Here is your Morning Brief for the morning of May 24, 2013. Give me your feedback below and tune in to The Chad Hasty Show for these and many more topics from 8:30 to 11am.

Win McNamee, Getty Images
Win McNamee, Getty Images
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1. War on Terror (link)

President Obama yesterday told Americans that it was time to wrap-up the War on Terror.  Why? Because history might judge us harshly.

On Thursday, President Barack Obama urged an end to the war against terrorism, which legally began once Congress reacted to the jihadi attack on the Twin Towers.

“Our systematic effort to dismantle terrorist organizations must continue” through the use of courts and police, he announced in a speech at the National Defense University.

“This war, like all wars, must end. That’s what history advises. That’s what our democracy demands,” he said.

Obama also acknowledged that the war war started by the jihadi ideology, which he called a “lie.”

But the president can’t end the war on terrorism by himself, former U.N. Ambassador John Bolton said. The war “is being waged against us” by jihadis, Bolton told Fox News after the speech. “Obama thinks of terrorism like a souped-up version of robbing a local Starbucks,” he said. Bolton argues that jihadis are motivated by a coherent, established idea of holy war for Islam, which urges near-perpetual war against non-Muslim governments.

Obama’s speech included repeated warnings against the use of force, repeated praise for the U.S. legal system, and repeated calls for tolerance of periodic terror strikes.

Much of the speech was directed at his progressive allies who have pressed for the release of more than 100 jihadis from the Guantanamo Bay prison, the end to missile strikes on jihadis overseas, and a rollback of the military’s role in U.S. foreign policy. Obama’s speech offered concessions to those progressive allies.

But he also offered some reassurance to the public, which overwhelmingly supports Guantanamo and drone strikes on jihadis. A Fox poll, for example, reported that 56 percent of Americans believe jihads are more threatening now than before September 2001.

How about this Mr. President. Instead of acting weak and trying to get Islamic Extremists to be nice to us, how about you say that the War on Terror will end when Islamic Extremism is dead?

2. Scarborough on Cruz (link)

Joe Scarborough who likes to call himself a Republican launched into a tirade yesterday on his show. The topic? Senator Ted Cruz.

Responding to Cruz’s comment that he did not trust the GOP to be an arbiter in the debt debate. Scarborough predicted Cruz’s “self-righteous” demeanor would be his ultimate undoing as a member of the U.S. Senate.

“It’s going to be a hell of a lot of fun when Ted Cruz is standing in line in the cloak room to get hot dogs,” Scarborough said. “This is a guy that has obviously decided he is going to be a lone wolf and you can be a lone wolf … Anyway, Mike Allen, this guy has obviously got no interest in working with any of his colleagues. He’s certainly… The people of Texas are going to find out in a very rude way that pissing off 97 senators, basically saying you’re the — I mean this guy is more self-righteous in politics than Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker were in religion — this is going to blow up in his face. We all know it. But somebody apparently hasn’t told Ted Cruz that he wasn’t the first person ever elected to the United States Senate. I can’t believe this will do anything but devastate his effectiveness and hurt the great people in Texas in the long run.”

In typical Scarborough fashion, the former Florida congressman reflected back on his time in the U.S. House of Representatives to explain where Cruz is going wrong.

“It’s very clear — when you go in there are two doors and only two doors. There’s the insider door and there is the outsider door. And when you go in, you can decide to be part of the establishment, you can decide to be part of the leadership, you can decide to be the ones that go to all of the fundraisers, that raise all of the money and do the dirty work for the leaders. If you go in there, you’ve got to go in there 100 percent or you’re an outsider, which obviously Ted Cruz has done.”

“And you’ve got to be an outsider. Listen — yeah, Dick Armey, when I was in Congress, he didn’t like me. John Boehner didn’t like me, Newt Gingrich,” he continued. “The leadership didn’t like me because I decided I would be an outsider. I was going to vote the way I wanted to vote. I was going to go after them hard when they spent too much money. But, at the same time, I was quietly making relationships with basically everybody else in the House. So people in my district didn’t get punished for my conservative activism. That’s not happening here and that’s why I think at the end of the day the big losers are going to be the great people in the state of Texas because Ted Cruz has gone to Texas as a political branding device instead of being a leader to help people in that huge important great state.”

So let's take a look at those being against Senator Cruz lately. John McCain, the NY Times, Liberals, and Joe Scarborough. Yeah, I'm thinking the Senator is doing just fine.

3. Boy Scouts of America (link)

Yesterday, the Boy Scouts of America voted to allow openly gay boys. 61% of the delegates in Grapevine supported the lift of the ban.

In one of their most dramatic choices in a century, local leaders of the Boy Scouts of America voted Thursday to ease a divisive ban and allow openly gay boys to be accepted into the nation's leading youth organization.

Gay adults will remain barred from serving as Scout leaders.

Of the local Scout leaders voting at their annual meeting in Texas, more than 60 percent supported the proposal.

Casting ballots were about 1,400 voting members of BSA's National Council who were attending their annual meeting at a conference center not far from BSA headquarters in suburban Dallas.

The vote will not end the wrenching debate over the Scouts' membership policy, and it could trigger defections among those on the losing side.

Some conservative churches that sponsor Scout units wanted to continue excluding gay youths, and in some cases threatened to leave the BSA if the ban were lifted.

More liberal Scout leaders - while supporting the proposal to accept gay youth - wanted the ban on gay adults lifted as well.

The BSA could also take a hit financially. Many Scout units in conservative areas feared their local donors would stop giving if the ban on gay youth were lifted, while many major corporate donors were likely to withhold donations if the ban had remained.

In January, the BSA executive committee suggested a plan to give sponsors of local Scout units the option of admitting gays as both youth members and adult leaders or continuing to exclude them. However, the plan won little praise, and the BSA changed course after assessing responses to surveys sent out starting in February to members of the Scouting community.

The BSA's overall "traditional youth membership" - Cub Scouts, Boy Scouts and Venturers - is now about 2.6 million, compared with more than 4 million in peak years of the past. It also has about 1 million adult leaders and volunteers.

Of the more than 100,000 Scouting units in the U.S., 70 percent are chartered by religious institutions.

Those include liberal churches opposed to any ban on gays, but some of the largest sponsors are relatively conservative denominations that have previously supported the broad ban - notably the Roman Catholic Church, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and Southern Baptist churches.

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints announced in April that it was satisfied with new proposal, and the National Catholic Committee on Scouting did not oppose it.

The BSA, which celebrated its 100th anniversary in 2010, has long excluded both gays and atheists.

It will be very interesting to see what the fallout is from this. I don't expect large numbers of people to leave the Boy Scouts, but I think this decision puts the Boy Scouts in a bad position. Questions and even more controversies will arise such as:

1. Will they accept atheists?

2. What about transgendered kids?

3. Could this open the BSA to lawsuits?

Those are just a few of the questions.

Other Top Stories:

These and many more topics coming up on today’s edition of The Chad Hasty Show. Tune in mornings 8:30-11am on News/Talk 790 KFYO, streaming online at kfyo.com, and now on your iPhone and Android device with the radioPup App. All guest interviews can be heard online in our podcast section after the show at kfyo.com

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