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Defenders of President Obama's release of five Taliban terrorists from the U.S. prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba in exchange for Army Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl cite as justification Israel's history of swapping hundreds of Palestinian prisoners for one or two Israel soldiers. As strong an ally and example of democracy as Israel is, especially in a region sorely lacking in either, Israel is not the United States. Israel has its own interests and purpose for its actions. The world looks to the United States for leadership and in this president and his administration it has found little. There are important...

Klinsmann Offers Brutally Honest Assessment Before Team Even Arrives In BrazilThe United States men’s soccer team has its work cut out for it at the upcoming World Cup. The United States is in what has been dubbed this year’s “Group of Death,” containing Germany, Portugal and Ghana. It will be very difficult for the U.S. to get out of Group G, and head coach Jurgen Klinsmann isn’t expecting a miracle in Brazil. In fact, he’s being brutally honest and realistic about his club’s chances. “We cannot win the World Cup because we are not at that level yet,” Klinsmann said,...

Here at GPS, we love deep data dives. We also revel in the fact that America continues to be the melting pot that it has always been. So we were interested to see a piece on Slate.com last week analyzing the most common languages spoken in each state using U.S. census data. This first map is predictable – other than English, Spanish is the most spoken language in almost all U.S. states. But watch what happens when you remove Spanish from the equation. Now there is the melting pot. In Michigan, Arabic clocks in as the third most commonly spoken...

Andrew Tahmooressi, 22, was arrested for driving into Mexico with firearms A U.S. Marine Corps reservist who had been living in San Diego will remain in a Mexican jail after firing his attorney. Andrew Tahmooressi, 22, was expected to testify before a Mexican judge during a court hearing Wednesday. Instead, he fired his attorney. Now the case is up in the air. On Monday, Tahmooressi's mother Jill told NBC 7 that her son said his attorney had instructed him to lie under oath. Tahmooressi was arrested April 1 after driving his black Ford pickup over the border at San Ysidro...

Russia is going to suspend the operation of all American GPS sites on its territory, starting from June 1, said Russia’s deputy PM, Dmitry Rogozin, who is in charge of space and defense industries. "Starting June 1, we will halt the work of those stations on Russian territory,” Rogozin said. Rogozin pointed out that American GPS ground stations are located in Russia under an agreement that dates back to 1993 and 2001. “Under this agreement there are 11 GPS stations on the territories of 10 [Russian federal] subjects,” he said.

Do you guys think that Muslims will use Harvard's decision to perform a Black Mass as propaganda to prove that the United States is indeed the Great Satan we are always accused us of being? I do think so, this will be a ripe chance for Jihadis to justify their attacks on us, as a righteous and genuinely holy war. Americans openly worhsiping the Devil in a Satanic ritual and this might very well be plastered all over the Muslim media in the Middle East.

A growing number of Syrian Christian leaders are traveling to the United States to plead with lawmakers to stop sending arms to the rebels. The most recent visitor is the Patriarch of the Church of Antioch, His Beatitude Gregorios III, who is based in Damascus. For the first three years of the civil war, Syria’s Christian leaders have not been frequent visitors to the U.S., in part fearing reprisals when they return to Syria, but also because they have been reluctant to engage in what they see as political issues. But with the civil war now in its fourth year,...

In February, the United Nations released a remarkably comprehensive report on North Korea's human rights abuses. The report interviewed 320 people, including a number of survivors from the notorious secret political system, and concluded that the country was committing human rights violations “without any parallel in the contemporary world.” So how did North Korea respond? With indignant anger. For weeks now, North Korean state media have been offering various retorts to the United Nations. In April, a North Korean spokesman argued that the United States and its allies were running a "human rights racket." Then, a few weeks later, the...

Whether the Cold War is back, it's an apt moment to strike up a wider conversation about a couple of central questions from my book "American Betrayal." Why did the West fail to claim an ideological or moral victory at the apparent end of the Cold War? Did the West really even win the Cold War? If we go back in time and listen, we hear no consensus click over signs that an unalloyed U.S.-led triumph over communist ideology had taken place; nor do we find a sense of national thanksgiving for the forces of good -- or, at...

It's a common question: Is soccer in the United States really growing, beyond the mere literal sense of the word? Answer: Yes and no – though even some instances of “no” actually point to “yes.” Let me try to explain, starting with a brief flyover of central Virginia youth soccer. A few months ago the Richmond Strikers and Richmond Kickers youth clubs, fierce rivals and longtime members of the US Soccer Development Academy, announced that they were merging their Developmental Academy programs into a new entity called “Richmond United". This new joint venture would pool both clubs' talent and coaching...

PHOENIX — The Arizona Legislature gave final approval Thursday to legislation that allows business owners asserting their religious beliefs to refuse service to gays and others, drawing backlash from Democrats who called the proposal "state-sanctioned discrimination" and an embarrassment.

NEW YORK (AP) — The U.S. abortion rate declined to its lowest level since 1973, and the number of abortions fell by 13 percent between 2008 and 2011, according the latest national survey of abortion providers conducted by a prominent research institute. The Guttmacher Institute, which supports legal access to abortion, said in a report being issued Monday that there were about 1.06 million abortions in 2011 — down from about 1.2 million in 2008. Guttmacher's figures are of interest

Canada, best known for its maple syrup and hockey teams, has now become a serious player on the international business stage. According to a study conducted by Bloomberg, our neighbors up north have now surpassed the United States and claimed the number two spot for the most business-friendly country. Not bad, eh? Canada’s rise to economic-stardom comes after a two year slump brought on by weak exports. The jump to the number two spot is mainly a consequence of reforms that cut the corporate income tax and the decreasing value of the dollar. “Those are two big factors,” John Manley,...

Red states and blue states? Flyover country and the coasts? How simplistic. Colin Woodard, a reporter at the Portland Press Herald and author of several books, says North America can be broken neatly into 11 separate nation-states, where dominant cultures explain our voting behaviors and attitudes toward everything from social issues to the role of government. “The borders of my eleven American nations are reflected in many different types of maps — including maps showing the distribution of linguistic dialects, the spread of cultural artifacts, the prevalence of different religious denominations, and the county-by-county breakdown of voting in virtually every...

From the day that the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act went into effect to the morning that the federal healthcare exchange went live, 1288 days passed. 3 years, 6 months, and 8 days. In all that time, our federal government could not construct a website that actually worked, and we are still waiting for a final product. Here are 4 things the United States government accomplished in less time than it has taken to build a working website: (Number 2 is pretty amazing) http://www.camharris.us/2013/11/4-things-the-us-government-accomplished-in-less-time-than-it-took-to-build-a-working-obamacare-website/

IRGC and the spiritual vacuum of Latin American leftists The following is a glimpse of the kind of thing I often see while researching the activities of the IRGC (writ large) in Latin America. Communism fails to provide for the spiritual needs of leftwing political activists, and the Islamic Republic of Iran seems to have done a pretty good job of inserting themselves and the Khomeinist version of Shiism into that void. (Either that or the IRI is throwing lots of money around and the leftists are whores, which is certainly possible, but for the moment I'll take the more...

Genesis 25 - The First Wrestling Match in Recorded History In Biblical History, which is arguably the most accurate history in the world, a woman named Rebekah was pregnant with two boys; Jacob and Esau. While in the womb the two boys moved and kicked very often, almost seeming to wrestle with each other. Like many historical stories in the Bible, all of us are like one of these two little wrestlers. Rebekah prayed and asked God why this was happening. The Lord answered her and said that she was pregnant with two great nations. The older would serve the...

The intense political polarization of the United States is most clearly reflected by the dysfunctional nature of the federal government. At a more local scale, it is seen as well in the growing movement to create new states by splitting existing ones. Most of these cases involve the desire of people in rural, conservative counties to secede from the more liberal states in which they are currently located. A front-page story in the October 7 edition of the New York Times, for example, highlights a drive to devise a new state of “Northern Colorado.” Eleven Colorado counties will vote on...

In September, the Siskiyou County Board of Supervisors voted to secede from the State of California. "Many proposed laws are unconstitutional and deny us our God-given rights," said one attendee at the council meeting. "We need our own state so we can make laws that fit our way of life." A few weeks later, the Modoc County Board of Supervisors voted to join Siskiyou in the new state of Jefferson, voting 4-0 to leave California. The board votes didn't mean much legally -- the federal government and state government of California would have to recognize the new proposed state of...