Hypocrisy.Org....The Saga Continues

The Captain's Quarters (http://www.captainsquartersblog.com/mt/) lays everything out concerning Air America Radio illegally diverting public funds into its own coffers.

Here's the text:

"Brian Maloney has the latest installment of the Air America disgrace that revealed the liberal radio netlet's misuse of government funds under founder Evan Cohen's direction.

Leftist bloggers have begun their inevitable backlash defending Air America, calling the story "phony" and irrelevant to Air America by trying to distingush between AA and its original owner, Progress Media -- which only had the one asset and whose chief executive sat on the board of the non-profit it helped to bankrupt through this "loan".

Well, the Left simply hasn't caught up to reality. Air America said in its second press release on this matter that it planned to pay back the money, a very strange thing to do if it didn't take it in the first place.

As I pointed out yesterday, it's also a very convenient position to take -- considering that Gloria Wise has gone bankrupt and closed its doors. Apparently that little detail didn't go unnoticed by Air America's other critics, and the netlet's spokesperson told Fox News this:

"We're committed to paying this money and the terms are being worked out... We are awaiting direction from the investigation into how to proceed."

That certainly indicates that AA believes it took the money improperly, and also that it has had contact with the investigation into Gloria Wise's collapse and possible malfeasance with its grant monies.

We know that Air America has had problems finding competent management (and an audience), but I doubt they'd be anxious to cough up $480,000 for no reason, especially in their present financial condition. It hardly sounds like a "phony" story to me."

Kudos to the Captain and all bloggers out there forcing Big Media to play by the rules!

Multiple Bulls-Eyes

Not only does Ted Lapkin hit the bulls-eye with the first arrow, he splits it with the next arrow, and the next and.....

Here is the link and the text of his articles, perhaps his best yet:

http://www.nationalreview.com/comment/lapkin200507210807.asp

Battered-Left Syndrome
We are in a war, like it or not.
By Ted Lapkin

The aftermath of the London terrorist bombings has demonstrated that the antiwar Left is severely afflicted by the political equivalent of battered-wife syndrome. With each new beating, the scarred and bruised victims of spousal abuse tend to excuse and rationalize the actions of their tormentors. A stubborn unwillingness to accept the proposition that their partners are violent louts plunges these woeful women into a morass of self-deception that spawns only further violence.

The far Left has similarly proved unable to liberate itself from the web of rose-tinted delusions that it has spun about the nature of Islamic extremism. After each al Qaeda outrage, leftist ideologues are quick to castigate their own countrymen for a catalogue of sins, both real and imagined.

With a perverse combination of self-loathing and adoration of the enemy, the radical Leftist mantra preaches that if only we were nicer, the jihadists could not fail to love us. It’s our own fault if Osama bin Laden doesn’t realize what good people we are.

And all the while, these “progressive” academics, pundits, and politicians engage in ridiculous intellectual contortions designed to mitigate the guilt of the terrorist perpetrators. When push comes to shove, some intellectuals believe that Islamism is simply an understandable reaction to what they describe as “Western imperialism.”

The streets of Britain’s capital city were still damp with innocent blood when the same obscene dance of political self-flagellation began. Within hours of the explosions on the Underground, author Tariq Ali was blaming these attacks on George Bush and Tony Blair. The architects of the London bombings were exercising their just entitlement to vengeance for the “violence being inflicted on the people of the Muslim world,” he wrote.

Journalist Robert Fisk rushed to sing from the same song-sheet in the left-wing British daily The Independent. “It was crystal clear Britain would be a target ever since Tony Blair decided to join George Bush’s ‘war on terror,’” Fisk thundered. The true arch-terrorists of our time, he argued, could be found in the White House and 10 Downing Street.

And if the causes of Islamist terrorism were being falsely diagnosed by leftist ideologues, then the policy proposals being advanced by these same voices were morally bankrupt as well. Rather than pursue the fanatics had who visited such death upon the innocent of London, George Galloway, a radical member of Parliament, urged Britain to adopt the Spanish model of crumpling under pressure.

After a terrorist attack last year on Madrid’s rail system, Spain’s socialist government withdrew its troops from Iraq. But Prime Minister Jose Zapatero’s capitulation did not remove Spain from al Qaeda’s target list. In mid-June 2005, CNN reported that 16 members of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi’s network were arrested in Madrid while planning additional terrorist attacks against that city.
On September 11, Americans became aware that they were facing a war against an enemy of a kind they had never before encountered. And through bombings, decapitations, and assassinations it has dawned upon other democratic nations that, like it or not, they too are part of this same conflict.

Our enemies go by such names as al Qaeda, Jamaa Islamiya, Hamas, and Hezbollah. They belong to a global jihadist movement that considers it a religious duty to wage holy Islamic war against the infidels of the West.

This is a war that we did not start, but that we dare not leave unfinished. We dare not because our foes are fanatics who strap explosives to their bodies and fly airliners into office buildings. We dare not leave it unfinished because our antagonists see the destruction of our civilization as a necessary precursor to the expansion of their own culture.

Our jihadist enemies are fighting to create an ideal society that looks a lot like Afghanistan under the Taliban. And this is a vision that is repugnant to the foundational ideals of free people everywhere. Women forced to be barefoot, burka-clad, illiterate, and unemployed. Christians and Jews barely tolerated as second-class dhimmicitizens. No art, no science. Societies dominated by poverty, oppression, backwardness, and ignorance.

In the world according to radical Islam it’s the jihadist way or the highway, and these 7th-century dogmas represent the only acceptable outcome to al Qaeda.
But the far-left views the world through a political prism that distorts this essential reality. Fixated by a knee-jerk hostility towards all things American, the likes of Ali, Fisk, and Galloway refuse to recognize the existence of this conflict, much less the stakes that are involved.

Their primal instinct is to appease bin Laden and his cohorts rather than oppose them.

But Winston Churchill defined an appeaser as “someone who feeds the crocodile in the hopes of being eaten last.” The sooner we accept the fact that this is a war; then the sooner we can get about the task of winning it.

"Nuff Said!"

I have refrained from posting anything about the "Valarie Plame Name Game" .

You know, that scandal wanna be.

But after coming across an article by Michael Bowers, I felt that I just had to post it here along with the link.

Enjoy!

http://www.starnewspapers.com/star/spedit/col/17-col1.htm

This could be the stupidest non-scandal ever
Sunday, July 17, 2005
Michael Bowers, Star columnist

In its lust to take down Karl Rove, the Washington press corps is protecting Joe Wilson by failing to tell the American people who he really is. So let me do it: Wilson is the Ward Churchill of the U.S. State Department.

Before his outburst, Churchill was an obscure professor in Colorado. Before his outburst, Wilson was an obscure former diplomat at Foggy Bottom.

Churchill called the victims in the Twin Towers "little Eichmanns," based on his hate for America.

Wilson called George Bush a liar based on a two-week junket to Niger in which he lounged by a hotel pool and listened to his contacts tell him, "Uranium? We don't know nothin' about no uranium."

Churchill is a sanctimonious fraud, claiming to be a Cherokee so that he can enrich himself and smear America.

Wilson is a sanctimonious fraud, claiming to be a Karl Rove victim so that he can enrich himself and smear George Bush. (He went on to serve as an adviser to the Kerry campaign.)

Now, here is the one most important thing you need to know about Joe Wilson. First, he complained bitterly that Rove had jeopardized the life of his wife, Valerie Plame. (Later he qualified himself and accused not Rove but "whoever did this.")

Yet, six months later, this man posed with his wife for a full-color, two-page photograph in Vanity Fair magazine.

Hypocrisy? Cynicism? Greed? Or simple stupidity? You make the call.

Here is the timeline: In July 2003, columnist Robert Novak wrote that according to two senior administration sources, Wilson was assigned his Niger fact-finding trip on the recommendation of his wife at the CIA.

(By the way, a Senate committee has proved that Wilson lied when he said his wife was not involved. Or, to use the punctuation that the Angry Left prefers when discussing Bush: WILSON LIED!!!)

Next, in October 2003, the couple made an appearance at which Wilson received an award for "truth-telling" from The Nation magazine. Our brave diplomat teared up, addressing his wife in the audience with the words, "If I could give you back your anonymity ... I would do it in a minute."

Finally, in January 2004, what do you know? The Vanity Fair photo appeared.
So much for giving Valerie back her anonymity.

Wilson's explanation is that the photo didn't matter because the White House had already blown Valerie's cover. And, of course, it had nothing to do with sales of his book, "The Politics of Truth: Inside the Lies That Led to War and Betrayed My Wife's CIA Identity." Sure, Joe.

Karl Rove recognizes the Ward Churchill character of this man. That's why he told a Time reporter, on "double super-secret background," not to take Wilson's Niger report too seriously.

Now this innocuous warning is being twisted into an evil meme that Rove outed a spy for revenge. It's nonsense.

The law that Rove "violated"? The Wall Street Journal summed it up well last summer: "The 1982 Intelligence Identities Protection Act was written in the wake of the Philip Agee scandal to protect the CIA from deliberate subversion, not to protect the identities of agents and their spouses who choose to enter into a national political debate."

In other words, the law aids deep-cover agents in hostile lands who usually face death if exposed.

Does this sound like a description of Valerie Plame, who in 2003 was a desk officer at the CIA in Langley, Va., with 3-year-old twins at home? A woman whose social circle included neighbors and reporters who already knew full well where she worked?

To ask the question is to answer it.

But Democrats press on. They fear and loathe Rove because he knows how to defeat them. They've lost all branches of government. Their situation worsens with every Supreme Court retirement. So they must do something to prove they still matter.

They must get Karl Rove.

If they succeed, it will be a victory only in their own imagination, just as the bombs in London were a victory only in the imagination of the Islamists. Already I can almost hear the jubilation among the press corps:

"Rejoice, for we have taken revenge against the Bush administration! The heroic reporters have carried out a blessed raid in Washington! The White House is burning with fear, terror and panic!"

Yes, I imagine Republicans will be embarrassed for a time. But we needn't worry too much, because in the big picture, the Democrats are hurting themselves more than they're hurting Bush.

This is because a crucial unintended result of the Fitzgerald investigation is that a federal court, by jailing Judith Miller of the New York Times, has dealt a harsh blow to the notion that reporters are entitled to keep their sources secret in the name of the "common good."

Thus, reporters' use of anonymous sources will drop. This hurts Democrats badly, because reporters don't use anonymous sources to take down Democratic presidents. They use anonymous sources to take down Republican presidents.
Furthermore, Rove has already done his job.

He got Bush elected in 2000 and re-elected in 2004. If he must quit now, he'll just go to work on the 2008 campaign of Bill Frist or Condi Rice. The temporary loss of his services will be a small price for Republicans to pay in exchange for a long-lasting blow to the power of the left-wing press.

So, Democratic partisans, keep pummeling away at the man you love to hate. You are destroying yourselves and don't even realize it. Thank you for making life easier for Republicans.

Did You Hear What They Said?

Hello True-Believers!

That's right, it's time for another fascinating edition of:

Did You Hear What They Said?

This is where we actually quote people in the know IN CONTEXT to illustrate profundity as well as .......uh.....ok, I'll say it: stupidity.

And now, with out further ado.......

Iran
"All the totalitarian regimes of the last century staged elections, and they were all meaningless, because the structure of the state concentrated power in the two hands of the dictator, and exercised through the single party. Perhaps the editorialists at the New York Times and the Washington Post could tear themselves away from the imagined horrors of Guantanamo and denounce the systematic oppression of nearly 70 million Iranians."--Michael Ledeen


GOVERNMENT
"The natural progress of things is for liberty to yield and government to gain ground." --Thomas Jefferson

"If you're not wearing a seatbelt, and don't do us the favor of dying in an accident and become an incapacitated vegetable, society will have to bear the expense of taking care of you.' That's not a problem of liberty and self-ownership. It's a problem of socialism. There's no moral case for forcing anyone to care for me for any reason. When we buy into socialism, we buy into paternalistic government." --Walter Williams

"There is nothing indispensable about a state role in education. Parents don't expect the government to provide their children's food or clothing or medical care; there is no reason why it must provide their schooling. An educated citizenry is a vital public good, of course. But like most such goods, a competitive and responsive private sector could do a much better job of supplying it than the public sector can. Imagine how diverse and vital American education could be if it were liberated from government control. There would be schools of every description -- just as there are restaurants, websites, and clothing styles of every description. ... With separation of school and state, the roiling education battles would come to a peaceful end. Robust competition and innovation would dramatically lower costs. Teachers, released from their one-size-fits-all straitjacket, would be happier in their chosen profession. Children would be happier, too -- and, perhaps best of all, better-educated to boot." --Jeff Jacoby

"the best way of doing good to the poor, is not making them easy in poverty, but leading or driving them out of it."--Ben Franklin


TRUTH

"Truth itself is the one enemy against which liberalism cannot prevail."--Chris Adamo


"We have a strange illusion that mere time cancels sin. I have heard others, and I have heard myself, recounting cruelties and falsehoods committed in boyhood as if they were not concern of the present speaker's, and even with laughter. But mere time does nothing either to the fact or to the guilt of a sin. The guilt is washed out not by time but by repentance and the blood of Christ." --C. S. Lewis

"In the 1980s, some people rejected the notion of universal standards, asking, 'Who are you to impose your morality on me?' The question became moot as the immoral have now imposed their immorality on the rest of us." --Cal Thomas

"The smallest good deed is better than the grandest good intention." --Duguet


"The Senate wants you to know how terribly, sincerely sorry they are even though not a single member of today's Senate was even in office the last time America saw a lynching. Some were not even born. But that's the way we prefer our apologies in American politics. We don't apologize for our own sins." --Mona Charen

"Democrats apparently think it's incredibly unfair that reporters actually report what a politician has said. Here's some free advice to Democrats: Stop saying stupid things." --The Washington Times

"In a slide-show presentation at the DNC conference last weekend, polltaker Cornell Belcher focused on why those voters aren't responding to the Democrats' economic message. One reason, he said, is that too many of them see the Democrats as 'anti-religion'." --Newsweek's Howard Fineman

"One of the best ways to get yourself a reputation as a dangerous citizen these days is to go about repeating the very phrases which our Founding Fathers used in the great struggle for independence." --Charles Beard

"It continues to defy explanation why liberals, who theoretically love liberty, equality, tolerance and moderation, should find so much to despise in their own country, which represents the fullest expression of those virtues anywhere on the globe." --Mona Charen

"Only an elitist who lives in a cocoon could survey the decline of morality over the past four decades (and the corresponding rise of social angst), and say the Great Divorce that the Supreme Court presided over -- the separation of faith from our public life -- has served us well." --Don Feder



ABORTION
" Karl Marx taught that if women desired to free themselves from the shackles of patriarchy, they first had to wrest control over the means of reproduction. Now birth rates in Europe have plummeted, choking off the inflow of young workers and imperiling the financial viability of the social welfare state."--Carey Roberts


TAXES
We need true tax reform that will at least make a start toward restoring for our children the American dream that wealth is denied to no one, that each individual has the right to fly as high as his strength and ability will take him." --Ronald Reagan

"In a society that constitutionally limits the powers of government and maximizes individual liberty, there is no justification for the forcible transfer of money from taxpayers to artists, scholars, and broadcasters." --David Boaz and Sheldon Richman


GITMO
"According to the Encyclopaedia Britannica, some 15 million to 30 million prisoners died in the Soviet gulags. By comparison, Guantanamo at its peak held 750 prisoners; currently, there are 520; none have died in captivity, and, as I wrote 3-1/2 years ago, it has the distinction of being 'a camp where the medical staff outnumber the prisoners.' You'll get swifter, cleaner and more efficient treatment than most Canadians do under socialized health care. It's the only gulag in history where the detainees leave in better health and weighing more than when they arrive. This means they're in much better shape when they get back to their hectic schedule of killing infidels: Of the more than 200 who've been released, around 5 percent -- that's to say, 12 -- have since been recaptured on the battlefield." --Mark Steyn


"Bill Clinton said Sunday it's time to shut down Guantanamo prison or clean it up. He said it's an embarrassment to the United States. His voice carries a lot of weight, because who knows more about embarrassing the United States than Bill Clinton." --Argus Hamilton

DOWNING STREET MEMOS
"The outrage about the nondisclosures in the Downing Street memos has led Congressman Walter Jones of North Carolina to demand that we tell the al-Qaida forces in Iraq exactly when we intend to give up."--Christopher Hitchens



FILIBUSTERS
"We owe it to the president to give Mr. Bolton an up-or-down vote on the floor of the U.S. Senate." --Sen. George Voinovich

(Oh.....NOW he tells us.....)


5TH AMENDMENT
The moment the idea is admitted into society that property is not as sacred as the laws of God, and that there is not a force of law and public justice to protect it, anarchy and tyranny commence." --John Adams


"A just security to property is not afforded by that government,
under which unequal taxes oppress one species of property and
reward another species." --James Madison

WAR
"our enemy would be no less committed to our destruction if we immediately withdrew from Iraq or gave every Gitmo prisoner daily bubble baths."--David Limbaugh

"If the U.S. walks away from this war and leaves it to Europe to hold back Islamic extremists, we might as well just accept right now that the terrorists will topple more of our skyscrapers--or worse.” --BRENDAN MINITER


http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=18633

The following exchange happened on the Michael Medved show between the host and Daniel Lazare of The Nation magazine:

Michael Medved: Daniel Lazare, would you like to see the elections scheduled for January 30 in Iraq fail?


Daniel Lazare: I'm totally opposed to what the U.S. is doing in Iraq. Therefore, I would no more support U.S. elections than I would support German elections in France during World War II.


Michael Medved: So you're sticking with this comparison of the United States to Nazi Germany?

David Horowitz: He is, because he believes it in his soul.


Daniel Lazare: I believe it. I believe it entirely.
---------------------

"They have to hope Iraq fails because for it to succeed means that the liberal approach will forever be rendered meaningless and impotent."--Lee P Butler

“Until a radical Muslim can lay hands on a nuclear weapon, the Left will remain al-Qaeda’s most potent weapon.” --Ben Johnson

"Some Democrats are simply uncomfortable about America having a strong and unapologetic role in the world. This isn't treason; it's weakness. And weakness in the dangerous world we face is an invitation for more terror. Be warned." --James Taranto

"The terrorists believe Iraq is the central battlefield in the war on terror, even if some in the West still don't. Perhaps the London bombings will inspire a new shared determination." --The Wall Street Journal


SOCIAL SECURITY
"Harry Reid needs to tell the American people what he plans to do about the looming Social Security crisis. If Reid plans to raise taxes to prop up Social Security, or cut benefits, he should tell us so. If he has another idea, he should share it with us. But fearmongering is not a Social Security plan." --Michael Tanner

JUDICIAL NOMINATIONS
"[The Senate's] role in advice and consent consists of determining intellect, experience, and judicial temperament. It is not up to [them] to select Justices based upon their ideology. That is the president's Constitutional role. [Their] job is to make sure that the person the president nominates is qualified to do the job, not to determine if the nominee will do the job [their] way." --Duane Patterson


"Justice Sandra Day O'Connor took sadistic glee in refusing to overturn Roe v. Wade in the face of the unending strife it has caused the nation. (And it hasn't been easy on 30 million aborted babies either.)--Ann Coulter


"[I]t will be the office of the president to nominate, and with the advice and consent of the senate to appoint. There will of course be no exertion of choice on the part of the senate. They may defeat one choice of the executive...but they cannot themselves choose -- they can only ratify or reject the choice, of the president."--Alexander Hamiltion

"In accord with a longstanding norm, every Member of this Court declined to furnish such information to the Senate. ... When a [nominee] promises to rule a certain way on an issue that may later reach the courts, the potential for due process violations is grave and manifest."--Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg


" I think that we're at a time in the history of this country where we've had enough discussion, debate, and contention on judges Senator Frist and I want to avoid that as the two leaders of the Senate"--Sen. Harry Reid

Hey Democrats, Those Tax Cuts Were for YOU!

Adding again to the long list of distortions created by the DNC, it would seem that the Democrat mantra of President Bush "creating tax cuts for the wealthy" is less than genuine.

The myth of "Rich Republicans" is totally destroyed by something that most Democrats cannot handle:

THE FACTS

Here is an article by Jerry Bowyer that lays it out clear and simple.

http://www.nationalreview.com/nrof_buzzcharts/buzzcharts200507110903.asp

July 11, 2005, 9:03 a.m.
Rich Republicans?
Not yet. The red states are still number two, and working hard for a living.
By Jerry Bowyer



Recently the Bureau of Economic Analysis released two reports which shed a lot of light on what’s really going on in American politics. The reports show beyond question that the states that went for George W. Bush in the last election are considerably poorer than the ones that went for Kerry. The notion that the GOP is the party of the rich simply doesn’t match the economic reality.

States with the highest per capita income trend Democrat; the states with the lowest per capita income trend Republican. The top ten “blue states,” for example, had an average per capita personal income of $36,327, which is 20 percent higher than the top ten “red states,” which had an average of $30,275.

Northeastern states, which make up the geographical heart of liberalism, are considerably wealthier than the upstart Sunbelt states, and that’s just by the measure of personal income. The Northeast states also boast many more generations of accumulated financial capital than their Sunbelt cousins. In other words, income statements and balance sheets in the Northeast states reveal much richer populations.

These realities have led the Left to formulate an appearance-saving theory modeled on the book What’s the Matter with Kansas?, by Thomas Frank. In the Left’s view, scary pictures of men holding hands have led red-staters to commit economic suicide by voting Republican.

But if the GOP is not the party of the rich, is it the party of the poor? No. Increasingly, and counter to the Kansas theory, it’s becoming clear that the GOP is the party of the aspiring.


Last year, GSP (that’s GDP for states) was roughly even during the run-up to the election. That shows that there’s nothing “wrong with Kansas.” However, so far this year, the red states have shown dramatically higher income growth than the blue states. In other words, the blue states are rich, but they’re losing ground. The red states are comparatively less rich, but they’re gaining ground.



As the above chart shows, although the blue states are still considerably wealthier than the red states, the red states are currently trending upwards at a faster rate. Per capita personal income for the first quarter of 2005 jumped 1.05 percent for the red states, which is more than three times the 0.29 percent increase for their blue-state counterparts.

This pattern also shows up in more finely honed geographic measures. Ninety-seven of the 100 fastest-growing counties in America went GOP last year. These counties tend to be highly aspirational ex-urbs — areas that lie outside central cities and outside inner-ring suburbs. Your BuzzCharts author lives in such a community: Lots of land, lots of growth, lots of small business owners. Ex-urbians generally don’t come from wealth. In fact, they’re immune to class guilt because they didn’t inherit their wealth. More than the “aspiring class,” this is the “perspiring class.” After all, these people sweat to get where they’re going.
These are the new Republicans who handed the White House to George W. Bush.

An Unfortunate Reminder

This morning the city of London was struck by a series of bomb blasts that shut down its transit system.

Let my voice join the chorus of Americans who not only offer prayers and condolences, but also pledge support and solidarity in the fight against the cowards who executed these attacks.

Multi-Media Road Tour: Forever 9/11

I have been hearing so much about how Americans in general have "forgotten" the tragedy of 9/11.

Rush Limbaugh has mentioned several times that we are a "visual society"--we react stronger to pictures than just words.

For example, all the negative images coming out of Vietnam went against any good news from the warfront at the time.

The same is happening now in Iraq: there ARE good things happening there, but not only are they NOT getting reported, we are daily bombarded with negative video of IED's exploding or our soldiers' dead bodies getting carted off or something.

The President is having to fight through all that because the media has a strangle-hold on how this war is portrayed. Hence the seeming lack-of-support for the war (I know about some polls saying 60% want us to stay the course--you know what I'm getting at).

With all this in mind, why not do an "end-run" around the media and use a multi-media presentation to remind America why this war on terror is necessary, why we are in Iraq and why our troops (and their Commander-in-chief) need our support?

Here's a picture that shows what I have in mind:





The presentation could be free to the public, perhaps underwritten by willing donors to cover the cost.

Here's a possible promotional poster:



This type of stuff could be labeled as propaganda, but then again, there are those of you out there that remember going to the movie theatres and seeing newsreels about how WWII was going. It was a constant reminder of America's need for vigilance.

Perhaps that is what we need today.............

Happy Birthday, America!

In the harbor of the Lady
On a cold windy night
There’s a ship coming in
With the Lady in sight
There and old man sees Her
Standing proud and tall
He came a long way to see Her
Waiting for Her call
There are many just like him
Their reasons are the same
Heard the talk of freedom
That is why they came
All the lives that were given
Just so she could stand
May the torch that she holds up
Shine throughout the land
For you and me

They give their hearts
To Sister Liberty
To dream of things
They never thought they’d see
In the dark and lonely night
They know she’ll hold her children tight
And protect them from anybody’s harm
The hold their hands
With Sister Liberty
Hope for things
They’d always hope to be
And all the things that she can do
For they know she’ll follow through
And will guide them out of the storm
Sister Liberty

On a warm summer’s day in a foreign land
There a boy sits on top of a hill with his head in his hands
Everyday he returns there as he looks out to sea
Hoping someday the Lady will come and set him free
Everyday he can see her in the books that he reads
He never hears of all the ways that she can meet his needs
But we really don’t realize just how lucky we are
‘Cause we can’t hear the crying of the boy from afar
Who cries alone

“Give me your tired, give me your poor
Bring all your tempest-tossed to me
I lift my lamp up beside the Golden Door
And forever they shall breathe free”

Copyright 1985--Robert M. Parker

The following is a re-posting from January 1, 2005:

AMERICA, WHO IS YOUR GOD?
(Psa 33:12 KJV) Blessed is the nation whose God is the LORD; and the people whom he hath chosen for his own inheritance.

Declaration of Independence Banned at Calif School
LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - A California teacher has been barred by his school from giving students documents from American history that refer to God -- including the Declaration of Independence.

Steven Williams, a fifth-grade teacher at Stevens Creek School in the San Francisco Bay area suburb of Cupertino, sued for discrimination on Monday, claiming he had been singled out for censorship by principal Patricia Vidmar because he is a Christian.

"It's a fact of American history that our founders were religious men, and to hide this fact from young fifth-graders in the name of political correctness is outrageous and shameful," said Williams' attorney, Terry Thompson."Williams wants to teach his students the true history of our country," he said. "There is nothing in the Establishment Clause (of the U.S. Constitution) that prohibits a teacher from showing students the Declaration of Independence."

Vidmar could not be reached for comment on the lawsuit, which was filed on Monday in U.S. District Court in San Jose and claims violations of Williams rights to free speech under the First Amendment.Williams asserts in the lawsuit that since May he has been required to submit all of his lesson plans and supplemental handouts to Vidmar for approval, and that the principal will not permit him to use any that contain references to God or Christianity.

Among the materials she has rejected, according to Williams, are excerpts from the Declaration of Independence, George Washington's journal, John Adams' diary, Samuel Adams' "The Rights of the Colonists" and William Penn's "The Frame of Government of Pennsylvania.""He hands out a lot of material and perhaps 5 to 10 percent refers to God and Christianity because that's what the founders wrote," said Thompson, a lawyer for the Alliance Defense Fund, which advocates for religious freedom.

"The principal seems to be systematically censoring material that refers to Christianity and it is pure discrimination."

Those of you who heard about this news story were no doubt shocked that something like this could go on in America.

When I heard this story, it reminded me of what we did every morning at school in the fifth grade.We actually started the day by saying the Pledge and Lord’s prayer.

That was going on in a PUBLIC SCHOOL.

And today a teacher is banned from using documents from the founding of our country just because they mention and make reference to God.

 We are living in a time of confusion and a time of misinformation.

 As a society we are at a crossroads. If you have been following the news, you have to be concerned about what is happening round you today in the United States of America.

 I am aware of how the Courts are now saying that young people cannot pray at football games,

For almost 30 years it has been legal to kill our children in the womb.
I’m sure that you‘ve heard the news reports of that woman who killed a pregnant lead and then cut the baby out of her womb and claimed it as her own.

If you read the newspapers and hear the story on TV, they refer to the child as a fetus, not a baby.

You know why, don’t you?

If they admit that its’ a baby, then they’re one step closer to admitting that abortion is wrong.

 What has caused us to slide down this path? We are confused about where and if God belongs in our nation. As time goes by, we are pushing God further and further out of our society.

All of these events lead me to ask an important question. It is a question that demands an answer…. And soon.

That question is this: AMERICA, WHO IS YOUR GOD?

When a nation that involved God in its founding makes clear and deliberate efforts to remove God from its culture, I think it is necessary for us to look back and see what the intention of our Founding Fathers were when they formed this great nation.

 What did our founding fathers fight and die for? What did they lay their lives on the line for? It is easy for us to look back on history and say that it was easy for these people to do what they did because we see that they won the war. But remember they took on the strongest nation in the world at the time, victory was not a sure thing.

 Is it important to see what our founding fathers believed and fought for? Yes it is. These men had a vision for the nation that they shed their blood for, it was a vision that was so strong, they were willing to pay the ultimate sacrifice in the face of overwhelming odds to make it happen.

 Today I want to take just a few minutes for us to look at where the founding fathers believed that God belonged in our heritage, our Government and in our educational system.

And when you compare it to what is going on today, I believe it will again bring us back to our original question;

AMERICA, WHO IS YOUR GOD?

When America was founded:

I. GOD WAS IN OUR HERITAGE
There is much confusion over our nations heritage. There is much confusion over the beliefs of the founding fathers.

Today it is popular for uninformed people to say that the founders were not Christians.

Did you know that the first act of the United States Congress was to authorize the printing of 20,000 Bibles for the Indians?

On January 21, 1781, Philadelphia printer Robert Aitken petitioned Congress to officially sanction a publication of the Old and New Testament which he was preparing at his own expense.

Congress "highly approve(s) the pious and laudable undertaking of Mr. Aitken, as subservient to the interest of religion . . . in this country, and . . . they recommend this edition of the bible to the inhabitants of the United States."

This resolution was a result of Aitken's successful accomplishment of his project. Aitken's Bible, published under Congressional patronage, was the first English language Bible published on the North American continent.

When our first President, under the new Constitution, received the request of both Houses of Congress concerning a national declaration of a public day of Thanksgiving and Prayer, ’George Washington...issued a National Thanksgiving Proclamation’ without any apparent concern that he might be mixing government and religion.

The men who founded our country clearly wedded it to Christian principles. "By today’s standards," as syndicated columnist Don Feder says, "the founding fathers were the religious right."

In March of 1798, President John Adams declared May 9th of that year to be a "day of solemn humiliation, fasting and prayer."

He is also quoted as saying, " The general principles upon which the Fathers achieved independence were the general principals of Christianity… I will avow that I believed and now believe that those general principles of Christianity are as eternal and immutable as the existence and attributes of God."

Benjamin Franklin in a speech to the Constitutional Convention said "In the beginning of the contest with Britain, when we were sensible of danger, we had daily prayers in this room for Divine protection. Our prayers, Sir, were heard, and they were graciously answered… do we imagine we no longer need His assistance?"

There are so many things that we no longer hear today. For example, we are now told that our Founding Fathers were atheists, agnostics, and deists.

However, 52 of the 55 Founding Fathers who worked on the constitution were members of orthodox churches.

In 1779 after the First Amendment (The Establishment clause) was written, the Supreme Court stated the following:

 Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.

 By our form the Christian religion is the established religion; and all sects and denominations of Christians are placed on the same equal footing.(Congress prohibited itself from establishing a religion partly because ONE HAD ALREADY BEEN ESTABLISHED IN THIS COUNTRY PRIOR TO THE WRITING OF THE CONSTITUTION)

If you doubt the veracity of that claim, consider this statement by Patrick Henry in May of 1765 in a speech to the House of Burgesses: "It cannot be emphasized too strongly or too often that this great nation was founded, not by religionists, but by Christians; not on religions, but on the gospel of Jesus Christ!"

When America was founded, GOD WAS IN OUR HERITAGE.

When America was founded,
II. GOD WAS IN OUR GOVERNMENT

Does God have a place in our government? If you listen to people today they will tell you no. Let’s briefly look at a couple of statements from our founders pertaining to God in Government.

In a 10-year study the Political Science Professors at the University of Houston researched over 15,000 writing of the founders:

They isolated 3154 direct quotes in these writings, of these direct quotes,
34% of these come directly from the Bible,

Another 60% were quotes from people like John Locke and Sir William Blackstone, who directly quoted the Bible.

Over 94% of the quotes found in the writings of the founders came from the Bible.

James Madison, the "Chief Architect of the Constitution" said this in reference to the 10 commandments:"We have staked the whole future of American civilization, not upon the power of government, far from it. We have staked the future of all of our political institutions upon the capacity of each and all of us to govern ourselves.. according to the Ten Commandments of God.."

At the Constitutional Convention of 1787, James Madison proposed the plan to divide the central government into three branches. He discovered this model of government from the Perfect Governor, as he read Isaiah 33:22; "For the LORD is our judge, the LORD is our lawgiver, the LORD is our king; He will save us."

President John Quincy Adams said:

 The law given from Sinai was a civil and municipal as well as a moral and religious code... laws essential to the existence of men in society and most of which have been enacted by every nation which ever professed any code of laws."

In 1811 The Supreme Court stated:
 Whatever strikes at the root of Christianity tends manifestly to the dissolution of civil government
And this ruling by the U. S. Supreme Court in 1892:

 "Our laws and our institutions must necessarily be based upon and embody the teachings of the Redeemer of mankind. It is impossible that it should be otherwise. In this sense and to this extent, our civilizations and our institutions are emphatically Christian."

When America was founded, GOD WAS IN OUR GOVERNMENT

When America was founded,
III. GOD WAS IN OUR EDUCATIONAL SYSTEM

1. Does God belong in the school? It does not seem so today.2. Let us look at the New England Primer that was the standard textbook in schools for over 200 years beginning in Boston in 1690.

The New England Primer followed a tradition of combining the study of the alphabet with Bible reading. It introduced each alphabet letter in a religious phrase and then illustrated the phrase with a woodcut.

The primer also contained a catechism of religious questions and answers. Emphasis was placed on fear of sin, God's punishment and the fact that all people would have to face death.Our educational institutions were founded with God as the center.

Look at these statements of philosophy of our major colleges in the United States.
 Yale- Seeing God is the giver of all wisdom, every scholar, besides private or secret prayer... shall be present morning and evening at public prayer

 Princeton- Cursed be all that learning that is contrary to the cross of Christ.

 Harvard- "Let every student be plainly instructed and earnestly pressed to consider well the main end of his life and studies is to know God and Jesus which is eternal life. John 17:3, and therefore to lay Christ in the bottom as the only foundation of all sound knowledge and learning.""Everyone shall so exercise himself in reading the Scriptures twice a day that he shall be ready to give such an account of his proficiency therein."

Each of the original state constitutions mandated that Christian teachings would be included in a child’s education

November 1, 1802 The Ohio State constitution said:

 Religion, morality, and knowledge, being essentially necessary to the good government, and the happiness of mankind, schools and the means of instruction shall forever be encouraged by legislative provision.

A few years ago, three-judge panel of the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled as unconstitutional Ohio’s 41-year-old state motto, "With God, All Things Are Possible." The panel said the motto was a government endorsement of Christianity because it quotes Jesus addressing his disciples in Matthew 19:26.

106 of the first 108 colleges formed in America and 123 of the first 126 were formed on Christian principles

By 1900 it was extremely rare to find a university president who was not an ordained clergyman.

When America was founded, GOD WAS IN OUR EDUCATIONAL SYSTEM

Let me close with this:

The Episcopal Church has debated the "normalization" of homosexual practices, same-sex marriage and the ordination (as ministers) of practicing homosexuals, for two decades.At its 74th triennial General Convention in August of 2003, the Episcopal House of Bishops voted, by a two-thirds majority, to confirm an unrepentant homosexual as Bishop of the New Hampshire Diocese.

ECUSA Presiding Bishop Frank Griswold has defended the election, proclaiming that the Bible does not condemn homosexual acts. "Discreet acts of homosexuality" were condemned only because they involved lust instead of the "love, forgiveness and grace" of homosexual relationships, argues Griswold.

"Homosexuality, as we understand it as an orientation, is not mentioned in the Bible. I think the confirmation of the bishop of New Hampshire is acknowledging what is already a reality in the life of the church and the larger society of which we are a part."

Griswold said further, "If I believed in any part of my being that the consent to this election was unfaithful to an authentic way of reading scripture and contrary to the leading of the Holy Spirit, I could no longer serve as the presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church."

Mr. Griswold, it’s time for you to hang up your robe and go home, because it is obvious that you have not read the Bible.

(Rom 1:27 KJV) And likewise also the men, leaving the natural use of the woman, burned in their lust one toward another; men with men working that which is unseemly, and receiving in themselves that recompense of their error which was meet (necessary).

For a church in America to even come close to going down this road lets me know that America has truly lost its moral compass.America, who is your God?

One of the great themes of the Bible is the fact that when God is involved in the founding of a nation, He blesses that nation. When that nation turns its back on God, judgement will follow.

When the nation of Israel turned its back on God, God turned His back on them, and Israel was overrun by the Babylonians and the Assyrians.

Since God was involved in the founding of this nation, how far away can WE be from suffering a similar fate?

It has become painfully obvious that the America I grew up is not the same America that I am trying to raise my children in.

I believe that it is up to us Christians to work to get America back on track.
The founding Fathers who gave us this great nation made it clear. Jesus belongs front and center in our society.

Don’t be fooled by the so-called enlightened people. The founders knew that when you take God out of something, that something will fail.

The cure for what ails America is laid out clearly and concisely for us in the Bible:

(2 Chr 7:14 KJV) If my people, which are called by my name, shall humble themselves, and pray, and seek my face, and turn from their wicked ways; then will I hear from heaven, and will forgive their sin, and will heal their land.

America is more than the soil under our feet.

YOU are America.

America, who is your God?