Monthly Archives: December 2010

Isaiah 59: 1-2—Behold, Yahweh’s hand is not so short that it cannot save; nor is His ear so dull that it cannot hear. But your iniquities have made a separation between you and your God, and your sins have hidden His face from you so that He does not hear.

Old Posts

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Jeremiah 12: 14-17:

Thus says Yahweh concerning all My wicked neighbors who strike at the inheritance with which I have endowed My people Israel, “Behold I am about to uproot them from their land and will uproot the house of Judah from among them.  And it will come about that after I have uprooted them, I will again have compassion on them; and I will bring them back, each one to his inheritance and each one to his land.  Then if they will really learn the ways of My people, to swear by My name, ‘As Yahweh lives,’ even as they taught My people to swear by Baal, they will be built up in the midst of My people.  But if they will not listen, then I will uproot that nation, uproot and destroy it,” declares Yahweh. (Jeremiah 12: 14-17)

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“For here we are not afraid to follow the truth wherever it may lead, nor to tolerate any error so long as reason is left free to combat it.” (Thomas Jefferson)

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  • Read SnyderTalk the way you would a newspaper.
  • Scan the headlines and read the articles that interest you.
  • Be sure to check out the pages in the column on the right.

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SnyderTalk.com YouTube Channel:

I post SnyderTalk video commentaries on the SnyderTalk.com YouTube Channel.  Yahweh is the primary focus of the commentaries, but from time-to-time I talk about important social and public policy issues.  You can see every SnyderTalk video commentary 24/7 in the column on the right under Pages.  The commentaries are listed by the date they were posted on YouTube.

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Isaiah 59: 1-2—Behold, Yahweh’s hand is not so short that it cannot save; nor is His ear so dull that it cannot hear.  But your iniquities have made a separation between you and your God, and your sins have hidden His face from you so that He does not hear.

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“My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge.” (Hosea 4: 6)

News Items of Interest:

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Israeli Uncensored News

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“We have the greatest opportunity the world has ever seen, as long as we remain honest – which will be as long as we can keep the attention of our people alive. If they once become inattentive to public affairs, you and I, and Congress and Assemblies, judges and governors would all become wolves.” (Thomas Jefferson)

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On Sunday thousands of Israel haters gathered in Istanbul to welcome the Turkish-Hamas terror ship Mavi Marmara to the harbor. Festooned with Palestinian flags, the crowd chanted “Death to Israel,” “Down with Israel” and “Allah akbar” with Hizbullah-like enthusiasm.

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Could mothers be putting their children on a path toward obesity from the very first days of their lives?

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Last week, I wrote about the result of “elections” in Belarus: Having failed to achieve a majority, President Alexander Lukashenko beat up the other candidates, arrested journalists and falsified poll results to take power. Belarus’s transition from communism to democracy has not merely failed: It has never taken place at all.

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In his op-ed on Sunday, former secretary of state Henry Kissinger apologized for “undoubtedly offensive” comments he made 37 years ago about the fate of Soviet Jews, remarks that recently came to light with the release of tapes by the Nixon presidential library. But in trying to explain the historical context of his words, Kissinger presented a dismissive view of the Soviet Jewry movement as an ineffective irritant. This distorts the important role it played in the Cold War.

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It’s been not quite two months since Republicans won a sweeping midterm victory, and already they seem divided, embattled and – not to mince words – freaked out. For good reason, I might add.

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The main achievements of the lame-duck session of Congress were reminders of what might have been. President Obama gave something to get something. To secure a second stimulus, he accepted Republican economic methods. To pass the New START treaty, Obama offered assurances to Republican senators on nuclear modernization and missile defense. Contrast this with health-care reform, imposed in party-line maneuvers that left an aftertaste of ideological radicalism.

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PRESIDENT OBAMA has lavished attention on Russian President Dmitry Medvedev at the expense of Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, on the theory that Mr. Medvedev might break with the corrupt authoritarianism that Mr. Putin brought to the Kremlin. On Monday a huge blow to that policy was delivered in a monotone by a Moscow judge, who devoted more than seven hours to reading out a guilty verdict in the most important political trial of Russia’s post-Soviet history.

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AS 2010 DRAWS to a close, things are looking up for the U.S. economy. Economists have raised their growth forecasts for 2011, in part because of the tax deal between President Obama and Senate Republicans. The long-term outlook still depends on the federal and state government debt burden. Then there’s the threat from across the Atlantic. The 27-member European Union constitutes the United States’ largest trading partner. But for almost a year now, the E.U. has been in the grip of a currency crisis that threatens growth and stability across the continent – and possibly beyond.

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Jack Riley left El Paso, Texas, to become the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration’s top man in Chicago. Even though he’s 1,500 miles from the border now, Mexico’s war against drug cartels still matters to him. It should matter to all of us. More than 90 percent of the marijuana, cocaine and heroin in the Chicago area enters the U.S. from Mexico. Drug rings are expanding into the Midwest to control distribution with violence a good bet to follow.  “If we’re going to be successful, Mexico needs to be successful,” Riley says. “We can’t do it without them.”

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So, now that the Chicago Board of Elections will allow Rahm Emanuel‘s name to be on the mayoral ballot, we can — as some candidates have been urging — start talking about The Real Issues.

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Maybe those defined-benefit pensions aren’t so lavish after all.  Maybe there are some jobs so dangerous, so demanding of steady nerves and sound judgment under pressure, that the men and women who work them deserve the benefit of our doubts.

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In May of this year, President Obama brought together a group of presidential historians for what was supposed to be the first of many meetings. By available accounts, he was curious about the rise of the tea party, curious as to whether there had been precedents for this sort of backlash against the established order. He listened to these experts of the American presidency, but was prickly and didn’t give anything away.

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Last week I sold an apartment in Beijing for more than 2.5 times what I paid for it five years and three months ago. When I asked the buyer why he was optimistic about real estate, he explained that land was limited in Chinese cities and government policies would keep the market going up.

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White House aides say they are working up an executive order to allow the U.S. to hold enemy combatants indefinitely, while last week a Democratic Congress barred the Pentagon from spending money to transfer detainees held at Guantanamo Bay to the U.S. mainland. Did we just wake up and discover this is 2003 and George W. Bush is still President?

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Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the former Russian oil tycoon who became a prominent political symbol in jail, will undoubtedly stay behind bars beyond the end of his current prison term next year. The news comes as no surprise. Russia’s Vladimir Putin wanted him out of the way ahead of presidential elections due in 2012. A Moscow judge yesterday obliged by convicting Mr. Khodorkovsky on a fresh batch of embezzlement charges.

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For old-fashioned political arm-twisting it’s hard to beat New Jersey, where a fight over a vacant seat on the state Supreme Court has a lawmaker attacking a judge for doing something so outrageous as defending the rule of law.

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On Jan. 2, the Environmental Protection Agency will officially begin regulating the emission of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. This move represents an unconstitutional power grab that will kill millions of jobs—unless Congress steps in.

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If I had to single out one thing that played the greatest role in initially convincing me of the Bible’s authenticity and the truth of Christianity, I’d choose the Old Testament prophecies, especially those concerning the Messiah. The specificity of some of the individual prophecies is powerfully probative, but the odds against so many of them being fulfilled in the person of Christ by coincidence are utterly breathtaking.

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I usually don’t write about single-state 2012 polls, but hoo boy. He was at 52 percent in March, more than 30 points ahead of Huckabee, and now? 21 percent, two points behind Huck. What happened?

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This comes from TPM, which sounds oddly chagrined notwithstanding the left’s many dire warnings during the Bush years about checks and balances and Congress’s duty to prevent executive overreach.

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President Obama assumed office in 2009 with an ambitious Middle East policy agenda. Atop the list of his campaign pledges, then Senator Obama vowed to pursue Israeli-Palestinian peace and re-engage in diplomacy with Tehran and Damascus. Given these grand plans, perhaps not surprisingly the first two years of the Obama Administration Middle East policy have been distinguished more by frustration than accomplishment. This is particularly true in the Levant—in Syria, Lebanon, Palestine, and Israel—the focus of much of the Administration’s regional efforts.

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Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Iran’s president, faces dangers on several fronts in 2011, including opposition protests on the streets and even the possibility of being bombed by American or Israeli missiles aimed at spiking Iran’s nuclear ambitions. He is also likely to become increasingly entangled in rows within the ruling clerical establishment, a growing part of which regards him as an unreliable maverick.

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The recent wave of deadly attacks on Iraqi Christians must have cast a pall over Christmas celebrations worldwide this year. But one can’t help wondering whether it also prompted any soul-searching at the Vatican.

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On a number of occasions over the past two years, Palestinians who protested in public against the policies of the Palestinian Authority have been assaulted and beaten by US-trained Palestinian policemen. Palestinian journalists and human rights activists who tried to document these assaults have also been beaten.

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I was sitting in a lecture hall at a British university. Bored by the speaker, I began glancing around the hall. I noticed someone who looked quite familiar from an earlier academic incarnation. When the session ended, I introduced myself and wondered if, after years that could be counted in decades, he remembered me.

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This isn’t Venezuela Mr. President.

The Obama administration’s power grab through the EPA and HHS is eerily similar of Hugo Chavez’s effort to rule Venezuela by decree.  The Republican House should do everything in its power to block them, and him, and so should Senate Republicans even though they are in the minority.

EPA is taking steps to regulate carbon emissions on its own because Congress didn’t bow to the president’s wishes and pass cap and trade legislation.  HHS is imposing rules regarding abortion and “end of life” matters that were expressly rejected by Congress during the shameful process that produced Obamacare.  Those are President Obama’s version of ruling by decree despite the wishes of a majority in Congress and the American people.

I’ve known and worked with liberal progressives for my entire professional life.  They taught me several lessons, first among them being that they say the right words about our representative republic while they are in the process of gaining power, but they prefer backroom deals and ruling by edict.  When all is said and done, they think they know more than others do.  They regard the legislative process as a superfluous impediment in their quest to create the utopian world they imagine.

Our Founding Fathers – who were much more knowledgeable, experienced, and intelligent than our current crop of “leaders” – knew well the inclinations of political power-seekers, and they put mechanisms in place to prevent anyone from assuming the role of dictator or king.  From the looks of things, President Obama would like to be both, and he’s using EPA, HHS, other government agencies, and executive orders to impose his will over our strong objections.  His attempts to rule by decree have been evident since the day he was elected, and the 2010 midterm “shellacking” did little to deter him.

We will have another opportunity in 2012 to send the president and his LP minions a message.  Until then we need for the Congress to man up and stop Team Obama in its tracks.  This isn’t about Barack Obama, the person.  It’s about protecting our constitutional form of government.  Is Congress up to the task?  We’ll find out in January.

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Take on The TimesTM

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In 1931, The Times celebrated its 80th birthday by inviting Henry Ford and seven other American innovators to predict what life would be like in 80 years.  W.J. Mayo, the founder of the Mayo Clinic, said that by 2011, the average life span, then only 54, would rise to 70 (it is 77.9). The physicist Arthur Compton, noting China’s rise, said “science will no longer be a monopoly of the West.” William Ogburn, a sociologist, said “people will become more nervous and mental disorders will rise for a time, but by 2011 mental hygienists will probably have the upper hand.”

Take:

An interesting piece.

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(T)here’s been a lot of talk this year about trying to reduce corruption in Afghanistan, Iraq and across the Middle East. But in a piece in The American Interest called “Understanding Corruption,” Lawrence Rosen asks: What does corruption mean?  For Westerners, it means one set of things: bribery and nepotism, etc. But when Rosen asks people in the Middle East what corruption is, he gets variations on an entirely different meaning: “Corruption is the failure to share any largess you have received with those with whom you have formed ties of dependence.”

Take:

Good article.

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I keep hearing from the data zealots that holiday sales were impressive and the outlook for the economy in 2011 is not bad.  Maybe they’ve stumbled onto something in their windowless rooms. Maybe the economy really is gathering steam. But in the rough and tumble of the real world, where families have to feed themselves and pay their bills, there are an awful lot of Americans being left behind.

Take:

Talk about “windowless rooms”.  Herbert may have windows in his room, but he must live in the closet.  The problems he sees are the product of policies put in place by his fellow LPs, and they won’t be solved by staying the course.  We need a course correction.  Hopefully, we’re about to get one.

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This country continues to pay a high price in both security and reputation for the Bush administration’s many violations of international law at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. After more than a year of review, the Obama administration is preparing an executive order intended to resolve the situation of four dozen prisoners in the prison there who are caught in a legal limbo: they cannot be freed because they are considered a potentially serious terrorist threat, and they cannot be tried because the evidence against them is classified or was improperly obtained, often through torture.

Take:

The editors at the NYT probably won’t understand that we are at war until ….  I take that back.  I don’t think they will ever understand that people who routinely cut off people’s heads and other limbs don’t hate us because we pour water over the heads of enemy combatants.  They hate us because of what we believe and because of who we are.

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Movie critic Dan Gagliasso doesn’t like the Coen brothers’ remake of the Henry Hathaway-John Wayne “True Grit.” He is especially upset because the moment he most treasures — when Wayne, on horseback, takes the reins in his teeth and yells to Lucky Ned Pepper (Robert Duvall), “Fill your hand you son-of-a-bitch” — is in the Coens’ hands just another scene. “The new film,” Gagliasso complains, “literally throws that great cinematic moment away.”

Take:

Who cares?  This is fodder for film critics – not serious people.

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Natural Healthcare Store, Live the Natural Life!TM

If you haven’t been there already, you should take the opportunity to visit Natural Healthcare Store.  Each product selected for sale at Natural Healthcare Store undergoes rigorous research to make sure that it is the highest quality at an affordable price.

Natural Healthcare Store carries skin care, hair care, and oral care products.  Be sure to check out the Dead Sea products imported from Israel and support the Israeli economy with your purchases.  Natural Healthcare Store carries makeup, deodorant, and detoxification products.  It also carries supplements, weight loss products, and loose leaf tea.  Rounding out its product mix, Natural Healthcare Store carries natural household cleaning products.

Katie and I believe strongly in healthy living, and we use the products.  We’re proud to say that our daughter Melanie owns the store.

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His Name is Yahweh:

There is a wealth of material available for free download on www.hisnameisyahweh.org including the book His Name is Yahweh.  His Name is Yahweh is also available at Amazon on Kindle for just $5.  If you haven’t read His Name is Yahweh, you should.  The importance of Yahweh’s Name is becoming more apparent with each passing day.

Available on Amazon Kindle and it can be downloaded at www.hisnameisyahweh.org