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U.S. president meets with Pentagon officials following weekend airstrikes in eastern Syria The complex threat of the ISIS extremist group will not be ultimately defeated by guns but through ideology, Barack Obama says. The U.S. president made the remarks Monday on the military campaign against the Islamic State group after being briefed by Pentagon officials earlier in the day. He called for co-operation among countries in a fight he said spills over borders. Obama will look to partner with Muslim communities that he said are often the target of ISIS attacks. "The battle for hearts and minds is going to...

Humans are extremely adaptable creatures; so we tend to quickly acclimate ourselves to our circumstances until they become the "new normal." However, sometimes when you have a hole in the bottom of your boat, it's a better idea to try to address it than to just keep bailing water all day long. For example, here in America we seem to believe that... 1) The only religion it's okay to mock is the most popular one, Christianity: Roughly 80% of Americans are Christian; yet which religion is openly mocked by Hollywood and the mainstream media? Is it Judaism? No, that would...

Some of humanity’s technological innovations are things we would have been better off without: the medieval rack, the atomic bomb and powdered lead potions come to mind. Religions tend to invent ideas or concepts rather than technologies, but like every other creative human enterprise, they produce some really bad ones along with the good. I’ve previously highlighted some of humanity’s best moral and spiritual concepts, our shared moral core. Here, by way of contrast, are some of the worst. These twelve dubious concepts promote conflict, cruelty, suffering and death rather than love and peace. To paraphrase Christopher Hitchens, they belong...

We recently gave you a list of 25 trends that would be making people billions. Most of the phenomena will end up benefiting everyone.But if you fancied yourself as someone who could be turned into a billionaire, you were arguably cheating — these were things everyone has already figured out.The real challenge, and the greater value and more lucrative pursuit, would be to come up with the solutions to problems that have befuddled engineers for decades or more.We thought of 10 of them:1. Wireless Power Digital devices have become so small that it can be cumbersome to plug them into a...

Chinese professor Chi Nan has built her own Li-Fi wireless system that can use LED lights to send and receive Internet data. "I bought the lights from Taobao," she said, referring to the Chinese e-commerce site. The professor from Fudan University showed off the technology on Tuesday at the China International Industry Fair in Shanghai. Unlike traditional Wi-Fi routers that use radio signals, Chi's system relies on light to send and receive data wirelessly. Others scientists, especially in the U.K., have also been researching the technology, and dubbed it "Li-Fi". But rather than develop specialized hardware, Chi bought off-the-shelf retail...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - After four rocky weeks while his landmark health insurance law has been disparaged as poorly managed, expensive and disappointing, President Barack Obama will travel to Boston on Wednesday to try to reset expectations about Obamacare. Obama is scheduled to deliver a speech in 271-year-old Faneuil Hall, where some of the seeds of the American revolution took root - and where on April 12, 2006, the start of another historic shift began. Against the backdrop of a huge painting of a famous debate on preserving the union at a time when the nation verged on civil war, then-Republican...

President Obama said reporters praise his economic proposals as “great” and tell him they are “all good ideas.” Obama made the remarks in a speech Wednesday in Galesburg, Ill., focused on the economy. The address didn’t include any new proposals on the economy, and Republicans criticized Obama for giving an address that was more of the same. But Obama said the news media often praises his ideas. "It’s interesting, in the run-up to this speech, a lot of reporters say that, well, Mr. President, these are all good ideas, but some of you’ve said before; some of them sound great,...

A new poll for the Hill newspaper finds that “more voters trust the Democratic Party than the Republican Party on budgetary issues . . . even though a strong majority actually prefer Republican fiscal policies.” The poll of 1,000 likely voters was taken last week by Pulse Opinion Research. It asked respondents to choose between two different budget approaches without their being identified with a particular party. A total of 55 percent picked a plan similar to the one offered by House budget chairman Paul Ryan: Trimming federal spending by $5 trillion, not raising taxes, and reaching a balanced budget...

Scientists and engineers dream about big advances that could change the world, and then they try to create them. On the following pages, Scientific American reveals 10 innovations that could be game changers: an artificial alternative to DNA, oil that cleans water, pacemakers powered by our blood, and more. These are not pie-in-the-sky notions but practical breakthroughs that have been proved or prototyped and are poised to scale up greatly. Each has the potential to make what may now seem impossible possible. —The EditorsNew Life-Forms, No DNA Required Artificial organisms based on man-made molecules could thrive and evolveDNA is passé....

I have seen several mentions on this site in the last few days that the Romney campaign has staffers who actively sift through this and other sites for ideas they can use. So I say, why make it hard for them? Let's post our best ideas here and let 'em have at it. Let the fun begin!

BEGIN TRANSCRIPT RUSH: Rick Santorum has just suspended his campaign. I think the reason for suspending the campaign is it allows you to continue to raise money to pay off your debt, but Santorum's campaign has been suspended. God bless him. I don't know why. I don't know if he had internal polling numbers that looked bad in Pennsylvania. I don't know if it's money. I don't know if it's the accumulation of pressure on him from the establishment. It's probably a combination, some people say unprecedented, in a Republican primary. Negative campaign ads have clearly worked. They drove Newt...

Haley understands why many politicos interpret Gingrich’s maneuvers as a retreat. Haley’s job, as he sees it, is to keep the campaign in survival mode until then — out of debt, in the news, and prepared for a floor debate. “We clearly have an opportunity to win,” Haley says. “Now, it’s clear from the delegate math that we have an almost impossible hurdle. But we also believe that Romney will have a very difficult time reaching the necessary 1,144 delegates he needs to be the nominee. If the Republican National Committee follows its rules regarding Florida and Arizona, Romney will...

Some folks, like Newt Gingrich, read Newt Gingrich's surge in this week's polls as a warm, if belated, embrace of his plan to balance the budget and get this country "back on track." Other folks, like a certain Words Work writer, wonder if the word "ain't" reads a tad unpresidential. "It ain't a day for quitting nothing," Texas governor Rick Perry assured us late last week after his infamous debate brain freeze. ....Oh, fine. But seriously, "ain't"? And not just "ain't," but "ain't a day for quitting nothing?" Was that the best line to hitch your star to on the...

America’s media is obsessed with every tick of every poll. The reason they cover polls is because they don’t want to cover ideas. Republicans should resist being sucked into this reality show mentality and focus instead on the candidate’s ideas. Herman Cain used this to great effect in the Florida Straw Poll. His powerful speech concluded with a riff in which he talked about how the media had declared, “I can’t win.” He then empowered his audience by telling them, “You decide who wins, not the media.” Good advice from a candidate that is now watching this particular race from...

More at Reaganite Republican

Mayor Rahm Emanuel tried to set the tone tonight for his second budget town hall meeting at the outset, saying he wanted to hear “ideas, not insults.”“I want people to be constructive, not just complain. I am looking for solutions,” Emanuel told the audience during a five-minute opening before he took any questions. “I understand people are upset. Change is upsetting."(Snip)The crowd at Malcolm X College was less raucous than the one that greeted the mayor at Kennedy-King College on the South Side on Monday night. More than 700 people gathered tonight

Fmr. chief economic advisor on Recovery Act, unemployment rate

List of 25 African American youngsters-all under 25-have ideas. Some are good but too many are liberal-agenda ideas. But that's me! Click on the box to read the person's idea's and you see what I am talking about

So said Joe Biden today on the second-floor bar at the Helmsley Park Lane Hotel at a fundraiser for incumbent Democratic NY-1 Rep. Tim Bishop. “Every single great idea that has marked the 21st century, the 20th century and the 19th century has required government vision and government incentive,” he said. “In the middle of the Civil War you had a guy named Lincoln paying people $16,000 for every 40 miles of track they laid across the continental United States. … No private enterprise would have done that for another 35 years.” For innovation and business, people don't look towards...

Liberal politicians and activists have long argued that the federal government caused the Great Divergence. And by "federal government," they generally mean Republicans, who controlled the White House for 20 of the past 30 years, after all. A few outliers even argue that for Republicans, creating income inequality was a conscious and deliberate policy goal. Until recently, the consensus among academics—even most liberal ones—was quite different. Economists argued that the Great Divergence was the result not of Washington policymaking but of larger "exogenous" (external) and "secular" (long-term) forces. In June, the Congressional Budget Office calculated that spending by the federal...