Joel 2

Joel 2

King James Version (KJV)

2 Blow ye the trumpet in Zion, and sound an alarm in my holy mountain: let all the inhabitants of the land tremble: for the day of the Lord cometh, for it is nigh at hand;

² A day of darkness and of gloominess, a day of clouds and of thick darkness, as the morning spread upon the mountains: a great people and a strong; there hath not been ever the like, neither shall be any more after it, even to the years of many generations.
³ A fire devoureth before them; and behind them a flame burneth: the land is as the garden of Eden before them, and behind them a desolate wilderness; yea, and nothing shall escape them.
⁴ The appearance of them is as the appearance of horses; and as horsemen, so shall they run.
⁵ Like the noise of chariots on the tops of mountains shall they leap, like the noise of a flame of fire that devoureth the stubble, as a strong people set in battle array.
⁶ Before their face the people shall be much pained: all faces shall gather blackness.
⁷ They shall run like mighty men; they shall climb the wall like men of war; and they shall march every one on his ways, and they shall not break their ranks:
⁸ Neither shall one thrust another; they shall walk every one in his path: and when they fall upon the sword, they shall not be wounded.
⁹ They shall run to and fro in the city; they shall run upon the wall, they shall climb up upon the houses; they shall enter in at the windows like a thief.
¹⁰ The earth shall quake before them; the heavens shall tremble: the sun and the moon shall be dark, and the stars shall withdraw their shining:
¹¹ And the Lord shall utter his voice before his army: for his camp is very great: for he is strong that executeth his word: for the day of the Lord is great and very terrible; and who can abide it?
¹² Therefore also now, saith the Lord, turn ye even to me with all your heart, and with fasting, and with weeping, and with mourning:
¹³ And rend your heart, and not your garments, and turn unto the Lord your God: for he is gracious and merciful, slow to anger, and of great kindness, and repenteth him of the evil.
¹⁴ Who knoweth if he will return and repent, and leave a blessing behind him; even a meat offering and a drink offering unto the Lord your God?
¹⁵ Blow the trumpet in Zion, sanctify a fast, call a solemn assembly:
¹⁶ Gather the people, sanctify the congregation, assemble the elders, gather the children, and those that suck the breasts: let the bridegroom go forth of his chamber, and the bride out of her closet.
¹⁷ Let the priests, the ministers of the Lord, weep between the porch and the altar, and let them say, Spare thy people, O Lord, and give not thine heritage to reproach, that the heathen should rule over them: wherefore should they say among the people, Where is their God?
¹⁸ Then will the Lord be jealous for his land, and pity his people.
¹⁹ Yea, the Lord will answer and say unto his people, Behold, I will send you corn, and wine, and oil, and ye shall be satisfied therewith: and I will no more make you a reproach among the heathen:
²⁰ But I will remove far off from you the northern army, and will drive him into a land barren and desolate, with his face toward the east sea, and his hinder part toward the utmost sea, and his stink shall come up, and his ill savour shall come up, because he hath done great things.
²¹ Fear not, O land; be glad and rejoice: for the Lord will do great things.
²² Be not afraid, ye beasts of the field: for the pastures of the wilderness do spring, for the tree beareth her fruit, the fig tree and the vine do yield their strength.
²³ Be glad then, ye children of Zion, and rejoice in the Lord your God: for he hath given you the former rain moderately, and he will cause to come down for you the rain, the former rain, and the latter rain in the first month.
²⁴ And the floors shall be full of wheat, and the vats shall overflow with wine and oil.
²⁵ And I will restore to you the years that the locust hath eaten, the cankerworm, and the caterpiller, and the palmerworm, my great army which I sent among you.
²⁶ And ye shall eat in plenty, and be satisfied, and praise the name of the Lord your God, that hath dealt wondrously with you: and my people shall never be ashamed.
²⁷ And ye shall know that I am in the midst of Israel, and that I am the Lord your God, and none else: and my people shall never be ashamed.
²⁸ And it shall come to pass afterward, that I will pour out my spirit upon all flesh; and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, your old men shall dream dreams, your young men shall see visions:
²⁹ And also upon the servants and upon the handmaids in those days will I pour out my spirit.
³⁰ And I will shew wonders in the heavens and in the earth, blood, and fire, and pillars of smoke.
³¹ The sun shall be turned into darkness, and the moon into blood, before the great and terrible day of the Lord come.
³² And it shall come to pass, that whosoever shall call on the name of the Lord shall be delivered: for in mount Zion and in Jerusalem shall be deliverance, as the Lord hath said, and in the remnant whom the Lord shall call.

An Army of Ted Cruzes: Louisiana candidate takes a page from a tea party hero

Retired Air Force Col. Rob Maness is making a play for a U.S. Senate seat

By Chris Moody, Yahoo News 58 minutes ago Yahoo News

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Louisiana Republican Senate candidate Rob Maness. (ABC News)

WASHINGTON — On July 31, 2012, a little-known state attorney in black ostrich-skin boots named Ted Cruz shocked the Lone Star State’s political establishment when, facing incredible odds, he defeated popular Texas Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst in the Republican primary race for Senate.
Within a year, Cruz would be a household name across the country and considered a possible candidate for the presidency. With another congressional election season approaching in November, Cruz’s story has inspired a new crop of little-known candidates who want to replicate his success. While Cruz may be the least popular man in the Senate, his popularity soars outside the Beltway, where he has become a model for a new generation of long shots.
Rob Maness, a retired Air Force colonel based in Madisonville, La., is one of them. Maness is one of four declared Republican candidates now vying for a chance to unseat vulnerable Democrat Sen. Mary Landrieu in Louisiana. He's raised almost a half a million dollars in his quest to assert himself as the hard-right tea party alternative to Republican front-runner House Rep. Bill Cassidy. Recent state polls put Maness in the single digits when pitted against Landrieu and Cassidy, but in the example of Cruz and other successful tea party insurgents who seemingly came out of nowhere to seize their party’s senate nomination, Maness sees a path to victory.
Maness embraces Cruz’s hard line on federal spending bills. He believes there’s “no need to raise the debt ceiling” under any circumstances. He opposes the Affordable Care Act and Obama’s 2014 strategy of using executive action to get around a deadlocked Congress, saying, “I’m with Sen. Cruz on that. It’s completely lawless.”
Both men went to Harvard — Cruz to Harvard Law and Maness to the Kennedy School of Government. Maness even wears black ostrich-skin cowboy boots, just like Cruz’s. And he decries political ambition. “Actually, I don’t want to be a senator,” he told me when we met for coffee recently near Capitol Hill.
Like most insurgents, he faces an uphill battle. Cassidy has already raised 10 times more than Maness in a race that could cost as much as $10 million to win, but Maness has the backing of the Senate Conservatives Fund, a group that bankrolls tea party candidates who lack the blessing of the party establishment. The group has given him more than $360,000 so far.
So far, the Senate Conservatives Fund has endorsed five tea party candidates who are running against fellow Republicans: In addition to Maness, they are Milton Wolf in Kansas, Matt Bevin in Kentucky, Chris McDaniel in Mississippi and Ben Sasse in Nebraska. While the group’s support isn’t an automatic kingmaker, it does make it more difficult for incumbents to focus on their Democratic challengers.
Maness has yet to prove himself as a candidate who can dazzle conservative audiences in the same way Cruz did last year. His opponents cast him as less a Cruz mini-me than a more polished version of tea party-backed Texas Reps. Louie Gohmert or Steve Stockman, who has won Internet fame for outlandish comments made during his primary campaign against Texas Republican Sen. John Cornyn.
While Maness is not as brazen as Stockman, who mysteriously vanished for several weeks last month and who has called for the impeachment of President Barack Obama, Maness’ own tactics can be raw. His website features a not-so-subtle graphic calling Cassidy a “Mary” — an obvious attempt to tie him to Mary Landrieu, but also a suggestion that he’s not a real man. (Both Maness and Stockman rely on the same political consulting firm, Political Media, to aid their campaigns in outreach and website design.)
Maness told me he considers Stockman “courageous,” but that he doesn’t plan to emulate his style in the Louisiana campaign.
“He’s a little unorthodox for a lot of people’s tastes, but you know what? Unorthodox times call for unorthodox measures,” Maness said. “I’m probably going to use different language and I might use a different approach, but I’m just as aggressive as that.”

Screenshot from Rob Maness' campaign website.

Maness has no political record to suggest how aggressive he might be in Congress, but his career outside of politics is sure to draw positive attention. He served 32 years in the Air Force, rising to colonel before retiring in 2011 when he wife was diagnosed with breast cancer. (She has since recovered.) He has five children, including one in the Army National Guard Guard and another in the Navy who started boot camp just days before the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. Maness himself was deployed on multiple tours of duty in Iraq and Afghanistan during his career before and after 9/11, and was working in the Pentagon when a hijacked airliner struck the western side of the building, killing 125 of his colleagues.
“From a personal perspective, it was one of the days when I felt most disappointed in my profession,” he recalled about that day. “I’m sitting in the world’s premier armed forces headquarters and we come to the realization that we’re not having a series of unfortunate accidents. That we’re actually being attacked and we don’t know who it is.”
Since that time, the federal government has struggled to find a balance between protecting American lives from more attacks and preserving liberties enshrined in the Constitution. The scope of the United State’s surveillance since 9/11 was recently made public by documents leaked by Edward Snowden, which raises difficult questions for aspiring lawmakers who cast themselves as strict “constitutionalists” like Maness.
Maness said the Patriot Act was “a necessary evil at the time,” but that over time, its reach should have been reduced. Since 9/11, the government’s surveillance efforts have gone “out of control,” he said. The information-gathering exposed by Edward Snowden, he said, is “a direct violation of our Constitution and Bill of Rights.”
Snowden "needs to stand trial so we can find out if we have an inadequate whistle-blower system in the classified world. Because that’s what he says drove him outside of the system. And I suspect he may be right from the whistle-blower process,” Maness said.
In his race for Senate this year, Maness must aim his attacks simultaneously at Cassidy and Landrieu, an effort that will take tremendous resources if he wants to make an impact in November. (The Senate Conservatives Fund has a history of pouring money into campaigns late in the game, although it won’t say how much it plans to spend in Louisiana.) So long as his money holds up, Maness will continue to hit Cassidy from the right and work to brand himself as a conservative candidate with more allegiance to principle than compromise. On Tuesday, he continued that effort by declaring that he would not vote to reinstate Kentucky Sen. Mitch McConnell as the party’s Senate leader.
And Maness still has time to make a splash — more time than most other insurgent candidates launching primary challenges against established Republicans. Louisiana relies on a little-used electoral system known as a “jungle primary,” in which candidates from all parties get lopped onto a single ballot in November. If no candidate wins a simple majority, the two top vote-getters engage in a runoff.
His largest hurdle could be name identification. Because his military career kept him on the road for more than 30 years, Maness was unable to put down firm roots in any one place. He lived in Louisiana for eight years during that time, and returned to the state in 2011 after 18 months stationed in New Mexico.
Despite his low early numbers, candidates like Maness have a tendency to make Republicans nervous. Longtime GOP operatives still have nightmares from 2010 and 2012 when untested tea party-backed Senate candidates like Nevada’s Sharron Angle, Delaware’s Christine O'Donnell and Indiana’s Richard Mourdock became party nominees and went on to lose their races.

Republicans see 2014 as a prime opportunity to return the Senate to Republican hands, and those responsible for doing so are under immense pressure to keep candidates with the best chance of winning in the race. In Louisiana right now, Republicans are putting their money on Cassidy, not Maness, to execute the mission.

Even a Maness general election victory would prove to be a headache for Republicans: It would put another stubborn conservative in ostrich-skin boots in the Senate, a future many Republicans would be happy to avoid.

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