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Some things you keep handy just in case something unexpected happens. What if multiple friends show up unexpectedly for a spontaneous pool party at your house? You don’t want to break out the china, crystal, or silver. Just give them the tools to not look like a bunch of drunken Neanderthals squatting over the kill: Dixie cups, paper plates, napkins, and plastic flatware. Give them items that are useful, cheap, disposable, lightweight, and don’t take up much room. That is a simple analogy for a short term, simple survival kit. The Henry U.S. Survival kit is a good example of...

Beset by criticism from all sides for its bungled healthcare exchange rollout, the Obama administration expects to weather the growing storm by lying, rationalizing, and running out the clock. Mendacity, stalling, and stonewalling have worked well as part of a public relations strategy for the Obama administration over its first five years, so there is no point in changing a winning formula now. Besides, extravagant healthcare subsidies begin to kick in next year, and all that free money floating around is bound to calm irate consumers. America’s first Marxist president has been able to get away with wrongdoing by lying...

Word For The Day, November 5, 2013 In order that we might all raise the level of discourse and expand our language abilities, here is the daily post of "Word for the Day". skeigh [skeekh] -adj1. (of horses) spirited; inclined to shy. 2. (of women) proud; disdainful. -adv3. proudly. [1500–10; earlier skeich, late Middle English skey, perhaps continuing Old English scēoh shy2 , with sk- < Middle Dutch schu shy]

All of Obama’s second term foreign policy goals are harmful to Israel. Everything that is good for Obama is necessarily bad for Israel. Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu apparently believes the greatest threat the country now faces is an escalated European trade war. He’s wrong. The greatest threat we are now facing is a national leadership that cannot get its arms around changing strategic realities. Over the weekend, Yediot Aharonot reported that during Secretary of State John Kerry’s seven-hour meeting in Rome last week with Netanyahu, Kerry warned that the price for walking away from the talks with the PLO will...

In March 1946, Winston Churchill told a Missouri audience, “From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the Continent. Behind that line lie all the capitals of the ancient states of Central and Eastern Europe. Warsaw, Berlin, Prague, Vienna, Budapest, Belgrade, Bucharest and Sofia.” Today a new iron curtain is descending. It encloses the small Missouri town where Churchill gave his speech and all the great capitals of a great nation. Behind the iron curtain lie New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago, Boston, Philadelphia and countless others. It covers a million...

After watching this exchange between Candy Crowley and Sen. Kelly Ayotte on CNN’s State of the Union yesterday, I had to go back and read the transcript to be sure I heard it correctly. Perhaps Crowley intended to play devil’s advocate here by encapsulating the latest Democratic Party spin to push blame for ObamaCare on the political party that has opposed it all along, and had nothing to do with its implementation. Regardless of intent, this question made my jaw drop: ... CROWLEY: Now, he is saying in a sort of nuance way what other Democrats are saying right out...

Pray For the Peace of Jerusalem Children and Families In The Bible 2 Samuel 18 New International Version (NIV) The king was shaken. He went up to the room over the gateway and wept. As he went, he said: "O my son Absalom! My son, my son Absalom! If only I had died instead of you--O Absalom, my son, my son!"

Starting October 1st, you can go to http://www.healthcare.gov and use the new Health Insurance Marketplace to see all of the health plans available in your a… Here we go exceptional people… Check out these related commercials…

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Festival-goers can be seen on a video dancing to electronic music and cheering as a man becomes engulfed in flames during West Hollywood's annual Halloween carnival.

The president misspoke: What he meant to say, a hundred or so times, was: “If I like your insurance, you can keep it.” You may like your insurance, but that is not quite good enough for the Obama administration. Contrary to the endlessly repeated promise of the president and his political allies, millions and millions of Americans who do in fact like their current insurance policies are receiving notices that they will not be allowed to keep them. The White House and its media allies are working furiously to explain away this fact, but there is no explaining it away:...

The question many on the left are asking as they witness the Obama administration flail in response to HealthCare.gov's debut disaster is: How could this happen? Obama is so brilliant, so capable and so wise. How could he bungle his signature initiative? He isn't, but even if he were, it wouldn't make a particle of difference. One of the central delusions of progressives is that government is efficient and effective and that complex human societies are amenable to centralized control and direction. We on the right presume government ineptitude. The Washington Post reports today, for example, that the federal employee...

Everyone is focusing on Obamacare because it is such an obvious disaster, but in fact, it is but a microcosm of Barack Obama's entire presidency. Obamacare is Obama unmasked. Aren't some of you tired of making lame excuses for him that only serve to make things worse? He has made a mess of nearly everything his policies have touched, and he's mostly avoided the blame; but he owns Obamacare, and he has nowhere to hide. When someone with the influence Obama enjoyed upon first taking office sets out to fundamentally transform the nation -- and he has the unqualified support...

I'm probably too young to have so many pet peeves. The list seems to get longer every year. So, naturally, the longer I teach, the longer my list of class rules seems to get. In addition to rules of class conduct, I also have to develop rules concerning over-disclosure of information in emails and office visits. Such over-disclosure is always geared towards one goal for the student: transforming personal deficiencies into legitimate disabilities in an effort to attenuate workload expectations. Whenever I'm feeling overwhelmed by these excuses, I take time out in class to reiterate the rules concerning over-disclosure. Note...

Making up a story about your mother to score political points and push an agenda doesn't exactly seem like a good idea...but when did Barack Obama ever think bad ideas weren't good ideas? According to the New York Times, yes, the New York Times, while campaigning in 2008, then Senator Obama lied about a "dispute" he had with a health insurance company so he could pull the sympathy card with voters by saying the insurer wouldn't give her coverage because her cancer was a pre-existing condition. Turns out, the insurer did give his mother coverage and reimbursed her medical costs....

The Vatican on Tuesday released the preparatory document for the Synod of Bishops Extraordinary General Assembly on the theme "The Pastoral Challenges of the Family in the Context of Evangelization". The Synod, called for by Pope Francis, will take place in the Vatican from October 5 to October 19 2014. Please find below the full text of the preparatory document below: PASTORAL CHALLENGES TO THE FAMILY IN THE CONTEXT OF EVANGELIZATIONPreparatory Document Vatican City 2013 I. Synod: Family and Evangelization The mission of preaching the Gospel to all creation, entrusted directly by the Lord to his disciples, has continued in...

In the first two parts of this series, I discussed how 10 times more U.S. minors than foreigners are trafficked in the U.S. But are many of them trafficked into the legal porn industry? A few years back, Dr. Mary Anne Layden, a sex abuse expert and psychotherapist at the University of Pennsylvania who has testified before the U.S. Senate on the dangers of online porn, addressed a forum on sex trafficking at Parliament House in Sydney. In an article titled "Online porn addiction turns our kids into victims and predators," The Sydney Morning Herald reported Layden as saying to...

NFC Seattle Seahawks 8 1 0 0.889 New Orleans Saints 6 2 0 0.750 Detroit Lions 5 3 0 0.625 Dallas Cowboys 5 4 0 0.556 San Francisco 49ers 6 2 0 0.750 Chicago Bears 5 3 0 0.625 Green Bay Packers 5 3 0 0.625 Carolina Panthers 5 3 0 0.625 Arizona Cardinals 4 4 0 0.500 Philadelphia Eagles 4 5 0 0.444 Washington Redskins 3 5 0 0.375 St. Louis Rams 3 6 0 0.333 Atlanta Falcons 2 6 0 0.250 New York Giants 2 6 0 0.250 Minnesota Vikings 1 7 0 0.125 Tampa Bay Buccaneers 0...

As thousands of consumers receive health insurance cancellation notices, President Obama is continuing to fine tune his promise that Americans who like their health plans would be able to them under his signature health care law. The president told about 200 of his campaign supporters and health care activists Monday that the administration had promised Americans they could keep their current coverage -- as long as their plans hadn’t changed since ObamaCare was signed into law. "If you have or had one of these plans before the Affordable Care Act came into law and you really liked that plan, what...

How many times have we heard, over the last three and a half years, that one of the primary and most popular features of Obamacare is that no one could be denied coverage for a preexisting condition? It turns out that this is just another one of the false claims used to sell the public on a health care reform that seems to move every aspect of health care in the wrong direction. The Affordable Care Act does indeed specify, in Section 1201, that “a health insurance issuer offering group or individual health insurance coverage may not impose any preexisting...