Teen Exorcists Give The Devil A Helluva Time In Arizona (VIDEO)
By David Moye Posted: 04/ 6/2012 10:22 am Updated: 04/ 6/2012 10:22 am
Most women have to ward off horny creatures on a daily basis, but the one that Phoenix teenagers Brynne, Tess and Savannah contend with isn't a high school quarterback, or a fist-pumping Jersey Shore wannabe -- it's the devil.
That's because when the trio aren't shopping, practicing karate or singing musical theater in local productions, they're performing exorcisms on people who've found themselves demonically possessed.
Brynne, a home-schooled redhead who competes on the beauty pageant circuit when not circumventing Satan, is considered "the enforcer" of the trio of teen exorcists, while Savannah, 20, is reportedly the more compassionate one. Tess, 17, is the "middle man" because she can play both good cop and bad cop in dealing with demonic entities that the girls run into on an average day.
"There is a war going on every day, being waged against us," Brynne told ABC Nightline. "Satan hates us. We know how the enemy is, we know what he's attacking and we can fight back."
How did Satan learn of their presence?
Well, exorcising is a family tradition for Brynne, whose dad, the Rev. Bob Larson [ http://www.boblarson.org/ ], claims to have performed more than 10,000 exorcisms in the last 30 years, many of which have become popular YouTube clips [
] among believers and non-believers alike because of their over-the-top nature.
Larson gives the teen devil defeaters hours of training each week and the girls have exorcised dozens of people already in between trips to the mall, classes and karate practice. In the process, Tess, is already a self-described expert in identifying a possessed person.
Tess first "saw the evil" and allegedly performed her first exorcism on a 15-year-old friend at a sleepover who had complained of "splitting headaches for no reason" (an apparent symptom of possession). The girl in question was said to have been a strong Christian who had recently wandered away from God.
Although the "God Squad" is getting offers to be in a reality show, the girls are also getting criticized by other demon fighters like the Father Edward Beck, a Roman Catholic priest, who told ABC Nightline that he believes that the girls are "unqualified" and "unprepared" to perform exorcisms. He said it could be dangerous for them, as well as their clients.
Larson and the girls' exorcism sessions are not free, and he insists that one session almost never does the trick.
"We have to fund what we do," he said.
However, skeptic Jim Underdown of the Center for Inquiry Los Angeles [ http://www.cfiwest.org/ ], a skeptics organization, said atheism is a much cheaper solution to demonic possession than exorcism.
Republican Committee Makes Big Turnaround on Fund-Raising
The Republican National Committee's war room in its Washington headquarters. At the start of last month, the committee reported more cash on hand than its Democratic counterpart. Doug Mills/The New York Times
Republican National Committee’s Finances Have Improved The Republican National Committee has raised more than $110 million in the last 15 months and retired more than half of its debt. Source: Campaign Finance Institute
With the divisive and drawn-out Republican primary season moving toward a close, the committee reported more money in the bank at the start of last month than the Democratic National Committee, which raised about $137 million during the same period but also spent far more.
Party officials said the Republican committee would report more than $30 million in cash on hand in filings due with the Federal Election Commission this month, including a $22 million “presidential trust” that would be available to Mr. Romney should he become the party’s nominee.
The committee’s unexpected turnaround is a case study in how Republicans are chipping away at Mr. Obama’s advantage in traditional fund-raising — and of the rapid evolution of old-fashioned party institutions in the post-Citizens United landscape of “super PACs [ http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/c/campaign_finance/index.html ]” and the unlimited money they can raise and spend.
One role that the committee has filled in the past when the party was out of power — pounding the president with early television advertising — has been taken up by outside groups like American Crossroads, founded by Karl Rove. That has allowed the committee and its chairman, Reince Priebus [ http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/p/reince_r_priebus/index.html ], to focus on rebuilding the party’s network of large donors.
The committee’s major-donor fund-raising in 2011 exceeded that of 2003, officials said, the year when President George W. Bush was preparing to run for re-election. Its small-donor program routinely brings in more than the Democratic committee’s, though far less than Mr. Obama’s campaign.
The party has already begun preparing for joint fund-raising operations with Mr. Romney, who has secured pledges from some of his donors to write large checks to the Republican committee if he becomes the nominee.
“Reince’s job, as he says, is to spend 80 percent of his time on the telephone and the other 20 percent at state party dinners,” said Frank J. Donatelli, a former deputy chairman at the committee. “There was a donor strike of sorts at the end of 2010. What he has done is regain the confidence of those major donors.”
At a time when Mr. Romney and other candidates have struggled to raise money, the committee’s fund-raising success has allowed it to move quickly into a general election posture, even before the emergence of a nominee and the flood of money to the party that usually accompanies it. While the party has run some advertising against Mr. Obama — including commercials in six swing states attacking his health care overhaul [ http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/health/diseasesconditionsandhealthtopics/health_insurance_and_managed_care/health_care_reform/index.html ] and timed to last week’s Supreme Court hearings — it has used most of its money, and the freedom afforded by super PAC advertising against Mr. Obama, to focus on its strength: identifying and turning out Republican voters.
“The R.N.C. is the only organization that can spend money directly on the ground game and organizing the states,” said Alfred Hoffman Jr., one of the country’s top Republican fund-raisers and a former finance chairman of the committee. “A super PAC can’t do that.”
The party has already opened campaign offices in Florida, North Carolina and Virginia, with up to a dozen more set to open during the coming weeks and designated staff members hired for Hispanic outreach in key states. Officials said the committee had already made more than a million voter contacts in Wisconsin, a presidential swing state where the recall effort against Gov. Scott Walker, a Republican, has energized the grass roots of both parties.
The party has also revamped its voter database, known as Voter Vault, which was built during Mr. Bush’s tenure but fell into disrepair after he left office. The new system will allow what committee officials there call “nano-targeting,” collecting far more detailed demographic and consumer data on Republican voters than the earlier version.
“We will be the gold standard of Republican get-out-the-vote efforts,” Mr. Priebus said in a statement. “We are at least 90 days ahead of where the R.N.C. has ever been in history.”
After its brush with near-bankruptcy, the committee slashed spending to $84 million since the beginning of 2011, compared with the Democratic committee’s $122 million in the same period. Mr. Priebus and his team have cut travel budgets, pared the ranks of expensive consultants and spent relatively little on polling. At the same time, the Democrats have invested heavily in information technology, data collection and party-building, which they believe will put them ahead of Republicans come November.
And Mr. Obama’s campaign remains well ahead of Mr. Romney’s in fund-raising: Through the end of February, Mr. Obama’s campaign had raised $172.7 million and had $84.7 million in cash on hand, dwarfing the $75 million raised by Mr. Romney, who has been forced to spend heavily against his primary opponents.
As that primary battle has raged, Mr. Obama’s team has been building a state-of-the-art national campaign, reconnecting with the millions of donors and supporters who helped him to victory four years ago.
Yet the Republican committee’s strong cash numbers suggest that relatively weak fund-raising by Mr. Romney will quickly improve as the primaries wind down, diminishing Mr. Obama’s advantage. Some Republican officials estimate that one-half to two-thirds of the party’s regular major donors have not yet contributed to Mr. Romney — but are likely to if he clinches the nomination.
In the coming weeks, Mr. Romney is likely to begin holding joint fund-raisers with the Republican committee, events that will leverage the presence of the party’s nominee to bring in large checks to the party’s treasury. (Mr. Obama’s campaign has staged more than 100 such events since last spring, far more than Mr. Bush did during his own re-election campaign.)
“The R.N.C. money is telling you that once it is no longer a choice among Republicans, but between the Republican nominee and the president, the party’s backers will come out to support the Republican nominee,” said Michael J. Malbin, the executive director of the Campaign Finance Institute, a research group..
To some extent, the committee has benefited from a nominating fight that has left many Republican donors wary. Some of the party’s top fund-raisers, like Mr. Hoffman, a Florida real estate developer, devoted themselves full-time to bundling checks for the committee last year rather than raising money for any of the Republican candidates.
Mr. Priebus also pledged to reserve large contributions for the presidential trust — rather than using them to pay down debt accumulated under his predecessor, Michael Steele — and persuaded donors that giving to the party was a better alternative during primary season than sitting on the sidelines.
Those efforts effectively channeled millions of dollars to the party that will be spent in an effort to beat Democrats rather than other Republicans.
“It hit a chord in a lot of people,” Mr. Hoffman said. “Put your money in the R.N.C., because you know it will help in 2012.”
US election 2012: Barack Obama and Mitt Romney accuse each other of being out of touch
Millionaire Mitt Romney who claims President Obama is out of touch Photo: GETTY
A line has been drawn in the early stages of the battle between President Barack Obama and Mitt Romney, the likely Republican challenger.
By Jon Swaine, Washington 4:50PM BST 08 Apr 2012
Mr Romney, a multimillionaire Harvard graduate, said the president is "out of touch". Mr Obama, a Harvard graduate and multimillionaire, says the same of his rival.
As Americans struggle to recover from the country's economic collapse, their likely choices for the White House are going to eyebrow-raising lengths to prove that the other does not feel the public's pain.
Mr Romney said this week that after "years of flying around on Air Force One, surrounded by an adoring staff of true believers," Mr Obama was "a little out of touch" with regular folk.
A smirking Mr Obama later noted in a speech that the former Massachusetts governor called a swingeing Republican austerity plan "marvellous" – "a word you don't often hear generally".
The message was clear: the candidate with a $250 million (£160 million) fortune and old-fashioned manner, who tied the family dog to the roof of their car for a drive to Canada, is detached.
It is unclear whether voters will believe that Mr Obama, who lives in a 132-room mansion and has an executive pastry chef, remains at one with the middle class. In the first year of his presidency he and his wife Michelle earned $5.5 million – about 110 times the average American household's income.
However Mr Romney's claim this week that the president spent "too much time at Harvard" to understand voters will take some outdoing for audacity.
While Mr Obama studied there for three years, Mr Romney managed four – before moving to a town just 15 minutes away, where he raised his family.
After an Easter hiatus, Mr Obama will on Tuesday embark on a tour of swing states to make the case for his "Buffett Rule", forcing millionaires pay a minimum 20 per cent income tax.
Mr Romney, who at the weekend was seen bodyboarding near his beachside home in California, will work towards wrapping up the Republican nomination contest in Pennsylvania later this month.
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