Two days before Obama voted for the FISA "compromise" in the Senate, his campaign plane had a mechanical problem that forced an emergency landing in St. Louis. We later learned that the problem was a good deal more serious than we were at first told.

Obama had announced the previous week that he was going to support the "compromise," but I don't imagine the national security state people would have had a problem with reminding him of the sorts of things they are capable of.

Apologies if this has already been posted, but I don't have time to go through all 20 pages of comments.

Ira Glunts on Mondoweiss reports on Hoyer's visit to Israel:

House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-MD) is leading a 29-member Democratic delegation on an AIPAC-sponsored tour of Israel. The junket follows the same itinerary as last week’s 25-member Republican House group led by Minority Whip Eric Cantor.

During the trip, Hoyer made a number of provocative statements which are at odds with the Obama administration’s current policy, although he did not criticize the President directly. The Majority Leader opined that the Palestinians were to blame for the stalled peace process because the U.S-designated Palestinian negotiation partner, Mahmoud Abbas, has wrongly insisted on Israeli compliance with a settlement freeze as a pre-condition for starting negotiations.

Hoyer also echoed Israeli Prime Minister’s Binyamin Netanyahu’s position that the so-called "natural growth" construction, which means expansion of the existing settlements, should be permissable. This is in direct contradiction to what is the current stated U.S. policy.

on this forum. Here's the URL for the Mondoweiss article on Hoyer: http://mondoweiss.net/2009/08/hoyer-junket-upsets-palestinians-undermines-obama.html .

at any moment a regional war in the Middle East, possibly nuclear, or even a world war.

will of course think he writes about Israel all the time. They don't read all his other pieces.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Left_Behind_(series) :

In 1998, the first four books of the series held the top four slots simultaneously,[1] despite the fact that the New York Times ' Bestseller's list does not take Christian bookstore sales into account. Book 10 debuted at number one on this list.[1] Total sales for the series have surpassed 65 million copies. Seven titles in the adult series have reached #1 on the bestseller lists for the New York Times, USA Today, and Publishers Weekly.[2]

...

Some practicing Christians, evangelical and otherwise, along with nonchristians have shown concern that the social perspectives promoted in the Left Behind series unduly sensationalize the death and destruction of masses of people. Harvey Cox, a professor of divinity at Harvard, says part of the appeal of the books lies in the "lip-licking anticipation of all the blood," and theologian Barbara Rossing, author of The Rapture Exposed: The Message of Hope in the Book of Revelation, said the books glorify violence.[17][18] Time magazine said "the nuclear frights of, say, Tom Clancy's The Sum of All Fears wouldn't fill a chapter in the Left Behind series. (Large chunks of several U.S. cities have been bombed to smithereens by page 110 of Book 3.)"[17]

More than one critic[who?] has pointed to a passage in Glorious Appearing in which Jesus, who is portrayed as a lamb in the Book of Revelation, slaughters millions of people:

The riders not thrown leaped from their horses and tried to control them with the reins, but even as they struggled, their own flesh dissolved, their eyes melted, and their tongues disintegrated. As Rayford watched, the soldiers stood briefly as skeletons in now-baggy uniforms, then dropped in heaps of bones as the blinded horses continued to fume and rant and rave.

Seconds later the same plague afflicted the horses, their flesh and eyes and tongues melting away, leaving grotesque skeletons standing, before they too rattled to the pavement. (pp. 273-274)

Paul Nuechterlein accused the authors of re-sacralizing violence, adding that "we human beings are the ones who put our faith in superior firepower. But in the Left Behind novels the darkness of that human, satanic violence is once again attributed to God."[19] In that same book Jesus merely speaks and the bodies of his enemies are ripped open, forcing the Christians to drive carefully to avoid "hitting splayed and filleted bodies of men and women and horses."[20]

without good works, was enough for salvation, but that certainly is not what I was taught in Catholic school. What I was taught was that, whether or not you believe, if you commit just one mortal sin, and it is not forgiven through repentance before you die, you go to hell, period.

Wasn't that one of the points at issue between Catholics and Protestants at issue during the Reformation period, that at least some Protestants believed that faith alone is sufficient for salvation?

So I would conclude that Catholic belief in the necessity of good works goes back at least into the Middle Ages. And I suspect, from what little I have read of the Christian Fathers, that that belief goes back to early Christianity.

with his religious ideas suffering the torments of hell.

that discouraged people raising doubts about the government's official line about what happened that day.

In his speech earlier this week to the VFW, http://www.whitehouse.gov/the_press_office/Remarks-by-the-President-at-the-Veterans-of-Foreign-Wars-convention/, that's just what he indicated:

We're adopting new concepts -- because the full spectrum of challenges demands a full range of military capabilities -- both the conventional and the unconventional, the ability to defeat both an armored division and the lone suicide bomber; the intercontinental ballistic missile and the improvised explosive device; 18th-century-style piracy and 21st-century cyber threats. No matter the mission, we must maintain America's military dominance.

And that's after he already used both phrases, "full spectrum" and maintaining "military dominance", in his speech to the Naval Academy graduates in May.