Yet another 'radical' muslim uprising

Another 'radical' muslim uprising is in progress. Libya, Egypt, Yemen. It will likely spread to other dominantly islamic countries. They are attacking American Embassies. "A mob of Libyans also attacked the U.S. consulate in the eastern city of Benghazi on Tuesday, killing American Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans." ~Here's a Fox News article about the current uprising.

This means they are attacking America itself, as embassies are considered to be US soil. Even though it is happening in countries on the other side of the world, America is under attack. Again. Obama won't see it that way, though. His administration's response to the supposed reason for the uprising was an apology! Unbelievable. Well. Not really considering if Obama himself isn't a closet muslim, he's definitely a muslim sympathizer. (Read my previous posts on this topic: Is Obama A Closet Muslim? and  Told Ya So!)

The Embassy of the United States in Cairo condemns the continuing efforts by misguided individuals to hurt the religious feelings of Muslims – as we condemn efforts to offend believers of all religions. Today, the 11th anniversary of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on the United States, Americans are honoring our patriots and those who serve our nation as the fitting response to the enemies of democracy. Respect for religious beliefs is a cornerstone of American democracy. We firmly reject the actions by those who abuse the universal right of free speech to hurt the religious beliefs of others.

(Yes, I know the apology was communicated before the attacks happened, but the Obama administration, which from what I just heard on the news approved the communication, didn't retract it for something like 9 hours after the attacks began.) According to the Obama Administration, which the Cairo Embassy represents, the movie (which I have not seen) is an "abuse of the universal right of free speech". So, they're saying expressing your opinion about islam is an abuse of the 1st Amendment. I suppose that means this post is an abuse of the 1st Amendment too. Typical liberal mindset: "You have free speech as long as you agree with what we think, otherwise you're an abuser!"

I put the words 'radical' in quotes because they are the furthest thing from 'radical' muslims. They are exactly what islam teaches them to be. The radical muslims would be those that claim peace and tolerance. I say claim because I think they are deceiving. Here's a post that I wrote 2 years ago, almost to the day, about another muslim uprising. It explains in more detail WHY our government, in fact most of the world, has islam backwards. Those being called radicals are more true to islam than those that are called mainstream.

You are witnessing jihad. Did you know that muslims are calling for the criminalization of speech that criticizes islam in the United States? From what I understand, Obama supports it! Throw the First Amendment out the door!

Islamic jihad is only going to get worse as time goes on, especially if we have a President that does not stand up for his country and offers appeasement to those that attack us.

Democrat voter fraud on International TV

"Well isn't THAT special?" ~The Church Lady

Have you been watching the DNC? I have, some. It has cemented my opposition to Obama and the Democratic party. It is proof that the democrats will use blatant lies, deceit, trickery, falsehood, cheating. Even against their own.

Let me say up front that not ALL democrats are this way. Not all are liars, cheaters, socialists, etc. Not all are atheists. Not all are against God. Not all are for the false notion of the separation of Church and State. Not all are against Israel. In this post, and any other post I make regarding politics, if I say 'Democrats', it means the general, national Party and their published platform and beliefs.

But, the leaders of their party, and clearly at least 50% of their delegates don't think that God has any place in American culture. They obviously have not read the writings of our Founding Fathers. They want to change history and the meaning of our Founding Documents, which they say are outdated and flawed. The Democrats have shown their true colors in regard to religion and their stand towards Israel as an ally of the United Sates.

The 2012 Democratic National Platform originally stated:

We gather to reclaim the basic bargain that built the largest middle class and the most prosperous nation on Earth – the simple principle that in America, hard work should pay off, responsibility should be rewarded, and each one of us should be able to go as far as our talent and drive take us.

The ORIGINAL 2012 Democratic Platform did not mention Jerusalem at all.

I found the original text here: http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/platforms.php. It has changed already on the Democrat's web site, so I downloaded it to my dropbox and local machine so I could maintain a copy of it.

The 2008 Platform stated:

We need a government that stands up for the hopes, values, and interests of working people, and gives everyone willing to work hard the chance to make the most of their God-given potential.

and

All understand that it is unrealistic to expect the outcome of final status negotiations to be a full and complete return to the armistice lines of 1949. Jerusalem is and will remain the capital of Israel. The parties have agreed that Jerusalem is a matter for final status negotiations. It should remain an undivided city accessible to people of all faiths. 

The 2012 Platform has now been amended, improperly I might add, to state:

We must keep moving forward and doing the hard work of rebuilding a strong economy by betting on the American worker and investing in a growing middle class. We need a government that stands up for the hopes, values, and interests of working people, and gives everyone willing to work hard the chance to make the most of their God-given potential.

and  

Jerusalem is and will remain the capital of Israel. The parties have agreed that Jerusalem is a matter for final status negotiations. It should remain an undivided city accessible to people of all faiths.

This is no error or oversight or mistake as the Dems are trying to spin it now. This is deliberate omission. They had to vote Tuesday to approve the platform. I presume they read it. But maybe not, since they didn't allow people to read the Obamacare law before they shoved it down our throats.

CBN News has a great article about this.

Here's their 2012 Platfom, as amended yesterday (9/5/2012): http://assets.dstatic.org/dnc-platform/2012-National-Platform.pdf

Photo from Foxnews.com

These amendments only happened after media commentators on various news channels (Primarily Fox News, I suppose!) began asking WHY did the Democratic party remove the text about God and about Jerusalem being the Capital Israel.

The funny thing is, they disenfranchised their own. Voter fraud on international TV. It was clear that there was not a 2/3 majority in the vote to amend the platform. The Chairman, Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa,  clearly is confused about what to do. Then he disenfranchises what sounds to me like more than 50% of the delegates by, in his opinion that the ayes have it, passing the amendment. I don't think either vote had a 2/3 majority, but it clearly was close to 50/50. If I understand the convention rules, if the voice vote was not clear, as it was not, he should have moved to a ballot vote. (Note: After I posted this, I found extended video of the incident where, prior to the vote on the amendment, they voted to suspend the rules. Typical democrats. They have rules to follow but choose to over-rule them and do what they want instead.) Instead, he over-rode the clear voices of "NO" and forced adaptation of the amendment. Democrats have a long history of voter fraud, but I never thought I'd see it plain as day on international television.


Matthew 10:32 "Therefore, everyone who will acknowledge Me before men, I will also acknowledge him before My Father in heaven. 33 But whoever denies Me before men, I will also deny him before My Father in heaven. 34 Don't assume that I came to bring peace on the earth. I did not come to bring peace, but a sword.

Dems are showing their true colors. Then trying to hide them by being politically correct. Failing miserably. They dont want God part of this country! http://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2012/09/05/jerusalem_and_god_get_booed_at_dem_convention.html

This further proves that the Democrats will do whatever they want to get whatever they want, despite the will of the people. They did it with Obamacare too.

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For comparison, here's the Republican 2012 platform: http://www.gop.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/2012GOPPlatform.pdf

Mentions of God? 10.

Supporting Israel and Jerusalem as the capitol? yes.

Convention Fact Checking

Here's a couple articles about fact checking the RNC and DNC.

RNC ("Mitt Romney avoided major falsehoods in making his case to the American public while accepting the presidential nomination at the Republican National Convention."):
http://www.usatoday.com/news/politics/story/2012-08-31/mitt-romney-fact-check-republican-convention/57467252/1

DNC ("a number of dubious or misleading claims on the first night of the Democratic National Convention"):
http://www.usatoday.com/news/politics/story/2012-09-05/fact-check-democratic-national-convention/57596574/1

This one it particularly scathing: http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/fact-checker/post/fact-checking-bill-clintons-speech-and-other-democrats-at-the-convention-in-charlotte/2012/09/06/55b9df68-f7e1-11e1-8b93-c4f4ab1c8d13_blog.html



Neither party is perfect, but the democrats have a long history of "dubious", "misleading", "gimmicky" and underhanded tactics.

Obamacare in 1 sentence

I have not heard anyone put it so perfectly. So succinctly. This lady hits a home run with her description of Obamacare.

Very interesting!!!!!!

Check out this web site that is showing the prominent words spoken at the RNC. Click a word bubble to see quotes of where the word was used and who spoke it. You can even enter a word in the search box if it's not already listed. It's going to be a fascinating comparison between the RNC and DNC once they publish those results.

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2012/08/28/us/politics/convention-word-counts.html

I keep hearing news people say that the Dems have taken the word God out of the platform. God was mentioned 95 times at the RNC according to this site. It will sure be interesting to see the results of the DNC.

How I vote.

I have 3 main criteria I use to determine who I vote for.

1. Morality.
    -I can not support anyone who's OK with killing babies. NO ONE has the right to take the life of an unborn baby. It's not a woman's right or anyone else's.

2. Fiscal Policy
    -I have never worked for a poor person. Poor people don't employ other people. Every place I've ever worked, it has been for a successful business person or successful company. I can't support anyone that wants to punish success and make it harder for businesses to hire and retain employees. Further, I can't support someone that wants to redistribute the earnings of people who work hard for a living and give it to people that refuse to work and live off government handouts. I can't support someone who removes the work requirements from government assistance. I can't support someone that believes government spending and trillions of dollars in debt is the way to stimulate the American economy. Tax & Spend has never worked and never will. The way to improve employment conditions in the US is to make it EASIER for employers to hire, not harder! This will help both the middle class and help give the poor a boost by providing more jobs!

3. Foreign Policy
    -I can not support anyone that does not support Israel. I can not support anyone that bows to other countries and apologizes for the United States of America being the greatest countries on earth. I can not support anyone who will stand by and allow evil to prosper on this planet.

I can't support anyone who's agenda is to destroy this country. To lower it to the status of countries like Cuba and Venezuela. Instead, we need to work to help raise other countries to be better, like us.

I can't support anyone who does not believe in our Constitution and thinks it's outdated and flawed. It may not be perfect, but it's the foundation of the greatest country that was ever on this planet.

I can't support anyone who continues to blame their predecessor for ongoing problems, heck, worsening problems, when they've had plenty of time to affect change for the positive and fail to do so. I hope you understand.

Are we better off than we were 4 years ago? Heck no. Here's a post I made in 2008 (http://bit.ly/PHkiY8). Things are worse now than the statistics I mention in that post. Food prices are higher. Gas prices have fluctuated, but are higher. House values are in the toilet. Unemployment?? I'll let this chart from the Bureau of Labor Statistics speak to that (click the picture to link to the web site):

Obama gets elected and BAM! Unemployment skyrockets.

Just today, the National Debt has reached $16 TRILLION dollars. Under Obama, the debt has increased more in 4 years than it did under President Bush in 8 years. "If Mr. Obama wins re-election, and his budget projections prove accurate, the National Debt will top $20 trillion in 2016, the final year of his second term. That would mean the Debt increased by 87 percent, or $9.34 trillion, during his two terms." (http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-503544_162-57400369-503544/national-debt-has-increased-more-under-obama-than-under-bush/)

Who's better off?? I'm not. I could expand on each of those 3 points above, but what I've posted is sufficient.

I can not support Obama. He fails the test.

The POWER of Social Media

I used to hate social media. I still hate some aspects of it (all those dang Facebook game requests!). I use Twitter more than any other social medium, but I have it post to my Facebook status sometimes (I use Selective Tweets). I sometimes blog on this blog, and my other blog about music. I just checked in on Foursquare (which I just started using last week) in my neighborhood and stole the mayorship. Yes, folks, I'm now the Mayor of Stonehaven. I'm learning about a couple new services that look interesting. One is Medium and the other is Branch. Both are 'invitation only' right now, but I'm sure after they see I mentioned them in this post they'll extend my invite. :)

I'm starting to really like social media. I've learned about the POWER of social media, for both good and bad. It's amazing the reactions people have to a Twitter or Facebook post. It's also amazing what companies will do when you post about them.

I once heard a story about a woman who posted something rather unpleasant about her boss on her Facebook  status. Her boss promptly commented that she must have forgotten that she friended him on Facebook. She was summarily fired. I've seen a lot of good and bad happen on Facebook. It's a great way to catch up with friends and family, but you really better be careful about what you post, cause you know the person that would be offended by it is sure to see it! Other social media platforms can be dangerous too. Better be careful what you tweet about your job or family or friends! I don't really like Facebook much, but I use it anyway. Good things come from Facebook too. For example, I was in a restaurant about to pay for our dinner when I noticed a sign that said if you check in on Facebook and like their Facebook page, you get a discount. 10% off, baby! (Disclaimer: this restaurant may or may not be currently offering this or other discounts, you'll have to check for yourself). I think Foursquare sometimes has the same type of deals... I dunno, I haven't really used it much yet.

Twitter, however has been my friend. I got into Twitter because I saw this story about a journalist named James Buck who got arrested during a protest in Egypt and had time to tweet only 1 word: Arrested. His friends and family saw it and knew something was wrong and was able to immediately start working to help him. Awesome.

I've had a lot of good come from some of my tweets.

We currently use AT&T for our wireless service. Honestly, they've hacked me off quite a bit, especially their customer service. Really the only reason we are still with them is we are 'grandfathered' in on their old unlimited data plan. I think they are really trying to get rid of customers like me, or at least they are trying to force us to change data plans. Apparently they don't like unlimited data users. Just recently they announced that they will not allow FaceTime to work on these older data plans. You have to move to their more expensive Mobile Share plans to be able to use Facetime. I think that sucks. But what sucks more is what I think is deliberate harassment of their unlimited data plan users. Back in December 2011, I got a nasty-gram from AT&T telling me that they would throttle my data speeds if I kept using so much data! This was news to me. I'd never used more than about 1GB of data in a month. Suddenly my data usage was at an amazing 8GB! Check out this usage chart from my account:

Uh....say what?? Data usage inexplicably jumps from 1.1GB or less per month to a whopping 7.9GB! I can assure you that my phone usage did not change at all. No new data-sucking apps or media streaming or anything out of the ordinary.

I contacted AT&T. They said I use too much data and they can throttle me if they want. I could not get them to cooperate with me to figure out what the heck happened. WHY was my data suddenly so HUGE?? Since AT&T would not cooperate with me and assure me that my data would not be throttled, I decided to become somewhat vocal about it. Hello, Twitter! I posted several posts expressing my displeasure at the situation. I searched the net for other people experiencing the same issue. Guess what I found? I found this article about a guy that sued AT&T for throttling his data. Guess who won? The guy. Not the mega-huge communications corporation. I started tweeting and posting about this relentlessly. AT&T responded a couple times, basically telling me if I didn't like it to change data plans. But then I think they got tired of all the negative publicity.... check this out:

Uh...say what? Data usage inexplicably DROPS from 7.9GB to... is that for real? 0.6GB. Yup. back to pre-December levels. What gives? I guess AT&T was starting to feel the pressure of negative publicity?  

I've used Twitter against them for another problem. When I signed up for U-Verse, they promised me all these discounts. Those discounts never happened. That is until I tweeted about it and their Twitter customer service people picked up on it. They contacted me, and to their credit, made it right.

That's not the only thing that's happened for the good after I tweeted something. Here's some other examples:

Back in July was my #4th birthday. I decided to do an experiment. I tweeted the following 2 tweets to see what would happen:

"Lets see if I can get any celebrities to wish me happy birthday..." (including the @ of celebrities I follow)

"Hmm....Wonder if I can get any companies to send me a b-day gift?" (including the @ of the companies I follow)

This experiment had AMAZING results. You can read all about it on my Twitter Experiment post on my other blog. In summary; several celebrities responded, and I got nice gifts from a few companies as well. It was a great birthday! (I think I'll try it again next year! Or maybe for Christmas! Hmmmm....)

The reason I'm writing this post, however, is due to what happened today.

In May 2012 I bought a new Ford Focus. With my lovely new little car came a Sirius satellite radio. When I called Sirius to activate the radio, the dude told me I was getting 15 months free trial. Cool. My dealer said 6 months, but this dude is telling me 15 months. I kinda argued with him some but he insisted that there was some special promotion or something going on for new Ford owners. 15 months. Cool.

I got some mail from Sirius the other day telling me to call them and they'll upgrade my trial to their Premium package for 6 months. Premium. Cool. So I called and inquired about it. While I was talking to this different dude, I asked when my current subscription would end (I didn't have the papers in front of me and I couldn't remember.) He said November 12, 2012.

Uh....say what? I can count pretty well and that's not 15 months. Not cool.

Dude says he sees that I had a 15 month trial but that it had been cancelled. I sure as heck didn't cancel it. He says that only myself or my dealer can cancel it, so it must have been the dealer. He also said only the dealer can change it back. I called the dealer. They said that they don't do anything with anyone's Sirius account. Once you drive your car off the lot, the deal is between you and Sirius and they're out of the picture. So I call Sirius back. I won't tell you about the conversation, because it was unpleasant. Basically they kept telling me only the dealer can change it. Dealer says they have nothing to do with it. I'm stuck between a rock and a hard place.

Twitter to the rescue!! I posted the following tweet earlier today: "@SIRIUSXM is losing a customer in me. I don't like being lied to!"

Almost immediately I get a reply from them. Here's the ensuing Twitter conversation:

I sent them an email explaining the situation. A couple hours later I get a call from another dude. I like this dude. Didn't like the other dudes. Cool Dude apologizes and says they're leaving the 6 month trial in place, but then adding 12 months of free PREMIUM service starting the day the trial ends. Check out this email I got from Cool Dude: "Thank you for taking the time to speak to me today. As we discussed I have added a 1 year follow on plan to start on Nov.12/2012 and will run until Nov.12/2013. At that time you will receive an invoice in the mail letting you know that your service is up for renewal and the cost."

Dang. That there, my friends, is what you call good customer service. Cool Dude even gave me his direct contact information and said if I had any further problems to contact him directly and he'd help. Follow-up tweets:

I'm now a happy Sirius customer, and I'm much more likely to renew the subscription once my free trial ends. This is how companies should treat their customers.

Social Media. Power. I never really expected these things to happen, but it's fascinating that these situations turned out the way they did. Companies clearly don't like negative publicity, even from a nobody like me. You can use Social media for good or for bad. You can get results. You could even save your life. Just ask Buck.