Conservatrolling Topic

[Deleted]

Yes, that IS what you're arguing. You're saying the Pope has authority. I'm saying he does not.
You never actually counter the points I make, so I did a little "what if you were actually right", and here we are.

Assuming the pope has an unbroken line back to Peter, he has the authority to bind or loose any religious law he feels like; this authority granted by God, and thus absolute.
God didn't say "Loosing and binding except in the things I've already settled on rules for!", God gave Peter the authority to countermand even God's own decisions.

Ergo, morality is in control of a human, not God, and should be adjusted based on what Humans, not God, deem moral.

In fact, God already had a bit of a run-in with this issue. If God could accurately understand what humans are like in "God" form, why bother with Jesus? It'd be a total waste of time and effort.
For anything to have actually come of Jesus's presence, there must be a fundamental difference in their perceptions of humanity, which lends more credit to God giving Peter such absolute authority; just let someone else handle understanding humans.

[Tails82]

God didn't say "Loosing and binding except in the things I've already settled on rules for!", God gave Peter the authority to countermand even God's own decisions. Ergo, morality is in control of a human, not God

This is an inaccurate conclusion, as God sits in judgment of mankind. Authority granted to the church is a gift, originating from God. How useful is an electronic device without its power supply? On whose behalf does the church act? On whose authority is man forgiven?

A timely example

www.ncregister.com/daily-news/canon-law-expert-indulgences-not-a-magical-formula/

The Vatican announced July 9 that Pope Francis had mandated that the faithful can receive indulgences through participation in World Youth Day.

“Because the Church has the spiritual authority that Christ has given it, the Church can invite us to particularly sanctifying moments and particularly sanctifying opportunities,” J.D. Flynn, special assistant to Bishop James Conley of Lincoln, Neb., explained to Catholic News Agency July 18.

He added that the authority for granting indulgences comes from the “teaching, sanctifying and governing authority of the Church,” which “comes definitely from Christ,” who appointed St. Peter “to be his vicar on earth, to act in his place in order to lead people to him.”

In granting indulgences, he said, the Church “acts in accord with her vocation to lead souls to Christ.”

No one is saying the pope is bigger than Jesus. The authority granted to him is from our creator and we are to seek greater unity with God.

But as someone who denies the authority of the pope, on whose authority do you act? How does one embrace the hydra of relativism while at the same time arguing their position is more accurate?

and should be adjusted based on what Humans, not God, deem moral.

Another inaccurate conclusion, which would turn humanity from God and contradict the purpose of the church. As rational beings we should seek out God, discern what his will is and follow it, because as a benevolent being he knows what is best for us.

Do humans have the ability to wipe the slate clean and declare murder, theft, etc. are not wrong? They do not, as these actions go against the natural law. Man is in a fallen state. We need a shepherd to bring us back when we go astray. Because of the love God has for his creation, we can be forgiven for these wrongs. This involves acknowledgement of wrongdoing.

If God could accurately understand what humans are like in "God" form, why bother with Jesus? It'd be a total waste of time and effort.

The question is whether humans accurately understand God, which after thousands of years we still struggle with. Jesus as mediator reveals the truth to us and offers redemption.

www.frc.org/washingtonupdate/new-attacks-reyes-the-stakes-on-censorship

If President Eisenhower were alive today, the five-star general may be shocked to know that his own speeches are too offensive to be quoted in the military he used to command! Just when Americans thought they'd heard it all, an Alaskan military chaplain was taken to task for fulfilling the job description that most spiritual leaders (until recently) were hired to do: talk about faith. In a harmless post for his online website, "Chaplain's Corner," Lt. Col. Kenneth Reyes (USAF) of the Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson in Alaska wrote an inspirational piece called, "No Atheists in Foxholes: Chaplains Gave All in World War II."

The phrase, which President Eisenhower made famous in 1954, dates way back to the Japanese attack at Corregidor. Reyes had hoped to encourage his troops -- believers and non-believers -- with the brave story of the man who first coined the quote.

Turns out, the story only encouraged the attack of anti-faith zealots. Mikey Weinstein, whose own statements are fairly well-known ("Christian monsters of human degradation, marginalization, humiliation and tyranny"), organized a letter to Reyes's commanding officer, Col. Brian Duffy, demanding the chaplain be censored. Weinstein and Military Religious Freedom Foundation rep Blake Page blasted Reyes for his "redundant use of the bigoted, religious supremacist phrase, 'no atheists in foxholes,'" and accused the chaplain of "defil[ing] the dignity of service members." Of course, anyone who has actually read Reyes's column would understand how preposterous those charges are. Reyes never suggested that "there are no atheists in foxholes," he was merely tracing, in a very neutral way, the history of the well-known phrase -- a far cry from the "anti-secular diatribe" MRFF calls it. Reyes goes out of his way to include unbelievers in his piece, even suggesting that "faith" can mean different things to different people.

Nonetheless, his superior, Col. Duffy, snapped to attention and within five hours of Mikey's complaint ordered the article scrubbed from the chaplain's website. In his profuse apology to MRFF, he promises to keep a vigilant watch over his troops' speech. "We remain mindful of the governing instructions on this matter and will work to avoid reoccurrence." Not surprisingly, that didn't satisfy Weinstein, who are demanding a formal punishment for Reyes. "Faith-based hate is hate all the same," Page wrote. "Lt. Col. Reyes must be appropriately reprimanded."

For what -- doing his job? Engaging in constitutionally-protected speech? Like it or not, a chaplain's duties, by definition, are to offer prayer, spiritual guidance, and religious instruction. Whether Duffy punishes Reyes or not, the damage has already been done. As FRC's Lt. Gen. Jerry Boykin told Fox News's Todd Starnes, chaplains across the military are already afraid of carrying out the most basic duties of their job. "In this case, a chaplain has been censored for expressing his beliefs about the role of faith in the lives of service members. ...Why do we have chaplains if they aren't allowed to fulfill that purpose?"

FRC's Ken Klukowski, whose piece on the controversy was picked up by Drudge Report, is confident that Weinstein's intolerance will backfire. Now that the House is on the verge of passing the Defense Department budget, the language inserted to protect troops' conscience and religious rights are one step closer to becoming law. "Reyes's story makes it more likely," Ken writes, "that Congress will stand its ground and fight to protect the religious liberty of [this chaplain] and countless others in the military."

...

Texas was right to secede -- from Planned Parenthood. The billion dollar operation finally admitted that its Gulf Coast affiliates have been defrauding the government for years in an elaborate scheme that overbilled Medicaid for services. Abby Johnson, a former Planned Parenthood clinic manager who is now a pro-life convert, blew the whistle on her former employer with the help of our friends at Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF).

In a legal settlement announced yesterday, Planned Parenthood has agreed to repay the $1.4 million it stole from taxpayers. ADF attorney Michael Norton talked about the great lengths Planned Parenthood went to falsify patient records, fudge accounting numbers, and submit bogus claims. "Americans deserve to know if their hard-earned tax money is being funneled to groups that are misusing it... These programs are designed to help the poor, but Planned Parenthood instead uses taxpayer dollars to pad its bottom line with little regard for the health of women."

Unfortunately, as we've reported over the past several months, the Texas scam is only part of Planned Parenthood's nationwide con game. Similar lawsuits have already been filed in Iowa and Washington State, where the organization has also swindled the government out of millions of dollars. So far, the revelations have done little to dent the President's relationship with the abortion giant. The federal government, meanwhile, has ample reason to defund the organization -- especially one so intent on extorting it! Congratulations to ADF and the courageous Abby Johnson for shining yet another spotlight on the dark and crooked world of Planned Parenthood.

online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324110404578626452647631608.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEADTop

Unworkable. That word best describes ObamaCare. Government agencies in states across the country, whether red or blue, have spent countless hours and incalculable dollars trying to keep the ObamaCare train on its track, but the wreck is coming. And it is the American people who are going to pay the price...the guidance that President Obama has offered to date has been inconsistent, arbitrary and frustrating—contributing further to the grave uncertainty that surrounds this law. But not everything about it is uncertain: In February, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office reported that seven million Americans will lose their employer-based health insurance as a result of ObamaCare.

On July 12, three of the country's largest unions sent a letter to Democratic leaders in Congress stating that ObamaCare would shatter not only hard-earned health benefits, but also destroy the 40-hour workweek that is the backbone of the American middle class...The administration, recognizing that ObamaCare is a ticking bomb, earlier this month announced that it would delay until 2015 the requirement that businesses offer health-care insurance to their employees or pay a fine. Yet the administration didn't also grant relief to individuals.

Think about that for a moment: The Obama team, for now, has spared employers but not employees. The day of reckoning for businesses is put off, but not for everyday citizens. Many Americans may wonder: On what authority does the administration arbitrarily decide which aspects of a law not to enforce and which ones to keep?

As governors, we have been expressing concern about the unworkability of ObamaCare since its passage in 2010. We have seen the trouble the law poses for our own state economies. The most recent evidence: The government now says that it will not verify the eligibility of individuals who apply for subsidized insurance on the health-care exchanges.

Health-care premiums are going up. Many businesses have stopped hiring, to avoid reaching the limit of 50 full-time employees where they are required to offer health benefits. Those businesses that are hiring often take on part-time workers to stay under the full-time cap. Older individuals seeking work are finding that companies are reluctant to take a chance on their potential health-care costs.

These are just a few of the problems resulting from a program that wasn't thought through before it was rushed into law. No wonder we hear that the Obama attack machine is gearing up to blame everyone but the law itself for the chaos that lies ahead.

This law was a bad idea from the start, and the American public never supported it. The Obama team, taking advantage of an unusual two-year window when Democrats controlled all branches of government, foisted upon the country a liberal hodgepodge of unworkable notions that will wreak havoc on American health care. Delaying implementation of ObamaCare, not just the employer mandate, is a reasonable idea. But an even better one would be a complete repeal.

online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324110404578628300074844038.html

In all the day-to-day of the IRS scandals I don't think it's been fully noticed that the overall reputation of the agency has suffered a collapse, the kind from which it can take a generation to recover fully. In the long term this will prove damaging to the national morale—what happens to a great nation when its people come to lack even rudimentary confidence in the decisions made by the revenue-gathering arm of its federal government?

The scandals that have so damaged the agency took place in just the past few years, since the current administration began. And it is not Republicans on the Hill or conservatives in the press who have revealed the agency as badly managed, political in its actions, and really quite crazily run. That information, or at least the early outlines of it, came from the agency's own inspector general.

But the point is that it was all so recent. It doesn't take long to crater a reputation. The conferences, seminars and boondoggles in which $49 million was spent, including the famous "Star Trek" parody video—all that happened between 2010 and 2012. The targeting of conservative groups, the IRS leadership's public lies about it, the leaking of private tax information to liberal groups or journalists, the abuse of donor information—all that took place since the administration began, in 2009. Just this week, an inspector general report revealed excessive travel spending by a handful of IRS executives in 2011 and 2012.

All of it has produced the biggest IRS scandal since Watergate. Which makes it the second of only two truly huge scandals to be visited on the agency in its entire 100-year history...One irony here is that the Obama White House, always keen to increase the reach and power of government, also seems profoundly disinterested in good governing. It is strange. The long-term project of liberalism involves encouraging the idea of faith in government as a bringer or guarantor of greater justice. But who needs more government if government works so very badly, and is in its operations unjust?

This White House is careless with the reputation of government. They are a campaigning organization, not a governing one.

You might think at this point the White House might begin to think cleverly and strategically. That they would very showily give the scandal their time and attention—really give it some priority. That they might show daily indignation, and see to it that the IRS is utterly forthcoming with Congress. That would have two effects. First, it would help the IRS recover if the public saw it being responsive, as opposed to speaking in the usual word salad punctuated with "We have no comment." Second, it would help the Obama White House look responsive, responsible and actually interested in good governance.

Instead the president and his spokesman just run around and call the scandal phony. That's their big contribution: It's phony. It was better in the old days, 2½ months ago, when they feigned outrage.

But really, Is that not what one would expect from a Stalinist? Denial of crimes and revisionist history are big things for the left.

[Deleted]

Jul 26, 2013 14:49:11 GMT -5 Tails82 said:

This is an inaccurate conclusion, as God sits in judgment of mankind. Authority granted to the church is a gift, originating from God. How useful is an electronic device without its power supply? On whose behalf does the church act? On whose authority is man forgiven?

Tell me this, then: if the Pope cannot countermand God, using God's own explicitly granted authority to loose and bind in heaven and earth, what exactly is that authority good for?
It's like being the unstoppable force in a world of immovable objects; you're not really doing much, and you may as well not even have that power for all the difference it makes.

No one is saying the pope is bigger than Jesus. The authority granted to him is from our creator and we are to seek greater unity with God.

"I can't argue against this directly, so lets toss in some junk no one mentioned about Jesus and being 'bigger', whatever that's supposed to even mean"

But as someone who denies the authority of the pope, on whose authority do you act? How does one embrace the hydra of relativism while at the same time arguing their position is more accurate?

1. In case you didn't notice, I've been using your religion to argue against your religion for a while now, not my atheism.
2. Even your God is relativistic. See: Jesus

Another inaccurate conclusion, which would turn humanity from God and contradict the purpose of the church. As rational beings we should seek out God, discern what his will is and follow it, because as a benevolent being he knows what is best for us.

Incorrect. As rational beings, we should understand that God gave Peter the authority to change the rules, and as such, anything done with said authority is completely within the scope of God's will.

The question is whether humans accurately understand God, which after thousands of years we still struggle with. Jesus as mediator reveals the truth to us and offers redemption.

"The question" was, and still is, if God could accurately understand what humans are like in "God" form, why bother with Jesus?
The answer you're trying to avoid is, of course, that the necessity of Jesus means God is not omniscient and does not actually know "what is best for us", because God's own view of things is relative.

[Jordan Ω]

Whoa I just read all of the fallacical arguments. Thanks for the great site, zetta

[Tails82]

online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324110404578625581152645480.html

The Real Reason the Once Great City of Detroit Came to Ruin

The politics of Mayor Coleman Young drove out the white and black middle class.

On an August evening in 1976, several hundred gang members descended on a concert in Detroit's Cobo Hall and rampaged through the crowd. The Detroit Police Department, whose ranks had been cut by 20% or nearly 1,000 officers by Mayor Coleman Young, took more than an hour to respond to the mini-riot while teens snatched purses and attacked concertgoers. The melee made headlines and provided stark evidence that in the nine years since the city's 1967 riots, which lasted five days and claimed 43 lives, Detroit's decline had continued.

Today, Detroit sits in bankruptcy court as the largest municipal Chapter 9 case in American history. Much of the commentary about the city's decline has focused on global economic forces that displaced auto manufacturing jobs and public unions whose demands emptied the till as Detroit foundered.

The truth is that Detroit was a failed city long before it became insolvent, thanks to a virtual collapse of its municipal government during Young's 1974-1994 reign as mayor. A radical trade unionist who ran as an antiestablishment candidate reaching out to disenfranchised black voters, Young lacked a plan except to go to war with the city's major institutions and demand that the federal government save it with subsidies. Critics called it "tin-cup urbanism."

As the city's government became increasingly less effective, whites and then middle-class blacks fled. "He left the city a fiscal and social wreck," the eminent political scientist James Q. Wilson wrote in a 1998 article in The New Republic, "The Closing of the American City."

The 1967 riots, sparked by a police raid on an after-hours club in a black neighborhood, generated legitimate calls for change. Elected ostensibly as a reform mayor in 1973, however, Young made things worse. He divided the police department along racial lines, creating separate layoff lists of white and black officers. He and his handpicked police chief, William Hart, made clear that policing that resulted in too many arrests or citations in the black community would not be tolerated. "I wouldn't write tickets for black kids," one black officer told journalist Tamar Jacoby in her 1998 book "Someone Else's House: America's Unfinished Struggle for Integration."

When residents complained about a lack of law enforcement, Chief Hart called the protests "racism and sour grapes." Mayor Young declared that "law and order was code for 'Keep the n-----s in their place.'" Detroit became one of America's most violent cities.

Young's divisive brand of governing extended to economic policy, such as it was. When General Motors agreed to build a new plant in the 1980s to help the city's revival, Young and GM targeted the still vibrant, largely white ethnic neighborhood of Poletown to locate the facility. In one of the nation's most infamous cases of eminent domain, the city sued in 1981 to raze some 1,500 homes and 144 businesses and displace 3,500 people.

As some Poletown residents hung on, hoping that court challenges would overturn the takings, Young withdrew services. Residents lived among demolition crews by day and looters by night. Documentary filmmaker George Corsetti described the chaotic last days of Poletown in a 2004 article in CounterPunch: "The night air was always smoke-filled and people slept with guns nearby."

Young benefitted politically from his very ineffectiveness. As the economists Edward Glaeser and Andrei Shleifer write in their study of urban ethnic politics, "The Curley Effect" (named after Boston's early 20th-century mayor James Michael Curley), as whites fled Detroit, Young's margin of electoral victory grew because his electoral base of poor blacks became a larger share of the city's population.

Meanwhile, the increasingly distressed city became a fiscal ward of the state and federal governments. As Ms. Jacoby wrote, by the late 1970s federal grants paid the salaries of up to one-third of Detroit's workforce.

Today, Detroit is an estimated $18 billion in debt including a $3.5 billion pension shortfall. Its population has shrunk to under 700,000 from 1.84 million in 1950. Unemployment is at 16.3 %, and the number of jobs in Detroit has declined by more than half since Young became mayor in 1974. The city's auto manufacturing base has shrunk despite the bailouts of GM and Chrysler, as those jobs moved to the likes of Kentucky and Alabama.

online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324783204578624161224137252.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEADTop

Detroit's decline really began with the middle-class migration to the suburbs in the 1950s, which accelerated after the 1967 race riot and election of labor organizer Coleman Young as mayor in 1973. During his 20-year reign, Mr. Coleman ignored crime, inflamed racial tensions and built a patronage machine.

Local politicians bought union support with generous labor agreements. Pensions were sweetened retroactively. In good investment years, retirement funds issued bonus checks. Until two years ago public-safety officers didn't have to pay a penny to their pensions and could retire at 55 with roughly 85% of their salary, a 2.25% annual cost-of-living increase and nearly free health benefits.

While the average pension is $30,000 for public safety and $19,000 for other municipal workers, these figures are skewed by workers who retire early with reduced benefits or on disability. A quarter of retired officers receive disability pensions, which pay two-thirds of salary. Fifty-four retirees are under the age of 20 and earn pensions that average $23,300, according to a 2011 actuarial report.

The actuaries mention as a footnote that the retirement tables "may include records with defective birth dates." Detroit's pension funds, like most of its municipal agencies, keep sloppy records...Misrule has resulted in the nation's highest violent crime rate, worst schools, blight and corruption. A former mayor, city treasurer and several pension-fund trustees were recently indicted for corruption. The general counsel for the pension funds this year was charged with securing kickbacks for trustees, including a $5,000 check presented as a birthday gift at a soiree, in return for a nice raise.

While local politicians and union chiefs got richer, the city became poorer. Businesses and middle-class families have fled, sapping the city of revenues and economic vitality. About a third of residents live below the poverty line.

To make up for lower property and income-tax collections, the state has increased its revenue-sharing with Detroit and allowed it to raise tax rates higher than any other city in Michigan. Detroit collects 50% more tax revenue per capita than Dearborn and receives four times as much money from the state.

In one sense, Detroit has already received a rolling bailout that it squandered. Last year the city received $228 million in federal grants and $137 million from the state. It has also borrowed $1.6 billion to finance pensions over the last decade. Under emergency manager Kevyn Orr's restructuring plan, the capital market creditors who bailed out the unions would be repaid pennies on the dollar. That should teach investors a lesson about enabling deadbeat cities.

Mr. Orr has also proposed slashing unfunded retirement liabilities by 90% and dropping retirees onto Medicare and the ObamaCare exchanges—thus kicking $5.7 billion in liabilities to national taxpayers. He also wants to shift workers to defined-contribution plans, which is what state workers receive.

For decades the city has turned to taxpayers and capital markets to finance worker pensions, but both are tapped out. So finally workers and retirees will have to pay. There's no such thing as a free pension.

Unions say it's not fair for the city to break promises to workers, though it long ago abrogated its social contract with local taxpayers to protect their safety and provide basic public services. What would really be unfair is to make taxpayers in cities like San Jose, California, and Providence, Rhode Island, which have scaled back current worker pensions to avert bankruptcy, pay for Detroit's recklessness.

online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323610704578626213931374992.html

Al Qaeda's Iraqi Breakout

Another good reason to keep Guantanamo open.

In today's installment of distressing Middle East news, let's go to Iraq. The escape of senior al Qaeda leaders this week highlights the shakiness of the Iraqi state, the spread of sectarian violence and terrorism from Syria, and the cost of America's absence in the region.

Militants on Sunday night used suicide bombers, mortars and rocket-propelled grenades to blast their way into two prisons, including Abu Ghraib. By the time Iraqi security reinforcements arrived by helicopter and regained control of Abu Ghraib the next day, more than 400 prisoners were gone, including al Qaeda terrorists on death row. The jailbreak boosts the morale and capabilities of the rejuvenated Sunni insurgency.

Nearly two years after President Obama brought the last U.S. soldier home, Iraq has gone from relative stability back to the brink of civil conflict. At least 26 soldiers, policemen and bystanders were killed this week in two separate assaults in the northern city of Mosul. Some 600 people have died in insurgent attacks so far in July, according to Reuters...As the Sunni-al Qaeda threat grows, Shiite militias are reconstituting themselves to fight...The complete military withdrawal in 2011 left the U.S. with little influence and eliminated its constructive role as a mediator.

Even as President Obama touts victories against the core al Qaeda leadership in Pakistan, the group has come back to life in Libya, Mali, Yemen, Somalia and the "fertile crescent" from Lebanon to Syria to Iraq. With these terrorist franchises, al Qaeda is as active as ever, and in more places.

One benefit of George W. Bush's 2007 Iraq "surge" is that it destroyed al Qaeda as a regional fighting force. Now it is coming back, and Americans will eventually be targets. "If [al Qaeda] can take down Abu Ghraib, they can take down the Green Zone" in Baghdad, notes James Jeffrey, the former U.S. ambassador to Iraq.

The Abu Ghraib breakout is also a reminder of the value of the U.S. prison for enemy combatants at Guantanamo Bay. Such prison breaks are all too common in places like Iraq, Afghanistan and Yemen led by weak regimes and corruptible guards. Seven years ago, a dozen senior al Qaeda leaders dug a tunnel out of their Yemeni jail and then formed the nucleus of al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. From that sanctuary, they repeatedly tried to attack the U.S. homeland, as with the underwear bomber flying into Detroit.

Yet President Obama recently re-emphasized his desire to close Gitmo and send most of the remaining 166 detainees home, notably to Yemen.

Bush won the war, Obama lost the peace

online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323610704578629302654179938.html?mod=WSJ_hppMIDDLENexttoWhatsNewsSecond

Egyptians Mass as Morsi Accused of Murder

By Friday evening, demonstrators had filled squares throughout the country—with millions nationwide estimated to have turned out in support of the popular Egyptian military, and considerably smaller crowds maintaining protests on behalf of Mr. Morsi, the ousted Muslim Brotherhood-backed leader.

Though the gatherings appeared largely peaceful, the death toll from clashes with security forces rose to 38 protesters, according to the Associated Press.

Egyptian soldiers, many of whom could be seen holding portraits of Gen. Abdel Fattah Al Sisi, the head of Egypt's military, took up positions throughout Cairo and its suburbs.

Egyptian prosecutors on Friday accused Mr. Morsi of conspiring with the Palestinian militant group Hamas to escape jail during Egypt's revolution against President Hosni Mubarak in early 2011. The prosecutor's investigation could see Mr. Morsi face trial for murder and espionage in the service of a foreign group—a charge that would be akin to treason and could carry a maximum life sentence.

Both sides in the protests hope to lay claim to street-level legitimacy—presenting dueling shows of force that illustrate that more than two years after protesters ousted Mr. Mubarak, Egypt's streets remain the principal source of political power.

That's democracy for you. The protesters shout and the military preserves itself by getting with the crowds. Not that it wasn't the right decision to oust Morsi, but it's still rule by mob.

In a speech on Wednesday, Gen. Sisi, Egypt's minister of defense and the head of its armed forces, asked Egyptians to protest on Friday in order to give him the mandate to deal with terrorists. On Friday evening, private satellite television channels canceled their normal Ramadan programming to encourage people to turn out to support the military.

For the Morsi supporters at Nasr City's Raba'a al Adiwiya Square, Gen. Sisi's appeal sounded like a call for political cover that would allow security forces to forcefully disperse their sprawling sit-in.

"It's like he's going to make a massacre with an alibi of all the people on the street," said Nada Kamal Ragab, 30 years old, a pharmacy instructor who said she had kept a vigil in Raba'a for weeks. "He wants a justification so that when he kills the people, he can say he had support."...Brotherhood leaders have already refused to negotiate with the military or the interim civilian government it ushered into power.

The general's appeal for public support before launching any move against the Brotherhood raises the danger that his plans could surpass legal limits, analysts said.

Egypt's media, military and interim civilian leadership have adopted antagonistic language toward Mr. Morsi's supporters, casually referring to them as terrorists, accusing them of having been infiltrated by foreign agents and in some cases demanding that they be "cleansed" from the public.

Mr. Harb and other Morsi opponents said that Gen. Sisi needs public backing to confront a terrorist menace that has so far been unwilling to compromise. He said that Brotherhood leaders have used live ammunition in often-violent clashes with police and anti-Morsi protesters over the past several weeks, terrorizing neighborhoods where they remain camped out. Brotherhood leaders have called for protests to be peaceful and have said they can't control rogue individual members.

Prosecutors on Friday remanded Mr. Morsi, whom the military has detained incommunicado since his removal from power more than three weeks ago, to 15 days in custody pending an investigation on espionage and other serious allegations, each of which could carry its own tough sentence.

Mr. Morsi is also accused of the murder of prisoners and prison guards, escaping from prison, attacking state institutions, attacking police installations and jails and bringing arms into the prison where Mr. Morsi was incarcerated.

The accusations that Mr. Morsi conspired with Hamas dovetail with wider suspicions—repeatedly made in the media over the past several weeks—that the Brotherhood has enlisted Hamas operatives to strike at police and military targets in Egypt's Sinai Peninsula.

Brotherhood leaders characterized Friday's accusations as a nakedly political attempt to justify Gen. Sisi's military takeover three weeks ago.

"Announcing a decision to detain a legitimate president who has immunity, who should not stand trial except under specific constitutional procedures and under very suspicious timing and in the absence of the simplest concepts of the rule of law as well in the absence of his lawyer, shows the nature of the current struggling fascist military regime," said a message posted Friday to the official Facebook page of Essam el-Erian, the deputy head of the Brotherhood's Freedom and Justice Party.

Protip: when a group is smeared as "fascist," it usually means the group is correct and its critics are far left sillies

Mr. Ashour noted that at the time of the prison break, Mr. Morsi and dozens of other Brotherhood leaders had been recently arrested and were being held without charge. They were among thousands of prisoners who escaped from prison during the uprising against Mr. Mubarak in February 2011.

Official investigations into the massive prison break shortly afterward revealed that Ministry of Interior officials freed many of the prisoners themselves, in what analysts and activists have since called an effort to terrorize an Egyptian public then in the throes of revolt.

Well that's not surprising. Anyway this all sounds like fog of war allegations and we'll have to wait and see.

Sisi has an opportunity to play a Pinochet role here.

[Pyro ᵛᵉʳᶦᶠᶦᵉᵈ ✔]

www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=10897927

Damn churchies

[Chromeo]

Lee, a doctor at Wairau Community Clinic in Blenheim, stood by his views and actions. "I don't want to interfere with the process of producing life," the Catholic father-of-two told the Herald on Sunday.

Lee also does not prescribe condoms, and encourages patients as young as 16 to use the rhythm method.

Teen pregnancy might be a girl's "destiny", he said, and it was certainly not as bad as same- sex marriage.

The only circumstances in which he would prescribe the contraceptive pill would be if a woman wanted space between pregnancies, or had at least four children.

"I think they've already done their reproductive job".

He acknowledged natural birth control was "not very reliable".

"That's the best thing about it. You can't choose it, you just have to be committed to it."

Cunt.

And people think that it's exaggeration/hyperbole to say that conservatives just want to punish women for having sex.

[Tails82]

online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324564704578629810369962152.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_MIDDLETopOpinion

Yesterday a real juror, B29--no relation to Enola Gay--said much the same thing in an interview with ABC News. "George Zimmerman got away with murder, but you can't get away from God," B29, also known as Maddy, told correspondent Robin Roberts. "And at the end of the day, he's going to have a lot of questions and answers he has to deal with."

It's not at all clear that Zimmerman has reason to fear adverse divine judgment for his actions on the night of Feb. 26, 2012. Seattle radio host John Carlson--who, like B29, initially thought Zimmerman guilty--notes:

"One of the most important, and remarkably under-publicized facts that came out at trial is that one of the detectives, while interrogating Zimmerman at the police station that night, told him that the entire incident had been caught on surveillance video. The detective was bluffing, but Zimmerman didn't know that. His reaction: 'Thank God.'

'Thank God.' How many people who do something wrong, lie about it and are told it's on tape react that way?"

B29 turns out to be the very model of civic virtue. She didn't play God by mistaking her prejudice for omniscience. Instead she put it aside, examined the facts, applied the law, and concluded that the prosecution had failed to prove its case beyond a reasonable doubt. She was therefore obliged to find him not guilty, notwithstanding her personal feeling that he was not innocent.

Whether or not it was good form to speak publicly after the trial--and let us note that B29 was not the first Zimmerman juror to do so--she performed the juror's role flawlessly.

online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324564704578630432525651780.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_BelowLEFTSecond

Talk about being between a rock and a hard place. The Obama administration and its allies in Congress are faced with the challenge of trying to convince Americans there are wide-ranging benefits to their 2010 takeover of our nation's health-care system, while at the same time working to delay it so as to minimize the negative consequences before the 2014 elections.

The last thing congressional Democrats want is a repeat of the drubbing their party took in 2010, courtesy of the ObamaCare backlash. But recent events have put ObamaCare and its outcomes front and center, adding to a growing fear on the left that Republicans not only will hold the House but could take the Senate.

Voters anxious for job growth cannot help but notice recent discussions about the law's detrimental effect on employment.The employer mandate, which requires entities with at least 50 full-time employees to provide costly federally approved insurance, acts as an incentive to keep payrolls at 49 or fewer or move workers to part-time status. The administration apparently agrees, as it announced it is postponing the start of the employer mandate by one year, to 2015. Even casual observers of the electoral calendar may note that's on the other side of the midterms.

Leaving aside for a moment whether it is legal for an administration simply to decree that a law won't be enforced until next year, such action keeps ObamaCare in the news. Earlier this month the House passed legislation that would make it legal to delay the employer mandate. The House passed another bill to delay the individual mandate by a year, with the logic that individuals and families deserve the same break busineses are getting. Both bills will languish in the Senate, but they have led to the rather odd situation of the president actually vowing to veto legislation that would put his extralegal action on solid footing.

The administration's problems are not just with Republicans, or the some two dozen House Democrats who joined them. Organized labor, one of the staunchest backers of Democrats in general and ObamaCare in particular, is beginning to foresee the law's negative impact on union members. A recent letter signed by leaders of three large unions and sent to congressional Democratic leaders said the law threatens to "shatter not only our hard-earned health benefits, but destroy the foundation of the 40 hour work week that is the backbone of the American middle class," and that labor's effort for Democrats "has come back to haunt us." Another union head has referred to the "destructive consequences" of ObamaCare.

Add sticker shock to the Democrats' concerns, with recent news of large ObamaCare-driven premium increases in the individual market (for policyholders who do not get coverage through an employer). We were promised that if we liked our current insurance plan, we could keep it. States like Indiana (projected premium increase of 76%), Ohio (88%) and others confirm what many already knew—we cannot keep our current plan if it does not meet what the administration considers "acceptable," and moving to one that meets the ObamaCare requirements can be quite expensive. True, individual-market purchasers in some states will not see these increases, and the pain of these increases will be ameliorated for lower-income families by federal subsidies, but that is small comfort for those in states with large increases who do not qualify for subsidies, and for taxpayers, who will foot the bill for the subsidies.

To top it all off, the president has implicitly admitted what every unbiased observer already knew—that relying on federal and state bureaucrats to revamp one-seventh of our economy will result in missed deadlines, severe disruptions and shortfalls. The president dismissively called these problems "glitches," but Sen. Max Baucus was close to the truth when he used the term "train wreck."

Conservatives were, once again, right. Years ahead of their time. Everyone else is finally starting to catch up.

[Jordan Ω]

My God I love Matthew Inman so much

[Laharls_Wrath]

Jul 28, 2013 21:29:11 GMT -5 Jordan Ω said:

My God I love Matthew Inman so much

same

[Chromeo]

[Tails82]

online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323610704578625581625448910.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_AboveLEFTTop

Detroit's European Aftershocks

U.S. municipal debt is designed to be an attractive investment for Americans, whose interest income on those bonds is often tax-free. Not so for Europeans or their banks, so it takes work to understand why Europe's lenders are holding about $1 billion of unsecured Detroit bonds. Motown disclosed $11 billion in unsecured debt in its bankruptcy filing.

European banks loaded up in part because Detroit's bonds offered high returns, never mind the city's economic and political deterioration. But the banks were also responding to incentives created by the Basel standards for international banking regulation. It's the muni version of why banks in Düsseldorf held toxic U.S. subprime mortgages in 2008, and why lenders across Europe held mountains of Greek and Irish sovereign debt in 2010...the effect on bank investment choices is similar: Government-issued assets will be snapped up beyond what their actual risk and return warrants.

In Detroit's case, this incentive combined with the low-yield environment of the mid-2000s to produce ill-fated deals with European lenders. The Swiss bank UBS helped the Motor City's government sell more than $1.4 billion of bonds in 2005 and 2006. One of the buyers was Ireland's Depfa Bank, which went in on at least $200 million of Detroit debt. Depfa was later bought by Hypo Real Estate Group, which the German government bailed out in 2008.

Another buyer was Dexia, the Franco-Belgian lender. The thrice-bailed-out basket case said last Monday that it will take a €59 million charge on Detroit-related losses. But that looks optimistic: The bank said that of its $305 million in exposure to Detroit's debt, $75 million is insured outright while the rest is covered by an insurer "involved in a restructuring procedure" (read: insolvent).

Today, banks across Europe are retooling their balance sheets to meet the tougher requirements of Basel III. But the new rules perpetuate the conceit that regulators can know in advance how risky certain asset classes are. If more local governments follow Detroit down the bankruptcy road, expect more losses to crop up in unlikely places. And regulations favoring government debt will be one of the reasons.

blog.heritage.org/2013/07/28/planned-parenthood-to-pay-1-4-million-in-medicaid-fraud-settlement/

Planned Parenthood to Pay $1.4 Million in Medicaid Fraud Settlement

Planned Parenthood Gulf Coast, which serves southeast Texas and Louisiana, agreed this week to pay $1.4 million to the state of Texas, settling claims that one of the largest abortion providers in the Southeast had fraudulently overbilled the state’s Medicaid program.

Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott’s office stated that its investigation into the fraud allegations “revealed that Planned Parenthood Gulf Coast improperly billed the Texas Medicaid program for products and services that were never actually rendered, not medically necessary, and were not covered by the Medicaid program.”

The Texas Planned Parenthood allegedly “falsified material information in patients’ medical records” to bolster fraudulent claims for reimbursement.

Alliance Defending Freedom’s recent analysis of state and federal audits of family planning programs suggests that in 12 states, Planned Parenthood affiliates overbilled Medicaid for more than $8 million. One federal audit of New York’s Medicaid family planning program reported that certain providers, “especially Planned Parenthoods,” had engaged in improper practices resulting in overpayment.

Despite mounting accusations of fraud, the organization that performs roughly one out of every four abortions in the U.S. has continued to ride the waves of taxpayer funding to annual surpluses. During its last reporting year alone, Planned Parenthood received over half a billion dollars in taxpayer government funding, all the while performing a record 333,964 abortions. To solidify its place as the top abortion provider in the country, Planned Parenthood announced that all local affiliates would have to begin providing abortion services starting in 2013.

If allegations of fraud and its single-minded provision of abortion services isn’t enough to question a continual stream of taxpayer dollars, Planned Parenthood’s opposition to legal protections for infants born after botched abortions and the group’s apparent willingness to abet the sex trafficking of minor girls should at least raise scrutiny of the organization’s federal funding.

The organization also allegedly turned a blind eye to unsafe and unsanitary conditions in Pennsylvania and Virginia. State officials began investigating a Planned Parenthood in Delaware this spring after two of the clinic’s nurses quit, claiming that the clinic kept unsafe, unsanitary conditions while performing what one report called “meat-market style of assembly-line abortions.”

“Planned Parenthood is far less concerned with providing competent healthcare to women than it is with padding its bottom line with taxpayer dollars,” says Alliance Defending Freedom in its report.

Yet this is the group that President Obama vowed to support, “fighting every step of the way.” And this is the industry that stands to benefit from an influx of abortion funding under Obamacare.

online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324110404578629823790563466.html

You might have missed it, but on July 9 the White House quietly announced in a press release that cocaine use in the U.S. is down by over a third since 2006. This news comes on the heels of a major reduction in world-wide cocaine production, down 41% between 2001 and 2012 according to the Office of National Drug Control Policy. Cocaine-related deaths in the U.S. dropped 44% between 2006 and 2010. The rate of positive drug tests for cocaine declined even more steeply, down 65% between 2006 and mid-2012.

You do not have to have lived during the cocaine and crack epidemics of the 1980s and early 1990s to be grateful for this remarkable change. If you did, the progress seems miraculous. Unfortunately, the Obama administration is cutting the funds and undermining the political will that helped bring about this transformation.

Of all those who contributed to this striking success in the effort to control illegal drugs, two leaders deserve particular thanks: Alvaro Uribe, president of Colombia from 2002-10, and Felipe Calderón, president of Mexico from 2006-12.

President Uribe changed the future of Colombia by attacking the cocaine trade and violent groups on the left and right who used trafficking as a source of power. He brought the rule of law to large areas of his country where people had given up hope.

President Calderón made taking back Mexico from violent traffickers—narco-terrorists—the center of his administration. While cocaine trafficking is only a part of the cartels' criminal activity, Mr. Calderón stepped up attacks on cartel leaders; in January 2007 he even sent a planeload of his worst traffickers to justice in the United States. Because he had the courage to take on this difficult struggle, he began to see the power and violence of these criminal groups decline before he left office, as drug-related murders dropped 12% in the first five months of 2012.

Messrs. Uribe and Calderón created an unprecedented alliance with the U.S. to serve the interests of their homelands, but as in any true alliance all the partners were better for it. Democrats and Republicans stood up for these two leaders, giving critical enforcement, eradication, interdiction and adjudication support to their efforts. During their presidencies, Colombia and Mexico extradited hundreds of their worst traffickers to the U.S. to buy time for their developing judicial systems.

Recent events in Mexico indicate that enforcement successes there will be sustained. But Mr. Calderón has expressed frustration with the failure to reduce drug consumption in the U.S., and he has warned that unchecked demand could lead to drug legalization.

A 41% reduction in cocaine production, one might imagine, has something to do with a 44% reduction in cocaine overdoses. Yet the Obama administration is actually proposing to cut funding for international drug control to $1.5 billion for fiscal year 2014 from $1.9 billion in this fiscal year, a 21% reduction. In its July 9 press release, the White House tells us that it is time to spend an additional $1.4 billion to expand treatment and education, "the largest percentage increase in at least two decades."

Prevention and treatment are worthy activities, but the administration seems to have missed the point in its press release, which links the declines in cocaine use to reductions in supply. It offers no evidence that treatment and prevention played any role.

Most of all, President Obama's failure to push back against drug legalization in this country works against international anti-drug efforts. Raymond Yans, president of the International Narcotics Control Board, warned in March that allowing the implementation of legalization initiatives in Colorado and Washington "would be a violation of international law, namely the United Nations Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs, to which the United States is a party." The U.S. is now undermining the foundation of the very achievement the administration just announced.

online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324328904578622190386123344.html

What to do when the two stars of the academic left collide? Grab the popcorn and sit back: The professoriate is engaged in a raucous family feud, complete with mutual accusations of charlatanry and bitter recriminations.

It started when Noam Chomsky, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology linguist and leftist icon, denounced the jargon-ridden, French-inspired cultural studies that prevail in the humanities.

"I'm not interested in posturing—using fancy terms like polysyllables and pretending you have a theory when you have no theory whatsoever," Mr. Chomsky told an interviewer in December. "There's no theory in any of this stuff, not in the sense of theory that anyone is familiar with in the sciences or any other serious field."

Mr. Chomsky was referring to the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek, who is a celebrity of sorts in academic circles...Mr. Žižek fired back earlier this month. "Chomsky, who always emphasizes how one has to be empirical," he told a panel at the University of London. "Well, I don't think I know a guy who was so often empirically wrong."

Depending on their inclinations, readers might be tempted to root for one over the other. But the truth is the professors are both right.

Regarding Mr. Žižek, it is "hard to see anything to what he's saying."

On Hitler: "The problem with Hitler was that he was 'not violent enough,' his violence was not 'essential' enough. Hitler did not really act, all his actions were fundamentally reactions, for he acted so that nothing would really change, staging a gigantic spectacle of pseudo-Revolution so that the capitalist order would survive."

Regarding Mr. Chomsky, he is "often empirically wrong."

For instance, there was the infamous 1977 Nation magazine essay—co-written with the economist Edward Herman while Pol Pot's butchery was raging—in which the authors pooh-poohed "alleged" Khmer atrocities in Cambodia and credited claims "that executions have numbered at most in the thousands" and "that these were localized in areas of limited Khmer Rouge influence and unusual peasant discontent." (Some 1.7 million Cambodians were exterminated by Khmer genocidaires.)

Mr. Chomsky on life behind the Iron Curtain: "In comparison to the conditions imposed by U.S. tyranny and violence, East Europe under Russian rule was practically a paradise."

On Pearl Harbor: "It's well understood that the Japanese attack on the colonial outposts of the United States, England, and Holland was in some respects highly beneficial to the people of Asia."

On 9/11: "Obama was simply lying when he said . . . that 'we quickly learned that the 9/11 attacks were carried out by al Qaeda.' Nothing serious has been provided since. There is much talk of bin Laden's 'confession,' but that is rather like my confession that I won the Boston Marathon."

Leftist "thinkers" defending every dictatorship out there, what's new?

[Jordan Ω]

Apparently... Well. 'ABOARD THE PAPAL AIRCRAFT — Pope Francis reached out to gays, saying he won’t judge priests for their sexual orientation in a remarkably open and wide-ranging news conference Monday as he returned from his first foreign trip.

“If someone is gay and he searches for the Lord and has good will, who am I to judge?” Francis asked. “We shouldn’t marginalize people for this. They must be integrated into society.”'

This was unexpected to me.

[Chromeo]

Pope Francis reached out to gays, saying he won’t judge priests for their sexual orientation

perhaps this shouldn't have come as a surprise, I mean the church has long been tolerant of pedophillia

[Jordan Ω]

Pretty sure that's false.