Month: March 2015

Russia Again Flight Tests New ICBM to Treaty-Violating Range

Russia conducted a flight test of a new intercontinental ballistic missile earlier this month that some U.S. officials and security analysts say is a new violation of Moscow’s arms control treaty commitments. The March 18 flight test of a new RS-26 missile is part of a large-scale nuclear arms buildup by Russia and is raising concerns about treaty compliance, said U.S. officials familiar with details of the missile test. The RS-26 missile carried a dummy warhead from Russia’s Kapustin Yar missile facility, located about 80 miles south of Volgograd in southern Russia, to an impact range at Sary Shagan in Kazakhstan. The distance between the launch facility and the impact area is approximately 1,248 miles, far less than the threshold of 3,417 miles required by the 1987 Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty. It is at least the fifth time in the past five years the Russians have conducted flight tests of the RS-26 to ranges prohibited under the INF treaty. An Oct. 10, 2013 flight test also traveled less than 2,000 miles. Testing an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) to intermediate range, as in the March 18 test, technically violates or circumvents the terms of the INF treaty, arms control analysts said.

We cannot simpy let this sorta thing slide..

Saudi Arabia Gives Israel Clear Skies to Attack Iranian Nuke Sites

Saudi Arabia has conducted tests to stand down its air defenses to enable Israeli jets to make a bombing raid on Iran’s nuclear facilities, The Times of London reported Saturday. In the week that the U.N. Security Council imposed a new round of sanctions on Tehran, defense sources in the Gulf say that Riyadh has agreed to allow Israel to use a narrow corridor of its airspace in the north of the country to shorten the distance for a bombing run on Iran. To ensure the Israeli bombers pass without hindrance, Riyadh has carried out tests to make certain its own jets are not scrambled and missile defense systems not activated. Once the Israelis are through, the kingdom’s air defenses will return to full alert. “The Saudis have given their permission for the Israelis to pass over and they will look the other way,” said a U.S. defense source in the area. “They have already done tests to make sure their own jets aren’t scrambled and no one gets shot down. This has all been done with the agreement of the [U.S.] State Department.” Sources in Saudi Arabia say it is common knowledge within defense circles in the kingdom that an arrangement is in place if Israel decides to launch the raid. Despite the tension between the two governments, they share a mutual loathing of the regime in Tehran and a common fear of Iran’s nuclear ambitions. “We all know this. We will let them [the Israelis] through and see nothing,” said one. The four main targets for any raid on Iran would be the uranium enrichment facilities at Natanz and Qom, the gas storage development at Isfahan and the heavy-water reactor at Arak. Secondary targets include the lightwater reactor at Bushehr, which could produce weapons-grade plutonium when complete.

Very interesting..  And something to keep an eye on..

Want Evidence of Hysterical Anti-Christian Bigotry? Look No Further than #BoycottIndiana

After litigating religious liberty issues for more than 20 years, I’m used to utter hysteria erupting on the Left when Christians try to assert conventional and traditional religious liberty rights. Perhaps my favorite example was the claim — by a Tufts University student panel — that a Christian group had to be thrown off campus without due process, in part because the Christian group’s insistence on selecting only Christians as leaders placed Tufts students at greater risk of suicide. Yes, suicide. But for national freakouts, it’s tough to beat either the sky-is-falling rhetoric around the idea that a few Hobby Lobby employees would have to buy their own abortifacients or, more recently, the sheer nonsense of #boycottindiana, the movement to freeze an entire state out of the national economy for passing a religious freedom law similar to the national Religious Freedom Restoration ACT (RFRA) and RFRAs in 19 other states. While it’s hardly surprising to see legally ignorant sportswriters use the language of segregated lunch counters, it’s disturbing to see well-informed CEOs such as Apple’s Tim Cook conjuring up the specter of the Old South. Simply put, their concerns about systematic invidious discrimination are utter hogwash, and they either know it or should know it. Why? Because RFRAs aren’t new, the legal standard they protect is decades older than the RFRAs themselves, and these legal standards have not been used — nor can they be used — to create the dystopian future the Left claims to fear. After all, the current RFRA legal tests were the law of the land for all 50 states — constitutionally mandated — until the Supreme Court’s misguided decision in Employment Division v. Smith, where the Court allowed fear of drug use to overcome its constitutional good sense. And yet during the decades before Smith, non-discrimination statutes proliferated, and were successfully enforced to open public accommodations to people of all races, creeds, colors, and — yes — sexual orientations. So what’s really going on here? A toxic combination of anti-Christian bigotry and sexual revolution radicalism. It is simply uninformed and bigoted to believe that Christians are somehow lurking in the shadows, ready to deny food, shelter, and basic services to their gay fellow citizens — blocked from such vicious actions only by the strong arm of the state. In my entire life as an Evangelical, I’ve never met a fellow Christian who wouldn’t gladly serve a gay customer. If there are exceptions to that nearly-universal rule, they are so marginal (and marginalized) in the Christian community that they’re irrelevant not only to Christendom but also to the body politic. But the Left, ever-vigilant against group-based slights on behalf of favored constituencies, is only too eager to label orthodox Christians as threats to the public. This bigotry has a purpose. It serves to demonize the last significant constituency standing in the way of sexual revolution radicalism. After all, unless you demonize your opposition, the general public will have little appetite for forcing Christians to pay for abortion pills, forcing Christian groups to open up to atheist leadership, or forcing Christian bakers or photographers to help celebrate events they find morally offensive. After all, there’s no clamor for requiring Kosher delis to stock pork or requiring gay lawyers to represent the Westboro Baptist Church. While RFRAs protect people of all faiths, from peyote-smoking Native Americans to Bible-toting florists, the Left’s outrage is narrowly targeted — against the Christian people whose livelihoods they seek to ruin, whose consciences they seek to appropriate, and whose organizations they seek to disrupt. #BoycottIndiana isn’t a cry for freedom. It’s nothing more than an online mob, seeking to bully those it hates.

Exactly!!  Excellent op/ed by attorney, and Iraq War Army vet, David French. Excellent!   🙂

NASA tests Mars ‘flying saucer’

NASA has given the world another glimpse of its revolutionary flying saucer technology, which will play a crucial role in future Mars missions. The 15-foot wide, 7,000-pound test vehicle underwent a “spin test” on a table at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. during a live broadcast Tuesday, ABC News reports. The flying saucer is part of NASA’s Low-Density Supersonic Decelerator (LDSD) project, which aims to develop landing vehicles for future missions. NASA says the project tests “breakthrough technologies that will enable large payloads to be safely landed on the surface of Mars, or other planetary bodies with atmospheres, including Earth.” According to the space agency, the technologies will also offer access to more of the red planet’s surface by enabling landings at higher-altitude sites. As part of its LDSD research, NASA will fly a rocket-powered saucer-shaped test vehicle into near-space from the Navy’s Pacific Missile Range Facility on Kauai, Hawaii, in June. Last year an LDSD test in Hawaii was deemed a success by engineers, despite the vehicle’s huge parachute apparently failing to deploy properly, according to Space.com.

Very cool!    🙂

Report: More Than 2,000 Illegal Immigrant Children Are Arriving Each Month in 2015

More than 2,000 illegal immigrant children continue to arrive in the U.S. each month, according to Department of Homeland Security statistics compiled by the Center for Immigration Studies. While more illegal immigrant children are entering the country this fiscal year than at this point in fiscal years 2012 and 2013, the number of children crossing the border has not yet surged as it did last year. The Center for Immigration Studies’ report shows that 84 percent of the children crossing the border are teenagers, most of whom are male. The Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, which takes custody of the illegal immigrant children, has encountered kids from 27 different countries this year alone, according to the report. DHS Secretary Jeh Johnson has attempted to spin earlier reports of the number of unaccompanied alien children to his benefit. “[T]he number of unaccompanied children apprehended at the southern border, month-to-month, are the lowest it has been in several years,” Johnson testified before the House Appropriations Committee last week. “As of March 15, 2015, the total number for the fiscal year is 43 percent less than it was the same time last year.” But the charts Johnson included with his written testimony, do not seem to fully back up his assertion. More unaccompanied alien children crossed during January and February of this year, than did during the same time frame in 2012. Moreover many children still cross as family units, with siblings, parents, or other relatives. Several Border Patrol agents and law enforcement officials at the southern border expect another influx of illegal immigrants will occur again this summer, and have already begun preparing for a second wave of illegal immigrant children from Central America. Whether DHS and other federal departments are prepared to handle any increase in illegal immigration remains to be seen, but CIS claims that fewer than 200 illegal immigrant children are deported by ICE each month.

Get ready for this to start up all over again..  Hopefully some of the southern states, like Texas and Arizona, are making plans to deploy their respective Army National Guards ON the border to help curb this summer’s invasion, since Obama and his minions like AG Eric Holder are doing everything they can to encourage the invasion..

Obama commutes sentences of 22 drug dealers

President Obama commuted the prison sentences Wednesday of 22 people convicted of drug dealing, mostly crack cocaine, including some who were caught selling in school zones. Many of the defendants were serving terms of life in prison; Mr. Obama’s action will release them at the end of July. One of them, Herman Rosenboro of Kingsport, Tennessee, had been convicted of possession with intent to distribute more than five kilograms of cocaine. Another, Lawrence Elmo Scott of Lynchburg, Virginia, was convicted of selling crack cocaine within 1,000 feet of a school. The Justice Department announced a new commutation drive last year aimed primarily at cutting the sentences of individuals serving long prison terms for trafficking in crack cocaine, who tend to be minorities. Mr. Obama signed a law in 2010 that reduced the disparity of prison terms for crack cocaine offenses compared with crimes involving the powder form of cocaine. The Justice Department’s drive has drawn the ire of new Senate Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley, Iowa Republican, who is exploring the formal arrangement between the department and advocacy groups pushing for the leniency.

Again, Obama plays the race card.. And, because so many of these crack dealers just so happen to be black, the attitude of Obama, and AG Eric Holder, is that the laws are inherently racist.  Typical..

Muslim groups attack Egyptian Copts over church honoring Christians killed by ISIS

Relatives of the Coptic Christians beheaded last month by jihadists in Libya – their deaths immortalized in a gory video set against the backdrop of a Mediterranean beach – are facing new extremist-Muslim violence as they seek to build a church to honor their murdered loved ones. An angry mob in the Upper Egyptian village of Al Our – the proposed site of the church because it was home to 13 of the 21 Christians murdered in the mass “beachfront” decapitation – descended on the community’s current church after the midday Islamic prayer Friday and chanted that they’d never allow construction of the new place of worship to begin, witnesses told Egyptian activists in the U.S. Things turned far uglier after nightfall, the witnesses said, as a smaller number of individuals threw Molotov cocktails and stones at the church, injuring several people, and setting cars ablaze, including one that belonged to a relative of one of the victims of the Libyan massacre. “The police came, but after the attack,” said Mina Abdelmalak, a Coptic Christian living in Washington who is in close contact with the witnesses to the events in Al Our. “There were already cars on fire. People had been bloodied. Stones and bricks had been thrown.” Some protesters also appeared at the family home of massacre victim Samuel Alham Wilson, but, in a gesture that provided some hope, were chased off by Muslim neighbors when the protesters started throwing stones. Copts are the native Christians of Egypt, accounting for about 10 percent of the country’s 88 million people. While they have traditionally faced varying levels of persecution in the mainly Muslim country, the Copts of Al Our — a village on the Nile about 125 miles south of Cairo — have additionally been in deep mourning since the Islamic State released its video Feb. 15 showing the beheading of the Christians — 20 of them Copts, the other from Ghana.

More Christian persecution, on top of the genocide being committed against them by ISIS/ISIL, in the middle east..

Rep. Duckworth, Top Dem Recruit, Demands Hillary Testify

Rep. Tammy Duckworth (D-IL) says Hillary Clinton should testify before the special select committee examining the tragedy in Benghazi. Duckworth added she would hold former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton “accountable” for erasing emails from her personal server. Duckworth’s strong stand may be a matter of political expediency. She’s running for U.S. Senate, for a seat Democrats would probably need to take if they hope to reclaim the majority in the elections in 2016. She is challenging first-term Senator Mark Kirk (R-IL), a former military intelligence officer. Duckworth herself is a veteran of the Iraq War. Duckworth’s statement is one of the first signs Democrat politicians may have to separate themselves from Hillary Clinton and the controversy over her email while she was Secretary of State. That such a high-profile Democrat recruit, facing election in 2016, would distance herself from Clinton indicates growing worry within the party about the impact of the scandal on their election prospects. Duckworth went even further than demanding that Clinton testify and said that Clinton “had to have been emailing classified documents” on her private email server while she led the State Department. Clinton has ardently claimed that she never emailed classified materials. Clinton’s private email server was outside the government’s secure system, raising the real prospect that such materials could have been intercepted by foreign governments.

Good for Rep. Tammy Duckworth (D-IL)!! Regardless of whether she’s doing this for purely political reasons, or because its the right thing to do….we’ll take it…and give credit where credit is due! 🙂

Kerry accused of exaggerating role as senator in early global warming hearings

Secretary of State John Kerry is taking heat for exaggerating his role as a senator in organizing the chamber’s first climate-change hearings. Questions about Kerry’s repeated assertions that he helped organize and participated in the Senate hearings roughly 27 years ago resurfaced after a March 12 speech before the Atlantic Council, in Washington, D.C. “Climate change is an issue that is personal to me, and it has been since the 1980s, when we were organizing the very first climate hearings in the Senate,” Kerry told the audience. “Al Gore, Tim Wirth and a group of us organized the first hearings in the Senate on this, 1988. We heard Jim Hansen sit in front of us and tell us it’s happening now, 1988.” The Washington Post fact-checker concluded that Kerry at least exaggerated about his involvement and — comparing his statements to recent tall tales by anchor Brian Williams — gave him four “Pinocchios.” The paper concluded he likely didn’t attend the June 23, 1988, hearing and perpetuated often-told details about the event that proved to be false. According to the Post, the March 12 speech was hardly the first time the tale was told. The Post reported that Kerry in a 2007 Council of Foreign Relations speech, at a 2009 Senate hearing, in a 2010 Huffington Post story and in a 2014 Boston Globe profile said he and Gore, then a Tennessee senator and a fellow Democrat, were part of the first hearing or hearings. “In all of the statements, there is a common theme — Kerry and Gore, riding shotgun together, organizing the ‘very first’ Senate or Capitol Hill hearings on climate change,” the newspaper wrote.

What? Al Gore and John Kerry exaggerating? Nahhhhh!!! lol It blows my mind that there are actually people out there that listen to either one of those two narcassistic blow-hards.

Russian Analyst Calls For Nuclear Attack on Yellowstone National Park

Russian geopolitical analyst Konstantin Sivkov has called for Moscow to launch a nuclear attack on Yellowstone National Park and the San Andreas fault line, noting that the devastating consequences would ‘disappear’ the United States as a country. Sivkov made the comments in a piece for Russian trade newspaper VPK News, which were translated by the Sydney Morning Herald. Arguing that NATO aggression against Russia required the “complete destruction of the enemy,” Sivkov went on to depict a chilling scenario. “Geologists believe that the Yellowstone supervolcano could explode at any moment. There are signs of growing activity there. Therefore it suffices to push the relatively small, for example the impact of the munition megaton class to initiate an eruption. The consequences will be catastrophic for the United States – a country just disappears,” he said. A Yellowstone supervolcano eruption would kill millions of people in the initial blast and bury much of the United States in volcanic ash. According to some experts, it could cause the end of the world. The last time a supervolcano exploded in Siberia, 85 per cent of all land species and 95 per cent of all ocean dwellers were completely wiped out. In 2013 it was revealed that the magma below Yellowstone was two and a half times larger than previously thought, giving the park’s supervolcano the potential to cause an eruption 2,000 times more powerful than Mount St. Helens. Some experts say the caldera is overdue to erupt. Sivkov also said that while Russia’s geography protected it from the threat posed by tsunamis, one could be triggered in the United States with an attack on the San Andreas fault. “Another vulnerable area of the United States from the geophysical point of view, is the San Andreas fault – 1300 kilometers between the Pacific and North American plates … a detonation of a nuclear weapon there can trigger catastrophic events like a coast-scale tsunami which can completely destroy the infrastructure of the United States,” he wrote. Sections of the San Andreas fault are overdue for major earthquake activity. “Researchers found that three sections of the San Andreas Fault system in Northern California — Hayward, Rodgers Creek and Green Valley — are either near or past their average recurrence interval and have accumulated sufficient strain to trigger earthquakes of magnitude 6.8 or greater,” reports CBS News. Fearing that the United States plans to “destroy Russia,” Sivkov says that Moscow is in a much worse position than it was 50 years ago because it has far fewer allies and cannot compete against the military might of NATO and its allies. While it would be unthinkable for anyone inside the Kremlin to take Sivkov’s comments seriously, his rhetoric illustrates how fraught tensions are between Moscow and Washington. Last month, General Sir Adrian Bradshaw, NATO’s deputy supreme allied commander in Europe, warned that the threat of a conflict with Russia, “represents an existential threat to our whole being”.

Umm…WOW! NOT good!! As we’ve been saying from day one here at The Daily Buzz… It is imperative that Obama get off his butt and start taking this inflamatory rhetoric coming out of Moscow seriously…not to mention the actual military provocations, including Russia’s illegal annexation of Crimea, among other things. It WAY past time that we as a nation, and as a leader in NATO, respond in kind and let Vlad and his fellow thugs know that America and NATO will NOT be bullied…and that we stand with our allies in eastern Europe (i.e. Poland, etc.) and with Petro’s government in Kiev, Ukraine. To that end, we have been calling on the Obama Administration to park an entire U.S. Navy Carrier Strike Group (CSG) in the Baltic…not just some random destroyer. Parking a major U.S. military power project platform like that in Russia’s backyard would send a pretty loud and clear message to Moscow. In addition, we’ve been calling on the administration to rebuild the missile defense shield in Poland that Obama so foolishly had dismantled when he became President. We need to show with actions, not just hollow words, that we stand WITH our Polish friends. Right now, they’re not sure…and I don’t blame them one bit. These are just a couple of SEVERAL measures we’ve outlined many times here at The Daily Buzz.