Indonesia – Explosions in Jakarta
STRATFOR.com:
At least two improvised explosive devices detonated in the Mega Kuningan business district of Jakarta, Indonesia, early on July 17, near the Ritz-Carlton and Marriott hotels, with one report describing extensive damage to the front facade of the Ritz. Several foreign embassies are reportedly also located in the area. Local reports describe witnesses observing white smoke coming from several structures, while other buildings were being evacuated.
Further details are sketchy at this point. It is unclear exactly where the devices were placed or how large they were, though some photos of the Ritz show damage that would be consistent with a small device being detonated inside. Early casualty reports described four people killed, though if the damage to the Ritz-Carlton is as extensive as described, the casualty count will likely rise.
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Two Scientists, Two Standards
By: Michelle Malkin, FrontPageMagazine.com:
The New York Times recently warned its readers about a wacky scientist in the Obama administration. But the fish wrap of record let the real nut job off the hook.
Reporting last week on the president’s choice to head the National Institutes of Health, Times writer Gardiner Harris noted that praise for Dr. Francis S. Collins “was not universal or entirely enthusiastic.” The geneticist is causing “unease,” according to the Times, because of “his very public embrace of religion.” Stomachs are apparently churning over a book Collins wrote describing his conversion to Christianity.
It’s called — gasp! — “The Language of God.” Harris intoned: “Religion and genetic research have long had a fraught relationship, and some in the field complain about what they see as Dr. Collins’ evangelism.”
And…that’s it. Yes, the mere profession of Collins’ faith is enough to warrant red flags and ominous declamations. A quarter of all Americans identify themselves as evangelical Christians and “publicly embrace their religion.” But to the Times, Collins’ open affiliation with 60 million American believers in Christ is headline news.
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The Threat of Totalitarianism
By Hilmar von Campe, AIM:
(Editor’s note: Hilmar von Campe, who grew up under the Nazis and wrote the book, Defeating the Totalitarian Lie, offers comparisons between Nazi Germany and America today. “Our nation has elected an anti-American left-wing radical if not Communist to be president of the United States,” he warns. “We better begin to plan now for the reality and not for a democratic daydream. The ideological war has reached us at the top of our power structure threatening our very existence from inside.”)
The executive director of the Holocaust Memorial Council in Washington received me twice. I apologized to him for the atrocities committed by a German Government and German citizens to his people. I had not participated in these atrocities but my ungodly life had made the godless Nazi government possible. I asked him to forgive me and my country, Germany at that time. We became friends. I told him that most people look at the criminals when trying to figure out how it was possible, that such evil could happen in a cultured nation like Germany. They should look, however, at the real culprits, the bystanders like me, who allowed evil to dominate. Germany went down because of godlessness.
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It may sound like I am exaggerating or over-dramatizing the situation, but I think that we have a repetition of Hitler’s policy to get total power developing in the United States. Obama’s massive expansion of the federal government will destroy the United States as a world power, make us even more dependent on our enemies, and will ruin a great part of the present population and their descendants.I believe his real purpose is not to get the United States out of the financial mess but to set the stage for a total takeover. The liberals controlling Congress are helping him in that task.
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I think this is dead on target. We are the problem. We have turned our backs in God and look for salvation (at least the temporal kind afforded to us by man-made ‘solutions’) in government and idols like Obama. The German conscience was laid waste by the German school of Biblical criticism called “higher criticism” which is ascribed to the Tübingen School. It later made its way to Britain and gave us fantasists like Darwin who of course cooked up the laughably idiotic theory of evolution that now holds sway in the scientific community, despite the obvious contrary evidence. The schools of today indoctrinate our youth in socialism, feminism, multiculturalism and humanism whilst immersing their young, malleable minds in sexual hedonistic excess. We have sown the wind and now must necessarily reap the whirlwind. A post-modern hell awaits because nature hates a vacuum. Put another way ‘ideas have consequences’…
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Presidents Aren’t What They Used to Be
By Victor Davis Hanson:
Roosevelt fought polio. Truman was once broke and throughout his life remained a common man. Eisenhower led millions of soldiers. In contrast, Johnson and Nixon were known first as political manipulators. The Bushes were born into splendor. Bill Clinton and Barack Obama at very early ages plugged into the Ivy League and soon after never left the government gravy train.
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More Sarah
David Warren:
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It is to the earthlings in this scenario that Ms. Palin is speaking. And when she writes lines like this intentional jaw-dropper in the Washington Post — “We are ripe for economic growth and energy independence if we responsibly tap the resources that God created right underfoot on American soil” — she is quite intentionally signalling that she is ready for war.
That only implies an immediate run for the presidency to people who cannot understand her. Instead, she intends to use her celebrity to champion the views of the many earth-based Americans who have been overlooked — and whom the Republican establishment will continue to patronize, and overlook, at the cost of their own annihilation.
We are going to have a war, next door in the U.S.A. — a war between two world views that have become very nearly mutually incomprehensible. One might almost say that it was quietly declared on the op-ed of the Washington Post yesterday.
Human Rights Watch Trolling for Saudi Bucks
Clarice Feldman, AT:
The notoriously anti-Israeli Human Rights Watch was, indeed, trolling for Saudi dollars to fund its work, concludes The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg, confirming what the Wall Street Journal earlier reported:
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U.S. Slams Caracas on Drugs
By JOSE DE CORDOBA, WSJ:
Venezuela is fast becoming a major hub for cocaine trafficking in the Western Hemisphere, according to a report written by the investigative arm of the U.S. Congress. The report from the nonpartisan Government Accountability Office is sure to raise tensions between Venezuela and the U.S. at a delicate moment in the two countries’ often testy relations.
The report, reviewed by The Wall Street Journal, blames widespread government corruption for increases in cocaine transshipments through Venezuela. Such shipments have soared more than fourfold to 260 metric tons in 2007 from 60 metric tons in 2004 as the government of President Hugo Chávez has systematically slashed its antinarcotics cooperation efforts with the U.S., according to the report.
“A high level of corruption within the Venezuelan government, military and other law enforcement and security forces contributes to the permissive environment,” says the report, scheduled to be released this month. Many of the drug shipments come from Colombian “illegal armed groups” such as the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, the report says, which the Venezuelan government provides with “a lifeline” of support and a haven within Venezuela. FARC is a communist guerrilla group.
The biggest problem: corruption of Venezuelan officials at all levels, according to the report. Corruption within the Venezuelan National Guard “poses the most significant threat,” the report says, because the “Guard reports directly to President Chávez and controls Venezuela’s airports, borders and ports.” In some cases, the report says, drugs captured by the National Guard and Venezuela’s Investigative Police, who are often themselves involved in drug trafficking, aren’t destroyed, but are taken by the officials or returned to drug traffickers.
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Questions Raised Over Influence of Obama ‘Czars’
Fox News:
President Obama might have slipped Monday, when he introduced Gil Kerlikowske as his “drug czar” while speaking to an urban policy group in Washington.
Kerlikowske’s real title is director of the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy. The administration generally rejects the term “czar” as a media-generated buzzword.
But as the so-called “czars” keep piling up, it’s raising serious questions about how powerful these White House insiders are and seems to make the term “czar” all the more appropriate.
By some accounts, there are close to three dozen czars in the Obama administration, managing everything from closing the Guantanamo Bay detention facility to ending the genocide in Darfur.
With Steve Rattner leaving as head of the administration’s auto task force, just days after General Motors emerged from bankruptcy, America will get a new auto czar — former steelworkers union official Ron Bloom.
The White House routinely fends off claims that Obama has named too many czars.
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RELATED:
Obama is creating a host of new programs and obligations on borrowed money
by Gary Andres, Weekly Standard:
Increasing the role of government during economic turmoil is not a novel concept. Some believe people are hungrier for an extra helping of Washington stew at times like this. And President Obama, along with Democrats in Congress, seem more than willing to serve it up.But something is missing. Government spending and more borrowing can only provide temporary stimulus. The economy needs a different food to spur growth longer-term.
Right now, however, those meals are missing from the menu. In fact, Obama and Democrats in Congress seem headed in the opposite direction — creating a host of new programs and obligations on borrowed money, without also adding components that will stimulate more enduring economic growth.
Democrats’ version of rented prosperity is particularly troubling to independent voters. Democratic pollster Doug Schoen told Politico’s Ben Smith last week, “This is a huge sea change that is playing itself out in American politics. Independents who had become effectively operational Democrats in 2006 and 2008 are now up for grabs and are trending Republican.”
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“Why tell Congress about a PowerPoint presentation?”
Ed Morrissey, HOT AIR:
This is nothing more than a political smokescreen to rescue Nancy Pelosi from herself, and a distraction from the mind-boggling details of ObamaCare. Unfortunately, if it undermines the CIA during the war on terror, it’s a distraction that will get people killed. I’d rather see Pelosi in retirement than the demolition of the intelligence effort against our enemies, and I suspect that most Americans would agree.
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The faithful don’t challenge the faith
Michael Coren, NP
It did, as it were, have to happen. A human rights body taking on the Roman Catholic Church. In this case the issues are still murky and confused, but it appears that an openly gay man who has been living with his partner for 19 years has been dismissed as an altar server in his Peterborough, Ont., parish. Several long-standing parishioners complained, and local Bishop Nicola De Angelis, one of the gentlest and kindest priests you are likely to meet, decided that the situation was inappropriate.
The man in question, spa-owner Jim Corcoran, claims that while he is homosexual he is celibate and a devout Catholic who observes Church teaching. Not, it seems, so devout and so observant of Church teaching that he is prepared to accept with Catholic humility and self-control the decision of that very Church to terminate an entirely voluntary (if important) position.
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The true church is being driven underground and in the end it will separate the wheat from the chaff and the faith with be revived. The bottom line is that the true church will never bow to Caesar.
The murder of Natalia Estemirova is a dire warning
Kate Allen, Telegraph [UK]:
Our Russia research team say there used to be three key people when it came to uncovering human rights abuses in Chechnya – the journalist Anna Politkovskaya, the lawyer Stanislav Markelov, and the human rights researcher Natalia Estemirova.In the space of less than three years, they’ve all now been murdered. These pivotal people supplied Amnesty with valuable information about Chechnya as well as neighbouring republics like Ingushetia, Dagestan and Kabardino-Balkari.
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