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News/Politics 9-12-14

What’s interesting in the news today?

1. Obama: I was against the authorization for war before I was for it.

From TheCable  “President Barack Obama’s plans to ramp up U.S. airstrikes against Islamic State targets inside Iraq and potentially launch new ones inside Syria rely on a thirteen-year-old law authorizing military force against al Qaeda and its affiliates that he has publicly stated he would like to see repealed.

In a landmark speech last year in which he pledged to take the United States off a “perpetual wartime footing,” Obama said that he would work with Congress to “refine” and “ultimately repeal” the 2001 Authorization to Use Military Force, or AUMF, a measure hastily passed in the chaotic, fear-filled days following the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. That measure authorized “all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or persons” responsible for the attacks.”

In his remarks Wednesday, Obama made clear that he believes he can take action against Islamic State militants without congressional approval but extended an olive branch to Capitol Hill, saying that he welcomed “congressional support for this effort in order to show the world that Americans are united in confronting this danger.” The White House is currently seeking congressional approval for a program to train and arm the Syrian opposition, one of the few things Obama doesn’t believe he can do unilaterally. To date, the administration has mostly sidestepped the 1973 War Powers Resolution, which mandates that the president seek congressional approval of any military action after 60 days of informing Congress that U.S. troops have been deployed in hostilities.”

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2. John Kerry says we’re not at war.

From CNN  “U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry on Thursday would not say the United States is at war with ISIS, telling CNN in an interview that the administration’s strategy includes “many different things that one doesn’t think of normally in context of war.”

“What we are doing is engaging in a very significant counterterrorism operation,” Kerry told CNN’s Elise Labott in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. “It’s going to go on for some period of time. If somebody wants to think about it as being a war with ISIL, they can do so, but the fact is it’s a major counterterrorism operation that will have many different moving parts.””

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3. Congress says authorization from them is needed.

From HotAir  “What started as a trickle is starting to feel like a flood. Lawmakers from both sides of the aisle are demanding that President Barack Obama seek their explicit approval for a new war in the Middle East, and it would be shortsighted for the president to ignore them.

The first and most salient reason why the president should seek out a congressional vote on a resolution authorizing force against the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria is that no such authorization currently exists. Though it remains on the books, the White House considers the 2002 Iraq resolution authorizing force to be defunct and has requested that it be repealed. It would be a perversion of the 2001 AUMF, which allows the President of the United States to attack al-Qaeda, to use that as authorization to attack the Islamic State. These terrorist organizations are two completely distinct entities and, at times, even adversaries.

Moreover, the president’s current justification for expanded “sovereignty strikes” in Iraq is particularly flimsy. The threat ISIS poses to American diplomatic and military assets in Baghdad and Erbil originally justified limited airstrikes, but using that logic to justify strikes on ISIS positions around strategically key sites like the Haditha Dam (The administration claims that the dam’s bursting could create a biblical flood which would eventually swamp the Green Zone in Baghdad) strains credulity.

Obama’s administration claims that the Constitution provides the president with the authority he needs to execute strikes in Syria, but the president did not believe he had that authority one year ago. When he sought strikes on targets in Syria in 2013, the president insisted that Congress would need to explicitly authorize that action. Today, Obama says he would welcome a congressional “buy in” in support of airstrikes inside that sovereign country, but his hand will not be stayed if that tacit consent is not forthcoming.”

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4. ISIS brothels full of kidnapped women are being run by British female jihadists.

From TheDailyMail  “Thousands of Iraqi women are being forced into sex slavery in brothels run by a ‘police force’ of British women jihadis, it has been reported.

As many as 3,000 women and girls have been taken captive from the Yazidi tribe in Iraq as Isis militants continue their reign of terror across the region.

Sources now say that British female jihadis operating a religious police force called the al-Khanssaa brigade, that punishes women for ‘un-Islamic’ behaviour, have set up brothels to for the use of Isis fighters.”

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5. And yet they’re allowed to vote….

From RasmussenReports  “Over one-third of Likely U.S. Voters remain unaware which political party controls the House of Representatives and which has a majority in the Senate – less than two months before an election that may put one party in charge of both.

A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that only 63% are aware that Republicans have majority control of the House. An identical number (63%) know that Democrats run the Senate.

Twenty percent (20%) mistakenly believe Democrats control the House, while 17% are not sure. Similarly, 18% think the GOP is in charge in the Senate, but 19% are not sure. (To see survey question wording.”

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6. Deportations of illegal immigrants is down.

From TheAP  “President Barack Obama has quietly slowed deportations by nearly 20 percent while delaying plans to act on his own potentially to shield millions of immigrants from expulsion.

The Homeland Security Department is on pace to remove the fewest number of immigrants since 2007, according to an analysis of its data by The Associated Press.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the federal agency responsible for deportations, sent home 258,608 immigrants between the start of the budget year last Oct. 1 and July 28 this summer, a decrease of nearly 20 percent from the same period in 2013, when 320,167 people were removed.

Over 10 months in 2012, Immigration and Customs Enforcement deported 344,624 people, some 25 percent more than this year, according to federal figures obtained by the AP.”

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7. All the more reason to send them back home.

From TheWashingtonPost  “All summer, Central American children caught at the U.S.-Mexico border have been trickling into the Washington area, sent to live with relatives in Latino communities. Now, they are descending en masse on the region’s public schools, bringing an array of problems that school officials are scrambling to address.

Ripped from distant worlds, most of the new students speak no English, and some are psychologically scarred from abuse by gangs or smugglers. Reunited with parents or other relatives they barely know, and still grieving for family and friends back home, they may feel depressed and resentful.

“Some of these kids arrive feeling very angry,” said Rina Chavez, a counselor with the Montgomery County schools. “After years of living with their grandparents, suddenly here they are with mom and a new stepdad and two younger siblings. Then they are expected in a heartbeat to sit down and learn, but they may not be ready.”

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28 thoughts on “News/Politics 9-12-14”

  1. We have been at war since the Marine barracks bombing in 1983. We never realized it.
    Just because we are tired of war doesn’t mean we can stop fighting.
    We need to get this country together, or we will lose it.
    This is a dangerous world we live in.
    The inevitable outcome?
    We sink into a dark age?
    We get it together, define the enemy and defeat them. (This is a very difficult task, and likely won’t happen.)
    I have another scenario, which I suspect is more likely, but it involves the Lord and His coming and it is too complicated and Iffy to interject here.

    There is a reason that we elected a man who hates America and the Constitution. It never made sense from the beginning, but it happened.

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  2. Obama and the mindless adoration he received never made sense to a lot of us, Chas.

    2008 was, hands down, one of the strangest campaigns & elections I’ve ever seen.

    We don’t have a very informed electorate anymore, either, I’m afraid. My former college boyfriend who teaches college journalism now was lamenting on FB yesterday about how a reporter & photographer for the student newspaper he advises went out to interview students on campus about two big national stories, the Central American children at the border and ISIS.

    Most (and close to all) of the students they talked to had not even HEARD of either.

    How can that be? When I was in college (and I don’t think I was out of the ordinary) we all followed the news.

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  5. Not a well-thought out approach by Sen. Cruz at that convention. It may be a surprise to Cruz that a dispensational view of Israel is not the only one taught in Christendom, and that Hal Lindsay isn’t regarded as credible by all Christians.

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  6. Interesting tweet:

    John Roberts @johnrobertsFox
    ISIS (31k) bigger than standing armies of Austria, Belgium, Czech Republic, Denmark, Hungary, Norway – all NATO countries

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  7. I read a good piece about the Cruz incident, but can’t remember where or who wrote it — but it was by a Christian writer who said perspective can be very different among persecuted Christians in the Middle East who may not always see things the way U.S. Christians tend to see them (Israel right or wrong).

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  8. The view of Jews in the Mid-East isn’t very high. I think it’s more a cultural than religious reason behind it. When Israel attacks aggressors like Hamas who bomb their people and lands, we in the US support them and see the justification in most cases. But if the bombs fall on people you consider friends, and that are your relatives in many cases, the view would of course be different. And don’t forget, they don’t get reports from both sides, they get state run media if anything.

    Cruz has a point, but so do they I guess.

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  9. Both sides could have learned something, and maybe reconsidered some of their views, if they’d taken the time to hear each other out. Instead you get hard feelings and campaign fodder for leftist Democrats. That’s sad.

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  10. Cruz didn’t really have to bring up Israel at all, let along pledge (perceived) unqualified support for Israel. That wasn’t really the function of the gathering. And not meaning to sound too cynical–as I do believe most conservative politicians see Christianity as consisting only of either Catholic theology on one hand, or dispensationalism on the other, and this affects their understanding to some degree–but there is also the possibility that conservative policy thinking is influenced by pro-Israel lobbies.

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  11. For those who are interested, here’s the Cruz speech. Don’t listen to what the pundits tell you, decide for yourself. A vocal few booed, not everyone. He didn’t get booed off so much as he decided to stop wasting his time, said goodnight, and walked off.

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  13. Sorry to be repeating myself, but Cruz made/makes the mistake of assuming conservative Christianity is basically a dispensational, pro-Israel proposition. That’s sort of OK, in some contexts, but if he were more well-versed, and had his handlers given him some background on his audience, he would have just left the Israel stuff out of his remarks.

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  14. The article I read also pointed out that some rulers in the Middle East whom we in the US consider negatively are supported by Christians there because they haven’t persecuted them as a religious minority. In other words, things may look very different to Christians who live there than they do to us.

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  16. Tychicus, as it regards Israel, by dispensationalism I mean the view that the Church is distinct from God’s people in Old Testament Israel, and that the Church is not the fulfillment of various prophecies about Israel, the result being that Israel and the Church are seen as distinct, and are addressed differently by God in significant ways. Practically, it has the effect of arousing nearly unconditional positive regard for the current state of Israel on (unfounded) theological grounds.

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  20. This is a pretty balanced presentation:

    http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dispensationalism

    Most Southern Baptist preachers are dispensationalists. This is the theology we were taught in church and by writers such as Hal Lindsay and others. The more I studied (particularly when I discovered that dispensationalism is less than 200 years old) the less I was prepared to accept this eschatology. Yet, Genesis 12 frightens me. I do believe that there will be a large conversion of Jews to Christianity in the last days, but even before then I am not certain that God’s promises to the Jewish people do not in some way relate to the nation of Israel.

    AJ, Thanks for posting the video.

    Solar P, When I first heard of the story I thought Cruz had blundered. As you stated, Israel wasn’t to be the subject of the gathering. After watching him, I think Cruz knew exactly what he was doing. Breitbart had an article today that indicated there were pro-Hezbollah elements at the gathering. I think Cruz knew this and was picking a fight deliberately.

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  23. Thanks for pointing that out, Donna J. I think the First Things writer was exactly correct. I like Cruz (after all he is a conservative Texan), but I think he was wrong here. Rather than cause a scene and a distraction, it would have been better for him not to have appeared at the event.

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  24. Donna J, My mother entirely agrees with you on Sanford. In the old days in South Carolina (pre -1861), one of his ex-wife’s brothers would have challenged him to a duel or horse-whipped him. Those were extreme solutions, but they did deter ungentlemanly behavior.

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  27. solarpancake (or rw, or whoever else): Having been in Europe for so long, I hadn’t really been directly exposed to the teaching and labels that are attached to dispensationalism, but in hearing something of what it’s about in recent years, it seems that what I believe falls on that side of things. I find these issues quite interesting. I’d like to ask you some questions:

    God has an overall redemptive purpose, but He deals with people differently in various historical and geographical contexts. Is that not dispensationalism in a nutshell? Aren’t all Christians who aren’t building arks or sacrificing animals in their backyards dispensational to some degree?

    Do you believe that OT Israel is the NT church? If so, in what sense?

    Whether NT or OT saints, we as God’s people are one body. However, there seems to be a clear distinction in the roles of OT Israel and the NT Church. I believe that the Scriptures clearly teach that God has given specific promises and blessings for Israel, and specific promises and blessings for the Church. How do you see it?

    Does not Covenant Theology take an optimistic outlook of the future, believing the world will get better and better? Don’t the daily headlines and the Scriptures themselves clearly teach that it will get worse and worse until Christ returns?

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  28. I’ll let others answer for the most part, but one point regarding covenant theology — that can and does include most all of the various eschatological views as sub-categories, including historic (not dispensational) pre-mill, a-mill and post-mill (the later of which sees the spread of the gospel as improving the world over time).

    It does view God’s people as one people throughout history as we are all saved by grace alone.

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