Month: July 2014

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Our Daily Thread 7-1-14

Good Morning! 

Welcome to the second half of 2014.

Today’s header photo is from Janice.

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On this day in 1798 Napoleon Bonaparte took Alexandria, Egypt. 

In 1862 the U.S. Congress established the Bureau of Internal Revenue. 

In 1867 Canada became an independent dominion. 

In 1916 the massive Allied offensive known as the Battle of the Somme began in France. The battle was the first to use tanks. 

In 1943 the U.S. Government began automatically withholding federal income tax from paychecks. 

And in 1950 American ground troops arrived in South Korea to stem the tide of the advancing North Korean army. 

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Quote of the Day

“The older I get, the more important my view of the family is.”

Robert Fogel

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Today is Thomas A. Dorsey’s birthday.

 Today is also Willie Dixon’s birthday. So here he is playing bass with some of the best in blues.

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Anyone have a QoD?

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Prayer Requests 7-1-14

Anyone have a request or praise to share with us today?

Psalm 5

¹Give ear to my words, O Lord, consider my meditation.

2 Hearken unto the voice of my cry, my King, and my God: for unto thee will I pray.

3 My voice shalt thou hear in the morning, O Lord; in the morning will I direct my prayer unto thee, and will look up.

4 For thou art not a God that hath pleasure in wickedness: neither shall evil dwell with thee.

5 The foolish shall not stand in thy sight: thou hatest all workers of iniquity.

6 Thou shalt destroy them that speak leasing: the Lord will abhor the bloody and deceitful man.

7 But as for me, I will come into thy house in the multitude of thy mercy: and in thy fear will I worship toward thy holy temple.

8 Lead me, O Lord, in thy righteousness because of mine enemies; make thy way straight before my face.

9 For there is no faithfulness in their mouth; their inward part is very wickedness; their throat is an open sepulchre; they flatter with their tongue.

10 Destroy thou them, O God; let them fall by their own counsels; cast them out in the multitude of their transgressions; for they have rebelled against thee.

11 But let all those that put their trust in thee rejoice: let them ever shout for joy, because thou defendest them: let them also that love thy name be joyful in thee.

12 For thou, Lord, wilt bless the righteous; with favour wilt thou compass him as with a shield.

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News/Politics 7-1-14

What’s interesting in the news today?

1. As I’m sure you’ve heard, the Supreme Court sided with Hobby Lobby over the ObamaCare contraceptive mandate. Despite that fact the ruling was a narrow one tailored to this case, and not the doom and gloom opening of the flood gates they’d like you to believe, the political left is losing their minds over it. While they’re a bit over-dramatic, it’s still fun to watch. 🙂

From HotAir  “I imagine the horrified shrieks that rose from the streets outside the Supreme Court on Monday as the decision in the Hobby Lobby case began to filter out into the crowd of liberal observers was reminiscent of those poor souls who watched helplessly as the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire claimed the lives of 146 young, female garment workers.

In fact, the similarities are eerie. It seems that liberal commentators have convinced themselves that, just as was the case in 1911, the courts and the country have deemed women to be of lesser value than their male counterparts. The distinction between these two eras, of course, is that while that argument could be supported in 1911, it exists only in the heads of progressives in 2014.

NBC News journalist Pete Williams, an accomplished reporter who is not prone to indulge in speculation, went out of his way to insist repeatedly that the Court’s decision in this case was a narrow one. He noted that the decision extends only to the specific religious objections a handful of employers raised about providing abortifacients (as opposed to contraceptives). Williams added that Justice Anthony Kennedy allowed in his concurring opinion that the federal government can pay for and provide that coverage if employers would not.

The Federalist published a variety of other observations about this ruling which indicate that it was narrowly tailored to this specific case. The Court ruled that Hobby Lobby and other employers could not simply drop health coverage in order to avoid mandates. This decision does not apply to other government mandates like those requiring employers cover vaccinations. Finally, if the will of the public in the form of an electoral mandate creates a groundswell of support for a government-funded program which provides access to abortifacients, then that would be perfectly constitutional.”

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2. The Court also ruled against forced unionization of home care workers.

From TheFreeBeacon  “The Supreme Court ruled Monday in Harris v. Quinn that politicians can no longer force family members caring for disabled relatives into public sector unions.

In a 5-4 ruling, the court found the state of Illinois violated the constitution when imprisoned former Gov. Rod Blagojevich agreed to funnel a portion of home healthcare worker checks to political allies SEIU and AFSCME. The unions collected more than $50 million from about 20,000 such people over a five-year period.

The decision, authored by Samuel Alito, did not completely limit the ability of public sector unions to collect dues from employees who do not want to join unions. However, the court recognized a category of “partial public employees” and ruled that fees cannot be forcefully extracted from these people.

“PAs are much different from public employees,” Alito’s decision read. “Unlike full-fledged public employees, PAs are almost entirely answerable to the customers and not to the State, do not enjoy most of the rights and benefits that inure to state employees, and are not indemnified by the State for claims against them arising from actions taken during the course of their employment.”

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3. Despite his and his supporters claims about his legal prowess and constitutional scholarliness, Obama continues to lose in court on constitutional issues. It’s almost like they’ve over-hyped the guy. 🙄

From TheWashingtonTimes  “President Obama suffered two final defeats in the Supreme Court on Monday, capping a 2013-2014 term in which the justices delivered several judicial hits to the White House while taking a firm stand against the unchecked power of the state.

The administration’s losses on Obamacare rules and compulsory union dues served as a rebuke on the Supreme Court’s final day after months of judicial decisions to rein in big government on issues such as snooping without a warrant, campaign finance restrictions and Mr. Obama’s recess appointment powers.

Just as damning was the way the court ruled in some of those cases. Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. corralled unanimous votes on privacy and recess appointments — cases that dealt stinging defeats to Mr. Obama, himself a lawyer and former lecturer on constitutional law.

In the more than five years that Mr. Obama has been in office, the court has rejected the government’s argument with a 9-0 decision 20 times. During the eight years each in the administrations of George W. Bush and Bill Clinton, the government lost on unanimous votes 15 times and 23 times, respectively. That puts the Obama administration on pace to greatly exceed recent predecessors in terms of judicial losses.”

Don’t believe the hype.

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4. Maybe part of Obama’s problem is he speaks a different language, the language of despotism.

From Hoover.org  “Long before 1984 gave us the adjective “Orwellian” to describe the political corruption of language and thought, Thucydides observed how factional struggles for power make words their first victims. Describing the horrors of civil war on the island of Corcyra during the Peloponnesian War, Thucydides wrote, “Words had to change their ordinary meaning and to take that which was now given them.” Orwell explains the reason for such degradation of language in his essay “Politics and the English Language”: “Political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible.”

Tyrannical power and its abuses comprise the “indefensible” that must be verbally disguised. The gulags, engineered famines, show trials, and mass murder of the Soviet Union required that it be a “regime of lies,” as the disillusioned admirer of Soviet communism Pierre Pascal put it in 1927.

Our own political and social discourse must torture language in order to disguise the failures and abuses of policies designed to advance the power and interests of the “soft despotism,” as Tocqueville called it, of the modern Leviathan state and its political caretakers. Meanwhile, in foreign policy the transformation of meaning serves misguided policies that endanger our security and interests.”

“No foreign policy crisis, however, is more illustrative of the “regime of lies” and abuse of language to serve “indefensible” aims than the conflict between Israel and the Arabs. The Arabs’ aim, of course, is to destroy Israel as a nation, a policy they have consistently pursued since 1948. Since military attacks have failed ignominiously, an international public relations campaign coupled to terrorist violence has been employed to weaken Israel’s morale and separate Israel from her Western allies. An Orwellian assault on language has been key to this tactic.”

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