations from the Danbury (Connecticut) Baptist Association contains a phrase familiar in today's political and judicial circles: "a wall of separation between church and state." Many in the United States, including the courts, have used this phrase to interpret the Founders' intentions regarding the relationship between government and religion, as set down by the First Amendment to the Constitution: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion . . . ." However, the meaning of this clause has been the subject of passionate dispute for the past fifty years.
Presented here are both the handwritten, edited draft of the letter and an adjusted facsimile showing the original unedited draft. The draft of the letter reveals that, far from dashing it off as a "short note of courtesy," as some have called it, Jefferson labored over its composition. Jefferson consulted Postmaster General Gideon Granger of Connecticut and Attorney General Levi Lincoln of Massachusetts while drafting the letter. That Jefferson consulted two New England politicians about his messages indicated that he regarded his reply to the Danbury Baptists as a political letter, not as a dispassionate theoretical pronouncement on the relations between government and religion. The Lord's Prayer in Jefferson's Hand
Jefferson liked to experiment with and use cryptology. There are several different codes in his papers at the Library of Congress, including this one based on the Lord's Prayer, which Jefferson carefully wrote out as a block of consecutive letters.
The Lord's Prayer
Thomas Jefferson, Holograph manuscript
Manuscript Division, Library of Congress (161)
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------The Jefferson Bible
It is thought that Jefferson prepared what is referred to as the "Jefferson Bible" in 1820. In this volume, Jefferson used excerpts from New Testaments in four languages to create parallel columns of text recounting the life of Jesus, preserving what he considered to be Christ's authentic actions and statements, eliminating the mysterious and miraculous. He began his account with Luke's second chapter, deleting the first in which the angel Gabriel announced to the Virgin Mary that she would give birth to the Messiah by the Holy Spirit. On the pages seen here, Jefferson deleted the part of the birth story in which the angel of the Lord appeared to the shepherds. The text ends with the crucifixion and burial and omits any resurrection appearance.
The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth extracted textually from
the Gospels in Greek, Latin, French & English
[index page one] -- [index page two] -- [index page three]Thomas Jefferson, c. 1820
National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution (162a)
The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth extracted textually from
the Gospels in Greek, Latin, French & English.
[title page] - [page one] - [page two]
Thomas Jefferson.
Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1904
General Collections, Library of Congress (162c)
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A Wall of Separation
The celebrated phrase, "a wall of separation between church and state," was contained in Thomas Jefferson's letter to the Danbury Baptists. American courts have used the phrase to interpret the Founders' intentions regarding the relationship between government and religion. The words, "wall of separation," appear just above the section of the letter that Jefferson circled for deletion. In the deleted section Jefferson explained why he refused to proclaim national days of fasting and thanksgiving, as his predecessors, George Washington and John Adams, had done. In the left margin, next to the deleted section, Jefferson noted that he excised the section to avoid offending "our republican friends in the eastern states" who cherished days of fasting and thanksgiving.
Thomas Jefferson to Nehemiah Dodge, Ephraim Robbins and Stephen S. Nelson,
a committee of the Danbury Baptist Association in the state of Connecticut, January 1, 1802.
Holograph draft letter, 1802
Jefferson Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress (163a)
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The Danbury Baptist Letter, as Originally DraftedThe Library of Congress is grateful to the Federal Bureau of Investigation Laboratory for recovering the lines obliterated from the Danbury Baptist letter by Thomas Jefferson. He originally wrote "a wall of eternal separation between church and state," later deleting the word "eternal." He also deleted the phrase "the duties of my station, which are merely temporal." Jefferson must have been unhappy with the uncompromising tone of both of these phrases, especially in view of the implications of his decision, two days later, to begin attending church services in the House of Representatives.
Thomas Jefferson to Nehemiah Dodge, Ephraim Robbins and Stephen S. Nelson,
a committee of the Danbury Baptist Association in the state of Connecticut, January 1, 1802.
Letter, digitally revised to expose obliterated sections. Copyprint
Manuscript Division, Library of Congress (163b)
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Jefferson at Church in the Capitol
In his diary, Manasseh Cutler (1742-1823), a Federalist Congressman from Massachusetts and Congregational minister, notes that on Sunday, January 3, 1802, John Leland preached a sermon on the text "Behold a greater than Solomon is here. Jef[ferso]n was present." Thomas Jefferson attended this church service in Congress, just two days after issuing the Danbury Baptist letter. Leland, a celebrated Baptist minister, had moved from Orange County, Virginia, and was serving a congregation in Cheshire, Massachusetts, from which he had delivered to Jefferson a gift of a "mammoth cheese," weighing 1235 pounds.
Journal entry, January 3, 1802
Manasseh Cutler
Charles Deering McCormick Library of Special Collections, Northwestern University Library (164)
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------Jefferson and Family at Church
Manasseh Cutler to Joseph Torrey, January 3, 1803. [page one] -- [page two] -- [page three] -- [page four]
In this letter Manasseh Cutler informs Joseph Torrey that Thomas Jefferson "and his family
have constantly attended public worship in the Hall" of the House of Representatives.
Manuscript letter
Charles Deering McCormick Library of Special Collections, Northwestern University Library (165)
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Reserved Seats at Capitol Services
Here is a description, by an early Washington "insider," Margaret Bayard Smith (1778-1844), a writer and social critic and wife of Samuel Harrison Smith, publisher of the National Intelligencer, of Jefferson's attendance at church services in the House of Representatives: "Jefferson during his whole administration was a most regular attendant. The seat he chose the first day sabbath, and the adjoining one, which his private secretary occupied, were ever afterwards by the courtesy of the congregation, left for him."Reminiscences. [left page] - [right page]
Margaret Bayard Smith, 1837. Manuscript volume. (Copyprint of verso)
Manuscript Division, Library of Congress (166-166a)
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Incident at Congressional Church Services
In this letter Catherine Mitchill, wife of New York senator Samuel Latham Mitchill, describes stepping on Jefferson's toes at the conclusion of a church service in the House of Representatives. She was "so prodigiously frighten'd," she told her sister, "that I could not stop to make an apology, but got out of the way as quick as I could."
Catherine Akerly Mitchill to her sister, Margaret Miller, April 8, 1806.
Manuscript letter
Manuscript Division, Library of Congress (167)
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Madison Seen at House Church Service
Abijah Bigelow, a Federalist congressman from Massachusetts, describes President James Madison at a church service in the House on December 27, 1812, as well as an incident that had occurred when Jefferson was in attendance some years earlier. Abijah Bigelow to Hannah Bigelow, December 28, 1812. [left page] - [right page]
Manuscript letter
The American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Massachusetts (168)
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Hymns Played at Congressional Church Service
According to Margaret Bayard Smith, a regular at church services in the Capitol, the Marine Band "made quite a dazzling appearance in the gallery . . . but in their attempts to accompany the psalm-singing of the congregation, they completely failed and after a while, the practice was discontinued.""The President's Own" United States Marine Corp Band, ca. 1798.
Watercolor, Lt. Col. Donna Neary, USMCR, late twentieth century. Copyprint.
United States Marine Corp Band, Washington, D.C. (169)
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The Old House of RepresentativesChurch services were held in what is now called Statuary Hall from 1807 to 1857. The first services in the Capitol, held when the government moved to Washington in the fall of 1800, were conducted in the "hall" of the House in the north wing of the building. In 1801 the House moved to temporary quarters in the south wing, called the "Oven," which it vacated in 1804, returning to the north wing for three years. Services were conducted in the House until after the Civil War. The Speaker's podium was used as the preacher's pulpit.
The Old House of Representatives
In the collection of the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. Museum Purchase, Gallery Fund (170)
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A Millennialist Sermon Preached in Congress
This sermon on the millennium was preached by the Baltimore Swedenborgian minister, John Hargrove (1750-1839) in the House of Representatives. One of the earliest millennialist sermons preached before Congress was offered on July 4, 1801, by the Reverend David Austin (1759-1831), who at the time considered himself "struck in prophesy under the style of the Joshua of the American Temple." Having proclaimed to his Congressional audience the imminence of the Second Coming of Christ, Austin took up a collection on the floor of the House to support services at "Lady Washington's Chapel" in a nearby hotel where he was teaching that "the seed of the Millennial estate is found in the backbone of the American Revolution."A Sermon on the Second Coming of Christ, and on the Last Judgment.
Delivered the 25th December, 1804 before both houses of Congress, at the Capitol in the city of Washington. John Hargrove. Baltimore: Warner & Hanna, 1805
Rare Book and Special Collections Division, Library of Congress (171)
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First Catholic Sermon in the House
On January 8, 1826, Bishop John England (1786-1842) of Charleston, South Carolina, became the first Catholic clergyman to preach in the House of Representatives. The overflow audience included President John Quincy Adams, whose July 4, 1821, speech England rebutted in his sermon. Adams had claimed that the Roman Catholic Church was intolerant of other religions and therefore incompatible with republican institutions. England asserted that "we do not believe that God gave to the church any power to interfere with our civil rights, or our civil concerns." "I would not allow to the Pope, or to any bishop of our church," added England, "the smallest interference with the humblest vote at our most insignificant balloting box." John England, Bishop of Charleston, South Carolina
Oil on canvas
Diocese of Charleston, Charleston, South Carolina (173)
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The substance of a discourse preached in the hall of the House of Representatives
of the United States, January 8, 1826.
John England. Baltimore: F. Lucas, 1826
Rare Book and Special Collections Division, Library of Congress (172)
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Woman Preacher in the House
In 1827, Harriet Livermore (1788-1868), the daughter and granddaughter of Congressmen, became the second woman to preach in the House of Representatives. The first woman to preach before the House (and probably the first woman to speak officially in Congress under any circumstances) was the English evangelist, Dorothy Ripley (1767-1832), who conducted a service on January 12, 1806. Jefferson and Vice President Aaron Burr were among those in a "crowded audience." Sizing up the congregation, Ripley concluded that "very few" had been born again and broke into an urgent, camp meeting style exhortation, insisting that "Christ's Body was the Bread of Life and His Blood the drink of the righteous."
Harriet Livermore.
Engraving by J.B. Longacre, from a painting by Waldo and Jewett, 1827
National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution (174)
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Communion Service in the Treasury Building
Manasseh Cutler here describes a four-hour communion service in the Treasury Building, conducted by a Presbyterian minister, the Reverend James Laurie: "Attended worship at the Treasury. Mr. Laurie alone. Sacrament. Full assembly. Three tables; service very solemn; nearly four hours."
Journal entry, December 23, 1804
Manasseh Cutler. Manuscript
Charles Deering McCormick Library of Special Collections, Northwestern University Library (175)
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The Treasury Building
The first Treasury Building, where several denominations conducted church services, was burned by the British in 1814. The new building, seen here on the lower right, was built on approximately the same location as the earlier one, within view of the White House.
Washington City, 1820.
Watercolor sketch by Baroness Hyde de Neuville, 1820
I. N. Phelps Stokes Collection, The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art,
Prints and Photographs, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations (176)
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Adams's Description of a Church Service in the Supreme Court
John Quincy Adams here describes the Reverend James Laurie, pastor of a Presbyterian Church that had settled into the Treasury Building, preaching to an overflow audience in the Supreme Court Chamber, which in 1806 was located on the ground floor of the Capitol.
Diary entry, February 2, 1806
John Quincy Adams. Copyprint
Adams Family Papers, Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston (177)
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The Old Supreme Court Chamber
Description of church services in the Supreme Court chamber by Manasseh Cutler (1804) and John Quincy Adams (1806) indicate that services were held in the Court soon after the government moved to Washington in 1800.
The Old Supreme Court Chamber, ca. 1810, U. S. Capitol Building
Photograph by Franz Jantzen. Copyprint
Collection of the Supreme Court of the United States (178)
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Church Services in Congress after the Civil War
Charles Boynton (1806-1883) was in 1867 chaplain of the House of Representatives and organizing pastor of the First Congregational Church in Washington, which was trying at that time to build its own sanctuary. In the meantime the church, as Boynton informed potential donors, was holding services "at the Hall of Representatives" where "the audience is the largest in town. . . .nearly 2000 assembled every Sabbath" for services, making the congregation in the House the "largest Protestant Sabbath audience then in the United States." The First Congregational Church met in the House from 1865 to 1868.
Fundraising brochure
Charles B. Boynton. Washington, D.C.: November 1, 1867
Rare Book and Special Collections Division, Library of Congress (180)
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House of Representatives, After the Civil War
The House moved to its current location on the south side of the Capitol in 1857. It contained the "largest Protestant Sabbath audience" in the United States when the First Congregational Church of Washington held services there from 1865 to 1868.
The House of Representatives, 1866Chromo-lithograph by E. Sachse & Co, 1866
Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress (179)
[ PART 1 ] [ PART 2 ]
HOME - EXHIBITION OVERVIEW - OBJECT LIST
SECTIONS: I. America as Refuge - II. 18th Century America
III. American Revolution - IV. Congress of the Confederation - V. State Governments
VI. Federal Government - VII. New Republic
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