by Rabbi Dov Heller, M.A.
It starts with getting rid of the entitlement attitude, which puts one's ",rights", ahead of everything else.
What in life do you feel is coming to you? Health? A good job? Children? A peaceful retirement? Check yourself out.
If you're like me, you probably have a whole list of things you feel entitled to, and if you don't get them, you feel cheated. If you are unable to take a vacation or buy the home you've dreamed of, then life has robbed you of something you are entitled to!
We live in a society that feeds an entitlement attitude. Compare the Bill of Rights, which focuses on our entitlements, to the Torah, which focuses on our responsibilities and obligations.
LIFE OWES US NOTHING
The entitlement attitude says, "life owes me something," or "people owe me something," or "God owes me something."
You know if you're into entitlement because the result leaves you constantly feeling angry, resentful, or frustrated. If you believe that someone owes you something and that person doesn't come through, you feel angry. You feel you've been ripped-off and cheated out of what I rightly deserve.
But entitlement is a lie. It's a ...   more »

By HAVIV RETTIG
Yonatan Stern, the "Sgan Mefaked Hakita" (deputy squad commander) of Kitat Konenut New York, insists his "paramilitary emergency armed response team" is no "group of vigilantes or a JDL [Jewish Defense League]."
"The goal of the organization is to have a competent and professional group of armed volunteers ready to respond to a threat at a moment's notice in any area where Jews reside," explains the Israeli combat veteran.
"We do not carry out demonstrations or political activity of any kind as we have no political agenda. Our agenda is to protect Jews wherever and whenever necessary and by any means needed."
On Friday, the third session of the group's training camp will begin in the Catskills woodlands of upstate New York, on land belonging to a Jewish supporter of the organization. With tuition at $400, the group expects 15 participants and five instructors for the 10 days of training. Participation has doubled since the group began three years ago.
Kitat Konenut New York is modeled on the rapid response teams in the West Bank settlements that are often the first to act when terrorist attacks or other emergencies take place. The group bills itself as religious-Zionist ...   more »

Gil Hoffman
Prime Minister Ehud Olmert is seriously considering quitting the premiership following the mid-September Kadima leadership race if the winner can form a new government, Channel 1 diplomatic correspondent Ayala Hasson reported Friday.
Olmert told Hebrew newspapers in stories published Friday that he had not even started thinking about whether he should run in the primary, let alone about what to do if someone else won. But in the interviews, in which he lashed out at law enforcement authorities, he made clear that he understood that his political fate had already been decided in the court of public opinion.
Kadima's election committee, headed by retired judge Dan Arbel, will meet this week to choose a date for the primary between September 14 and 18. The committee will also set a deadline a month before that for candidates to join the race.
Should Olmert decide not to run, he would already be considered a lame duck, even though he could remain prime minister until after a spring 2009 general election if the winner of the Kadima race in September is unable to form a new government.
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Herb Keinon
The government needs to take a hard look at the situation in the Gaza Strip, because if it doesn't, it will have to ask itself five years from now how it allowed the situation there to get out of hand, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert told the cabinet Sunday.
Olmert's comments came during a discussion about the calm in the Gaza Strip, whether it was holding, and how Israeli should respond to Palestinian infractions.
Olmert said he would hold a security cabinet meeting on the situation in Gaza, because the calm was enabling Hamas to build itself up and creating a "problematic" reality.
Just as the situation in the North was not as bad as some people believed it was, Olmert said, so the situation in the South was not as good as some would have the ministers believe.
He told the ministers that the arms-smuggling from Sinai into the Gaza Strip continued, and that Palestinians had fired on Israeli communities in the western Negev since the calm went into effect last month. The security cabinet needed to meet and discuss how to deal with the situation, he said.
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Israel’s Ministry of Interior has decided to reinstate an old regulation that is threatening to cripple, if not shut down, several Christian ministries by limiting the time volunteers can spend serving in Israel to 27 months.
The ruling was as sudden as it was drastic. The effects began to be felt earlier this month when three volunteers from Christian Friends of Israel, assuming their visas would be renewed at the Interior Ministry under the previous five-year agreement, were instead told they had two weeks to pack up and leave the country.
Since then, several more volunteers who have been in the country at least two years have been denied visa renewals and are planning hasty departures. Many others have been left with a heavy sense of uncertainty as their own visas come due in the following months.
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Transportation minister warns of new trend of attacks in capital, recommends change in policy including demolition of homes, deportation of terrorists' families. Vice Premier Ramon contradicts him, says solution is placing Arab villages east of fence
Attila Somfalvi
Transportation Minister Shaul Mofaz said during Sunday's weekly cabinet meeting that Jerusalem was fast becoming "a terror hub".  
His remarks referred to the second bulldozer attack that had taken place in the capital, and he said the increasing terror would require "a change in policies".  
Bulldozer Attack  
Bulldozer driver a relative of Hamas lawmaker  / Ali Waked   
Man who carried out Jerusalem attack named as Ghasan Abu-Tir of east Jerusalem. His relative, Palestinian Parliament member Muhammad Abu-Tir, is jailed in Israel  
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By: Sylvia Booth Hubbard  
Statin drugs, which are used to lower cholesterol, may adversely affect a particular group of brain cells important to the health of aging brains, according to researchers at the University of Rochester Medical Center. “There has been a great deal of discussion about a link between statins and dementia, but evidence either way has been scant,” said Steven Goldman, M.D., Ph.D., the research team leader. “This new data provides a basis for further exploration.”
The team looked specifically at the effect of statins on “glial progenitor cells.” These are flexible brain cells held in reserve which the brain can change and customize according to whatever type of cell it needs to stay healthy. The researchers found that statin drugs spur the glial progenitor cells, which are similar to stem cells, to become a particular kind of cell and to lose their crucial ability to change. In other words, statins cause the cells to take a final form of some kind which the brain can no longer modify or transform.
In their study of glial progenitor cells, the scientists ran a test to see which genes are more active in these cells compared to other brain ...   more »

'Global Poverty Act' to cost each citizen $2,500 or more
By Bob Unruh
The U.S. Senate soon could debate whether you, your spouse and each of your children – as well as your in-laws, parents, grandparents, neighbors and everyone else in America – each will spend $2,500 or more to reduce poverty around the world.
The plan sponsored by Sen. Barack Obama, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, is estimated to cost the U.S. some $845 billion over the coming few years in an effort to raise the standard of living around the globe.
Barack Obama
S.2433 already has been approved in one form by the U.S. House of Representatives and now has been placed on the Senate Legislative Calendar for pending debate.
WND previously reported the proposal demands the president develop "and implement" a policy to "cut extreme global poverty in half by 2015 through aid, trade, debt relief" and other programs.
Cliff Kincaid at Accuracy in Media has published a critique asserting that while the Global Poverty Act sounds nice, the adoption could "result in the imposition of a global tax on the United States" and would make levels of U.S. foreign aid spending "subservient to the dictates of ...   more »

Warning issued about 'bonanza' of potential property confiscations
By Bob Unruh
The congressional plan to bail out the U.S. housing and mortgage industries, which could be approved by Congress and signed by the president as early as this weekend, actually endangers Americans' housing, according to the director of the Center for Entrepreneurship at the Competitive Enterprise Institute.
"Of all the unintended consequences of the housing bill that passed the House – of which there will likely be many – one of the most ironic and far-reaching may be this: that whatever security marginal homeowners have from foreclosures, their homes will be far less safe from being taken by a bureaucrat through eminent domain," John Berlau wrote on the organization's website.
According to the Wall Street Journal the White House says the bill needs to be enacted soon so its new authorities will start taking effect.
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Now that New Yorker editor David Remnick has said he’d do it all over again, here’s an idea for the next cover satirizing rumor-mongering conservatives:
Keep the Stars and Stripes smoldering in the fireplace, but move the scene of the flag burning from the Oval Office to an unidentified room in Gaza City. Substitute the picture of Osama bin Laden hanging on the wall with a smiling portrait of the Obamas. The image of Barack Obama will also appear on the “Hope” T-shirts that two young Palestinians manning phones are wearing. In one bubble coming from a telephone will be a FARC terrorist in military fatigues holding a phone to his shoulder while writing out a check; in another, Kim Jong Il — wearing a “Yes We Can” hat — will also be making a financial contribution to the Democratic nominee.
Sophisticated New Yorker readers are sure to catch the irony, even if they’re unaware of the fact that young Palestinians in Hamas-controlled Gaza have actually set up phone banks to rally support for Obama. Many Barack Obama supporters believe that any mention of the fact that the candidate is disturbingly popular with America’s enemies is akin to saying that ...   more »

By Darren Wolfe
Harrisburg, PA - Pennsylvania gun owners breathed a sigh of relief at the Heller vs. DC Supreme Court ruling, but the Libertarian Party of  Pennsylvania (LPPa) warns that major threats to gun rights still exist.  One such threat is REAL ID, the federal mandate turning driver's licenses into national ID cards.
The long-term plan for REAL ID is to force its biometric ID functions on federal, state, local and private entities for all transactions.  Thus, ID confirmation by a distant bureaucracy becomes permission for essential daily activities including banking, doctor visits, transit, school attendance and purchases -- including guns.
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Homeland Security: Forced to defend its growing terrorist watch list, the FBI let slip a chilling fact that should silence ACLU grumblers: America is teeming with 20,000 terrorists.
After 9/11, federal authorities estimated that as many as 5,000 terrorists were living in the U.S. The new figure is jarring not only because it's four times as large but because it's based on real persons, not estimates.
It's not something headquarters wanted to publicize. Officials had downplayed the threat so as not to spook the public. The spin had been that Britain has the homegrown problem, not us.
But that was before the ACLU launched a campaign with the Democrat Congress to demonize the watch list as a Gestapo-like tool. The FBI had no choice but to knock down their myths.
The ACLU charged that an "out-of-control" FBI is adding mostly innocent people to the list, ballooning it to "over 1 million names." "I doubt this thing would even be effective at catching a real terrorist," ACLU spokesman Barry Steinhardt harrumphed.
In fact, the list has saved countless lives, according to the head of the FBI's terrorism screening center - an assertion backed up by a recent independent review by the ...   more »

As you know I am not a very political person. I just wanted to pass along that Senator Obama came to Bagram Afghanistan for about an hour on his visit to "The War Zone". I wanted to share with you what happened. He got off the plane and got into a bullet proof vehicle, got to the area to meet with the Major General (2 Star) who is the commander here at Bagram. As the Soldiers where lined up to shake his hand he blew them off and didn't say a word as he went into the conference room to meet the General. As he finished, the vehicles took him to the ClamShell (pretty much a big top tent that military personnel can play basketball or work out in with weights) so he could take his publicity pictures playing basketball. He again shunned the opportunity to talk to Soldiers to thank them for their service. So really he was just here to make a showing for the American's back home that he is their candidate for President. I think that if you are going to make an effort to come all the way over here you would thank those that ...   more »