Author: Papa Giorgio
Sad News: KKLA Host, Frank Pastore died following a tragic motorcycle accident
Frank had recently done this PragerU video:
Sad News via The Blaze:
On Monday, KKLA, a California-based Christian radio station, announced that popular host Frank Pastore, 55, died following a tragic motorcycle accident on Nov. 19. While certainly saddening, the story surrounding his injury is also eyebrow-raising. After falling into a coma, the theologian and radio host made headlines for on-air comments he issued just before the accident — statements that eerily predicted, in detail, the trauma he was to sustain.
Amazing Medical technology To Help Paraplegics
Examples/Evidence of Obama’s Policies Not Working, Thus Proving the Republican Position Works
What many Democrats seem to forget is that the reason for Big Business to join forces with Big Government, is to run any threat of competitiveness out of the market. To MONOPOLIZE. Obama’s policies are proving that these Big Businesses are not altruistic in their reasoning for pursuing such causes like Obama-Care and raising of taxes and more regulatory conditions. From over Obama-Care 2,000 waivers, to the stories below, Obama’s policies are filling the rolls of LARGE insurance carriers and forcing small companies who cannot compete with large “Warren Buffett” type firms to move many of their full-time workers to part time. FAILED policies.
What is funny — to give one more example — a family member of one of the Gay Patriots told him he was voting for Obama because he thought Republicans wanted to cut Pell Grants. Sorry Charlie:
Sorry, college students. President Obama has cut your access to Pell Grants by 33%; he just forgot to mention it before Election Day. During the recent campaign, President Obama claimed credit for increasing funding to the Pell Grant program, which provides college funds, free from repayment, to millions of students.
[….]
This cut in eligibility was never mentioned by President Obama during the campaign, and when he boasted about increasing funding to the Pell Grant program, CNN fact-checked his claim as true. While the amount of government funding to the program is going up in future years, CNN failed miserably by not pointing out the cuts in eligibility to students. The cuts could be a rude awakening to students who thought President Obama was expanding their educational opportunities.
Hollywood is another example of this hypocrisy of avoidance, proving, yes PROVING, the Republican position. Hollywood and most in it campaign for higher taxes. But what is wrong with this is that after these taxes hit, they leave California to shoot movies in other states with lower tax-rates. Here Adam Corolla and Dennis Prager talk about this:
Another example of what Democrats voted for, unlike Bill Clinton who, yes, raised taxes but REFORMED social programs and CUT spending at the time. Obama is offering another stimulus (more government spending) that is about equal to any forecast gain in tax increases/revenue — the exact opposite of Clinton!
Like medical giant, Stryker, one of Obama’s biggest financial backers, laying off almost 1,200 workers to prep for Obama-Care, and the falling revenue (33%) of the Californian government showing in the the micro what higher taxes and more regulation does to the engine of the economy. Here are more stories of failure, and how these higher taxes will hit the retired folks that worked hard their whole lives, just to see it disappear. Google and Microsoft are two of Obama’s largest financial backers (Bloomberg):
The company avoided about $2 billion in worldwide income taxes in 2011 by shifting $9.8 billion in revenue into a Bermuda shell company, almost double the total from three years before, filings show.
Governments in France, the U.K., Italy and Australia are probing Google’s tax avoidance as they seek to boost revenue. Schmidt said the company’s efforts around taxes are legal.
We pay lots of taxes; we pay them in the legally prescribed ways,” he said. “I am very proud of the structure that we set up. We did it based on the incentives that the governments offered us to operate.”
The company isn’t about to turn down big savings in taxes, he said.
“It’s called capitalism,” he said. “We are proudly capitalistic. I’m not confused about this.”
[….]
Google’s overall effective tax rate dropped to 21 percent last year from about 28 percent in 2008. That compares with the average combined U.S. and state statutory rate of about 39 percent.
Costco also was a huge supported of Obama and is borrowing money to avoid paying higher taxes on it now (WSJ):
When President Obama needed a business executive to come to his campaign defense, Jim Sinegal was there. The Costco COST +1.92% co-founder, director and former CEO even made a prime-time speech at the Democratic Party convention in Charlotte. So what a surprise this week to see that Mr. Sinegal and the rest of the Costco board voted to give themselves a special dividend to avoid Mr. Obama’s looming tax increase. Is this what the President means by “tax fairness”?
Specifically, the giant retailer announced Wednesday that the company will pay a special dividend of $7 a share this month. That’s a $3 billion Christmas gift for shareholders that will let them be taxed at the current dividend rate of 15%, rather than next year’s rate of up to 43.4%—an increase to 39.6% as the Bush-era rates expire plus another 3.8% from the new ObamaCare surcharge.
More striking is that Costco also announced that it will borrow $3.5 billion to finance the special payout. Dividends are typically paid out of earnings, either current or accumulated. But so eager are the Costco executives to get out ahead of the tax man that they’re taking on debt to do so.
[….]
To sum up: Here we have people at the very top of the top 1% who preach about tax fairness voting to write themselves a huge dividend check to avoid the Obama tax increase they claim it is a public service to impose on middle-class Americans who work for 30 years and finally make $250,000 for a brief window in time.
If they had any shame, they’d send their entire windfall to the Treasury.
Other companies as well that bundled, supported money (and press time to) Obama are doing the same (Townhall):
One of the people who will benefit from this deal will be Costco’s co-founder and former CEO Jim Sinegal who owns more than two million shares of its stock and will collect about $14.4 million from the special dividend. Had he taken that next year, he could be slapped with a tax rate of 43.4 percent if Obama’s proposed tax increases become law (boosting the tax rate on dividends to over 20 percent and adding a surcharge tax on millionaires).
Instead, Costco decided to pay its stockholders before Dec. 18 so that the special payoff plus a regular quarterly cash dividend of 27.5 cents will be taxed at the current 15 percent rate under the investment tax cuts wisely enacted under President George W. Bush in 2003.
This means Sinegal, who gave a prime-time speech in behalf of Obama’s re-election at this summer’s Democratic national convention, would avoid paying about $4 million in higher taxes next year.
Costco is not alone in its early tax-avoidance payouts. Many American businesses, from Wynn Resorts to Tyson Foods, have also declared special dividends to avoid the higher tax rate if the Bush rates expire.
One of the most notable Fortune 500 companies to join the pack is the Washington Post who endorsed Obama for a second term and has warmly embraced his tax increase plans. The media conglomerate has announced it will pay its 2013 dividends “before the end of this year to try to spare investors from anticipated tax increases,” reports the Associated Press.
Among those who stand to benefit from the Post’s beat-the-tax-deadline — and pocket a bundle of money — will be stock tycoon Warren Buffet and his Berkshire Hathaway firm, the newspaper’s biggest shareholder.
How can governments stop people from doing this, besides the right thing and lowering taxes to increase the amount of businesses staying in our country and wanting to move their operations here? Why, enforce the law with threat of prison and fines! Here is an example from France, whom, you’ll remember, raised the top rate to 75%, here is a story from Libertarian Republican (“stopped at the border… ‘papers please'”):
The President of France, François Hollande, announced today the possibility of reviewing the existing tax treaties with Belgium to prevent welthy people from moving to the neighboring country in order to evade taxes. One of the most recent cases was that of the famous actor Gerard Depardieu, who decided to set his house in the Belgian town of Néchin, where other wealthy French citizens live in order to benefit from a more lenient tax regime. “Everyone should have and ethical behavior, regardless of his job,” Hollande told reporters. The tax exile of the highest paid actor in France was described as a lack of patriotism, especially since he always boasted of its popular origins and occasionally denounced social inequities.
What other option is there? If you are Big Government that is!
1) On a dark street, a man draws a knife and demands my money for drugs;
2) Instead of demanding my money for drugs, he demands it for the Church;
3) Instead of being alone, he is with a bishop of the Church who acts as the bagman;
4) Instead of drawing a knife, he produces a policeman who says I must do as he says;
5) Instead of meeting me on the street, he mails me his demand as an official agent of the government.
If the first is theft, it is difficult to see why the other four are not also theft.
*Tears* A Story of Loss and a Story of Life
Another story in the horror was a girl who had the wherewithal to act deceased in the middle of a blood bath!
An unnamed six-year old Sandy Hook survivor played dead in a pile of 15 corpses of her classmates last Friday. When the the shooter, Adam Lanza, left the classroom, she then ran out of the school “covered from head to toe with blood.”
Jim Solomon, a pastor close to the girl’s family, told ABC News that her first words to her mother were, “Mommy, I’m OK but all my friends are dead.”
“Somehow in that moment, by God’s grace, [she] was able to act as she was already deceased,” the pastor said.
The girl “waited until she believed it was safe hiding among the corpses, then ran from the building covered with blood from head to toe.”
…read more…
`I wish to God she [the Principle] would have had an M4 in her office locked up-and didn’t have to lunge heroically with nothing in her hands` ~ Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-TX)
There was time for her to get it out and save lives (of some other staff member):
…Hochsprung’s husband, George, told CNN: “There were gunshots. Somebody shot the window. Somebody came in, into the — not into the office, but into the building, the foyer of the building. And Dawn told us to go hide,” George said the teachers told him.
Hochsprung “and at least one other teacher went out and actually tried to subdue the killer. I don’t know where that comes from. Dawn was 5’2,” he continued, sitting surrounded by his three daughters from a previous marriage and one of Dawn’s two daughters from her previous marriage.
“Dawn put herself in jeopardy. And I have been angry about that. Angry. Until just now, when I met two women that she told to go under shelter while she actually confronted the gunman,” George recounted.
“She could have avoided that. And she didn’t. I knew she wouldn’t. So, I’m not angry anymore. I’m not angry. I’m not angry at anyone. I’m not angry,” he repeated as if hoping she would hear him, adding in a small voice, “I’m just very sad.”…
…read more…
Guns Save Lives, And More Guns On Sandy Hook Campus Would Have As Well
Via Breitbart:
Gun control advocates just need to look at Virginia. Between 2006-2011 gun sales went up by 73% and at the same time gun-related violent crimes fell 24%. Virginia Commonwealth University professor Thomas R. Baker, who specializes in research methods and criminology, said this proves that more guns do not in fact cause more violence.
“While there is a wealth of academic literature attempting to demonstrate the relationship between guns and crime, a very simple and intuitive demonstration of the numbers seems to point away from the premise that more guns leads to more crime, at least in Virginia,” said Baker.
Baker examined six years of data from the Virginia Firearms Transaction Center that broke down the number of gun transactions for every federally licensed firearm dealer in Virginia. Background checks went up from 243,251 in 2006 to 420,829 in 2011. In 2006 there were 23,431 violent crimes in Virginia and dropped to 18,196 in 2011.
Handgun purchases increased 112% between 2006-2011 and violent crimes committed by people using handguns dropped by 22%.
Guns are a major part of Switzerland’s culture. Instead of a standing army they have a militia. Men between the ages of 20 and 30 are put into the militia and undergo military and weapons training, which means Switzerland has one of the highest gun ownership rates in the world. Yet, Switzerland has a low crime rate. In 2010 there were only 40 gun homicides.
Which supports the idea I intimated on my FaceBook the day of the attack:
I am even madder at Mayor Bloomberg (NY) and Mayor Menino (Boston) are using this opportunity to politicize a horror. I was listening to Larry Elder talk to a security expert, he made the point that our banks, federal buildings, many corporations, and the like have armed security. But our schools are soft targets. He said “you don’t think a bunch of terrorists are putting two-and-two together. Twin Tower type attacks… hard. Walking into a school… easy.”
[…]
If only 5% or 10% of the staff were trained and were able to carry concealed firearms… this would not have been so tragic. But crazy lefties are wanting to restrict what can only help in this type of situation. Crazy.
[…]
I watched 60-Minutes and the nurse that lived through the ordeal hid in the closet for 4-hours… and she said she felt helpless. No duh! Even having a 22 in her purse (or other faculty) and shooting out his kneecaps would have stopped countless deaths. And she wouldn’t have felt helpless.
Gateway Pundit shares this story of the Police Chief saying “its time to arm staff:”
St. Louis County Police Chief Tim Fitch says after the shooting last week in Newtown it is time to arm the teachers. Local KMOX reported:
St. Louis County Police Chief Tim Fitch says it is time to talk about arming civilian school personnel following Friday’s massacre in Newtown, Connecticut, comparing it to arming airline pilots after September 11, 2001.
“I see it no differently,” he said. “Pilots have been armed now for many many years, we’ve not had another hijacking and the issue is, for the bad guy, he doesn’t know which airplane he’s getting on, if the pilot is armed or not.”
Fitch said the killing will not be stopped by legislation or laws. “If there’s somebody that’s really hellbent on doing something like this, they’re not going to care what the law is.”
An EXAMPLE of this logic working recently:
PORTLAND — Nick Meli is emotionally drained. The 22-year-old was at Clackamas Town Center with a friend and her baby when a masked man opened fire.
“I heard three shots and turned and looked at Casey and said, ‘are you serious?,'” he said.
The friend and baby hit the floor. Meli, who has a concealed carry permit, positioned himself behind a pillar.
“He was working on his rifle,” said Meli. “He kept pulling the charging handle and hitting the side.”
The break in gunfire allowed Meli to pull out his own gun, but he never took his eyes off the shooter.
“As I was going down to pull, I saw someone in the back of the Charlotte move, and I knew if I fired and missed, I could hit them,” he said.
Meli took cover inside a nearby store. He never pulled the trigger. He stands by that decision.
“I’m not beating myself up cause I didn’t shoot him,” said Meli. “I know after he saw me, I think the last shot he fired was the one he used on himself.”
This shooter saw an armed citizen, and took his life. Similarly, when Adam Lanza heard the first responders coming, he turned the weapon on himself.
Another recent example for the record books here at RPT, via Free Republic:
Two people are hospitalized after a gunman chased terrified restaurant patrons into the lobby of the Santikos Mayan 14 movie theater during a showing of “The Hobbit” last night, 1200 WOAI news reprots.
Police detectives and sheriff’s investigators say the incident started in the China Garden Restaurant on Southwest Military Drive about 9 PM Sunday, when an employee of the restaurant walked in looking for a woman.
When the woman, who officials say is also a restaurant employee, wasn’t there, the man pulled a gun and attempted to open fire in the restaurant but his weapon jammed.
“It started at the restaurant and then went into the parking lot and then into the movie theater,” Deputy Lou Antu told 1200 WOAI news.
Investigators say some of the terrified restaurant patrons poured into the movie theater, and the gunman followed.
He opened fire, shooting one man in the chest, before Antu says an off duty sheriff’s deputy who was working security at the theater shot him once.
…read more…
ACLU [e.g., leftist orgs] To Blame for these Mentally Ill Persons Being Free and Undiagnosed/Treated Able to Kill (Updated)
UPDATE via Breitbart:
In February 2012, Connecticut Senate Bill 452 (SB452) was put forward to remedy the fact that Connecticut was one of less than ten states in the U.S. to lack an “assisted outpatient treatment” (AOT) law.
But the bill was passed to Connecticut’s Joint Committee on Judiciary in March, where it quietly faded away because of opposition by those who viewed it as “egregious” and “outrageously discriminatory.”
[…]
Why didn’t the legislation pass? Because the ACLU and other “civil liberties” groups and individuals cried foul. The ACLU in particular said 452 would “infringe on patients’ privacy rights by expanding [the circle of] who can medicate individuals without their consent.” They also said it infringed on patient rights by reducing the number of doctors’ opinions necessary to commit someone to institutionalization.
To be clear, no one can know that the passage of SB452 would have stopped Lanza for sure, as there’s no guarantee a doctor or mental specialist would have seen the warning signs in time to institutionalize him for treatment.
However, it is worth noting that proponents of SB452 had the prevention of situations like Friday’s shooting in mind when they tried to provide Connecticut residents with another layer of protection from the mentally ill (and criminal).
….read more…
Gateway Pundit brings up a couple of stories that really find their genesis in leftist groups decades ago. Similar to my conversation with the Michael Berryman (actor), we see the hands of far left groups making impossible health related options for these sick individuals… even helping cause deaths in the wake of the many homeless (mentally ill) people on the streets:
Months before the Newtown massacre far left groups defeated a Connecticut mental health protections law.
Counter Contempt reported:
Here’s a fact you might not know – Connecticut is one of only SIX states in the U.S. that doesn’t have a type of “assisted outpatient treatment” (AOT) law (sometimes referred to as “involuntary outpatient treatment”). There’s no one standard for these types of laws, but (roughly speaking) these are laws that allow for people with mental illness to be forcibly treated BEFORE they commit a serious crime. Whereas previous legal standards held that the mentally ill cannot be institutionalized or medicated until they harm someone or themselves, or until they express an immediate intent to do so, AOT laws (again, roughly speaking) allow for preventative institutionalization or forced medication (I highly recommend reading the data cited in the link I provided in this paragraph, especially regarding what is known as “first episode psychosis”).
AOT laws vary state-by-state, and often bear the name of a person murdered by an untreated mentally ill person (“Kendra’s Law” in New York, “Laura’s Law” in California, etc.).
Earlier this year, Connecticut considered passing an AOT law (and a weak one, at that), and it failed, due to protests from “civil liberties” groups.
In my conversation with Berryman, I pointed out that the blame often associated with Reagan for this is in fact deserves to be laid at the feet of the ACLU and the liberal/progressive Democrats of that day and now:
The people who ‘liberated’ the inmates tended to be on the opposite end of the political spectrum. In fact, it was the ACLU who provided legal representation to force the VA to release these patients.
[…]
The ACLU was the main catalyst behind fighting for the rights of these people to be free, even the freedom to live in alleyways and eat from trash cans. Anything but a conservative or Republican institution, they were one of the main thrusts behind both California and later a nationwide release of patients. They [the ACLU], have long held that involuntary institutionalization of an unwilling person, even if mentally or physically incapable, is the worst of two evils.
Gateway Pundit continues:
It actually very hard to force people with severe mental diseases to be treated because of a range of reforms pushed by progressives starting in the 60′s:
1) Ronald David Laing, a Scottish Psychiatrist, In the 60′s put forth the foundation of the Anti-Psychiatry movement. He maintained that schizophrenia was “a theory not a fact”. The popularity of Laing’s theories is blamed for decline in students entering the psychology profession.
2) President John F. Kennedy’s 1963 Community Mental Health Centers Act accelerated the trend toward deinstitutionalizationwith the establishment of a network of community mental health centers and changes in laws regarding commitment.
3) Kenneth Kesey, wrote “One Flew over the Cukoo’s Nest”based in part on Laing’s thinking (and his own intensive use of drugs). “Kesey did not believe that these patients were insane, rather that society had pushed them out because they did not fit the conventional ideas of how people were supposed to act and behave.” The Book,play, and later the movie, portrayed a anti-psychiatry philosophy leading to a public displeasure with residential mental facilities resulting in further deinstitutionalization policies.
4) Deinstitutioanlization led to many legal and structural changes. American public mental hospital patients declined from more than 550,000 in 1955 to fewer than 40,000 at present. The displaced patients now represent 30-50% of the homeless populations.
As a result of Laing, Kennedy, Kesey and public efforts to transform the mental health care system to be more humane, to characterize mentally ill people as “Just thinking differently”, and characterizing mental health care as some form of evil, we now have a system that makes it virtually impossible to get folks like Loughner the care they need.
Deinstitutionalization policies driven by “do good” liberals and the federal government put focus on limited bad acts. Kesey wrote a story based on his LSD induced observations in one VA mental hospital. Once his story was put into film, his small example falsely characterized the bulk of mental health care as dehumanizing and made it impossible to force the Laughners of the world to get treatment.
Critics will focus on gun control after today’s school massacre. The focus should be on failed liberal policies that excuse rather than assist extremely dysfunctional individuals.
So again, the people who say they are for the “little-man” are in fact hurting everyone, even our kids.
Hope in the Face of Tragedy ~ Heading Into This Season with Advice from Father
- “Love consists in this: not that we loved God, but that He loved us and sent His Son to be the propitiation for our sins.”…. We love because He first loved us.” (1 John 4:10, 19)
- “But God proves His own love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us!” (Romans 5:8)
My message to Craig Scott whom I listened to this morning on Fox & Friends, he is the brother of Rachel Scott, who was the first person killed at Columbine High School on April 20, 1999.
===================
Thank you for your strength in making your sisters and your families experience be a beacon of light in the darkness. Your [Craig] intimating of letting go of this hate reminded me of a verse in Revelations:
Rev 6:9-10:
✞ And when he had opened the fifth seal, I saw under the altar the blood of them that were slain for the word of God, and for the testimony which they held. And they cried with a loud voice, saying, How long, O Lord, holy and true, dost thou not judge and avenge our blood on them that dwell on the earth?
Any action taken against people who are in opposition to God’s plan (read here: those who take innocent life, who would be the most in opposition to God’s plan, since the “blood” represents life [Lev 17:11], given by God) is God himself — in the ultimate sense. And by giving this hate/action to Him, we are free to live in His mercy and grace, affecting and interacting with those around us much more positively. He [God] is interested in each of our well-beings… and putting actions (like hatred) upon the cross is what He wants for our well-being. Justice is His to doll out, and this realization helps us live.
Blessing to you and yours, and a heart-felt prayer to the recent loss from our current presence these young persons, and a realization that Heaven gained their presence.
SeanG
Prescription Anti-Depressant Drugs Part of the Problem
While I think there is a combination of reasons for these types of actions (the secularization of society, desensitizing people to violence or moral duty, and the like), this is an issue that is pushing many to despair by numbing the conscience and increasing the will to act on evil thoughts. TAKE NOTE that the following is a bit of Scientology propaganda… where psychiatry and all drug prescribing are seen AS the culprit. But you can dissect this “all-or-nothing” view and use some of the info from this presentation.
Too `White` for ESPN`s Rob Parker ~ Kudos to Stephen Smith!
Liberals “love” and tolerate blacks (and who they date/marry), that is, until they find out that black person may be a Republican. Then all bets are off. For example, watch ESPN “First Take” commentator Rob Parker and his comments about Washington Redskins quarterback Robert Griffin III
Neil Cavuto and Rep. Eddie Bernice Johnson (D-Texas) Battle it Out Over the `Fiscal Cliff`
(Via The Blaze) While discussing the looming “fiscal cliff” on Thursday, Fox News’ Neil Cavuto and Rep. Eddie Bernice Johnson (D-Texas) had a rather unpleasant exchange of words: