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Gun Control: You can't trust John McCain or his BFF Lindsey Graham
Immigration Bill: ANOTHER 1500-PAGE BILL NOBODY WILL READ BEFORE THEY SIGN -- NO AMENDMENTS ALLOWED?
SCARY COMMUNIST TALK FROM MSNBC HOST MELISSA HARRIS-PERRY -- YOUR CHILDREN BELONG TO THE COMMUNITY
Barack Obama, John Kerry and the Liberals being played by Iran and North Korea? Futility of a proportional response?
Gun Control: You can't trust John McCain or his BFF Lindsey Graham
Posted: 08 Apr 2013 11:00 PM PDT
First, let’s get something out of the way. John McCain should be thanked for his service to his country. But, he was no hero. The claim that he waited his turn to be released from captivity is negated by claims that he was a North Vietnamese collaborator and that he, single-handedly stopped the United States from officially inquiring into MIAs – by shutting down public access to the records of returning veterans who may have had knowledge of Americans who were left behind.

Second, historically, John McCain was an aisle hopper who was associated with some of the most spectacularly flawed legislation man has ever created. McCain-Feingold Campaign Finance Reform whose unintended consequences allowed even more money shenanigans than ever before. McCain-Kennedy Comprehensive Immigration Reform which proposed to legalize that which was illegal and declare the financial, social, medical, and cultural problem solved. Then there was McCain-Lieberman Climate Control which purported to fix a non-existent problem and bankrupt the United States. In each instance, pushing the democrat socialist agenda forward without benefit to his own party. I shouldn’t really say no benefits, as there was money aplenty for all of the corrupt politicians used to dipping their wicks into the public’s pocket.

And now we find John McCain claiming, “I Don’t Understand Filibustering Gun Control …

John McCain: “I Don’t Understand Filibustering Gun Control”

Senator John McCain (R-AZ) once again demonstrated why he should be on his way out when he is up for re-election. On CBS’ Face the Nation on Sunday, McCain expressed bewilderment over the proposed filibuster by Senators Paul, Cruz and Lee over Harry Reid’s gun control legislation. “I don’t understand it,” McCain said. “The purpose of the United States Senate is to debate and to vote and to let the people know where we stand.” “I don’t understand why United States senators want to block debate when the leaders said we could have amendments,” McCain said.

Perhaps John McCain does not understand what is at stake …

It should only take a few moments to review the core concept of the Second Amendment.

The purpose of the Second Amendment is to insure that man’s right of self-defense as well as to combat government tyranny.
This is the Amendment that guarantees that the Constitution will remain the supreme law of the land when it comes to restricting the federal government from granting itself unrestricted powers and imposing laws that would restrict American freedoms.
The Constitution was not designed to empower the federal government, but to restrict its actions – leaving all of the rights not specifically enumerated to the states or to “We the People.”
Perhaps we should look at the context it which the Second Amendment was written by considering the words of Thomas Jefferson …

“The democracy will cease to exist when you take away from those who are willing to work and give to those who would not.”

“When governments fear the people, there is liberty. When the people fear the government, there is tyranny. The strongest reason for the people to retain the right to keep and bear arms is, as a last resort, to protect themselves against tyranny in government.”

We are dangerously close to the first condition where President Obama and his fellow travelers in Congress are unconstitutionally engaging in wealth redistribution. Taking money from Americans and giving it to foreign nations without any tangible benefits to ordinary Americans. Paying off nations to accept a presidential photo-op is not a prudent use of our tax dollars. Neither is arming terrorists who hate the United States is some perverted war over petro-dollars. Especially when the multi-national oil companies and their bought-and-paid-for politicians have deliberately denied us energy independence and made America more vulnerable. Here in California, one can find no better example of how this malevolent condition is succeeding under democrat control.

As for the second statement, we are finding more and more Americans becoming afraid of their government. Of the outrageous abuse of power by government bureaucracies – sometimes pursuing issues that make absolutely no sense.

Bottom line …

John McCain and his BFF Lindsey Graham are tools. Tools of a corrupt political system. Tools of a corrupt socialist ideology. And, just because McCain was unfortunate enough to be shot down over Viet Nam and survive a prison camp, we should not accord him honors as a hero – as an ordinary soldier, certainly – but not as a hero or one who is enlightened or morally superior to anyone else.

I am afraid of John McCain. He does not appear to be a man of the people and acting for the people. He appears to be a wealthy, privileged members of an old club that is trying to centrally plan the world.

-- steve

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Immigration Bill: ANOTHER 1500-PAGE BILL NOBODY WILL READ BEFORE THEY SIGN -- NO AMENDMENTS ALLOWED?
Posted: 08 Apr 2013 06:41 PM PDT
The word is coming down, the proposed immigration bill will be at least 1,500 pages long, cede unprecedented power to the Secretary of DHS – as if she did not already control much of the Administration – and be offered with no opportunity for amendments.

This omnibus legislation in reminiscent of Obamacare and Dodd-Frank – massive bills that nobody read or understood before they voted in favor of incomplete, incomprehensible legislation that greatly extended the powers of the executive branch agencies, while minimizing congressional powers.

Bottom line …

BOHICA: Bend Over Here It Comes Again!

Another fast one pulled by the corrupt socialist democrats and their equally corrupt republicans who are more interested in gaining the Hispanic vote than they are caring for our nation’s safety and security. It is believed, by me and others, that this bill will be so fouled-up that the republicans may withhold their vote and then be demonized by the democrats in the 2014 congressional race.

And, the stupid republicans have no plan or public relations campaign to tell the truth to the American public --- only grabbing money for the upcoming elections based on individuals.

-- steve

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SCARY COMMUNIST TALK FROM MSNBC HOST MELISSA HARRIS-PERRY -- YOUR CHILDREN BELONG TO THE COMMUNITY
Posted: 08 Apr 2013 01:41 PM PDT
We have never invested as much in public education as we should have, because we always had sort of a private notion of children. Your kid is yours and totally your responsibility. We haven’t had a very collective notion of these are our children. So part of it is we have to break through our kind of private idea that kids belong to their parents. Or kids belong to their families. And recognize that kids belong to whole communities. Once it is everybody’s responsibility, and not just the household’s, then we start making better investments.

In her own words …

Bottom line …

The idea that individuals are unexceptional population units and must be directed by an enlightened ruling elite for the benefit of the collective is pure communism. As is, the idea that children belong to the state, to be educated by the state, and for the state to dictate their future.

We have always known MSNBC to be a radical left propaganda machine, but it appears that they are starting to broadcast the very rhetoric used by communists and totalitarian regimes.

Unfortunately, with much of our unthinking, uncritical and “go along to get along” public, this is one of those red flags (pardon the pun) that serves as notice that the progressives, liberals, democrats, socialists and communists – or whatever they brand themselves to avoid instant negative connotations and associations – is becoming a clear and present danger to America and her citizens.

The real trouble lies with the endless repetition of this message until it ingrained in our “collective” subconscious, so that it becomes an accepted part of conscious culture – and no longer an outlandish and unacceptable idea.

The truth about public education is that it is not only controlled by socialist unions who fete seniority over merit, the status quo over innovation, the concept of an inviolate lifetime right to a job and benefits, onerous work rules which prevent a parent-volunteer from participating in any act performed by a “classified” school employee, and no accountability for malfeasance or wrongdoing -- but the proof that these incompetent ideologues are educating our children is not present. More and more children are being graduated, if the graduate at all, as functional illiterates – tied to calculators and “cut and paste” computers to be able to perform any task.

There is no constitutional right for the federal government to interfere in education. And if it were not for the coercion of providing taxpayer money to states and local municipalities, the federal government would have zero power over what is essentially a local affair. Even today, when the elements of basic education are well-known, there is no core curricula, no basic achievement standards and textbooks containing “old” information are outrageously priced. It’s not about the children, it’s about the adults – money and power.

And, as we have recently seen, even when standarded tests exists, those in charge of the children CHEAT!

The 35 Atlanta public school employees charged in a testing scandal have been released from jail and are awaiting their first appearance in court. They are accused of running a conspiracy in which they changed students’ answers on standardized tests in order to be paid performance bonuses. By Wednesday evening, a day after they were ordered to surrender at the Fulton County Jail, all the defendants had posted bond and been released. Defense lawyers said they are asking the district attorney, Paul L. Howard Jr., to hold trials before multiple juries. They said there is no courtroom in the county large enough to accommodate 35 defendants, lawyers and family members.

Your children are yours and your responsibility. To cede additional power to the local, state or federal government is to abrogate your rights as parents and to accept that the tenets of communism are acceptable.

-- steve

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Barack Obama, John Kerry and the Liberals being played by Iran and North Korea? Futility of a proportional response?
Posted: 08 Apr 2013 12:29 PM PDT
Is this an Iranian ploy to buy more time for their nuclear adventures?

What is the probability that North Korea is playing the United States in order to allow Iran to complete its nuclear weapons works and that any nuclear test in North Korea is actually a test of the Iranian weapon itself, after which Iran will announce that they are now a nuclear state? Because of the number of Iranians in Southern California an the continuing travel between the two countries, it seems that the United States should have better intelligence sources in Iran than in North Korea. And, because of the number of workers crossing the South Korean/North Korean border, one might suspect that there are intelligence moles on both sides of the 38th parallel. So what is the real story?

And, what’s up with a “proportional response?”

Proportional responses were designed by weak powers who are trying to demonstrate to their own citizens that they are “tough” even though they are afraid of provoking a much larger conflict. It appears to me that proportional responses against a country that considers its citizens as unexceptional and bothersome chattel, like North Korea, or cares not a whit for its citizens like the Muslim countries where it is a blessed event to die in the cause of Allah, is just another sign of weakness. You may have a designated military target – and you destroy it completely and thoroughly. If the other side attacks a civilian population center, you respond by destroying two of their cities, completely and thoroughly. The ancient Roman approach to warfare that stops aggression quickly. The trick is not to appear tough, it is to be tough.

From the New York Times …

U.S. Designs a Korea Response Proportional to the Provocation

As North Korea hints at new military provocations in the coming days, the United States and South Korea have drawn up plans to respond more forcefully than in the recent past, but in a limited way intended to prevent an escalation to broader war.

Amid the rising tensions, there were still efforts on many fronts on Sunday to limit the possibility of military conflict. In an indirect but clear criticism of China’s longtime ally, North Korea, Xi Jinping, China’s new president, said in a speech on Sunday that no country in Asia “should be allowed to throw a region and even the whole world into chaos for selfish gain.”

A senior adviser to President Obama, Dan Pfeiffer, appearing on the ABC program “This Week,” played down the situation as “a pattern of behavior we’ve seen from the North Koreans many times.”

Still, the escalating tensions were underscored Sunday when the commander of American forces on the Korean Peninsula, Gen. James D. Thurman, abruptly canceled a trip to Washington for Congressional testimony and consultations. So did South Korea’s top commander. Source: U.S. and South Korea Devise Plan to Counter North - NYTimes.com

Bottom line …

Let us hope that our nation is not being unduly crippled by the democrats, as it was during Carter whose ineptness brought about Islamo-fascism and jihad, and Clinton who bombed an aspirin factory as a show of force. With foreign policy experts like Joe Biden and John Kerry, perhaps we will mimic France and surrender to North Korean demands in a staggering show of appeasement. Of course, I am not certain that Barack Obama, with his pro-Muslim/anti-Israel sentiments does not mind a nuclear-armed Iran as a counter to Israel’s weapons base. Even though co-conspirator jihadist Saudi Arabia is terrified of a nuclear Iran.

-- steve

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The Hygiene Hypothesis: Exploring the Connection Between Allergies and an Agrarian Lifestyle

Here's a look at the latest science on what leads to a healthy immune system.
By Megan E. Phelps
March/April 2013
Studies have shown that children who grow up on farms have fewer allergies than those who don't.
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Whether we’re aware of it or not, many of us are living with immune systems that are slightly out of whack—and, incidentally, making us feel miserable. Take allergies, for example. If you’re an allergy sufferer, you have a lot of company. Maybe it’s pollen that makes your nose twitch, or maybe you—or your child—have a nut allergy that threatens to send you to the emergency room if you accidentally eat something that contains the slightest trace of peanuts. An allergy is the product of an overactive immune system—the body’s natural defenses against infection mobilized against harmless foreign particles.

Asthma is another form of allergic disease, and has its own serious consequences. Like allergies, it often develops in childhood and can be treated, but not cured. And then there are autoimmune diseases—less common but often more debilitating than allergic diseases—including conditions such as lupus and multiple sclerosis. These diseases are caused when the immune system starts attacking the body itself.

Both allergic and autoimmune diseases are on the rise in the United States, and researchers have been working to understand why. In fact, there’s a pretty solid theory about what’s going on. It’s called the “hygiene hypothesis,” and it helps explain a curious fact that has been documented by recent research: You’re less likely to develop allergies and asthma if you grow up on a farm.

Documenting The Farm Effect

I started my research by calling Mark Holbreich, an allergist who has worked in Indiana since 1987. Both he and his wife are physicians, and several years ago, they began to treat people within the local Amish community, many of whom did not have easy access to medical care. But Holbreich quickly realized there was relatively little need for his services among the Amish. They had surprisingly low rates of allergy—even many of the people who came to him for treatment turned out to have other conditions, not allergic diseases.

As it turned out, a similar phenomenon had already been documented in Europe. “Around 2002, the first literature appeared in a German study that coined the term ‘the farm effect,’” Holbreich says. The researchers were looking at asthma and allergy rates among farming families, and found that those who worked in barns around large livestock were less likely to have these conditions. “When that article came out, I said, ‘Gee, that sounds like the Amish.’ And in 2010, I began a collaboration with German researchers,” Holbreich says. The resulting article was published in 2012 in the Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology.

The European study subjects lived in rural parts of Switzerland, and the Amish community in Indiana was living a similar agrarian lifestyle. “We decided to do a study looking at how common allergies were in these children,” Holbreich says. “We weren’t looking necessarily for illness, but for a positive skin test, what we call allergic sensitization.” If you test children in the general population for allergies, about 50 percent will have at least one positive skin test. “In the Swiss farm children, it was about 25 percent; in the Amish children, it was about 7 percent,” Holbreich says. That’s a huge difference—so now the question was, why?

To Holbreich and the other researchers, three protective factors stood out: “First, when the mothers are pregnant they spend time around large animals like cows,” he says. “Second, the children are in the barn at a very early age; and third, the children drink raw, unpasteurized milk.”

Before we go any further, Holbreich wants to be clear that he doesn’t recommend drinking raw milk. “For children and pregnant women, raw milk presents a large risk,” he says. Drinking unpasteurized milk could potentially expose people to dangerous pathogens.

It also seems unlikely that you could get the same effect just by the occasional visit to a farm. After all, the studies in Switzerland were comparing farm kids not to urban dwellers but to other rural children. “I think it’s the whole picture: living on a farm, being pregnant on a farm,” Holbreich says.

In fact, there aren’t many actions we can take right this minute based on research on the farm effect. But it does give us a better idea of how our immune systems work—or why they might not be working—and points us toward therapies that might solve those problems.

This research also helps illuminate the theory about immunity called the hygiene hypothesis. For more information on that area of research, Holbreich recommended I talk to Dr. Andy Liu at National Jewish Health, a Denver hospital and research center that specializes in respiratory diseases. He also mentioned a book that was recently published on this topic, An Epidemic of Absence, by Moises Valasquez-Manoff, which focuses not just on allergic conditions, but also autoimmune diseases.

Why We Need Microbes

When I called Liu to talk about the farm effect studies, he explained that these ideas are not as new as we might think. “People have been thinking about it almost since allergy was discovered 150 or so years ago,” he says. “You can see when people are writing about it they’re asking, ‘Why is it happening to these people who are living in cities and with educated backgrounds, and not happening to farmers or not happening to the poor?’”

It may seem counterintuitive that wealthier people would be the ones getting sicker, but that’s exactly the trend with allergies and asthma. It’s happened in many other countries, Liu explains: As average incomes rise, so do the rates of asthma and allergies.

“Some people think the roots of it are in public or personal hygiene. That’s where the term hygiene hypothesis comes from,” Liu says. This line of thinking suggests that improved sanitation around the early 1900s meant that people encountered fewer germs. While on the whole, improvements such as cleaner drinking water had major benefits for public health, there may also have been some unintended effects. It seems that early exposure to various microbes may actually help us develop healthy immune systems that stay with us for the rest of our lives. “With the hygiene hypothesis, it’s about the immune system and its period of learning,” Liu says.

Specifically, the hygiene hypothesis considers how the immune system learns to regulate itself, how it learns when to launch a full-scale assault against infection and when to calm down because those defenses aren’t needed. “Without the development of that appropriate regulation you see the immune system going after things that it shouldn’t necessarily go after,” Liu says. For example, with hay fever, the symptoms are caused by an overactive immune system attacking pollen as though it were an infectious agent.

The idea that our immune systems seem to have a critical period of learning shouldn’t be surprising, Liu says, because we see it in other areas of development. “It happens with the brain, too—with infants. When they don’t receive stimulation, they fail to thrive.”

How exactly this works is still unfolding, but exposures early in life, including in the womb, seem to be important. There’s also some question of whether it’s simply that we are exposed to microbes that matters, or if there are specific protective microbes. Or both. In any case, farms are a great place to study this. “The farms are rich in microbial environments,” Liu says. “A lot of it seems to be related to animals or to the other people we’re around. To the extent that we can quantify microbial burdens, it’s much higher in farm homes.” You also find richer microbial environments in homes with pets or many young children.

Some of the broader implications of the hygiene hypothesis relate to all kinds of immune dysfunction—not only allergies and asthma, but also autoimmune diseases. But so far, most of the research focuses on allergies and asthma because they are more widespread. “Autoimmunity is so much less prevalent that it’s hard to do population studies,” Liu says. “If you think of the most common autoimmune conditions, you need maybe a hundred times more people to show the same effect compared to allergies.”

On the more extreme end of the spectrum, researchers are experimenting with some really interesting treatments related to the hygiene hypothesis. It’s not just microbes that researchers are examining, but also parasites. That may sound far out, but Liu points me to a clinical study in which a type of pig whipworm is being tested as a treatment for Crohn’s disease, an autoimmune disorder. But more about parasites in a minute.

We Didn’t Evolve for an Urban Environment

Finally, I spoke to Moises Valasquez-Manoff, author of An Epidemic of Absence: A New Way of Understanding Allergies and Autoimmune Diseases. The title points to the underlying idea: It’s not so much what we’re exposed to that’s causing these diseases, it’s the conditions we evolved with that are now missing. As a result, “The immune system is missing critical input, or at least that’s what the theories sort of predict,” Valasquez-Manoff says.

He’s done an immense amount of research for the book, and I wanted to ask something that had been nagging me: Why are we sure it’s not cleaner farm air that’s leading to lower rates of asthma and allergies? Surely these conditions are tied to air pollution? Well, for quite a few reasons, he explains.

“One way to think about the pollution question is simply to look at the epidemiology. At least in terms of airborne pollution, if you were to graph asthma and pollution, the graphs are inverse of each other,” he says. After the Clean Air Act in the 1970s, air pollution in the United States started to decline. At the same time, asthma rates were shooting up. Studies have also been done in East and West Germany. Before the wall fell, East Germany was much more polluted, but it also had lower rates of asthma and allergies than West Germany. “Now, each new generation is more allergic than the previous one in the East.”

Plus, there were the original farm effect studies in Switzerland. “Those studies were in pristine areas of the Alps, where there was no pollution.” Regardless, the researchers found that farm kids had much lower rates of allergy and asthma compared with their rural neighbors, all of whom were breathing exceptionally clean air.

That’s not to say that air pollution doesn’t have an effect on allergies and asthma. “I think we should unwed ourselves from the idea that there’s only one cause for everything,” Valasquez-Manoff says. “And I’m not going to say that breathing car exhaust every day is good for you. But in terms of the greater trend, I think there’s something else going on that’s more biological.”

With the farm effect studies, the low rates of allergies and asthma for farm-raised people appears to point to exposure to microbes, whereas the increase in allergic and autoimmune disease for Americans relates to lack of exposure. Most of us simply aren’t in daily contact with the kinds of microbes our ancestors lived with for thousands of years. People who live on small farms often are. “You think about this in an evolutionary context and you realize that the sort of environment we evolved in much more resembles a Bavarian cowshed than it does a modern apartment in New York or San Francisco,” Valasquez-Manoff says.

And while we’re on the topic, there’s something else that’s missing from many of our lives: parasites. It’s probably not just microbes teaching our immune systems how to regulate themselves. Quite a bit of evidence points out that parasites do the same thing—and have done so for the thousands of years that our ancestors lived with many kinds of worms. Valasquez-Manoff, in fact, infected himself with hookworms as a part of the research for his book because it’s an underground treatment for some autoimmune conditions.

Of course, no one recommends hookworm infection as an allergy treatment. And in research on the farm effect, all the evidence points more strongly toward beneficial microbes (which, fortunately, means that any therapies that come out of that research are likely to be a lot less disturbing).

“Maybe it is just really going to be a probiotic,” Valasquez-Manoff says. Or maybe it will be as simple as drinking milk. Researchers are looking closely at raw milk, and what it is that seems to be offering protection against allergies and asthma. “Whatever it is, we all drink milk, and if you can just preserve it in regular milk, it’s a very easy intervention,” Valasquez-Manoff says. What if we found a new technique for sanitizing milk that improves upon pasteurization? We might be able to destroy the pathogens while preserving whatever it is that’s beneficial. Or the solution could be as simple as adding beneficial compounds to milk in the same way we add vitamin D. “Can you imagine?” Valasquez-Manoff asks. “It would be incredible.”

Allergy Statistics

■ In 2001, one out of 14 people in the United States had asthma. By 2009, it had increased to one in 12.

■ Between 4 and 6 percent of children in the United States have food allergies. This rate increased by 18 percent between 1997 and 2007.

■ 90 percent of food allergy reactions come from the following eight types of food: cow’s milk, eggs, peanuts, tree nuts, fish, shellfish, soybeans and wheat.

■ 18 million adults in the United States (about 8 percent of the population) have hay fever; 7 million children (9.5 percent) have hay fever.

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Pray for another Thatcher or Reagan to save US!

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Oops si...........Me bad but Camel so good.....yum!

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