Why the deal President Obama made with Iran is the worst possible deal

Everyone is heralding the Iran nuclear deal as “historic”, but it could end up being remembered as one of the most dangerous agreements brokered in recent history. As Pat and Stu pointed out on radio this morning, this deal guarantees that the sanctions restricting Iran from building a nuclear weapon will undoubtedly never return. In a few years, the country will be able to amass pretty most kinds of conventional weapons. In ten years, they’ll be able to have ballistic missiles. Could we see an arms race in the Middle East? Pat and Stu have the story and more reasons why this has endangered not only the Middle East but the world.

Listen to the story in the opening moments of today's podcast, and scroll down for a transcript of this segment:

Below is a rush transcript of this segment, it may contain errors:

PAT: Pat and Stu in for Glenn on the Glenn Beck Program. 877-727-BECK. Glenn is recovering, resting his vocal cords as much as he can getting ready for his return August 3rd. Kind of when we're scheduled. So there will be plenty of time to get ready between that time when he returns and 8/28 with Birmingham. So everybody is talking about how we now have peace. Everybody in the Obama administration. We now have peace. This is something nobody else could do. We finally got done what these other idiots before us, the other 42 just couldn't manage to do. Peace with Iran. And it's going to be a lasting peace. There's no threat now of Iran building a nuclear weapon.

I mean, sure, they could buy -- they could buy conventional weapons from Russia now and use those on whoever they want at any time they want. And in a few years, they could also restart their nuclear program. But we've kicked that can down the road a little bit, so we're pretty excited about it.

STU: We sure have, Pat. And the idea that you would allow Iran to buy conventional weapons from Russia, pretty much guarantees the idea that the sanctions will never be reversed. Because we're talking about a half trillion of dollars pouring into the country in which they can spend a large portion of that -- first of all, it will go to sandals four needy children. That's number one, I know. Number two, pancake batter for Middle East pancakes. Defeat the hungry. There will be all sorts of delicious treats?

PAT: Falafels.

STU: They do have falafels. Once that's all taken care of, they do have a few dollars to purchase the weapons from Russia. So this is of course giving Russia and several other countries lots have motivation to keep these things -- the sanctions away in the future. So all of the sticks, as opposed to the carrots in this agreement, will never be in place because the other countries won't come along. We can sit here all we want and say, well, we have a -- we have a possibility -- there's so many -- there's a dead end everywhere they go, if they try to do anything outside of this agreement.

The other issue, as you bring up, Pat, even if they stay within the agreement, they are far more dangerous than they were yesterday. Far more dangerous. They're able to buy all sorts of conventional weapons. They're able to stockpile them. Even if we were to turn on the sanctions later on, we would be turning on sanctions to a much wealthier nation, a nation that is no longer at the brink because of the sanctions in the first place. They were able to recover. Even if we were to sanction them again, which we won't, then it would be a tougher job. It would be less effective. It really -- it is in many ways the worst of both worlds.

PAT: Yeah, the president was saying yesterday that this is an agreement not based in trust. We won't just trust them. This is based on verification.

In fact, representative Don Beyer, who is a Democrat from Virginia, he said on MSNBC yesterday that he would vote for the Iran deal because thanks to the Obama administration's negotiations, Iran's nuclear program will be under lock, key, and camera, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.

STU: Wow, really?

PAT: Yep, except no. The eyes of the international community are on every centrifuge, every ounce of uranium in all of Iran's nuclear facilities, except for, again, no. It's completely false. UN inspectors can demand access to nuclear facilities on Iran military sites, but they aren't immediate, and they aren't guaranteed.

STU: Yeah. The immediate is the fantastic part. If I ask for access to a site, they have 14 days to get back to me. Fourteen days. To say, hey, you know what --

PAT: Yeah. And it needs to be approved by a joint commission.

STU: Yeah. And if you can't come to an agreement, if I say, Pat, I want to come over at 3:00 a.m. next Tuesday, then you have 14 days to say -- well, in this particular case you have to be 14 days out. Fourteen days, and you say to me, no, I can't come to an agreement of what time. 3 o'clock just won't work for me. I'll be watching a marathon of Desperate Housewives. I say to you, okay, well, now we need to go to a commission. That commission is seven days they have to decide for the commission. So now we're at 21. Then you have three more days to reply after that. 24 days.

PAT: Twenty-four days.

STU: It's a joke!

PAT: Are you telling me that in the year 2015, a country can't move whatever it is they need to move away from the -- the place that's about to be inspected in 24 days? In almost a month to get rid of any evidence and then bring it right on back.

STU: The society has come up with not only nuclear technology, but also wheels.

PAT: I understand they now have wheels in Iran.

PAT: Yeah, and trucks. And they can theoretically drive those trucks somewhere else in the cover of night with one of 24 opportunities to get it somewhere else. Now, look, is there a -- theoretically, a giant centralized area that would be difficult to tear down and move around in 24 days? Sure. But there's a lot they can do. They can essentially do what they're doing, but they have to be more careful about it. And what do we get out of that? We get the opportunity to just make money flow into this country, up to, they think, a half trillion dollars will be the benefit for Iran here.

A half trillion dollars flows into this country. And what do we get out of it? The right to no longer sanction them.

PAT: And we didn't get our four people back. We didn't get our four Americans back. We just left them there.

STU: Sad.

PAT: I thought we didn't leave anybody behind. In fact, it seems like the administration said that when they made that massive exchange for what's-his-face?

STU: Bowe Bergdahl.

PAT: Yeah, the traitor. The deserter. And one of the excuses they used for sending five nasty murderers in exchange for one guy who deserted his unit was, well, yeah, this is America we don't leave anybody behind. Well, what are you talking about? You left four people behind to be killed in Benghazi. And you left these four Americans in Iran to be left behind.

STU: That's a throwaway in this negotiation. You know what, it's one of those things, where you walk in and you're about to sign the papers, and you say, oh, wait, obviously we get those four guys back, right? That's happening.

PAT: Obviously those four.

STU: I just don't see that in here. Can you just add that little addendum at the end?

It shouldn't even be a negotiating point.

PAT: Yeah. They can still proclaim this was a massive victory given to them by Allah. Go ahead. Don't mention you gave back these four. Who is going to know?

STU: That is a great point. I guess maybe it would come out in the American press. But they say everything in the American press is fake anyway. They could easily find a way out of that, if they wanted to maintain it. Again, they're getting half a trillion dollars. I think the Iranian people would be like, all right, those four people, eh, we let them go, for half a trill. We're giving away terrorists to get one guy back. Not even a guy -- a guy who deserted his post. It's unbelievable.

Of course, the fact that they're trying to sell this as this monumental achievement is just embarrassing. That's John Kerry for you. He's going to come out -- he's making these -- they put so much into this that you can negotiate with people like this. We all realize that down the road, what happens? They break the agreement. Then they believe to us, the American people. And they say, yes, look, technically they're in breach of this contract. But this is a historic document. This is a historic agreement. We can't throw it away because they made one little breach. This is going to happen. There's a back-and-forth. There's a flow to these things. And, yes, of course, sometimes they'll do things we don't like. But if we overact, we'll blow up a historic achievement. Now just the fact that it was signed is an achievement. When you go and you negotiate a new contract in the NFL and you sign the deal, but they don't give you any money, it's not a historic achievement.

PAT: You got 1.50 a year. But only 85 cents of that is guaranteed. That's a historic agreement! But that's what this administration has done since the beginning. They find a way to make something that was a tragic mistake, really, on their part. An incredibly historic or unprecedented event. They're really good at it. And then they lie about it. You know, if you like your plan you can keep your plan.

I didn't call the Islamic State the JV team. How many times have we been lied to by these people? Over and over -- I will -- I won't have a single lobbyist in my administration. Well, except for the 64. I didn't mean those 64.

STU: Everyone is going to --

PAT: I said a single one. I don't have a single one. There are 64 of them.

STU: Pat, there is a historic pronouncement to say there would be no lobbyists. Yes, you'll have your 64 that will filter in. If you call me out on that, we're blowing up this historic promise I made about lobbyists.

PAT: Historic. They are good at that. I don't remember Bush doing that. Do you? I don't even remember Clinton calling everything historic and unprecedented or -- but that's been their MO their whole administration.

STU: Well, the thing is, everything he does is the first time a black president has done it. So everything is historic. Just call everything historic. Year seven of his presidency, we're still saying it's historic that he's doing things.

Featured Image: WASHINGTON, DC - JULY 15: U.S President Barack Obama pauses during a news conference in the East Room of the White House in response to the Iran nuclear deal on July 15, 2015 in Washington, DC. The landmark deal will limit Iran's nuclear program in exchange for relief from international sanctions. The agreement, which comes after almost two years of diplomacy, has also been praised by Iranian President Hassan Rouhani but condemned by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. (Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images)

When 'Abolish America' stops being symbolic

Al Drago / Stringer | Getty Images

Prosecutors stopped a New Year’s Eve bombing plot rooted in ideology that treats the US as an enemy to be destroyed.

Federal prosecutors in Los Angeles announced that four members of an anti-capitalist extremist group were arrested on Friday for plotting coordinated bombings in California on New Year’s Eve.

According to the Department of Justice, the suspects planned to detonate explosives concealed in backpacks at various businesses while also targeting ICE agents and vehicles. The attacks were supposed to coincide with midnight celebrations.

Marxists, anarchists, and Islamist movements share a conviction that the United States, like Israel, is a colonial project that must be destroyed.

The plot was disrupted before any lives were lost. The group behind the plot calls itself the Turtle Island Liberation Front. That name matters more than you might think.

When ideology turns operational

For years, the media has told us that radical, violent rhetoric on the left is mostly symbolic. They explained away the angry slogans, destructive language, and calls for “liberation” as performance or hyperbole.

Bombs are not metaphors, however.

Once explosives enter the picture, framing the issue as harmless expression becomes much more difficult. What makes this case different is the ideological ecosystem behind it.

The Turtle Island Liberation Front was not a single-issue group. It was anti-American, anti-capitalist, and explicitly revolutionary. Its members viewed the United States as an illegitimate occupying force rather than a sovereign nation. America, in their view, is not a nation, not a country; it is a structure that must be dismantled at any cost.

What ‘Turtle Island’ really means

“Turtle Island” is not an innocent cultural reference. In modern activist usage, it is shorthand for the claim that the United States has no moral or legal right to exist. It reframes the country as stolen land, permanently occupied by an illegitimate society.

Once people accept that premise, the use of violence against their perceived enemies becomes not only permissible, but virtuous. That framing is not unique to one movement. It appears again and again across radical networks that otherwise disagree on nearly everything.

Marxists, anarchists, and Islamist movements do not share the same vision for the future. They do not even trust one another. But they share a conviction that the United States, like Israel, is a colonial project that must be destroyed. The alignment of radical, hostile ideologies is anything but a coincidence.

The red-green alliance

For decades, analysts have warned about what is often called the red-green alliance: the convergence of far-left revolutionary politics with Islamist movements. The alliance is not based on shared values, but on shared enemies. Capitalism, national sovereignty, Western culture, and constitutional government all fall into that category.

History has shown us how this process works. Revolutionary coalitions form to tear down an existing order, promising liberation and justice. Once power is seized, the alliance fractures, and the most ruthless faction takes control.

Iran’s 1979 revolution followed this exact pattern. Leftist revolutionaries helped topple the shah. Within a few years, tens of thousands of them were imprisoned, executed, or “disappeared” by the Islamist regime they helped install. Those who do not understand history, the saying goes, are doomed to repeat it.

ALEX WROBLEWSKI / Contributor | Getty Images

This moment is different

What happened in California was not a foreign conflict bleeding into the United States or a solitary extremist acting on impulse. It was an organized domestic group, steeped in ideological narratives long validated by universities, activist networks, and the media.

The language that once circulated on campuses and social media is now appearing in criminal indictments. “Liberation” has become a justification for explosives. “Resistance” has become a plan with a date and a time. When groups openly call for the destruction of the United States and then prepare bombs to make it happen, the country has entered a new phase. Pretending things have not gotten worse, that we have not crossed a line as a country, is reckless denial.

Every movement like this depends on confusion. Its supporters insist that calls for America’s destruction are symbolic, even as they stockpile weapons. They denounce violence while preparing for it. They cloak criminal intent in the language of justice and morality. That ambiguity is not accidental. It is deliberate.

The California plot should end the debate over whether these red-green alliances exist. They do. The only question left is whether the country will recognize the pattern before more plots advance farther — and succeed.

This is not about one group, one ideology, or one arrest. It is about a growing coalition that has moved past rhetoric and into action. History leaves no doubt where that path leads. The only uncertainty is whether Americans will step in and stop it.

This article originally appeared on TheBlaze.com.

Trump v. Slaughter: The Deep State on trial

JIM WATSON / Contributor | Getty Images

The administrative state has long operated as an unelected super-government. Trump v. Slaughter may be the moment voters reclaim authority over their own institutions.

Washington is watching and worrying about a U.S. Supreme Court case that could very well define the future of American self-government. And I don’t say that lightly. At the center of Trump v. Slaughter is a deceptively simple question: Can the president — the one official chosen by the entire nation — remove the administrators and “experts” who wield enormous, unaccountable power inside the executive branch?

This isn’t a technical fight. It’s not a paperwork dispute. It’s a turning point. Because if the answer is no, then the American people no longer control their own government. Elections become ceremonial. The bureaucracy becomes permanent. And the Constitution becomes a suggestion rather than the law of the land.

A government run by experts instead of elected leaders is not a republic. It’s a bureaucracy with a voting booth bolted onto the front to make us feel better.

That simply cannot be. Justice Neil Gorsuch summed it up perfectly during oral arguments on Monday: “There is no such thing in our constitutional order as a fourth branch of government that’s quasi-judicial and quasi-legislative.”

Yet for more than a century, the administrative state has grown like kudzu — quietly, relentlessly, and always in one direction. Today we have a fourth branch of government: unelected, unaccountable, insulated from consequence. Congress hands off lawmaking to agencies. Presidents arrive with agendas, but the bureaucrats remain, and they decide what actually gets done.

If the Supreme Court decides that presidents cannot fire the very people who execute federal power, they are not just rearranging an org chart. The justices are rewriting the structure of the republic. They are confirming what we’ve long feared: Here, the experts rule, not the voters.

A government run by experts instead of elected leaders is not a republic. It’s a bureaucracy with a voting booth bolted onto the front to make us feel better.

The founders warned us

The men who wrote the Constitution saw this temptation coming. Alexander Hamilton and James Madison in the Federalist Papers hammered home the same principle again and again: Power must remain traceable to the people. They understood human nature far too well. They knew that once administrators are protected from accountability, they will accumulate power endlessly. It is what humans do.

That’s why the Constitution vests the executive power in a single president — someone the entire nation elects and can unelect. They did not want a managerial council. They did not want a permanent priesthood of experts. They wanted responsibility and authority to live in one place so the people could reward or replace it.

So this case will answer a simple question: Do the people still govern this country, or does a protected class of bureaucrats now run the show?

Not-so-expert advice

Look around. The experts insisted they could manage the economy — and produced historic debt and inflation.

The experts insisted they could run public health — and left millions of Americans sick, injured, and dead while avoiding accountability.

The experts insisted they could steer foreign policy — and delivered endless conflict with no measurable benefit to our citizens.

And through it all, they stayed. Untouched, unelected, and utterly unapologetic.

If a president cannot fire these people, then you — the voter — have no ability to change the direction of your own government. You can vote for reform, but you will get the same insiders making the same decisions in the same agencies.

That is not self-government. That is inertia disguised as expertise.

A republic no more?

A monarchy can survive a permanent bureaucracy. A dictatorship can survive a permanent bureaucracy. A constitutional republic cannot. Not for long anyway.

We are supposed to live in a system where the people set the course, Congress writes the laws, and the president carries them out. When agencies write their own rules, judges shield them from oversight, and presidents are forbidden from removing them, we no longer live in that system. We live in something else — something the founders warned us about.

And the people become spectators of their own government.

JIM WATSON / Contributor | Getty Images

The path forward

Restoring the separation of powers does not mean rejecting expertise. It means returning expertise to its proper role: advisory, not sovereign.

No expert should hold power that voters cannot revoke. No agency should drift beyond the reach of the executive. No bureaucracy should be allowed to grow branches the Constitution never gave it.

The Supreme Court now faces a choice that will shape American life for a generation. It can reinforce the Constitution, or it can allow the administrative state to wander even farther from democratic control.

This case isn’t about President Trump. It isn’t about Rebecca Slaughter, the former Federal Trade Commission official suing to get her job back. It’s about whether elections still mean anything — whether the American people still hold the reins of their own government.

That is what is at stake: not procedure, not technicalities, but the survival of a system built on the revolutionary idea that the citizens — not the experts — are the ones who rule.

This article originally appeared on TheBlaze.com.

1 in 20 Canadians die by MAID—Is this 'compassion'?

Vaughn Ridley / Stringer | Getty Images

Medical assistance in dying isn’t health care. It’s the moment a Western democracy decided some lives aren’t worth saving, and it’s a warning sign we can’t ignore.

Canada loves to lecture America about compassion. Every time a shooting makes the headlines, Canadian commentators cannot wait to discuss how the United States has a “culture of death” because we refuse to regulate guns the way enlightened nations supposedly do.

But north of our border, a very different crisis is unfolding — one that is harder to moralize because it exposes a deeper cultural failure.

A society that no longer recognizes the value of life will not long defend freedom, dignity, or moral order.

The Canadian government is not only permitting death, but it’s also administering, expanding, and redefining it as “medical care.” Medical assistance in dying is no longer a rare, tragic exception. It has become one of the country’s leading causes of death, offered to people whose problems are treatable, whose conditions are survivable, and whose value should never have been in question.

In Canada, MAID is now responsible for nearly 5% of all deaths — 1 out of every 20 citizens. And this is happening in a country that claims the moral high ground over American gun violence. Canada now records more deaths per capita from doctors administering lethal drugs than America records from firearms. Their number is 37.9 deaths per 100,000 people. Ours is 13.7. Yet we are the country supposedly drowning in a “culture of death.”

No lecture from abroad can paper over this fact: Canada has built a system where eliminating suffering increasingly means eliminating the sufferer.

Choosing death over care

One example of what Canada now calls “compassion” is the case of Jolene Bond, a woman suffering from a painful but treatable thyroid condition that causes dangerously high calcium levels, bone deterioration, soft-tissue damage, nausea, and unrelenting pain. Her condition is severe, but it is not terminal. Surgery could help her. And in a functioning medical system, she would have it.

But Jolene lives under socialized medicine. The specialists she needs are either unavailable, overrun with patients, or blocked behind bureaucratic requirements she cannot meet. She cannot get a referral. She cannot get an appointment. She cannot reach the doctor in another province who is qualified to perform the operation. Every pathway to treatment is jammed by paperwork, shortages, and waitlists that stretch into the horizon and beyond.

Yet the Canadian government had something else ready for her — something immediate.

They offered her MAID.

Not help, not relief, not a doctor willing to drive across a provincial line and simply examine her. Instead, Canada offered Jolene a state-approved death. A lethal injection is easier to obtain than a medical referral. Killing her would be easier than treating her. And the system calls that compassion.

Bureaucracy replaces medicine

Jolene’s story is not an outlier. It is the logical outcome of a system that cannot keep its promises. When the machinery of socialized medicine breaks down, the state simply replaces care with a final, irreversible “solution.” A bureaucratic checkbox becomes the last decision of a person’s life.

Canada insists its process is rigorous, humane, and safeguarded. Yet the bureaucracy now reviewing Jolene’s case is not asking how she can receive treatment; it is asking whether she has enough signatures to qualify for a lethal injection. And the debate among Canadian officials is not how to preserve life, but whether she has met the paperwork threshold to end it.

This is the dark inversion that always emerges when the state claims the power to decide when life is no longer worth living. Bureaucracy replaces conscience. Eligibility criteria replace compassion. A panel of physicians replaces the family gathered at a bedside. And eventually, the “right” to die becomes an expectation — especially for those who are poor, elderly, or alone.

Joe Raedle / Staff | Getty Images

The logical end of a broken system

We ignore this lesson at our own peril. Canada’s health care system is collapsing under demographic pressure, uncontrolled migration, and the unavoidable math of government-run medicine.

When the system breaks, someone must bear the cost. MAID has become the release valve.

The ideology behind this system is already drifting south. In American medical journals and bioethics conferences, you will hear this same rhetoric. The argument is always dressed in compassion. But underneath, it reduces the value of human life to a calculation: Are you useful? Are you affordable? Are you too much of a burden?

The West was built on a conviction that every human life has inherent value. That truth gave us hospitals before it gave us universities. It gave us charity before it gave us science. It is written into the Declaration of Independence.

Canada’s MAID program reveals what happens when a country lets that foundation erode. Life becomes negotiable, and suffering becomes a justification for elimination.

A society that no longer recognizes the value of life will not long defend freedom, dignity, or moral order. If compassion becomes indistinguishable from convenience, and if medicine becomes indistinguishable from euthanasia, the West will have abandoned the very principles that built it. That is the lesson from our northern neighbor — a warning, not a blueprint.

This article originally appeared on TheBlaze.com.

A Sharia enclave is quietly taking root in America. It's time to wake up.

NOVA SAFO / Staff | Getty Images

Sharia-based projects like the Meadow in Texas show how political Islam grows quietly, counting on Americans to stay silent while an incompatible legal system takes root.

Apolitical system completely incompatible with the Constitution is gaining ground in the United States, and we are pretending it is not happening.

Sharia — the legal and political framework of Islam — is being woven into developments, institutions, and neighborhoods, including a massive project in Texas. And the consequences will be enormous if we continue to look the other way.

This is the contradiction at the heart of political Islam: It claims universal authority while insisting its harshest rules will never be enforced here. That promise does not stand up to scrutiny. It never has.

Before we can have an honest debate, we’d better understand what Sharia represents. Sharia is not simply a set of religious rules about prayer or diet. It is a comprehensive legal and political structure that governs marriage, finance, criminal penalties, and civic life. It is a parallel system that claims supremacy wherever it takes hold.

This is where the distinction matters. Many Muslims in America want nothing to do with Sharia governance. They came here precisely because they lived under it. But political Islam — the movement that seeks to implement Sharia as law — is not the same as personal religious belief.

It is a political ideology with global ambitions, much like communism. Secretary of State Marco Rubio recently warned that Islamist movements do not seek peaceful coexistence with the West. They seek dominance. History backs him up.

How Sharia arrives

Political Islam does not begin with dramatic declarations. It starts quietly, through enclaves that operate by their own rules. That is why the development once called EPIC City — now rebranded as the Meadow — is so concerning. Early plans framed it as a Muslim-only community built around a mega-mosque and governed by Sharia-compliant financing. After state investigations were conducted, the branding changed, but the underlying intent remained the same.

Developers have openly described practices designed to keep non-Muslims out, using fees and ownership structures to create de facto religious exclusivity. This is not assimilation. It is the construction of a parallel society within a constitutional republic.

The warning from those who have lived under it

Years ago, local imams in Texas told me, without hesitation, that certain Sharia punishments “just work.” They spoke about cutting off hands for theft, stoning adulterers, and maintaining separate standards of testimony for men and women. They insisted it was logical and effective while insisting they would never attempt to implement it in Texas.

But when pressed, they could not explain why a system they consider divinely mandated would suddenly stop applying once someone crossed a border.

This is the contradiction at the heart of political Islam: It claims universal authority while insisting its harshest rules will never be enforced here. That promise does not stand up to scrutiny. It never has.

AASHISH KIPHAYET / Contributor | Getty Images

America is vulnerable

Europe is already showing us where this road leads. No-go zones, parallel courts, political intimidation, and clerics preaching supremacy have taken root across major cities.

America’s strength has always come from its melting pot, but assimilation requires boundaries. It requires insisting that the Constitution, not religious law, is the supreme authority on this soil.

Yet we are becoming complacent, even fearful, about saying so. We mistake silence for tolerance. We mistake avoidance for fairness. Meanwhile, political Islam views this hesitation as weakness.

Religious freedom is one of America’s greatest gifts. Muslims may worship freely here, as they should. But political Islam must not be permitted to plant a flag on American soil. The Constitution cannot coexist with a system that denies equal rights, restricts speech, subordinates women, and places clerical authority above civil law.

Wake up before it is too late

Projects like the Meadow are not isolated. They are test runs, footholds, proofs of concept. Political Islam operates with patience. It advances through demographic growth, legal ambiguity, and cultural hesitation — and it counts on Americans being too polite, too distracted, or too afraid to confront it.

We cannot afford that luxury. If we fail to defend the principles that make this country free, we will one day find ourselves asking how a parallel system gained power right in front of us. The answer will be simple: We looked away.

The time to draw boundaries and to speak honestly is now. The time to defend the Constitution as the supreme law of the land is now. Act while there is still time.

This article originally appeared on TheBlaze.com.