Smoky Mountains Sunrise

Friday, September 26, 2014

Thursday, September 25, 2014

Catholic Scholars Blast Common Core in Letter to U.S. Bishops

About 130 Catholic scholars around the country have signed a hard-hitting letter to U.S. Catholic bishops denouncing the Common Core State Standards as doing “a grave disservice to Catholic education” and urging the bishops  to ignore the standards or, in the more than 100 dioceses that have already adopted them, to give them up.

The letter was sent by Gerard V. Bradley, a law professor at the University of Notre Dame, to every Catholic bishop in the country, with 132 scholars from various disciplines and institutions signing on.




Regensburg Vindicated

By George Weigel

On the evening of Sept. 12, 2006, my wife and I were dining in Cracow with Polish friends when an agitated Italian Vaticanista (pardon the redundancy in adjectives) called, demanding to know what I thought of “Zees crazee speech of zee pope about zee Muslims.” That was my first hint that the herd of independent minds in the world press was about to go ballistic on the subject of Benedict XVI’s Regensburg Lecture: a “gaffe”-bone on which the media continued to gnaw until the end of Benedict’s pontificate.

Eight years later, the Regensburg Lecture looks a lot different. Indeed, those who actually read it in 2006 understood that, far from making a “gaffe,” Benedict XVI was exploring with scholarly precision two key questions, the answers to which would profoundly influence the civil war raging within Islam—a war whose outcome will determine whether 21st-century Islam is safe for its own adherents and safe for the world.

Monday, September 22, 2014

Calgary Sun Eviserates Obama: Now He Wants Help From Allies He's Spent Entire Presidency Snubbing

From Fox News
By Marc Patrone, Calgary Sun
 

ISIS is Barack Obama’s mess.

He made it and now he wants our help to clean it up. What do Canadians owe him?
 
He’s turned his back on allies such as Israel, having proven himself a bigger friend to the likes of Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood than to the Jewish state.

He’s no friend of Canada’s.

Instead of working with his friends, he’s tried in vain to appease such longtime enemies as Iran.

His rush to pull out of Iraq without leaving a reserve force behind has led to the disaster we see unfolding there now.

Now Obama needs allies to battle ISIS and help him save face. So who is stepping up to the plate? The Iranians? The Saudis? Hardly.

Daniel Hannan: The Positive Case for Nationalism

In the end, it came down to flags. It always does.
In the final days of the campaign, it became all about nationhood. Arguments about sterling and the NHS and oil revenues faded into the background as both sides appealed to their supporters’ patriotism. True, there were two competing patriotisms, one British and the other exclusively Scottish. But both campaigns grasped that, in the last analysis, national feeling would trump other considerations, and voters duly went to the polls surrounded by saltires and Union flags.

Senate Democrats Block Ted Cruz Bill Revoking U.S. Citizenship of Terrorists

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) on Thursday ripped U.S. Senate Democrats for blocking his bill that would revoke the U.S. citizenship of those who join the ISIS terrorist organization, noting that they are abandoning something Hillary Clinton supported when she was Secretary of State.



The Democrats blocked Cruz’s bill on Thursday, a bill that would revoke citizenship from Americans who join ISIS. Cruz’s bill is very similar to one that then Sen. Scott Brown (R-MA)—who is now running in New Hampshire against Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (D-NH)—and then Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-CT) offered a couple of years ago.

Read more at Hawai'i Free Press >>

 

Saturday, September 20, 2014

Nonpartisan, Independent Watchdog Demonstrates Obamacare Uses Taxpayer Dollars for Abortion Coverage

Government Accountability Office Report Adds to the Administration’s Long List of Broken Promises

A new report prepared by the nonpartisan Government Accountability Office (GAO) demonstrates that, despite the president’s clear promise, taxpayer dollars are being spent on abortion plans under the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. Just over five years ago, President Obama stood before a joint session of Congress and declared to the American people, “under our plan, no federal dollars will be used to fund abortions, and federal conscience laws will remain in place.” But the GAO report confirms that the administration is failing to uphold its promise. The independent watchdog found that the health law’s accounting gimmick is not being enforced and more than one thousand plans available on the health insurance exchanges cover abortion on demand. Additionally, the GAO found that information about abortion coverage for plans available on the exchanges is not uniformly available to consumers. 

Read more at Christian Coalition of America >>