Oct 07 2008
Prayer, Suffering, and the Nature of God | Addison Road
You really, really should go read the link above. It’s about the life we all live. It’s by my friend, Mike Lee.
UPDATE: lots of interesting conversation here since first post. And given tonight’s presidential debate, I think we’re in for lots of suffering….
Oct 07 2008
What a fool I’ve been – scrambling, scraping, working overtime, working extra jobs, doing without, and tightening the proverbial belt. In my foolishness I’ve made some pretty difficult financial decisions that will help ensure I can honor all debts I have accrued, pay back every cent of money I have borrowed, and try to keep the promises I have made.
What I should have been doing was selling my home and buying a much bigger, more expensive one – with a mortgage I knew I would not be able to afford! Because that way I could just sit back and let the federal government “bail” me out. And now the latest “rescue” – McCain wants to spend 300 billion dollars (of TAXPAYER money) to have the government buy up so-called “bad” mortgages, lower the value of the homes, and then issue correspondingly new lower, more “manageable” mortgages that reflect the lower home value. Brilliant, simply brilliant. (Gee, that won’t have any market-effect on home values, will it…….) Meanwhile, like some kind of faux-Steinbeck character, I plod along hoping to see the light at the end of the tunnel before I die and maybe getting a chance to “tend them rabbits”.
I think if I had any brains at all I’d just stop making my mortgage payments right now. But instead, I have created a short self-quiz in honor of the debate.
After listening to the Presidential debate tonight I must admit I feel like a complete:
a. idiot
b. sucker
c. schmuck
d. all of the above
…I think I’ll choose d.
P.S. For those of you entranced with the rhetoric of “change you can believe in” – you should be careful what you wish for. Because you may wake up some day after the election and realize you should have asked a few questions about what kind of change you were getting.
Oct 07 2008
We’re letting people who hate us and who have been trained to kill us loose in our nation’s capitol. (much more at the link)
Immediately after it was released this summer, Barack Obama applauded the U.S. Supreme Court’s 5/4 decision in Boumediene v. Bush, which for the first time extended rights under the U.S. Constitution to foreigners captured and held abroad based on their activities abroad. To reach that result, the Supreme Court had to declare unconstitutional a statute passed by Congress with bipartisan support and signed into law by the president which gave these individuals substantive and procedural rights comparable or superior to those we give to our own sons and daughters in uniform. It also had to ignore and/or mischaracterize decades of prior federal precedents holding that such foreigners had no right to claim the U.S. Constitution’s protections through a writ of habeas corpus, essentially extending the protections of the U.S. Constitution to the entire world.
Now as the inevitable consequence of that ruling, seventeen hard-core Islamic jihadists who’d come from their homes in China to train at terrorist camps in Afghanistan, captured there by our armed forces, and held since at Guantanamo Bay, are on the brink of being released this week, not for return to China, but into the general population of our nation’s capital, Washington, D.C.:
Did you get that? We’re letting trained Chinese Islamic extremist trainee killers loose in Washington DC. This is the outcome that is praised by the Left, including Obama and acolytes. They wanted this.
So.
I propose that the government place these, uh, gentlemen in half-way houses in the same neighborhood as the Left leaning Supreme Court judges who made this idiotic decision. Or the neighborhood where the Democrat Senators live who invented Borking, or the Democrat Senators who filibustered the appointment of constructionist judges. Or, my personal favorite, the neighborhood where the ACLU lawyers live, who pushed for this ruling.
Actually, I suppose we can’t blame the Leftists on the Court for voting like “useful idiots“. But Justice Kennedy really ought to know better. So let’s just let the Chinese Islamic terrorist trainees loose in his neighborhood. Maybe that would be a nice place for the halfway house.
Oct 07 2008
Imagine if you took vitamins in moderation, ate a healthy diet, exercised regularly, and got enough rest. Now, imagine you have gotten ill, due to exposure to something that has challenged your immune system, or some unexpected toxic exposure.
Imagine someone who told you that your good habits are what made you sick, that you’ve overdone all that health stuff, and you need to develop a few new vices and ease off the healthy lifestyle. Imagine that person never mentioned the possibility of bacteria or virus as the cause of your illness, and when it was pointed out as the likely reason, simply denied that germs or toxic exposure have anything to do with being sick.
What would you think of the judgment of someone who gave you the following advice?
1) You should stop eating a healthy diet. Eat more fat, salt, sugar and alcohol. And preservatives. You need preservatives.
2) You sleep too much. Watch TV a couple extra hours each night, and still get up at the same time in the morning. That’ll help.
3) Forget the supplements. Vitamins and minerals are overrated, and may be hurting you. You should smoke or something.
4) When you get well, for pity’s sake knock off the aerobic exercise and weight-lifting. You’ll do yourself a mischief.
Is this making sense to you? Or would you suspect that maybe your friend owned stock in a tobacco company, or had a Twinkie franchise? Or maybe just hated you?
Oct 06 2008
Now, Obama’s campaign is claiming he didn’t know that William Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn were terrorists, unrepentant ones, during all the years when Obama worked with Ayers, sent foundation money in Ayers’ direction, when Ayers’ helped Obama kick off his political career, etc.
Powerline has this to say about the likelihood that Obama “didn’t know”.
This strikes me as a rather stunning development. Obama appears to be admitting that if he knew about Ayers’ terrorist history, and the fact that he still takes pride in that history and despises America, it would be an error in judgment to form a close association with him.
But it is inconceivable that Barack Obama knew Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn well enough to kick off his first political campaign in their living room, but didn’t know that Ayers and Dohrn were Communists who led the Weatherman faction of SDS, urged young people to “kill your parents,” carried out approximately 30 bombings, including New York City’s police headquarters, the Capitol and the Pentagon, celebrated the Charles Manson murders, spent years living underground to avoid criminal prosecution, and continued to express their lifelong hatred for the United States in books, magazine articles, and public speeches. This is rather like a person claiming that he had worked closely with Arnold Schwarzenegger for years, but had no idea that he was once a bodybuilder and movie actor. Ayers’ and Dohrn’s radical past is their only claim to fame.
There must be a great many people who can attest that Obama was well aware of Ayers’ and Dohrn’s history. It will be interesting to see whether any of them are willing to blow the whistle on Obama’s latest evasion.
But there are also other problems with this incredible assertion:
1) The Ayers association has been a big topic among those opposing Obama for over a year. Why, exactly, is it only NOW that we’re being told Obama didn’t know? We’re supposed to think that the campaign just noticed, this week, that Obama’s relationship with Ayers is a problem? Why didn’t Obama say so when he was asked about this in the primary campaign debates with Hillary Clinton?
2) Even if one accepted the impossible assumption of Obamian ignorance about Ayers’ past, what does this say about the KINDS of people with whom Obama works? Ayers has NEVER hidden his past: indeed, he celebrates it, and specifically refers to it often as a badge of honor, verifying his pedigree as an authentic supporter of the radically LEFT causes he supports, and with which he and Obama were involved. That means Obama’s ability to assess people is very weak, at a minimum, a charge strengthened by his pretended shock that Rev. Wright just surprised him with his hate-speech, after all those years of attending his church, being married by him, having his babies blessed by him, etc.
3) When the Obama campaign (inevitably) retracts this silly assertion, will the campaign pay a price for lying desperately to try to blunt the charges about Obama’s terrorist connections? Probably not, because the main stream media, snorkeling around in the tank for Obama, will simply not cover it, write editorials about the questions it raises, etc.
UPDATE: One more thought: even if we take a face value the argument that Obama didn’t know about Ayers’ terrorist past and unrepentant present, when Obama was working most closely with him on “education foundations”, Ayers was kicking off Obama’s political career in his home, etc., it is impossible to believe that those advising Obama at the time did not know, either. Why wouldn’t they have told Obama? Hard to think of a reason, unless it is that they knew Obama wouldn’t care.
Oct 05 2008
I should probably stop quoting Mr. Bidinotto so much, but his analysis is simply dead on target. After reviewing the history of the current financial meltdown (that’s what happens when you play with something as radioactive as cheap financing for bad credit risks with a short half-life in the name of equality), he opines:
Now, what’s Congress’s answer to all of this?
To nationalize the bad loans — thus formalizing the taxpayers’ obligation to underwrite the rampant irresponsibility that led to this mess in the first place.
The welfare state established the basic moral principle we now see in all its ugliness: that responsible taxpayers are to be sacrificial servants of the irresponsible — that they are to buffer the irresponsible from the destructive consequences of their actions, by absorbing that damage themselves.
But now, we are adding the following amendment to this premise of moral cannibalism: that the greater and more destructive the irrationality caused by others, the more immediate and pressing is the taxpayers’ moral duty to absorb the harm onto themselves.
Continue reading “Capitalism tried and found guilty for the crimes of socialists”
Oct 04 2008
Continuing to demonstrate the inability to just give the news without editorializing, Yahoo news leads with this.
Republican vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin accused Democratic candidate Barack Obama on Saturday of “palling around with terrorists,” in the latest sign the campaign is turning increasingly nasty.
Just a question: if Obama has actually “paled around with terrorists”, is it a sign the campaign is “turning increasingly nasty” to point that out?
Not until the sixth paragraph do we get anything about the nature of Obama’s relationship to the terrorist Bill Ayers: (the earlier ones are all devoted to he said/she said type reporting)
Palin cited a New York Times story on Saturday that examined Obama’s relationship with Bill Ayers, a former member of the Vietnam-era militant Weather Underground organization who is now a professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago. The Times concluded they were not close.
Ah, the NYTimes, that bastion of Olympian fairness, has decided Obama is not “close” to Ayers, a self-admitted terrorist and bomber. Apparently, the NYTimes thinks you aren’t “close” to someone unless you share a toothbrush or something.
Just a question, for the reader: do YOU even know someone who knows someone who knows a terrorist?
I didn’t think so. Here’s paragraph NINE of the story:
Obama served with Ayers on the board of a foundation in Chicago, and has said he was only eight-years-old when the Weather Underground committed its best-known bombing. He has also noted that former President Bill Clinton pardoned two members of the group during the last days of his presidency.
Clinton also pardoned some Puerto Rican terrorists and Marc Rich. This is a recommendation?
This is not simple “guilt by association”. It isn’t like they both went to Denny’s at the same time and happened to be placed at adjacent tables. Obama and Ayers served on boards together, were associates who worked together for “education initiatives” in Chicago, etc. Obama chose to continue his association with Ayers, and the first campaign kickoff for Obama was at Ayers’ house.
In the following video, Obama wants us to believe that Clinton is worse for having pardoned Weather Underground terrorists than Obama is for having associated with Ayers, one of the terrorists who WASN’T pardoned, but got off on a technicality because the FBI botched the investigation. Ayers: “Guilty as sin and free as a bird.”
Try to understand this. Even Obama admits knowing Ayers was a terrorist, an unrepentant one, and tries to pass off his relationship as “being on a board together”, and minimizes Ayers’ evil behavior as “something that happened 40 years ago”, as if evil done 40 years ago and not repented for is less evil, and his association with the perpetrator less suspect. In fact, they worked closely on that board, and in other organizations, and Ayers was a prime supporter launching his political career.
The “40 years ago” approach is masking something that is revealed by changing a couple of details, in a sort of thought experiment. What if Ayers had been a virulent racist, enthusiastic member of the KKK, burning crosses on lawns of black people, beating them when possible, encouraging lynchings, and the like? What if he was now unrepentant about it, and said, “We didn’t do enough.”? Would Obama pass it off as “something that happened 40 years ago” and essentially ignore it?
You know the answer, and so do I. The only reason the “40 year ago” excuse works in his mind is because he doesn’t think having been a terrorist bomber and killer of police is all that bad. So since it happened way back there somewhere, we can just sort of ignore it.
Except that we can’t. And if you can…. well, I have some words for your judgment that I can’t really commit to print right now.
As for the quality of reporting in the article referenced above, it’s just more evidence that the media is morally blind, dumb and deaf, and totally in the tank for Obama. Imagine if McCain had that racist friend just suggested in the “thought experiment” above. Would the NYTimes conclude “they weren’t that close”?
Hah.
UPDATE: To no one’s particular surprise, Stanley Kurz has done an excellent job covering this entire matter, and gives his analysis of the NYTimes “reporting” here.
UPDATE: In the meantime, Tom Brokaw wants us to believe that unrepentant terrorist Ayers, who recently said, “We didn’t do enough,” is really just a “school reformer”. Maybe Brokaw means that Ayers should be in “reform school for terrorists”, but somehow I doubt it.
Oct 04 2008
Power Line, quoting the New York Post
Some [of the Biden Blunders], of course, were just Biden being Biden. He smeared Dick Cheney as “the most dangerous vice president we’ve had probably in American history.”
To which we must take specific offense: After all, the founder of this newspaper, Alexander Hamilton, was killed in a duel by then-Vice President Aaron Burr. (Certainly Burr was a better shot than Cheney.)
Oct 04 2008
Investor’s Business Daily on some of the Biden Blunders in the debate. See if you find anything about this in the NYTimes, and if you do, what page it’s on.
as InstaPundit’s Michael Totten instantly noted after the debate, Biden, the great, seasoned foreign policy expert who chairs the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, falsely claimed France and the U.S. “kicked Hezbollah out of Lebanon.”
Of course, the debate’s moderator, Gwen Ifill of PBS’ “Washington Week,” didn’t call Biden on the gaffe; that might not be good for sales of her upcoming book, “The Breakthrough: Politics and Race in the Age of Obama” (especially if there turns out not to be an Age of Obama).
There was also Biden’s accusation that John McCain is soft on regulation, when in fact he tried to beef up regulations on Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, an explanation for why he got so little campaign money from Fannie and Freddie over the years, under $22,000, as opposed to the more than $126,000 Obama received in his short time in the Senate.
Sen. Biden falsely claimed that Obama didn’t pledge to meet with Iran’s president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad; he falsely claimed Gov. Sarah Palin supported a windfall profits tax on oil companies; he said he’s always been for clean coal in spite of his record of voting against it in the Senate.
Biden said we have to drill for more of our own oil, easily leading viewers to conclude he and Obama are in favor of more domestic drilling, but as the American Thinker blog’s Rick Moran noted in a list of “Biden’s Big Lies,” “Biden has opposed offshore drilling and even compared offshore drilling to ‘raping’ the Outer Continental Shelf.”
Gov. Palin called Biden on his claim that Gen. David McKiernan in Afghanistan said that the surge could not be applied in Afghanistan; in fact, McKiernan has said that some aspects of Gen. David Petraeus’ Iraq strategy could be part of our war efforts in Afghanistan.
And Biden was wrong when he claimed that both McCain and Obama opposed troop funding; McCain simply opposed legislation with a withdrawal deadline.
The Delaware Democrat falsely claimed that McCain’s health care plan raises taxes, failing to mention his proposal’s offsetting tax credit. And he was untruthful in claiming that under an Obama Administration the middle class will “pay no more than they did under Ronald Reagan.” Obama, in fact, says he will return income tax rates to the Clinton levels, which were significantly higher than those in effect after tax reform during the Reagan Administration.
National Review’s Jim Geraghty noted Biden’s claim that “we spend more money in three weeks on combat in Iraq than we spent on the entirety of the last seven years that we have been in Afghanistan building that country” and concluded Biden was “off by 2,000%.”
Geraghty also found that “Katie’s Restaurant” in Wilmington, Del., where good old Joe invited anyone to have a beer with him, apparently hasn’t been around for decades. Maybe the senator was too busy conferring with imaginary French liberators of Lebanon to visit his constituency.
But when tall tales are told with a straight face and mock conviction they are, unfortunately, believed by all too many, especially when the media helps peddle the disinformation.
Oct 04 2008
Advance Liberty, Overturn Roe! | The Scriptorium Daily: Middlebrow
Every aborted baby looks alike, but every child allowed to live becomes absolutely unique. Abortion crushes liberty for the sake of a single choice—it ends possibility with the cruel actuality of murder.
Roe should be overturned because by judicial fiat it hallows killing the innocent as part of our Constitution. In a just society there can be no right to do evil. Not every evil should be illegal, but no evil action should be hallowed as a constitutional right.
It took years and much horror to remove slavery, another soul crushing immorality, from the Constitution, but at least the Founders authored this bad law. The court imposed a “culture of death,” to borrow a phrase from John Paul the Great, on our nation, contrary to our oldest traditions, our best moral impulses, and the gradual expansion of liberty and justice to all Americans.
Yes. Read it all. And consider how Jesus of Nazareth would vote in the matter.
It seems likely that the next president will be appointing judges who will decide if Roe v. Wade is to be overturned. If it is, abortion will not end, or suddenly be illegal, it will simply be returned to the states, where, presumbably, normal legislative processes will occur that actually represent the will of the people. It does seem certain that abortion will be significantly reduced, if Roe is overturned. That means that those who claim to “dislike abortion” but say “we can’t criminalize it” or “prolife is a seamless garment” are putting up a smokescreen to obscure the fact that they don’t want a legal change that is guaranteed to save many, many, many lives.
