US Gov't. Shutdown, Inviting CAIR to Church, Your Digital Trail, Casinos in NY...

US Gov't Shutdown: 800,000 Furloughed Workers, Museums Closed, Obamacare Health Exchanges Go Into Effect Today
With no deal in sight, the U.S. federal government will undergo a partial government shutdown until political leaders can reach an agreement to fund the government. On Tuesday morning, all non-essential government employees will be ordered to leave work until further notice. This is the first time the government is shutting down in 17 years.

The Republican-led House of Representatives has passed three continuing resolutions to temporarily fund the government. The Democratic-led Senate has countered with three of its own continuing resolutions. Yet the two sides have failed to reach an agreement. President Barack Obama, meanwhile, says that he will not offer any concessions to Republicans to finalize a deal.

As of Tuesday, some 800,000 federal workers who are considered non-essential will be furloughed...

They Don’t Cut Ribbons for Casinos
“Political leaders do not want to give a speech, cut a ribbon, or pose for photographs at the opening of a casino,” David Blankenhorn points out in a new and damning study, New York’s Promise: Why Sponsoring Casinos Is a Regressive Policy Unworthy of a Great State. “They understand that there is something unseemly about it, and even if they want the casinos to exist in order to get the money, politicians don’t want to frequent, much less to become a symbol of or spokesman for, casinos and their values.”

Governor Andrew Cuomo “talks with comic-book hyperbole about ripple effects and super-charges and resorts and convention centers and boosting upstate tourism. But he knows — everyone paying any attention to this issue knows — that the gambling initiative is about New York’s government getting the money.” There isn’t, David argues, any evidence for the governor’s claims about the benefits of gambling, and the governor himself presents none, and a great deal of evidence against it.
Among the damning evidence David presents is the view of the current governor’s father...

Inviting CAIR to Church
When a Unitarian church in Florida decided to teach its congregation about Islam around the time of this year’s anniversary of 9/11, it brought in an extremist official from the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) who has promoted 9/11 conspiracy theories. The group may no longer be embraced by the FBI, but CAIR’s list of published endorsements shows there are plenty of Christian and Jewish leaders happy to work with it.

CAIR is an unindicted co-conspirator in the country’s largest terrorism financing trial and is listed by federal prosecutors as an entity of the U.S. Muslim Brotherhood’s secret Palestine Committee. A federal judge ruled in 2009 that there is “ample” evidence tying CAIR to Hamas. The organization was recently accused of using money laundering to hide its foreign financiers...

Obama administration: Lawmakers, staff can get abortion coverage
The Office of Personnel Management ruled Monday that members of Congress and their staffs will be able to buy health care plans that pay for abortions, even though the premiums are funded largely by taxpayer money — a move that conservatives say breaks federal law on abortion funding.

Under the terms of Obamacare, lawmakers and their aides are required to ditch their government-sponsored plans and buy insurance on state-based health care exchanges, though unlike most people on the exchanges, the staffers and members will have most of the costs of their premiums paid by their employer — in this case, taxpayers...

Your Digital Trail, And How It Can Be Used Against You
...And while most of us know we're leaving behind a digital trail, consider how intricate that trail is and how easy it is for law enforcement, private investigators and marketers to paint a data portrait based on your actions throughout the day.

Examples from the series include online dating sites, like OKCupid.com. The report shows how profile questions on the site about things like drug use, religious beliefs and more were transmitted to a data tracking company, along with the user's IP address...

Book review: Killing Jesus
Tim Challies: his book is going to be big, a near-lock for the bestseller lists. First Bill O’Reilly and Martin Dugard teamed up to write a book about Killing Lincoln and it sold more than a million copies. They followed it up with Killing Kennedy and it sold briskly as well. And now they turn their attention to their greatest subject: Jesus of Nazareth. Killing Jesus: A History is a short biography of Jesus, focusing on the events leading to his death.

From the outset, the authors make it clear that though they are Roman Catholics, they are not writing a religious book. Rather, they are writing a historical account of a historical figure “and are interested primarily in telling the truth about important people, not converting anyone to a spiritual cause.” They necessarily rely on the four gospels for their source material and often tell their story by directly quoting the Bible...

...As the authors begin to tell about the life of Jesus, they follow the biblical accounts quite closely. They tell his life skillfully and with all the narrative tension and interest they used to tell their compelling accounts of Lincoln and Kennedy. The reader is left with no doubt that Jesus’ whole life was leading to a cross and that Jesus knew he would end up there. The reader sees that the claims Jesus made about himself put him at odds with both the Jews and the Romans....