Motivational-Inspirational-Historical-Educational-Political-Enjoyable
Promoting "God's Holy Values and American Freedoms"!
"My Comments"
Auld Lang Syne
http://wilstar.com/xmas/auldlangsyne.htm
"Daily Motivations"
"Discovery consists of looking at the same thing as everyone else does and thinking something different." -- Albert Szent-Gyorgyi
"It takes courage to grow up and turn out to be who you really are." -- Edward Estlin Cummings
The best leader is the one who has the sense to surround himself with winning people. -- Unknown
"Daily Devotions" (KJV and/or NLT)
He was lost, but now he is found. (Luke 15:24)
John Newton's mother was a devoted Christian, but she died when he was a child. As a young man, he decided to follow in the footsteps of his father, an English sea captain. He joined the British Royal Navy but was discharged for unruly behavior. He moved to the western coast of Africa and worked for a slave trader. He eventually became captain of a slave ship, treating the slaves despicably. What a loathsome man he had become!
On one voyage, a fierce storm severely battered his ship. Fearing for his life, he surrendered himself to God. Over the next few years as he became convinced that slavery was abhorrent, he gave up slave trading and crusaded against slavery. His life changed so much that he even studied to become a minister. Soon, he became known as the "old converted sea captain" all because he had personally encountered the living God. Eventually, he wrote one of the most famous hymns in the English language, Amazing Grace. In it, he describes his own transformation:
"Amazing grace, how sweet the sound,
That saved a wretch like me.
I once was lost, but now am found,
Was blind, but now I see."
Who else but almighty God could change a calloused slave trader into a compassionate minister and anti-slavery crusader? Have you experienced this change? If He could change John Newton, he can certainly change you.
For more than fifty years, I have walked and talked with our loving heavenly Father. The more I get to know Him, the more peace, joy, love, and excitement I experience. It has been my greatest adventure. He has proven to be my best friend, someone I can trust in every situation.
Your View of God Really Matters …
If you have experienced the marvelous revelation of God's amazing grace, think of one significant way it has affected your life. Then ask God to show you one person who needs to hear your story.
"The Patriot Post"
"In questions of power, then, let no more be heard of confidence in man, but bind him down from mischief by the chains of the Constitution." -- Thomas Jefferson
Insight
"The [U.S.] Constitution is a limitation on the government, not on private individuals ... it does not prescribe the conduct of private individuals, only the conduct of the government ... it is not a charter for government power, but a charter of the citizen's protection against the government." -- author and philosopher Ayn Rand (1905-1982)
Government
"One of the ways the country is going in the wrong direction is not simply with huge government spending but with huge government period. Ordinary Americans are uneasy about trusting their fate to huge government. They know that government services are inefficient, expensive, and occasionally repressive and subject to corruption. More than that, huge government is unreliable. The healthcare debate has got to be reminding ordinary Americans of their unease over government promises. Think about it. The same big government Democrats who are promising government-secured healthcare are promising 'healthcare savings' that are clearly the denial of Medicare services to the elderly. That is to say, Medicare services that were once promised to seniors by Medicare's advocates are being taken from them under the false claim that they are savings. Face the facts: the Democrats' healthcare savings are actually healthcare denials to those who have been counting on those services for years. Government does not keep its promises. Yet government is the Democrats' solution to practically all our current problems. ... Once again government cannot be trusted. What government gives to us, government can take away." -- columnist R. Emmett Tyrrell
Political Futures
"In [last] Tuesday's primary election, Massachusetts Democrats chose as their Senate nominee a woman who kept a clearly innocent man in prison in order to advance her political career. Martha Coakley isn't even fit for the late Teddy Kennedy's old seat. (What is it about this particular Senate seat?) During the daycare/child molestation hysteria of the '80s, Gerald Amirault, his mother, Violet, and sister, Cheryl, were accused of raping children at the family's preschool in Malden, Mass., in what came to be known as the second-most notorious witch trial in Massachusetts history. ... Of all the men and women falsely convicted during the child molestation hysteria of the '80s, by 2001, only Gerald Amirault still sat in prison. Even his sister and mother had been released after serving eight years in prison for crimes that never occurred. In July 2001, the notoriously tough Massachusetts parole board voted unanimously to grant Gerald Amirault clemency. Although the parole board is not permitted to consider guilt or innocence, its recommendation said: '(I)t is clearly a matter of public knowledge that, at the minimum, real and substantial doubt exists concerning petitioner's conviction.' Immediately after the board's recommendation, The Boston Globe reported that Gov. Jane Swift was leaning toward accepting the board's recommendation and freeing Amirault. Enter Martha Coakley, Middlesex district attorney. ... Coakley put on a full court press to keep Amirault in prison simply to further her political ambitions. By then, every sentient person knew that Amirault was innocent. But instead of saying nothing, Coakley frantically lobbied Gov. Jane Swift to keep him in prison to show that she was a take-no-prisoners prosecutor, who stood up for 'the children.' As a result of Coakley's efforts -- and her contagious ambition -- Gov. Swift denied Amirault's clemency. Thanks to Martha Coakley, Gerald Amirault sat in prison for another three years. Remember all that talk about President Bush shredding constitutional rights? Overzealous liberal prosecutors and feminist do-gooders allowed Gerald Amirault to sit in prison for 18 years for crimes that didn't exist -- except in the imaginations of small children under the influence of incompetent child 'therapists.' Martha Coakley allowed her ambition to trump basic human decency as she campaigned to keep a patently innocent man in prison. Anyone with the smallest sense of justice cannot vote to put this woman in any office. If you absolutely cannot vote for a Republican on Jan. 19, 2010, write in the name 'Gerald Amirault.'" -- columnist Ann Coulter
The Last Word
"I guess we all have our own favorite Christmas memories, for this is the time of year when most of us try to be better than our everyday selves. For the past few years in this great house, I've thought of our first real Christmas as a nation. It was the dark and freezing Christmas of 1776, when General Washington and his troops crossed the Delaware. They and Providence gave our nation its first Christmas gift -- a victory that brought us closer to liberty, the condition in which God meant man to flourish. It always seems to me that Christmas is a time of magic. Each December we celebrate a Prince, the Prince of Peace, born in utter poverty. And the fact of his birth makes hearts turn warmest at the coldest time of the year." -- Ronald Reagan (Dec. 13, 1984)
"The Web"
Christian witnessing a no-no on campus
Charlie Butts - OneNewsNow
http://www.onenewsnow.com/Legal/Default.aspx?id=827542
Alliance Defense Fund (ADF) is appealing a decision to permit a bad speech policy to stand while a lawsuit against Georgia Southern University proceeds.
In March of last year, Benjamin Bloedorn visited the campus to distribute tracts and talk about his faith with students in a free-speech area of the school. ADF attorney Nate Kellum picks up the story.
"Some officers affiliated with Georgia Southern said basically he could either keep quiet, stop talking about Jesus, or be arrested -- and while he was trying to confer with the officers about this, they just decided to arrest him," Kellum explains.
According to the attorney, Bloedorn was also told he had to have permission from the university to exercise his constitutional right to free speech.
Later a trespassing charge was dropped, but Bloedorn was told not to return to the campus to share his faith. The federal court refused to grant a restraining order to prevent enforcement of the campus policies. Kellum expects that decision to be overturned.
"We don't think the court of appeals will view it the same way -- so...while the case is still ongoing, we appealed this decision about the constitutionality of the ordinance to the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals," he says. "And we're very hopeful the 11th Circuit will see it very differently."
Numerous court rulings in similar cases would tend to back up that claim.
Obama Describes Nigerian As ‘Isolated Extremist,’ Despite Ties to Yemen
By Susan Jones, Senior Editor
http://www.cnsnews.com/news/article/59115
President Barack Obama speaks to the media about the recent air travel incident on Monday, Dec. 28, 2009, at the Marine Corps Base Hawaii at Kaneohe Bay, Hawaii. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon)
(CNSNews.com) – President Barack Obama, in his first public comments on the attempted bombing of a U.S. airliner traveling from Amsterdam to Detroit, described the suspect as “an isolated extremist,” despite reports that the 23-year-old Nigerian had been trained in Yemen, a country he visited twice.
The Associated Press, quoting a Yemeni government official, said Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab lived in Yemen for two extended periods of time -- a year, from 2004-2005 and again from August-December this year. He apparently was in Yemen a few weeks before the attempt to blow Flight 253 out of the sky over Michigan. (See timeline)
A statement posted online Monday by Al-Qaeda in Yemen (also known as al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula) said its “manufacturing sector” had provided Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab with the explosives he took onboard the aircraft. (The United States has not yet authenticated the Web posting, but Abdulmutallab's connection to Yemen is not in doubt.)
Al Qaeda in Yemen is the same group with which Anwar al-Awlaki is affiliated. Awlaki, a U.S.-born imam, preaches a radical form of Islam that may have inspired the Fort Hood killer. As CNSNews.com reported earlier, al-Awlaki described Maj. Nidal Hasan as a "hero" after Hasan allegedly shot and killed 13 people at Fort Hood last month. Hasan reportedly had contacted al-Awlaki on numerous occasions before the rampage.
Rep. Pete Hoekstra (R-Mich.) told ABC News it looks like al-Awlaki "played a role" in the attempt to bomb Flight 253. "All roads point back to Yemen, they point back to Awlaki, I think it is a pretty deadly combination," Hoekstra told ABC's "The Blotter."
In another twist, ABC News reported that two of the men behind the Flight 253 bombing plot were released from the U.S. military detention center at Guantanamo Bay in November 2007 and sent to Saudi Arabia, where they were later freed. They are now said to be leaders of al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula.
President Obama, in recounting what happened in the air over Michigan on Christmas day, used the word “allegedly” to describe the attempted bombing. The president says he’s asked his aides to “continue monitoring the situation.”
What follows are Obama’s first remarks on the would-be terror attack, delivered Monday at a military base in Hawaii – three days after Abdulmutallab tried unsuccessfully to detonate explosives hidden in his underwear.
Text of Obama’s prepared remarks:
Good morning, everybody. I wanted to take just a few minutes to update the American people on the attempted terrorist attack that occurred on Christmas Day and the steps we're taking to ensure the safety and security of the country.
The investigation's ongoing. And I spoke again this morning with Attorney General Eric Holder, the secretary of homeland security, Janet Napolitano, and my counterterrorism and homeland security adviser, John Brennan. I asked them to keep -- continue monitoring the situation to keep the American people and members of Congress informed.
Here's what we know so far: On Christmas Day, Northwest Airlines Flight 253 was en route from Amsterdam, Netherlands, to Detroit. As the plane made its final approach to Detroit Metropolitan Airport, a passenger allegedly tried to ignite an explosive device on his body, setting off a fire.
Thanks to the quick and heroic actions of passengers and crew, the suspect was immediately subdued, the fire was put out, and the plane landed safely. The suspect is now in custody and has been charged with attempting to destroy an aircraft.
A full investigation has been launched into this attempted act of terrorism, and we will not rest until we find all who were involved and hold them accountable.
Now, this was a serious reminder of the dangers that we face and the nature of those who threaten our homeland. Had the suspect succeeded in bringing down that plane, it could have killed nearly 300 passengers and crew, innocent civilians preparing to celebrate the holidays with their families and friends.
The American people should be assured that we are doing everything in our power to keep you and your family safe and secure during this busy holiday season.
Since I was first notified of this incident, I've ordered the following actions to be taken to protect the American people and to secure air travel.
First, I directed that we take immediate steps to ensure the safety of the traveling public. We made sure that all flights still in the air were secure and could land safely. We immediately enhanced screening and security procedures for all flights, domestic and international. We added federal air marshals to flights entering and leaving the United States. And we're working closely in this country, federal, state and local law enforcement, with our international partners.
Second, I've ordered two important reviews, because it's absolutely critical that we learn from this incident and take the necessary measures to prevent future acts of terrorism.
The first review involves our watch list system, which our government has had in place for many years to identify known and suspected terrorists so that we can prevent their entry into the United States. Apparently the suspect in the Christmas incident was in this system, but not on a watch list, such as the so-called no-fly list. So I have ordered a thorough review, not only of how information related to the subject was handled, but of the overall watch list system and how it can be strengthened.
The second review will examine all screening policies, technologies and procedures related to air travel. We need to determine just how the suspect was able to bring dangerous explosives aboard an aircraft and what additional steps we can take to thwart future attacks.
Third, I've directed my national security team to keep up the pressure on those who would attack our country. We do not yet have all the answers about this latest attempt, but those who would slaughter innocent men, women and children must know that the United States will more -- do more than simply strengthen our defenses. We will continue to use every element of our national power to disrupt, to dismantle and defeat the violent extremists who threaten us, whether they are from Afghanistan or Pakistan, Yemen or Somalia, or anywhere where they are plotting attacks against the U.S. homeland.
Finally, the American people should remain vigilant, but also be confident. Those plotting against us seek not only to undermine our security, but also the open society and the values that we cherish as Americans. This incident, like several that have preceded it, demonstrates that an alert and courageous citizenry are far more resilient than an isolated extremist.
As a nation, we will do everything in our power to protect our country. As Americans, we will never give in to fear or division. We will be guided by our hopes, our unity, and our deeply held values. That's who we are as Americans; that's what our brave men and women in uniform are standing up for as they spend the holidays in harm's way. And we will continue to do everything that we can to keep America safe in the new year and beyond.
Two Al-Qaeda top dogs behind Flight 253 jihad plot were released from Gitmo
http://www.jihadwatch.org/2009/12/two-al-qaeda-top-dogs-behind-flight-253-jihad-plot-were-released-from-gitmo.html
Gitmo recidivism comes back to bite us directly. "Two al Qaeda Leaders Behind Northwest Flight 253 Terror Plot Were Released by U.S.: Former Guantanamo Prisoners Believed Behind Northwest Airlines Bomb Plot; Sent to Saudi Arabia in 2007," by Brian Ross, Anna Schecter and Joseph Rhee for ABC News, December 28 (thanks to Awake):
Two of the four leaders allegedly behind the al Qaeda plot to blow up a Northwest Airlines passenger jet over Detroit were released by the U.S. from the Guantanamo prison in November, 2007, according to American officials and Department of Defense documents. Al Qaeda claimed responsibility for the Northwest bombing in a Monday statement that vowed more attacks on Americans.
American officials agreed to send the two terrorists from Guantanamo to Saudi Arabia where they entered into an "art therapy rehabilitation program" and were set free, according to U.S. and Saudi officials.
An "art therapy rehabilitation program." Yes, you read that right.
Guantanamo prisoner #333, Muhamad Attik al-Harbi, and prisoner #372, Said Ali Shari, were sent to Saudi Arabia on Nov. 9, 2007, according to the Defense Department log of detainees who were released from American custody. Al-Harbi has since changed his name to Muhamad al-Awfi.
Both Saudi nationals have since emerged in leadership roles in Yemen, according to U.S. officials and the men's own statements on al Qaeda propaganda tapes.
Both of the former Guantanamo detainees are described as military commanders and appear on a January, 2009 video along with the man described as the top leader of al Qaeda in Yemen, Abu Basir Naser al-Wahishi, formerly Osama bin Laden's personal secretary.
In its Monday statement claiming responsibility for the Northwest bombing, Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula called bombing suspect Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab a "hero" and a "martyr" and lauded him for beating U.S. intelligence.
The two-page written claim included a photo of Abdulmutallab and boasted of Al Qaeda's success in designing "advanced explosive packages" that can pass through airport screening undetected.
The statement also asks for attacks upon Americans in the Arabian peninsula, and promises further attacks on the American people.
The suspected bomber, 23-year-old Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, told FBI agents he was trained for his Christmas Day mission in Yemen by top leaders of al Qaeda who provided him with the explosive materials.
"The so-called rehabilitation programs are a joke," a U.S. diplomat said in describing the Saudi efforts with released Guantanamo detainees.
Saudi officials concede its program has had its "failures" but insist that, overall, the effort has helped return potential terrorists to a meaningful life....
I.e., jihad.
Teachers’ Unions Are Washington’s Fat Cats
by Kyle Olson
http://biggovernment.com/2009/12/18/teachers-unions-are-washingtons-fat-cats/
We know how liberals, particularly those in the education establishment, like to say that Corporate America dictates public policy through campaign contributions.
A new report, prepared by the Center for Responsive Politics and the National Institute on Money in State Politics, does a good job of dispelling that myth.
As it turns out, the National Education Association was by far the nation’s biggest political contributor during the 2008 election cycle. The NEA dropped a cool $56.3 million on its list of favored liberal candidates at various levels of government, which was about $12 million more than the runner-up contributor spent.
The American Federation of Teachers was also busy writing contribution checks, to the tune of $13.8 million. And the two unions joined forces to contribute about $3.3 million to various campaigns in a handful of states.
What was that again? Our government has been bought and paid for by Corporate America?
The Education Intelligence Agency summed up the true situation this way: “America’s two teachers unions outspent AT & T, Goldman Sachs, Wal-Mart, Microsoft, General Electric, Chevron, Pfizer, Morgan Stanley, Lockheed Martin, FedEx, Boeing, Merrill Lynch, Exxon Mobil, Lehman Brothers and the Walt Disney Corporation combined.”
That’s ironic when you consider what the unions got in return for their huge investment. We’re certain they were excited on election night last November, with a Democrat headed to the White House, big Democratic majorities taking over Congress, and Democrats controlling statehouses across the nation.
But alas, Democratic officeholders at every level have turned on the unions, despite their generous campaign gifts. The President is demanding Republican-style education reforms through his “Race to the Top” initiative, and state officials across the map are scrambling to cooperate and quality for federal money.
So I guess we can’t say that the teachers unions are dictating public policy with huge campaign expenditures. They certainly tried, but their pet politicians ate up all the treats, then turned around a bit their masters.
"The e-mail Bag"
The couple who sneaked into the White House without any credentials
by stephanieinar
http://stephanieinar.homeschooljournal.net/2009/12/19/the-couple-who-sneaked-into-the-white-house-without-any-credentials/
Thursday, December 31, 2009
Wednesday, December 30, 2009
ConservativeChristianRepublican-Report - 20091230
Motivational-Inspirational-Historical-Educational-Political-Enjoyable
Promoting "God's Holy Values and American Freedoms"!
"Daily Motivations"
Living inspired is born in the awareness that this is it! We have one chance at life. And the wonderful gift we are given every morning is the choice of how we are going to live that moment, that day. -- Sally Cofer-Lindberg
"He who cannot forgive others destroys a bridge over which he himself must pass." -- George Herbert
"Regret for the things we did can be tempered by time; it is regret for the things we did not do that is inconsolable." -- Sydney J Harris
"Daily Devotions" (KJV and/or NLT)
The Lord is kind and merciful, slow to get angry, full of unfailing love. (Psalm 145:8)
Justice delayed is often justice denied. For example, if a defense lawyer can keep postponing a murder case, evidence that is available in a speedy trial becomes useless. Witnesses may die or move away. The defense can challenge the validity of a witness's memory. Police departments misplace evidence.
However, as believers, it is important that we also recognize that we are saved precisely because God delays His justice. Whatever age you or I received God's promise of eternal life was more than enough time for God to have caused His just wrath to fall on us.
Dr. Cyril E. M. Joad, who for years was the head of the Philosophy Department at the University of London, probably did more to undermine the faith of the collegiate world of recent generations than almost any other. He believed that God was an impersonal part of the cosmos and that there was no such thing as sin.
However, before he died, Dr. Joad became convinced that the only explanation for sin was found in the Bible---and the only solution for sin was the cross of Jesus Christ. Like the apostle Paul, he became a zealous follower of Jesus. No doubt many of his followers turned to faith in God through his testimony and writings. God's long-suffering and incredible patience brought this skeptic to his knees at the cross.
None of us deserve even one day of life because of our sinful, depraved nature, so we should be grateful for a just God who delays His justice. When it comes to our sin, justice delayed works to our advantage.
Your View of God Really Matters …
The next time you see justice denied because it is delayed, let it be a poignant reminder of how greatly you have benefited because God was slow to enact His justice toward you.
"The Patriot Post"
"The steady character of our countrymen is a rock to which we may safely moor; and notwithstanding the efforts of the papers to disseminate early discontents, I expect that a just, dispassionate and steady conduct, will at length rally to a proper system the great body of our country. Unequivocal in principle, reasonable in manner, we shall be able I hope to do a great deal of good to the cause of freedom & harmony." -- Thomas Jefferson, letter to Elbridge Gerry, 1801
"No man in his senses can hesitate in choosing to be free, rather than a slave." -- Alexander Hamilton
The BIG Lie
"To paraphrase Shakespeare, it's sound and fury signifying nothing. I haven't read all the [CRU] e-mails, but the most recent one is more than 10 years old. These private exchanges between these scientists do not in any way cause any question about the scientific consensus. ... [W]here the scientific consensus is concerned, it's completely unchanged. What we're seeing is a set of changes worldwide that just make this discussion over 10-year-old e-mails kind of silly." -- Algore on the disclosure of e-mails from the Climate Research Unit at East Anglia University
This Week's 'Alpha Jackass' Award
On the topic of health care, Harry Reid offered an interesting comparison on the Senate floor. He likened opponents of the Democrats' proposed takeover of one-sixth of the U.S. economy to those who defended slavery and opposed women's suffrage.
"Instead of joining us on the right side of history, all the Republicans can come up with is, 'slow down, stop everything, let's start over,'" Reid said. "If you think you've heard these same excuses before, you're right. When this country belatedly recognized the wrongs of slavery, there were those who dug in their heels and said 'slow down, it's too early, things aren't bad enough.'" Slavery is not exactly a favorable issue for Democrats.
But he didn't stop there. "When women spoke up for the right to speak up, they wanted to vote, some insisted they simply, slow down, there will be a better day to do that, today isn't quite right. When this body was on the verge of guaranteeing equal civil rights to everyone regardless of the color of their skin, some senators resorted to the same filibuster threats that we hear today."
Wall Street Journal columnist John Fund notes one of the historical omissions in Reid's claim: "Among those voting to block the civil rights bill was West Virginia Senator Robert Byrd, who personally filibustered the bill for 14 hours. The next year he also opposed the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Mr. Byrd still sits in the Senate, and indeed preceded Mr. Reid as his party's majority leader until he stepped down from that role in 1989."
This Week's 'Braying Jenny' Award
"Is it morally correct [to force taxpayer funding of abortion]? Yes, I believe it is. Abortion is legal, and there are certain very tragic circumstances that a woman finds herself in. Married, with an unborn baby that's unable to survive outside of the womb, her doctor tells her it's a threat to her health. I think she ought to have a policy available to her. ... We pay for a lot of things that we may or may not agree with, and taxpayers pay for it, for those things, as well." -- Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Death Valley)
Don't miss more on the abortion issue, including Sen. Ben Nelson's rejected amendment to the health care bill barring federal funding for abortions, as well as Sen. Barbara Boxer's comparison of abortion to a certain blue pill.
Judicial Benchmarks: A Tale of Two Cases
The U.S. Supreme Court this term has taken up two cases that are important to religious freedom and property rights, respectively. On Dec. 7, the Court granted a hearing in Christian Legal Society v. Martinez, in which the University of California Hastings College of Law denied recognition to the local CLS chapter because it required each prospective member to sign a statement of faith that tracked traditional, orthodox Christian theology and morality. Unless the CLS chapter opened its membership to everyone, including non-Christians and practicing homosexuals, UC would deny access to any benefits and facilities provided to other student organizations.
The district court decision, which was summarily affirmed by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, lightly glossed over the obvious and oppressive burden placed on the CLS members by UC's actions. Arguing that the CLS chapter could avoid the restrictions by simply accepting everyone as members, the court completely missed the point: If it accepted everyone as members, the CLS chapter would no longer be a Christian organization. The CLS chapter was unfairly burdened precisely because it is Christian. Or maybe that was the point.
The Court also heard arguments on Dec. 1 in Stop the Beach Renourishment v. Florida Dep't of Environmental Protection. In this case, Florida trucked in sand to "renourish" critically eroded beaches and then promptly took ownership of this "new dry land." Owners of what had previously been waterfront properties now had a strip of state land between themselves and the ocean.
Tossing out well-settled principles of common law in its attempt to "balance" the rights of the property owners and the state, the Florida Supreme Court ruled that this was not an unconstitutional taking in violation of the Fifth Amendment Takings Clause. In an unusually strident dissent, Justice Charles T. Wells pointed out that Florida expropriated valuable property rights clearly established by Florida law: the right to have their property in contact with the water. While Florida was free to do so, it should pay the owners compensation for the taking.
Both of these cases will be important tests of whether the Court will uphold constitutional religious, association and property rights against government encroachment.
Friends in High Places
Some people work their whole life to achieve a position of prominence, but others take a shorter path, i.e., they sleep their way to the top. That's the perception of Melodee Hayes, who recently withdrew her candidacy for U.S. Attorney in Montana. She is also the girlfriend of Montana Democrat Senator Max Baucus.
Hayes, who was director of Baucus's Montana office when their relationship started in 2008, indeed had some qualifications for the U.S. Attorney post as she had served as a local prosecutor prior to working under the senator. But their deepening relationship (as Baucus was divorcing his wife of 25 years) led to the speculation that he was pushing his girlfriend for the job. He also gave her a $14,000 raise at the time. She withdrew from consideration and took a job at the Justice Department -- partly so she could shack up with Baucus.
Of course, had this been a Republican senator, the story might have competed with other sordid domestic tales for airtime on the network news shows. Since Baucus has a "D" after his name, however, this will blow over quickly and will be a distant memory when he's up for re-election in 2014.
Speaking of Republicans, South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford dodged a bullet this week when state lawmakers rejected an impeachment resolution, choosing instead to consider a formal rebuke of the governor. Sanford had traveled to Argentina in June, where he ended an extra-marital affair. He was accused of misusing state resources but repaid the expenses, thus making the charges moot.
Belly Laugh of the Week
"One of the central goals of this administration is restoring fiscal responsibility." -- Barack Obama
"The Web"
Islamic Terror Attacks on American Soil
http://www.thereligionofpeace.com/Pages/AmericanAttacks.htm
We recently got taken to the mat by a polite, young Muslim living in the U.K. who took issue with our oft-repeated statement that no Muslim-American lost their life to vigilante violence following 9/11. She provided us a list of six or seven candidates and, after whittling out the ones where the killer was unknown or in cases with mitigating circumstances such as “victim was sleeping with killer’s ex-girlfriend” (and we’re not making that up), we reached a shocking conclusion:
We were wrong.
There is one seemingly unambiguous case that occurred in Dallas, Texas where Waqar Hasan, a Muslim convenience storeowner, was gunned down by Mark Anthony Stroman four days after the 9/11 attacks. Stroman claimed to have been motivated by anger from watching the towers fall. He is not exactly your average American, however, even apart from the shooting. For one thing, he is a white supremacist who carried a felony criminal record at the time of the attack. He also went on to shoot two more people in the weeks that followed.
Thankfully, an American jury sentenced Mark Stroman to death. The same cannot be said of many Muslim terrorists such as Lockerbie bomber, Abdelbaset Al Megrahi, who not only have sanctuary in Muslim countries, but are often treated as heroes by devout followers of Muhammad.
Nevertheless, we acknowledge that our friend is correct and that there was at least one Muslim killed in an anti-Arab hate crime in the U.S. following the anti-American hate crime on 9/11. For anyone keeping score:
People killed by radical Muslims on 9/11: 2,996
Muslim-Americans killed "in revenge": 1
Of course, 9/11 was neither the first nor the last time that Muslims have killed Americans on U.S. soil in terror attacks. In fact, since that day, Muslims have killed at least 52 people in 31 separate acts of terrorism in the United States (by the standards that Muslim-American groups set for hate crimes). Perhaps more importantly, there have been quite a few planned mass murders of Americans by Islamic terrorists that were thwarted by the FBI, law enforcement and overseas intelligence operations both before and after 9/11.
By contrast, Muslim-Americans do not appear to be in any special danger from murderous (non-Muslim) religious fanatics, even in a nation awash in firearms. Identity groups, such as CAIR, whine incessantly about relatively trivial incidents while turning a blind eye to the horrible violence that is meted out daily in the name of their religion. This distasteful petulance offers insight not only into the character of Islam, but also the impressive religious tolerance that Americans manage to maintain.
For anyone wondering about the history of deadly Islamic terror on American soil in the last 35 years, here’s what we could find:
Date, Country, City/State, Killed, Injured, Description
4/14/1972
USA
New York, NY
1
3
Ten members of a local mosque phone in a false alarm and then ambush responding officers, killing one.
1/19/1973
USA
Brooklyn, NY
1
1
Muslim extremists rob a sporting goods store for weapons, gunning down a police officer who responds to the alarm.
7/18/1973
USA
Washington, DC
8
2
Nation of Islam members shoot seven members of a family to death in cold blood, including four children. A defendant in the case is later murdered in prison on orders from Elijah Muhammad.
10/19/1973
USA
Oakland, CA
1
1
Nation of Islam terrorists kidnap a couple and nearly decapitate the man, while raping and leaving the woman for dead.
10/29/1973
USA
Berkeley, CA
1
0
A woman is shot repeatedly in the face by Nation of Islam terrorists.
11/25/1973
USA
Oakland, CA
1
0
A grocer is killed in his store by Nation of Islam terrorists.
12/11/1973
USA
Oakland, CA
1
0
A man is killed by Nation of Islam terrorists while using a phone booth.
12/13/1973
USA
Oakland, CA
1
0
A woman is shot to deah on the sidewalk by Nation of Islam terrorists.
12/20/1973
USA
Oakland, CA
1
0
Nation of Islam terrorists gun down an 81-year-old janitor.
12/22/1973
USA
Oakland, CA
2
0
Nation of Islam terrorist kills two people in separate attacks on the same day.
12/24/1973
USA
Oakland, CA
1
0
A man is kidnapped, tortured and decapitated by Nation of Islam terrorists.
1/24/1974
USA
Oakland, CA
4
1
Five vicious shooting attacks by Nation of Islam terrorists leave three people dead and one paralyzed for life. Three of the victims were women.
4/1/1974
USA
Oakland, CA
1
1
A Nation of Islam terrorist shoots at two Salvation Army members, killing a man and injuring a woman.
4/16/1974
USA
Ingleside, CA
1
0
A man is killed while helping a friend move by Nation of Islam terrorists.
3/9/1977
USA
Washington, DC
1
1
Hanifi Muslims storm three buildings including a B'nai B'rith to hold 134 people hostage. At least two innocents were shot and one died.
7/22/1980
USA
Bethesda, MD
1
0
A political dissident is shot and killed in front of his home by an Iranian agent who was an American convert to Islam.
8/31/1980
USA
Savou, IL
2
0
An Iranian student guns down his next-door neighbors, a husband and wife.
1/31/1990
USA
Tuscon, AZ
1
0
A Sunni cleric is assassinated in front of a Tuscon mosque after declaring that two verses of the Qur'an were invalid.
11/5/1990
USA
New York City, NY
1
0
An Israeli rabbi is shot to death by a Muslim attacker at a hotel.
1/25/1993
USA
Langley, VA
2
3
A Pakistani with Mujahideen ties guns down two CIA agents outside of the headquarters.
2/26/1993
USA
New York, NY
6
1040
Islamic terrorists detonate a massive truck bomb under the World Trade Center, killing six people and injuring over 1,000 in an effort to collapse the towers.
3/1/1994
USA
Brooklyn, NY
1
0
A Muslim fires on a vanload of Jewish boys, killing one.
3/23/1997
USA
New York, NY
1
6
A Palestinian leaves an anti-Jewish suicide note behind and travels to the top of the Empire State building where he shoot seven people in a Fedayeen attack.
4/3/1997
USA
Lompoc, CA
1
0
A prison guard is stabbed to death by a radical Muslim.
10/31/1999
USA
Near Nantucket
217
0
An Egyptian airline pilot runs a planeload of 217 passengers into the water after uttering a Qur'anic prayer.
3/17/2000
USA
Atlanta, GA
1
1
A local imam and Muslim spiritual leader guns down a deputy sheriff and injures his partner.
9/11/2001
USA
Washington, DC
184
53
Nearly 200 people are killed when Islamic hijackers steer a plane full of people into the Pentagon.
9/11/2001
USA
Shanksville, PA
40
0
Forty passengers are killed after Islamic radicals hijack the plane in an attempt to steer it into the U.S. Capitol building.
9/11/2001
USA
New York, NY
2772
251
Islamic hijackers steer two planes packed with fuel and passengers into the World Trade Center, killing hundreds on impact and eventually killing thousands when the towers collapsed. At least 200 are seriously injured.
3/19/2002
USA
Tuscon, AZ
1
0
A 60-year-old man is gunned down by Muslim snipers on a golf course.
5/27/2002
USA
Denton, TX
1
0
Muslim snipers kill a man as he works in his yard.
7/4/2002
USA
Los Angeles, CA
2
0
Muslim man pulls out a gun at the counter of an Israeli airline and kills two people.
9/5/2002
USA
Clinton, MD
1
0
A 55-year-old pizzaria owner is shot six times in the back by Muslims at close range.
9/21/2002
USA
Montgomery, AL
1
1
Muslim snipers shoot two women, killing one.
9/23/2002
USA
Baton Rouge, LA
1
0
A Korean mother is shot in the back by Muslim snipers.
10/2/2002
USA
Wheaton, MD
1
0
Muslim snipers gun down a program analyst in a store parking lot.
10/3/2002
USA
Montgomery County, MD
5
0
Muslim snipers kill three men and two women in separate attacks over a 15-hour period.
10/9/2002
USA
Manassas, VA
1
1
A man is killed by Muslim snipers while pumping gas two days after a 13-year-old is wounded by the same team.
10/11/2002
USA
Fredericksburg, VA
1
0
Another man is killed by Muslim snipers while pumping gas.
10/14/2002
USA
Arlington, VA
1
0
A woman is killed by Muslim snipers in a Home Depot parking lot.
10/22/2002
USA
Aspen Hill, MD
1
0
A bus driver is killed by Muslim snipers.
8/6/2003
USA
Houston, TX
1
0
After undergoing a religious revival, a Saudi college student slashes the throat of a Jewish student with a 4" butterfly knife, nearly decapitating the young man.
12/2/2003
USA
Chicago, IL
1
0
A Muslim doctor deliberately allows a Jewish patient to die from an easily treatable condition.
4/13/2004
USA
Raleigh, NC
1
4
A Muslim man runs down five strangers with a car.
4/15/2004
USA
Scottsville, NY
1
2
In an honor killing, a Muslim father kills his wife and attacks his two daughters with a knife and hammer because he feared that they had been sexually molested.
6/16/2006
USA
Baltimore, MD
1
0
A 62-year-old Jewish moviegoer is shot to death by a Muslim gunman in an unprovoked terror attack.
6/25/2006
USA
Denver, CO
1
5
Saying that it was 'Allah's choice', a Muslim shoots four of his co-workers and a police officer.
7/28/2006
USA
Seattle, WA
1
5
An 'angry' Muslim-American uses a young girl as hostage to enter a local Jewish center, where he shoots six women, one of whom dies.
10/6/2006
USA
Louisville, KY
4
1
In an 'honor' attack, a Muslim man rapes and beats his estranged wife, leaving her for dead, then savagely murders their four children.
2/13/2007
USA
Salt Lake City, UT
5
4
A Muslim immigrant goes on a shooting rampage at a mall, targeting people buying Valentine's Day cards at a gift shop and killing five.
1/1/2008
USA
Irving, TX
2
0
A Muslim immigrant shoots his two daughters to death on concerns about their 'Western' lifestyle.
7/6/2008
USA
Jonesboro, GA
1
0
A devout Muslim strangles his 25-year-old daughter in an honor killing.
2/12/2009
USA
Buffalo, NY
1
0
The founder of a Muslim TV station beheads his wife in the hallway for seeking a divorce.
6/1/2009
USA
Little Rock, AR
1
1
A Muslim with 'religious motives' shoots a local soldier to death inside a recruiting center.
11/2/2009
USA
Glendale, AZ
1
1
A woman dies from injuries suffered when her father runs her down with a car for being too 'Westernized.' (10-20-09)
11/5/2009
USA
Ft. Hood, TX
13
31
A Muslim psychiatrist guns down thirteen unarmed soldiers while yelling praises to Allah.
(3,308 killed by Muslims in America in 65 terror attacks)
Attorney: Hasan's 'religious rights' prohibited
Chad Groening - OneNewsNow
http://www.onenewsnow.com/Security/Default.aspx?id=827476
One of the nation's foremost critics of Islam says it's absolutely reprehensible that the lead attorney for the man charged in the murderous rampage at Fort Hood last month is trying to paint his client as a victim.
Army Major Nidal Malik Hasan is suspected of killing 14 people, including an unborn baby, while wounding more than two dozen others at the Army post in Texas on November 5. Hasan remains hospitalized at Brooke Army Medical Center at Fort Sam Houston, Texas, where he is paralyzed from the chest down.
The San Antonio Express-News recently reported that Hasan's attorney, John P. Galligan, claims the Army is violating his client's religious rights because it prohibited him from praying from the Koran in Arabic with a relative. Hasan was reportedly on the phone with his brother when the guard cut the conversation short because the suspect was not speaking English. The military has restricted Hasan to only speaking English to visitors or on the phone, unless an Army-approved translator is present.
"It's very common for Islamic jihadists to claim victim status when they're in prison," notes Robert Spencer, director of Jihad Watch. "Part of the al Qaeda playbook is that they should always claim that they have been tortured, whatever the truth may be."
In Spencer's opinion, Galligan's claims are at fault. "It's reprehensible for this lawyer to be demanding that Nidal Hasan be given free and unrestricted access to the ideology that led him to commit those murders," he argues. "It would be like saying that a Nazi war criminal has to have a copy of Mein Kampf in his jail cell."
The Jihad Watch director concludes that the military is completely justified in imposing the language restrictions on Hasan.
Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano is not fit for position, recent events prove
Michael Daly
http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/2009/12/29/2009-12-29_put_real_cops_in_charge_of_security..html
Brandon/AP
It's time to put a real cop in charge. Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano is just not fit for the job, after she claimed "the system worked" in Flight 253 terror incident.
Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano is living proof you can not only take the girl out of New York, but take New York out of the girl as well.
Napolitano was born in New York and yet takes so little interest in us that as recently as last April she seemed unaware of some basic facts regarding the attack on the World Trade Center.
That became apparent in an interview with Canadian television. Napolitano suggested that the Canadian and Mexican borders warranted equal attention.
"Yes, Canada is not Mexico. It doesn't have a drug war going on," Napolitano said. "Nonetheless, to the extent that terrorists have come into our country ...it's been across the Canadian border."
The interviewer inquired if the terrorists included those who had staged the 9/11 attacks.
"Not just those, but others as well," Napolitano said.
The Canadian ambassador to the U.S., Michael Wilson, subsequently lamented that "misconceptions arise on something as fundamental as where the 9/11 terrorists came from."
"As the 9/11 commission reported in 2004, all of the 9/11 terrorists arrived in the United States from outside North America," Wilson noted. "They flew to major U.S. airports. They entered the U.S. with documents issued by the United States government. No 9/11 terrorists came from Canada."
Napolitano announced through an aide she had "misunderstood" the interviewer and had actually been speaking about the lone would-be bomber who had been caught crossing from Canada into Washington State in 1999.
Napolitano then made a declaration no homeland security chief should ever have had to make, most particularly one born in New York.
"I know that the Sept. 11 hijackers did not come through Canada to the United States," she said.
No doubt some Canadians saw a certain irony on Christmas Day, when the undies bomber aboard a flight from Amsterdam attempted to destroy an airliner descending into Detroit, just across a river from Canada.
An Islamic extremist who never should have been allowed on an airliner in the first place had passed through security with a high explosive. He likely would have killed all 289 aboard were it not for his bungling and the heroism of a Dutch passenger.
"The system worked," Napolitano had the nerve to say.
No doubt some Canadians discerned a pattern when Napolitano responded to the ensuing uproar over her remark by saying she had been "taken out of context."
"Our system did not work in this instance," Napolitano now said.
In both instances, Napolitano flip-flopped after saying something ludicrous while playing politics. That is particularly reprehensible in time of war, but it is not surprising, for she is a politician by profession.
By all accounts, she was a pretty good governor in her adopted state of Arizona, certainly much better than the one we have in her native New York.
She is a disgrace as the secretary of homeland security. That job should be held by somebody who has some working expertise and no agenda other than to keep the innocent as safe as possible.
I hate to admit it, but President George W. Bush was right to appoint a cop to head homeland security. He just picked the wrong one when he chose Bernard Kerik, who is also a crook.
In making that mistake, Bush was no doubt looking for some of the magic that has transformed New York into America's safest big city, a phenomenon in which Kerik played no significant role.
Our new President could get some of that magic from those who really did make it happen.
Our present police commissioner, Raymond Kelly, is one.
Former NYPD Commissioner and LAPD chief William Bratton is another.
There is also John Timoney, who went from the NYPD to become top cop in Philadelphia and then Miami.
Put one of those truly talented souls in charge and the system might actually work, eh?
It's the incompetence, stupid
Rich Lowry
http://www.nypost.com/p/news/opinion/opedcolumnists/it_the_incompetence_stupid_Smobhu7UYi3kwiQzGPHnMP
Janet Napolitano is impressed with Janet Napolitano's work. In an instantly notorious statement on CNN over the weekend, the Homeland Security secretary said "the system worked" when a man boarded a Christmas Day flight from Amsterdam to Detroit with explosives in his underwear that he couldn't quite manage to ignite.
Does "the system" count on all explosive devices smuggled onto international flights not detonating? When Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab set himself on fire while trying to blow up the plane and kill its 278 passengers, a Dutch filmmaker leapt on him, ripped a smoldering object from near his crotch and put it out with his bare hands. Or as Napolitano put it, "Everybody played an important role here."
Napolitano: Letting airline passengers fend for themselves.
This is a bizarre division of labor. You carefully pack to avoid any liquids more than 3 ounces. You stand in a security line. You take off your shoes. You get your fingernail clippers confiscated. You run your carry-on bags through an X-ray machine and walk through a metal detector, with an extra wanding if your spare pocket change sets off the alarm. And after all that, it's still your responsibility to subdue the terrorist in the next row trying to set off the pentaerythritol tetranitrate (PETN) secreted on his body.
Napolitano immediately took back her praise of "the system," in a tacit acknowledgment that its only success was in demonstrating its own industrial-scale irrationality. At a cost of $30 billion since 2004, we've implemented security procedures ideally suited to harassing innocent passengers who only want to travel from Point A to Point B with minimal inconvenience. It's only the terrorists we have trouble handling.
If a terrorist is a proverbial needle in a haystack, Abdulmutallab constituted something closer to a sledgehammer. His father, a powerful banker in Nigeria, warned the US Embassy that he might be dangerous. This didn't prompt any further investigation, but got Abdulmutallab entered into the Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment, a huge database that evidently does nothing to enjoin terrorists from traveling to America on missions of mass murder.
Even by the most basic standard of post-9/11 travel, Abdulmutallab should have set off alarms. He reportedly bought his ticket in cash and only had carry-on luggage. Never mind his travel history that included a trip to Yemen, or the revocation of his visa by the British when they suspected he tried to enter Britain on false pretenses. For all this, Abdulmutallab -- who maintains he worked with al Qaeda in Yemen on his plot -- got nary an extra pat.
The initial reaction to the incident has been more of the same: beside-the-point inconveniences in the grand airport-security charade. On the latest international flights to the US, passengers have been kept from standing up during the last hour and have had to stow all personal items, including books and the airline's own pillows. What do the new rules say should be done with the PETN?
It's never going to be easy for a free society to defend itself from furtive enemies, but that doesn't excuse willful obliviousness. We should move to a more Israel-style security system, devoting more energy to the intelligence and on-the-spot assessments necessary to focus on the greatest potential threats. And we should resist the civil libertarians who create pressure to narrow down the most meaningful watch lists and work to forestall adoption of more effective whole-body imaging scanners.
For its part, the Obama administration should frankly acknowledge that the "war on terror" wasn't a Bush-Cheney construct to scare and manipulate the American public. Speaking from Hawaii, Obama sounded stalwart yesterday, but it took him 72 hours to address the incident. The administration's body language says it would prefer to keep counterterrorism on a back-burner while it engages in the more important work of nationalizing health care and fighting global warming.
The same Napolitano who initially portrayed the near-miss on Christmas as a vindication did her utmost to avoid even uttering the word "terror" at a congressional hearing earlier this year, preferring the absurd neologism "man-caused disaster."
That's a phrase best applied to the shoeless shuffle at the airport-security lines, not the heinous acts of war plotted by Abdulmutallab and his inevitable successors.
No pastels in Florida
Donald Lambro
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2009/dec/28/no-pastels-in-florida//print/
Conservative challenger Marco Rubio has surged into a dead heat in his Florida Senate campaign against establishment-backed Charlie Crist in a primary battle that is the first major test of the growing power of the "tea party" movement.
Mr. Rubio's once-underdog candidacy, which has been trailing far behind the better-financed Republican governor for months, is suddenly catching fire, helped by the conservative Club for Growth and an army of tea party activists drawn by his unequivocal anti-tax, anti-big government campaign.
The latest Rasmussen telephone poll showed Mr. Rubio, the son of Cuban immigrants and Florida's former speaker of the House, was tied among Republican primary voters, 43-43 percent.
Mr. Crist, in his first term as governor, is the hand-picked candidate of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, recruited and all but endorsed by Texas Sen. John Cornyn, the NRSC's chairman. His decision to run was widely seen as nailing down the open Senate seat for the Republican Party, and Mr. Rubio's challenge was dismissed as a lost cause by the party's right flank.
But Mr. Rubio unleashed a relentless barrage of attacks that challenged Mr. Crist's conservative credentials, charging he had raised taxes to balance the state's budget and embraced President Obama's nearly $800 billion, waste-ridden, economic spending stimulus that was overwhelmingly opposed by Republicans in Congress.
For months, the nonstop attacks seemed to throw Mr. Crist on the defensive. So much so that at one point he denied he had endorsed Mr. Obama's big-spending plan to get the economy moving again. But then the Club for Growth came in, running TV ads across the state showing Mr. Crist standing next to Mr. Obama at a Florida rally, fully endorsing the big spending pork-barrel bill.
The TV ads drew blood and elevated Mr. Rubio into a major candidate to be reckoned with, boosting his support from the Republican Party's conservative base and tea party activists and organizers in particular.
Things went from bad to worse this month when Mr. Crist was asked if he would support Mr. Obama's recent call - in the face of a 10 percent jobless rate - for a second similar stimulus spending bill. "It depends what's in it," he said.
Mr. Crist has badly underestimated the growing conservative mood of his state's electorate toward Mr. Obama's big-government policies, even for a so-called jobs bill in the midst of a deepening recession.
"What's really exceptional at this stage of Mr. Obama's presidency is the extent to which the public has moved in a conservative direction on a range of issues," writes veteran pollster Andrew Kohut, president of the Pew Research Center at PewResearch.org.
Surprisingly, this trend has "emanated as much from the middle of the electorate as from the highly energized conservative right," Mr. Kohut says - producing a "backlash against Obama policies that have expanded the role of governnment."
The latest Rasmussen poll in the Crist-Rubio contest reflect Mr. Kohut's findings. Earlier this year, soon after Mr. Crist announced his candidacy, he was flying high and all but assured of the GOP's nomination for the Senate.
But as Mr. Rubio and the Club for Growth stepped up their fall ad campaign, Mr. Crist's support began dropping from 53 percent in August to 49 percent in October. "The fact that Mr. Crist has fallen below 50 percent in a primary against a lesser known opponent suggests potential vulnerability," Mr. Rasmussen said at the time.
Mr. Rubio is now viewed "very favorably" by 34 percent of likely primary voters, up from 18 percent who said that this summer. Mr. Crist, on the other hand, has seen his "very favorable" ratings drop to 19 percent.
"I believe voters are starting to realize that there are vast differences between me and Charlie Crist on a number of important issues," Mr. Rubio said in a statement.
A few national party leaders have begun to break for Mr. Rubio, including South Carolina Jim DeMint. Republican campaign strategist Karl Rove noted in his Wall Street Journal column last week that he has donated to Mr. Rubio's campaign, but says either Mr. Crist or Mr. Rubio "will likely hold the seat."
But there is an even larger political struggle going on here for the soul of the Republican Party and its future ideological direction.
The party's base has, to a large degree, turned against candidates that are too often willing to water down party principles for the sake of political expediency - as Mr. Crist has done on Mr. Obama's failed stimulus plan. Like the campaign theme struck by Ronald Reagan in his 1976 campaign against President Gerald Ford, the Republican bedrock base wants the party's policy positions to be drawn in bold colors, not "pale pastels."
Andrew Kohut's polling analysis accurately portrays the rightward trend of the nation's electorate. There is a huge backlash building against the far-left policies of the Obama administration and the Democratic Congress.
Mr. Obama's job approval numbers fell this month into the 40s. Congress' approval ratings are in the teens. The current outlook in the House is a Democratic loss of 20 to 30 seats, and elections handicapper Stuart Rothenberg says "Republican Senate gains are now looking likely."
Donald Lambro is chief political correspondent of The Washington Times.
How Big Are You? Keep life in perspective!
Posted by Trayan
http://www.hemuz.org/Space/How-Big-Are-You-Keep-life-in-perspective
In case there is anybody out there that sweats the small stuff!
Now, THIS is really fascinating - it's rather dazzling to see it presented this way.
Beyond our sun it's a big universe.
Antares is the 15th brightest star in the sky.
It is more than 1000 light years away.
Now how big are you?
-------------------------------------------------------------
Now TRY to wrap your mind around this.........
This is a Hubble Telescope Ultra Deep Field Infrared View of countless "ENTIRE" Galaxies Billions of Light-Years Away.
Below is a close up of one of the darkest regions of the photo above.
Humbling, isn't it?
Now How Big Are You?
And how big are the things that upset you today?
Keep life in perspective. and don't sweat the small stuff!
"The e-mail Bag"
You might be a redneck .....
http://www.eons.com/groups/topic/1952299-You-might-be-a-redneck-?page=1
You might be a redneck if: It never occurred to you to be offended by the phrase, 'One nation, under God.'
You might be a redneck if: You've never protested about seeing the 10 Commandments posted in public places.
You might be a redneck if: You still say ' Christmas' instead of 'Winter Festival.'
You might be a redneck if: You bow your head when someone prays.
You might be a redneck if: You stand and place your hand over your heart when they play the National Anthem.
You might be a redneck if: You treat our armed forces veterans with great respect, and always have.
You might be a redneck if: You've never burned an American flag, nor intend to.
You might be a redneck if: You know what you believe and you aren't afraid to say so, no matter who is listening..
You might be a redneck if: You respect your elders and raised your kids to do the same.
You might be a redneck if: You'd give your last dollar to a friend.
Promoting "God's Holy Values and American Freedoms"!
"Daily Motivations"
Living inspired is born in the awareness that this is it! We have one chance at life. And the wonderful gift we are given every morning is the choice of how we are going to live that moment, that day. -- Sally Cofer-Lindberg
"He who cannot forgive others destroys a bridge over which he himself must pass." -- George Herbert
"Regret for the things we did can be tempered by time; it is regret for the things we did not do that is inconsolable." -- Sydney J Harris
"Daily Devotions" (KJV and/or NLT)
The Lord is kind and merciful, slow to get angry, full of unfailing love. (Psalm 145:8)
Justice delayed is often justice denied. For example, if a defense lawyer can keep postponing a murder case, evidence that is available in a speedy trial becomes useless. Witnesses may die or move away. The defense can challenge the validity of a witness's memory. Police departments misplace evidence.
However, as believers, it is important that we also recognize that we are saved precisely because God delays His justice. Whatever age you or I received God's promise of eternal life was more than enough time for God to have caused His just wrath to fall on us.
Dr. Cyril E. M. Joad, who for years was the head of the Philosophy Department at the University of London, probably did more to undermine the faith of the collegiate world of recent generations than almost any other. He believed that God was an impersonal part of the cosmos and that there was no such thing as sin.
However, before he died, Dr. Joad became convinced that the only explanation for sin was found in the Bible---and the only solution for sin was the cross of Jesus Christ. Like the apostle Paul, he became a zealous follower of Jesus. No doubt many of his followers turned to faith in God through his testimony and writings. God's long-suffering and incredible patience brought this skeptic to his knees at the cross.
None of us deserve even one day of life because of our sinful, depraved nature, so we should be grateful for a just God who delays His justice. When it comes to our sin, justice delayed works to our advantage.
Your View of God Really Matters …
The next time you see justice denied because it is delayed, let it be a poignant reminder of how greatly you have benefited because God was slow to enact His justice toward you.
"The Patriot Post"
"The steady character of our countrymen is a rock to which we may safely moor; and notwithstanding the efforts of the papers to disseminate early discontents, I expect that a just, dispassionate and steady conduct, will at length rally to a proper system the great body of our country. Unequivocal in principle, reasonable in manner, we shall be able I hope to do a great deal of good to the cause of freedom & harmony." -- Thomas Jefferson, letter to Elbridge Gerry, 1801
"No man in his senses can hesitate in choosing to be free, rather than a slave." -- Alexander Hamilton
The BIG Lie
"To paraphrase Shakespeare, it's sound and fury signifying nothing. I haven't read all the [CRU] e-mails, but the most recent one is more than 10 years old. These private exchanges between these scientists do not in any way cause any question about the scientific consensus. ... [W]here the scientific consensus is concerned, it's completely unchanged. What we're seeing is a set of changes worldwide that just make this discussion over 10-year-old e-mails kind of silly." -- Algore on the disclosure of e-mails from the Climate Research Unit at East Anglia University
This Week's 'Alpha Jackass' Award
On the topic of health care, Harry Reid offered an interesting comparison on the Senate floor. He likened opponents of the Democrats' proposed takeover of one-sixth of the U.S. economy to those who defended slavery and opposed women's suffrage.
"Instead of joining us on the right side of history, all the Republicans can come up with is, 'slow down, stop everything, let's start over,'" Reid said. "If you think you've heard these same excuses before, you're right. When this country belatedly recognized the wrongs of slavery, there were those who dug in their heels and said 'slow down, it's too early, things aren't bad enough.'" Slavery is not exactly a favorable issue for Democrats.
But he didn't stop there. "When women spoke up for the right to speak up, they wanted to vote, some insisted they simply, slow down, there will be a better day to do that, today isn't quite right. When this body was on the verge of guaranteeing equal civil rights to everyone regardless of the color of their skin, some senators resorted to the same filibuster threats that we hear today."
Wall Street Journal columnist John Fund notes one of the historical omissions in Reid's claim: "Among those voting to block the civil rights bill was West Virginia Senator Robert Byrd, who personally filibustered the bill for 14 hours. The next year he also opposed the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Mr. Byrd still sits in the Senate, and indeed preceded Mr. Reid as his party's majority leader until he stepped down from that role in 1989."
This Week's 'Braying Jenny' Award
"Is it morally correct [to force taxpayer funding of abortion]? Yes, I believe it is. Abortion is legal, and there are certain very tragic circumstances that a woman finds herself in. Married, with an unborn baby that's unable to survive outside of the womb, her doctor tells her it's a threat to her health. I think she ought to have a policy available to her. ... We pay for a lot of things that we may or may not agree with, and taxpayers pay for it, for those things, as well." -- Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Death Valley)
Don't miss more on the abortion issue, including Sen. Ben Nelson's rejected amendment to the health care bill barring federal funding for abortions, as well as Sen. Barbara Boxer's comparison of abortion to a certain blue pill.
Judicial Benchmarks: A Tale of Two Cases
The U.S. Supreme Court this term has taken up two cases that are important to religious freedom and property rights, respectively. On Dec. 7, the Court granted a hearing in Christian Legal Society v. Martinez, in which the University of California Hastings College of Law denied recognition to the local CLS chapter because it required each prospective member to sign a statement of faith that tracked traditional, orthodox Christian theology and morality. Unless the CLS chapter opened its membership to everyone, including non-Christians and practicing homosexuals, UC would deny access to any benefits and facilities provided to other student organizations.
The district court decision, which was summarily affirmed by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, lightly glossed over the obvious and oppressive burden placed on the CLS members by UC's actions. Arguing that the CLS chapter could avoid the restrictions by simply accepting everyone as members, the court completely missed the point: If it accepted everyone as members, the CLS chapter would no longer be a Christian organization. The CLS chapter was unfairly burdened precisely because it is Christian. Or maybe that was the point.
The Court also heard arguments on Dec. 1 in Stop the Beach Renourishment v. Florida Dep't of Environmental Protection. In this case, Florida trucked in sand to "renourish" critically eroded beaches and then promptly took ownership of this "new dry land." Owners of what had previously been waterfront properties now had a strip of state land between themselves and the ocean.
Tossing out well-settled principles of common law in its attempt to "balance" the rights of the property owners and the state, the Florida Supreme Court ruled that this was not an unconstitutional taking in violation of the Fifth Amendment Takings Clause. In an unusually strident dissent, Justice Charles T. Wells pointed out that Florida expropriated valuable property rights clearly established by Florida law: the right to have their property in contact with the water. While Florida was free to do so, it should pay the owners compensation for the taking.
Both of these cases will be important tests of whether the Court will uphold constitutional religious, association and property rights against government encroachment.
Friends in High Places
Some people work their whole life to achieve a position of prominence, but others take a shorter path, i.e., they sleep their way to the top. That's the perception of Melodee Hayes, who recently withdrew her candidacy for U.S. Attorney in Montana. She is also the girlfriend of Montana Democrat Senator Max Baucus.
Hayes, who was director of Baucus's Montana office when their relationship started in 2008, indeed had some qualifications for the U.S. Attorney post as she had served as a local prosecutor prior to working under the senator. But their deepening relationship (as Baucus was divorcing his wife of 25 years) led to the speculation that he was pushing his girlfriend for the job. He also gave her a $14,000 raise at the time. She withdrew from consideration and took a job at the Justice Department -- partly so she could shack up with Baucus.
Of course, had this been a Republican senator, the story might have competed with other sordid domestic tales for airtime on the network news shows. Since Baucus has a "D" after his name, however, this will blow over quickly and will be a distant memory when he's up for re-election in 2014.
Speaking of Republicans, South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford dodged a bullet this week when state lawmakers rejected an impeachment resolution, choosing instead to consider a formal rebuke of the governor. Sanford had traveled to Argentina in June, where he ended an extra-marital affair. He was accused of misusing state resources but repaid the expenses, thus making the charges moot.
Belly Laugh of the Week
"One of the central goals of this administration is restoring fiscal responsibility." -- Barack Obama
"The Web"
Islamic Terror Attacks on American Soil
http://www.thereligionofpeace.com/Pages/AmericanAttacks.htm
We recently got taken to the mat by a polite, young Muslim living in the U.K. who took issue with our oft-repeated statement that no Muslim-American lost their life to vigilante violence following 9/11. She provided us a list of six or seven candidates and, after whittling out the ones where the killer was unknown or in cases with mitigating circumstances such as “victim was sleeping with killer’s ex-girlfriend” (and we’re not making that up), we reached a shocking conclusion:
We were wrong.
There is one seemingly unambiguous case that occurred in Dallas, Texas where Waqar Hasan, a Muslim convenience storeowner, was gunned down by Mark Anthony Stroman four days after the 9/11 attacks. Stroman claimed to have been motivated by anger from watching the towers fall. He is not exactly your average American, however, even apart from the shooting. For one thing, he is a white supremacist who carried a felony criminal record at the time of the attack. He also went on to shoot two more people in the weeks that followed.
Thankfully, an American jury sentenced Mark Stroman to death. The same cannot be said of many Muslim terrorists such as Lockerbie bomber, Abdelbaset Al Megrahi, who not only have sanctuary in Muslim countries, but are often treated as heroes by devout followers of Muhammad.
Nevertheless, we acknowledge that our friend is correct and that there was at least one Muslim killed in an anti-Arab hate crime in the U.S. following the anti-American hate crime on 9/11. For anyone keeping score:
People killed by radical Muslims on 9/11: 2,996
Muslim-Americans killed "in revenge": 1
Of course, 9/11 was neither the first nor the last time that Muslims have killed Americans on U.S. soil in terror attacks. In fact, since that day, Muslims have killed at least 52 people in 31 separate acts of terrorism in the United States (by the standards that Muslim-American groups set for hate crimes). Perhaps more importantly, there have been quite a few planned mass murders of Americans by Islamic terrorists that were thwarted by the FBI, law enforcement and overseas intelligence operations both before and after 9/11.
By contrast, Muslim-Americans do not appear to be in any special danger from murderous (non-Muslim) religious fanatics, even in a nation awash in firearms. Identity groups, such as CAIR, whine incessantly about relatively trivial incidents while turning a blind eye to the horrible violence that is meted out daily in the name of their religion. This distasteful petulance offers insight not only into the character of Islam, but also the impressive religious tolerance that Americans manage to maintain.
For anyone wondering about the history of deadly Islamic terror on American soil in the last 35 years, here’s what we could find:
Date, Country, City/State, Killed, Injured, Description
4/14/1972
USA
New York, NY
1
3
Ten members of a local mosque phone in a false alarm and then ambush responding officers, killing one.
1/19/1973
USA
Brooklyn, NY
1
1
Muslim extremists rob a sporting goods store for weapons, gunning down a police officer who responds to the alarm.
7/18/1973
USA
Washington, DC
8
2
Nation of Islam members shoot seven members of a family to death in cold blood, including four children. A defendant in the case is later murdered in prison on orders from Elijah Muhammad.
10/19/1973
USA
Oakland, CA
1
1
Nation of Islam terrorists kidnap a couple and nearly decapitate the man, while raping and leaving the woman for dead.
10/29/1973
USA
Berkeley, CA
1
0
A woman is shot repeatedly in the face by Nation of Islam terrorists.
11/25/1973
USA
Oakland, CA
1
0
A grocer is killed in his store by Nation of Islam terrorists.
12/11/1973
USA
Oakland, CA
1
0
A man is killed by Nation of Islam terrorists while using a phone booth.
12/13/1973
USA
Oakland, CA
1
0
A woman is shot to deah on the sidewalk by Nation of Islam terrorists.
12/20/1973
USA
Oakland, CA
1
0
Nation of Islam terrorists gun down an 81-year-old janitor.
12/22/1973
USA
Oakland, CA
2
0
Nation of Islam terrorist kills two people in separate attacks on the same day.
12/24/1973
USA
Oakland, CA
1
0
A man is kidnapped, tortured and decapitated by Nation of Islam terrorists.
1/24/1974
USA
Oakland, CA
4
1
Five vicious shooting attacks by Nation of Islam terrorists leave three people dead and one paralyzed for life. Three of the victims were women.
4/1/1974
USA
Oakland, CA
1
1
A Nation of Islam terrorist shoots at two Salvation Army members, killing a man and injuring a woman.
4/16/1974
USA
Ingleside, CA
1
0
A man is killed while helping a friend move by Nation of Islam terrorists.
3/9/1977
USA
Washington, DC
1
1
Hanifi Muslims storm three buildings including a B'nai B'rith to hold 134 people hostage. At least two innocents were shot and one died.
7/22/1980
USA
Bethesda, MD
1
0
A political dissident is shot and killed in front of his home by an Iranian agent who was an American convert to Islam.
8/31/1980
USA
Savou, IL
2
0
An Iranian student guns down his next-door neighbors, a husband and wife.
1/31/1990
USA
Tuscon, AZ
1
0
A Sunni cleric is assassinated in front of a Tuscon mosque after declaring that two verses of the Qur'an were invalid.
11/5/1990
USA
New York City, NY
1
0
An Israeli rabbi is shot to death by a Muslim attacker at a hotel.
1/25/1993
USA
Langley, VA
2
3
A Pakistani with Mujahideen ties guns down two CIA agents outside of the headquarters.
2/26/1993
USA
New York, NY
6
1040
Islamic terrorists detonate a massive truck bomb under the World Trade Center, killing six people and injuring over 1,000 in an effort to collapse the towers.
3/1/1994
USA
Brooklyn, NY
1
0
A Muslim fires on a vanload of Jewish boys, killing one.
3/23/1997
USA
New York, NY
1
6
A Palestinian leaves an anti-Jewish suicide note behind and travels to the top of the Empire State building where he shoot seven people in a Fedayeen attack.
4/3/1997
USA
Lompoc, CA
1
0
A prison guard is stabbed to death by a radical Muslim.
10/31/1999
USA
Near Nantucket
217
0
An Egyptian airline pilot runs a planeload of 217 passengers into the water after uttering a Qur'anic prayer.
3/17/2000
USA
Atlanta, GA
1
1
A local imam and Muslim spiritual leader guns down a deputy sheriff and injures his partner.
9/11/2001
USA
Washington, DC
184
53
Nearly 200 people are killed when Islamic hijackers steer a plane full of people into the Pentagon.
9/11/2001
USA
Shanksville, PA
40
0
Forty passengers are killed after Islamic radicals hijack the plane in an attempt to steer it into the U.S. Capitol building.
9/11/2001
USA
New York, NY
2772
251
Islamic hijackers steer two planes packed with fuel and passengers into the World Trade Center, killing hundreds on impact and eventually killing thousands when the towers collapsed. At least 200 are seriously injured.
3/19/2002
USA
Tuscon, AZ
1
0
A 60-year-old man is gunned down by Muslim snipers on a golf course.
5/27/2002
USA
Denton, TX
1
0
Muslim snipers kill a man as he works in his yard.
7/4/2002
USA
Los Angeles, CA
2
0
Muslim man pulls out a gun at the counter of an Israeli airline and kills two people.
9/5/2002
USA
Clinton, MD
1
0
A 55-year-old pizzaria owner is shot six times in the back by Muslims at close range.
9/21/2002
USA
Montgomery, AL
1
1
Muslim snipers shoot two women, killing one.
9/23/2002
USA
Baton Rouge, LA
1
0
A Korean mother is shot in the back by Muslim snipers.
10/2/2002
USA
Wheaton, MD
1
0
Muslim snipers gun down a program analyst in a store parking lot.
10/3/2002
USA
Montgomery County, MD
5
0
Muslim snipers kill three men and two women in separate attacks over a 15-hour period.
10/9/2002
USA
Manassas, VA
1
1
A man is killed by Muslim snipers while pumping gas two days after a 13-year-old is wounded by the same team.
10/11/2002
USA
Fredericksburg, VA
1
0
Another man is killed by Muslim snipers while pumping gas.
10/14/2002
USA
Arlington, VA
1
0
A woman is killed by Muslim snipers in a Home Depot parking lot.
10/22/2002
USA
Aspen Hill, MD
1
0
A bus driver is killed by Muslim snipers.
8/6/2003
USA
Houston, TX
1
0
After undergoing a religious revival, a Saudi college student slashes the throat of a Jewish student with a 4" butterfly knife, nearly decapitating the young man.
12/2/2003
USA
Chicago, IL
1
0
A Muslim doctor deliberately allows a Jewish patient to die from an easily treatable condition.
4/13/2004
USA
Raleigh, NC
1
4
A Muslim man runs down five strangers with a car.
4/15/2004
USA
Scottsville, NY
1
2
In an honor killing, a Muslim father kills his wife and attacks his two daughters with a knife and hammer because he feared that they had been sexually molested.
6/16/2006
USA
Baltimore, MD
1
0
A 62-year-old Jewish moviegoer is shot to death by a Muslim gunman in an unprovoked terror attack.
6/25/2006
USA
Denver, CO
1
5
Saying that it was 'Allah's choice', a Muslim shoots four of his co-workers and a police officer.
7/28/2006
USA
Seattle, WA
1
5
An 'angry' Muslim-American uses a young girl as hostage to enter a local Jewish center, where he shoots six women, one of whom dies.
10/6/2006
USA
Louisville, KY
4
1
In an 'honor' attack, a Muslim man rapes and beats his estranged wife, leaving her for dead, then savagely murders their four children.
2/13/2007
USA
Salt Lake City, UT
5
4
A Muslim immigrant goes on a shooting rampage at a mall, targeting people buying Valentine's Day cards at a gift shop and killing five.
1/1/2008
USA
Irving, TX
2
0
A Muslim immigrant shoots his two daughters to death on concerns about their 'Western' lifestyle.
7/6/2008
USA
Jonesboro, GA
1
0
A devout Muslim strangles his 25-year-old daughter in an honor killing.
2/12/2009
USA
Buffalo, NY
1
0
The founder of a Muslim TV station beheads his wife in the hallway for seeking a divorce.
6/1/2009
USA
Little Rock, AR
1
1
A Muslim with 'religious motives' shoots a local soldier to death inside a recruiting center.
11/2/2009
USA
Glendale, AZ
1
1
A woman dies from injuries suffered when her father runs her down with a car for being too 'Westernized.' (10-20-09)
11/5/2009
USA
Ft. Hood, TX
13
31
A Muslim psychiatrist guns down thirteen unarmed soldiers while yelling praises to Allah.
(3,308 killed by Muslims in America in 65 terror attacks)
Attorney: Hasan's 'religious rights' prohibited
Chad Groening - OneNewsNow
http://www.onenewsnow.com/Security/Default.aspx?id=827476
One of the nation's foremost critics of Islam says it's absolutely reprehensible that the lead attorney for the man charged in the murderous rampage at Fort Hood last month is trying to paint his client as a victim.
Army Major Nidal Malik Hasan is suspected of killing 14 people, including an unborn baby, while wounding more than two dozen others at the Army post in Texas on November 5. Hasan remains hospitalized at Brooke Army Medical Center at Fort Sam Houston, Texas, where he is paralyzed from the chest down.
The San Antonio Express-News recently reported that Hasan's attorney, John P. Galligan, claims the Army is violating his client's religious rights because it prohibited him from praying from the Koran in Arabic with a relative. Hasan was reportedly on the phone with his brother when the guard cut the conversation short because the suspect was not speaking English. The military has restricted Hasan to only speaking English to visitors or on the phone, unless an Army-approved translator is present.
"It's very common for Islamic jihadists to claim victim status when they're in prison," notes Robert Spencer, director of Jihad Watch. "Part of the al Qaeda playbook is that they should always claim that they have been tortured, whatever the truth may be."
In Spencer's opinion, Galligan's claims are at fault. "It's reprehensible for this lawyer to be demanding that Nidal Hasan be given free and unrestricted access to the ideology that led him to commit those murders," he argues. "It would be like saying that a Nazi war criminal has to have a copy of Mein Kampf in his jail cell."
The Jihad Watch director concludes that the military is completely justified in imposing the language restrictions on Hasan.
Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano is not fit for position, recent events prove
Michael Daly
http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/2009/12/29/2009-12-29_put_real_cops_in_charge_of_security..html
Brandon/AP
It's time to put a real cop in charge. Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano is just not fit for the job, after she claimed "the system worked" in Flight 253 terror incident.
Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano is living proof you can not only take the girl out of New York, but take New York out of the girl as well.
Napolitano was born in New York and yet takes so little interest in us that as recently as last April she seemed unaware of some basic facts regarding the attack on the World Trade Center.
That became apparent in an interview with Canadian television. Napolitano suggested that the Canadian and Mexican borders warranted equal attention.
"Yes, Canada is not Mexico. It doesn't have a drug war going on," Napolitano said. "Nonetheless, to the extent that terrorists have come into our country ...it's been across the Canadian border."
The interviewer inquired if the terrorists included those who had staged the 9/11 attacks.
"Not just those, but others as well," Napolitano said.
The Canadian ambassador to the U.S., Michael Wilson, subsequently lamented that "misconceptions arise on something as fundamental as where the 9/11 terrorists came from."
"As the 9/11 commission reported in 2004, all of the 9/11 terrorists arrived in the United States from outside North America," Wilson noted. "They flew to major U.S. airports. They entered the U.S. with documents issued by the United States government. No 9/11 terrorists came from Canada."
Napolitano announced through an aide she had "misunderstood" the interviewer and had actually been speaking about the lone would-be bomber who had been caught crossing from Canada into Washington State in 1999.
Napolitano then made a declaration no homeland security chief should ever have had to make, most particularly one born in New York.
"I know that the Sept. 11 hijackers did not come through Canada to the United States," she said.
No doubt some Canadians saw a certain irony on Christmas Day, when the undies bomber aboard a flight from Amsterdam attempted to destroy an airliner descending into Detroit, just across a river from Canada.
An Islamic extremist who never should have been allowed on an airliner in the first place had passed through security with a high explosive. He likely would have killed all 289 aboard were it not for his bungling and the heroism of a Dutch passenger.
"The system worked," Napolitano had the nerve to say.
No doubt some Canadians discerned a pattern when Napolitano responded to the ensuing uproar over her remark by saying she had been "taken out of context."
"Our system did not work in this instance," Napolitano now said.
In both instances, Napolitano flip-flopped after saying something ludicrous while playing politics. That is particularly reprehensible in time of war, but it is not surprising, for she is a politician by profession.
By all accounts, she was a pretty good governor in her adopted state of Arizona, certainly much better than the one we have in her native New York.
She is a disgrace as the secretary of homeland security. That job should be held by somebody who has some working expertise and no agenda other than to keep the innocent as safe as possible.
I hate to admit it, but President George W. Bush was right to appoint a cop to head homeland security. He just picked the wrong one when he chose Bernard Kerik, who is also a crook.
In making that mistake, Bush was no doubt looking for some of the magic that has transformed New York into America's safest big city, a phenomenon in which Kerik played no significant role.
Our new President could get some of that magic from those who really did make it happen.
Our present police commissioner, Raymond Kelly, is one.
Former NYPD Commissioner and LAPD chief William Bratton is another.
There is also John Timoney, who went from the NYPD to become top cop in Philadelphia and then Miami.
Put one of those truly talented souls in charge and the system might actually work, eh?
It's the incompetence, stupid
Rich Lowry
http://www.nypost.com/p/news/opinion/opedcolumnists/it_the_incompetence_stupid_Smobhu7UYi3kwiQzGPHnMP
Janet Napolitano is impressed with Janet Napolitano's work. In an instantly notorious statement on CNN over the weekend, the Homeland Security secretary said "the system worked" when a man boarded a Christmas Day flight from Amsterdam to Detroit with explosives in his underwear that he couldn't quite manage to ignite.
Does "the system" count on all explosive devices smuggled onto international flights not detonating? When Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab set himself on fire while trying to blow up the plane and kill its 278 passengers, a Dutch filmmaker leapt on him, ripped a smoldering object from near his crotch and put it out with his bare hands. Or as Napolitano put it, "Everybody played an important role here."
Napolitano: Letting airline passengers fend for themselves.
This is a bizarre division of labor. You carefully pack to avoid any liquids more than 3 ounces. You stand in a security line. You take off your shoes. You get your fingernail clippers confiscated. You run your carry-on bags through an X-ray machine and walk through a metal detector, with an extra wanding if your spare pocket change sets off the alarm. And after all that, it's still your responsibility to subdue the terrorist in the next row trying to set off the pentaerythritol tetranitrate (PETN) secreted on his body.
Napolitano immediately took back her praise of "the system," in a tacit acknowledgment that its only success was in demonstrating its own industrial-scale irrationality. At a cost of $30 billion since 2004, we've implemented security procedures ideally suited to harassing innocent passengers who only want to travel from Point A to Point B with minimal inconvenience. It's only the terrorists we have trouble handling.
If a terrorist is a proverbial needle in a haystack, Abdulmutallab constituted something closer to a sledgehammer. His father, a powerful banker in Nigeria, warned the US Embassy that he might be dangerous. This didn't prompt any further investigation, but got Abdulmutallab entered into the Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment, a huge database that evidently does nothing to enjoin terrorists from traveling to America on missions of mass murder.
Even by the most basic standard of post-9/11 travel, Abdulmutallab should have set off alarms. He reportedly bought his ticket in cash and only had carry-on luggage. Never mind his travel history that included a trip to Yemen, or the revocation of his visa by the British when they suspected he tried to enter Britain on false pretenses. For all this, Abdulmutallab -- who maintains he worked with al Qaeda in Yemen on his plot -- got nary an extra pat.
The initial reaction to the incident has been more of the same: beside-the-point inconveniences in the grand airport-security charade. On the latest international flights to the US, passengers have been kept from standing up during the last hour and have had to stow all personal items, including books and the airline's own pillows. What do the new rules say should be done with the PETN?
It's never going to be easy for a free society to defend itself from furtive enemies, but that doesn't excuse willful obliviousness. We should move to a more Israel-style security system, devoting more energy to the intelligence and on-the-spot assessments necessary to focus on the greatest potential threats. And we should resist the civil libertarians who create pressure to narrow down the most meaningful watch lists and work to forestall adoption of more effective whole-body imaging scanners.
For its part, the Obama administration should frankly acknowledge that the "war on terror" wasn't a Bush-Cheney construct to scare and manipulate the American public. Speaking from Hawaii, Obama sounded stalwart yesterday, but it took him 72 hours to address the incident. The administration's body language says it would prefer to keep counterterrorism on a back-burner while it engages in the more important work of nationalizing health care and fighting global warming.
The same Napolitano who initially portrayed the near-miss on Christmas as a vindication did her utmost to avoid even uttering the word "terror" at a congressional hearing earlier this year, preferring the absurd neologism "man-caused disaster."
That's a phrase best applied to the shoeless shuffle at the airport-security lines, not the heinous acts of war plotted by Abdulmutallab and his inevitable successors.
No pastels in Florida
Donald Lambro
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2009/dec/28/no-pastels-in-florida//print/
Conservative challenger Marco Rubio has surged into a dead heat in his Florida Senate campaign against establishment-backed Charlie Crist in a primary battle that is the first major test of the growing power of the "tea party" movement.
Mr. Rubio's once-underdog candidacy, which has been trailing far behind the better-financed Republican governor for months, is suddenly catching fire, helped by the conservative Club for Growth and an army of tea party activists drawn by his unequivocal anti-tax, anti-big government campaign.
The latest Rasmussen telephone poll showed Mr. Rubio, the son of Cuban immigrants and Florida's former speaker of the House, was tied among Republican primary voters, 43-43 percent.
Mr. Crist, in his first term as governor, is the hand-picked candidate of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, recruited and all but endorsed by Texas Sen. John Cornyn, the NRSC's chairman. His decision to run was widely seen as nailing down the open Senate seat for the Republican Party, and Mr. Rubio's challenge was dismissed as a lost cause by the party's right flank.
But Mr. Rubio unleashed a relentless barrage of attacks that challenged Mr. Crist's conservative credentials, charging he had raised taxes to balance the state's budget and embraced President Obama's nearly $800 billion, waste-ridden, economic spending stimulus that was overwhelmingly opposed by Republicans in Congress.
For months, the nonstop attacks seemed to throw Mr. Crist on the defensive. So much so that at one point he denied he had endorsed Mr. Obama's big-spending plan to get the economy moving again. But then the Club for Growth came in, running TV ads across the state showing Mr. Crist standing next to Mr. Obama at a Florida rally, fully endorsing the big spending pork-barrel bill.
The TV ads drew blood and elevated Mr. Rubio into a major candidate to be reckoned with, boosting his support from the Republican Party's conservative base and tea party activists and organizers in particular.
Things went from bad to worse this month when Mr. Crist was asked if he would support Mr. Obama's recent call - in the face of a 10 percent jobless rate - for a second similar stimulus spending bill. "It depends what's in it," he said.
Mr. Crist has badly underestimated the growing conservative mood of his state's electorate toward Mr. Obama's big-government policies, even for a so-called jobs bill in the midst of a deepening recession.
"What's really exceptional at this stage of Mr. Obama's presidency is the extent to which the public has moved in a conservative direction on a range of issues," writes veteran pollster Andrew Kohut, president of the Pew Research Center at PewResearch.org.
Surprisingly, this trend has "emanated as much from the middle of the electorate as from the highly energized conservative right," Mr. Kohut says - producing a "backlash against Obama policies that have expanded the role of governnment."
The latest Rasmussen poll in the Crist-Rubio contest reflect Mr. Kohut's findings. Earlier this year, soon after Mr. Crist announced his candidacy, he was flying high and all but assured of the GOP's nomination for the Senate.
But as Mr. Rubio and the Club for Growth stepped up their fall ad campaign, Mr. Crist's support began dropping from 53 percent in August to 49 percent in October. "The fact that Mr. Crist has fallen below 50 percent in a primary against a lesser known opponent suggests potential vulnerability," Mr. Rasmussen said at the time.
Mr. Rubio is now viewed "very favorably" by 34 percent of likely primary voters, up from 18 percent who said that this summer. Mr. Crist, on the other hand, has seen his "very favorable" ratings drop to 19 percent.
"I believe voters are starting to realize that there are vast differences between me and Charlie Crist on a number of important issues," Mr. Rubio said in a statement.
A few national party leaders have begun to break for Mr. Rubio, including South Carolina Jim DeMint. Republican campaign strategist Karl Rove noted in his Wall Street Journal column last week that he has donated to Mr. Rubio's campaign, but says either Mr. Crist or Mr. Rubio "will likely hold the seat."
But there is an even larger political struggle going on here for the soul of the Republican Party and its future ideological direction.
The party's base has, to a large degree, turned against candidates that are too often willing to water down party principles for the sake of political expediency - as Mr. Crist has done on Mr. Obama's failed stimulus plan. Like the campaign theme struck by Ronald Reagan in his 1976 campaign against President Gerald Ford, the Republican bedrock base wants the party's policy positions to be drawn in bold colors, not "pale pastels."
Andrew Kohut's polling analysis accurately portrays the rightward trend of the nation's electorate. There is a huge backlash building against the far-left policies of the Obama administration and the Democratic Congress.
Mr. Obama's job approval numbers fell this month into the 40s. Congress' approval ratings are in the teens. The current outlook in the House is a Democratic loss of 20 to 30 seats, and elections handicapper Stuart Rothenberg says "Republican Senate gains are now looking likely."
Donald Lambro is chief political correspondent of The Washington Times.
How Big Are You? Keep life in perspective!
Posted by Trayan
http://www.hemuz.org/Space/How-Big-Are-You-Keep-life-in-perspective
In case there is anybody out there that sweats the small stuff!
Now, THIS is really fascinating - it's rather dazzling to see it presented this way.
Beyond our sun it's a big universe.
Antares is the 15th brightest star in the sky.
It is more than 1000 light years away.
Now how big are you?
-------------------------------------------------------------
Now TRY to wrap your mind around this.........
This is a Hubble Telescope Ultra Deep Field Infrared View of countless "ENTIRE" Galaxies Billions of Light-Years Away.
Below is a close up of one of the darkest regions of the photo above.
Humbling, isn't it?
Now How Big Are You?
And how big are the things that upset you today?
Keep life in perspective. and don't sweat the small stuff!
"The e-mail Bag"
You might be a redneck .....
http://www.eons.com/groups/topic/1952299-You-might-be-a-redneck-?page=1
You might be a redneck if: It never occurred to you to be offended by the phrase, 'One nation, under God.'
You might be a redneck if: You've never protested about seeing the 10 Commandments posted in public places.
You might be a redneck if: You still say ' Christmas' instead of 'Winter Festival.'
You might be a redneck if: You bow your head when someone prays.
You might be a redneck if: You stand and place your hand over your heart when they play the National Anthem.
You might be a redneck if: You treat our armed forces veterans with great respect, and always have.
You might be a redneck if: You've never burned an American flag, nor intend to.
You might be a redneck if: You know what you believe and you aren't afraid to say so, no matter who is listening..
You might be a redneck if: You respect your elders and raised your kids to do the same.
You might be a redneck if: You'd give your last dollar to a friend.
Tuesday, December 29, 2009
ConservativeChristianRepublican-Report - 20091229
Motivational-Inspirational-Historical-Educational-Political-Enjoyable
Promoting "God's Holy Values and American Freedoms"!
"Daily Motivations"
"Life is not easy for any of us. But what of that? We must have perseverance and above all confidence in ourselves. We must believe that we are gifted for something, and that this thing, at whatever cost, must be attained." -- Madam Marie Curie
"Don't ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive, and go do it. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive." -- Howard Thurman
"Daily Devotions" (KJV and/or NLT)
This letter is from Paul, a slave of Christ Jesus.... (Romans 1:1)
When I proposed to Vonette, I said we would travel the world and that we would live in prestigious Bel Air, California. I promised her everything her heart could desire before we were married.
But within a couple of years our desires and our interests had changed. We had both fallen in love with Jesus. We came to the conclusion that knowing and serving Jesus was more important than anything else.
It was in that spring of 1951, one memorable afternoon, that Vonette and I, in our home in the Hollywood Hills, got on our knees and prayed, "Lord, we surrender our lives irrevocably to You. We want to do Your will. We want to love and serve You with all of our hearts for the rest of our lives."
We actually wrote and signed a contract committing our whole lives to Him, relinquishing all of our rights, all of our possessions, everything we would ever own, giving to Him, our dear Lord and Master, everything.
In the words of the apostle Paul, Vonette and I became voluntary "slaves" of Jesus that Sunday afternoon, by choice, as an act of the will.
Approximately 24 hours after we signed the contract to be His slaves, He gave me a world-changing vision, which we call Campus Crusade for Christ. I believe that had there been no contract, there would have been no vision.
For over 50 years, I have considered it my greatest honor to be a slave of our Lord Jesus Christ.
Your View of God Really Matters
Is God truly sovereign in your life? Do you believe wholeheartedly that knowing and serving Jesus is the more important than anything else? Are you willing, along with the apostle Paul, to voluntarily become a slave of Jesus out of your love for Him?
"The Patriot Post"
"We are firmly convinced, and we act on that conviction, that with nations as with individuals our interests soundly calculated will ever be found inseparable from our moral duties, and history bears witness to the fact that a just nation is trusted on its word when recourse is had to armaments and wars to bridle others." -- Thomas Jefferson, Second Inaugural Address, 1805
"Is it not the glory of the people of America, that whilst they have paid a decent regard to the opinions of former times and other nations, they have not suffered a blind veneration for antiquity, for custom, or for names, to overrule the suggestions of their own good sense, the knowledge of their own situation, and the lessons of their own experience? To this manly spirit, posterity will be indebted for the possession, and the world for the example of the numerous innovations displayed on the American theatre, in favor of private rights and public happiness." -- James Madison, Federalist No. 14
"Were we directed from Washington when to sow, and when to reap, we should soon want bread." -- Thomas Jefferson
The Founding Fathers on Jesus, Christianity and the Bible
Jacob Broom
LEGISLATOR; SIGNER OF THE CONSTITUTION
A letter to his son, James, attending Princeton University:
I flatter myself you will be what I wish, but don’t be so much flatterer as to relax of your application – don’t forget to be a Christian. I have said much to you on this head, and I hope an indelible impression is made.21
Endnotes
21. Jacob Broom to his son, James, on February 24, 1794, written from Wilmington, Delaware, from an original letter in our possession.
Surely the Founding Fathers talked of this: "I keep thinking we should include something in the constitution in case the people elect a complete moron."
"The Web"
Napolitano: "The system worked"
http://www.politico.com/blogs/politicolive/1209/Napolitano_The_system_worked.html?showall
EXCLUSIVE: Napolitano Failed to Get Dutch to Allow Air Marshals on US-Bound Flights!
By Debbie Schlussel
http://www.debbieschlussel.com/14388/exclusive-napolitano-failed-to-get-dutch-to-allow-us-air-marshals/
Contrary to Janet Napolitano’s claim that “the system worked,” not only didn’t the system work with Northwest Airline Flight 253 Islamic terrorist Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, but a former top Customs official tells me that Napolitano had a major role in that failure. She failed to get the Dutch to agree to allow our Federal Air Marshals on flights into the U.S. from Amsterdam! Helloooooo . . . ?
Debbie,
I am a former US Customs official. I now work under contract with the US Dept of State in an embassy.
I have seen cables in the past 30 days that the Dutch refuse to allow armed Air Marshals on flights to/from Amsterdam. The Secretary of DHS, Janet Napolitano, was there and pleaded to allow the armed Marshals but has been refused. Unless something has changed in the past 30 days, which I doubt, there would have been no armed Air Marshals on the recent flight to Detroit – do the Terrorists know this?
DHS Secretary Napolitano met with the Minister of Transportation of the Netherlands a month ago and did not get an agreement to allow Air Marshals on flights even if they checked their weapons at the airport police office.
Homeland Security?: Napolitano Too Busy Pimping Extremist Muslim University to Get Air Marshals on US-Bound Flights
I believe the terrorists do, indeed, know this. They pick the flights from Amsterdam for a reason. It’s no coincidence that two different Nigerians chose to cause a ruckus on the exact same flight from Amsterdam to Detroit on two different days. But, hey, Janet Napolitano has her priorities. And those priorities aren’t forcing the Dutch to allow US Air Marshals (nor it that her boss’ Obama’s priority). Nope. She’s too busy visiting extremist Muslim colleges in the Gulf and pimping them on Orthodox Jews.
Hmmm . . . did the system work? Sure doesn’t sound like it if she can’t even insist on U.S. Air Marshals on flights from Amsterdam. If they had any cojones–and even though “she” looks like she’s of that gender, she doesn’t–the Obama administration would have told the Dutch, “No air marshals, no flights from Amsterdam to anywhere near U.S. air space.” I guaran-dam-tee ya that, if they said (and meant) that, we’d already have U.S. Air Marshals on the flights.
Morning Bell: The System Failed
Pentaerythritol tetranitrate (PETN), the explosive Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab tried to detonate aboard Northwest Airlines flight 253, is among the most powerful of explosives in the world and was widely used to blow up airplanes in the 1970s and 1980s. The only reason the passengers of Flight 253 are still alive today is because Mr. Abdulmutallab’s syringe detonator failed for still unknown reasons.
Yet despite the facts that PETN is easily detected and Mr. Abdulmutallab’s father warned the U.S. embassy in Nigeria about his son this November, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano had the audacity to go on television yesterday and say “the system worked” and that the suspect was properly screened. The “system worked?” The 278 passengers on flight 253 could be dead today but for a faulty syringe and the Obama administration considers that a success? That is pure idiocy. Idiocy that is a direct threat to the security of this country and that goes to the heart of the Obama administration’s approach to the war on terror.
What on earth could Secretary Napolitano possibly mean when she said the “system worked?” The answer can be found at the University of Michigan Medical Center in Ann Arbor where on Saturday U.S. District Judge Paul Borman read Mr. Abdulmutallab the charges the Obama administration has filed against him for trying to blow up Flight 253. And the Obama administration probably will win a slam dunk conviction of Mr. Abdulmutallab. But his conviction will not make us any more safer than the convictions of the 1993 World Trade Center bombers did during the Clinton administration. Prosecuting terrorists when we can is necessary to protect our country, but is in no way sufficient.
The Obama administration continues to demonstrate that they believe counterterrorism is a law enforcement problem to be managed, not a war to be won. Hence Attorney General Eric Holder’s insistence on sending Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and four other terrorists to New York for a civilian trial in federal court. The five defendants are already plotting how best to air their grievances and exploit their treatment while in detention. Worse, criminalizing the war on terror will force our government to give
up the chance to interrogate terrorists like any enemy combatants and lose invaluable intelligence.
The Flight 253 incident was an intelligence failure. Instead of focusing on convictions, the Obama administration should be focusing on gathering the intelligence necessary to best protect the American people. This aborted attack provides a visceral reminder that terrorists remain committed to killing Americans. But it also illustrates the need to:
Work with international partners on countering terrorism;
Defend the domestic intelligence and law enforcement tools that disrupt plots inside the U.S.; and
Pursue foreign terrorist sanctuaries that serve as staging grounds for international operations.
Clearly, terrorists have not wavered in their resolve to strike America. The United States must be equally resolute in its response.
Letters To Leaders
http://www.congress.org/congressorg/bio/userletter/?id=3181&letter_id=4421624571
All messages are published with permission of the sender. The general topic of this message is Gov't Operations:
Subject:
HOW can our elected officials in "GOOD CONSCIENCE" vote THEMSELVES pay RAISES, while we Joe and Jane AVERAGE AMERICAN continue to struggle??? 22% increases! OUTRAGEOUS!!!!
You cannot legislate the poor into freedom by legislating the wealthy out of freedom. What one person receives without working for, another must work for without receiving. The government cannot give to anybody anything that it does not first take from someone else. When half of the people get the idea that they do not have to work because the other half is going to take care of them, then the other half gets the idea that it does no good to work because somebody else is going to get what they worked for, that is about the end of any nation. You cannot multiply wealth by dividing it. -- Adrian Rogers
Rep. Steve King: ACORN scandal bigger than Watergate
By Jordan Fabian
http://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/news/73219-rep-steve-king-acorn-scandal-bigger-than-watergate
Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa) on Monday claimed that allegations of wrongdoing surrounding the community group ACORN are bigger than the Watergate scandal that brought down the President Richard Nixon.
King, a long-time critic of ACORN, told the conservative American Spectator that the ACORN scandals have been worse because they affect state, local and national politics.
"It's thousands of times bigger than Watergate because Watergate was only a little break-in by a couple of guys," said King. "By the time we pull ACORN out by its roots America's going to understand just how big this is."
The House Judiciary Committee member described the ACORN saga as "the largest corruption crisis in the history of America."
King and other conservatives have pushed for congressional investigations of ACORN [Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now] after several of its employees were caught on camera giving financial advice to two individuals posing as a pimp and prostitute.
Congress subsequently voted to temporarily strip the group of its federal funding.
Several Democratic lawmakers have said that the vote to strip the group of funding was a violation of its bill of attainder rights, which bans a legislature for punishing an individual or group without being convicted at trial.
In the interview King says that the group has direct ties to the White House and other powerful Democratic constituencies such as the labor movement.
Conservatives also have accused the group of engaging in voter registration fraud during the 2008 elections, during which the Democrats grew their majority in Congress and voters elected Barack Obama president.
Let's Roll 2
By: Mark Steyn
On September 11th 2001, the government's (1970s) security procedures all failed, and the only good news of the day came from self-reliant citizens (on Flight 93) using their own wits and a willingness to act.
On December 25th 2009, the government's (post-9/11) security procedures all failed, and the only good news came once again from alert individuals:
"Suddenly, we hear a bang. It sounded like a firecracker went off," said Jasper Schuringa, a film director who was traveling to the US to visit friends.
"When [it] went off, everybody panicked ... Then someone screamed, ‘Fire! Fire!’"
Schuringa, sitting in seat 20J, in the right-most section of the Airbus 330, looked to his left. "I saw smoke rising from a seat ... I didn’t hesitate. I just jumped," he said.
Schuringa dove over four passengers to reach Abdul Mutallab’s seat. The suspect had a blanket on his lap. "It was smoking and there were flames coming from beneath his legs."
"I searched on his body parts and he had his pants open. He had something strapped to his legs."
The unassuming hero ripped the flaming, molten object — which resembled a small, white shampoo bottle — off Abdul Mutallab’s left leg, near his crotch. He said he put out the fire with his bare hands.
Schuringa yelled for water, and members of the flight crew soon appeared with fire extinguishers. Then, he said, he hauled the suspect out of the seat.
If the facts remain broadly as outlined, this incident has serious implications for airline travel: A man is on the no-fly list but is allowed to board the plane. Everyone flying on an inbound long-haul flight to the United States is forced to hand over excessively large amounts of liquids and gels and put the small amounts permitted into separate plastic bags, yet the no-fly guy's material for bomb-making sails through undetected.
This time the last line of defense worked. Next time, the paradise-seeking jihadist might get lucky and find himself sitting next to, say, Charlie Sheen, too immersed in a lengthy treatise on how 9/11 was an inside job to notice the smoldering socks in the next seat; or to the same kind of nothing-to-see-here crowd who thought Major Hasan's e-mails were "consistent with his research interests".
As for the perpetrator:
The young man, who yesterday night attempted to ignite an explosive device aboard a Delta Airlines flight from Amsterdam to Detroit, Michigan in the United States has been identified as Abdul Farouk Umar Abdulmutallab, the 23-year-old son of Alhaji Umaru Mutallab, former First Bank chairman. Mutallab, a former minister and prominent banker recently retired from the bank’s board...
The family home of the Mutallabs in Central London, is currently being searched by men of the Metropolitan Police. THISDAY checks reveal that the suspect, Abdulfarouk Umar Muttalab who is an engineering student at the University College, London had been noted for his extreme views on religion since his secondary school days at the British International School, Lome, Togo.
So once again we see the foolishness of complaceniks who drone the fatuous cliches about how "in this struggle, scholarships will be far more important than smart bombs". The men eager to self-detonate on infidel airliners are not goatherds from the caves of Waziristan but educated middle-class Muslims who have had the most exposure to the western world and could be pulling down six-figure salaries almost anywhere on the planet. And don't look to "assimilation" to work its magic, either. We're witnessing a process of generational de-assimilation: In this family, yet again, the dad is an entirely assimilated member of the transnational elite. His son wants a global caliphate run on Wahhabist lines.
Pro-Life Democrat Predicts Senate Health Care Bill Will ‘Go Down in Flames’ in House, Unless Changes Made
By Pete Winn, Senior Writer/Editor
http://www.cnsnews.com/news/article/58999
Rep. Bart Stupak (D-Mich.) (AP photo)
(CNSNews.com) –The Senate health care bill is dead on arrival in the House of Representatives unless major changes are made, including removal of special “carve outs” for Medicaid funding for certain states and inclusion of language barring taxpayer-funded health plans that cover abortions, Rep. Bart Stupak (D-Mich.) told CNSNews.com on Tuesday.
Faced with the possibility that House Democratic leaders and the White House will try to force the U.S. House to accept “as is” the health care bill that the Senate is poised to pass on Christmas Eve, the pro-life Democrat said the Senate bill differs too much from the version passed by the House to be accepted.
“If they expect the House to accept the Senate bill, it’s going to go down in flames,” Stupak told CNSNews.com in an interview.
CNSNews.com asked Stupak: “Are you prepared to vote for a bill that looks more like the Senate bill – and Senator Nelson’s language on abortion – than the House bill, with your language?”
“No, absolutely not,” said the Democratic congressman, whose district encompasses all of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula and roughly one-quarter of the territory in the remainder of Michigan.
“The Senate bill will not receive support in the House,” Stupak said. “If they tell us we have to take that bill without changes, it will not survive the House. Regardless of the abortion language, there are just too many objectionable items in there that at least I see, and in talking with maybe a half-dozen other members, they sort of see the same thing.”
Stupak, like many in Congress, takes strong exception to the fact that, under the Senate plan, certain states would receive special “carve outs” for increased funding for Medicare/Medicaid.
“That’s not what it’s all about,” he said. “This is about health care, this is providing health care for all Americans – it’s not to see who can strike the best deal for their state. This is the wrong piece of legislation to try to do carve outs, or get an exception for your state and the rest of the country is supposed to pick up the tab. That’s not what health care is all about. That’s not the policy, that’s not the principle behind the bill.
In exchange for their votes for the Senate bill, Sen. Ben Nelson (D-Neb.) reportedly obtained $100 million in additional Medicaid benefits for Nebraska and Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-La.) obtained $300 million in additional aid for Louisiana.
In addition, Sen. Bill Nelson (D-Fla.) managed to obtain a carve-out for 800,000 Floridians, who will keep their Medicare Advantage plans, while those in other parts of the country are slated to lose their Medicare Advantage plans under the bill’s targeted cuts.
Stupak was incensed at the special deals.
“All the rest of us that live in states that did not receive that exception, why would we [be] inclined to give Nebraska or Florida or Louisiana a special break underneath the bill and expect the rest of us to pay for it?”
Beyond the carve-outs, Stupak pointed out that seniors “take some cuts in the Senate bill that are not found in the House bill [that] members are not going to accept” -- and that the bill would tax people who have “decent” health insurance programs.
“Aren’t you really going to force more people off health insurance?” Stupak said.
He added: “If you just take a look at my three main constituencies – Right to Life, labor unions, and senior citizens – the Senate bill is contrary to all their interests,” Stupak said.
“I’d have no real desire to vote for this bill the way its being outlined in the media," he said. "I know the bill’s not finalized yet, but if that holds true, if they expect the House to accept the Senate bill, it’s going to go down in flames.”
Stupak, who succeeded last month in getting 64 House Democrats to join him in attaching his pro-life amendment to the House version of the health care bill, also firmly rejected language in the Senate bill regarding abortion.
The “Stupak amendment,” as his provision is known, would prohibit the federal government from allocating taxpayer money to pay for any part of any health insurance plan that covers abortion except in cases of rape, incest, or when the life of the mother is in danger.
But the abortion language in the Senate bill secured by Sen. Ben Nelson (D-Neb.), which attempts to segregate taxpayer money from paying for health plans that provide abortion, does not contain an outright ban on taxpayer money going to fund abortion.
Stupak, however, added: “Even if they fixed the abortion language, if it’s the Senate language, I have to vote for – I’m not voting for it.”
One Day, when I was a Freshman in High School…
by RY Deshpande
One day, when I was a freshman in high school, I saw a kid from my class was talking home from school. His name was Kyle. It looked like he was carrying all of his books. I thought to myself, 'Why would anyone bring home all his books on a Friday? He must really be a nerd.'
I had quite a weekend planned (parties and a football game with my friends the following afternoon), so I shrugged my shoulders and went on. As I was walking, I saw a bunch of kids running toward him.
They ran at him, knocking all his books out of his arms and tripping him so he landed in the dirt. His glasses went flying, and I saw them land in the grass about ten feet from him. He looked up and I saw this terrible sadness in his eyes. My heart went out to him. So, I jogged over to him as he crawled around looking for his glasses, and I saw a tear in his eye. As I handed him his glasses, I said, 'Those guys are jerks' they really should get lives.
'He looked at me and said, 'Hey thanks!' There was a big smile on his face. It was one of those smiles that showed real gratitude.
I helped him pick up his books, and asked him where he lived. As it turned out, he lived near me, so I asked him why I had never seen him before. He said he had gone to private school before now. I would have never hung out with a private school kid before. We talked all the way home, and I carried some of his books. He turned out to be a pretty cool kid.
I asked him if he wanted to play a little football with my friends. He said yes. We hung out all weekend and the more I got to know Kyle, the more I liked him, and my friends thought the same of him.
Monday morning came, and there was Kyle with the huge stack of books again. I stopped him and said, 'Boy, you are gonna really build some serious muscles with this pile of books everyday! 'He just laughed and handed me half the books.
Over the next four years, Kyle and I became best friends. When we were seniors we began to think about college. Kyle decided on Georgetown and I was going to Duke. I knew that we would always be friends, that the miles would never be a problem.
He was going to be a doctor and I was going for business on a football scholarship. Kyle was valedictorian of our class. I teased him all the time about being a nerd. He had to prepare a speech for graduation. I was so glad it wasn't me having to get up there and speak.
Graduation day, I saw Kyle. He looked great. He was one of those guys who really found himself during high school. He filled out and actually looked good in glasses. He had more dates than I had and all the girls loved him. Boy, sometimes I was jealous! Today was one of those days.
I could see that he was nervous about his speech. So I smacked him on the back and said, 'Hey, big guy, you'll be great!' He looked at me with one of those looks (the really grateful one) and smiled. 'Thanks' he said. As he started his speech, he cleared his throat, and began.
Graduation is a time to thank those who helped you make it through those tough years. Your parents, your teachers, your siblings, maybe a coach … but mostly your friends...
I am here to tell all of you that being a friend to someone is the best gift you can give them. I am going to tell you a story.
I just looked at my friend with disbelief as he told the first day we met.
He had planned to kill himself over the weekend. He talked of how he had cleaned out his locker so his Mom wouldn't have to do it later and was carrying his stuff home. He looked hard at me and gave me a little smile. 'Thankfully, I was saved'. My friend saved me from doing the unspeakable.
I just looked at my friend with disbelief as he told the first day we met.
He had planned to kill himself over the weekend. He talked of how he had cleaned out his locker so his Mom wouldn't have to do it later and was carrying his stuff home. He looked hard at me and gave me a little smile. 'Thankfully, I was saved'. My friend saved me from doing the unspeakable.
"The e-mail Bag"
A senior citizen said to his eighty-year old buddy. 'So I hear you're getting married?' 'Yes!' 'Do I know her?' 'Nope!' 'This woman, is she good looking?' 'Not really.' 'Is she a good cook?' 'No, she can't cook too well.' 'Does she have lots of money?' 'Nope! Poor as a church mouse.' 'Well, then, is she good in bed?' 'I don't know.' 'Why in the world do you want to marry her then?' 'Because she can still drive!'
Three old guys are out walking. First one says, 'Windy, isn't it?' Second one says, 'No, it's Thursday!' Third one says, 'So am I. Let's go get a beer.'
Promoting "God's Holy Values and American Freedoms"!
"Daily Motivations"
"Life is not easy for any of us. But what of that? We must have perseverance and above all confidence in ourselves. We must believe that we are gifted for something, and that this thing, at whatever cost, must be attained." -- Madam Marie Curie
"Don't ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive, and go do it. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive." -- Howard Thurman
"Daily Devotions" (KJV and/or NLT)
This letter is from Paul, a slave of Christ Jesus.... (Romans 1:1)
When I proposed to Vonette, I said we would travel the world and that we would live in prestigious Bel Air, California. I promised her everything her heart could desire before we were married.
But within a couple of years our desires and our interests had changed. We had both fallen in love with Jesus. We came to the conclusion that knowing and serving Jesus was more important than anything else.
It was in that spring of 1951, one memorable afternoon, that Vonette and I, in our home in the Hollywood Hills, got on our knees and prayed, "Lord, we surrender our lives irrevocably to You. We want to do Your will. We want to love and serve You with all of our hearts for the rest of our lives."
We actually wrote and signed a contract committing our whole lives to Him, relinquishing all of our rights, all of our possessions, everything we would ever own, giving to Him, our dear Lord and Master, everything.
In the words of the apostle Paul, Vonette and I became voluntary "slaves" of Jesus that Sunday afternoon, by choice, as an act of the will.
Approximately 24 hours after we signed the contract to be His slaves, He gave me a world-changing vision, which we call Campus Crusade for Christ. I believe that had there been no contract, there would have been no vision.
For over 50 years, I have considered it my greatest honor to be a slave of our Lord Jesus Christ.
Your View of God Really Matters
Is God truly sovereign in your life? Do you believe wholeheartedly that knowing and serving Jesus is the more important than anything else? Are you willing, along with the apostle Paul, to voluntarily become a slave of Jesus out of your love for Him?
"The Patriot Post"
"We are firmly convinced, and we act on that conviction, that with nations as with individuals our interests soundly calculated will ever be found inseparable from our moral duties, and history bears witness to the fact that a just nation is trusted on its word when recourse is had to armaments and wars to bridle others." -- Thomas Jefferson, Second Inaugural Address, 1805
"Is it not the glory of the people of America, that whilst they have paid a decent regard to the opinions of former times and other nations, they have not suffered a blind veneration for antiquity, for custom, or for names, to overrule the suggestions of their own good sense, the knowledge of their own situation, and the lessons of their own experience? To this manly spirit, posterity will be indebted for the possession, and the world for the example of the numerous innovations displayed on the American theatre, in favor of private rights and public happiness." -- James Madison, Federalist No. 14
"Were we directed from Washington when to sow, and when to reap, we should soon want bread." -- Thomas Jefferson
The Founding Fathers on Jesus, Christianity and the Bible
Jacob Broom
LEGISLATOR; SIGNER OF THE CONSTITUTION
A letter to his son, James, attending Princeton University:
I flatter myself you will be what I wish, but don’t be so much flatterer as to relax of your application – don’t forget to be a Christian. I have said much to you on this head, and I hope an indelible impression is made.21
Endnotes
21. Jacob Broom to his son, James, on February 24, 1794, written from Wilmington, Delaware, from an original letter in our possession.
Surely the Founding Fathers talked of this: "I keep thinking we should include something in the constitution in case the people elect a complete moron."
"The Web"
Napolitano: "The system worked"
http://www.politico.com/blogs/politicolive/1209/Napolitano_The_system_worked.html?showall
EXCLUSIVE: Napolitano Failed to Get Dutch to Allow Air Marshals on US-Bound Flights!
By Debbie Schlussel
http://www.debbieschlussel.com/14388/exclusive-napolitano-failed-to-get-dutch-to-allow-us-air-marshals/
Contrary to Janet Napolitano’s claim that “the system worked,” not only didn’t the system work with Northwest Airline Flight 253 Islamic terrorist Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, but a former top Customs official tells me that Napolitano had a major role in that failure. She failed to get the Dutch to agree to allow our Federal Air Marshals on flights into the U.S. from Amsterdam! Helloooooo . . . ?
Debbie,
I am a former US Customs official. I now work under contract with the US Dept of State in an embassy.
I have seen cables in the past 30 days that the Dutch refuse to allow armed Air Marshals on flights to/from Amsterdam. The Secretary of DHS, Janet Napolitano, was there and pleaded to allow the armed Marshals but has been refused. Unless something has changed in the past 30 days, which I doubt, there would have been no armed Air Marshals on the recent flight to Detroit – do the Terrorists know this?
DHS Secretary Napolitano met with the Minister of Transportation of the Netherlands a month ago and did not get an agreement to allow Air Marshals on flights even if they checked their weapons at the airport police office.
Homeland Security?: Napolitano Too Busy Pimping Extremist Muslim University to Get Air Marshals on US-Bound Flights
I believe the terrorists do, indeed, know this. They pick the flights from Amsterdam for a reason. It’s no coincidence that two different Nigerians chose to cause a ruckus on the exact same flight from Amsterdam to Detroit on two different days. But, hey, Janet Napolitano has her priorities. And those priorities aren’t forcing the Dutch to allow US Air Marshals (nor it that her boss’ Obama’s priority). Nope. She’s too busy visiting extremist Muslim colleges in the Gulf and pimping them on Orthodox Jews.
Hmmm . . . did the system work? Sure doesn’t sound like it if she can’t even insist on U.S. Air Marshals on flights from Amsterdam. If they had any cojones–and even though “she” looks like she’s of that gender, she doesn’t–the Obama administration would have told the Dutch, “No air marshals, no flights from Amsterdam to anywhere near U.S. air space.” I guaran-dam-tee ya that, if they said (and meant) that, we’d already have U.S. Air Marshals on the flights.
Morning Bell: The System Failed
Pentaerythritol tetranitrate (PETN), the explosive Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab tried to detonate aboard Northwest Airlines flight 253, is among the most powerful of explosives in the world and was widely used to blow up airplanes in the 1970s and 1980s. The only reason the passengers of Flight 253 are still alive today is because Mr. Abdulmutallab’s syringe detonator failed for still unknown reasons.
Yet despite the facts that PETN is easily detected and Mr. Abdulmutallab’s father warned the U.S. embassy in Nigeria about his son this November, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano had the audacity to go on television yesterday and say “the system worked” and that the suspect was properly screened. The “system worked?” The 278 passengers on flight 253 could be dead today but for a faulty syringe and the Obama administration considers that a success? That is pure idiocy. Idiocy that is a direct threat to the security of this country and that goes to the heart of the Obama administration’s approach to the war on terror.
What on earth could Secretary Napolitano possibly mean when she said the “system worked?” The answer can be found at the University of Michigan Medical Center in Ann Arbor where on Saturday U.S. District Judge Paul Borman read Mr. Abdulmutallab the charges the Obama administration has filed against him for trying to blow up Flight 253. And the Obama administration probably will win a slam dunk conviction of Mr. Abdulmutallab. But his conviction will not make us any more safer than the convictions of the 1993 World Trade Center bombers did during the Clinton administration. Prosecuting terrorists when we can is necessary to protect our country, but is in no way sufficient.
The Obama administration continues to demonstrate that they believe counterterrorism is a law enforcement problem to be managed, not a war to be won. Hence Attorney General Eric Holder’s insistence on sending Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and four other terrorists to New York for a civilian trial in federal court. The five defendants are already plotting how best to air their grievances and exploit their treatment while in detention. Worse, criminalizing the war on terror will force our government to give
up the chance to interrogate terrorists like any enemy combatants and lose invaluable intelligence.
The Flight 253 incident was an intelligence failure. Instead of focusing on convictions, the Obama administration should be focusing on gathering the intelligence necessary to best protect the American people. This aborted attack provides a visceral reminder that terrorists remain committed to killing Americans. But it also illustrates the need to:
Work with international partners on countering terrorism;
Defend the domestic intelligence and law enforcement tools that disrupt plots inside the U.S.; and
Pursue foreign terrorist sanctuaries that serve as staging grounds for international operations.
Clearly, terrorists have not wavered in their resolve to strike America. The United States must be equally resolute in its response.
Letters To Leaders
http://www.congress.org/congressorg/bio/userletter/?id=3181&letter_id=4421624571
All messages are published with permission of the sender. The general topic of this message is Gov't Operations:
Subject:
HOW can our elected officials in "GOOD CONSCIENCE" vote THEMSELVES pay RAISES, while we Joe and Jane AVERAGE AMERICAN continue to struggle??? 22% increases! OUTRAGEOUS!!!!
You cannot legislate the poor into freedom by legislating the wealthy out of freedom. What one person receives without working for, another must work for without receiving. The government cannot give to anybody anything that it does not first take from someone else. When half of the people get the idea that they do not have to work because the other half is going to take care of them, then the other half gets the idea that it does no good to work because somebody else is going to get what they worked for, that is about the end of any nation. You cannot multiply wealth by dividing it. -- Adrian Rogers
Rep. Steve King: ACORN scandal bigger than Watergate
By Jordan Fabian
http://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/news/73219-rep-steve-king-acorn-scandal-bigger-than-watergate
Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa) on Monday claimed that allegations of wrongdoing surrounding the community group ACORN are bigger than the Watergate scandal that brought down the President Richard Nixon.
King, a long-time critic of ACORN, told the conservative American Spectator that the ACORN scandals have been worse because they affect state, local and national politics.
"It's thousands of times bigger than Watergate because Watergate was only a little break-in by a couple of guys," said King. "By the time we pull ACORN out by its roots America's going to understand just how big this is."
The House Judiciary Committee member described the ACORN saga as "the largest corruption crisis in the history of America."
King and other conservatives have pushed for congressional investigations of ACORN [Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now] after several of its employees were caught on camera giving financial advice to two individuals posing as a pimp and prostitute.
Congress subsequently voted to temporarily strip the group of its federal funding.
Several Democratic lawmakers have said that the vote to strip the group of funding was a violation of its bill of attainder rights, which bans a legislature for punishing an individual or group without being convicted at trial.
In the interview King says that the group has direct ties to the White House and other powerful Democratic constituencies such as the labor movement.
Conservatives also have accused the group of engaging in voter registration fraud during the 2008 elections, during which the Democrats grew their majority in Congress and voters elected Barack Obama president.
Let's Roll 2
By: Mark Steyn
On September 11th 2001, the government's (1970s) security procedures all failed, and the only good news of the day came from self-reliant citizens (on Flight 93) using their own wits and a willingness to act.
On December 25th 2009, the government's (post-9/11) security procedures all failed, and the only good news came once again from alert individuals:
"Suddenly, we hear a bang. It sounded like a firecracker went off," said Jasper Schuringa, a film director who was traveling to the US to visit friends.
"When [it] went off, everybody panicked ... Then someone screamed, ‘Fire! Fire!’"
Schuringa, sitting in seat 20J, in the right-most section of the Airbus 330, looked to his left. "I saw smoke rising from a seat ... I didn’t hesitate. I just jumped," he said.
Schuringa dove over four passengers to reach Abdul Mutallab’s seat. The suspect had a blanket on his lap. "It was smoking and there were flames coming from beneath his legs."
"I searched on his body parts and he had his pants open. He had something strapped to his legs."
The unassuming hero ripped the flaming, molten object — which resembled a small, white shampoo bottle — off Abdul Mutallab’s left leg, near his crotch. He said he put out the fire with his bare hands.
Schuringa yelled for water, and members of the flight crew soon appeared with fire extinguishers. Then, he said, he hauled the suspect out of the seat.
If the facts remain broadly as outlined, this incident has serious implications for airline travel: A man is on the no-fly list but is allowed to board the plane. Everyone flying on an inbound long-haul flight to the United States is forced to hand over excessively large amounts of liquids and gels and put the small amounts permitted into separate plastic bags, yet the no-fly guy's material for bomb-making sails through undetected.
This time the last line of defense worked. Next time, the paradise-seeking jihadist might get lucky and find himself sitting next to, say, Charlie Sheen, too immersed in a lengthy treatise on how 9/11 was an inside job to notice the smoldering socks in the next seat; or to the same kind of nothing-to-see-here crowd who thought Major Hasan's e-mails were "consistent with his research interests".
As for the perpetrator:
The young man, who yesterday night attempted to ignite an explosive device aboard a Delta Airlines flight from Amsterdam to Detroit, Michigan in the United States has been identified as Abdul Farouk Umar Abdulmutallab, the 23-year-old son of Alhaji Umaru Mutallab, former First Bank chairman. Mutallab, a former minister and prominent banker recently retired from the bank’s board...
The family home of the Mutallabs in Central London, is currently being searched by men of the Metropolitan Police. THISDAY checks reveal that the suspect, Abdulfarouk Umar Muttalab who is an engineering student at the University College, London had been noted for his extreme views on religion since his secondary school days at the British International School, Lome, Togo.
So once again we see the foolishness of complaceniks who drone the fatuous cliches about how "in this struggle, scholarships will be far more important than smart bombs". The men eager to self-detonate on infidel airliners are not goatherds from the caves of Waziristan but educated middle-class Muslims who have had the most exposure to the western world and could be pulling down six-figure salaries almost anywhere on the planet. And don't look to "assimilation" to work its magic, either. We're witnessing a process of generational de-assimilation: In this family, yet again, the dad is an entirely assimilated member of the transnational elite. His son wants a global caliphate run on Wahhabist lines.
Pro-Life Democrat Predicts Senate Health Care Bill Will ‘Go Down in Flames’ in House, Unless Changes Made
By Pete Winn, Senior Writer/Editor
http://www.cnsnews.com/news/article/58999
Rep. Bart Stupak (D-Mich.) (AP photo)
(CNSNews.com) –The Senate health care bill is dead on arrival in the House of Representatives unless major changes are made, including removal of special “carve outs” for Medicaid funding for certain states and inclusion of language barring taxpayer-funded health plans that cover abortions, Rep. Bart Stupak (D-Mich.) told CNSNews.com on Tuesday.
Faced with the possibility that House Democratic leaders and the White House will try to force the U.S. House to accept “as is” the health care bill that the Senate is poised to pass on Christmas Eve, the pro-life Democrat said the Senate bill differs too much from the version passed by the House to be accepted.
“If they expect the House to accept the Senate bill, it’s going to go down in flames,” Stupak told CNSNews.com in an interview.
CNSNews.com asked Stupak: “Are you prepared to vote for a bill that looks more like the Senate bill – and Senator Nelson’s language on abortion – than the House bill, with your language?”
“No, absolutely not,” said the Democratic congressman, whose district encompasses all of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula and roughly one-quarter of the territory in the remainder of Michigan.
“The Senate bill will not receive support in the House,” Stupak said. “If they tell us we have to take that bill without changes, it will not survive the House. Regardless of the abortion language, there are just too many objectionable items in there that at least I see, and in talking with maybe a half-dozen other members, they sort of see the same thing.”
Stupak, like many in Congress, takes strong exception to the fact that, under the Senate plan, certain states would receive special “carve outs” for increased funding for Medicare/Medicaid.
“That’s not what it’s all about,” he said. “This is about health care, this is providing health care for all Americans – it’s not to see who can strike the best deal for their state. This is the wrong piece of legislation to try to do carve outs, or get an exception for your state and the rest of the country is supposed to pick up the tab. That’s not what health care is all about. That’s not the policy, that’s not the principle behind the bill.
In exchange for their votes for the Senate bill, Sen. Ben Nelson (D-Neb.) reportedly obtained $100 million in additional Medicaid benefits for Nebraska and Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-La.) obtained $300 million in additional aid for Louisiana.
In addition, Sen. Bill Nelson (D-Fla.) managed to obtain a carve-out for 800,000 Floridians, who will keep their Medicare Advantage plans, while those in other parts of the country are slated to lose their Medicare Advantage plans under the bill’s targeted cuts.
Stupak was incensed at the special deals.
“All the rest of us that live in states that did not receive that exception, why would we [be] inclined to give Nebraska or Florida or Louisiana a special break underneath the bill and expect the rest of us to pay for it?”
Beyond the carve-outs, Stupak pointed out that seniors “take some cuts in the Senate bill that are not found in the House bill [that] members are not going to accept” -- and that the bill would tax people who have “decent” health insurance programs.
“Aren’t you really going to force more people off health insurance?” Stupak said.
He added: “If you just take a look at my three main constituencies – Right to Life, labor unions, and senior citizens – the Senate bill is contrary to all their interests,” Stupak said.
“I’d have no real desire to vote for this bill the way its being outlined in the media," he said. "I know the bill’s not finalized yet, but if that holds true, if they expect the House to accept the Senate bill, it’s going to go down in flames.”
Stupak, who succeeded last month in getting 64 House Democrats to join him in attaching his pro-life amendment to the House version of the health care bill, also firmly rejected language in the Senate bill regarding abortion.
The “Stupak amendment,” as his provision is known, would prohibit the federal government from allocating taxpayer money to pay for any part of any health insurance plan that covers abortion except in cases of rape, incest, or when the life of the mother is in danger.
But the abortion language in the Senate bill secured by Sen. Ben Nelson (D-Neb.), which attempts to segregate taxpayer money from paying for health plans that provide abortion, does not contain an outright ban on taxpayer money going to fund abortion.
Stupak, however, added: “Even if they fixed the abortion language, if it’s the Senate language, I have to vote for – I’m not voting for it.”
One Day, when I was a Freshman in High School…
by RY Deshpande
One day, when I was a freshman in high school, I saw a kid from my class was talking home from school. His name was Kyle. It looked like he was carrying all of his books. I thought to myself, 'Why would anyone bring home all his books on a Friday? He must really be a nerd.'
I had quite a weekend planned (parties and a football game with my friends the following afternoon), so I shrugged my shoulders and went on. As I was walking, I saw a bunch of kids running toward him.
They ran at him, knocking all his books out of his arms and tripping him so he landed in the dirt. His glasses went flying, and I saw them land in the grass about ten feet from him. He looked up and I saw this terrible sadness in his eyes. My heart went out to him. So, I jogged over to him as he crawled around looking for his glasses, and I saw a tear in his eye. As I handed him his glasses, I said, 'Those guys are jerks' they really should get lives.
'He looked at me and said, 'Hey thanks!' There was a big smile on his face. It was one of those smiles that showed real gratitude.
I helped him pick up his books, and asked him where he lived. As it turned out, he lived near me, so I asked him why I had never seen him before. He said he had gone to private school before now. I would have never hung out with a private school kid before. We talked all the way home, and I carried some of his books. He turned out to be a pretty cool kid.
I asked him if he wanted to play a little football with my friends. He said yes. We hung out all weekend and the more I got to know Kyle, the more I liked him, and my friends thought the same of him.
Monday morning came, and there was Kyle with the huge stack of books again. I stopped him and said, 'Boy, you are gonna really build some serious muscles with this pile of books everyday! 'He just laughed and handed me half the books.
Over the next four years, Kyle and I became best friends. When we were seniors we began to think about college. Kyle decided on Georgetown and I was going to Duke. I knew that we would always be friends, that the miles would never be a problem.
He was going to be a doctor and I was going for business on a football scholarship. Kyle was valedictorian of our class. I teased him all the time about being a nerd. He had to prepare a speech for graduation. I was so glad it wasn't me having to get up there and speak.
Graduation day, I saw Kyle. He looked great. He was one of those guys who really found himself during high school. He filled out and actually looked good in glasses. He had more dates than I had and all the girls loved him. Boy, sometimes I was jealous! Today was one of those days.
I could see that he was nervous about his speech. So I smacked him on the back and said, 'Hey, big guy, you'll be great!' He looked at me with one of those looks (the really grateful one) and smiled. 'Thanks' he said. As he started his speech, he cleared his throat, and began.
Graduation is a time to thank those who helped you make it through those tough years. Your parents, your teachers, your siblings, maybe a coach … but mostly your friends...
I am here to tell all of you that being a friend to someone is the best gift you can give them. I am going to tell you a story.
I just looked at my friend with disbelief as he told the first day we met.
He had planned to kill himself over the weekend. He talked of how he had cleaned out his locker so his Mom wouldn't have to do it later and was carrying his stuff home. He looked hard at me and gave me a little smile. 'Thankfully, I was saved'. My friend saved me from doing the unspeakable.
I just looked at my friend with disbelief as he told the first day we met.
He had planned to kill himself over the weekend. He talked of how he had cleaned out his locker so his Mom wouldn't have to do it later and was carrying his stuff home. He looked hard at me and gave me a little smile. 'Thankfully, I was saved'. My friend saved me from doing the unspeakable.
"The e-mail Bag"
A senior citizen said to his eighty-year old buddy. 'So I hear you're getting married?' 'Yes!' 'Do I know her?' 'Nope!' 'This woman, is she good looking?' 'Not really.' 'Is she a good cook?' 'No, she can't cook too well.' 'Does she have lots of money?' 'Nope! Poor as a church mouse.' 'Well, then, is she good in bed?' 'I don't know.' 'Why in the world do you want to marry her then?' 'Because she can still drive!'
Three old guys are out walking. First one says, 'Windy, isn't it?' Second one says, 'No, it's Thursday!' Third one says, 'So am I. Let's go get a beer.'
Monday, December 28, 2009
ConservativeChristianRepublican-Report - 20091228
Motivational-Inspirational-Historical-Educational-Political-Enjoyable
Promoting "God's Holy Values and American Freedoms"!
"Daily Motivations"
"No stream or gas drives anything until it is confined. No Niagara is ever turned into light and power until it is tunneled. No life ever grows great until it is focused, dedicated and disciplined." -- Harry E. Fosdick
"When we choose not to focus on what is missing from our lives but are grateful for the abundance that's present....we experience heaven on earth." -- Sarah Breathnack
"Failure is only the opportunity to begin again more intelligently." -- Henry Ford
"Daily Devotions" (KJV and/or NLT)
Your workmanship is marvelous. (Psalm 139:14)
When I tour an historic mansion and scrutinize the building's details - the quality, design, and decor - I can draw some conclusions about its builder. Is the foundation strong? Are the walls and floors plumb and square? How well are the most intricate details constructed? Does the design flow from one room to another?
We live on a grand estate called Earth. As we look at the beauty and intricacies of our residence, we marvel at the genius of the design. When we gaze up into the heavens, we are overcome with awe at the vastness of what our Creator has brought into being. In one of the most beautiful passages in the Bible, King David describes how nature testifies to the power of God: "The heavens proclaim the glory of God. The skies display His craftsmanship. Day after day they continue to speak; night after night they make Him known. They speak without a sound or word; their voice is never heard. Yet their message has gone throughout the earth, and their words to all the world." (Psalm 19:1-4, NIV)
To get just a small idea of God's creative power, let us consider our corner of the universe. We live on one of nine planets that revolve around the sun. As the dominant light of our solar system, our sun gives off far more energy in one second than all mankind has produced since creation. With a diameter of approximately 860,000 miles, the sun could hold one million planets the size of the Earth. Yet our sun is only an average-size star.
How comforting it is to know that the God of creation is concerned with my well-being. There is no greater power!
Your View of God Really Matters …
On the next clear, starry night, go outside, gaze upward at God's heavens, and worship Him for marvelous His power and wisdom. Tell Him how much you love Him. Listen for His voice in your heart.
"The Patriot Post"
"[A] wise and frugal government ... shall restrain men from injuring one another, shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned. This is the sum of good government." -- Thomas Jefferson
Insight
"Time and money spent in helping men do more for themselves is far better than mere giving." -- American industrialist Henry Ford (1863-1947)
"The world is moved not only by the mighty shoves of the heroes, but also by the aggregate of the tiny pushes of each honest worker." -- American writer Helen Keller (1880-1968)
"All history is one long story to this effect: men have struggled for power over their fellow men in order that they might win the joys of earth at the expense of others, might shift the burdens of life from their own shoulders upon those of others." -- American professor William Graham Sumner (1840-1910)
Upright
"After last week's White House 'jobs summit,' the President claimed that he is 'open to every demonstrably good idea' that might create jobs, yet noted that 'we also though have to face the fact that our resources are limited.' Barack Obama may be surprised by what a tremendous 'resource' the American people can be -- if he could only get out of our way.." -- columnist Austin Hill
"Democrats have defined success as dragging any [health care] bill into law as quickly as possible, no matter how damaging, while leaving the mess it creates to be cleaned up in the future once the entitlement is entrenched and higher taxes are inevitable. The only way to prevent that outcome is to force them to start over." -- The Wall Street Journal
"There's no difference in this global warming hoax, and the health care reform hoax. They are born of the same ideology, they're born of the same tactics, and they are born with the same objectives. Radical leftists claim that man-made global warming destroys lives. Radical leftists also claim that private sector medical care destroys lives. The president himself has indicted the medical community for this." -- radio talk-show host Rush Limbaugh
"One of the ostensible reasons for reforming our health insurance system is the need to halt the growth of spending on medical treatment. So it may be a surprise to learn that in its first major vote on the health care overhaul, the U.S. Senate took a clear and simple position: Cost is no object." -- columnist Steve Chapman
The Demo-gogues
This week's "Alpha Jackass" Award: "Instead of joining us on the right side of history, all the Republicans can come up with is, 'slow down, stop everything, let's start over.' If you think you've heard these same excuses before, you're right. When this country belatedly recognized the wrongs of slavery, there were those who dug in their heels and said 'slow down, it's too early, things aren't bad enough.'" -- Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV), of the party of slavery -- then and now
Nothing more than feelings: "We have to talk about how to put the final pieces [of the health care bill] together. It's good to hear from the president now, because it's getting to that stage where you have to come to a decision with your heart as well as your head." -- Sen. John Kerry (D-MA) (What about the Constitution?)
All about jobs: "I noticed the press yesterday, because we had this jobs forum at the White House, they said 'Obama's finally pivoting to jobs.' As if what we haven't been doing for the whole nine months from the day I was sworn in and we start talking about the recovery was all about jobs." -- Barack Obama
Tax 'em all: "I believe that the transaction tax still has a great deal of merit. The concern that many of us or others have had is that it will send, it will send transactions overseas. ... The fact is, what we are talking about is a global transaction [tax], something that we would do in conjunction with other G nations, whether it is G8, G20, whatever the current G number is. Because it is really a source of revenue that has really minimal impact on the transaction, but a tremendous impact on helping us meet our needs. I think there would be a market for it among the American people to say that we are all participating in the economic prosperity of our country, and we are all pitching in to continue that prosperity." -- House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) touting a tax on stocks, bonds and other financial transactions
Pot and kettle: "We will be clear about what we expect from those who receive our assistance.... We expect those who are ineffective or corrupt to be held accountable." -- Barack Obama referencing Afghanistan, but the same comment could well describe his own Chicago mob administration
Village Idiots
Denial: "Nothing that has come out in the public as a result of the recent email hackings has cast doubt on the basic scientific message on climate change and that message is quite clear -- that climate change is happening much, much faster than we realized and we human beings are the primary cause." -- UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon
"I think the e-mail scandal is being used as a political side show to deflect interest in actually dealing with climate change. I think, in that regard, it will fail." -- Princeton University's Professor Michael Oppenheimer
"There is nothing in the hacked e-mails that undermines the science upon which this decision is based." -- EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson asserting the farcical government stance that carbon dioxide is harmful to humans
It'll never be enough: "Are we doing enough? The answer is obviously no -- [restricting world emissions of carbon dioxide at or below 450 parts per million] is not the right target. But it is presently seen as beyond the capacity of governments around the world. We are stretching the capacity of governments even to hit a 450 target. We are gambling with the future of human civilization in accepting odds that by any definition make our present course reckless.... But it's still the most likely path to success." -- Algore
It's already too late: "Even a final treaty will have to set the stage for other tougher [emissions] reductions at a later date. We have already overshot the safe levels of CO2 in the atmosphere.." --Algore
Left-theology: "Don't let anybody tell you that religious people don't support choice. You not only have a constitutional right for abortion, but you have a God-given right." -- Rev. Carlton Veazy, president and CEO of the Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice ("Before I formed you in the womb I knew you..." --Jeremiah 1:5)
"The Web"
Another "After" Merry Christmas!
www.andiesisle.com/didsheknow.html
Give Forgiveness at Christmas
By Cinde Lucas
Overflow Ministries
http://www.crosswalk.com/spirituallife/worship/11623923/page0/
Christmas is a time of year when we make our list of friends and family to whom we want to give gifts. We usually start with our children and spouse and work our way out to our family, friends and co-workers. As we do this, the list becomes larger and larger. It's no wonder that we can be overwhelmed at the COST of Christmas.
God paid a very dear cost for us to receive the Gift of eternal life through Jesus. He gave His one and only Son so that we could have life. Most of us understand eternal life as being something that we will receive after we die. But that isn't the full meaning. You see ETERNAL means endless, never-ending, everlasting, and timeless. The moment we accept the offer of Jesus' sacrifice of LIFE, we begin our eternal, never ending walk with God. What that means is that God's life, His love, His peace, His joy, His compassion, is NOW part of who we are and as we submit ourselves to Him, the Holy Spirit empowers us to be more and more like Jesus. That's the part of LIVING that I didn't understand for many years of my Christian walk; that I didn't have to survive on my own anymore because the Holy Spirit was IN ME to HELP ME live the Christian life.
One of the things that the Holy Spirit empowers us to do is FORGIVE. To some that sounds like an impossible task that even God would not ask us to do. After all, some of the people we don't want to forgive really did hurt us. But forgiveness is the MAIN thing that Jesus was born to give to us. We are all sinners who fall short of God's glory and without the shed blood of Jesus, we are doomed not just to hell, but to live a life of misery, because separated from God our lives are hopeless. But Jesus offers us forgiveness of sins and reconciliation with God. Now that is LIFE ETERNAL!
I believe that one of the biggest reasons that people, even Christians, are miserable is because they refuse to let go of the hurts, disappointment, and offenses of others. They justify their pain and keep themselves and others locked in a prison of unforgiveness.
Peter had a problem with unforgiveness too. He wasn't exactly thrilled with one of his fellow disciples. One day (Matthew 18) he asked Jesus a question, "How many times must I forgive? How about 7? That sounds reasonable doesn't it?" Can't you just see Peter beaming with pride after answering his own question? But Jesus went above and beyond Peters expectation and said; "How about 7 times 70?" I can just hear Peter. "You've got to be kidding me? You expect me to forgive this guy John, who by the way keeps bragging about how much you love him 490 times?! Why don't you deal with Him about his pride and give me a BREAK!"
Jesus had a way of getting right to the heart of people's problems. The real issue here is that NO ONE, not even Peter who walked with Jesus every day, could love the unlovely and give forgiveness without the Help of the Holy Spirit. Jesus was reminding Peter, and US, that apart from HIM we can't do anything.
Have you ever noticed that right in the middle of the word forgiveness is the word GIVE? Luke 6:38 says that whatever we give will be given back to us. Paul said in Galatians 6:7 that whatever we sowed, which is also a form of giving would be what we harvested. Jesus said that unless we forgive others, God wouldn't forgive us (Matthew 6:15). OUCH! Why do you suppose that we are required to do this?
I believe there are two main reasons that God requires Christians to offer forgiveness to others. First, we have been forgiven. All of our sins, which are many, have been washed away. They haven't just been covered over. The blood of Jesus cleanses us from ALL unrighteousness and sets us free from the power of sin and death. When we refuse to forgive others, WE, not them, are placed into a pit and our hearts become a seed bed for satan's seeds of bitterness, depression, and offense. The longer we go holding onto the unforgiveness, the more the garden of our heart becomes infested with the enemy's seeds! This is NOT the life that Jesus died to give us. This the enemy's plan to kill, steal and destroy the love that God wants to shed abroad in our hearts!
Second, when we offer forgiveness to others who have hurt us, it unlocks the chains in their life for God to work in their hearts. This is exactly what happened in my own life many years ago. A person whom I had really mistreated chose to forgive and pray for me. I know in my heart that because of that, God did a work in my life! Jesus even said that those whom we forgive, their sins will be forgiven. That's pretty amazing that we have that much power!
One of the obstacles to giving forgiveness is that our flesh never wants to do it. I can't tell you how many people have said to me "I wish I could forgive, but I just don't feel like I can." Wishing isn't one of the gifts of the Holy Spirit, but self-control is! That's the reason that God told us in Deut 3:19 that even though He put the choice of Life and death in front of us, we would have to choose life! It's not something we always feel like doing! James 4:7 says that if we will submit ourselves to God and resist the devil he'll flee. Notice that Satan doesn't flee until after we choose to submit ourselves to God and I can't find anywhere that it says I have to feel like it! Forgiveness is a choice we make in obedience to God's word. It may take a while for our flesh to get over harboring unforgivensess but our spirit man loves it when we choose to follow God!
It isn't easy making the choice to forgive. But living with unforgiveness can be downright deadly! I've heard it said that harboring unforgiveness is like drinking poison and hoping the other person dies! That's a good way to think about it, because many, many illnesses, including depression and arthritis, can be linked to bitterness and unforgiveness!
That's why I'm giving you this gift idea to give to some undeserving soul this Christmas! Giving forgiveness will open a door for God to do great things in your life and in the lives of those you choose to forgive. So as you're making your Christmas list this year, try making a list of those that you need to forgive. Maybe it's your spouse or your children. Maybe it's the store clerk that was rude to you. Maybe it's your pastor or your friend. Maybe it's yourself. Your gift of forgiveness will go a long way for God to work in their hearts, and in yours. Ask the Holy Spirit to stir up a heart of compassion in you and release LOVE, JOY, and PEACE in your heart. Be obedient to the still small voice of God and forgive those who have hurt and disappointed you in the past. Your Christmas will be brighter and their life will be better for it too.
Blessings and MERRY Christmas!
Giving thanks, the day after
I am Thankful :
For the wife who says it’s hot dogs tonight because she is home with me, and not out with someone else.
For the husband who is on the sofa watching sports because he is home with me and not out with someone else.
For the teenager who is complaining about doing dishes because it means she is at home, not on the streets.
For the taxes I pay because it means I am employed.
For the mess to clean after a party because it means I have been surrounded by friends.
For the clothes that fit a little too snug because it means I have enough to eat.
For the shadow that watches me work because it means I am out in the sunshine.
For a lawn that needs mowing, windows that need cleaning and gutters that need fixing because it means I have a home.
For all the complaining I hear about the government because it means we have freedom of speech.
For the parking spot I find at the far end of the lot because it means I am capable of walking and I have been blessed with transportation.
For my huge heating bill because it means I am warm.
For the lady behind me in line who is talking too loudly because it means I can hear.
For the pile of laundry and ironing because it means I have clothing to wear.
For weariness and aching muscles at the end of the day because it means I have been capable of working hard.
For the alarm that goes off in the early morning hours because it means that I am alive.
EXCLUSIVE: Transvestites, Mao And Obama Ornaments Decorate White House Christmas Tree
by Capitol Confidential
http://biggovernment.com/2009/12/22/transvestites-mao-and-obama-decorate-white-house-christmas-tree/
Why let a holiday season come between the White House and making some political statements? The White House pegged controversial designer Simon Doonan to oversee the Christmas decorations for the White House. Mr. Doonan, who is creative director of Barney’s New York has often caused a stir with his design choices. Like his naughty yuletide window display of Margaret Thatcher as a dowdy dominatrix and Dan Quayle as a ventriloquist’s dummy. For this year’s White House, he didn’t disappoint.
These photos of ornaments on the White House Christmas tree in the Blue Room were taken just days ago. Of course, Mao has his place in the White House.
And, of course, it wouldn’t be Christmas without an ornament of legendary transvestite Hedda Lettuce.
He/She even signed it:
And, so soon after collecting the Nobel Peace Prize, why wouldn’t the White House have an ornament super-imposing President Obama onto Mt. Rushmore:
All around, a very Barry Christmas!
Boehner: Senate Health Plan Subsidizes Abortions
By: Dan Weil
http://newsmax.com/InsideCover/Boehner-Senate-Health-Plan/2009/12/22/id/344296?s=al&promo_code=9415-1
House Republican Leader John Boehner, Ohio, says Senate Democrats’ healthcare bill doesn’t keep federal money from financing abortions, as they claim.
“Fixed it is not,” Boehner writes on his web site.
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s, D-Nev., latest healthcare ‘manager’s amendment’ would still levy a new ‘abortion premium’ fee on Americans under the Democrats’ healthcare plan.”
The amendment doesn’t prohibit abortion coverage for federally subsidized plans participating in the insurance exchange, Boehner says.
“Instead, the amendment includes layers of accounting gimmicks that demand that plans participating in the exchange or the new government-run plan … must establish ‘allocation accounts’ when elective abortion is a covered benefit,” Boehner writes.
“Everyone enrolled in these plans must pay a monthly abortion premium, and these funds will be used to pay for the elective abortion services.”
To be sure, the bill does allow states to opt out of the requirement is they pass laws to prohibit insurance coverage of abortion, Boehner writes.
“But it’s a sham because it does nothing to prevent one state’s tax dollars from paying for elective abortions in other states.”
Boehner isn’t the only abortion opponent upset with the Senate bill.
National Right to Life Committee legislative director Douglas Johnson said in a statement, “The new abortion language solves none of the fundamental abortion-related problems with the Senate bill, and it actually creates some new abortion-related problems.”
But abortion opponents can take heart. Rep. Bart Stupak, D-Mich., and about 40 other Democrats in the House made their support for healthcare reform contingent on a strong anti-abortion provision.
So a bill without such a provision is unlikely to gain final approval in the House, let alone the Senate.
"The e-mail Bag"
Q: If Pelosi, Reid, Kerry and Obama were on a boat in the middle of the ocean and it sank, who would be saved?
A: America!
Q: What's the difference between Obama and his dog, Bo?
A: Bo has papers.
Promoting "God's Holy Values and American Freedoms"!
"Daily Motivations"
"No stream or gas drives anything until it is confined. No Niagara is ever turned into light and power until it is tunneled. No life ever grows great until it is focused, dedicated and disciplined." -- Harry E. Fosdick
"When we choose not to focus on what is missing from our lives but are grateful for the abundance that's present....we experience heaven on earth." -- Sarah Breathnack
"Failure is only the opportunity to begin again more intelligently." -- Henry Ford
"Daily Devotions" (KJV and/or NLT)
Your workmanship is marvelous. (Psalm 139:14)
When I tour an historic mansion and scrutinize the building's details - the quality, design, and decor - I can draw some conclusions about its builder. Is the foundation strong? Are the walls and floors plumb and square? How well are the most intricate details constructed? Does the design flow from one room to another?
We live on a grand estate called Earth. As we look at the beauty and intricacies of our residence, we marvel at the genius of the design. When we gaze up into the heavens, we are overcome with awe at the vastness of what our Creator has brought into being. In one of the most beautiful passages in the Bible, King David describes how nature testifies to the power of God: "The heavens proclaim the glory of God. The skies display His craftsmanship. Day after day they continue to speak; night after night they make Him known. They speak without a sound or word; their voice is never heard. Yet their message has gone throughout the earth, and their words to all the world." (Psalm 19:1-4, NIV)
To get just a small idea of God's creative power, let us consider our corner of the universe. We live on one of nine planets that revolve around the sun. As the dominant light of our solar system, our sun gives off far more energy in one second than all mankind has produced since creation. With a diameter of approximately 860,000 miles, the sun could hold one million planets the size of the Earth. Yet our sun is only an average-size star.
How comforting it is to know that the God of creation is concerned with my well-being. There is no greater power!
Your View of God Really Matters …
On the next clear, starry night, go outside, gaze upward at God's heavens, and worship Him for marvelous His power and wisdom. Tell Him how much you love Him. Listen for His voice in your heart.
"The Patriot Post"
"[A] wise and frugal government ... shall restrain men from injuring one another, shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned. This is the sum of good government." -- Thomas Jefferson
Insight
"Time and money spent in helping men do more for themselves is far better than mere giving." -- American industrialist Henry Ford (1863-1947)
"The world is moved not only by the mighty shoves of the heroes, but also by the aggregate of the tiny pushes of each honest worker." -- American writer Helen Keller (1880-1968)
"All history is one long story to this effect: men have struggled for power over their fellow men in order that they might win the joys of earth at the expense of others, might shift the burdens of life from their own shoulders upon those of others." -- American professor William Graham Sumner (1840-1910)
Upright
"After last week's White House 'jobs summit,' the President claimed that he is 'open to every demonstrably good idea' that might create jobs, yet noted that 'we also though have to face the fact that our resources are limited.' Barack Obama may be surprised by what a tremendous 'resource' the American people can be -- if he could only get out of our way.." -- columnist Austin Hill
"Democrats have defined success as dragging any [health care] bill into law as quickly as possible, no matter how damaging, while leaving the mess it creates to be cleaned up in the future once the entitlement is entrenched and higher taxes are inevitable. The only way to prevent that outcome is to force them to start over." -- The Wall Street Journal
"There's no difference in this global warming hoax, and the health care reform hoax. They are born of the same ideology, they're born of the same tactics, and they are born with the same objectives. Radical leftists claim that man-made global warming destroys lives. Radical leftists also claim that private sector medical care destroys lives. The president himself has indicted the medical community for this." -- radio talk-show host Rush Limbaugh
"One of the ostensible reasons for reforming our health insurance system is the need to halt the growth of spending on medical treatment. So it may be a surprise to learn that in its first major vote on the health care overhaul, the U.S. Senate took a clear and simple position: Cost is no object." -- columnist Steve Chapman
The Demo-gogues
This week's "Alpha Jackass" Award: "Instead of joining us on the right side of history, all the Republicans can come up with is, 'slow down, stop everything, let's start over.' If you think you've heard these same excuses before, you're right. When this country belatedly recognized the wrongs of slavery, there were those who dug in their heels and said 'slow down, it's too early, things aren't bad enough.'" -- Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV), of the party of slavery -- then and now
Nothing more than feelings: "We have to talk about how to put the final pieces [of the health care bill] together. It's good to hear from the president now, because it's getting to that stage where you have to come to a decision with your heart as well as your head." -- Sen. John Kerry (D-MA) (What about the Constitution?)
All about jobs: "I noticed the press yesterday, because we had this jobs forum at the White House, they said 'Obama's finally pivoting to jobs.' As if what we haven't been doing for the whole nine months from the day I was sworn in and we start talking about the recovery was all about jobs." -- Barack Obama
Tax 'em all: "I believe that the transaction tax still has a great deal of merit. The concern that many of us or others have had is that it will send, it will send transactions overseas. ... The fact is, what we are talking about is a global transaction [tax], something that we would do in conjunction with other G nations, whether it is G8, G20, whatever the current G number is. Because it is really a source of revenue that has really minimal impact on the transaction, but a tremendous impact on helping us meet our needs. I think there would be a market for it among the American people to say that we are all participating in the economic prosperity of our country, and we are all pitching in to continue that prosperity." -- House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) touting a tax on stocks, bonds and other financial transactions
Pot and kettle: "We will be clear about what we expect from those who receive our assistance.... We expect those who are ineffective or corrupt to be held accountable." -- Barack Obama referencing Afghanistan, but the same comment could well describe his own Chicago mob administration
Village Idiots
Denial: "Nothing that has come out in the public as a result of the recent email hackings has cast doubt on the basic scientific message on climate change and that message is quite clear -- that climate change is happening much, much faster than we realized and we human beings are the primary cause." -- UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon
"I think the e-mail scandal is being used as a political side show to deflect interest in actually dealing with climate change. I think, in that regard, it will fail." -- Princeton University's Professor Michael Oppenheimer
"There is nothing in the hacked e-mails that undermines the science upon which this decision is based." -- EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson asserting the farcical government stance that carbon dioxide is harmful to humans
It'll never be enough: "Are we doing enough? The answer is obviously no -- [restricting world emissions of carbon dioxide at or below 450 parts per million] is not the right target. But it is presently seen as beyond the capacity of governments around the world. We are stretching the capacity of governments even to hit a 450 target. We are gambling with the future of human civilization in accepting odds that by any definition make our present course reckless.... But it's still the most likely path to success." -- Algore
It's already too late: "Even a final treaty will have to set the stage for other tougher [emissions] reductions at a later date. We have already overshot the safe levels of CO2 in the atmosphere.." --Algore
Left-theology: "Don't let anybody tell you that religious people don't support choice. You not only have a constitutional right for abortion, but you have a God-given right." -- Rev. Carlton Veazy, president and CEO of the Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice ("Before I formed you in the womb I knew you..." --Jeremiah 1:5)
"The Web"
Another "After" Merry Christmas!
www.andiesisle.com/didsheknow.html
Give Forgiveness at Christmas
By Cinde Lucas
Overflow Ministries
http://www.crosswalk.com/spirituallife/worship/11623923/page0/
Christmas is a time of year when we make our list of friends and family to whom we want to give gifts. We usually start with our children and spouse and work our way out to our family, friends and co-workers. As we do this, the list becomes larger and larger. It's no wonder that we can be overwhelmed at the COST of Christmas.
God paid a very dear cost for us to receive the Gift of eternal life through Jesus. He gave His one and only Son so that we could have life. Most of us understand eternal life as being something that we will receive after we die. But that isn't the full meaning. You see ETERNAL means endless, never-ending, everlasting, and timeless. The moment we accept the offer of Jesus' sacrifice of LIFE, we begin our eternal, never ending walk with God. What that means is that God's life, His love, His peace, His joy, His compassion, is NOW part of who we are and as we submit ourselves to Him, the Holy Spirit empowers us to be more and more like Jesus. That's the part of LIVING that I didn't understand for many years of my Christian walk; that I didn't have to survive on my own anymore because the Holy Spirit was IN ME to HELP ME live the Christian life.
One of the things that the Holy Spirit empowers us to do is FORGIVE. To some that sounds like an impossible task that even God would not ask us to do. After all, some of the people we don't want to forgive really did hurt us. But forgiveness is the MAIN thing that Jesus was born to give to us. We are all sinners who fall short of God's glory and without the shed blood of Jesus, we are doomed not just to hell, but to live a life of misery, because separated from God our lives are hopeless. But Jesus offers us forgiveness of sins and reconciliation with God. Now that is LIFE ETERNAL!
I believe that one of the biggest reasons that people, even Christians, are miserable is because they refuse to let go of the hurts, disappointment, and offenses of others. They justify their pain and keep themselves and others locked in a prison of unforgiveness.
Peter had a problem with unforgiveness too. He wasn't exactly thrilled with one of his fellow disciples. One day (Matthew 18) he asked Jesus a question, "How many times must I forgive? How about 7? That sounds reasonable doesn't it?" Can't you just see Peter beaming with pride after answering his own question? But Jesus went above and beyond Peters expectation and said; "How about 7 times 70?" I can just hear Peter. "You've got to be kidding me? You expect me to forgive this guy John, who by the way keeps bragging about how much you love him 490 times?! Why don't you deal with Him about his pride and give me a BREAK!"
Jesus had a way of getting right to the heart of people's problems. The real issue here is that NO ONE, not even Peter who walked with Jesus every day, could love the unlovely and give forgiveness without the Help of the Holy Spirit. Jesus was reminding Peter, and US, that apart from HIM we can't do anything.
Have you ever noticed that right in the middle of the word forgiveness is the word GIVE? Luke 6:38 says that whatever we give will be given back to us. Paul said in Galatians 6:7 that whatever we sowed, which is also a form of giving would be what we harvested. Jesus said that unless we forgive others, God wouldn't forgive us (Matthew 6:15). OUCH! Why do you suppose that we are required to do this?
I believe there are two main reasons that God requires Christians to offer forgiveness to others. First, we have been forgiven. All of our sins, which are many, have been washed away. They haven't just been covered over. The blood of Jesus cleanses us from ALL unrighteousness and sets us free from the power of sin and death. When we refuse to forgive others, WE, not them, are placed into a pit and our hearts become a seed bed for satan's seeds of bitterness, depression, and offense. The longer we go holding onto the unforgiveness, the more the garden of our heart becomes infested with the enemy's seeds! This is NOT the life that Jesus died to give us. This the enemy's plan to kill, steal and destroy the love that God wants to shed abroad in our hearts!
Second, when we offer forgiveness to others who have hurt us, it unlocks the chains in their life for God to work in their hearts. This is exactly what happened in my own life many years ago. A person whom I had really mistreated chose to forgive and pray for me. I know in my heart that because of that, God did a work in my life! Jesus even said that those whom we forgive, their sins will be forgiven. That's pretty amazing that we have that much power!
One of the obstacles to giving forgiveness is that our flesh never wants to do it. I can't tell you how many people have said to me "I wish I could forgive, but I just don't feel like I can." Wishing isn't one of the gifts of the Holy Spirit, but self-control is! That's the reason that God told us in Deut 3:19 that even though He put the choice of Life and death in front of us, we would have to choose life! It's not something we always feel like doing! James 4:7 says that if we will submit ourselves to God and resist the devil he'll flee. Notice that Satan doesn't flee until after we choose to submit ourselves to God and I can't find anywhere that it says I have to feel like it! Forgiveness is a choice we make in obedience to God's word. It may take a while for our flesh to get over harboring unforgivensess but our spirit man loves it when we choose to follow God!
It isn't easy making the choice to forgive. But living with unforgiveness can be downright deadly! I've heard it said that harboring unforgiveness is like drinking poison and hoping the other person dies! That's a good way to think about it, because many, many illnesses, including depression and arthritis, can be linked to bitterness and unforgiveness!
That's why I'm giving you this gift idea to give to some undeserving soul this Christmas! Giving forgiveness will open a door for God to do great things in your life and in the lives of those you choose to forgive. So as you're making your Christmas list this year, try making a list of those that you need to forgive. Maybe it's your spouse or your children. Maybe it's the store clerk that was rude to you. Maybe it's your pastor or your friend. Maybe it's yourself. Your gift of forgiveness will go a long way for God to work in their hearts, and in yours. Ask the Holy Spirit to stir up a heart of compassion in you and release LOVE, JOY, and PEACE in your heart. Be obedient to the still small voice of God and forgive those who have hurt and disappointed you in the past. Your Christmas will be brighter and their life will be better for it too.
Blessings and MERRY Christmas!
Giving thanks, the day after
I am Thankful :
For the wife who says it’s hot dogs tonight because she is home with me, and not out with someone else.
For the husband who is on the sofa watching sports because he is home with me and not out with someone else.
For the teenager who is complaining about doing dishes because it means she is at home, not on the streets.
For the taxes I pay because it means I am employed.
For the mess to clean after a party because it means I have been surrounded by friends.
For the clothes that fit a little too snug because it means I have enough to eat.
For the shadow that watches me work because it means I am out in the sunshine.
For a lawn that needs mowing, windows that need cleaning and gutters that need fixing because it means I have a home.
For all the complaining I hear about the government because it means we have freedom of speech.
For the parking spot I find at the far end of the lot because it means I am capable of walking and I have been blessed with transportation.
For my huge heating bill because it means I am warm.
For the lady behind me in line who is talking too loudly because it means I can hear.
For the pile of laundry and ironing because it means I have clothing to wear.
For weariness and aching muscles at the end of the day because it means I have been capable of working hard.
For the alarm that goes off in the early morning hours because it means that I am alive.
EXCLUSIVE: Transvestites, Mao And Obama Ornaments Decorate White House Christmas Tree
by Capitol Confidential
http://biggovernment.com/2009/12/22/transvestites-mao-and-obama-decorate-white-house-christmas-tree/
Why let a holiday season come between the White House and making some political statements? The White House pegged controversial designer Simon Doonan to oversee the Christmas decorations for the White House. Mr. Doonan, who is creative director of Barney’s New York has often caused a stir with his design choices. Like his naughty yuletide window display of Margaret Thatcher as a dowdy dominatrix and Dan Quayle as a ventriloquist’s dummy. For this year’s White House, he didn’t disappoint.
These photos of ornaments on the White House Christmas tree in the Blue Room were taken just days ago. Of course, Mao has his place in the White House.
And, of course, it wouldn’t be Christmas without an ornament of legendary transvestite Hedda Lettuce.
He/She even signed it:
And, so soon after collecting the Nobel Peace Prize, why wouldn’t the White House have an ornament super-imposing President Obama onto Mt. Rushmore:
All around, a very Barry Christmas!
Boehner: Senate Health Plan Subsidizes Abortions
By: Dan Weil
http://newsmax.com/InsideCover/Boehner-Senate-Health-Plan/2009/12/22/id/344296?s=al&promo_code=9415-1
House Republican Leader John Boehner, Ohio, says Senate Democrats’ healthcare bill doesn’t keep federal money from financing abortions, as they claim.
“Fixed it is not,” Boehner writes on his web site.
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s, D-Nev., latest healthcare ‘manager’s amendment’ would still levy a new ‘abortion premium’ fee on Americans under the Democrats’ healthcare plan.”
The amendment doesn’t prohibit abortion coverage for federally subsidized plans participating in the insurance exchange, Boehner says.
“Instead, the amendment includes layers of accounting gimmicks that demand that plans participating in the exchange or the new government-run plan … must establish ‘allocation accounts’ when elective abortion is a covered benefit,” Boehner writes.
“Everyone enrolled in these plans must pay a monthly abortion premium, and these funds will be used to pay for the elective abortion services.”
To be sure, the bill does allow states to opt out of the requirement is they pass laws to prohibit insurance coverage of abortion, Boehner writes.
“But it’s a sham because it does nothing to prevent one state’s tax dollars from paying for elective abortions in other states.”
Boehner isn’t the only abortion opponent upset with the Senate bill.
National Right to Life Committee legislative director Douglas Johnson said in a statement, “The new abortion language solves none of the fundamental abortion-related problems with the Senate bill, and it actually creates some new abortion-related problems.”
But abortion opponents can take heart. Rep. Bart Stupak, D-Mich., and about 40 other Democrats in the House made their support for healthcare reform contingent on a strong anti-abortion provision.
So a bill without such a provision is unlikely to gain final approval in the House, let alone the Senate.
"The e-mail Bag"
Q: If Pelosi, Reid, Kerry and Obama were on a boat in the middle of the ocean and it sank, who would be saved?
A: America!
Q: What's the difference between Obama and his dog, Bo?
A: Bo has papers.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)