Saturday AM ~ TheFrontPageCover

TheFrontPageCover
~ Featuring ~
The Catholic Church Sex Abuse Scandal
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by Cal Thomas 
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Canada trade talks fizzle, Trump moves on Mexico-only deal
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{ washingtonexaminer.com } ~ The Trump administration and Canada failed to come to an agreement on the president's bilateral trade deal with Mexico Friday... prompting the White House to submit the deal to Congress without Canada even while planning to continue talks between the two countries. "Today the president notified the Congress of his intent to sign a trade agreement with Mexico -- and Canada, if it is willing -- 90 days from now," U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer said. He is scheduled to resume negotiations on Wednesday. Friday was previously considered a deadline for the deal because under Trade Promotion Authority, the law covering submitting trade deals to Congress, Trump must give lawmakers 90 days notice. Friday, Aug. 31, is 90 days before incoming President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, a NAFTA critic, officially takes office, so a deal submitted by Friday's deadline then would still be handled by Mexico’s current president, Enrique Peña Nieto. The decision to move  forward without an agreement from Canada sets up a potential showdown between the White House and lawmakers, many of whom have expressed skepticism of proceeding on a deal without Canada's approval because that would damage NAFTA. Another potential sticking point is that the administration's original notice to Congress that it was entering talks said it was going to renegotiate NAFTA. Some lawmakers argue that, accordingly, anything submitted to Congress must involve all three NAFTA countries...
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Mattis Authorizes National Guard Troops 
To Stay On The Border For Another Year
by Will Racke
dailycaller.com } ~ Defense Secretary James Mattis authorized the National Guard troops deployed to the southwest border to stay there for another year... the Pentagon confirmed Friday. Mattis granted a 12-month extension of the current deployment order, which authorizes up to 4,000 guardsmen to support U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agents until Sept. 30, the end of the current fiscal year. The extension permits the same deployment through Sept. 30, 2019, Pentagon spokesman Lt. Col. Jamie Davis told The Daily Caller News Foundation. “It’s the same mission, the same set up,” Davis said. The border deployment, dubbed Operation Guardian Support, kicked off April 13 in response to President Donald Trump’s call to use the military to guard against rising illegal  immigration. A joint operation with the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), the mission aims to provide surveillance and logistical support to border agents, freeing them up to interdict drug and human smuggling...
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Most Red-State Senate dummycrats-Democrats 
Voting Against Trump Judges 
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{ breitbart.com } ~ President Trump continues to appoint federal appellate judges at a record pace. However... Senate dummycrats-Democrats up for reelection in 2018 in states carried by Trump are mostly voting against those nominees, sharpening the battle lines over one of the nation’s highest-profile political issues heading into a midterm election that will set the course of the next two years. Senators on Thursday confirmed two more federal judges: Marvin Quattlebaum and Julius Richardson, both for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit. With them, President Trump has confirmed 14 appellate judges thus far this year and 26 during his presidency. That is a record for being 19 months into a presidency. Adding 26 district court judges and one Supreme Court justice results in a total of 53 federal judges. That total number lags behind recent presidents only because district court judges district courts are the trial courts have historically been confirmed unanimously with little or no debate...  https://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2018/08/21/most-red-state-senate-democrats-voting-against-trump-judges/
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Israeli Warships Get Missile Defense Boost
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{ frontpagemag.com } ~ The Israeli Navy will soon receive a significant boost in its operational capabilities after it was announced that Israel Aerospace Industries (IAI) entered into an agreement... to equip Israel’s newest and most powerful warships – the Sa’ar 6 – with Barak-8 missile defense systems. The Barak-8 is a sophisticated missile defense system that can intercept aircraft and is equally adept at countering incoming missile threats. The platform is currently in service with the Israeli Navy as well as the Indian Navy and air force. This development comes on the heels of an announcement by the Israeli Ministry of Defense that it awarded a contract to Israel’s Elbit Systems for the delivery of electronic warfare suites to the Israeli Navy. The Sa’ar 6 class of corvettes includes a series of four new warships that will be used alongside other naval assets to patrol Israel’s Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ). The Sa’ar 6 is a formidable platform brimming with sophisticated weaponry and electronic surveillance equipment. It will be armed with 40 Barak-8 missiles as well as multi-round launchers equipped with C-Dome interceptors produced by Rafael Advanced Defense Systems. The C-Dome is a point defense  missile system capable of intercepting short-range rockets and artillery and was based on the combat proven Iron Dome and Barak 1 designs. The Barak-8 and C-Dome missile defense  systems will be able to provide the navy with a formidable multi-tiered defense capability against a variety of threats including aircraft, drones and sea-skimming cruise missiles like the Chinese C-802 and Russian Yakhont, both of which were supplied to Hezbollah via Iran. The Sa’ar 6 will also be fitted with an Oto Melara 76mm Super Rapid gun mount, which offers high rate of fire against air and surface targets. To address long-range surface threats, the Sa’ar 6 will deploy the combat-proven, sea skimming IAI Gabriel IV and Boeing RGM-84 Harpoon anti-ship missiles. Rounding out the weapons package will be two torpedo launchers for MK54 Torpedoes, and two 30mm Rafael Typhoon remote, stabilized weapons platforms. The warship will also accommodate helicopters like the AS565 Panther of the Maritime Helicopters Squadron. The Panther, which is also known in Israel as the Atalef, is a versatile platform that can be used for combat assault, anti-submarine warfare as well as search and rescue operations...
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Iran Needs a Whiff of Grapeshot
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{ frontpagemag.com } ~ A “whiff of grapeshot” is how English historian Thomas Carlyle described Napoleon’s method of stopping a Royalist riot during the French Revolution... Napoleon ordered his men to fire cannon loaded with “grapeshot,” shrapnel, directly into the mob, killing some and scattering the rest. The saying has lived on as a lesson in deterrence: decisive and brutal force used at the right time can avoid a more serious engagement with higher casualties. The failure to learn this lesson about deterrence has compromised our now four-decades old conflict with Iran. The mullahcracy’s latest burst of braggadocios threats and empty boasts about “controlling” the Persian Gulf and the Straits of Hormuz is a good opportunity to display some old-school deterrent action. We rich, comfortable moderns, of course, look on such brutal methods as relics of our savage past––barbarous behavior beneath our morally superior sensibilities. Don’t we live in the “international rules-based order,” where all agree that lethal force should be used only as a last resort, and that diplomacy and “engagement” should be the best way to resolve conflicts? Of course, the history of just the last century shows empirically that this is a pipe dream. In the real world our enemies and rivals live in, force isn’t an adjunct to diplomacy, but diplomacy is a “technical adjunct” to force, as Robert Conquest described the diplomacy of the Soviet Union, and what an advisor to Lyndon Johnson called a “weapons system” for the North Vietnamese. Moreover, diplomacy will work with the most determined aggressor only after national prestige has been maintained by a consistent punishment of those who break their word or cheat on their agreements, or by determined actions that threaten the aggressor’s own power and prestige. Ronald Reagan’s world-changing diplomacy with Mikhail Gorbachev worked not because the Soviets shared our principles and aims, but because diplomacy was preceded by Reagan’s military pushback against Soviet adventurism in Grenada, Afghanistan, and El Salvador; by his unpopular and much decried deployment of hundreds of U.S. cruise missiles and Pershing 2 ballistic missiles in Germany and other NATO countries in order to counter the Soviet SS-20s; and by a military build-up, and the Strategic Defense Initiative to build anti-missile networks, that the Soviets did not have the money or technical skills to match...
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The Catholic Church Sex Abuse Scandal
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by Cal Thomas

townhall.com } ~ Sexual scandals and inappropriate behavior are as old as the Bible. I give you (1 Corinthians 5:1) in which Paul writes: "It is actually reported that there is sexual immorality among you, and of a kind that even pagans do not tolerate: A man is sleeping with his father's wife."

In more modern times, there have been sex scandals involving TV evangelists from Aimee Semple McPherson in the '20s to Jim Bakker and Jimmy Swaggart in the '80s. And there have been more recent examples, too, Ted Haggard, Bob Coy, Bill Gothard.

But at least those scandals involved adults; what has happened within the Roman Catholic Church involves children and for that reason it is the greater sin.

A Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, grand jury released a report after a two-year investigation into six of the state's dioceses and found 301 "predator priests" who were "raping little boys and girls."

It is not the first time such allegations have been made, but it may be the first time the allegations have been so exhaustively detailed, including the naming of priests and their alleged victims.

In Ireland, where Pope Francis visited last week and issued another apology but took no responsibility for un-priestly behavior, more stories surfaced detailing what happened to unwed mothers and their babies seven decades ago in a home created for girls and women who became pregnant out of wedlock. The girls and women were abused, their babies either buried in the home's yard, or forcibly taken from them to be adopted, all this from a church that claims to be "pro-life."

Writes the Irish Examiner: "Between 1991 and 2011, the numbers of atheists, agnostics, and those with no religion in Ireland increased more than four-fold to 277,237. This group included 14,769 children of primary school age and 14,478 of secondary school age."

Is it any wonder?

Last Sunday, the former top Vatican diplomat in the United States, Archbishop Carlo Maria Vigano, a frequent critic of Pope Francis, released an 11-page letter in which he claimed the Vatican hierarchy has been complicit in covering up for some abusers and their protectors. Vigano claims Pope Francis knew about accusations that Cardinal Theodore McCarrick had sexually abused seminarians for years before the public learned about it and that when those accusations became public he refused to punish McCarrick, instead allowing him to choose powerful American bishops.

During a brief meeting with reporters on his return to Rome, the Pope was asked if Vigano had informed him in 2013 about Cardinal McCarrick's record of abuse and whether his predecessor, Pope Benedict XVI, had sanctioned the cardinal as Vigano claims. The New York Times reported Francis did not deny it, saying he would not "dignify" the allegations with a response.

The Catholic Church and the Pope's few defenders have said much of this behavior took place years ago and is only now coming out. There should be no statute of limitations when it comes to sins within any church, including attempts to cover them up.

Surely the Catholic Church's leadership is familiar with (James 3:1): "Not many of you should become teachers, my fellow believers, because you know that we who teach will be judged more strictly." Then there is this command from God Himself: "you must purge the evil from among you." (Deuteronomy 17:7)

If that isn't enough for the Catholic Church to purge these evil priests and those who covered for them, they might consider the words of Jesus, who they presume to serve: "If anyone causes one of these little ones -- those who believe in me -- to stumble, it would be better for them to have a large millstone hung around their neck and to be drowned in the depths of the sea." (Matthew 18:6)
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