Tag: America

The Death of Justice Antonin Scalia: Time to Start “Borking”

On By kingsjesterIn Politics2 Comments

Pendulum-NRD-600Last night, President Barack Hussein Obama addressed the nation concerning the passing of Conservative Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia. As he showed during a State of the Union Address, several years back, to say that he did not care for this Judicial Giant, would be putting it mildly.

In fact, as his remarks, courtesy of whitehouse.gov reveal, ol’ Scooter is positively chomping at the bit to replace him with a Far left Extremist Judicial Activist of his own choosing.

Good evening, everybody.  For almost 30 years, Justice Antonin “Nino” Scalia was a larger-than-life presence on the bench — a brilliant legal mind with an energetic style, incisive wit, and colorful opinions.     He influenced a generation of judges, lawyers, and students, and profoundly shaped the legal landscape.  He will no doubt be remembered as one of the most consequential judges and thinkers to serve on the Supreme Court.  Justice Scalia dedicated his life to the cornerstone of our democracy:  The rule of law.  Tonight, we honor his extraordinary service to our nation and remember one of the towering legal figures of our time.

     Antonin Scalia was born in Trenton, New Jersey to an Italian immigrant family.  After graduating from Georgetown University and Harvard Law School, he worked at a law firm and taught law before entering a life of public service.  He rose from Assistant Attorney General for the Office of Legal Counsel to Judge on the D.C. Circuit Court, to Associate Justice of the Supreme Court.

     A devout Catholic, he was the proud father of nine children and grandfather to many loving grandchildren.  Justice Scalia was both an avid hunter and an opera lover — a passion for music that he shared with his dear colleague and friend, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg.  Michelle and I were proud to welcome him to the White House, including in 2012 for a State Dinner for Prime Minister David Cameron.  And tonight, we join his fellow justices in mourning this remarkable man.

     Obviously, today is a time to remember Justice Scalia’s legacy.  I plan to fulfill my constitutional responsibilities to nominate a successor in due time.  There will be plenty of time for me to do so, and for the Senate to fulfill its responsibility to give that person a fair hearing and a timely vote.  These are responsibilities that I take seriously, as should everyone.  They’re bigger than any one party.  They are about our democracy.  They’re about the institution to which Justice Scalia dedicated his professional life, and making sure it continues to function as the beacon of justice that our Founders envisioned.

     But at this moment, we most of all want to think about his family, and Michelle and I join the nation in sending our deepest sympathies to Justice Scalia’s wife, Maureen, and their loving family — a beautiful symbol of a life well lived.  We thank them for sharing Justice Scalia with our country. 

God bless them all, and God bless the United States of America.

The Liebrals, over at The Washington Post elaborated on the situation facing our nation and Obama’s possible choices.

President Obama declared Saturday that he intends to nominate a replacement for the late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, a move aimed at deepening his imprint on the nation’s highest court.

“I plan to fulfill my constitutional responsibilities to nominate a successor in due time,” Obama said, adding that there’s “plenty of time” for the Senate “to give that person a fair hearing and a timely vote. These are responsibilities that I take seriously, as should everyone. They’re bigger than any one party — they’re about a democracy.”

But the president faces a fierce and protracted battle with Republicans who have already signaled that they have no intention of allowing Obama to choose a nominee to succeed Scalia.

Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and Senate Judiciary Committee Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa) said that Scalia should not be replaced until the next president has taken office. “The American people should have a voice in the selection of their next Supreme Court Justice,” McConnell said in a statement.

Senate Minority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.) rejected that position. “It would be unprecedented in recent history for the Supreme Court to go a year with a vacant seat,” he said in a statement. “Failing to fill this vacancy would be a shameful abdication of one of the Senate’s most essential Constitutional responsibilities.”

Obama has nominated two justices to the court in the past, and he has expressed the desire for jurists with empathy. He did not discuss his thinking about that on Saturday night. Instead, he used the moment to pay tribute to Scalia, whom he described as an “extraordinary judicial thinker.”

In selecting Supreme Court nominees, Obama has relied heavily on the advice of Vice President Biden, a former Senate Judiciary chairman. Biden has demonstrated again and again a strong working relationship with McConnell, having previously negotiated several tax and budget deals. The court nomination may hinge on Biden’s ability to reach a deal with McConnell again.

But the fate of the nomination would clearly be in Republican hands. While Democrats were able to change the rules in 2013 to make it easier to approve lower court judges with a simple majority, Supreme Court nominations still require 60 votes to advance past an opposition filibuster. To derail or delay the nomination, McConnell could simply not schedule a vote, but even if he allows Senate consideration of the nomination, Democrats do not have the numbers to overcome a GOP filibuster.

Although the Republican-controlled Congress could easily thwart an Obama nominee, such a decision could reverberate across the presidential campaign and into in the November elections, in which several GOP senators face tough, competitive races.

The most immediate outcome of the Scalia vacancy is that it offers Obama the chance to draw sharper battle lines with Republicans during an increasingly acrimonious presidential election.

The administration now faces a chaotic political and legal environment in which the president must prepare for a bitter confirmation fight or embrace the prospect of a deadlocked Supreme Court divided evenly between liberals and conservatives.

Scalia’s death also throws into doubt the outcome of some of the most controversial issues facing the nation in cases before the court this term: abortion, affirmative action, the rights of religious objectors to the contraceptive mandate in the Affordable Care Act, and the president’s powers on immigration and deportation.

A deadlocked court could leave appellate decisions in place without setting a precedent. That would please the administration on a case involving union membership, for instance, but would keep Obama’s executive action on deportation from being implemented.

White House officials would not comment Saturday evening on their deliberations about a potential nominee, but the administration has an extensive list of possible candidates to choose from, including some who would change the face of the court by virtue of their race or sexual orientation.

“Blocking a strong person of color, a woman or an historic LGBT candidate for the Supreme Court might cause conservatives more trouble than they think they’re preventing,” said Robert Raben, a Democratic consultant and lobbyist who served as a senior Justice Department official under President Clinton. “The perception of unfairness or bias at the height of a national election could seriously backfire.”

One former senior administration official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the subject, said the president was likely to look to someone young enough to make a mark on the court over several decades. Obama has appointed several such jurists to U.S. appellate courts, the person noted, providing him with a relatively deep bench to from which to choose.

Among the leading candidates would be Sri Srinivasan, a judge on U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, who was confirmed to seat in a 97-to-0 Senate vote in May 2013. Srinivasan would be the first South Asian American on the court. He worked in the U.S. Solicitor General’s office under both Obama and President George W. Bush, and clerked for former Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor.

Other contenders from that same court include its chief judge, Merrick Garland, who is well liked by conservatives and was a finalist for such a nomination when Obama selected Justice Elena Kagan in 2010. Patricia Ann Millett, who won confirmation to the D.C. Circuit in December 2013, may also be considered.

Obama could also look to current or former administration officials, said those familiar with the president’s thinking, or even to the Senate. Among those officials are Attorney General Loretta E. Lynch, Solicitor General Donald B. Verrilli Jr., Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson and Eric Holder, the former attorney general.

Other potential choices could include Deval Patrick (D), the former governor of Massachusetts, or Paul Smith, who chairs the appellate and Supreme Court practice at Jenner & Block and, if confirmed, would be the first openly gay justice.

Beyond the D.C. Circuit, there are many other appellate judges the president could look to in selecting a nominee. Those include Paul Watford and Mary H. Murguia of the 9th Circuit; Albert Diaz of the 4th Circuit and Ojetta Rogeriee Thompson of the 1st Circuit.

Regardless of whom Obama selects, the combination of the timing of the opening, the stark division on the court and deeply partisan passion being evoked in both presidential primaries would make this confirmation battle unlike any of the past 40 years.

The last confirmation in the eighth year of a presidency was Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, whose 97-to-0 vote in February 1988 came after two failed nomination efforts by President Reagan in the face of a Democratic-controlled Senate in late 1987. Kennedy is seen as a traitor among conservative activists, who view his rulings on abortion and gay rights with the liberal bloc as an example of GOP leaders choosing political expediency over ideological rigidity.

The only other attempt to fill a vacancy during a presidential election year came in 1968, when President Lyndon Johnson tried to elevate Abe Fortas to be chief justice. The Senate blocked Fortas. Subsequently, the other nomination to fill Fortas’s spot as associate justice was withdrawn during the final months of Johnson’s presidency.

Under normal circumstances, the nomination of a justice takes about 75 to 90 days, the first 60 or so involving a thorough vetting process by the Senate Judiciary Committee. Typically, the panel does not consider judicial nominees after mid-May, under a tradition established by the late Strom Thurmond (R-S.C.). While chairing the Judiciary Committee, Thurmond declared that he would not take up new judicial nominations within a few months of a presidential election.

Filling the post of Scalia, however, will be anything but normal. He was the outspoken champion for the court’s conservative wing and had many admirers in the Senate, including McConnell. Obama’s first two appointments to the court were relatively easy because Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Kagan were replacing liberal-leaning justices.

Senate conservatives, already predisposed to not approve of Obama’s choice, might be loath to allow him to replace their judicial hero with a liberal jurist who would tip the court in a left-leaning direction. As of now, Sotomayor and Kagan often sided with Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen G. Breyer in the most ideologically driven cases, with Kennedy and sometimes Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. providing the tie-breaking votes.

If Republicans leave the Scalia seat vacant for any lengthy time, that sets up the chance of a series of 4-to-4 votes in which the ruling of the lower federal court would stand as the law of that particular region of the country.

That political math in the Senate means Obama will need the support of all 46 members of the Democratic caucus and at least 14 Republicans to end a filibuster and successfully appoint Scalia’s successor. In the president’s previous Supreme Court nominations, just nine and then four Republicans voted to confirm Sotomayor and Kagan, respectively.

So, what now? I will tell you “What Now”.

Time for McConnell and the Senate Republicans to grow a spine and do some “Borking”.

What do I mean by “Borking”?

On October 23, 1987, The New York Times printed the following article…

One of the fiercest battles ever waged over a Supreme Court nominee ended today as the Senate decisively rejected the nomination of Judge Robert H. Bork.The vote was 58 against confirmation and 42 in favor, the biggest margin by which the Senate has ever rejected a Supreme Court nomination. [ Roll call, page 10. ] Judge Bork’s was the 27th Supreme Court nomination to fail in the country’s history, the sixth in this century, and the first since 1970, when the Senate rejected President Nixon’s nomination of G. Harrold Carswell by a vote of 51 to 45. There have been 104 Supreme Court justices in the nation’s history.

The vote came two weeks after Judge Bork, in the face of expected defeat, said he would not withdraw his name and wanted the full Senate to vote on his nomination. In a statement issued from his chambers at the Federal courthouse here, where he still serves on the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, Judge Bork said he was ”glad the debate took place.”

”There is now a full and permanent record by which the future may judge not only me but the proper nature of a confirmation proceeding,” the 60-year-old judge said.

President Reagan, in a statement released by the White House, said, ”I am saddened and disappointed that the Senate has bowed today to a campaign of political pressure.” The Next Nominee? In the final hours of the three-day debate on the Senate floor, senators turned their attention to the next nominee for the vacancy on the court. The White House is not expected to name a new candidate before the middle of next week.

The President has publicly vowed to find a nominee who will upset Judge Bork’s opponents ”just as much” as Judge Bork himself. Mr. Reagan said today, ”My next nominee for the Court will share Judge Bork’s belief in judicial restraint – that a judge is bound by the Constitution to interpret laws, not make them.”

Meanwhile, senators on both sides of the debate urged the President to adopt a less confrontational tone.

Now, in the last year of the Obama Presidency (Praise God), it is imperative for the United States Senate to adopt president Reagan’s “confrontational tone”.

Why? Well, here is a quote for you…

In our own times, a coherent socialist movement is nowhere to be found in the United States. Americans are more likely to speak of a golden past than of a golden future, of capitalism’s glories than of socialism’s greatness. Conformity overrides dissent; the desire to conserve has overwhelmed the urge to alter. Such a state of affairs cries out for explanation. Why, in a society by no means perfect, has a radical party never attained the status of a major political force? Why, in particular, did the socialist movement never become an alternative to the nation’s established parties?

Who said that?  Karl Marx?  Vladimir Lenin?  Danny Glover?  George Clooney?  Barack Hussein Obama (mm mmm mmmm)?  Nope.  It was the Obama-appointed and Senate-ratified, Supreme Court Justice, Elena Kagan.  The quote was a part of her senior thesis, written almost thirty years ago while an undergraduate at Princeton. The title of the thesis: “To the Final Conflict: Socialism in New York City, 1900-1933”.

The Senate must “Bork” every single Supreme Court Nomination of this Lame Duck President.

He has done enough damage to our country, already.

Until He Comes,

KJ

 

A KJ Op Ed: Vetting The Republican Candidates – Going After the Wrong “Enemy”

On By kingsjesterIn PoliticsLeave a comment

ctax=Campaigns^Expose^Viewers^Placement%2035743%20-%20Viewer (2) Sward-StoneFor those of us Conservatives, who are considering which candidate to vote for in the 2016 presidential Election, our cup runneth over.

We literally have a smorgasbord of candidates, who are still campaigning, less than 10 months from the big day.

And, therein lies the problem.

While candidates seem to be more interested in attacking each other, than the Democrats, potential Republican Voters are following suit, and attacking each other, all over the World Wide Web.

To quote the Master of Malapropisms, the late, great Yogi Berra,

It’s deja vu, all over again.

During the Presidential Elections of 2008 and 2012, while we were busy “vetting” the Republican Candidates, in search of their “bonafides”, Liberal Democrats were solidly behind their Great Black Hope”, the “Clean and Articulate” (Biden’s words, not mine) Barack Hussein Obama, which resulted in an unvetted, untested, incompetent, petulant, anti-American metrosexual assuming the role of “Leader of the Free World”.

Why have we and why are we “eating our own”?

  • Unlike the present-day version of the Democrat Party, which has moved to the Far Left of the Political Spectrum, Republicans, both Conservative and “Moderate”, still think for themselves. We all have our own opinion on the criteria necessary for a successful American President. Democrats, like the Proletariat of the old Soviet Union, possess a “Hive-Mind” mentality, voting en masse for whoever is deemed “good for the Party”.
  • There is a Generational Gap, in regards to morality and ethical behavior, which is a determining factor as to each Republican’s own definition of “Conservatism”, which is a determining factor as to whom their candidate of choice will be. For example, in my case, as a 57-year old Reagan Conservative, I judge Presidential Primary Candidates, and those who vote for them, by the following criteria, as defined by Matt Barber…

Ronald Reagan often spoke of a “three-legged stool” that undergirds true conservatism. The legs are represented by a strong defense, strong free-market economic policies and strong social values. For the stool to remain upright, it must be supported by all three legs. If you snap off even one leg, the stool collapses under its own weight.

A Republican, for instance, who is conservative on social and national defense issues but liberal on fiscal issues is not a Reagan conservative. He is a quasi-conservative socialist.

A Republican who is conservative on fiscal and social issues but liberal on national defense issues is not a Reagan conservative. He is a quasi-conservative dove.

By the same token, a Republican who is conservative on fiscal and national defense issues but liberal on social issues – such as abortion, so-called gay rights or the Second Amendment – is not a Reagan conservative. He is a socio-liberal libertarian.

Put another way: A Republican who is one part William F. Buckley Jr., one part Oliver North and one part Rachel Maddow is no true conservative. He is – well, I’m not exactly sure what he is, but it ain’t pretty. 

  • Another problem, which Republican voters are facing, is the fact that there are no Perfect Candidates. Ronald Reagan is not running for President. Each of the Top Tier Candidates all have their own  good points. Unfortunately, they all have their weak points, as well, just like we voters do. Voters support those candidates whose stance of the important issues most closely resembles their own, a fact which helps to explain why Trump and Cruz are leading the pack.
  • Our defensiveness toward the Republican Candidates comes from the fact that the Republican Establishment has, in several instances, abandoned and betrayed those who placed them in office: average American Voters, living out here in the heartland (or, as those up in the Halls of Power refer to it as, “Flyover Country”). The reaction of Republican Voters in this Primary Season, is, above all else, a repudiation of betrayal of the Republican-held House and Senate. While compromise is, indeed, a part of Washington Politics, capitulation to the opposition party is not. Because of the actions of the Republican Establishment, average Americans have become hyper-vigilant to discrepancies in what a candidate says in the present, and, their actions in the past.

And that, gentle reader, is why we, as Conservatives and potential voters for the Republican Candidate, are allowing the Main Stream Media to lead us around by the nose, “vetting” our candidates, by cause more consternation and infighting, than a bunch of texting teenage girls on Prom Night.

Because of our concerns that whoever winds up as the Republican Candidate for the Office of President of the United States of America represent US, the average American Voter, we are literally, presently, at war with one another, mirroring the infighting going on between the candidates, using the platforms given to us via Political Websites and Facebook Pages.

While vetting the candidates through the use of the New Media is a good thing, it must not be used to tear down each other and destroy our opportunity to undo the damage that years of “Progressive” Political Control in DC has done to our country.

Our mission, now, as Americans, is to decide our own destiny. 

We must not let the Political Elite, on BOTH sides of the aisle, nor the Main Stream Media, pick our candidate for us.

Ronald Reagan once said,

Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn’t pass it to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same.

A charge to keep WE have.

Until He Comes,

KJ

 

 

 

 

‘Cuda Shoots. She Scores!: Palin Endorses Trump. Conservative Populism Is Reborn

On By kingsjesterIn PoliticsLeave a comment

untitled (21)pop·u·lism [ˈpäpyəˌlizəm] NOUN – 1. support for the concerns of ordinary people: “it is clear that your populism identifies with the folks on the bottom of the ladder” · [more] “the Finance Minister performed a commendable balancing act, combining populism with prudence” 2. the quality of appealing to or being aimed at ordinary people: “art museums did not gain bigger audiences through a new populism”

Liberals love to brag that they are the most intelligent and the most tolerant people in any room that they walk into.

That is a bunch of self-conceit and downright baloney. When a Conservative (the political ideology of majority of Americans) calls them on their overestimation of their intelligence, and humiliates them in public, if you will (as Legendary Professional Wrestler, the “American Dream”, the late Dusty Rhodes, used to say), they stalk them, like a hyena stalking a wounded gnu, waiting for the opportunity for revenge.

For example, even though they will stand up and tell you that the Arctic Fox is nothing but a has-been, reality show-starring ‘chillbilly”, they still view her as  a thorn in their Collective Side.

And, that is why Governor Palin endorsement of the Republican Primary Front-runner, Donald J. Trump, is a BIG DEAL.

That being said, Liberals are still looking for ways to “get even” with the Former Governor of Alaska…any way they can.

Check out the not unexpected tone of the following article…and consider the source.

The New York Times reports that

AMES, Iowa — Sarah Palin, the former Alaska governor and 2008 vice-presidential nominee who became a Tea Party sensation and a favorite of grass-roots conservatives, endorsed Donald J. Trump in Iowa on Tuesday, providing him with a potentially significant boost just 13 days before the state’s caucuses.

“Are you ready for the leader to make America great again?” Mrs. Palin said with Mr. Trump by her side at a rally at Iowa State University. “Are you ready to stump for Trump? I’m here to support the next president of the United States — Donald Trump.”

Her support is the highest-profile backing for a Republican so far. It came the same day that Iowa’s Republican governor, Terry Branstad, said he hoped that Senator Ted Cruz would be defeated in Iowa. The Feb. 1 caucuses are a must-win for the Texas senator, who is running neck-and-neck with Mr. Trump in state polls.

The endorsement came as Mr. Trump was bearing down in the state, holding multiple campaign events and raising expectations about his performance in the nation’s first nominating contest.

As Mrs. Palin announced her backing, Mr. Trump stood wearing a satisfied smile as she scolded mainstream Republicans as sellouts and praised how Mr. Trump had shaken up the party. “He’s been going rogue left and right,” Mrs. Palin said of Mr. Trump, using one of her signature phrases. “That’s why he’s doing so well. He’s been able to tear the veil off this idea of the system.”

It is not clear that Mrs. Palin’s blessing will have a major impact on Mr. Trump’s long-term prospects. But in Iowa, where Mrs. Palin spent years developing a network of supporters, it could be helpful. Mr. Trump has faced questions about whether his campaign’s organizing muscle can draw the voters to match his poll numbers come caucus night.

“Over the years Palin has actually cultivated a number of relationships in Iowa,” said Craig Robinson, the former political director of the Republican Party of Iowa and publisher of the website The Iowa Republican. “There are the Tea Partyactivists who still think she’s great and a breath of fresh air, but she also did a good job of courting Republican donors in the state,” he added.

Other conservatives said that Mrs. Palin serves as a particularly effective shield against Mr. Cruz, who has assiduously courted Iowa’s evangelical voters.

“Palin’s brand among evangelicals is as gold as the faucets in Trump Tower,” said Ralph Reed, the chairman of the Faith and Freedom Coalition.

“Endorsements alone don’t guarantee victory, but Palin’s embrace of Trump may turn the fight over the evangelical vote into a war for the soul of the party,” he said.

Mrs. Palin could amplify the news media-circus aspects of Mr. Trump’s candidacy: She too is a reality television star accustomed to playing to the cameras and often accused of emphasizing flash over substance.

And while Mr. Trump has already shown the ability to garner wall-to-wall cable-news coverage, Mrs. Palin’s involvement in his campaign could help him deprive Mr. Cruz of attention in the homestretch to the caucuses.

As rumors circulated that the endorsement was about to happen, Mr. Cruz offered praise for his former political ally after an aide to the senator mocked the pending endorsement earlier Tuesday. “I love Sarah Palin,” the senator told reporters in New Hampshire. “Sarah Palin is fantastic. Without her friendship and support, I wouldn’t be in the Senate today. So regardless of what Sarah decides to do in 2016, I will always remain a big, big fan of Sarah Palin.”

As word of Mrs. Palin’s endorsement trickled through the Hansen Agriculture Student Learning Center at Iowa State University, the reaction from supporters of Mr. Trump who braved snow and frigid temperatures to see the candidate was mixed. Backers of Mr. Trump filled a warehouse-style building with a dirt floor that is sometimes used for tractor shows, but most said that it was the candidate that they cared about, not his new endorsement.

“I’m not here to see her,” said Rich Hoffmann, 41, of Ankeny. “Some people it will matter to, but it doesn’t to me.”

Mrs. Palin and Mr. Trump are not strangers. The two shared pizza along with Mr. Trump’s wife, Melania, in May 2011, when Mrs. Palin was considering a presidential run of her own and was making a bus tour around the country. (Mr. Trump was mocked at the time for using a knife and fork on his slice.)

They also share a trusted operative: Mr. Trump’s national political director, Michael Glassner, was chief of staff to Mrs. Palin’s political action committee.

And like Mr. Trump, Mrs. Palin has maverick tendencies. The mantra of her final weeks of the 2008 campaign was “going rogue,” as she defied instructions from aides to Senator John McCain of Arizona, the party’s presidential nominee.

Little-known before Mr. McCain picked her as his running mate, Mrs. Palin ultimately eclipsed him in popularity and polls show her maintaining strong support among Republicans. She has endured as a coveted endorser with an impressive fund-raising list. After the loss in 2008, she declined to finish her term in Alaska, and went on to become a television star and a Fox News commentator.

The endorsement of Mr. Trump puts Mrs. Palin back in the center of the media maelstrom, and allows her to rehabilitate her political image, which had diminished in the last year as her contract with Fox News ended.

Mrs. Palin endorsed several of Mr. Trump’s Republican rivals in their statewide races, including Mr. Cruz during his Senate bid in Texas and Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky. Mr. Cruz, after his 2012 primary victory over the incumbent lieutenant governor, David Dewhurst, said he would not have made it to the Senate without Mrs. Palin’s backing.

For Mr. Trump, who is trying to accrue other endorsements in the coming weeks, the backing of high-profile Republicans could dent the outsider-to-politics aura that has been elemental to his success in the polls before the voting has begun. But the support of Mrs. Palin, a darling of the Tea Party insurgency, could help inoculate him from such attacks.

The endorsement comes as Mr. Cruz is facing increasing scrutiny in Iowa for his opposition to federal ethanol mandates, highlighted by the criticism from Governor Branstad, whose son works for a group promoting ethanol, the corn-based fuel that is a crucial Iowa industry.

“Ted Cruz is ahead right now. What we’re trying to do is educate the people in the state of Iowa,” Mr. Branstad told reporters at the Renewable Fuels Summit in Altoona. “He is the biggest opponent of renewable fuels. He actually introduced a bill in 2013 to immediately eliminate the Renewable Fuel Standard.”

“He’s heavily financed by Big Oil,” the governor added. “I think it would be a big mistake for Iowa to support him.”

The remark was highly unusual for Mr. Branstad, an establishment Republican who nonetheless has stayed out of his party’s presidential primaries in thepast.

As I continue to write about this endorsement, make no mistake about my political ideology:

I AM STILL A REAGAN CONSERVATIVE.

That being said, I am enjoying the stew out of Trump’s gigging of the Washingtonian Status Quo and his expertise in the art of “Political Jiu-Jitsu”, through the trumpeting of his own horn, in order to achieve free publicity for his campaign.

Over the next month, at least, you will hear self-appointed Liberal and “dejected Conservative” Political Pundits grouse and whine that Palin’s endorsement is an albatross around the neck of Trump, and that she brings nothing to the table.

They’re full of it.

If these “pundits” are anticipating trying to defeat Donald J. Trump and Sarah Palin, in a battle of wits…they are woefully unarmed.

Back in July of 2009, Alaskan Fisherman, Dewey Whetsell, wrote the following list of Sarah Palin’s accomplishments as Governor of Alaska:

1. Democrats forget when Palin was the Darling of the Democrats, because as soon as Palin took the Governor’s office away from a fellow Republican and tough SOB, Frank Murkowski, she tore into the Republican’s “Corrupt Bastards Club” (CBC) and sent them packing. Many of them are now residing in State housing and wearing orange jump suits, The Democrats reacted by skipping around the yard, throwing confetti and singing, “la la la la” (well, you know how they are). Name another governor in this country that has ever done anything similar.

2. Now with the CBC gone, there were fewer Alaskan politicians to protect the huge, giant oil companies here. So she constructed and enacted a new system of splitting the oil profits called “ACES.” Exxon (the biggest corporation in the world) protested and Sarah told them, “don’t let the door hit you in the stern on your way out.” They stayed, and Alaska residents went from being merely wealthy to being filthy rich. Of course, the other huge international oil companies meekly fell in line. Again, give me the name of any other governor in the country that has done anything similar.

3. The other thing she did when she walked into the governor’s office is she got the list of State requests for federal funding for projects, known as “pork.” She went through the list, took 85% of them and placed them in the “when-hell-freezes-over” stack. She let locals know that if we need something built, we’ll pay for it ourselves. Maybe she figured she could use the money she got from selling the previous governor’s jet because it was extravagant.

Maybe she could use the money she saved by dismissing the governor’s cook (remarking that she could cook for her own family), giving back the State vehicle issued to her, maintaining that she already had a car, and dismissing her State provided security force (never mentioning – I imagine – that she’s packing heat herself). I’m still waiting to hear the names of those other governors.

4. Now, even with her much-ridiculed “gosh and golly” mannerism, she also managed to put together a totally new approach to getting a natural gas pipeline built which will be the biggest private construction project in the history of North America. No one else could do it although they tried. If that doesn’t impress you, then you’re trying too hard to be unimpressed while watching her do things like this while baking up a batch of brownies with her other hand.

5. For 30 years, Exxon held a lease to do exploratory drilling at a place called Point Thompson. They made excuses the entire time why they couldn’t start drilling. In truth they were holding it like an investment. No governor for 30 years could make them get started. Then, she told them she was revoking their lease and kicking them out. They protested and threatened court action. She shrugged and reminded them that she knew the way to the court house. Alaska won again.

6. President Obama wants the nation to be on 25% renewable resources for electricity by 2025. Sarah went to the legislature and submitted her plan for Alaska to be at 50% renewable by 2025. We are already at 25%. I can give you more specifics about things done, as opposed to style and persona Everybody wants to be cool, sound cool, look cool. But that’s just a cover-up. I’m still waiting to hear from liberals the names of other governors who can match what mine has done in two and a half years. I won’t be holding my breath.

By the way, she was content to return to AK after the national election and go to work, but the haters wouldn’t let her. Now these adolescent screechers are obviously not scuba divers. And no one ever told them what happens when you continually jab and pester a barracuda. Without warning, it will spin around and tear your face off. Shoulda known better.

Of course, her influence and status as “kingmaker” has become the stuff of legend.

Of the 41 candidates Palin endorsed in 2009,2010, and 2012, 30 of them earned victories.  

In 2012, she endorsed the following winners: Rand Paul, Marco Rubio, Tim Scott, Pat Toomey, Nikki Haley, Deb Fischer, Jeff Flake and Ted Cruz, himself.

That is the reason that he was so gracious and kind toward her, when her endorsement of Trump was announced.

Not too shabby, huh?

Of course, Liberals will continue to ignore the accomplishments of Conservative Populists like Sarah Palin…it spoils the lies they tell about her, in order to feel better about themselves.

Liberals have to keep targeting America’s Conservative Leaders as we approach the 2016 Elections.

After all, what are they going to do? Run on Obama’s Record of Accomplishments?

Or, perhaps, Hillary and Bernie’s “youthful, dynamic leadership”?

Puhleeze.

Until He Comes,

KJ

 

 

U.S. Navy Captured, Iran Frees American Prisoners, Gets $100 Billion Back and Nuclear Capability: America Gets Conned. Thanks, Obama

On By kingsjesterIn PoliticsLeave a comment

Missing-Piece-600-LIThe late, great Jerry Reed once sang a song about a fellow who got a divorce, titled, “She Got the Gold Mine. I Got the Shaft.”

As Obama and his minions celebrate their deal with Iran, Americans with common sense are feeling like that fellow in Jerry’s song.

The New York Times reports that

VIENNA — The United States and European nations lifted oil and financial sanctions on Iran and released roughly $100 billion of its assets after international inspectors concluded that the country had followed through on promises to dismantle large sections of its nuclear program.

This came at the end of a day of high drama that played out in a diplomatic dance across Europe and the Middle East, just hours after Tehran and Washington swapped long-held prisoners.

Five Americans, including a Washington Post reporter, Jason Rezaian, were released by Iran hours before the nuclear accord was implemented. The detention of one of the released Americans, Matthew Trevithick, who had been engaged in language studies in Tehran when he was arrested, according to his family, had never been publicly announced.

Early on Sunday, a senior United States official confirmed that “our detained U.S. citizens have been released and that those who wished to depart Iran have left.” The Washington Post also released a statement confirming that Mr. Rezaian and his wife, Yeganeh Salehi, had left Iran.

“Iran has undertaken significant steps that many people — and I do mean many — doubted would ever come to pass,” Secretary of State John Kerry said Saturday evening at the headquarters of the International Atomic Energy Agency, which earlier issued a report detailing how Iran had shipped 98 percent of its fuel to Russia, dismantled more than 12,000 centrifuges so they could not enrich uranium, and poured cement into the core of a reactor designed to produce plutonium.

But Mr. Kerry was clearly energized by the release of the Americans, an issue he took up on the edges of almost every nuclear negotiation, and pursued in separate, secret talks that many involved in the nuclear issue were only vaguely aware were happening.

The release of the “unjustly detained” Americans, as Mr. Kerry put it, came at some cost: Seven Iranians, either convicted or charged with breaking American embargoes, were released in the prisoner swap, and 14 others were removed from international wanted lists. Many of the presidential candidates, including Senator Marco Rubio of Florida and Donald J. Trump, denounced the swap as a sign of weakness, and they have long promised to review or withdraw from the nuclear agreement.

They particularly object to the release of about $100 billion in frozen assets — mostly from past oil sales — that Iran will now control, and the end of American and European restrictions on trade that had been imposed as part of the American-led effort to stop the program. It was not only sanctions that forced Iran to the table: the United States and Israel also developed one of the world’s most sophisticated cyberweapons to destroy the centrifuges that Iran has now been dismantling.

With the start of the so-called implementation day, the day that the accord goes fully into operation, the structures are finally in place for Tehran to re-engage with the world after decades of isolation.

But even in a week that started with the release of 10 sailors who drifted into Iranian waters — the Defense Department still has not provided an explanation of how that happened — and ended with a prisoner swap that seemed drawn from the pages of the Cold War, it was far from clear whether Tehran would choose to re-engage — at least very quickly.

In Tehran and Washington, political battles are still being fought over the merits and dangers of moving toward normal interchanges between two countries that have been avowed adversaries for more than three decades. But Mr. Kerry suggested that the nuclear deal had broken the cycle of hostility, enabling the secret negotiations that led up to the hostage swap. It was far from a sure thing: Just weeks ago, Iran was demanding the release of nearly 20 Iranians convicted or indicted in the United States; an administration official said that number had been whittled down to seven, but even that still rankled some.

“Critics will continue to attack the deal for giving away too much to Tehran,” said R. Nicholas Burns, who started the sanctions against Iran that were lifted Saturday as the No. 3 official in the State Department during the George W. Bush administration. “But the fact that Iran’s nuclear ambitions will be effectively frozen for the next 10 to 15 years is a real advantage for us,” he said, adding that “it was achieved by tough-minded diplomacy and not war.”

Still Mr. Burns, who now teaches diplomacy at Harvard and has advised Hillary Clinton, a Democratic candidate for president, argued that recent encounters with Iran — including its ballistic missile tests and its propping up of President Bashar al Assad of Syria, “demonstrate how complicated our relationship with Iran will continue to be.” He urged President Obama to issue new sanctions against Iran this weekend for the ballistic missile tests — a violation of United Nations Security Council resolutions — to demonstrate that he will keep up the pressure.

A copy of the proposed sanction leaked three weeks ago, and the Obama administration pulled it back — perhaps to avoid torpedoing the prisoner swap and the completion of the nuclear deal. Negotiations to win the release of Mr. Rezaian, who had covered the nuclear talks before he was imprisoned on vague charges, were an open secret: Mr. Kerry often alluded to the fact that he was working on the issue behind the scenes.

First off, Praise God that the hostages, including Pastor Saeed, are free!

However, money talks and BS walks.

About those “tough negotiations”…

The Middle East Media Research Institute reports that

Iranian officials recently began to reveal details from the nuclear negotiations with the U.S. since their early stages. Their statements indicate that the U.S. initiated secret negotiations with Iran not after President Hassan Rohani, of the pragmatic camp, was elected in 2013, but rather in 2011-2012, in the era of radical president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.[1] The disclosures also indicate that, already at that time, Iran received from the U.S. administration a letter recognizing its right to enrich uranium on its own soil. Hossein Sheikh Al-Islam, an advisor to the Majlis speaker, specified that the letter had come from John Kerry, then a senator and head of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Iranian vice president and top negotiator Ali Akbar Salehi said that Kerry, while still a senator, had been appointed by President Obama to handle the nuclear contacts with Iran.

Now, why would Obama have Kerry, who was not even Secretary of State, yet, have secret “nuclear contacts” with Ahmadinejad and the Mad Mullahs?

Simple. Family ties.

Courtesy of AllenB.West.com…

You not might be aware that in 2009, the daughter of Secretary of State John Kerry, Dr. Vanessa Bradford Kerry, John Kerry’s younger daughter by his first wife, married an Iranian-American physician named Dr. Brian (Behrooz) Vala Nahed.

Of course you’re not aware of it.

Brian (Behrooz) Nahed is son of Nooshin and Reza Vala Nahid of Los Angeles. Brian’s Persian birth name is “Behrooz Vala Nahid” but it is now shortened and Americanized in the media to “Brian Nahed.” At the time his engagement to Bradford Kerry, there was rarely any mention of Nahed’s Persian/Iranian ancestry, and even the official wedding announcement in the October 2009 issue of New York Times carefully avoids any reference to Dr. Nahed (Nahid)’s birthplace (which is uncommon in wedding announcements) and starts his biography from his college years.

Gosh, I wonder why??

Gee, do you think Secretary Kerry should have recused himself from the negotiations with Iran at the very outset because of his long-standing relationship to his Iranian counter-part, Mohammad Javad Zarif? Let me explain.

Zarif is the current minister of foreign affairs in the Rouhani administration and has held various significant diplomatic and cabinet posts since the 1990s. He was Kerry’s chief counterpart in the nuclear deal negotiations.

Secretary Kerry and Zarif first met over a decade ago at a dinner party hosted by George Soros at his Manhattan penthouse. What a surprise. I have to say, connecting the dots gets more and more frightening.

But it gets even worse. Guess who was the best man at the 2009 wedding between Kerry’s daughter Vanessa and Behrouz Vala Nahed? Javad Zarif’s son.

Does this bother anyone at all?

Apparently Kerry only revealed his daughter’s marriage to an Iranian-American once he had taken over as Secretary of State. But the subject never came up in his Senate confirmation hearing, either because Kerry never disclosed it, or because his former colleagues were “too polite” to bring it up.

Polite? Somehow the words “Iran” and “nuclear capability” just do not go with the word “polite”.

The 44th President of the United States of America, Barack Hussein Obama, has purposely and surreptitiously handed a Rogue State of Radical Muslim Barbarians the means of the destruction of both the United States of America and  our staunch ally, Israel.

Why is the President of these United States, Barack Hussein Obama, trusting Iran, an enemy of freedom, to stand by its “Agreement” to refrain from nuking the United States of America and Israel?

He just gave them everything they wanted: their money, nuclear capability, and acquiescence by the Government of the United States of America.

Here’s a question for you:

What if a condition of the Iran Prisoner Swap Agreement and the closure of the “Iran Deal” was that we humble ourselves by allowing our Navy Personnel to be captured and used as propaganda?

Iran remains our mortal enemy, who wants every single American Infidel beheaded, and, who, to this day, refers to this sacred land as “The Great Satan”.

It is well known, that a young Obama, after his mother wed a quite well-off fellow from Indonesia, attended a Madrassa, or Muslim School, in Jakarta.

I believe that the time he spent among “the religion of peace” in his youth, and the 20 years he spent under the “Reformed Muslim” (Liberation Theology) teachings of “ex”-American Muslim, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, molded and cemented his attitude toward Muslims.

Obama innately trusts Muslims…even radical ones.

Obama, Kerry, and the rest of his Liberal Dhimmi Cabal has shown where their loyalties unequivocally lie, with their braggadocio over this Chamberlain-esque “deal” that is destined to not only blow up in their faces, but also “where alabaster cities gleam, undimmed by human tears” and in the heart of the Holy Land, itself.

Obama’s concern is not with our allies nor the safety of the citizens and the military of the United States of America.

Obama, as he always has been, is concerned with himself and leaving a marvelous legacy as president.

Giving Iran the means to “kill the infidels” will definitely cement Obama’s Legacy…if there is anyone left to remember it.

Iran has always been, since the ouster of the Shah, a rogue nation. They are a threat to every nation who stands in the way of their crazed Political Ideology, disguised as a “religion”.

Either due to naiveté or simple over-estimation of their own intelligence, on the part of Obama and his Administration, as regards their “superior intellect”, to quote Fred Thompson, as Admiral Josh Painter, in the great movie “The Hunt for Red October”…

This business will get out of control. It will get out of control and we’ll be lucky to live through it.

Obama has screwed both God’s Chosen People and the nation which he is sworn to protect…for the sake of his own ego’s contentment.

Until He Comes,

KJ

 

The Iran Hostage Situation and Gov. Nikki Haley’s SOTU Rebuttal: When Did Mistreating Our Own Become Acceptable?

On By kingsjesterIn PoliticsLeave a comment

conservative1The are two major stories presently in the news.

The first story involves the capture and the release, a day later, of 10 American Navy Personnel by the partner in Barack Hussein Obama’s Legacy-Securing “Gentleman’s Agreement”, which gave Iran a ton of cash and the nuclear capability to make America a footnote in history.

The second story involves the Republican Party Rebuttal to Obama’s last (Amen.) State of the Union Address, delivered by South Carolina’s perky Governor, Nikki Haley, in which she spent much of her allotted time attacking Republican Presidential Primary Front-Runner, Donald J. Trump, instead of President Barack Hussein Obama, who delivered the address, which she was supposed to be rebutting.

The reason that both are National Water Cooler Topics for discussion is that both illicit a response of incredulity from average Americans.

Regarding the seizing of our two Naval Vessels and their crews by the Worldwide Sponsors of Radical Islamic Terrorists, Iran…

Several things make this whole incident smell as rotten as Hillary Clinton’s Bathtub.

  1. Obama and Kerry’s Response – Any actual President of the United States of America would have immediately parked a Navy Gunship off the coast of Iran and told those turban-wearing barbarians that, unless our Brightest and Best were freed immediately, their desert sands would become glass. Instead, the White House’s response was that this was not “a Hostile Act”. In fact, the Dhimmi-in Chief did not even mention it, during his barely-watched SOTU Address.
  2. The Crippling of our Vessels – The GPS Navigation Systems on our boats were busted by the Iranians. What if we did not actually stray into “their Territorial Waters”?
  3. The Treatment of our Sailors – After they returned our nine men and one woman, the Iranians released both videos and photographs, which showed the humiliation which they put these sailors through, including making the woman hide her face and having a Commander apologize, in a video which was disseminated around the world.
  4. Thank you for Humiliating Us – Secretary of State John F. (I served in Vietnam…and threw my fellow soldiers under the bus) Kerry publicly thanked the Iranians for how magnanimous they were for actually returning our Navy Personnel.
  5. The Kissing of Iran’s Hindquarters by “The Leader of the Free World” – In conjunction with my first point, what kind of AMERICAN PRESIDENT bows and scrapes to a nation of barbarian whackadoodles, who would rather behead us than look at us, and whose subjugated population lives in fear and abject poverty?

As Rush Limbaugh observed on his Nationally-Syndicated Radio Program yesterday…

This Iranian business.  Folks, you can think what you want, but I’m gonna tell you something.  This kind of story where we apologized, and, “Boy the Iranians were so nice. Oh, my God, it was so much fun be with them! They were so nice. It was our fault; we shouldn’t have been there. We apologize. they treated us so well,” you might think that’s cool.  I’m telling you, that’s one of the biggest propaganda victories that this Satanic country could get. 

In the Middle East, where this is the kind of stuff that matters, it’s gonna make it look like they totally dominate us.  It’s gonna come across as another huge victory over the Great Satan, the United States of America.  Now, last nightin his State of the Union speech, Obama’s going on and on, “We’re the most powerful country in the world! we got the best fighting force in the world. We got the best military in the world! We spend more on our military than the first eight nations behind us combined. We got the greatest battle machine world!”

Ask yourself a question.  All of that may be true.  We may be the most powerful nation in the world.  What kind of rules of engagement are they saddled with.  But more importantly than that, why…? I’m dead serious about this.  Why, given that fact we have the most powerful military, the greatest fighting force ever — we can project more power than any nation on earth can even dream of — why are all of our enemies growing in power?  Why are they getting bigger?  Why are they stronger?  Why are our enemies more dangerous than ever?  Why are they bigger, more dangerous, and wreaking more havoc than ever before under Obama?

That’s how you measure it.  We can have the best, most powerful fighting force in the world and if it’s led by a wuss or somebody who thinks that it’s the problem in the world, what good is it, under his command?  And make no mistake: Barack Hussein Obama is one of these people that thinks the United States military is one of the greatest problems in the world, historically and at present.  Do not doubt me. It falls right in line with this whole belief system that in the United States is not the solution to the world’s problems.  We are the problem. 

The second hot topic is the SOTU Rebuttal, as delivered By South Carolina’s Republican Governor, Nikki Haley.

Supposedly written by the Governor, herself, this rebuttal, at times, seemed not to be a rebuttal at all, but a personal attack against Donald J. Trump, the Business Entrepreneur and Showman, who is leading the other Republican Primary Candidates for their party’s Presidential Candidate Nomination by a wide margin.

As I pointed out on Twitter, yesterday,

The purpose of a SOTU Rebuttal is to discredit the opposition…not the potential Presidential Candidate of your own Political Party.

So, why would the Republican Party allow, and probably encourage, Governor Haley to attack Trump like that?

As I have written before, I believe that the main reason that Trump is leading among the other Republican Candidates, is that he, while sparse on details on of his platform, is empathetic on what he personally believes.

He is “flying” BOLD COLORS, while the other candidates are “flying” PALE PASTELS.

For example, while others up on the CNN Stage last night, watched, Trump boldly stated that “we speak English in America”, referring to the unprecedented accommodations that Liberal Politicians, on both sides of the aisle, have made for Illegal Aliens, here in a country whose very sovereignty they have violated.

This is what I don’t understand about the Republican Establishment.

They run around telling everybody how Conservative they are, when in reality,they actually hold the same beliefs as Liberal Democrats.

As Ronald Reagan said in his famous speech, given so long ago, today’s Republican Party needs to be “flying” “bold colors, not pale pastels”.

From what I’m seeing out of a lot of the Republicans right now, they’re not even presenting Americans with pale pastels.

The majority of Republican Congressmen and women seem to be quite content with the Washingtonian Status Quo and the self-serving political practice of “reaching across the aisle”, even if making “concessions” screws us “rubes’ back here in “Flyover Country”, America’s Heartland.

And, they don’t want anything, or ANYONE, to stop their “Gravy Train”.

That is why they are attacking Trump and the other Republican Primary  Front-Runner, Senator Ted Cruz.

For the Establishment (Vichy) Republicans, it’s a matter of survival…theirs, not that of us “rubes”.

What both of these topics have in common is a betrayal of the heritage and the principles which made America the Greatest Country on the Face of Good’s Green Earth.

Our Ancestors, Family Members, and Friends did not make the ultimate sacrifice on the Field of Battle for Professional Politicians and Spineless Bureaucrats (but, I repeat myself) to assist a megalomaniac Muslim-sympathizing Marxist in “radically changing” the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave into The Land of the Proletariat and the World’s Doormat.

This November, it’s time to fight back.

Are you with me?

Until He Comes,

KJ

 

 

 

 

 

 

The State of the Union Address: While Iran Holds 10 American Sailors Hostage, Obama Has a “Chip Diller” Moment

On By kingsjesterIn Politics2 Comments

th (55)Have you ever seen the Classic Movie, “Animal House”, about a Fraternity at fictional Faber College, who partied all the time, until the Dean of Students expelled them all?

A young Kevin Bacon played a Gung Ho ROTC Cadet, a member of the snotty fraternity who got the “Animal House” expelled, named Chip Diller. When the Animal House guys exacted their revenge during the surrounding town’s annual parade, Chip was assigned crowd control, in an effort to calm the panicking parade crowd and to avert the resulting stampede.

The young cadet stood in the path of the rapidly exited mob, shouting

Remain calm. All is well! 

Needles to say, he was trampled in the stampede.

Last night, in his last (hopefully) State of the Union Address, President Barack Obama had a “Chip Diller” Moment.

In case you missed it, here’s a summary from Foxnews.com:

President Obama, with an eye on cementing his legacy and countering the narrative on the Republican campaign trail, used his final State of the Union address Tuesday night to defend his economic record – and, in stark language, downplay the threat from the Islamic State.

“Over-the-top claims that this is World War III just play into their hands,” the president said, arguing that ISIS fighters “do not threaten our national existence.”

The remarks on ISIS are sure to rile Republican critics who say the president’s strategy for confronting the group is inadequate – particularly just hours after ISIS was blamed for another deadly attack, this time in Istanbul.

Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, one of the leading candidates for the GOP presidential nomination, tweeted afterward that the address was “less a State of the Union and more a state of denial.”

The backdrop of the address undeniably was election-year politics, though Obama is not on the ballot. Throughout the speech, the president took several implicit jabs at the GOP candidates competing for his job, and in doing so sought to shore up his own legacy.

His message to them seemed to be: The sky is not falling.

On the economy and on national security, Obama called the criticism “political hot air.” More broadly, the president sounded a call for “better politics” and bipartisanship, and cast the rancor directed at his administration’s policies as the product of an overheated political system.

“Let me tell you something, the United States of America is the most powerful nation on Earth. Period,” Obama said, to those who say America is getting weaker.

And to those who say the economy is just limping along, Obama countered: “Anyone claiming that America’s economy is in decline is peddling fiction.” He said America’s is the “most durable economy in the world” and one that has improved on his watch.

The defiant remarks were met with skepticism from Republicans in the audience. House Speaker Paul Ryan’s office said the “lofty platitudes” still did not explain how to defeat ISIS and get the economy back on track.

In the official GOP response, South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley challenged the president’s message on terror, saying the country is facing threats like few others in recent memory and the president is unwilling or unable to deal with it. At the same time, she urged Americans to avoid following the “angriest voices.”

On that, Haley and Obama had a common message. In his address, Obama returned repeatedly to a warning that the country faces a choice in a time of “extraordinary change” – between facing the future with “confidence” or with “fear.”

He decried politicians who “insult Muslims” or target people “because of race or religion,” an implicit reference to some of the comments made on the Republican campaign trail including from Donald Trump. And he made a reference to remarks from Cruz, saying the answer to threats “needs to be more than tough talk or calls to carpet bomb civilians.”

Cruz responded on Twitter, “We need a president who will defeat radical Islamic terrorism.”

But Obama delivered pointed remarks on the nature of the terror threat. He said the priority remains protecting the American people from terrorism, but went on to play down the ISIS problem.

“Masses of fighters on the back of pickup trucks, twisted souls plotting in apartments or garages, they pose an enormous danger to civilians. They have to be stopped. But they do not threaten our national existence,” Obama said. “That is the story ISIL wants to tell; that’s the kind of propaganda they use to recruit.”

He also dug in on what effectively is an administration policy of not referring to the terror threat as radical Islam. He urged against “echoing the lie that ISIL is somehow representative of one of the world’s largest religions,” and said: “We just need to call them what they are – killers and fanatics who have to be rooted out, hunted down, and destroyed.”

In a statement after the speech, House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Ed Royce, R-Calif., accused him of “pushing these growing threats to the next administration.”

The president from the start was by turns combative and casual, delivering an unconventional address that avoided a detailed to-do list. From the outset, he said he’d “go easy” on the laundry list of proposals – and focus more broadly “on our future.”

“For this final one, I’m going to try to make it a little shorter. I know some of you are antsy to get back to Iowa,” he joked.

He also began, and closed, his address with a call for bipartisan cooperation on key issues, saying Washington “might surprise the cynics.” On issues ranging from criminal justice reform to prescription drug abuse, Obama suggested both parties can find common ground.

The president delivered his seventh and final State of the Union address as he faces an invigorated opposition in both houses of Congress and the prospect of his policies becoming unraveled if a Republican wins the White House in November.

His administration, though, is still trying to deliver on promises made since his first inauguration – most notably, the vow to close the Guantanamo Bay prison camp.

He renewed that vow Tuesday, saying he will “keep working to shut down the prison at Guantanamo.”

“It is expensive, it is unnecessary, and it only serves as a recruitment brochure for our enemies,” he said, without saying whether he might resort to executive action to achieve his goal.

Despite vowing to avoid the to-do list, Obama did tick off several other final-year goals: including raising the minimum wage, doing more on gun control and pushing for free community college – a proposal left over from last year’s agenda. He also tapped Vice President Biden to lead “mission control” in a new national effort to research a cure for cancer.

Hanging over Tuesday’s address, aside from the terror attack in Istanbul, was yet another diplomatic dispute involving Iran — as it emerged Iran was holding 10 U.S. Navy sailors after they apparently drifted into Iranian waters.

Obama did not address the dispute in the State of the Union, though Republicans pointed to the incident in renewing their concerns about the Iran nuclear deal.

As I sit down to write today’s blog, our country finds itself  under attack, by an old established enemy, whom  Obama has given the means, though a lopsided “Gentleman’s Agreement, by which to annihilate America through a Nuclear Bomb.

The Rogue Radical Islamic State Sponsor of Terror, Iran, has kidnapped nine American men and an American woman, who voluntarily enlisted in OUR Navy, in the process crippling one of Our Navy’s boats, while their Commander-in -Chief publicly ignored their plight and Iran’s hostile act, while chastising us for being worry about the safety of our nation, as regards to the plans of Radical Islamists, a political ideology, masquerading as a religion, which he claims has nothing to do with the Followers of the “Warrior Prophet”, Mohammed.

President Barack Hussein Obama is in a trap of his own making. It started with his Speech to the Muslim World at the University of Cairo, shortly after his first Inauguration as President, in which he sounded like a subservient dhimmi.

In the years that followed, his genteel Foreign Policy toward the Barbarians of the Muslim World, known as “Smart Power!”, led to a never-ending Radical Islamic Revolution in the Middle East, known as Arab Spring, through which Moderate Muslim Dictators were replaced by Radical Muslim Dictators. It also led to the increased threat of the extermination of Israel, and the changing of NASA into a Muslim Outreach Program.

The sixth President of the United States of America, John Quincy Adams, wrote the following about the nature of Islam:

THE ESSENCE OF HIS [MUHAMMAD’S] DOCTRINE WAS VIOLENCE AND LUST: TO EXALT THE BRUTAL OVER THE SPIRITUAL PART OF HUMAN NATURE [Adams’ capital letters]… Between these two religions, thus contrasted in their characters, a war of twelve hundred years has already raged. The war is yet flagrant… While the merciless and dissolute dogmas of the false prophet shall furnish motives to human action, there can never be peace upon earth, and goodwill towards men…The precept of the Koran is, perpetual war against all who deny, that Mahomet is the prophet of God. The vanquished may purchase their lives, by the payment of tribute; the victorious may be appeased by a false and delusive promise of peace; and the faithful follower of the prophet, may submit to the imperious necessities of defeat: but the command to propagate the Moslem creed by the sword is always obligatory, when it can be made effective. The commands of the prophet may be performed alike, by fraud, or by force.

In contrast, our present Petulant President Pantywaist will not even call Radical Islam by its name, as exhibited last night.

He has already proclaimed that we are not at war with Islam.

So, how can America win this war against Radical Islam, if the President of our country will not even admit that we are in one?

Barack Hussein Obama’s disdain for all of the core values of our country, such as American Exceptionalism, American Rugged Individualism, American Achievement, the American Family Unit, and the Faith of Our Fathers, has been shown through his words and actions, over and over again, through this long National Nightmare, through which we have been suffering, hoping fervently that the light at the end of the tunnel, is not an oncoming train…or a Nuclear Explosion.

The Good News is…

As a Constitutional Republic, those of us, the overwhelming majority of Americans who still believe in the concept of right and wrong, maintain the Rights which our Founding Fathers bestowed upon us, to speak our mind…regardless of what the current Presidential Administration, the Main Stream Media, and the rest of the mindless sycophants, who worship at the dual altars of popular culture and political correctness, want us to do.

We shall not be assimilated into the Hive-Mind.

That still, small voice which resides within each one of us, has led Americans to do great things, in service to their country and the concept of American Freedom, as personified by Lady Liberty, standing so majestically in New York Harbor.

God gave us this nation, ensconced in the concept of “Liberty and Justice for all”.

By His Grace, we will keep it.

As President Ronald Wilson Reagan, himself, said,

Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn’t pass it to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same.

Until He Comes,

KJ

Political Pundits Panicking…Republican Elites Equivocating: Trump is Still in the Lead

On By kingsjesterIn Politics1 Comment

Trump-n-CruzThe smoke-filled backrooms adjoining the Halls of Political Power in our nation’s capital have become scenes resembling the Psych Ward in the Jack Nicholson Class, “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest”.

Howard Kurtz, Media Analyst for the Fox News Channel, recently posted the following observations.

The Republican establishment, which has always distrusted and discounted Donald Trump, is getting increasingly nervous.

So nervous, in fact, that some of its media voices are starting to denounce their party’s front-runner in the strongest possible terms.

As in, refusing to vote for the man if he’s the nominee. As in, loudly proclaiming that he will destroy the GOP.

Viewed from one perspective, this has the smell of panic. Viewed from another, it’s a case of party stalwarts speaking out based on principle.

For decades now, there has been primary-season sniping between the establishment wing and the insurgent/hard-line/Tea Party wing. Commentators rough up their least favorite candidate, even declare them unqualified for the White House.

But if that person prevails—think Mitt Romney in 2012—the sharpest Republican critics find a way to walk it back. Well, he wasn’t my first choice, but he would be better than Barack Obama. He’s evolved on immigration/tax cuts/ObamaCare. He would pull this country out of its left-wing tailspin.

These days, the rhetoric is getting so hot that there will be no scrambling back on board. Bill Kristol has been openly musing about a third party if Trump wins the nomination.

Does the conservative media elite hope to throw some tacks under the Trump steamroller with such sharp rhetoric? Or are its members just speaking out to clear their consciences?

If it’s the former, I think it might actually help Trump to have the Beltway types arrayed against him. These are the folks he is running against, and he’s never positioned himself as a doctrinaire conservative.

Michael Gerson, a Bush White House official who writes for the Washington Post, uses sweeping language:

“Trump’s nomination would not be the temporary victory of one of the GOP’s ideological factions. It would involve the replacement of the humane ideal at the center of the party and its history. If Trump were the nominee, the GOP would cease to be.”

Cease to be. That’s pretty historic stuff.

Gerson calls Trump a “demagogue” who “has followed some of America’s worst instincts wherever they have led, and fed ethnic and religious prejudice in the process. All presidential nominees, to some extent, shape their parties into their own image. Trump would deface the GOP beyond recognition.”

In case you missed the point, Gerson says: “Trump is disqualified for the presidency by his erratic temperament, his ignorance about public affairs and his scary sympathy for authoritarianism. But for me, and I suspect for many, the largest problem is that Trump would make the GOP the party of racial and religious exclusion.”

Doug Heye has been communications chief of the RNC, a top deputy to Eric Cantor and a Bush administration official. He makes a personal declaration in the Independent Journal:

“Because of Trump’s perversion of conservatism, along with the devastating impact he would have if nominated, I cannot support Donald Trump were he to win the Republican nomination.”

Heye says Trump would be “dangerous to the United States and the world at a time when the world is at risk.” His nomination, says Heye, “would be catastrophic for Republican hopes to win the White House and maintain control of the Senate and would damage the party and the conservative cause for years to come. His having the legitimacy that comes with the nomination of a major political party would cause greater instability throughout the world at a time when the world looks to America for leadership that is serious and sober.”

This is the New York Times’ latest version of the same story, calling it a “people’s coup”:

At family dinners and New Year’s parties, in conference calls and at privatelunches, longtime Republicans are expressing a growing fear that the coming election could be shattering for the party, or reshape it in ways that leave it unrecognizable.

But a very different tack from Peggy Noonan, who worked for Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, who turns the question back on the establishment:

“I do not understand the inability or refusal of Republican leaders to take Mr. Trump seriously. They take his numbers seriously—they can read a poll—but they think, as Mr. Bush said, that his support is all about anger, angst and theatrics. That’s part of the story, but the other, more consequential part has to do with real policy issues. The establishment refuses to see that, because to admit it is to implicate themselves and their leadership. Political consultants can’t see it because they don’t think issues matter—not to them and certainly not to the dumb voters.

“But issues do matter, and Mr. Trump has functioned this year not as a great communicator or great compromiser but as the great disruptor. He brags that he has brought up great questions and forced other candidates to face them and sometimes change their stands—and he has.”

There really isn’t much of an establishment left. It consists of some megabuck donors, elected officials, seasoned operatives and media pundits. They don’t have the power to stop Trump, and they know it.

The best they can hope for is to influence the debate. Their problem is that most of them don’t like Ted Cruz, either.

Indeed.

Just as the backlash against President Barack Hussein Obama and the Democr5at Party has reached deafening levels here in America’s Heartland, snobbishly referred to by the Political Elite as “Flyover Country”, so has the refusal of the leaders of both Political Parties to admit their culpability in creating the problems our nation is facing, which can be traced back to their failed domestic and foreign policies and failed leadership.

Why do I believe that Donald J. Trump is still the frontrunner among all the Republican Presidential Candidates?

This brash, unabashedly American, business entrepreneur and quintessential showman has dominated the media for the past several years.

The popularity of his reality program on NBC and the catch phrase that came leaping out from it, “You’re fired!”, spread across America like wildfire.

Now, his Presidential Campaign continues to do the same.

It is not just his flamboyance that has caught the eye of Americans.

The fact is, after almost two terms of an Administration taking the great country in the world on a scenic tour of the Highway to Hell, Donald Trump is the only Republican Candidate shouting, “Hit the brakes, you idiots!”

Trump’s straightforwardness has struck a chord in the hearts of average Americans, tired of the wussification of America, being so relentlessly pushed by both modern political parties.

This is what I don’t understand about the Republican Establishment:

They run around telling everybody how Conservative they are, when in reality, they actually hold the same beliefs as Liberal Democrats.

Ronald Reagan gave a famous stump speech about the fact that the Republican Party at one time, needed “bold colors, not pale pastels”.

From what I’m seeing out of a lot of the Republicans right now, they’re not even presenting Americans with pale pastels.

…Except for Donald Trump and Ted Cruz.

The “Republican Elite”, as Kurtz refers to them, are showing their color to be Liberal Blue, while they claim to be Conservative Red.

It is almost as if they believe that the Political Tsunami, which resulted in Republicans holding both Houses of Congress, came about because they made themselves look like Democrats.

They need to come down off of Capitol Hill every now and then.

And, visit Realityville.

Average Americans, like you and me, living from paycheck to paycheck in America’s Heartland, do not need another Democratic Party.

If we wanted to continue to put up with their Liberal Stupidity, we would have left all of them in office.

Instead, in November of 2014, we showed them the door.

If Jeb Bush and the rest of the Vichy Republicans actually believe that they will win over the Mexican vote, or the rest of the Hispanic Vote, if by then those who are now illegal are allowed to vote, in 2016, then I have two bridges over the Mississippi River at Memphis to sell them.

The overwhelming majority of average Americans want Conservatives whose blood runs red, not Liberal squishes, who have more in common with the Democrats in the Northeast Corridor, than they do with average Americans in the Heartland.

If the Republican Establishment does not come to that realization very soon, they will go down to defeat again in 2016.

They will never achieve victory by trying to push a candidate, who represents the Jello of “Liberal Moderation”, up a hill.

In summation, the American people are tired of Political Correctness and anti-American political expediencies being forced down our throats by both political parties and trumpeted by their lackeys in the Main Stream Media.

Donald Trump, for all of his brashness and braggadocio, is a breath of free air and, quite frankly an anomaly. He’s not a professional politician. He is a businessman who wants to become a public servant.

Now, where did I hear that before?

Oh, yeah.

That’s the way the Founding Fathers envisioned our system of government, led by citizens, who served their terms as public servants…AND THEN WENT HOME.

But, I digress…

You know what tickles me the most about “The Donald”?

He reminds me of one of my favorite movie characters.

He actually has a backbone.

Just remember what ol’ Jack Burton does when the earth quakes, and the poison arrows fall from the sky, and the pillars of Heaven shake. Yeah, Jack Burton just looks that big ol’ storm right square in the eye and he says, “Give me your best shot, pal. I can take it.” – Jack Burton, Truck Driver (Kurt Russell) “Big Trouble in Little China”

…and that, boys and girls, is a refreshing change.

Until He Comes,

KJ

 

Obama’s Gun Control Town Hall: “Giving Up a Little Bit of Liberty For a Little Bit of Security”

On By kingsjesterIn Politics1 Comment

But-one-Life-600-LIThe President of the United States of America, Barack Hussein Obama, continued to display his “great disconnect” from average Americans last night in an Internationally-televised “Townhall Event, featuring a hand-picked audience, selected by CNN and the White House.

Foxnews.com reports that

President Obama doubled down on his push for gun control Thursday at a televised town hall meeting in which he said that sales of guns have soared under his presidency because gun rights groups have convinced people “that somebody is going to come get your guns.”

“Part of the reason is that the NRA has convinced many of its members that somebody is going to come get your guns,” Obama said after admitting that his presidency had been good for gun manufacturers.

The town hall came just two days after Obama announced executive actions designed, among other goals, to broaden the scope of gun sales subject to background checks.

Obama said that he has never owned a gun but would occasionally shoot one at Camp David for skeet shootings.

He also said he would “be happy” to meet with the National Rifle Association — which has vocally opposed to the president’s gun control proposals — and that he had invited them to the White House multiple times. Obama criticized the NRA’s decision not to attend the event, and took aim at their fiery language in response to his actions.

“If you listen to the rhetoric, it is so over the top, and so overheated,” Obama said.

At the town hall, which was hosted and televised by CNN, Obama took questions from Taya Kyle, whose late husband Chris Kyle was depicted in the film “American Sniper.” Kyle told Obama that gun ownership was at an all-time high while murder rates are at an historic low, and defended her right to own a gun.

“I want the hope — and the hope that I have the right to protect myself; that I don’t end up to be one of these families; that I have the freedom to carry whatever weapon I feel I need,” Kyle said.

“There is a way for us to set up a system where you (as) a gun owner … can have a firearm to protect yourself but where it is much harder for somebody to fill up a car with guns and sell them to 13-year-old kids on the streets,” Obama replied.

Obama also took questions from Cleo Pendleton, whose daughter was shot and killed near Obama’s Chicago home, and from Sheriff Paul Babeu, an Arizona lawman and congressional candidate who has accused Obama of unconstitutional power grabs on guns.

He also took questions from controversial Chicago Catholic priest Rev. Michael Pfleger.

“The reality is that I don’t understand why we can’t title guns just like cars,” Pfleger said. “If I have a car and I give it to you, Mr. President, and I don’t transfer a title, and you’re in an accident, it’s on me.”

“Issues like licensing, registration, that’s an area where there’s just not enough national consensus at this stage to even consider it. And part of it is, is people’s concern that that becomes a prelude to taking people’s guns away,” Obama replied.

Also in the audience was former Rep. Gabby Giffords and her husband Mark Kelly. Kelly and Giffords became prominent gun control advocates after Giffords was shot in 2011.

Obama has come under heavy fire from Republicans and Second Amendment advocates for his actions, which they say infringe on Americans’ right to bear arms.

The NRA fired back at Obama while the town hall was still going on. NRA Director Chris Cox told Fox News’ Megyn Kelly: “This is an attempt to distract the American people away from his failed policies.”

“The NRA does more to teach safe and responsible gun ownership than this president ever has or ever will,” Cox said.

The president also published an opinion piece in Thursday’s New York Times in which he pledged not to support any candidate who is opposed to gun control.

“I will not campaign for, vote for or support any candidate, even in my own party, who does not support common-sense gun reform,” Obama said, a move that could make Democratic candidates in Republican states feel unable to request the political support of the two-term president.

White House spokesman Josh Earnest said before the event that Obama hoped the forum will spur a “serious conversation” about the Second Amendment as well as the administration’s new push to tighten gun control rules.

So, let’s have a “serious conversation” about the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, found in the section known as the “Bill of Rights”.

The Second Amendment states that

A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.

Why did our Founding Fathers, in all their wisdom, include this Amendment?

Dr. Nelson Lund, Patrick Henry Professor of Constitutional Law and the Second Amendment at George Mason University, wrote the following in an article posted at Heritage.org…

The Founding generation mistrusted standing armies. Many Americans believed, on the basis of English history and their colonial experience, that central governments are prone to use armies to oppress the people. One way to reduce that danger would be to permit the government to raise armies (consisting of full-time paid troops) only when needed to fight foreign adversaries. For other purposes, such as responding to sudden invasions or similar emergencies, the government might be restricted to using a militia, consisting of ordinary civilians who supply their own weapons and receive a bit of part-time, unpaid military training.

…Thus, the choice was between a variety of militias controlled by the individual states, which would likely be too weak and divided to protect the nation, and a unified militia under federal control, which almost by definition could not be expected to prevent federal tyranny. This conundrum could not be solved, and the [Constitutional] Convention did not purport to solve it. Instead, the Convention presumed that a militia would exist, but it gave Congress almost unfettered authority to regulate that militia, just as it gave the new federal government almost unfettered authority over the army and navy.

This massive shift of power from the states to the federal government generated one of the chief objections to the proposed Constitution. Anti-Federalists argued that federal control over the militia would take away from the states their principal means of defense against federal oppression and usurpation, and that European history demonstrated how serious the danger was. James Madison, for one, responded that such fears of federal oppression were overblown, in part because the new federal government was structured differently from European governments. But he also pointed out a decisive difference between America and Europe: the American people were armed and would therefore be almost impossible to subdue through military force, even if one assumed that the federal government would try to use an army to do so. In The Federalist No. 46, he wrote:

“Besides the advantage of being armed, which the Americans possess over the people of almost every other nation, the existence of subordinate governments, to which the people are attached and by which the militia officers are appointed, forms a barrier against the enterprises of ambition, more insurmountable than any which a simple government of any form can admit of. Notwithstanding the military establishments in the several kingdoms of Europe, which are carried as far as the public resources will bear, the governments are afraid to trust the people with arms. And it is not certain that with this aid alone they would not be able to shake off their yokes.”

Implicit in the debate between the Federalists and Anti-Federalists were two shared assumptions: first, that the proposed new constitution gave the federal government almost total legal authority over the army and the militia; and second, that the federal government should not have any authority at all to disarm the citizenry. The disagreement between Federalists and Anti-Federalists was only over the narrower question of how effective an armed population could be in protecting liberty.

My purpose in reviewing history is quite simple:

Those who do not study history are doomed to repeat it.

Make no mistake, if President Barack Hussein Obama had his way, we would live in a country comprised of restrictive gun laws, which would be modeled after those in Europe.

And, as recent events have plainly shown, those restrictive gun laws have allowed Islamic Terrorists to kill innocent people unchallenged, because none of those innocent people were allowed to carry a weapon with which to defend themselves.

In fact, in some cases, even the police officers, who first arrived on the scene, were unarmed, and had to call for additional forces, thus giving the perpetrators more time to murder and maim the innocent.

One of our Founding Fathers, Dr. Benjamin Franklin, once wrote,

Any society that would give up a little liberty to gain a little security will deserve neither and lose both.

Like Dr. Franklin and the rest of those who have fought for our freedom, average Americans realize what the president does not.

Until He Comes,

KJ

 

The War Against Christianity: The Myth of “Constitutional Religious Neutrality”

On By kingsjesterIn Christianity, Politics1 Comment

American Christianity 2Do American Political Leaders have the right to invoke the Name of the God of Abraham in their public speeches?

Or, should they keep their faith out of the Public Arena of Ideas, like the “Smartest People in the Room” keep  insisting?

The Washington Post reports that

METAIRIE, La. — Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia said Saturday the idea of religious neutrality is not grounded in the country’s constitutional traditions and that God has been good to the U.S. exactly because Americans honor him.

Scalia was speaking at a Catholic high school in the New Orleans suburb of Metairie, Louisiana. Scalia, who was appointed by President Ronald Reagan in 1986 is the court’s longest serving justice. He has consistently been one of the court’s more conservative members.

He told the audience at Archbishop Rummel High School that there is “no place” in the country’s constitutional traditions for the idea that the state must be neutral between religion and its absence.

“To tell you the truth there is no place for that in our constitutional tradition. Where did that come from?” he said. “To be sure, you can’t favor one denomination over another but can’t favor religion over non-religion?”

He also said there is “nothing wrong” with the idea of presidents and others invoking God in speeches. He said God has been good to America because Americans have honored him. 

Scalia said during the Sept. 11 attacks he was in Rome at a conference. The next morning, after a speech by President George W. Bush in which he invoked God and asked for his blessing, Scalia said many of the other judges approached him and said they wished their presidents or prime ministers would do the same.

“God has been very good to us. That we won the revolution was extraordinary. The Battle of Midway was extraordinary. I think one of the reasons God has been good to us is that we have done him honor. Unlike the other countries of the world that do not even invoke his name we do him honor. In presidential addresses, in Thanksgiving proclamations and in many other ways,” Scalia said.

“There is nothing wrong with that and do not let anybody tell you that there is anything wrong with that,” he added.

Scalia’s comments Saturday come as the court prepares to hear arguments later this year in a case that challenges part of President Barack Obama’s health care law and whether it adequately shields faith-based hospitals, colleges and charities from having to offer contraceptive coverage to their employees.

For what now seems like an eternity, those on the Left side of Political Aisle, spearheaded by President Barack Hussein Obama,  have focused their attention on “radically changing” America.

They soon realized that they simply could not do it through popular culture and educational indoctrination, inundating America’s children with both overt and subliminal imaging designed to countermand the Traditional American Values that they were being raised with, in normal American Households, out here in “Flyover Country”, otherwise known as America’s Heartland…or “the Red States”.

Modern Liberals soon figured out that the way to program Americans into believing that “all paths lead to God” and that cradle-to-grave Nanny-State Government were the new American Standards for living our daily lives, was to turn Christian American Houses of Worship away from being instructors of the Word of God and a sanctuary in which to worship Our Creator, to, instead, being purveyors of the joys of Popular Culture. Wednesday Night Bible Studies were soon replaced by Yoga Classes and Encounter Groups. Religious Leaders were soon quoting philosophy, instead of the Bible in their Sunday Morning Sermons.

And, instead of taking a stand against those things of the world which were directly opposed to what is found in God’s Word, these “new, enlightened” churches started standing up for the “right” of a woman to have her baby prematurely yanked out of her womb with a set of tongs, standing up for the right of Adam to “marry” Steve, when the Bible states that marriage is between a man and a woman, and standing up for the equality of all faiths, when the Son of God firmly states, in John 14:6, that

I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.

So, when  as all this Christianity in America going to “fade away” as predicted by “the Smartest People in the Room”?

As recent polls show…not any time soon.

America remains a nation whose population consists of 70-75%, who proclaim Jesus Christ as their Personal Savior and 92%, who believe in God.

Being filled with human beings, churches have made a lot of mistakes, However, they have also done a lot of good in the name of the Lord.

For example, the church I attend, houses a Food Pantry, operated in co-operation with other churches in our area, which feeds 2,000 people per month, counseling them, and getting them the assistance that they need.

Churches today have to walk a fine line.

The spiritual battle the influence of American Popular Culture and those seeking the Will of God in their lives, takes all the strength…and prayer, that Christians can muster.

Modern Liberals seem to have great difficulty comprehending the role which Our Creator, the God of Abraham, played and plays in this Grand Experiment, known as the United States of America.

Why have Liberals ratcheted up their anti-Christian Vitriol and Negativity since January 21, 2009?

Why are they so focused on removing America’s Christian Heritage?

Well, as is usually my wont, I have been doing some “reckoning” about this.

It seems to this ol’ Southern Boy, living here in the Heartland, that America’s Christian Heritage and the very real fact of His influence in building and shaping America’s growth into the greatest country on the face of God’s Green Earth, not only stifles and interferes with Modern Liberals’ “anything goes”, “share the wealth”, “hive-mind”, “man is his own god” Political Ideology, but the reality of God’s very existence, somewhere deep in their miserable, bitter psyches, scares the mess out of them.

Why else would they be trying so hard to fight against the influence of Someone Whom they really don’t believe in?

I see them every single day on the television, on the Internet, on Facebook Political Pages, posting stupid meme (a picture with words on it) after stupid meme, attempting to make fun of The Great I Am and those of us who have given our lives to Him.

They are so hateful, and filled with such bitterness, that it is difficult to engage them in “conversation”.

Perhaps, somewhere in their back of their minds, all of these Modern American Liberals, realize that they are fighting a losing battle.

Christianity continues to thrive in America, despite their best efforts.

For, as Justice Scalia stated so eloquently,

God has been very good to us

America was built upon a Solid Rock.

To ignore our nation’s Faith-Based Founding and Heritage is to live in purposeful ignorance.

As President Ronald Reagan said,

If we ever forget that we are One Nation Under God, then we will be a nation gone under.

And, as Hebrews 13:8 tells us,

Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today and forever.

Regardless of the Political Machinations of Modern American Liberals, God will have the final word, as to our country’s future.

He always does.

Until He Comes,

KJ

Obama to Issue Gun Control Executive Orders Next Week…What “Checks and Balances”?

On By kingsjesterIn Politics1 Comment

1722924_1319321378127988_8942781069457189654_nFreedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn’t pass it to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same. – Ronald Reagan

The Washington Post reports that

HONOLULU — President Obama will press ahead with a set of executive actions on guns next week despite growing concerns in the United States over terrorism that have dampened some Americans’ enthusiasm for tighter firearms restrictions.

The president will meet Monday with Attorney General Loretta E. Lynch to finalize a series of new gun control measures and will announce his package of proposals soon after, according to several individuals who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the plan is not yet public.

One of the main proposals Obama is poised to adopt would require some unlicensed gun dealers to get licenses and conduct background checks on potential buyers. The change is aimed at occasional dealers, including some who sell online frequently or rent tables at gun shows but do not have a storefront.

Obama began examining how he could tighten the nation’s gun rules after October’s mass shooting at Umpqua Community College in Roseburg, Ore. Administration lawyers have spent months reviewing various proposals to make sure they can withstand legal challenges.

The idea of requiring informal gun dealers to obtain a license from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives and of conducting background checks came up two years ago when White House officials drafted a proposal for dealers who sell at least 50 guns annually.

The idea was shelved because of legal concerns but gained new momentum after the Roseburg shooting. At that point, Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton said she would pursue such a requirement by executive action if elected. Administration officials gave the proposal another look and determined it could be done in a way that was legally defensible.

The White House review has been conducted in relative secrecy, soliciting input from gun safety groups without specifying which policies the administration might ultimately adopt. In the past month, Obama has met with former representative Gabrielle Giffords (D-Ariz.), who was gravely injured in a 2011 mass shooting, and her husband, Mark Kelly, and with former New York City mayor Michael R. Bloomberg and the president of Everytown for Gun Safety, which Bloomberg helped start.

In Obama’s weekly radio address, released a day earlier than usual, the president said he was moving unilaterally because Congress had failed to address the growing problem of gun violence.

“A few months ago, I directed my team at the White House to look into any new actions I can take to help reduce gun violence,” he said. “And on Monday, I’ll meet with our attorney general, Loretta Lynch, to discuss our options.

“Because I get too many letters from parents, and teachers, and kids to sit around and do nothing,” Obama continued. “I get letters from responsible gun owners who grieve with us every time these tragedies happen; who share my belief that the Second Amendment guarantees a right to bear arms; and who share my belief we can protect that right while keeping an irresponsible, dangerous few from inflicting harm on a massive scale.”

In reviewing its options, the administration has shut out congressional Republicans, who joined with some Democrats in helping block legislation to expand background checks after the 2012 mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn.

“The administration has not communicated with us, and we have not been briefed,” Doug ­Andres, a spokesman for House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.), said in an email. “We will consider options once we have information, but what seems apparent is none of these ideas would have prevented the recent atrocities. Our focus should be on the consistent causes of these acts — mental illnesses and terrorism — rather than infringing on law-abiding Americans’ constitutional rights.”

While most Republican presidential candidates did not provide immediate reaction to Obama’s announcement, they are expected to talk about it in the coming days. Former Florida governor Jeb Bush is scheduled to attend a gun show in Orlando on Sunday, where he will discuss the high marks he has received from the National Rifle Association.

Catherine Frazier, a spokeswoman for Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.), said that “President Obama is trying to distract Americans from his failure to address the true threat of radical Islamic terrorism, and instead going after the rights of law-abiding American citizens — it is complete lunacy. If Ted Cruz is elected president, the lawlessness will end on Day One, and Americans’ personal liberties will be restored and protected.”

Obama will make his case for additional gun restrictions in a number of forums in the coming month, according to aides, including during his Jan. 12 State of the Union address.

While beefing up background checks has strong support — a Quinnipiac University poll in December found that 89 percent of Americans supported checks for purchases at gun shows and for online sales — Obama’s actions also come as Americans have grown more fearful about the prospect of terrorist strikes and are expressing an openness to having ordinary citizens carry guns.

A Washington Post/ABC News poll conducted last month in the wake of the San Bernardino, Calif., terrorist shootings, for example, found that 53 percent of respondents opposed a ban on assault weapons ban, a record high. When asked which is the better reaction to terrorism, 47 percent said encouraging more people to carry guns legally, while 42 percent preferred enacting stricter gun control laws.

Why are Obama, his Administration, and their “fellow travelers” so intent over getting our guns?

If they cared so much about our nation’s children, their supposed reason for gun confiscation, they would not be pro-abortion, which has murdered 56 million children.

David Mamet, in an  article for The Daily Beast, published on January 27, 2013, wrote the following:

…where in the Constitution is it written that the Government is in charge of determining “needs”? And note that the president did not say “I have more money than I need,” but “You and I have more than we need.” Who elected him to speak for another citizen?

It is not the constitutional prerogative of the Government to determine needs. One person may need (or want) more leisure, another more work; one more adventure, another more security, and so on. It is this diversity that makes a country, indeed a state, a city, a church, or a family, healthy. “One-size-fits-all,” and that size determined by the State has a name, and that name is “slavery.”

The Founding Fathers, far from being ideologues, were not even politicians. They were an assortment of businessmen, writers, teachers, planters; men, in short, who knew something of the world, which is to say, of Human Nature. Their struggle to draft a set of rules acceptable to each other was based on the assumption that we human beings, in the mass, are no damned good—that we are biddable, easily confused, and that we may easily be motivated by a Politician, which is to say, a huckster, mounting a soapbox and inflaming our passions.

The Constitution’s drafters did not require a wag to teach them that power corrupts: they had experienced it in the person of King George. The American secession was announced by reference to his abuses of power: “He has obstructed the administration of Justice … he has made Judges dependant on his will alone … He has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our Constitution, and unacknowledged by our Laws … He has erected a multitude of new offices, and sent hither swarms of officers to harass out people and to eat out their substance … imposed taxes upon us without our consent… [He has] fundamentally altered the forms of our government.”

…The police do not exist to protect the individual. They exist to cordon off the crime scene and attempt to apprehend the criminal. We individuals are guaranteed by the Constitution the right to self-defense. This right is not the Government’s to “award” us. They have never been granted it.

The so-called assault weapons ban is a hoax. It is a political appeal to the ignorant. The guns it supposedly banned have been illegal (as above) for 78 years. Did the ban make them “more” illegal? The ban addresses only the appearance of weapons, not their operation.

Will increased cosmetic measures make anyone safer? They, like all efforts at disarmament, will put the citizenry more at risk. Disarmament rests on the assumption that all people are good, and, basically, want the same things.

But if all people were basically good, why would we, increasingly, pass more and more elaborate laws?

The individual is not only best qualified to provide his own personal defense, he is the only one qualified to do so: and his right to do so is guaranteed by the Constitution.

President Obama seems to understand the Constitution as a “set of suggestions.” I cannot endorse his performance in office, but he wins my respect for taking those steps he deems necessary to ensure the safety of his family. Why would he want to prohibit me from doing the same?

Why, indeed? The Communist Leader, Vladimir Lenin ,answered that question very succinctly:

One man with a gun can control 100 without one.

Now, I am not one prone to conspiracy theories, but I question the timing of the whole thing. I believe that all of this “solution” was already prepared, and Obama and his sycophants were just waiting for the appropriate trigger mechanism to begin their push for gun confiscation. Unfortunately, the Islamic Terrorist Attack in San Bernadino, California provided them the excuse that they were waiting for.

So now, even as I write this, there are Executive Orders, sitting on the president’s desk, waiting to be signed.

This should come as no surprise to anyone. He has stated, numerous times, that if Congress will not give him what he wants, he will go around them.

Yes, our Founding Fathers put in a System of Checks and Balances. However, that system relies on the willingness of politicians to enforce them.

Unfortunately, in 2016, we have a bunch of professional politicians, who are too afraid of being thrown off of the Gravy Train, to tell the Conductor he’s on the wrong track. When the new Speaker of the House just recently demonstrated his willingness to be a doppelganger of the previous Vichy Republican in that position, by getting the Omnibus Bill passed, he left no doubt as to the state of his intestinal fortitude.

Hurry up, November.

Until He Comes, 

KJ