Thursday, June 6, 2013

Marxist? Communist?

This, http://historymatters.gmu.edu/d/5767/ is a long read, but I think it is worthwhile. I have to admit. I have never read Marx. At least, when I tried to read some, I could not stay engaged with it. On the other hand, I have read just about everything by Rand, a fair amount of Friedman, and other pro capitalist essays. What most of you don't accept is that I agree that capitalism does a lot of what it says it will. Namely it well rewards those who are successful and provides the needed incentive to encourage risk taking. What it also does, however, is establish very sharp gaps between winners and losers and it creates social problems that many are not happy with. Somewhere in the 80's, the attitude that you did not rub your wealth in the face of others was replaced by an attitude of "Fuck you, you're just jealous that you aren't as smart as me." That attitude persists today.

This link here is to Andrew Carnegie's essay called, "The Gospel of Wealth". Nothing I have ever read more succinctly describes my views then this piece. In general terms, Carnegie "preaches" it is right and just for a very few to have enormous control of vast sums of wealth. Moreover, he says it is a natural consequence of markets, and on that score, I agree with him. However, from here, he begins to steer in a much different direction and preaches that the wealth is not really the property of the wealth holder, rather it is an accumulation of community that the wealth holder needs to reinvest wisely in the community.

In the communist world, control of the economy and everything else is planned by bureaucrats and predictably, this has failed. However, now that we have reached a point in our society where the majority of wealth is again concentrated in a small pool of hands, we see communities collapsing everywhere. I believe that some of the best brains of our day are rightfully wealthy and successful. However, I also believe they are essentially just hoarding the money and sitting back contently while the country around them goes to shit. I've frequently made mention that people of my grandparent's generation did not live so selfishly. After the great depression, they basically told the wealthy that if you won't help manage the community with your money, we will take it and do it for you. I don't quite like that solution, but it I see it as preferable to creating a super race of wealthy who will simply spawn and do nothing but sit back and live off the wealth they gained after others paved the way for them. Obama has been endlessly ridiculed for his, "You didn't build that" comment, but the ridicule is fierce solely to stop people from actually considering what he is really saying.

If I'm a Marxist and agree 100% with what Carnegie is saying here, what does that make him?

1984.. Published 64 years ago today

Obama administration collecting phone records of millions daily... Secret court order requires VERIZON to hand over ALL CALL DATA... WH defends: Critical tool against 'terrorist threats'... Specifically targeted Americans, not foreigners... 'Homeland Security': Laptops, phones can be searched based on hunches... NSA SEES ALL: Phone Sex, Banks, Emails... FBI WANTS BACK DOOR TO ALL SOFTWARE... CIA: We'll Spy on You Through Your Dishwasher...

'1984' Published 64 Years Ago Today...

Dems at work night and day removing our freedoms every second of every day, in secret, just as they do in every corner of every city in this entire country.

I used to put this little reminder up now and then, seems it is coming true

"If you look at a long term political strategy, one that guarantees you will be the party in power for all time, one only needs to follow the play book. 1. There's a depression 2. Give the voters money to get thru it. 3. Take no real action to fix the problems that created the depression. 4. Convince the majority of voters that they need government to provide the solutions, from taxes, to end the depression. 5. Add voters to the roles of the party that is providing the welfare to a point where the majority of voters are on welfare. 6. Once voted in the majority the party is now in power forever.

The Democratic Party playbook has just been shown to you, do you debate the realization that this is what is being done to us or do you refute that this is not happening?"

Look at the the headlines pasted above, read the data, do you deny that The Democratic Party is "Big Brother"?

Freedom is "free" not being spied on and controlled at every corner, want to smoke and die, do so.. want to eat yourself to death, do so... want to make lots of money and be a Republican, not so fast, the IRS is in the hands of control freaks, so is the White House.

Now our healthcare is in the hands of the IRS! Is this really what you wanted Max? Really?

It is time to stand up and be counted, counted as being "free" not "Democratic Party Free" but really free. Throw these liars out of our government, might I go to far to state that the actions of the IRS in stalling Tea Party tax status cost The Republicans the White House?

How much money was not raised as a result of zealots cheating for "The Playbook" above

Wednesday, June 5, 2013

Karl Lagerfeld wants to marry his cat

By Bonnie Malkin

1:26AM BST 05 Jun 2013

The eccentric creative director of Chanel said the one-year-old white Siamese cat was his most prized possession.

Choupette has its own staff, including three maids who are tasked with noting down everything the feline does while Largerfeld is away from their home in Paris so that he can check up on how his beloved pet is spending its time.

"There is no marriage, yet, for human beings and animals… I never thought that I would fall in love like this with a cat," Lagerfeld told CNN's Fashion Week: Backstage Pass.

When asked if the cat flies by private jet, Largerfeld said: "Yes, why not?"

Choupette is well known among fashion circles. As well as its own maids, the cat has 27,000 followers on Twitter. It has its own pillow and dines with Largefeld twice a day, eating food that has been specially prepared.

Obamacare nullification bill on SC Senate agenda

South Carolina this week could become the first state in the country to restrict the enactment of Obamacare since the U.S. Supreme Court upheld that law last year.

A proposed bill, on special order in the state Senate, would allow the state attorney general to take businesses, including health insurers, to court if he “has reasonable cause to believe” they are harming people by implementing the law. The bill already has passed the House.

If it passes, the bill could push South Carolina to the forefront of Obamacare resistance, giving the state’s Republican leaders a national stage. It also could push South Carolina into yet another costly legal battle in the federal courts that, critics say, is unnecessary and avoidable.

“It is going to get us in court, as we all know. But ... it is worth the risk to see if we can protect our state from this far-reaching federal legislation,” state Sen. Kevin Bryant, R-Anderson, one of the lawmakers pushing for the Senate to pass the bill this week before it adjourns for the year.

Many Senate Democrats, and some Republicans, dismiss the bill as nothing more than a symbolic political salvo meant to provide fodder for lawmakers’ legislative newsletters and campaign signs. But health-insurance companies are worried the bill could complicate further their efforts to navigate the regulatory landscape.

“We need to make sure that companies – health-care providers in South Carolina – aren’t faced with situation where the federal government says you must and the state government says you cannot,” said Bob Coble, an attorney for Nexsen Pruett who represents several hospitals.

For example, some health-insurance companies say the bill would prevent them from helping customers buy insurance through a federally operated health-care exchange, designed to lower costs by federal subsidies and pooling insurance.

“If all of a sudden it becomes illegal for me to help a citizen go through an exchange and get a subsidy, that kind of defeats a lot of the purpose of trying to help them get coverage,” said Mark Riley, legislative chairman for the S.C. Association of Health Underwriters.

But state Sen. Larry Martin, R-Pickens, said nothing in the bill would prevent a business from participating in a federal health-insurance exchange, rejecting the suggestion the bill would make businesses “choose state law or federal law.”

“That doesn’t seem to be in there,” he said.

What is troubling about the bill, Martin said, is a provision that effectively would wipe out federal tax penalties for not complying with the law. For example, if someone refuses to buy health insurance, that person would have to pay more in federal taxes. But if South Carolina passes the proposal, that person would get a state tax deduction to offset their increased federal taxes.

Martin said he cannot support that. “No. 1, it is an unknown amount of money involved, and No. 2 ... all you would be doing is encouraging folks not to pay for insurance so their fellow South Carolinians can pay the premium for you.”

But Bryant compared the tax deduction to the economic incentives the state awards to companies to locate in South Carolina.

“Every time we give a tax credit, the taxpayer pays for it, essentially,” Bryant said. “You can get a tax credit for everything under the sun.”

Republican Gov. Nikki Haley was an outspoken opponent of expanding the state’s Medicaid program under the Affordable Care Act. Haley’s spokesman would not say Monday if Haley would sign the anti-Obamacare bill if it comes to her desk.

“The governor has also been very clear about her priorities this session – blocking Obamacare’s Medicaid expansion, restructuring and ethics reform,” Rob Godfrey said in a written statement.

Haley might not have to decide whether to sign the bill this year.

The Senate is scheduled to adjourn for the year at 5 p.m. Thursday. While the bill is on special order – making it harder for lawmakers to pass it over – it is behind the ethics reform bill, which could take several days to debate and pass.

“I can’t venture to see any type of possibility that it passes this session,” said state Sen. Gerald Malloy, D-Darlington, who said he likely will oppose the bill. It could pass next year, Malloy added, but only after “one of the most extensive debates we have had in recent times.”

Read more here: http://www.thestate.com/2013/06/03/2800482/obamacare-nullification-bill-on.html#storylink=cpy

Tuesday, June 4, 2013

A RINO post?

Thought this was an excellent article http://newsok.com/state-rep.-doug-cox-the-gop-and-abortion-legislation/article/3835587

I have no idea what the full political views of this guy are, but this article represents something that has been almost completely destroyed in the Republican party, that something is independent rational thought. I don't post this to glorify abortion. Instead, I post it because it is a rare display of honesty by a man who questions his party's refusal to accept how detached their views are from the real world.

Monday, June 3, 2013

Who is Richard Windsor?

Saturday, June 1, 2013

Move Over Marx, Here Comes Obama

Ronald Reagan would be turning in his grave, wouldn’t he? In what became known as the most anti-communist speech of all time given by Reagan in 1987 on the 70^th anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution (1917), the former President of the United States of America said that the Soviet Union was the ‘evil empire’. If we could bring that President back to life in true-Hollywood fashion (in fitting with his previous job! A leopard never changes its spots), he would certainly say that it was not Russia today that was the evil empire of communism, but the United States itself! Funny how, as time goes on, people seem to change their attitudes and forget what they once criticized in the past, isn’t it?

http://www.tothetick.com/move-over-marx-here-comes-obama

The Question that Obama is begging us all to answer these days is: has the good old US of A gone Commy? Pinko?Lefty? You know what I’m hinting it, don’t you? Don’t go getting all bashful, some might say that there is nothing to be ashamed of. Shame it just didn’t happen fifty-odd years ago, you might have saved us all the heartache of the Cold War, shivering out in the freezing temperatures of two ideologies that were at loggerheads with each other, vying for a place of supremacy.

Now the US has gone the other way. Move over Marx! Marx is so yesterday, anyhow, dontcha know? Obama is the new manna; he’s a happening all in himself, food from heaven and the best thing about it all is that it came at a time when nobody expected it at all.

Obama’s new tax policy will raise $800 billion over a decade. But, it’s the rich and the middle class that are going to be hit the most. The People’s Bank of the Soviet Union shortly after the Revolution was created by the merging of banks that were nationalized by force. Only difference with Obama and the US banking system is where the forcing came from. The banks in the US have been to all intents and purposes nationalized. Obama has bailed out the banks to the tune of $780 billion each year since the recession according to research. They get $360 billion in Federal Reserve subsidies and $120 billion in federal deposit insurance. You can add another $100 billion in government-guaranteed loans and the same sum in monopolistic advantages. Lastly there’s $100 billion in fees in the OTC (over-the-counter) derivative market. That all adds up to trillions. Literally.

Remember they were “too big to fail”. Where’s the free-market economics that were the pride of neoliberalism? Reagan would be turning in his grave! Didn’t we believe in the US at one time that printing money would do nothing more than increase inflation. Whatever happened to those principles of the USA, so dear to their hearts, so exportable to the rest of the world? It was the model that we all had to follow. Now, the US is turning in on itself, coming full circle, turningcommy. Who would have thought?

Obamacare was an admirable pledge for his election. Even though he is far from succeeding and there are still million without access to health in the USA. There were 45 million in 2012 that still didn’t have healthcare cover. But, in the process of setting up healthcare Obama has created a hoard of bureaucrats that are employed daily as civil servants to deal with the implementation of new policies. Federal employment has increased under Obama by 11.7% on average since 2009. If the shrinking private sector of liberals can’t employ you (there’s been a fall of 7.5 million jobs), then the state will happily do so. Can we all join the bandwagon? There were 2, 790, 000 federal workers in January 2009 (when Obama took office). Now there are 2, 804, 000. Every month has seen an increase in the number of federal workers since that date. Where’s the neoliberal attitude gone?

What happened to free trade? Where are the open markets, privatization and deregulation? Where’s the reduction in the public sector gone? Where’s the meritocracy in life? Where’s the employee of the month hanging on the wall out of just deserves? That’s so old-hat, isn’t it just! Everyone gets protected, helped, boosted, aided. That’s the wonderful thing about Communism. Old-School style. Now that’s fashionable, isn’t it? Old-school!

The Obama administration has sent the welfare state through the roof, costing nearly $1 trillion a year. That’s an increase of 19%. Is the US becoming an assisted state? Is the state become the people’s nanny? Federal and state spending have grown from $779.9 billion to $927.2 billion. Debt is growing, spending is increasing and the welfare state is expanding. The answer in true Soviet fashion is to print the bills and provide for the people.

This reads like a fictional piece. A Hollywood film featuring Obama and everybody gets to eat the popcorn…well sorry, the rich pay, the poor eat the popcorn. But, it’s not a movie. It’s what’s happening today.

Had the Soviet Union still been in existence, the USA would have been annexed as a wonderful example of the ideology that they invented. Today, that’s not possible. So, Obama is going to have to go it alone.

But, as we look on and watch in awe at what is happening with the QE, the state intervention(s), the money-printing, the bolstering of the banks, the massive shore-up policies to save the failings of their system, we wonder how Stalin must have (somewhere, wherever he is in that Communist paradise) a wry smirk on his face. Can you hear The Internationale? Obama is humming it as we speak! The USSA?

Friday, May 31, 2013

Freshwater = The New Gold

The Colorado River, The High Plains Aquifer And The Entire Western Half Of The U.S. Are Rapidly Drying Up

What is life going to look like as our precious water resources become increasingly strained and the western half of the United States becomes bone dry? Scientists tell us that the 20th century was the wettest century in the western half of the country in 1000 years, and now things appear to be reverting to their normal historical patterns. But we have built teeming cities in the desert such as Phoenix and Las Vegas that support millions of people. Cities all over the Southwest continue to grow even as the Colorado River, Lake Mead and the High Plains Aquifer system run dry. So what are we going to do when there isn't enough water to irrigate our crops or run through our water systems? Already we are seeing some ominous signs that Dust Bowl conditions are starting to return to the region. In the past couple of years we have seen giant dust storms known as "haboobs" roll through Phoenix, and 6 of the 10 worst years for wildfires ever recorded in the United States have all come since the year 2000. In fact, according to the Los Angeles Times, "the average number of fires larger than 1,000 acres in a year has nearly quadrupled in Arizona and Idaho and has doubled in every other Western state" since the 1970s. But scientists are warning that they expect the western United States to become much drier than it is now. What will the western half of the country look like once that happens?

A recent National Geographic article contained the following chilling statement...

The wet 20th century, the wettest of the past millennium, the century when Americans built an incredible civilization in the desert, is over.

Much of the western half of the country has historically been a desolate wasteland. We were very blessed to enjoy very wet conditions for most of the last century, but now that era appears to be over.

To compensate, we are putting a tremendous burden on our fresh water resources. In particular, the Colorado River is becoming increasingly strained. Without the Colorado River, many of our largest cities simply would not be able to function. The following is from a recent Stratfor article...

The Colorado River provides water for irrigation of roughly 15 percent of the crops in the United States, including vegetables, fruits, cotton, alfalfa and hay. It also provides municipal water supplies for large cities, such as Phoenix, Tucson, Los Angeles, San Diego and Las Vegas, accounting for more than half of the water supply in many of these areas.

In particular, water levels in Lake Mead (which supplies most of the water for Las Vegas) have fallen dramatically over the past decade or so. The following is an excerpt from an article posted on Smithsonian.com...

And boaters still roar across Nevada and Arizona’s Lake Mead, 110 miles long and formed by the Hoover Dam. But at the lake’s edge they can see lines in the rock walls, distinct as bathtub rings, showing the water level far lower than it once was—some 130 feet lower, as it happens, since 2000. Water resource officials say some of the reservoirs fed by the river will never be full again.

Today, Lake Mead supplies approximately 85 percent of the water that Las Vegas uses, and since 1998 the water level in Lake Mead has dropped by about 5.6 trillion gallons.

So what happens if Lake Mead continues to dry up?

Well, the truth is that it would be a major disaster...

Way before people run out of drinking water, something else happens: When Lake Mead falls below 1,050 feet, the Hoover Dam's turbines shut down – less than four years from now, if the current trend holds – and in Vegas the lights start going out.

Ominously, these water woes are not confined to Las Vegas. Under contracts signed by President Obama in December 2011, Nevada gets only 23.37% of the electricity generated by the Hoover Dam. The other top recipients: Metropolitan Water District of Southern California (28.53%); state of Arizona (18.95%); city of Los Angeles (15.42%); and Southern California Edison (5.54%).

You can always build more power plants, but you can't build more rivers, and the mighty Colorado carries the lifeblood of the Southwest. It services the water needs of an area the size of France, in which live 40 million people. In its natural state, the river poured 15.7 million acre-feet of water into the Gulf of California each year. Today, twelve years of drought have reduced the flow to about 12 million acre-feet, and human demand siphons off every bit of it; at its mouth, the riverbed is nothing but dust.

Nor is the decline in the water supply important only to the citizens of Las Vegas, Phoenix, and Los Angeles. It's critical to the whole country. The Colorado is the sole source of water for southeastern California's Imperial Valley, which has been made into one of the most productive agricultural areas in the US despite receiving an average of three inches of rain per year.

You hardly ever hear about this on the news, but the reality is that this is a slow-motion train wreck happening right in front of our eyes.

Today, the once mighty Colorado River runs dry about 50 miles north of the sea. The following is an excerpt from an excellent article by Jonathan Waterman about what he found when he went to investigate this...

Fifty miles from the sea, 1.5 miles south of the Mexican border, I saw a river evaporate into a scum of phosphates and discarded water bottles. This dirty water sent me home with feet so badly infected that I couldn’t walk for a week. And a delta once renowned for its wildlife and wetlands is now all but part of the surrounding and parched Sonoran Desert. According to Mexican scientists whom I met with, the river has not flowed to the sea since 1998. If the Endangered Species Act had any teeth in Mexico, we might have a chance to save the giant sea bass (totoaba), clams, the Sea of Cortez shrimp fishery that depends upon freshwater returns, and dozens of bird species.

So let this stand as an open invitation to the former Secretary of the Interior and all water buffalos who insist upon telling us that there is no scarcity of water here or in the Mexican Delta. Leave the sprinklered green lawns outside the Aspen conferences, come with me, and I’ll show you a Colorado River running dry from its headwaters to the sea. It is polluted and compromised by industry and agriculture. It is overallocated, drought stricken, and soon to suffer greatly from population growth. If other leaders in our administration continue the whitewash, the scarcity of knowledge and lack of conservation measures will cripple a western civilization built upon water.

Further east, the major problem is the drying up of our underground water resources.

In the state of Kansas today, many farmers that used to be able to pump plenty of water to irrigate their crops are discovering that the water underneath their land is now gone. The following is an excerpt from a recent article in the New York Times...

Vast stretches of Texas farmland lying over the aquifer no longer support irrigation. In west-central Kansas, up to a fifth of the irrigated farmland along a 100-mile swath of the aquifer has already gone dry. In many other places, there no longer is enough water to supply farmers’ peak needs during Kansas’ scorching summers.

And when the groundwater runs out, it is gone for good. Refilling the aquifer would require hundreds, if not thousands, of years of rains.

So what is going to happen to "the breadbasket of the world" as this underground water continues to dry up?

Most Americans have never even heard of the Ogallala Aquifer, but it is one of our most important natural resources. It is one of the largest sources of fresh water on the entire planet, and farmers use water from the Ogallala Aquifer to irrigate more than 15 million acres of crops each year. It covers more than 100,000 square miles and it sits underneath the states of Texas, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Colorado, Kansas, Nebraska, Wyoming and South Dakota.

Unfortunately, today it is being drained dry at a staggering rate. The following are a few statistics about this from one of my previous articles...

1. The Ogallala Aquifer is being drained at a rate of approximately 800 gallons per minute.

2. According to the U.S. Geological Survey, "a volume equivalent to two-thirds of the water in Lake Erie" has been permanently drained from the Ogallala Aquifer since 1940.

3. Decades ago, the Ogallala Aquifer had an average depth of approximately 240 feet, but today the average depth is just 80 feet. In some areas of Texas, the water is gone completely.

So exactly what do we plan to do once the water is gone?

We won't be able to grow as many crops and we will not be able to support such large cities in the Southwest.

If we have a few more summers of severe drought that are anything like last summer, we are going to be staring a major emergency in the face very rapidly.

If you live in the western half of the country, you might want to start making plans for the future, because our politicians sure are not.

Thursday, May 30, 2013

Maine doctor cuts prices in half by refusing health insurance

Maine doctor Michael Ciampi stopped accepting insurance enabling him to cut prices in half and make house calls

Published: May 29, 2013 at 2:39 PM

By KRISTEN BUTLER, UPI.com

A Portland, Maine, physician announced on April 1 that he would cut the middle man and deal directly with his patients, no longer accepting insurance in any form.
"I’ve been able to cut my prices in half because my overhead will be so much less," Dr. Michael Ciampi told the Bangor Daily News. Before, Ciampi charged an existing patient $160 for an office visit addressing one or more complicated health problems. Now, he charges $75.
Ciampi lost a few hundred of his 2,000 patients who had insurance and didn't want to deal with the hassle of paperwork for reimbursement, but he expects to make up the loss by attracting the self-employed, the young and others without insurance or with prohibitively high deductibles.
Now that he no longer accepts any form of private or government-sponsored insurance, he posts prices on his website, payable at the end of the visit. Patients with an earache or strep throat could spend $300 at their local hospital emergency room, or promptly get an appointment at his office and pay $50.
"I’m freed up to do what I think is right for the patients," Ciampi said. That includes making house calls and negotiating lower prices for patients with financial difficulty.
Gordon Smith, a spokesman for the Maine Medical Association, wasn't so sure, expressing concern for patients who rely on Medicare and Medicaid.
But Ciampi believes more doctors are likely to follow suit and cut out insurance entirely, even opening “concierge practices” in which patients pay to keep a doctor on retainer.
“If more doctors were able to do this, that would be real health care reform,” he said. “That’s when we’d see the cost of medicine truly go down.”

Some 100,000 Christians killed per year over faith, Vatican says

By Cristina Corbin

Published May 29, 2013

FoxNews.com

A staggering 100,000 Christians are killed annually because of their faith, according to the Vatican -- and several human rights groups claim such anti-Christian violence is on the rise in countries like Pakistan, Nigeria and Egypt.

"Credible research has reached the shocking conclusion that an estimate of more than 100,000 Christians are violently killed because of some relation to their faith every year," Vatican spokesman Monsieur Silvano Maria Tomassi said Tuesday in a radio address to the United Nations Human Rights Council.

"Other Christians and other believers are subjected to forced displacement, to the destruction of their places of worship, to rape and to the abduction of their leaders, as it recently happened in the case of Bishops Yohanna Ibrahim and Boulos Yaziji, in Aleppo [Syria]," Tomassi said.

While several human rights groups could not comment specifically on the Vatican's number, organizations, like Persecution.Org, said the persecutions of Christians have been on the rise in places like Africa and the Middle East over the last decade.

"Two-hundred million Christians currently live under persecution. It’s absolutely on the rise," Jeff King, the group's president, told FoxNews.com.

"It’s easing in the old Communist world and it's rising in the Islamic world," King said, noting in particular countries like Egypt, Pakistan and Nigeria. King said that the first major killing spree in recent years happened between 1998 and 2003, when he claims 10,000 Christians were murdered in Indonesia alone during those years.

Last March, a Nigerian Christian leader was killed when suspected Muslim militants burst into his home and shot him. Two members of Islamic militant group Boko Haram shot Faye Pama Mysa, a Pentecostal pastor and secretary of the Christian Association of Nigeria, in his home Wednesday, according to multiple reports. The killing happened just after President Goodluck Jonathan declared a state of emergency because of ongoing attacks in Africa's most populous nation.

King spoke of another example in which young Christian girls were forced into sex slavery in Bangladesh. More than 140 children were rescued from Islamic training centers over the last year -- with the majority of girls being targeted because of their religion, according to King.

"Two-hundred million Christians currently live under persecution. It’s absolutely on the rise."

- Jeff King, president of Persecution.Org

John Eibner, CEO of Christian Solidarity International, has raised grave concerns over what he calls "religious cleansing" in Syria.

"Religious minorities are under constant threat in Syria," Eibner told FoxNews.com. "If things continue as they have been for the past two years in Syria, with an increase in religious cleansing, it's reasonable to think that there will be no more Christian communities or other religious minorities in the near future."

"Anti-Christian violence is on the increase throughout the world, especially throughout North Africa and the Middle East," he added. "It's hard for me to say with precision what the numbers are, but without doubt anti-Christian violence is on the increase."

Dinah Pokempner, general counsel for Human Rights Watch, was not able to independently verify the Vatican's figure, but said, "I think there’s little doubt that every week, every day, someone in the world is being persecuted – even to the point of losing their life – based on their religion."

"Persecution is a daily event on the basis of religion," Pokempner said. "This persecution affects Christians just as it does Muslims, Jews, Bahá'ís and people of other faiths."

A spokesman with the Vatican could not be immediately reached for comment.

Jane Zimmerman, the U.S. State Department's Deputy Assistant Secretary of State, said in a statement that: "While I’m unfamiliar with the methodology that was used to reach that number, we have certainly followed numerous cases in recent years in which Christians and others of many faiths have been attacked or killed on account of their religious beliefs."

"Whatever the numbers, no one should die for professing or practicing their faith, whatever that faith is," Zimmerman told FoxNews.com. "The United States firmly supports the freedom to profess and practice one’s faith, to believe or not to believe, and to change one’s beliefs. As Secretary Kerry said on May 20, religious freedom 'is a birthright of every human being.'"