.
About the only time we
hear from the president now is when he attends another fund raiser, has rock,
pop and blues stars for personal concerts in the White House, or has to
apologize for something someone in his vast administration did or said.
Why does the White House
cost keep going up, now $1.4 billion a year, when very little is being done by
our elected officials? I bet things
would happen a lot faster if we stopped Beyonce from playing for the first
family in the White House or withheld checks to Congressmen until they passed a
budget and some meaningful laws.
When it comes to the
performance of our elected officials including the president, his cabinet, and
both the House and Senate, molasses would be the odds on favorite to beat them all
in a sprint to the finish line. Nothing
gets finished in Washington,
D.C. and it doesn't matter if you
are Democrat, Republican, Catholic or Prostitute or any other ingredient of our
vast melting pot.
I, for one, favor turning
over the government to different groups and give them a chance to mess it up
for a while. Could they do any worse
than what we have? Our new set of political
standards in America
have reached such a new low that it really should not matter what background
our temporary government members bring to their office.
If we rotated our
political leaders every six months or so they wouldn't have time to arrange for
kickbacks, payoffs, and all the other forms of corruption and ethics violations
currently found in government.
Since these temporary
politicians did not come up through the election process but were appointed,
then they haven't sold their souls to the financial demons that control the
economy, government, wars, health care, energy, education and international
relations, meaning international trade and the flow of cash it represents.
It would be the first
government administration in a very long time that came with "no strings
attached." Campaign financing is
one of the top three most corrupt of all ways to manipulate and leverage money,
along with health care, wars, energy resources, frivolous lawsuits, alienation
and discrimination. Oh my, that is seven
not three ways.
Obama Kills Osama declares Al-Qaeda on the run.
Too
bad our president didn't get Man of the
Year from the National Rifle
Association after he led the Navy Seal raid in Pakistan
that killed Osama Bin Laden, mastermind of the World Trade
Center terrorist attack.
At
the time the news media was aglow with praise for our commander-in-chief for
dealing a devastating blow to Al Qaeda, the terrorist network founded by
Osama. It was only a matter of time
before they would become extinct.
That
NRA plaque would look great next to Obama's Nobel Peace prize awarded before he
even had a chance to brush the confetti off his tux from his first
inauguration.
Here is a
timeline for the few things that actually happened since Barack Obama became
president.
Barack Obama Presidential Timetable
January
20, 2009 - Obama first inauguration
January
20, 2009 - Beyonce performs at President's Inauguration
October 9, 2009
- Obama wins Nobel Peace prize
August 2010 -
Obama completes troop buildup in Afghanistan
May 2, 2011 -
Obama kills Osama
December 18,
2011 - Last US troops leave Iraq
September 11,
2012 - American diplomatic mission at Benghazi, Libya, attacked by
Al Qaeda - US Ambassador one of four Americans murdered.
July 22, 2013 -
Al Qaeda attacks Iraq
prisons, frees 500 terrorists.
You get the idea. Not much for prosperity or the history books.
Sunni and Shiite Islam Muslims
continue their war of extermination against each other. With the Shiite in control of Iraq and Iran while the Sunni and Al Qaeda represent
most of the Arab world, there is no end in sight for the sectarian bloodshed.
The following is the NBC News report on the prison attack.
By Richard Engel, Chief Foreign Correspondent, NBC
News
Al Qaeda-linked militants have claimed
responsibility for Monday’s assault on Iraq’s
Abu Ghraib jail, which freed some of the terror network's top leaders amid U.S. fears that
the country is back in civil war.
Checkpoints were set up Tuesday as the search
continued for up to 500 militants freed by the attack, which followed the
deaths of 250 Iraqis in 10 days of violence.
The Islamic State of Iraq
and the Levant, which was formed earlier this year through a merger between al
Qaeda's affiliates in Syria
and Iraq,
said in a statement that it was behind the storming of the jail late on Sunday
night.
The attack began when suicide bombers smashed
explosives-laden cars into the prison’s front gate, while gunmen attacked
guards with rocket-propelled grenades.
As fighters held off reinforcements outside, other
militants, some wearing suicide vests, stormed into the prison and freed the
convicts.
“Most of them were convicted senior members of al
Qaeda and had received death sentences," Hakim Al-Zamili, a senior member
of the security and defense committee in parliament, told Reuters.
"The security forces arrested some of them,
but the rest are still free," Hakim Al-Zamili said.
The group also said it was behind a second, almost
simultaneous assault on Taji Jail, to the north of city. But Iraqi authorities
said those attackers had been fought off with a couple of helicopters.
They added that checkpoints had been set up around
Abu Ghraib, as the search for the escapees continued.
Both attacks took place exactly a year after The
Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant's most senior leader, Sheikh Abu Bakr
al-Baghdadi, launched a campaign dubbed "Breaking the Walls" to make
freeing imprisoned members a top priority.
“The mujahideen brigades set off after months of
preparation and planning to target two of the biggest prisons of the Safavid
government," the group said in the statement, Tuesday.
Safavid is used by hardline Sunnis as a derogatory
term for Shiite Muslims and refers to the dynasty that ruled Iran from the
16th to 18th centuries.
Abu Ghraib gained notoriety because of abuses
carried out by U.S.
personnel while the country was under occupation following the removal of
Saddam Hussein.
The prison assaults followed a violent 10 days in
the country, which has seen 250 killed by car bombs, ambushes and gun fights,
according to violence monitoring group Iraq Body Count.
The spiral of violence has led U.S. officials to warn that the country is
sliding back into civil war, undoing the work achieved by the 'surge' of U.S. troops.
NBC News' Henry Austin and Reuters contributed to
this report.
So what exactly is the difference between the
Shiite and Sunni Moslems? Here is what
the staff at the History Channel had to say about the difference.
The Islam religion was founded by Mohammed in the
seventh century. In 622 he founded the first Islamic state, a theocracy in Medina, a city in western Saudi
Arabia located north of Mecca. There are two branches of the religion
he founded.
The Sunni branch believes that the first four
caliphs--Mohammed's successors--rightfully took his place as the leaders of
Muslims. They recognize the heirs of the four caliphs as legitimate religious
leaders. These heirs ruled continuously in the Arab world until the break-up of
the Ottoman Empire following the end of the
First World War.
Shiites, in contrast, believe that only the heirs of
the fourth caliph, Ali, are the legitimate successors of Mohammed. In 931 the
Twelfth Imam disappeared. This was a seminal event in the history of Shiite
Muslims. According to R. Scott Appleby, a professor of history at the University of Notre Dame, "Shiite
Muslims, who are concentrated in Iran,
Iraq, and Lebanon,
[believe they] had suffered the loss of divinely guided political
leadership" at the time of the Imam's disappearance. Not "until the
ascendancy of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini in 1978" did they believe that
they had once again begun to live under the authority of a legitimate religious
figure.
Another difference between Sunnis and Shiites has
to do with the Mahdi, “the rightly-guided one” whose role is to bring a just
global caliphate into being. As historian Timothy Furnish has written, "The
major difference is that for Shi`is he has already been here, and will return
from hiding; for Sunnis he has yet to emerge into history: a comeback v. a
coming out, if you will."
In a special 9-11 edition of the Journal of
American History, Appleby explained that the Shiite outlook is far different
from the Sunni's, a difference that is highly significant:
... for Sunni Muslims, approximately 90 percent of
the Muslim world, the loss of the caliphate after World War I was devastating
in light of the hitherto continuous historic presence of the caliph, the
guardian of Islamic law and the Islamic state. Sunni fundamentalist leaders
thereafter emerged in nations such as Egypt and India, where contact with
Western political structures provided them with a model awkwardly to imitate
... as they struggled after 1924 to provide a viable alternative to the
caliphate.
In 1928, four years after the abolishment of the
caliphate, the Egyptian schoolteacher Hasan al-Banna founded the first Islamic
fundamentalist movement in the Sunni world, the Muslim Brotherhood (al-Ikhwan
al-Muslimun). Al-Banna was appalled by"the wave of atheism and lewdness
[that] engulfed Egypt"
following World War I. The victorious Europeans had "imported their
half-naked women into these regions, together with their liquors, their
theatres, their dance halls, their amusements, their stories, their newspapers,
their novels, their whims, their silly games, and their vices." Suddenly
the very heart of the Islamic world was penetrated by European"schools and
scientific and cultural institutes" that" cast doubt and heresy into
the souls of its sons and taught them how to demean themselves, disparage their
religion and their fatherland, divest themselves of their traditions and
beliefs, and to regard as sacred anything Western."14 Most distressing to
al-Banna and his followers was what they saw as the rapid moral decline of the
religious establishment, including the leading sheikhs, or religious scholars,
at Al-Azhar, the grand mosque and center of Islamic learning in Cairo. The clerical
leaders had become compromised and corrupted by their alliance with the
indigenous ruling elites who had succeeded the European colonial masters.
Osama bin Laden is a Sunni Muslim. To him the end
of the reign of the caliphs in the 1920s was catastrophic, as he made clear in
a videotape made after 9-11. On the tape, broadcast by Al-Jazeera on October 7,
2001, he proclaimed: "What America
is tasting now is only a copy of what we have tasted. ... Our Islamic nation
has been tasting the same for more [than] eighty years, of humiliation and
disgrace, its sons killed and their blood spilled, its sanctities
desecrated."
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