Not All Syrians Happy With Putin's Deal

Syrian Rebels Furious At U.S.-Russian Deal

Zero Hedge
September 15, 2013

With major deadlines now pushed off until next year and Assad appearing to come out smelling of (slightly tarnished) roses with his ‘compromise’ agreement with Russia (and the US) to join the chemical weapons treaty, not only is Israel now a major focus but the Syrian rebels – as one might expect – are not happy. As Reuters reports, the head of the opposition Syrian Supreme Military Council said on Saturday a U.S.-Russian agreement to eliminate Syria’s chemical weapons was a blow to the two-and-a-half-year uprising to remove President Bashar al-Assad from power.

Crucially, General Salim Idris notes that this allows Assad “to escape being held accountable,” and, while unverified for now, Idris added, “we have told our friends that the regime has begun moving a part of its chemical weapons arsenal to Lebanon and Iraq. We told them do not be fooled.” But another military council official, Qassim Saadeddine, was a little more aggressive: “Let the Kerry-Lavrov plan go to hell. We reject it and we will not protect the inspectors or let them enter Syria.”

Via Reuters,

The head of the opposition Syrian Supreme Military Council said on Saturday a U.S.-Russian agreement to eliminate Syria’s chemical weapons was a blow to the two-and-a-half-year uprising to remove President Bashar al-Assad from power.

General Selim Idris said the deal would allow Assad to escape being held accountablefor killing hundreds of civilians in a poison gas attack on Damascus on Aug. 21. Assad has denied responsibility for the attack.

…

“We have told our friends that the regime has begun moving a part of its chemical weapons arsenal to Lebanon and Iraq. We told them do not be fooled,” Idris told reporters in Istanbul.

“All of this initiative does not interest us. Russia is a partner with the regime in killing the Syrian people. A crime against humanity has been committed and there is not any mention of accountability.”

…

But another military council official, Qassim Saadeddine, said: “Let the Kerry-Lavrov plan go to hell. We reject it and we will not protect the inspectors or let them enter Syria.”

McCain Might Retire--Is It Time To Get A Real Patriot In His Seat?

Is Sen. John McCain Planning to Retire?

September 14, 2013

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U.S. Sen. John McCain has hinted that he may not seek another term in 2016, because he doesn't want to become "one of these old guys that should've shoved off."

McCain's comments came while he was speaking about his relationship with President Barack Obama, The Hill reported.

"The president and I, he's in his last term, I'm probably in mine, the relationship we have had over the past three years is quite good," McCain told The Wrap in an interview. "Quite good."

McCain, a 77-year-old Republican representing Arizona, has served 27 years in the Senate.

However, McCain said he wasn't quite sure whether this will be his last term or not.

"Nah, I don't know," McCain said. "I was trying to make a point. I have to decide in about two years so I don't have to make a decision. I don't want to be one of these old guys that should've shoved off."

Meanwhile, the Russian Communist Party newspaper Pravda has tentatively agreed to publish an op-ed written by McCain, RIA Novosti reported.

The agreement came after McCain slammed Russian President Vladimir Putin's op-ed in The New York Times that was highly critical of the United State's push to intervene in Syria.

McCain called Putin's piece "an insult to the intelligence of every American," and said "I would love to have a commentary in Pravda." referring to Russia's strict press policies.

"If John McCain wants to write something for us, he is welcome," Dmitry Sudakov, the English editor of Pravda, said. "We have been critical of his stance on Russia and international politics in our materials, but we would be only pleased to publish a story penned by such a prominent politician as John McCain."

Copyright 2013 United Press International, Inc. (UPI). Any reproduction, republication, redistribution and/or modification of any UPI content is expressly prohibited without UPI's prior written consent.

Help Conservative Tom Raise Money For Childhood Cancer--The Event Is Today!!!

Today is our event--Shave To Save--to raise money for childhood cancer. We wrote the details last week but wanted to remind everyone.   This is your final notice!

One of the charities where the money goes is the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society (LLS). They have made  spectacular advances against not only these two killer but many other cancers.  So when we raise money for LLS we fighting for all cancer patients as blood is the common element in many of these other diseases or it serves as the conduit for them to spread.

Can you spare a buck, a ten spot or whatever else that your heart dictates that you should do?

Thanks for your help.

Conservative Tom

P.S. You can make contributions at the event (12 mile and Halsted in Farmington Hills, MI from 3-5) or by going to the following link: http://www.stephenssoldiers.org/events.html
Thanks again.

P.P.S.  So far the keep the mustache people are ahead--so if you would like for me to cut off the mustache, please contribute or if you would not like to see me without a mustache, make your feelings known!!

More Liberals Taste The Sting Of ObamaCrapCare

 Most artists are liberals. As such many of them voted for Obama and now they are feeling the pain caused by ObamaCrapCare.  As we continue to learn daily, this catastrophic act will destroy the health insurance (flawed as it was) industry and the coverages itself. Most Americans will lose their insurance, will feel the pain of much higher premiums and in the end, will want to return to the flawed system of the past!

Conservative Tom

Artists Losing Healthcare Insurance Under Obamacare

Artists, photographers, writers, and other members of the "creative class" who have access to health insurance through many professional organizations will lose that coverage when Obamacare is implemented.

Professional organizations have offered reduced-rate insurance plans for their members, through insurance providers.

"But thanks to the fine print in the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, on January 1, 2014, many of these plans will fail to pass legal muster," The Weekly Standard reported.

One professional organization, the College Art Association — a 13,000-member group for practitioners and scholars in art, art history, and art criticism — posted this notice on its website: "The New York Life Insurance Company recently informed CAA that it will no longer offer catastrophic healthcare coverage previously available to CAA members."

The notice disclosed that it "is no longer an option" for "associations whose members reside in different states" to provide coverage.

Instead, members will have to seek coverage from their home state's new Obamacare exchanges.

The Entertainment Industry Group Insurance Trust's website stated: "All individual and/or Sole Proprietor Health Insurance will terminate January 1, 2014. This includes plans acquired as members of our Affiliated Associations and their groups."

Those associations include the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists, the Dramatists Guild, the Graphic Arts Guild, NY Women in Film and Television, and others.

In most cases, freelance artists, designers, and musicians forced to enter the state-run exchanges will see their insurance premiums rise, according to The Weekly Standard.

Ironically, Nancy Pelosi back in 2010 touted the benefits of Obamacare this way: "Think of an economy where people could be an artist or a photographer or a writer without worrying about keeping their day job in order to have health insurance."

The Weekly Standard notes: "Pelosi's vision of a world full of carefree artists, musicians, and writers is a mirage and becoming fainter the closer we get to January 1."

Arctic Ice Growing At Unprecedented Rates--More Evidence That Global Warming Is A Farce

Global Warming Warnings Called 'Gravely Flawed'

Six years ago, the BBC cited climate scientists in predicting that the Arctic would be ice-free in summer by 2013.

Instead, Arctic ice this August covered nearly a million more square miles of ocean than in August 2012 — an increase of 60 percent.

This has led Britain's Mail on Sunday to report: "Some eminent scientists now believe the world is heading for a period of cooling that will not end until the middle of the century — a process that would expose computer forecasts of imminent catastrophic warming as dangerously misleading."

The newspaper also asserted that global warming had paused since the beginning of 1997.

The pause is "important," the Mail stated, because predictions of ever-increasing global temperatures "have made many of the world's economies divert billions of pounds into 'green' measures to counter climate change. Those predictions now appear gravely flawed."

Arctic ice now extends from Canada's northern islands to Russia's northern shore, blocking the Northwest Passage, and more than 20 yachts that had planned to sail it from the Atlantic to the Pacific have been left ice-bound.

Professor Anastasios Tsonis of the University of Wisconsin, who has investigated ocean cycles, said: "We are already in a cooling trend, which I think will continue for the next 15 years at least. There is no doubt the warming of the 1980s and 1990s has stopped."

The Mail article, which has been criticized and even dismissed by some global warming proponents, points to evidence that Arctic ice levels are cyclical. There was a massive melt in the 1920s and 1930s, followed by an intense re-freeze that did not end until 1979 — the year the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says the shrinking of Arctic ice began.

If You Believe That Putin Is a Peacemaker--You Don't Understand Him--He's All In It For Himself

Putin the Peacemaker?

Steve Deace | Sep 14, 2013

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In the geo-political game of “Survivor” the former KGB agent pretending to be president has out-witted, out-lasted, and out-played the former community organizer pretending to be president.

As a result, the end-game of President Obama’s latest foreign policy folly is to allow the world’s most sophisticated gangster, Russian dictator Vladimir Putin, to go legit and perhaps bring his nation mired in a thugocracy since the fall of the Soviet Union back to global relevancy.

The Left has complained for more than a decade that it wasn’t fair for the United States to be the world’s lone superpower. Apparently they decided to finally do something about it.

It is Putin, every bit as morally flawed as Obama, who has finally been able to do what John McCain, Mitt Romney, John Boehner, Mitch McConnell, Karl Rove, and the “leadership” of the so-called opposition have either been unable or unwilling to do throughout two presidential campaigns and years of the worst recovery in American history—make Obama cry uncle.

It is Putin who has capitalized on the American people’s lack of trust for Obama’s leadership, not the Republican Party. If it were up to the leadership of the Republican Party, we’d still be plotting how to salvage Obama’s credibility by getting involved in a Syrian civil war between an Arab thugocracy and Jihadists. But the American people would have none of it, so now not even the Democrats are fully on board with Obama’s attempt to drag us into World War Syria.

It is Putin – who recently cast aside the bride of his youth for a trophy wife – that is perceived to be fighting back against those peddling moral depravity as the new normal, even refusing to permit homosexual propaganda in his schools. But does anybody really believe a dictator that presides over a nation of 700,000 divorces per year, has 30% more abortions than live births, and consumes $25 billion worth of pornography every year really cares about family values?

It is Putin who is assisting Iran, likely the leading terrorist state in the world, with its nuclear weapons program while promising to be Syria’s chemical weapons babysitter.

Let’s see…peace through strength, respecting the will of the people, traditional moral values…where have I heard all this before?

Putin has co-opted the American Exceptionalism playbook the Obama Regime’s army of progressives detests and has successfully turned it against us. And it’s all made possible by the disdain our ruling class elites in both major political parties have for the values, virtues, and traditions that made this the greatest country on Earth.

Putin has co-opted the very talking points we used to diminish the former Soviet Union he once served into a hot mess run by mobsters—with Putin himself serving as its dysfunctional Don Corleone. And he’s using the talking points that once made us the greatest nation on Earth, which our ruling class no longer believes, to reassert Russia’s dominance in the world again. He’s even channeling Thomas Jefferson in The New York Times: “We are all different, but when we ask for the Lord’s blessings, we must not forget that God created us equal.”

Using your opponent’s strengths against him is a classic chess move, and Putin is playing chess while our elites that support the Muslim Brotherhood and our“unbelievably small” attack strategy aren’t even playing checkers. They’re playingSorry, which is exactly what they are.

Putin is no hero. He’s an opportunist. At best he can be an untrustworthy temporary ally when there’s mutual self-interest. Make no mistake, raising his global prestige and influence is a bad idea. But that’s nothing new for an administration well-versed in leading from behind. When it’s all said and done, the sum total of the Obama era will be a stronger China, a stronger Muslim Brotherhood, now a stronger Russia, and a weaker United States.

But what do you expect from a president who touts the “holy Qur’an” in his first major foreign policy speech, believes the federal government has the power to make you do things that violate your moral conscience, uses the military to crack down on the worldview that founded the country, and counts the Muslim Brotherhood and Al-Qaeda among his allies.

When Putin is the man on the white horse riding in to save the day, it’s probably time to start looking for the four horsemen of the Apocalypse.

Freedom Of Religion --Muslim Style

Afghan Lawmaker: Christian Converts Must Die

A prominent lawmaker in Afghanistan is calling for the execution of Afghans who convert from Islam to Christianity.

Mohabat News, an Iranian Christian news agency, reported that Nazir Ahmad Hanafi, head of the Afghan parliament's Legislative Commission, said: "Afghani citizens continue to convert to Christianity in India. Numerous Afghanis have become Christians in India. This is an offense to Islamic law and according to the Koran, they need to be executed."

Thousands of Afghan refugees have fled to India, and a small congregation of Christian converts meets in New Delhi, according to CNS News.

Another Afghan lawmaker, Abdul Sattar Khawasi, reportedly has demanded that the Afghan government pressure Indian authorities to provide the names of Afghans who have converted to Christianity so that the Afghan government can arrest and punish them if they return home.

And Afghan lawmaker Abdul Latif Pedram has blamed the increase in conversions on the presence of American forces in the country. According to Mohabat, he said: "The United States' long-term plan is to attack Afghan culture. Converting Afghan citizens serves that purpose."

Barnabas Fund, a charity that supports Christians in Islamic nations, reported: "For 10 consecutive nights at the end of August, two TV channels broadcast photos of the leader of the Afghan church in Delhi, calling for him to be executed."

A U.S. State Department report disclosed that while there are five Hindu temples and 13 Sikh places of worship in Afghanistan, there are no Christian churches or schools.

The report stated: "Under some interpretations of Islamic law, converting from Islam to another religion is deemed apostasy and considered an egregious crime. Male citizens over age 18 or female citizens over age 16 of sound mind who convert from Islam have three days to recant their conversions or possibly face death by stoning."

Christians are also under fire in Egypt. The Muslim Brotherhood and its supporters have begun forcing the 15,000 or so Coptic Christians in the village of Dalga to pay a "jizya" tax, the Washington Times reported.

Jizya is the tribute "that conquered non-Muslims historically have to pay their Islamic overlords," a source explained.

The tribute ranges from 200 Egyptian pounds a day (about $29) to 500 pounds a day.

And in Syria, Islamist rebels invaded a Christian man's shop "and gave him three options," according to the Christian Science Monitor. "Become a Muslim, pay $70,000 as a jizya tax, or be killed along with his family."