Motivational-Inspirational-Historical-Educational-Political-Enjoyable
Promoting "God's Holy Values and American Freedoms"!
"Daily Motivations"
"Growing old is nothing more than mind over matter; If you don't mind, it doesn't matter." -- Anonymous
"You don't concentrate on risks. You concentrate on results. No risk is too great to prevent the necessary job from getting done." -- Chuck Yeager
"As much as we need a prosperous economy, we also need a prosperity of kindness and decency." -- Caroline Kennedy
"Daily Devotions" (KJV and/or NLT)
Your word is a lamp for my feet and a light for my path. (Psalm 119:105)
Many years ago, I was driving in the mountains when my car started to overheat. I noticed a ranger station and stopped to ask for water for my car. I loosened my radiator cap, and it blew sky high. As I stooped to pick up the cap, a New Testament fell out of my breast pocket. After replacing both, I drove away.
But God was obviously trying to say something to me. So I listened and received a strong impression: He wanted me to speak to the ranger. So I turned the car around and headed back.
When I returned to his station, the ranger came out to greet me. He asked if I had forgotten something. I told him indeed I had; I had forgotten to talk to him about Jesus. The ranger was very receptive, and he eventually explained to me that there had been a time when he was a pillar in his church. Somewhere along the way, however, he had given in to bitterness and had not gone to church for years. That day, the ranger and I got on our knees as he confessed his sin. God's joy was restored to his life as the result of a Divine appointment.
There are times when we can discern the voice of God speaking through the circumstances of life. However, we must take great care in reading the events around us. Remember, the Bible is the yardstick we must use to measure all other forms of guidance. The Holy Spirit will never lead us down a path contrary to God's Word.
Your View of God Really Matters …
If God is truly sovereign over all creation, including the events in your life, then expect Him to work through those events---even today. Pay attention and listen. Don't miss His voice. He may be quietly trying to tell you something.
"The Patriot Post"
"A universal peace ... is in the catalogue of events, which will never exist but in the imaginations of visionary philosophers, or in the breasts of benevolent enthusiasts." --James Madison
Warfighting 101
The Long Road Ahead
By Mark Alexander Publisher, PatriotPost.US
I spent much of the last week participating in a national security forum organized by the Air War College and hosted by the Twelfth Air Force and the 355th Fighter Wing at Davis-Monthan AFB.
Discussing the challenges of Operation Iraqi Freedom (OIF) and the surge for Operation Enduring Freedom (OEF) in Afghanistan with command personnel makes for lively debate, but the best part of these forums is incidental -- the opportunity to meet many enlisted airmen and those flying the planes they make ready.
I have been on military bases across the nation, and without fail I am most impressed by the young uniformed Patriots who are the foundation of our military might. Simply put, their dedication, talent and spirit are second to none.
In a nation where most young people are devoted, first and foremost, to themselves, our young airmen, sailors, soldiers, coast guardsmen and Marines serve a much higher calling, true to their oaths to "support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic..." If only their civilian political leaders were true to the same.
Among other operations around the world, these young people, and those in their chain of command, have made enormous progress toward establishing a functional democracy in the heart of the Middle East, Iraq. And despite what Vice President Joe Biden may believe, this remarkable achievement is theirs, not his.
After launching military operations against Iraq in 2003, our enemies were greatly emboldened by traitors on the Left and their Leftmedia minions, especially those running cover stories such as Newsweek's "We're losing..." proclamation.
In a debate some years ago with a professor from MIT who had written many policy papers on why we should not have prosecuted OIF, I asked him how many papers he had written on the consequences had we not prosecuted OIF. That query returned a classic "deer in the headlights" gaze.
My point, of course, was that it's easy to criticize anything past or under way. Hindsight can be 20/20, but military battle plans rarely withstand the first shots fired, which is to say that you start where your boots are, and fight on from there.
All those Leftist talking points notwithstanding, Iraq is now well on the way to restoring its once great Mesopotamian heritage.
To the east of Iraq, on the far side of another Islamic trouble spot, Iran, our military forces now face a daunting task in Afghanistan, a very different battlefront.
I was in the region shortly after the Soviets retreated in 1989, and I can tell you that this vast, desolate moonscape offers little more than a meager subsistence for even the most seasoned tribal people.
Consequently, Afghanistan has two -- and only two -- exports: heroin and terrorism, and not necessarily in that order.
Since we first launched strikes in Afghanistan shortly after 9/11, our objective has been to kill or capture al-Qa'ida terrorists and dislodge their Taliban hosts. That mission was, and remains, quite different from our mission in Iraq, which is a mix of war-fighting, peacekeeping and nation building.
Most recently, U.S. and Afghan warriors, supported by other allies, launched Operation Moshtarak (a Dari word meaning "together") in the center of Afghanistan's southern Helmand province and the town of Marjah.
There is very little chance that a functioning democracy, or much else, can be established in Afghanistan. The internal regional conflicts, with or without the Taliban mixing things up, preclude such establishment.
Our objective is to prevent the Taliban from occupying uncontrolled regions there long enough for us to support and build up the Afghan military to a sustainable level. Once this is accomplished, the Afghan military will endeavor to rid the countryside of Taliban extremists, and keep them out, even if it invites eradication efforts across the southeastern border with Pakistan. (Pakistan is much more concerned with its neighbor, India, than its border with Afghanistan.)
Why prosecute the Taliban?
Because their presence in Afghanistan serves as a launch pad for jihadi attacks around the world.
On 10 September 2001, after eight years of Clinton administration national security malfeasance, and eight months of the newly installed Bush administration's efforts to reorder national security priorities, most Americans were unaware that a deadly enemy had set up shop on our turf.
On 11 September, that enemy attacked us, leaving a hole in a Pennsylvania field and collapsing not only our World Trade Center towers and one fifth of the Pentagon, but also the U.S. economy, which was its ultimate objective. That attack was organized by Sheik Osama bin Laden and his terrorist network, al-Qa'ida, from Taliban-occupied territory in Afghanistan.
Al-Qa'ida was, and remains, part of an increasingly unified and asymmetric Islamist terror network supported by nation states including Iran, Syria and extremist factions in Saudi Arabia, and previously by Iraq.
Unlike symmetric threats emanating from clearly defined nation states such as Russia and China -- those with unambiguous political, economic and geographical interests -- asymmetric enemies defy nation-state status, thus presenting new and daunting national-security challenges for the executive branch and U.S. military planners.
The strategy to-date in Afghanistan has been somewhat modeled after our strategy in Iraq. The operational blueprint has been "shape, clear, hold and build": Shape the conditions to secure population centers; clear insurgents; hold the region so that insurgents can't regain tactical advantage; and build, which includes the provision of humanitarian and reconstruction efforts until such control can be transferred to national authorities.
However, as noted, there remain serious questions about whether any such national authority can be established in Afghanistan, or if the best we can hope for is the development of a military authority, heavily underwritten by the U.S. and NATO, and sufficient to contain the Taliban and its terrorist campaigns against the West.
Afghanistan remains an ideal breeding ground for the active cadres of "Jihadistan," a borderless nation of Islamic extremists comprising al-Qa'ida and other Muslim terrorist groups around the world.
A borderless nation, indeed. The "Islamic World" of the Quran recognizes no political borders. Though orthodox Muslims (those who subscribe to the teachings of the "pre-Medina" Quran) do not support acts of terrorism or mass murder, large, well-funded sects within the Islamic world subscribe to the "post-Mecca" Quran and Hadiths (Mohammed's teachings). It is this latter group which calls for jihad, or "holy war," against all "the enemies of God."
For the record, these "enemies," or infidels, are all non-Muslims.
Are you a non-Muslim?
Jihadists, then, are characterized by the toxic Wahhabism of Osama bin Laden and his heretical ilk -- those who would remake the Muslim world in their own image of hatred, intolerance, death and destruction. In the words of bin Laden himself: "We love death. The U.S. loves life. That is the big difference between us."
Does Barack Hussein Obama get the message?
Given his penchant for appeasement and for ill-advised withdrawal timelines from Iraq and Afghanistan, one would think not.
Moreover, the Obama administration's newly released quadrennial outline for national and homeland defense makes no mention of "Islam," "Islamic" or "Islamist," preferring instead to reference "violent extremism."
Obama's "Assistant to the President and Deputy National Security Advisor for Homeland Security and Counterterrorism," John Brennan (a.k.a. "Terrorist Czar"), has deflected criticism of the quadrennial reports, and of Obama's re-warming of the Clinton model for treating terrorists as "criminals" rather than "enemy combatants."
"Politics should never get in the way of national security," says Brennan, who insists that Obama's detractors are "misrepresenting the facts to score political points, instead of coming together to keep us safe." The thin-skinned Brennan has also charged that "politically motivated criticism and unfounded fear-mongering only serve the goals of al-Qa'ida."
Obama's foreign policy is driven by nothing if not politics, and this includes his Afghanistan strategy. It's a strategy necessitated by his phony bravado during the 2008 presidential campaign -- a strategy with the ultimate aim of an easy political out.
Carnegie Endowment policy analyst Robert Kagan observes, "The new doctrine that seems to enjoy enormous cachet among the smart foreign policy set is: Fight wars until they get hard, then quit."
I prefer John Stuart Mill's assessment: "War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things: the decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks that nothing is worth a war, is much worse. ... A man who has nothing which he is willing to fight for, nothing which he cares more about than he does about his personal safety, is a miserable creature who has no chance of being free, unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself."
"The Web"
How Great Thou Art
http://www.openmyeyeslord.net/UltimateFreedom.htm
Christian's speech deemed 'hateful propaganda'
Charlie Butts - OneNewsNow
http://www.onenewsnow.com/Legal/Default.aspx?id=928020
A Christian student in the Los Angeles Community College District is carrying his free-speech case to the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.
Jonathan Lopez had an assignment in a public speaking class and was required to give an informative speech on any topic. Alliance Defense Fund (ADF) attorney David Hacker tells OneNewsNow that Lopez chose to speak about his Christian beliefs. "And during that speech, when he mentioned that marriage is between a man and a woman according to his Christian beliefs, the professor called him this horrible name, refused to let him finish the assignment, and told other students in the class, 'If you're offended, you can leave,'" Hacker explains.
When no students left, the professor dismissed the class. Hacker adds that Lopez is an "A" student -- "but the problem is he never got a grade on that informative speech, and in fact, the professor wrote on his evaluation form, 'Ask God what your grade is.'"
The ADF attorney argues that demonstrates the hostility towards religion on many college campuses. The lower court in Los Angeles issued a preliminary injunction against the school, saying its speech code -- allowing administrators to punish Lopez's "hateful propaganda" -- is unconstitutional. That has been appealed to the Ninth Circuit.
Roberts: Scene at State of Union `very troubling'
By JAY REEVES (AP)
http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5gyvfRvSPtr5INaLpoyt0_bd8V0AwD9EBCSAG0
TUSCALOOSA, Ala. — U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts said Tuesday the scene at President Obama's State of the Union address was "very troubling" and the annual speech has "degenerated to a political pep rally."
Obama chided the court, with the justices seated before him in their black robes, for its decision on a campaign finance case.
Responding to a University of Alabama law student's question, Roberts said anyone was free to criticize the court, and some have an obligation to do so because of their positions.
"So I have no problems with that," he said. "On the other hand, there is the issue of the setting, the circumstances and the decorum.
"The image of having the members of one branch of government standing up, literally surrounding the Supreme Court, cheering and hollering while the court — according the requirements of protocol — has to sit there expressionless, I think is very troubling."
Breaking from tradition, Obama criticized the court's decision that allows corporations and unions to freely spend money to run political ads for or against specific candidates.
"With all due deference to the separation of powers the Supreme Court reversed a century of law to open the floodgates for special interests — including foreign corporations — to spend without limit in our elections," Obama said in January.
Justice Samuel Alito was the only justice to respond at the time, shaking his head and mouthing the words "not true" as Obama continued.
Roberts told the students he wonders whether justices should attend the speeches.
"I'm not sure why we're there," said Roberts, a Republican nominee who joined the court in 2005.
Justice Antonin Scalia once said he no longer goes to the annual speech because the justices "sit there like bumps on a log" in an otherwise highly partisan atmosphere. Six of the nine justices attended Obama's address.
Roberts opened his appearance in Alabama with a 30-minute lecture on the history of the Supreme Court and became animated as he answered students' questions. He joked about a recent rumor that he was stepping down from the court and said he didn't know he wanted to be a lawyer until he was in law school.
Asked about the Senate's method of confirming new justices, Roberts said senators improperly try to make political points by asking questions they know nominees can't answer because of the limitations of judicial ethic rules.
"I think the process is broken down," said Roberts.
While Associate Justice Clarence Thomas told students at Alabama last fall he saw little value in oral arguments before the court, Roberts disagreed.
"Maybe it's because I participated in it a lot as a lawyer," Roberts said. "I'd hate to think it didn't matter."
Nancy's nutty new rules
By GRACE-MARIE TURNER
http://www.nypost.com/p/news/opinion/opedcolumnists/nancy_nutty_new_rules_EX9ApnhgHZConMA7wxkMuN
The next act in the drive to pass ObamaCare is the mother-of-all political maneuvers -- in which Democrats will use an incredibly convoluted and possibly unconstitutional process.
Things were already arcane: President Obama, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid have been threatening to enact "health-care reform" through the narrow path of budget reconciliation. It's a ploy to allow the Senate to pass "reform" with just 51 votes -- making the election of Scott Brown as the 41st senator against ObamaCare irrelevant.
AP - Pelosi: Will "deem" bill to have passed.
To use reconciliation, Pelosi must first get House members to vote for the exact bill the Senate passed in December. That is, the House would "keep the process moving" so both the House and Senate could pass a second bill to fix things members don't like in the Senate measure.
But the speaker is having trouble rounding up the 216 votes she needs to get the Senate bill through the House. Her members rightly fear that the Senate might prove unwilling or unable to pass the "fixed" bill -- and, at the least, would have a huge advantage in negotiations over just what "fixes" to make.
The problem is straight out of a 7th-grade civics class: If both houses of Congress pass identical bills, the bill can go to the president to be signed into law.
House members are being told that they must vote for the Senate bill as a procedural step. But the bill would then be only a presidential signature away from becoming law. That is, House members might end up voting for the Senate's Cornhusker Kickback, Louisiana Purchase, "Cadillac" tax, abortion coverage and other unpopular provisions -- and then find it's all become law.
The risks are plain enough that Pelosi doesn't yet have the votes: Her members fear they'll be left hanging to defend their votes for the hated Senate bill.
So now Democratic leaders say they'll package a two-for-one vote: Moving the original Senate bill simultaneously with a "reconciliation" bill -- thus, if the House votes for the bill of fixes, the main Senate bill will be deemed to also have passed. Then the reconciliation bill will go back to the Senate, where it only needs 50 votes (plus Vice President Joe Biden's) to pass.
Hmm. Nowhere in the US Constitution does it say that Congress can deem a bill to have passed. Pelosi & Co. aren't just making up policy as they go, but also procedure -- possibly unconstitutional procedure, at that. All to enact a bill remaking a sixth of the US economy over the 3-1 opposition of the American people.
Grace-Marie Turner is president of the Galen Insti tute, a nonprofit research organization focusing on pa tient-centered health reform.
ACORN Defends Voter Drive Despite Workers Being Charged With Fraud
http://new.whbl.com/news/articles/2010/mar/09/acorn-defends-voter-drive-despite-workers-being-ch/
MILWAUKEE, Wis. (WTAQ) - The community organizing group ACORN defended its voter registration drive in Milwaukee, after 2 of its workers were charged with felony election fraud. 36-year-old Maria Miles of Milwaukee and 26-year-old Kevin Clancy of Racine were accused of trying to sign up the same voters more than once – so they could meet ACORN’s quota of 20 signatures per day. It happened during the 2008 presidential campaign.
Former ACORN organizer Carolyn Castore said Miles and Clancy were fired after the group discovered the fraud before anybody else did. And Castore called it a “victimless crime,” since it was caught before anyone could actually vote illegally. But according to prosecutors, Miles told investigators that ACORN workers were quote, “all hoodlums” with criminal histories – and they were going to “do whatever they had to do” to get the money each day. ACORN has been dogged by allegations of voter registration fraud – and Congress voted last year to cut off its federal funding.
Miles and Clancy were among 5 Milwaukee area people charged Monday with voter fraud. A husband and wife were accused of voting twice in ’08, and Milwaukeean was charged with illegally voting as a convicted felon.
The Stimulus Bill’s Hidden Attack on What We Eat, Drink, and Smoke
by Phil Kerpen
http://biggovernment.com/pkerpen/2010/03/09/the-stimulus-bills-hidden-attack-on-what-we-eat-drink-and-smoke/
One of the more extreme proposals floated early in the national health care debate was the idea of taxing soda and other sugary beverages. That trial balloon was almost immediately shot down by the American public, but the Obama administration is attempting to achieve, by subterfuge, soda taxes and a lot of other ways to micromanage our lives in the name of public health—whether or not ObamaCare passes. The mechanism is buried in last year’s $862-billion-and-counting stimulus bill, and works by diverting hundreds of millions of dollars that should be promoting economic growth to instead pay lobbyists to push for higher taxes and nanny-state controls over our lives.
It’s on pages 66 and 67 on the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, which created a $1 billion “Prevention and Wellness Fund.” Of that, $650 million went to Kathleen Sebelius’s Department of Health and Human Services and has been used to start a new program at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) called “Communities Putting Prevention to Work” (CPPW).
Where does that giant pot of grant funding under the CPPW go? What it calls “MAPPS Interventions for Communities Putting Prevention to Work.” MAPPS stands for “Media, Access, Point of decision information, Price, and Social support/services.” In other words, strategies for changing our behavior, for social engineering on a large-scale, and, it seems, circumventing the normal democratic process. In a 14-page guidance for grant applicants, the CDC details tactics that grant applicants should include in their plans. It includes “counter-advertising” against targeted products, complete tobacco usage bans, limiting “unhealthy food availability” (the really bad stuff like “whole milk, sugar sweetened beverages, high-fat snacks”), and of course taxes (or in CDC lingo: “changing relative prices of healthy vs. unhealthy items”).
A supplemental document explains in more detail what the targets are, including restricting availability of soft drinks “in homes, schools, work sites, and communities.”
It also recommends local zoning changes to put fast food restaurants out of business, trans-fat bans, salt regulation, and food taxes. They even suggest a TV ban of sorts, recommending: “specific regulations/policies that limit television and other screen media.”
The first $120 million of funds has already been awarded to the states, and local grant recipients are expected to be announced soon. In Wisconsin, for example, we already know that the state department of health submitted a grant to use federal stimulus dollars to hire lobbyists to push for bans on flavored tobacco programs at the local level.
Although the grants under this program are supposedly restricted from funding lobbying activities, there is imply no way these objectives can be accomplished without major legislative changes at the state and local level. Our federal stimulus dollars are being used to hire lobbyists to push for these taxes, bans, restrictions, rules and regulations on what we eat, drink, smoke, and do for recreation. It’s a sweeping micromanagement of our lives that we didn’t vote for, made even worse by the fact that it’s being funded by stimulus money that was supposed to put people other than lobbyists back to work.
"The e-mail Bag"
Military Wisdom
"If the enemy is in range, so are you." — Infantry Journal
"It is generally inadvisable to eject directly over the area you just bombed." — US Air Force Manual
"Whoever said the pen is mightier than the sword, obviously never encountered automatic weapons." — General MacArthur
"You, you, and you ... Panic. The rest of you, come with me." — U.S. Marine Corp Gunnery Sgt.
"Tracers work both ways." — U.S. Army Ordnance Manual
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