Category Archives: politics

Update: the Mystery Project continues

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Well, my Big Project is nearly done. I believe I will have it finished tomorrow. Pictures to come.

Eventually.

I’ll give you a hint: it’s something for my grand-daughter…

I also again got in my two hours of writing on Sky so I feel pretty happy about that! But now I am very tired, and once again… no continuation of America Lite, though that too is still coming…

Oh, but did you happen to notice? Now ABC has reported the “breaking news” that… THERE WAS NO PROTEST OUTSIDE THE BENGHAZI CONSULATE the night it was attacked.  “We’ve not heard anything like this!” cried Diane Sawyer.

No? I posted that bit of information here on Sept 18… Courtesy of McClatchey and Fox…

 

Endorsements: Romney vs Obama

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So on the one hand we have those who have endorsed Gov Romney for President:

Anti-communist hero Lech Walesa

the People of Israel

42 Congressional Medal of Honor Winners

and the Small Business Owners of America

And on the other we have those who have endorsed President Obama for re- election:

Russia’s President Vladimir Putin (some say also head of the KGB) who called Obama an “honest man who really wants to change much for the better.”

Venezuela’s dying dictator and megolomaniac Hugo Chavez (“I’d vote for you and you for me.”)

and the Communist Party of America

Hmm. Wonder which one I should choose…

The Creepy Obama Cult

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The video at the end of this blog is about the creepiest thing I have ever seen. I found it in a piece on Human Events called “A Short Visual History of the Creepy Obama Cult.”

I watched it  in astonishment, unable to fathom the cause of these people’s devotion. Clearly they aren’t really thinking, or even relating to reality. They have — or had — laid their own desires and fantasies into the persona of what was then Candidate Obama.

“We’re going to change the world!”

They say it over and over, but what does it mean? Change the world how? Well, a couple of them say…

“The world will finally respect us.”

Really? I mean… really?

This is delusional. Or perhaps merely naive, a fantasy indulged in by those who have no clue about life, about people, about history, about much of anything, it would seem.

“I want a cleaner world.”

So says a young mother (probably some sort of star but I don’t know who), as if all you need do is get the Ajax and a paper towel. Even then you have to deal with the leftover plastic bottle and the paper. And that’s not even considering where you’re going to get the plastic and the paper and the Ajax in the first place.

For example, I just saw an article in the New York Times today that said wind power will shrivel away without the millions of federal subsidies it needs to survive.  In fact, the industry is already shriveling and soon the tax credit will expire. Without it the wind business “‘falls off a cliff,’ said Ryan Wiser, a staff scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory who studies the market potential of renewable electricity sources.”

And the biggest thing is that everything these people on the video have, wear, use — their clothing, their cosmetics, their cars, their cell phones, the very system they used to record the video and then to play it back — almost all of it is reliant on oil. Many things come from petroleum, plastic being a huge one.

A cleaner world? If we shut down the oil drilling here, that might make it cleaner here, though I doubt it, but what about in the Middle East? Do they really think that Middle Eastern drilling and refining operations are cleaner than ours? And just because they are on the other side of the world, do they think we can be free of them?

Power Line Blog cited a report that air pollution in the form of aerosol particulates from China is blowing across the Pacific and reaching our shores. “We estimate that the mass of aerosols arriving at North American shores from overseas is comparable with the total mass of particulates emitted domestically,” says an abstract of the report. Which means we could demand zero emissions of particulates from our industries, and it wouldn’t change a thing. Yet here in Arizona liberal politicians are campaigning to shut down the power plants and such, protesting against the building of a new copper mine which will provide hundreds of jobs, and urging for clean energy in solar panels and windmills… which don’t come free, as mentioned above. Not free to make, not free to install, not free to maintain.

The people in this video are like children, really. Living in a fairy tale. And all there is, for them, is the picture they want to see, and none of the nitty-gritty that goes on behind the scenes to make any of it happen. Even in the printing of a Fairy Tale Book you have logging, (or possibly paper recycling plants), machinery, paints, dyes, inks, power, buildings, trucks, oil… And a Fairy Tale movie? The list is endless.

Nothing comes free and easy in this world. And almost four years later now, we can certainly say it didn’t with  O….. BA….. MA!

Obama the Competitor

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Yes, it’s another post about politics, though I suppose it’s not surprising, given politics are rising to the fore what with the Republican National Convention last week, and the Democrat Convention beginning today. I’m not exactly a political junkie, but the majority of blogs I read are political in nature, and sometimes I come across things that blow me away.

Like this article in Forbes today, titled “New York Times Proves Eastwood Correct — Obama is a Lousy CEO.” In it Forbes staff writer  Rich Karlgaard references a piece  published in the New York Times by Jodi Kantor called “The Competitor in Chief — Obama Plays To Win, In Politics and Everything Else”

Golf. Bowling. Billiards. Cards. Golf. Basketball. Reading to kids…  Golf…

As Karlgaard points out, both Kantor and the Times  are usually in the President’s camp, so he expresses surprise they’d write what he sees as essentially a hit piece. In fact, he calls it “devastating” and wonders if  “the NYT might just have killed President Obama’s re-election hopes.”

Having read the Times article, I agree that it certainly doesn’t portray the President in an attractive light. However, I’m not altogether sure the Times and Kantor see it that way.

The article’s tone seemed to me more like a paean to Obama’s constant striving to be perfect and to excel in everything, as if this were a good thing; a characteristic that made him a good president and would perhaps give him the edge over that idiot Romney (which is how he clearly perceives his opponent according to Kantor).

The trade-off in time and energy the President devotes to trivialities rather than the weighty issues his office demands were left to Forbes’s Karlgaard to remark upon. And his constant need to correct and teach others, his overweening opinion of his own excellence in every area of life seemed minor inconveniences, not major character flaws as Kantor presented it — that is, irrelevant defects and only to be expected from someone as great as The One.

Certainly she never expressed the sort of conclusions that Karlgaard did, but perhaps that was because she was merely “reporting,” while he was assessing.

In any case, he boiled  it down to the salient points and as I said, didn’t hesitate to draw the necessary conclusions and it’s … rather chilling, actually.

You can read Karlgaard’s Forbes piece HERE.  It’s shorter and links to the Times article if you want to go on from there.

Or if you’d rather go straight to the Times, click HERE.

National Empty Chair Day

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My Empty Chair

Today (Monday) was National Empty Chair Day, in honor of Clint Eastwood’s performance at the Republican National Convention last Thursday.  We saw it live, and I thought it was hilarious. It was clearly not a speech, but a performance.

However many on the left were unable to discern the difference. They jumped to the conclusion that this man, who is 82, was a witless, rambling old fool who’d lost his marbles to age. So sad. Poor old Clint.

Right.

He’s an ACTOR! Actors act like people they are not.

Eastwood has directed 8 movies in the last five years, is quite articulate when seen in interviews and was coolly, competently, persuasive in that Superbowl ad he did for Chrysler last winter (It’s Half Time in America). In addition, he ad libbed his entire performance in front of a huge crowd and much of the nation. It was the empty chair, in which sat an invisible President Obama, that required the teleprompter.

At first, I’ll admit, what he was doing seemed strange and even mildly alarming. Until he talked to the chair. And then repeated or replied to what its invisible occupant was saying as well.

I’ve seen sketches like this before, and in fact, I think it was Mark Steyn that mentioned the similarity to an old Bob Newhart bit, where he seems befuddled as he talks to an invisible cohort.  But in between Eastwood’s bouts of apparent befuddlement he let loose some real zingers.

“We own this country… Politicians are employees of ours….   They’re just going to come around and beg for votes every few years.”

“When somebody does not do the job, we’ve got to let him go.”

Anyway, the chair was such a hit, some folks decided to make this year’s Labor Day Holiday National Empty Chair Day. I first heard of it on Drudge, Power Line and Legal Insurrection, the latter suggesting people put out their empty chair, take a picture of it and then send them the photo. They got 100 photos the first night and the next day, between a continuing avalanche of photos and visitors from Drudge and Instanpundit, their server crashed.

So there was as LOT of interest in the empty chair. You can see some more pictures of empty chairs and accompanying decorations here at The Right Scoop.

A Christian Nation

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I was hoping to say a bit about the conference, some of the things that were taught, some of the things that we did, but I have been an zombie all day, some of the things I thought. I did get some housecleaning done and figured out how to use the new dishwasher my hubby put in while I was gone… but writing much of anything was pretty much futile.

I didn’t even remember to vote until hubby got home and reminded me.

Voting put me in mind of politics and so, in honor of the Republican Convention, which, much to the dismay of Samuel L. Jackson and Ellen Barkin, was not washed away/shut down/destroyed and pillaged by Hurricane Isaac, but is proceeding more or less as planned, I decided now might be the time to share this video by Stoplight called “A Walk for the President: A Christian Nation?”

Munich Massacre Widow Still Seeks Justice

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Iconic news photo one one of the Munich hostage-takers

In the summer of 1972, I was living in a dormitory at the University of Arizona, taking Organic Chemistry in summer school. That was five days of lecture and three days of labs, each of them three-hours long. The labs required a full written report for each session as well. It was a lot of work, and I had no job. Also no money… that was the summer I counted out pennies for a taco at Taco Bell, though mostly I lived on oatmeal, green grapes and “cup custard” sandwich cookies… I lost a good deal of weight, but at the end of three months I started getting sick all the time and went back to a more nutritious diet.

Clearly I had little time for radio, newspapers or TV, yet even I managed to hear about the massacre of the entire Israeli Olympic team at the Munich Olympic Games that summer.

During the Games’ second week, PLO terrorists sneaked into the Israeli dormitory one night around 4am, killed two of the Israeli team right there, took the other 9 hostage and in the end killed them all.

The movie Munich with Eric Bana is based on this event, focusing on the actions of Israel’s Mossad to bring the criminals to justice… or to exact retribution, however you wish to look at it. I think they accomplished both. (It’s a good movie; I recommend it)

Recently The Times of Israel ran an article on Ankie Spitzer, wife of slain Israeli fencing master and Olympic team coach Andre Spitzer. For decades she’s been trying to get the Olympic authorities to commemorate her husband and the other murdered athletes within the framework of the Olympic Games themselves.

Why at the Games? Because all the victims were Olympic athletes or coaches, and all were attending the Olympic games when they were killed. The International Olympic Committee has allowed official commemorations for all sorts of other tragedies, some of which had nothing to do with the games or the athletes, so remembering the Israeli deaths seems entirely appropriate.

She’s been at it for 40 years, stymied by the committee’s fear of alienating Arab nations who have threatened to boycott the Olympics should there be any such official remembrance of the slain Israelis. This from the representatives of the so-called Religion of Peace. And in the context of an event that supposedly celebrates “Man is Wonderful! Lets All Just Get Along!”

Except for the Jews, it would seem.

Here are a couple of quotes:

 The International Olympic Committee, while promoting peace and fraternity, also has a history of honoring the despicable. In 1936, some 11 months after the enactment of the Nuremberg Laws, the committee allowed Hitler to host the Olympics in Berlin. In the 1980s, the committee bestowed its highest honor, the Olympic Order, on Nicolae Ceausescu of Romania and Erich Honecker of East Germany. In the 1990s, the committee welcomed Saddam Hussein’s psychopathic son, Uday, as the head of Iraq’s National Olympic Committee even though it was well-known that he regularly tortured and killed athletes who underperformed during the Games.

And,

 “They are a corrupt organization, led by greed rather than the Olympic spirit,” said Spitzer, noting that a great deal of funding comes from the oil-rich gulf states.

The whole situation illustrates one of the major fronts in the unseen spiritual war around us — which is the fact that the kingdom of darkness HATES Israel. It will do anything it can to destroy the Jews, being God’s people, the nation and race to whom He has promised a messiah and human king who will rule over them  personally on this earth during the Millennium.

If Satan can wipe them out, then God will no longer be able to keep His promises to them…not only that they’ll have a special part in the Millennial kingdom, whose king is directly from the line of David, but that He will preserve them as a nation until that time. If He can’t keep His promises then He is proved weak, unjust, misguided, unrighteous, untruthful, in short, not God.

This Times of Israel article provides a good outline of events seen from Ankie’s perspective and is well worth your time. Read it HERE.

For further information check out Wikipedia’s article on the Munich massacres as well. You can find that HERE.

Update: And now that the 2012 Olympics have begun, with this year’s opening ceremonies including a moment of silence for Britain’s victims of Islamic terrorism in the London bombings which occurred the day after London was selected to host these very games, the Olympic committee’s refusal to hold a moment of silence commemorating the murdered Israeli athletes only confirms their hypocrisy.  You can watch the memorial  production for the Londoners — one NBC chose not to air Friday night HERE.

4 July 2012

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“We have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. Avarice, ambition, revenge, or gallantry, would break the strongest cords of our Constitution as a whale goes through a net. Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” ~ John Adams*

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Today, as we celebrate the freedoms we’ve enjoyed as a nation for over three hundred years, freedoms which seem to be eroding away because of the very elements Adams notes in the quote above, let us remember that while human freedom is weak because it depends on fallen humans for its maintenance, the spiritual freedom we have in Christ cannot be touched by anyone.

“Now the Lord is the Spirit; and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom.” ~ 2 Corinthians 3:17

*The Works of John Adams, ed. C. F. Adams, Boston: Little, Brown Co., 1851, 4:31

What Price Freedom?

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090311-N-0696M-097
A lone U.S. Army bugler plays Taps at the conclusion of the First Annual Remembrance Ceremony in Dedication to Fallen Military Medical Personnel at Arlington National Cemetery, March 11, 2009

The following is excerpted from Freedom Through Military Victory by R.B. Thieme, Jr.,  Pastor of Berachah Church, 1950-2003:

“If a nation wishes to perpetuate inviolate the priceless privileges and blessings of independence, warfare is inevitable. Every generation must face the crucible of war.

Freedom is bought and paid for by the blood of individuals who set a higher value on their liberty than on life itself. If one generation is not prepared mentally and spiritually to defend such values, if enough individuals in a national entity reject the principle of freedom through military victory, liberty languishes.

Despite man’s zealous efforts to achieve freedom through peaceful means, wars will continue until the end of human history when Jesus Christ, the Prince of Peace, reigns on earth for one thousand years (Is 9:6 cf Eccl 3:8; Micah 4:1-3; Mark 13:7; Rev 20:4)…

Until then, any nation that desires autonomy, must maintain a military force trained and equipped for war.

The freedom the United States possesses has been purchased through the sacrifice and suffering of courageous men. We as a people have a right of self-determination because of military victory. We as Christians have the privilege to assemble in public worship services and to evangelize unbelievers without persecution courtesy of the military. Since 1776, we owe an immeasurable debt to all our gallant fighting forces, especially to those who gave their lives that we might remain a free people.”

Memorial day is a holiday set aside for us to remember the dedication and sacrifice of those who paid the ultimate price for the many precious and amazing freedoms we still enjoy in these United States; and having remembered, to reaffirm our devotion to the cause for which they gave so much…

Liberty is a gift; nations whose people take it for granted, will eventually lose it.

Let us not lose by apathy, distraction, ignorance or political chicanery what so many of our men and women in uniform down through our history have giventheir lives to preserve for us.

 (DoD photo by Mass Communication Specialist 1st Class Chad J. McNeeley/Released, acquired through Beverly & Jack’s Photostream, Creative Commons, Flickr)

A Nation of Immense Size and Diversity

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Recently I’ve been writing about how the Romans didn’t think democracy was a workable form of government for their nation. For one thing, they didn’t think their non-patrician countrymen were up to it. Another reason they thought it to be impractical was because of the size and diversity of its population. In his book Roman History, second century Roman historian Dio Cassius recorded the words of Gaius Maecenas, a close associate and advisor to Augustus Caesar:

“The cause [of democracy being impractical] is the immense size of our population and the magnitude of the issues at stake. Our population embraces every variety of mankind in terms both of race and character; hence both their tempers and their desires are infinitely diverse, and these evils have gone so far that they can only be controlled with great difficulty.” [from Life in Ancient Rome by Don Nardo]

Like Rome, America also has an immense population (ours is 313 million compared to Rome’s 88 million at the time of its greatest expansion under Emperor Trajan) and our diversity has long been cause for marveling. Not because it was a good thing in itself so much as that so many people of infinitely diverse backgrounds could come together and live in peace as one nation.

E Pluribus Unum

From many, One

Our first, de facto national motto, and one of the keys to America’s success as a nation. Our early ideals were never about being “diverse” so much as about being free. About being a part of a new sort of government that guaranteed the freedom and equality of all men before the law. The credo from times past was that people came to America to be American, not to remain whatever they were before. They left the old country because the old country wasn’t working for them — was stifling them, starving them, abusing them, enslaving, even killing them. They came to embrace American ideals of freedom and the right to pursue happiness as they saw fit, to learn English, to work their way out of poverty into prosperity  — to become a part of this great nation, not a part in it.

Cultural trappings were brought into the great melting pot and assimilated, not singled out for special regard and treatment. Our Christmas traditions in particular are an amalgam of the customs of many different nationalities.  And if you don’t want to celebrate Christmas that’s fine too. This assimilation and amalgamation is what allowed us to survive,  what allowed our representative democratic republic to work. In other nations or regions where different tribes or cultures or ethnicities insisted on maintaining their separate “identities,” there has been continual warfare.

Unfortunately, more and more we’re beginning to see that sort of identity politics developing here: people who come to this country for the prosperity, but have no interest in acquiring a new language or new ways. Instead, clinging to their old tongue and culture, they create enclaves within the whole, gathering together with their fellows and, in so doing, insulating themselves from American culture. They don’t want to join it, to learn its language, to work side by side with its people and become one of them, they just want to get the goods — to keep their old ways and allegiances as they send what they get back home to the old, dysfunctional country.

And there are some Americans who are fine with that. Who even celebrate it.

Which is just one more reason why as a nation we are growing more and more fracture-lines by the day…