Joe Biden Interrupts Florida Woman’s Breast Cancer Story With On-Stage Squatting Charades
At a campaign event Friday afternoon in Florida, Vice President Joe Biden and Senator Bill Nelson took the stage to a cheering crowd. They were being introduced by a Florida resident named Barbra who began by telling a story about her struggle with breast cancer. She was in the middle of describing her fear of relapse when Biden went over to Sen. Nelson, whispered something, and then eventually started doing squatting charades in an effort to get the crowd to sit down. The Vice President also gave thumbs up to the crowd and broke into laughter while the woman was telling her story.
The actions caused a great deal of laughter, interrupting the woman twice in the middle of her story. She had to stop and ask, “What’s he doing back there?”
By the way, it seems the Biden does have a thing against people standing while he’s speaking. At a recent campaign stop he became annoyed with a group that was continuing to stand throughout his speech and told them to sit down. The only problem? They didn’t have any seats. He quickly apologized.
http://www.theblaze.com/stories/joe-biden-interrupts-womans-breast-cancer-story-with-on-stage-charades/
How U.S. Amb. Chris Stevens May Have Been Linked to Jihadist Rebels in Syria (And It Involves Weapons)
The details of the September 11 attack that killed four Americans at the U.S. consulate in Benghazi are still murky and there’s certainly more to be known.
Former CIA officer Clare Lopez argues that the key issue is “the relationship of the U.S. government, Ambassador Christopher Stevens and the U.S. diplomatic mission in Libya with Al Qaeda.”
That relationship, Lopez argues, could be connected to the rise of Islamic brigades in Syria, who recently created a “Front to Liberate Syria” to wage jihad against the Syrian regime and turn the country into an Islamic state.
That potential connection starts with who Ambassador Stevens worked with during the Libyan revolution and ends with who he hosted on the night of his death.
In March 2011 Stevens became the official U.S. liaison to the al-Qaeda-linked Libyan opposition and began coordinating U.S. assistance to the rebels.
The top military commander of the rebels, Abdelhakim Belhadj, was the leader of the pro-al-Qaeda Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG).
After Gaddafi fell the LIFG disbanded and some of the fighters joined the amorphous group Ansar al-Shariah (Soldiers of Shariah), which reportedly participated in the attack that took Stevens’ life.
In November 2011 The Telegraph reported that Belhadj, acting as head of the Tripoli Military Council, “met with Free Syrian Army [FSA] leaders in Istanbul and on the border with Turkey” in an effort by the new Libyan government to provide money and weapons to the growing insurgency in Syria.
Last month The Times of London reported the a Libyan ship “carrying the largest consignment of weapons for Syria … has docked in Turkey.” The shipment reportedly weighed 400 tons and included SA-7 surface-to-air anti-craft missiles and rocket-propelled grenades (RPGs).
Those heavy weapons are most likely from Muammar Gaddafi’s stock of about 20,000 portable heat-seeking missiles—the bulk of them SA-7s—that the Libyan leader obtained from the former Eastern bloc.
Reuters reports that Syrian rebels have been using those heavy weapons to shoot down Syrian helicopters and fighter jets.
The ship’s captain was ”a Libyan from Benghazi and the head of an organization called the Libyan National Council for Relief and Support,” which was presumably established by the new government.
That means that Ambassador Stevens had only one person—Belhadj—between himself and the Benghazi man who brought heavy weapons to Syria. (The official U.S. stance is that it is opposed to providing Syrian rebels with heavy weapons.)
Furthermore, we know that jihadists are the best fighters in the Syrian opposition, but where did they come from?
Last week The Telegraph reported that a FSA commander called them “Libyans” when he explained that the FSA doesn’t “want these extremist people here.”
So this much is fairly certain: Libya has been sending seasoned Islamic fighters, heavy weapons and presumably money to Syria in support of the opposition.
The uncertain part is where Stevens, and the U.S. government, fits into all of this.
If the new Libyan government was sending jihadists and 400 tons of lethal cargo to Syria through a port in southern Turkey—a deal brokered by Stevens’ primary Libyan contact during the Libyan revolution—then the governments of Turkey and the U.S. surely knew about it.
Reuters reported that satellite photos exposed a CIA post in Benghazi, located 1.2 miles from the U.S. consulate, was used as “a base for, among other things, collecting information on the proliferation of weaponry looted from Libyan government arsenals, including surface-to-air missiles” … and that its security features “were more advanced than those at rented villa where Stevens died.”
We also know that about a dozen CIA operatives and contractors left the Benghazi base after it was exposed. Could these two CIA groups be connected as start and end points to help funnel heavy weapons to the Syrian opposition?
We know that the CIA has been funneling weapons to the rebels in southern Turkey, but CNN reports that FSA members are “cutting their own deals to get weapons” from well-armed extremists so it raises questions about who the CIA is arming.
We know that U.S. weapons are ending up in the hands of hard-line Islamists in Syria. It turns out that many of these jihadists are the same ones that Stevens helped arm to topple Gaddafi.
On September 11 Stevens held an evening meeting with a Turkish diplomat before retiring to his room at 9 p.m. Gunfire and explosions began 40 minutes later. Is Steven’s guest for his last meeting just another eerie coincidence?
Either way it seems that the connection between Benghazi and the rise of jihadists in Syria is much stronger than has been officially acknowledged.
http://www.theblaze.com/stories/how-u-s-amb-chris-stevens-may-have-been-linked-to-jihadist-rebels-in-syria-and-does-it-involve-weapons/
Fall in Love with Freedom All Over Again
It’s worth noting, in the wake of three major national debates, that all four national candidates — Barack Obama, Mitt Romney, Joe Biden and Paul Ryan – seem to think of themselves as superheroes. Among other predictions, they suggest that they themselves will create jobs, jumpstart the economy, achieve energy independence, save Medicare and improve higher education.In reality, on the domestic front, they’ll do nothing more nor less than execute the laws enacted by Congress and implement allowable government policies with the help of an overblown federal bureaucracy. At least, that’s all they’ll do if they abide by the Constitution. A president might seek, as President Obama has at various points throughout his presidency, to legislate through executive orders and extralegal regulations, but, even should the outcome of those orders and regulations be favorable on the create-utopia front, they’d still erode our much-cherished political system of separation of powers.
To put it more simply, the slick-sounding predictions and promises of Messrs. Obama, Romney, Biden and Ryan might be politically savvy, but they don’t exactly proceed from key American foundational assumptions about government and particularly the role of the executive. To keep all their promises, they’ll need a mighty amount of cooperation from the American people and Congress or they’ll have to skirt the system.
The election matters. It probably matters more than any election in the history of our republic. Our sense of ourselves matters even more. Question after question Tuesday night amounted to this: “What can you do for me?” If that’s any indication, we’ve arrived at a time in which Democrats and Republicans alike think the purpose of the federal government – and, more specifically, the presidency – is not merely to provide for the common defense, secure our rights and promote the general welfare, but also to guarantee a decent living, health care and a world-class education for all Americans.
That’s all fine if we no longer care to determine our own destinies — but, if we, like the generations of Americans before us, would rather risk poverty for the sake of freedom than risk freedom for the sake of personal security, then it’s time to rein in this expanded conception of government.
The measure of the success of a domestic policy should not be whether it delivers outcomes that a majority of Americans agree are desirable — a secure retirement, for example, or a well-rounded education or reduced poverty. The measure of the success of a domestic policy should be whether it leaves us freer to pursue the jobs, health care and education — in short, the lives — we want. We’ve mistaken the right to pursue happiness with a right to happiness. Unfortunately, happiness never comes in the form of a handout; it comes through earned success.
Perhaps we should stop asking “What can you do for me?” and start asking, “What can I do for myself?” (The truly mature person asks, “What can I do for others?” but, just as a passenger in a spiraling airplane should strap on his own oxygen mask before he helps his seatmate, we have to be able to care for ourselves before we can care for others.) The Constitution already answers the question of what a president can do for us. The answer, intentionally, is: Not much. The biographies of great men and women answer the question of what individuals are capable of when they leverage whatever resources are at their disposal — from the meagerest penny to the most fabulous inheritance — with courage and creativity. The answer is: A great deal.
If we’re able-bodied adults and we’re presently unable to do for ourselves what needs to be done, then maybe that’s less an indication that the government is too weak than that we as individuals are not as strong as we should be.
The very first step is to desire to be strong as individuals, as families, as communities – to desire to be independent from the government. Do we? If we’re honest with ourselves, we’ll admit: Often, we want to be dependent. We conflate freedom from responsibility with true freedom. We want to be freed of all obligations, to be taken care of by someone else, to be told what choice to make when we face a dilemma. Unfortunately for us, that’s not true freedom; that’s to be at the mercy and under the control of whoever does take responsibility for us.
As the great economist Friedrich von Hayek wrote in The Road to Serfdom, “The economic freedom which is the prerequisite of any other freedom cannot be the freedom from the economic care which the socialists promise us and which can be obtained only by relieving the individual at the same time of the necessity and of the power of choice; it must be the freedom of our economic activity which, with the right of choice, inevitably also carries the risk and the responsibility of that right.”
In other words, if we want freedom, we have to accept responsibility. Kindergarten stuff, maybe – but still stiff medicine!
“It is … [the citizens'] choice, and depends upon their conduct,” said George Washington, “whether they will be respectable and prosperous, or contemptible and miserable as a Nation. This is the time of their political probation; this is the moment when the eyes of the World are turned upon them.”
May we choose to be respectable and, so, prosperous; may we choose freedom and independence.
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