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Politics : How Quickly Can Obama Totally Destroy the US? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: The1Stockman who wrote (2049)	3/29/2013 11:27:44 AM
From: joseffy	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 16547

Why Muslims seek converts in prison ... unlike conversion to other faiths which preach repentence, Islam offers a justification for violence and crime: James Holmes: It Serves Him Right to Suffer The Aurora, Colorado shooter has grown his beard and converted to Islam. The debate over James Holmes’s sanity has raged hotly ever since he murdered twelve people and wounded 58 in a movie theater in Aurora, Colorado in July 2012. But now the controversy can be laid to rest: Holmes is sane. The clearest indication of his sanity came last week, when the Daily Mail reported that he had converted to Islam. The Mail reported that Holmes is apparently quite devout: he has grown a lavish beard, eats only halal food, prays the obligatory five daily prayers, and studies the Qur’an for hours every day. Holmes’s conversion reveals that instead of being unaware of what he did, or utterly remorseless, as one might expect of a psychotic or a sociopath, the murders must trouble him a great deal. For it is souls that are troubled – intellectually, morally, spiritually, psychologically – who cast about for some solution to what troubles them, and often find it in religious conversion. But it is what Holmes converted to that is significant. Had Holmes converted to Christianity, he might have found relief for any remorse he might be feeling for the massacre in the proposition that in Christ his sins, no matter how great, were forgiven; if he had explored Buddhism, he might have focused upon developing right intention, right speech, and right action, and eradicating the illusions that led him to kill in the first place. Instead, Holmes chose Islam. A prison source noted: “He has brainwashed himself into believing he was on his own personal jihad and that his victims were infidels.” [iframe height=315 src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/kE84dHl5Nr0" frameBorder=0 width=560][/iframe] This suggests that Holmes’s conversion is a defensive action against any regret that he may be feeling. But instead of meeting that regret with repentance, he has found a way to justify his actions. Instead of acknowledging his wrongdoing, he chose a belief system that justifies violence in certain circumstances, and has attempted to cleanse himself of any wrongdoing by seeing his murders in light of that belief system. Jihad may take the form of indiscriminate mass murder of infidels, as we saw on 9/11, and 7/7, and in Beslan and Mumbai and Fort Hood and in so very, very many other places. Unfortunately for Holmes, however, jihad is not retroactive. If Holmes was an infidel at the time of the murders, then it doesn’t make his actions jihad to convert to Islam afterward. Nonetheless, his conversion illustrates yet again why Islamic supremacist groups make such a concerted effort to make converts in prison. They know that men who are already in many cases notably aggressive and violent, and who have a grievance against society, are perfect fits for a religion that contains teachings that are themselves aggressive and violent, and that sets itself against infidel society. Islamic proselytizers in prisons hope to channel that aggression by sanctifying and thereby justifying it – as Holmes seems to be trying to justify his murders by affecting Islamic piety now. But in reality, there is no justifying mass murder of innocent people, whether by invoking the religion whose holy book exhorts believers to “slay the polytheists wherever you find them” (Qur’an 9:5) or in any other way. If Holmes is really trying to excuse his murders by dismissing his victims as infidels, prison officials’ tolerance of his Islam is no more explicable than the military’s accommodation of the beard of Fort Hood jihad mass murderer Nidal Malik Hasan. Hasan maintained that he grew his beard in violation of army regulations because he had a duty to do so as a devout Muslim; yet he also murdered thirteen people at Fort Hood out of the same sense of Islamic duty. Should murderers really be reinforced in the very ideology that they use to justify their murders? ....... pjmedia.com credit brumar

To: The1Stockman who wrote (2049)	4/16/2013 10:11:34 AM
From: joseffy	Respond to of 16547

Congress Guts Key Provision from Government Insider Trading Law ........................................................................................ by Wynton Hall 15 Apr 2013 breitbart.com Last week, the House and Senate passed a bill that would gut a key provision of the popular STOCK (Stop Trading On Congressional Knowledge) Act that bans congressional insider trading and increases financial transparency for lawmakers, members of the executive branch, and their staffs. The bill passed last week strikes down the STOCK Act’s requirement that financial records of some 28,000 federal officials—which are already publicly available in paper form—be made available online via searchable databases. Government watchdog groups say this provision would have increased transparency and helped root out potential financial conflicts of interest and cronyism in government deals, grants, and contracts. Federal workers fiercely opposed the transparency measure. In a dramatic letter, a bipartisan roster of former senior federal officials warned that making records that are already public record accessible in a digitized, searchable format posed a dangerous threat to national security that could be a “jackpot” for “enemies of the United States intent on finding security vulnerabilities they can exploit.” Government watchdog groups slammed the gutting of the STOCK Act, claiming the reversal of the act was based on scaremongering and was an effort by Washington insiders to protect one another and keep taxpayers in the dark. “Continuing to obscure the contents of these reports by eliminating the database requirements is unnecessary and uncalled for,” said Dan Auble of the Center for Responsive Politics. “The filings of federal employees are and for many years have been available as part of the public record." "In this day and age, publicly disclosed should mean available online,” he reasoned. Lisa Rosenberg of the Sunlight Foundation agreed: “Security through obscurity as a justification to repeal the transparency provisions of the STOCK Act starts us down a slippery slope where any government action or information could be taken offline in the name of safety.” Overwhelming bipartisan support for the STOCK Act emerged in 2011 after the publication of the book Throw Them All Out by Government Accountability Institute President Peter Schweizer revealed that members of Congress were using nonpublic information to enrich themselves. Schweizer’s book prompted a 60 Minutes investigation that produced an explosive exchange between CBS veteran reporter Steve Kroft and Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) over a Visa IPO she and her husband gained access to. The investment helped the Pelosis bag a 203% rate of return on a $1 million to $5 million purchase of Visa stock (politicians are required to report investments in ranges, not exact amounts). Pelosi denied any wrongdoing in the deal.