Its one thing for people on the Right to read Huffington Post to get the Left’s perspective. Its another to have a Republican Senator who is treated as the defacto head of his party to tweet an article attacking his own party. That is what John McCain did today on Twitter.
McCain continues to show his true Progressive colors.
This comes as no shocker to anyone who reads about economic news. Red states have been outperforming blue states for the last decade.
Texas outperformed every other state in the nation on jobs and growth over the past decade, according to the latest annual report on state economic performance released Thursday by the American Legislative Exchange Council. Michigan came in dead last.
The rankings are based on state GDP growth, population shifts, and changes in non-farm payroll jobs between 2001 and 2011.
The ALEC report also finds that Utah has the best economic outlook this year, and Vermont the worst.
That outlook ranking is based on more than a dozen public policies that the authors say are closely related to economic growth — including various tax rates, workers compensation costs, minimum wage laws, right to work laws, government jobs as a share of the workforce, and debt service as a share of tax revenues.
Hizb’Allah continues to suffer losses in their battle with al-Qaeda and Free Syrian Army on the border town of al Qusasyr. They have sent their elite soldiers in with artillery and armor support from the Syrian Army. The town still has not fallen and rebel reinforcements have arrived.
A source close to Hezbollah confirmed to A.F.P. on Thursday that more than 75 Hezbollah fighters were killed in Syria while fighting alongside the Syrian regime forces with armed opposition groups.
The same source reported that 57 Hezbollah fighters were killed in the battles, noting that the other 18 succumbed to their wounds after being involved in clashes taking place mainly in the border region of al-Qusayr.
The Syrian rebels and al-Qaeda probably have suffered higher losses, but they have a higher pool of people to work with. Hizb’Allah funerals are now becoming a common occurrence in their strongholds.
Hezbollah is throwing its men into battle in the Syrian city of Qusayr, and many are returning to Lebanon in coffins. Through their funerals and commemorations posted on pro-Hezbollah Facebook pages, we are now getting a sense of the casualties that the self-proclaimed “Party of God” is suffering as it joins the Syrian conflict on the side of President Bashar al-Assad.
It’s no secret why Qusayr is a vital piece of real estate for both the Syrian regime and the Lebanese paramilitary group. The city is a strategic link in the Syrian communications chain, connecting the capital of Damascus, Syria’s Alawite-dominated coastal highlands, and Hezbollah’s heartland in Lebanon’s Beqaa Valley. The Lebanese border is only a few miles to the city’s west, and the Damascus-Aleppo highway lies to its east.
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Despite Hezbollah’s obscuring of facts surrounding their dead, it is clear their supporters know these men met their end in Syria. Chants of “Labayka ya Zaynab” (“We are here for you, O Zaynab”) are ubiquitous at funerals for Hezbollah’s martyrs. The highly sectarian and mantra-like chant references the Zaynab mosque in Damascus, an important Shia shrine near Damascus and a gathering point for pro-Iranian foreign fighters in Syria.
Qusayr isn’t Hezbollah’s first battle in Syria — for months, its militiamen have also taken part in fighting around the Zaynab shrine. While in Damascus, Hezbollah members tend to operate under the moniker of a group called Liwa Abu Fadl al-Abbas (LAFA). The group is comprised of fighters from throughout the Shia world, the vast majority coming from Iranian proxy parties in Iraq and from Hezbollah. The group takes its name from a legendary Shiite fighter who was martyred during the Battle of Karbala, a central event in Shiism. Hezbollah’s dead are often also claimed by LAFA on their wide network of Facebook pages.
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Another narrative, primarily one emerging from pro-rebel sources, was that Hezbollah was mainly losing young men. This too appears to be incorrect: While ages of those killed are very rarely posted by any Hezbollah-affiliated source, a number of older members have been killed in Syria. Ahmed Kamal Khurees, a Hezbollah fighter from the southern Lebanese town of Khiam, sports a white beard in his martyrdom photo. Fadi Muhammed Jazar, a Hezbollah member — and possible commander — who served time in Israeli prisons and was released during a 2004 Hezbollah-Israel prisoner exchange, was no youngster. Ibrahim Husayn, reportedly a Hezbollah commander, was also an older fighter. The presence of veteran fighters in Syria underlines the importance of this campaign for Hezbollah.
The conflict also shatters the myth of Hizb’Allah’s alleged “victory” over Israel in 2006. The organization lost 500-600 fighters against a half hearted Israeli campaign. Now it appears that the losses suffered at the hands of Israel has robbed it of experience veterans and as a result, they are struggling in the Qusasyr campaign.
It’s been five days since Hezbollah and Assad regime forces launched their joint offensive on the town of al-Qusayr in the Homs countryside. Hezbollah and regime media were quick to claim major advances, confidently predicting that the town would fall swiftly. These pronouncements have proven premature.
The attack on al-Qusayr has been long in the making. Assad’s forces, limited in manpower, are now acting more in concert with irregular sectarian militias trained by Iran. But the string of tactical gains in the Homs countryside, starting in April and leading to the current battle in al-Qusayr, is tied directly to Hezbollah’s lead role in spearheading ground operations.
As it became clear that the Syrian opposition was putting up fierce resistance, Hezbollah began adjusting its story about the battle for al-Qusayr. The group was now making it known that it was sending in reinforcements from its elite units, and that the fighting might last at least another week. More troublesome for Hezbollah, however, was the news about the severe losses its units were sustaining, with casualty numbers ranging from 30 to 40 dead after the first day of fighting alone. By Tuesday, Syrian activists in al-Qusayr were claiming another 25 dead Hezbollah fighters. This, of course, is not counting those who had been killed prior to the latest assault, going back to last year. The number and make-up of the casualties raise some interesting questions about Hezbollah’s fighting force post-2006.
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As more of the group’s elite units are called up from Lebanon to reinforce their comrades in Syria, Iran has to be concerned about more than just seeing its strategic weapons caches blown up by Israel. It also has to be worried about how Hezbollah’s vulnerabilities are being exposed not by the IDF, but by Syrian rebels that the Party of God was supposed to dispatch easily. If the Iranians have overestimated Hezbollah’s capabilities against an adversary like the Free Syrian Army, one wonders what else about their power they’ve misjudged.
The Israelis you can bet are watching Hizb’Allah’s performance in Syria and now they will face a weakened opponent in a rematch.
I am not counting on a life time of gratitude from the family.
by Sara Sidner
Holon, Israel (CNN) — She never displayed the boundless energy of other children — all she seemed to do was cry.
Her mother couldn’t figure out why until a doctor examined her baby girl and broke the news. She had a heart condition that would eventually kill her if left untreated. Doctors said surgery should be done when she turned one but there was no one able to do it in her home town. The family did not have the money to go elsewhere.
It was torture. The longer she waited, the worse her daughter would get. Then something happened that changed everything. War broke out in Syria and eventually spread to their town. They tried to wait it out but it raged on with non-stop ferocity.
Escape from ruins
Then six months ago, the girl and her mother escaped what was left of their home. But they could not escape their child’s medical problems. The girl had turned four and her condition was getting worse — as doctors predicted.
“She could not play or walk or talk. She would get tired. She could not indulge in anything,” her mother said. “She could only eat very little.”The child’s mother asked us to keep their identity secret because of what happened after they left Syria. Their journey eventually landed them in Israel, which is technically still at war with Syria and has been for decades. The family worries they will be seen as traitors or spies when they return to their homeland if their neighbors find out they’ve been inside the “enemy state.” But the family acknowledge their journey to Israel saved the girl’s life.
Oxygen starved
Their perilous journey from Syria first landed them in a refugee camp with hundreds of thousands of others. Desperate and dirty, the camp was no place for a sickly child whose heart condition was slowly but surely starving her of oxygen.
“We all have in the heart two pumps but she has only one that is working,” explained Dr. Sion Houri, the head of the Pediatric Intensive Care Unit at the Wolfson Medical Center in Holon, Israel. “We have two tubes in our body — one going to the lung, one going to the body. The one going to the lung was severely narrowed.”
Dr. Houri is from an organization called “Save a Child’s Heart.” Founded in Israel in 1995 by another surgeon at the Wolfson, the non-profit organization’s mission is to provide heart surgery to children wherever they are. So far they have treated 3,200 children from 44 nations. Last week they added another nation to their list, Syria. The civil war across the border sent them a child in need they would probably never been able to help due to the breakdown in relations between the two neighbors. When Save a Child’s Heart heard about the little girl’s plight, they jumped through all the necessary security hoops to get her the treatment she badly needed.
Bridge stereotypes
“We hope that we can contribute in our small way first and foremost to the medical care to the children in our neighborhood. We also believe that this has the ability to bring people closer together to bridge stereotypes,” said Simon Fisher, the executive Director of Save a Child’s Heart.
While the treatment is free for the patients, the organization relies on donations to pay the bills that invariably need to be settled.
A team of doctors and nurses at the Wolfson performed open-heart surgery on the girl. Though it was a major operation, doctors say it is a relatively simple procedure that often produces amazingly fast results.
She could not play or walk or talk. She would get tired.
Girl’s mother“You can see differences that are absolutely crazy. Kids that were thought to be retarded all of a sudden start talking and walking, all they needed was a little bit of oxygen,” Dr. Houri added.
Healthy child
We met the little girl three days after surgery. Her curly hair, big brown eyes and huge smile captivated everyone around her. She was playing with bright colored plastic toys strewn alongside her bed. Though still hooked up to a machine, she acted like any typical four-year old, rather than the sickly, constantly exhausted child she was until very recently.
“Thank God, thank God, my daughter has recovered. She is so much better than before,” her mother explained.
She is incredibly relieved. She had been worried about how she would be treated — like so many others who have come to the hospital from far afield. At the moment there are young heart patients being treated from the West Bank, Ethiopia, Sudan, China and Tanzania.
As for the little Syrian girl who has survived a war and now open-heart surgery, she will need one more operation in about a year’s time as her body grows.
As she sits on the bed recovering from surgery, the little girl begins to sing a lullaby asking God to protect her baby brother. It turns out she was the one who needed protection the most. The mere fact the wide-eyed infant is able to sing easily without losing her breath is evidence enough to give her mother a sense of hope she hasn’t felt since before her country was plunged into war.
The FBI was interviewing an assocate of Tamerlan Tsanev in the Orlando area, yesterday. During the interview Ibragim Todashev, attacked the FBI agent who then shot and killed him.
ORLANDO, Fla. —An FBI agent shot and killed a man overnight in Orlando who had ties to one of the suspects in the Boston Marathon bombings, NBC News has confirmed.
According to NBC News, a special agent was interviewing the suspect regarding his connections to bombing suspect Tamerlan Tsarnaev and other extremists. The suspect, who was not immediately identified by officials, was originally cooperative, but he was shot after attacking the agent.
A friend of the suspect, Khusn Taramiv, said his friend, 27-year-old Ibragim Todashev, was being investigated as part of the Boston bombings and knew Tsarnaev because both were MMA fighters.
Remeber the claims that the Tsarnaevs were part of a cell? It seems that those were not false allegations.
(Hat Tip: Iron Fist)
Not content with the beating they’ve been taking in Syria, Hezbollah and Assad loyalists appear to be massing on the Golan Heights.
Iran and its terror proxy Hezbollah are building a military force on Israel’s northern border in the Golan Heights in order to wage “popular resistance” against the Jewish state, according to areport released Tuesday.
Military forces constituted by both Syrian and non-Syrian forces have been amassing near the Golan Heights and are waiting for an attack order, according to the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI), which has collected and translated a number of Arab media reports on the matter.
“Regiments and brigades, both Syrian and non-Syrian, are being established to wage ‘popular resistance’ against Israel in the Golan—although the intention is clearly to wage armed guerilla warfare like that of Hezbollah,” according to MEMRI.
“Syria’s allies—chiefly Hezbollah and Iran—announced that they would support resistance in the Golan, and Hezbollah Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah, whose organization is fighting in Syria alongside the regime forces, stressed that his organization would provide this resistance with all the material and moral support it required,” according to MEMRI.
Assad has his hands full with a garden variety of jihadis and it wouldn’t take much provocation from the Syrians for Turkey to get into the fight. Attacking Israel will be Assad’s final mistake.
Continue reading here. Hat tip – The Washington Free Beacon
PROTEST THE CORRUPTION – PROTEST THE CRIMINAL OBAMA IRS
Thanks to Barack Obama the Tea Party is once again outraged and motivated.
The Tea Party Patriots on behalf of Tea Party, Patriot groups, 9/12, liberty activists, and the American people, we are calling for anyone and everyone to protest the IRS’ complete abuse of power on Tuesday, May 21, 2013 at noon local time.
CLICK TO FIND A LOCATION NEAR YOU
NOW IS THE TIME TO STAND UP AGAINST THIS HORRIBLE ABUSE OF POWER!
Tuesday – May 21 – Noon – at Your Local IRS Office.
** And, here’s a link where people can tell us their stories, either individually being targeted or their groups being targeted.
PLEASE PASS THIS ON—
This is step one of our national assault to FIGHT BACK.
More here.
asking that the U.S. government get involved in the release of the two kidnapped bishops in Syria…
“Below is the link to an appeal to President Obama and his government for the release of two Orthodox Christian Metropolitans, namely Metropolitan Paul Yazigi (the brother of His Beatitude, Patriarch JOHN X) and Metropolitan Youhanna Ibrahim who were abducted by armed rebels on April 23, 2013 in the suburbs of Aleppo, Syria. The driver of the Archbishops was murdered and the Archbishops were forced by the rebels to go to an unknown location either in Syria or in Turkey.
We appeal to you beloved in Christ and peace loving people to sign this petition urgently asking the American administration to use all its influence for the release of these two Archbishops and to bring a peaceful settlement to this bloodletting Syrian conflict through a negotiated settlement.
I urge all of you to not only sign this petition, but to forward this link to everyone you know so that we can show our unity in North America against such acts of violence especially in the murder of an innocent deacon and in keeping these two hierarchs away from their flocks during Great and Holy Week.”
(Message from Archbishop Joseph, Antiochian Diocese of Los Angeles & the West)
That’s right! Two of MSM’s biggest Obama rumpswabs now admit that the IRS and AP scandals pretty much prove that the fear of increased background checks by Pro-Second Amendment groups may have some merit.
How big of a wake-up call are the Obama scandals, especially the ones surrounding the seizing of phone records from the Associated Press and the IRS’s targeting of conservatives? So big that two of the media’s most shameful and shameless gun control advocates — Joe Scarborough and Piers Morgan — have finally conceded that arguments made by pro-Second Amendment activists against the expanding of background checks might not be so ridiculous.
In a roundtable discussion on Friday’s “Morning Joe,” Scarborough said that because of the IRS scandal, “My argument is less persuasive today because of these scandals.” He added: “People say, ‘Hey, if they do this with the IRS, asking people what books you read, then how can I trust them with information about my Second Amendment rights?’”
Mika agreed completely: “That is a really, really good point.” Even the Huffington Post’s Sam Stein agreed.
Scarborough added that, when it comes to both background checks and immigration reform, the IRS scandal is “devastating,” because both of those pieces of legislation ask us to trust the kind of government that would seize the media’s phone records and use the IRS to target a president’s political foes.
Also courtesy of NRO, here is no-less than Piers Morgan conceding he was wrong to ridicule gun-rights activists (including our own Ben Shapiro) for making the argument that a legitimate fear of government tyranny is what makes the Second Amendment so crucial:
Read the entire article here. Hat tip Breitbart.
Two movies from the late 60′s and early 70′s starring James Garner, Walter Brennan, Bruce Dern, Harry Morgan, and one of my personal favorites, Jack Elam. The Support Your Local blank movies mixed comedy and western into plug and play scripts that probably would have worked for more than they were used. Of the two that were made, this one is my favorite, (lucky, since the other one has not been uploaded to youtube.)
Garner delivers as the slow moving laid back quick drawing sheriff who has no use for a reputation. He cleans up a town that finds being dirty much more fun than the alternative, except that the mine owners are tired of having 20% of their revenues extorted.
Grab a cup of coffee and enjoy a fun movie that is not meant to be taken too seriously. It’s about an hour and a half of your time, and fun for those who like either comedies or westerns.
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