California: Orange County Couple Threatened With $500-Per-Meeting Fines For Home Bible Study…

Weasel Zippers  "An Orange County couple has been ordered to stop holding a Bible study in their home on the grounds that the meeting violates a city ordinance as a “church” and not as a private gathering.

"Homeowners Chuck and Stephanie Fromm, of San Juan Capistrano, were fined $300 earlier this month for holding what one city official called “a regular gathering of more than three people” that requires a conditional use permit, according to Pacific Justice Institute, the couple’s legal representation."

City demands Christians get permit for Bible study  "The newspaper said city records showed someone complained, however, and a code enforcement officer first gave them a verbal warning and then issued citations in May and June."
"“We don’t like lawsuits, but we have to stand up for what’s right. It’s not just a personal issue,” Stephanie Fromm told the newspaper. “Can you imagine anybody in any neighborhood, that one person can call and make it a living hell for someone else? That’s wrong … and it’s just sad.”"
"A trial is scheduled for Oct. 7."

Contact Info: CITY OF SAN JUAN CAPISTRANO

If you think you've heard this before, the City of San Diego tried this same thing some time back but wound up apologizing. TD

Maddow Lets Jimmy Carter's Dishonesty About Israel Pass Unchallenged

Newsbusters

"Israel also pulled out of southern Lebanon in 2000 after nearly two decades of occupation following its invasion in 1982 in an attempt to destroy the Palestinian Liberation Army. Five years later, Israel withdrew from the Gaza Strip.
"What have these good-faith efforts brought to Israel? Suicide bombings on a scale unmatched anywhere in the world. Thousands of rockets from Hezbollah and Hamas, from north and south, indiscriminately targeting military and civilian alike. Kidnappings of its soldiers, including one, Gilad Shalit, whose whereabouts remain unknown after five years.
"Having conceded its hard-fought buffers in the Sinai, Gaza and Lebanon, a country the size of New Jersey is less able to defend itself from an unapologetic savagery intent on Israel's destruction."...

If Obama fails, does America fail?

Neal Boortz  "We are starting to see a growing trend among libs and progs.  The trend is this … If you do not want to see Barack Obama succeed, then you are against America and want our economy to fail.  The issue stems from a comment made by Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell.  He said in an interview somewhere, "The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president."

....

"If a doctor says “the single most important thing we want to achieve is to defeat this cancer” that doctor is not saying that he wants the patient to die. He wants the patient to be cancer-free so he will survive. Defeating Obama wouldn’t make America cancer-free. There’s still malignancies known as Pelosi, Hoyer, Reid and others … but it would be a nice start."

Mideast fail; Barry Rubin:  I accuse President Barack Obama of Destroying Western Interests in the Middle East, Helping Destabilize the Region, and Putting Millions of Lives in Jeopardy

"Do you think that’s extremist, crazy, can’t be true because you’re not seeing that stuff in the New York Times? You must be a right-wing Republican, you say?
"No, just a serious Middle East analyst."
...."So consider fairly and honestly the list of points below.":  Each is discussed in more depth.
Egypt:                                                      Gaza:
Syria:                                                       Saudi Arabia:
Israeli-Palestinian Peace Process:          Iran:
Israel:                                                      Empowering Islamism:
Turkey:                                                    Endangering the lives of American soldiers and civilians:
Lebanon:                                                 Libya:
Danger: Obama failed to realize it or to define properly friends and enemies.

Rejection of basic diplomatic principles:

http://www.mideasttruth.com/index.shtml

"The American people, Middle East allies, US. interests, and the world generally cannot afford another four years of misjudgment and reckless endangerment. Can Obama be trusted to deal with a nuclear-armed Iran, a radical Egypt supporting Hamas, a Turkish regime screaming about fighting Israel, a Palestinian movement that has thrown away any diplomatic alternative?"

Emphasis added.

That Palin smear: Can The Daily Caller survive?

Legal Insurrection  "The controversy is not that a convicted rapist would make such statements, but that The Daily Caller would run the clip with a bold traffic-grabbing headline and keep it there without so much as any commentary (which was not added until later).
"I can’t say it was the worst trashing of Palin I’ve ever seen, but it definitely was the worst I’d ever seen at a supposedly conservative website and one which has a high profile. While the post quoted Tyson, it was pure traffic-baiting using sexual violence against Palin as the tease."  ....



"Carlson tried to call it mere news reporting, but it was pure traffic baiting. Greta saw it for what it was, and Carlson just kept digging."

Daily Caller Runs For Cover Over Vile Palin Smear, Threatens Blogger With Lawsuit For Exposing It  "While the Caller item now comes with this disclaimer, obviously meant only as cover for their disgusting editorial judgment, it is only a late addition to the post after receiving more attention and increasingly broad condemnation."

Here is the Daily Caller's take on it.  "Leading the charge was Greta Van Susteren, who’s been calling Tucker Carlson names and making baseless allegations about his motives, while insisting she’s his friend." Jim Treacher (aka Sean Medlock)

Learn economics at the Tunnel Wall

Socialism Explained - Abbott and Costello Explain The Stimulus Plan

A socialist attempts to explain why she thinks socialism will work...this time.

Many in the comments section of the above Youtube link take issue with this video, but it is very close to at least one "progressive" I know.

The University of Texas and Racial Preferences

Hans A. von Spakovsky  "Abigail Fisher’s application to the University of Texas at Austin in 2008 was rejected. Had she been black or Hispanic, she almost certainly would have been accepted — and so she and another student in a similar circumstance filed a lawsuit. So far, the federal courts have ruled against them, reinforcing the odious notion that colleges can discriminate on the basis of race — as long as the right people are being discriminated against.
"But that may soon change."
National Review Online

Obama Hits Bottom

NATIONAL REVIEW ONLINE   "Worse, this tax hike would immediately devalue the investments of millions of American households, and would make investing in American firms, which already labor under the developed world’s second-highest corporate-tax rate, even less attractive. It would do so precisely at the time when we should be encouraging investment, which is the only real source of reliable long-term job growth."

http://townhall.com/political-cartoons/lisabenson

While we believe that a tax increase is bad medicine for a country on the cusp of a double-dip recession and suffering from the weakest growth and worst job market in modern history, practically all parties — Republicans and Democrats, supply-side conservatives and their tormenters at the Brookings Institution — agree that a deep and fundamental reorganization of the U.S. tax code is highly desirable, and there are several excellent proposals for doing so. President Obama’s preference for simply jacking up tax rates on families earning $250,000 and more is crude and childish in comparison with the proposals of thoughtful Democrats, to say nothing of those offered by more sensible conservatives.

American Civil War Battle of Antietam, Sept 17th, 1862

The Battle of Antietam, 149 years ago: Wikipedia summary:
Referred to in the South as the Battle of Sharpsburg, since they named battles after the closest town. The northerners named the battles after the closest river.

Antietam battle maps

The Battle of Antietam "...also known as the Battle of Sharpsburg, particularly in the South), fought on September 17, 1862, near Sharpsburg, Maryland, and Antietam Creek, as part of the Maryland Campaign, was the first major battle in the American Civil War to take place on Northern soil. It was the bloodiest single-day battle in American history, with about 23,000 casualties."

Civil War Trust  Click on the slide show at this page for pictures, then and now.

Antietam Battle Description

Many links for the Civil War Buff
Antietam on the Web
Pictures of the Battle of Antietam

The Maryland campaign of 1862

"The American Civil War Battle of Antietam (Sharpsburg) put an end to General Lee's 1862 incursion into the North, gave President Lincoln the victory he needed to issue the crucial Emancipation Proclamation, and probably doomed the Confederacy's hopes for European recognition and support." More here. 

Historian Bruce Catton's essay on the Emancipation Proclamation.

A Walk at Antietam

More photos around Sharpsburg Md.

Maybe we shouldn’t ask if Obama will quit …Maybe he already has!

Hot Air  "We’ve analyzed the potential for Obama to pull an LBJ and pull out of the 2012 election, or for Democrats to pressure him into quitting the race if he doesn’t reach that conclusion on his own.  With the obvious implications of Obama’s two proposals this month, the better question is whether he’s already quit being President in favor of just being a candidate:"

Obama mailed in both proposals rather than engage in the hard work of governance. If Obama had any interest in actually passing his deficit-reduction plan, he would not have filled it with tax hikes that have floated around the Beltway for years — and which both Republicans and Democrats have rejected in the past. The jobs bill was even less creative than his approach to deficit reduction, cribbed from a failed and costly exercise in central economic control. Obama didn’t bother to put much effort into either because he has no intention of doing the hard work needed to accomplish actual deficit reduction or improve the job-creation climate. The president has more than a year to go before the next election, but Obama has stopped governing and has shifted entirely to campaign mode. This is what it looks like when a president quits. Edward Morrissey

US News cartoon

Hollywood Love Affair with World’s Biggest Celebrity Hits Rough Patch…

PJ Lyfestyle  "You want to talk about real movie magic? How ‘bout a president who could save a “billion jobs” and still face an unemployment rate north of 9 percent?

"Hollywood’s love affair with Obama may have hit a few rough spots, but here’s betting the relationship will be reborn in 2012. Hollywood loves sequels as much as it does Democratic politicians."

It isn't that Hollywood is realizing that socialist policies are bankrupt; it's that they wish Obama was even further to the left.

Obama's Dilemma: U.S. Foreign Policy and Electoral Realities

STRATFOR ...."The vilification from all sides that follows any mention we make of American politics is both inevitable and unpleasant. Nevertheless, it’s our job to chronicle the unfolding of the international system, and the fact that the United States is moving deeply into an election cycle will affect American international behavior and therefore the international system."
....
"The U.S. president will not be deeply engaged in the world for more than a year. Thus, he will have to cope with events pressed on him. He may undertake initiatives, such as trying to revive the Middle East peace process, but such moves would have large political components that would make it difficult to cope with realities on the ground. The rest of the world knows this, of course. The question is whether and how they take advantage of it."
Obama's Dilemma: U.S. Foreign Policy and Electoral Realities is republished with permission of STRATFOR.

One has to ask, with near-daily trips to the hinterlands for campaigning and blame-shifting plus rounds of golf, when does Obama have time or even interest to spend with foreign policy advisors?
I see no trace of either in the man.

Obama’s Middle East Is in Tatters, Utter Tatters  "It is not actually his region. Still, with the arrogance that is so characteristic of his behavior in matters he knows little about (which is a lot of matters), he entered the region as if in a triumphal march. But it wasn’t the power and sway of America that he was representing in Turkey and in Egypt. For the fact is that he has not much respect for these representations of the United States."  Emphasis added.

Why Won’t Obama List Israelis Among the Victims of Terrorism?  "If not blowing up a bus in the Negev, then a shoot-out at the El Al counter at Leonardo da Vinci Airport in Rome. A family massacre in the Galilee, a mass murder of Olympic athletes in Munich, two high-toll bombings in Buenos Aires. In a Jerusalem Yeshiva, on a Tel Aviv thoroughfare. And the liquidation of five members of a family, yes, a family that lived in a settlement. But its three-month-old didn’t really know that. Knife across the neck anyway.
"The omission is surely deliberate."

Daniel Pipes: Obama's Pretend Counterterrorism Policy  "In brief, an organization connected to terrorists swoons over the administration's pretend counterterrorism policy while the grieving father of a terrorist scornfully dismisses it. That tells us everything.
"What now, with the enshrining of a fringe study as national policy? There are no shortcuts: Those who want a genuine counterterrorism policy must work to remove the Left and the multiculturalists from government."

Peter King (left) and Bennie Thompson (right) symbolize
 the difference in counterterrorism policy outlook.

A Ponzi scheme that should be fixed

mjperry.blogspot.com

Charles Krauthammer  "The Great Social Security Debate, Proposition 1: Of course it’s a Ponzi scheme."

"In a Ponzi scheme, the people who invest early get their money out with dividends. But these dividends don’t come from any profitable or productive activity — they consist entirely of money paid in by later participants."....
Proposition 2: The crucial distinction between a Ponzi scheme and Social Security is that Social Security is mandatory.
"When it’s mandatory, you’ve ensured an endless supply of new participants. Indeed, if Charles Ponzi had had the benefit of the law forcing people into his scheme, he’d still be going strong ..."
Proposition 3: Even a mandatory Ponzi scheme such as Social Security can fail if it cannot rustle up enough new entrants.
"The Treasury already steps in and borrows the money required to cover the gap between what workers pay into Social Security and what seniors take out. When young people were plentiful, Social Security produced a surplus. Starting now and for decades to come, it will add to the deficit, increasingly so as the population ages."
Demography is destiny. Which leads directly to Proposition 4: This is one Ponzi scheme that can be saved by adapting to the new demographics.
"Of course it’s a Ponzi scheme. So what? It’s also the most vital, humane and fixable of all social programs. The question for the candidates is: Forget Ponzi — are you going to fix Social Security?"