US Generals Flood Israel for Exercise Against Specific Threats

An unprecedented number of American generals, along with 1,400 U.S. army soldiers, are participating with top IDF brass in the high-level Juniper Cobra military exercise that one U.S. Navy commander said is aimed at “specific threats.” Public affairs officials interrupted the naval commander in order to divert the conversation from the scenario of Israel attacking Iran’s nuclear facilities and defending itself from a counter-attack.

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Half of Israelis Back Immediate Strike on Iran

Just over half of Israelis back an immediate attack on the nuclear facilities of arch-foe Iran but the rest want to wait and see the results of US diplomacy, according to a poll released on Sunday.

Fifty-one percent support an immediate Israeli strike on Iran’s nuclear sites, while 49 percent believe the Jewish state should await the outcome of efforts by the US administration to engage with the Islamic republic, said the survey published by Tel Aviv University.

But 74 percent of those questioned said they believe that new US President Barack Obama’s efforts will not stop the Islamic republic from acquiring atomic weapons.

Israel, widely considered to be the Middle East’s sole if undeclared nuclear armed state, considers Iran its arch-foe after repeated statements by President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad for the Jewish state to be “wiped off the map.”

Israel and Washington accuse Iran of trying to develop atomic weapons under the guise of a civilian nuclear programme, a charge Tehran has repeatedly denied.

via Half of Israelis back immediate strike on Iran.

Will Israel Be Forced To Face The World Alone?

As Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu prepares for his visit to the United States next week, warnings abound that the Obama Administration’s policies will leave Israel to face Iran and Hamas alone.

The warnings are summed up in recent articles by the West’s two main pro-Israel female commentators: Melanie Phillips and Caroline Glick. Writing in the Spectator (United Kingdom) last week, Philips warns that “Obama is attempting to throw Israel under the Islamist bus.” She cites the report that Obama’s National Security Adviser told a European foreign minister that Obama will be ‘forceful’ with Israel, and plans to impose, with the EU and moderate Arab states, “a satisfactory endgame solution” upon Israel.

“This is all not only evil,” Phillips says, “but exceptionally stupid… The Arab states are beside themselves with anxiety about Iran. They want it to be attacked and its nuclear programme stopped. They are desperately fearful that the Obama administration might have decided that it can live with a nuclear Iran… A Palestine state will be Iran, in the sense that it will be run by Hamas as a proxy for the Islamic Republic. The idea that a Palestine state will not compromise Israel’s security is ludicrous.”

American Jewry: Spineless

After expressing incredulity at the American demands for further Israeli concessions in the light of the utter failure of the Disengagement, Phillips writes that U.S. Jews are reacting “with a total absence of spine… Almost eighty per cent of American Jews voted for Obama despite the clear and present danger he posed to Israel. They did so because their liberal self-image was and is more important to them than the Jewish state whose existence and security cannot be allowed to jeopardise their standing with America’s elite.”

Netanyahu must therefore take Israel’s message to “the ordinary American people,” she concludes: “They do value and support Israel. They do understand that if Israel is thrown under that bus, the west is next. And it is they to whom Israel’s Prime Minister Netanyahu must now appeal, over the heads of the politicians and the media and certainly America’s Jews and everyone else. He must tell the American people the terrible truth, that America is now run by a man who is intent on sacrificing Israel for a reckless and amoral political strategy which will put America and the rest of the free world at risk.”

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Most U.S. Christians Don’t Believe Satan, Holy Spirit Exist

Nearly six out of ten Christians either strongly agreed or somewhat agreed with the statement that Satan “is not a living being but is a symbol of evil,” the survey found.

Forty percent strongly agreed with the statement while 19 percent of American Christians somewhat agreed.

In contrast, about 35 percent of American Christians believe Satan is real. Twenty-six percent strongly disagreed with the statement that Satan is merely symbolic and about one-tenth (9 percent) somewhat disagreed.

The remaining eight percent of American Christians responded they were unsure what to believe about the existence of Satan.

Interestingly, the majority of Christians believe a person can be under the influence of spiritual forces, such as demons or evil spirits, even though many of these same people believe Satan is merely a symbol of evil. Two out of three Christians agreed that such forces are real (39 percent agreed strongly, 25 percent agreed somewhat).

Likewise, most Christians in the United States do not believe that the Holy Spirit is a living force. Fifty-eight percent strongly or somewhat agreed with the statement that the Holy Spirit is “a symbol of God’s power or presence but is not a living entity.”

Only one-third of Christians disagreed with the statement that the Holy Spirit is not just symbolic (9 percent disagreed somewhat, 25 percent disagreed strongly). Nine percent expressed they were unsure.

Interestingly, about half (49 percent) of those who agreed that the Holy Spirit is only a symbol but not a living entity, agreed that the Bible is totally accurate in all of the principles it teaches. The Bible states that the Holy Spirit is God’s power or presence, not just symbolic.

“Most Americans, even those who say they are Christian, have doubts about the intrusion of the supernatural into the natural world,” commented George Barna, founder of The Barna Group and author of books analyzing research concerning America’s faith.

“Hollywood has made evil accessible and tame, making Satan and demons less worrisome than the Bible suggests they really are,” he said. “It’s hard for achievement-driven, self-reliant, independent people to believe that their lives can be impacted by unseen forces.”

via Most U.S. Christians Don’t Believe Satan, Holy Spirit Exist| Christianpost.com.

Texas Gov. Rick Perry Affirms Texas Sovereignty

Governor Rick Perry of Texas has joined with state legislators to push for a resolution confirming the 10^th Amendment rights of states such as Texas against the encroachment of federal government power.

Rush Limbaughs site features much of the transcript.

Rush: In light of all that’s happening, Obama’s speech on the economy justifying the basic destruction of the US free market — which is what this speech is. It’s the only way to describe it: the justification of the destruction of capitalism, the free market as we’ve known it and this inflammatory report from the Department of Homeland Security calling mainstream conservatives right-wing extremists, militia members, tarring and feathering returning veterans as becoming right-wing extremists and warning everybody to be on the lookout for these people on the eve of these tea parties. I want to go back to last week, last Thursday. The governor of Texas, Rick Perry, held a press conference to announce that he supports the House Concurrent Resolution 50 in Support of States’ Rights under the Tenth Amendment of the Constitution. He’s all upset about the bailout money, TARP money, the stimulus money. This is great stuff. Here’s the first of several bites from the governor of Texas.

PERRY: The federal government has become oppressive. I believe it’s become oppressive in its size, its intrusion into the lives of its citizens, and its interference with the affairs of our state. Millions of Texans just like yourselves that are tired of Washington, DC, trying to come down here and tell us how to run Texas. (applause) We think it’s time to draw the line in the sand and tell Washington that no longer are we going to accept their oppressive hand in the state of Texas. There is a point in time where you stand up and say, “Enough is enough,” and I think Americans and Texans especially have reached that point.

Source

The Atlantic

Seattle Earthquake Risk

Seattle’s tallest buildings are at risk of collapse during a rupture of the Cascadia fault zone in the Pacific Northwest, say U.S. seismic experts. The Cascadia subduction zone is likely to produce the strongest shaking experienced from earthquakes in the lower 48 states, said seismic experts from the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena.

While the Pacific Northwest has experienced little seismic activity in 200 years, there is growing consensus the Cascadia subduction zone ruptures in giant earthquakes exceeding 9 on the Richter scale, Caltech scientists Thomas Heaton and Jin Yang said Thursday at the Seismological Society of America’s annual meeting in Monterey, Calif. The Cascadia subduction zone last ruptured in 1700, Heaton and Yang said.

Simulations at Caltech show such earthquakes, which last for more than 4 minutes and are dominated by low-frequency motions, would be exacerbated by the geography of the Seattle basin and cause severe damage among modern high-rises, said Heaton and Yang.

via Source

US Religious Right Concedes Defeat

Editors Note- The defeat is only temporary, if you read the back of The Book, ultimately we win…

Leading evangelicals have admitted that their association with George W. Bush has not only hurt the cause of social conservatives but contributed to the failure of the key objectives of their 30-year struggle.

James Dobson, 72, who resigned recently as head of Focus on the Family – one of the largest Christian groups in the country – and once denounced the Harry Potter books as witchcraft, acknowledged the dramatic reverse for the religious Right in a farewell speech to staff.

“We tried to defend the unborn child, the dignity of the family, but it was a holding action,” he said.

“We are awash in evil and the battle is still to be waged. We are right now in the most discouraging period of that long conflict. Humanly speaking, we can say we have lost all those battles.”

Despite changing the political agenda for a generation, and helping push the Republicans to the Right, evangelicals have won only minor victories in limiting the availability of abortion. Meanwhile the number of states permitting civil partnerships between homosexuals is rising, and the campaign to restore prayer to schools after 40 years – a decision that helped create the Moral Majority – has got nowhere.

Though the struggle will go on, the confession of Mr Dobson, who started his ministry from scratch in 1977, came amid growing concern that church attendance in the United States is heading the way of Britain, where no more than ten per cent worship every week.

Unease is rising that a nation founded – in the view of evangelicals – purely as a Christian country will soon, like northern Europe, become “post-Christian”.

Source – Read Full Article

Iran Has 7,000 Centrifuges

Iran is now running 7,000 uranium enrichment centrifuges,a senior official said on Thursday, an announcement likely to increase Western concerns about the Islamic Republic’s disputed nuclear plans.

Gholamreza Aghazadeh, head of Iran’s Atomic Energy Organisation, also said it had obtained the technology to produce more “accurate” centrifuges, which are used to enrich uranium.

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Christian College Creates Homosexual Housing

The church-affiliated Texas Christian Read more

University Screens X-rated Movie

Neither side is prepared to lay down its sword.

University of Maryland students — protesting what they see as an intrusion by Big Brother — are planning to defy authority and screen a hard-core porn movie in the name of free speech and academic freedom.

“What we’re upset about is somebody is trying to control what goes on on campus. This is symbolic,” said Liz Ciavolino, a sophomore who is active in the group Feminism Without Borders.

In response, one conservative state legislator revived his threat: If the porn flick is shown on campus, the university might just kiss some state dollars goodbye.

A university spokesman declined to comment last night.

The tale of the scheduled screening of “Pirates II: Stagnetti’s Revenge” has roiled the university’s flagship campus and hit newspapers as far away as Australia.

The movie was initially to be shown in the student union last night. But university officials canceled it after Sen. Andrew P. Harris (R-Baltimore County) introduced a bill to withhold state funding from any public university that allowed the screening of a triple-X film.

via Source

Unemployment – 13 Million Jobless

Unemployment zoomed to 8.5 percent last month, the highest in a quarter-century, as employers axed 663,000 more workers and pushed the nation’s jobless ranks past 13 million. The hard times were only expected to get harder — a painful 10 percent jobless rate before long.

The current rate would be even higher — 15.6 percent — if it included laid-off workers who have given up looking for new jobs or have had to settle for part-time work because they can’t do any better. That’s the highest on record for that number in figures that go back to 1994.
Source.

Bill May Give President Control Of The Internet

A pair of bills introduced in the U.S. Senate would grant the White House sweeping new powers to access private online data, regulate the cybersecurity industry and even shut down Internet traffic during a declared “cyber emergency.”

Senate bills No. 773 and 778, introduced by Sen. Jay Rockefeller, D-W.V., are both part of what’s being called the Cybersecurity Act of 2009, which would create a new Office of the National Cybersecurity Advisor, reportable directly to the president and charged with defending the country from cyber attack.

A working draft of the legislation obtained by an Internet privacy group also spells out plans to grant the Secretary of Commerce access to all privately owned information networks deemed to be critical to the nation’s infrastructure “without regard to any provision of law, regulation, rule or policy restricting such access.”

Privacy advocates and Internet experts have been quick to sound the alarm over the act’s broadly drawn government powers.

“The cybersecurity threat is real,” says Leslie Harris, president of the Center for Democracy and Technology, which obtained the draft of S.773, “but such a drastic federal intervention in private communications technology and networks could harm both security and privacy.”

Source

Faith of Conservatives, Liberals Differ Greatly

Social, political conservatives differ significantly Read more

Mysterious Light,Explosion Rattles Nerves In Several States

Were they meteors? A comet? UFOs?

People from Maryland to Hampton Roads heard loud explosions and saw brilliant, streaking lights in the sky Sunday night.

There was no immediate explanation, the National Weather Service office in Wakefield said. The Virginia Beach 911 center had numerous calls waiting just before 10 p.m., a supervisor said.

The Weather Service said reports were made from Dorchester County, Md., to the Virginia/North Carolina border. People said they saw a streak in the sky and heard an explosion.

“It was orange, like a fireball,” said Steve Wagner, who lives in the Great Bridge area of Chesapeake and said what he saw was too close to be a shooting star. Wagner was outside cooking with family when he saw the streak. He said he went inside when his daughter called, then heard an explosion that sounded like thunder.

Chris Wamsley, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service’s Wakefield office, said there could be various causes of the explosions and lights. A team of people is looking into what happened, he said.

Lindsey Hosek of the Great Neck area of Virginia Beach was jogging along the water with her dog when the sky lit up, she said.

“The bright light at first terrified me because I thought somebody was shining a light on me, and then I saw it, and I was in complete awe because it was so beautiful,” she said.

Then she saw something that looked like a comet moving low toward the ground; it was blue in front followed by orange and appeared to be the shape and size of a refrigerator.

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Wavy.com is investigating the loud boom and bright flash in the sky witnessed by hundreds of thousands of people around 9:40 Sunday night.

People from Maryland to North Carolina have called 10 on your side and wavy.com reporting the flash.

Witnesses say they saw a bright light off towards the east and saw a bright light raveling across the sky in a west-south west direction.

Scientists from the National Weather Service in Wakefield say they have also been getting hundreds of calls.

Source – Read More

Emergency crews fanned out across the city looking for whatever caused a loud explosion Sunday night.

At around 9:45 911 dispatchers started receiving calls from people reporting a light in the sky followed by a loud boom.

Some reported that the explosion caused their homes to shake.

However, emergency crews could find no evidence of any kind of explosion.

No injuries, fires or damage were reported.

The National Weather Service had few answers.

Jennifer McNatt, a meteorologist said the service had been in touch with the Navy, Air Force and NASA, but none of those organizations had any unusual activity to report.

Officials at Norfolk International Airport had received reports of the light and explosion, but said nothing wsa out of the ordinary at the airport.

Source

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