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Amish man details Ohio hair-cutting attack on dad
Even the Amish have issues. Who knew?
CLEVELAND (AP) — An Amish preacher testified Wednesday that he watched three men cut his father’s hair and beard during an attack last fall that left his father shaking and relatives screaming.
Andy Hershberger was the first witness in the federal trial of a breakaway Amish group from eastern Ohio accused of hate crimes in hair-cutting attacks on fellow Amish. Prosecutors say Hershberger’s father was among those attacked because he and the leader of the breakaway group had religious differences.
Andy Hershberger testified that his father, an Amish bishop, pleaded for the men not to shear him. But he said within minutes, the hair from his father’s beard had been cut and scattered across the floor. He said clumps of hair were missing from his father’s head and his scalp was bleeding.
Beards and hair have great religious importance among the Amish.
Andy Hershberger testified that the men arrived at the house in the evening and said, “We want to talk with you and your dad.” Once inside, one of the defendants, whom he identified as Johnny Mullet — son of accused ringleader Sam Mullet Sr. — stood up and said: “We’re from Bergholz. We’re here to do what you did to our people.”
Hersherger described a chaotic scene, with the men holding him, his father, Raymond, and his brother down while his father was sheared.
“I saw the hair fly,” Andy Hershberger testified. Afterward, he said, his father “was shaking all over.”
“The women and my dad were crying,” he said.
Prosecutors say his father, Raymond Hershberger, was targeted because he was among several bishops who had religious disagreements with Mullet.
Attorneys for the defendants don’t deny that the hair cuttings took place. Instead, they argued that the Amish are bound by different rules guided by their religion and that the government shouldn’t get involved in what amounted to a family or church dispute.
Their attorneys say members of the breakaway group took action out of concern that some Amish were straying from their beliefs.
From HERE.
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The obama regime probably does not want to upset their best buds the taliban?
Just days before a congressional deadline, the Obama administration is deeply divided over whether to designate the Pakistan-based Haqqani network as a terrorist group, with some officials worried that doing so could complicate efforts to restart peace talks with the Taliban and undermine already-fraught relations with Pakistan.
Early this month, Congress gave Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton 30 days to determine whether the Haqqani group, considered the most lethal opponent of U.S. forces in Afghanistan, meets the criteria for designation — a foreign organization engaging in terrorist activity that threatens U.S. citizens or national security.
If she says it does not, Clinton must explain her rationale in a report due to Congress on Sept. 9. Acknowledgment that the group meets the criteria, however, would probably force the administration to take action, which is strongly advocated by the military but has been resisted by the White House and some in the State Department.
Senior officials have repeatedly called the Haqqani network the most significant threat to its goal of exiting a relatively peaceful Afghanistan by the end of 2014, and have accused Pakistan of direct support for its leadership. The network has conducted a series of lethal, high-profile attacks against U.S. targets.
In recent weeks, the military has reiterated its call for Pakistan to prove its counterterrorism commitment by attacking Haqqani sanctuaries in its North Waziristan tribal area. The CIA has escalated drone attacks on Haqqani targets, including a strike last week that administration officials said killed the son of the network’s founder and its third-ranking official.
But just as there are reasons to designate the network a terrorist group, there are several factors weighing against the move, according to officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity about the administration’s closed-door deliberations.
Those factors include a tenuous rapprochement with Pakistan that led last month to the reopening of vital U.S. military supply lines into Afghanistan; hopes that the autumn end of this year’s Afghan fighting season will bring the Taliban back to the negotiating table after the suspension of talks last March; and a reconfigured U.S. offer on a prisoner exchange that could lead to the release of the only U.S. service member being held by the militants.
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Can You Make It Through This Post Without Crying?
First, look at this amazing photo of chimps at a rescue center grieving for their friend Dorothy, who died of old age.
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Somehow, I doubt if Clint would call this big fat ass a fellow director. Plus the only people that actually pay attention to fat ass guy are dumber than dirt liberals. Hear me susan sarandon?
live:
Filmmaker Michael Moore’s assessment of fellow director Clint Eastwood’s speech at the Republican National Convention:
It “will live on in infamy as the moment when a crazy old man hijacked a national party’s most important gathering to tell off the president.”
“Speaking to Invisible Obama last night, in a performance that seemed to have been written by Timothy Leary and performed by Cheech & Chong, Clint Eastwood was able to drive home to tens of millions of viewers the central message of this year’s Republican National Convention: ‘We Are Delusional and Detached from Reality. Vote for Us!’ Moore wrote on his Web site.
The Flint native said Eastwood’s performance “will be played to audiences a hundred years from now as the Most Bizarre Convention Moment Ever.”
Moore also recounts a personal story about Eastwood, whom he said once growled at him during an awards ceremony: “If you ever show up at my house with that camera, I’ll shoot you on sight.”
“The audience laughed, I laughed, but the person who issued the threat wasn’t laughing. That creeped me out a bit. I made sure never to go stand on Clint Eastwood’s lawn,” Moore wrote.
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This is me for sure. I go looking for something, wife has to stop me and ask what I am looking for so that she can either get it for me or tell me where it is I am looking for.
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Barack Obama? Forward? Bill Clinton? War on Women? WTF?!!!
Read The WhistleBlower by Marinka Peschmann
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Hilarious – Judge is Allowing Felon Governor to Attend DNC
Why not make him the keynote speaker!!??!!!
A federal judge has given former Alabama Gov. Don Siegelman permission to travel to Charlotte, N.C., next week to attend the Democratic National Convention.
The convention is a week before Siegelman is scheduled to report to a federal prison in Louisiana to finish his 78-month sentence.
U.S. District Judge Mark Fuller said in an order that Siegelman can travel to Charlotte Sept. 3-6. Fuller ordered Siegelman to advise his probation officer of his flight plans and hotel reservations and to notify probation officials when he returns to his home in Birmingham.
Siegelman plans to lobby at the convention for President Obama to grant his request for clemency.
Siegelman told the Associated Press on Thursday that he hopes to meet with Alabama’s only Democratic member of Congress, Rep. Terri Sewell of Birmingham. He said he hopes to meet with former governors and others who he hopes will be “sympathetic and helpful.”
“That will be the place for me to be,” the former governor said of the convention.
Siegelman is returning to prison to complete a sentence of six years and six months. But he served nine months before getting out while he pursued an appeal of his bribery conviction with former HealthSouth CEO Richard Scrushy, who has completed his sentence and is living in Houston.
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Blind fish share common ancestor
Eyeless and colourless, Madagascan cave goby relatives were living “down-under”.
A pair of eyeless, cave-dwelling fish species, separated millions of years ago, have turned up on either side of the Indian Ocean.
A study published in PLoS One showed that blind Madagascan and Australian cave fish share a common ancestor.
Their forebears probably lived in caves on the prehistoric southern super-continent Gondwanaland.
Then continental drift tore this family apart – transporting them to their current locations.
MORE.
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University of Cape Town Researchers Believe They Have Found a Single Dose Cure for Malaria
CAPE TOWN (2012-08-28): The University of Cape Town’s Science Department believes that it has found a single dose cure for Malaria.
This was announced by researchers that have been working on this compound, from the aminopyridine class, for several years. Unlike conventional multidrug malaria treatments that the malaria parasite has become resistant to, Professor Kelly Chibale and his colleagues now believe that they have discovered a drug that over 18 months of trials ”killed these resistant parasites instantly”.
Animal tests also showed that it was not only safe and effective, but there were no adverse reported side effects. Clinical tests are scheduled for the end of 2013.
Potential Impact for Africa
If this tablet is approved in coming years, this achievement will surely usher in a new age for science in Africa. It will save millions upon millions of lives on the continent, helping avoid at least 24 percent of child deaths in sub-Saharan Africa. Professor Chibale proudly explains: “This is the first ever clinical molecule that’s been discovered out of Africa, by Africans, from a modern pharmaceutical industry drug discovery programme. The potent drug has been tested on animals and has shown that a single oral dose has completely cured those infected with malaria parasites.”
This “super pill” could potentially cure millions of people every year, and save the lives of over one million people from around the world each year. This “cure” will most likely save health care systems throughout the developing world billions of dollars and open new areas for development and settlement.
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The day after Paul Ryan’s RNC speech I posted a series of graphics based on his speech (here). This was probably the best line of them all, and I wanted to make sure I could come up with something that would do it justice…
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The Race Canard
As Obama looks increasingly vulnerable, the media is pulling out the stops.
Silly season is over. Racist season is here.
Silly season is when nothing is going on in the presidential campaign and the debate focuses on trivialities. Racist season is when the campaign begins in earnest and President Barack Obama looks vulnerable. Then, liberal commentators pull out all the stops to deem practically any criticism of the president racist.
Chris Matthews of MSNBC led the charge with an on-set rant against Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus. Criticizing the gutting of welfare reform? Racist. GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney’s joke about no one ever asking for his birth certificate? Racist, too. Saying the president is inspired by a European welfare-state model? Obviously racist.
Priebus looked like he’d been buttonholed by a persistent drunk at a bar and didn’t know how to get away.
It’s only late August, and the campaign is tied. Wait until October, especially if Obama is trailing. In the imaginations of the president’s devotees, an America where he is behind by 2 or 3 points will be indistinguishable from an America where blacks are set on by dogs during civil-rights marches.
When Romney joked in Michigan that no one ever had to ask for his birth certificate, it was a banner day in the racist season. Michael Eric Dyson, who apparently earned an advanced degree in finding obscure ways to accuse people of bigotry, detected the telltale signs of “othering.”
“Other” used to be a perfectly fine word, then became jargon fit for use only by people with regular MSNBC gigs or endowed chairs in nonsense.
It’s not clear why the former Massachusetts governor would insist that Obama is an American during the Republican primaries only to lurch toward birtherism in the general election, with an unscripted joke he will never, ever repeat.
Even Dyson lacks the creativity of Thomas Edsall, a Columbia Journalism School professor. Edsall wrote a blog post for the New York Times contending that, by attacking Obama for cutting Medicare to pay for Obamacare, the Romney campaign is engaged in a politics of “racially freighted resource competition.”
Why? Because Medicare beneficiaries are “largely white,” and Obamacare beneficiaries will be “disproportionately minority.” Edsall calls this supposed strategy “subtle.” Subtle, indeed.
According to this logic, the Obama ads hitting Romney for wanting to end Medicare as we know it must be a naked racial appeal, the “othering” of Romney’s reform plan.
There is a consensus among Democrats and the media that Romney’s attacks on Obama for “gutting” welfare reform are out of bounds and racially charged.
This, too, is wrong. Obama has altered the welfare-reform law fundamentally. The section of the law imposing the work requirements was written to be unwaivable. The Obama administration unlawfully claims authority to waive it.
Imagine that a Republican administration claimed authority to waive the entitlement status of Medicare and Medicaid. Wouldn’t Democrats accuse that administration of “gutting” those entitlements?
A Romney ad goes too far in suggesting that the work requirements will disappear immediately. It will probably be a slow unraveling. Any loosening comes in the context of work requirements that already don’t have much force. Only about 40 percent of adult welfare recipients in any state are required to undertake “work activities,” according to Robert Rector of the Heritage Foundation. (Roughly a third of the welfare caseload is black.)
Work is not some racist code. It’s a core American value. Ninety-seven percent of conservatives thought able-bodied welfare recipients should be required to work or prepare for work, according to a 2009 Heritage Foundation poll. Ninety-two percent of liberals agreed.
The usual suspects probably consider this universal sentiment a form of prejudice. What a dim view they take of their countrymen. They believe the American public is keenly attuned to racist dog whistles and — though they elected Obama with 53 percent and still like him personally — is ready to reject him partly because he’s an African-American.
The silly season can occasionally be fun. The racist season is rancid.
From NRO.
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The ‘Deterrence Works’ Fantasy
Deterring Iran is fundamentally different from deterring the Soviet Union.
There are few foreign-policy positions more silly than the assertion without context that “deterrence works.” It is like saying air power works. Well, it worked for Kosovo; it didn’t work over North Vietnam.
It’s like saying city-bombing works. It worked in Japan 1945 (Tokyo through Nagasaki). It didn’t in the London blitz.
The idea that some military technique “works” is meaningless. It depends on the time, the circumstances, the nature of the adversaries. The longbow worked for Henry V. At El Alamein, however, Montgomery chose tanks.
Yet a significant school of American “realists” remains absolutist on deterrence and is increasingly annoyed with those troublesome Israelis who are sowing fear, rattling world markets, and risking regional war by threatening a preemptive strike to stop Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons. Don’t they understand that their fears are grossly exaggerated? After all, didn’t deterrence work during 40 years of the Cold War?
Indeed, a few months ago, columnist Fareed Zakaria made that case by citing me writing in defense of deterrence in the early 1980s at the time of the nuclear-freeze movement. And yet now, writes Zakaria, Krauthammer (along with others on the right) “has decided that deterrence is a lie.”
Finish reading HERE.
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