The Perspective

The Perspective is Moving!!!

2006-08-05T07:53:00.000-07:00

Since this is the first posting since March, you can tell that my love affair with the internet has waned a bit because of the symphony of political myopia that is so pervasive out there.

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That, coupled with that crazy little thing called LIFE, happened.

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Days without posting became weeks, then months and the next thing you know, I became a bit detached from it all.

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In the process, I was able to see that almost all of the media has become obsessed with short-term political gain instead of seeing The Big Picture of The Future.

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It really shouldn't matter which label a politician wears, but rather, the content of their soul. It is THAT content that will determine what kind of a leader they will be.

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Yes, there ARE moral absolutes. Yes, there ARE values to which we must cling.

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That is what you will find at our new website: Heart of America.

There will be things that we write that will anger some readers, embolden others.

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But the bottom line is that it will come FROM THE HEART.

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As with the former blog, The Perspective, this site will always be a work-in-progress.

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Please be patient. Please be courteous. Please feel free to share....from the heart.

Did You Hear What They Said?

2006-03-26T14:51:00.000-08:00

Welcome back, True Believers!

It's time for another edition of The Perspective's Signature Series:

Remember, it's not media mis-reporting. . . they actually said it!!!

OF WHOM THE WORLD WAS NOT WORTHY...

"I am not an infidel or a fugitive. I am a Christian. If they want to sentence me to death, I accept that."--Abdul Rahman, Afghan and former Muslim, who converted to Christianity 16 years ago, after being arrested for his conversion.

A WORD FROM THE FOUNDERS

"Let us therefore rely upon the goodness of the Cause, and theaid of the supreme Being, in whose hands Victory is, to animateand encourage us to great and noble Actions. "
-- George Washington (General Orders, 2 July 1776)

MEMO TO JOHN MURTHA

"America united with a handful of troops, or without a single soldier, exhibits a more forbidding posture to foreign ambition than America disunited, with a hundred thousand veterans ready for combat." —James Madison

"To contend for our own liberty, and to deny that blessing to others,involves an inconsistency not to be excused."
-- John Jay (letter to R. Lushington, 15 March 1786)

GOVERNMENT

"A political party cannot be all things to all people. It must represent certain fundamental beliefs which must not be compromised to political expediency, simply to swell its ranks." —Ronald Reagan

" What Americans need is not a new federal education program but the absence of all federal education programs... If Americans are to take our Constitution and the education of our children seriously, we need to wake up, reclaim our power, and 'Just Say No' to federal control of education." —Michael Ostrolenk

"Charity is no part of the legislative duty of the government." —James Madison

" If we are still on the wrong course, it is because we choose to be... The conservative movement is at a crossroads. Are we committed to the ideals of limited government, fiscal discipline and traditional moral values or not?" —Rep. Mike Pence

"Once born, a government program is nearly impossible to kill. That's mostly because politicians are spending our money and not their own." —Cal Thomas

"While the creation of wealth may be more effective for enabling millions of people to rise out of poverty, it provides no special role for the political left, no puffed up importance, no moral superiority, no power for them to wield over others... Things that work for millions of people offer little to the left, and ultimately the left is about the left, not about the people they claim to want to lift out of poverty." —Thomas Sowell

UAE PORT DEAL

"Congress is up in arms. The Democrats, in particular, are in full cry, gleeful to at last get to the right of George Bush on an issue of national security. Gleeful, and shamelessly hypocritical. If a citizen of the UAE walked into an airport in full burnoose and flowing robes, speaking only Arabic, Democrats would be deeply offended, and might even sue, if the security people were to give him any more scrutiny than they would to my sweet 84-year-old mother. Democrats loudly denounce any thought of racial profiling. But when that same Arab, attired in business suit and MBA, and with a good record running ports in 15 countries, buys P&O, Democrats howl at the very idea of allowing Arabs to run our ports. (Republicans are howling too, but they don't grandstand on the issue of racial profiling.) On this, the Democrats are rank hypocrites." —Charles Krauthammer

"The nation which indulges towards another an habitual hatred,or an habitual fondness, is in some degree a slave. It is aslave to its animosity or to its affection, either of which issufficient to lead it astray from its duty and its interest."
-- George Washington (letter to Alexander Hamilton, 8 May 1796)

CLUELESSNESS, LIBERAL STYLE

"We are a little bit out of touch in Hollywood every once in a while. I think it is probably a good thing... I'm proud to be out of touch."--George Clooney

"Simply put, Democrats believe they can ask voters to give them control of the legislative branch [in November] without revealing any sort of policy or plan to deal with the most pressing issue before the country today: the war in Iraq... Not only do Democrats not have a plan, they're proud of not having a plan." —Byron York

"In front of a crowd in Florida this past weekend, Al Gore said that, "The people of the United States are going to stand up and take our country back." And then the manager of the karaoke bar took the microphone away and said, "Either sing or sit down buddy."--Jay Leno

"I'm tired of being accused of bias and being liberal. I have been covering all sides of every argument in politics for a quarter century, and I think I am as fair and neutral as it is humanly possible to be—which is not perfect. How about some unbiased readers for a change?" —Newsweek's Howard Fineman

FREEDOM

"Guard with jealous attention the public liberty. Suspect every onewho approaches that jewel. Unfortunately, nothing will preserveit but downright force. Whenever you give up that force, you areinevitably ruined."
-- Patrick Henry (speech in the Virginia Ratifying Convention,5 June 1778)

"The right to freedom being the gift of God Almighty, it is not in the power of Man to alienate this gift, and voluntarily become a slave." —John Adams

ABORTION

"If South Dakota has led the way toward a democratic eruption, it also has shaken up the political marketplace by rejecting the popular rape-and-incest exception. The loophole doesn't make moral sense. If life begins at conception, children conceived through rape and incest are human beings. They are innocent of crimes, even if they are the byproduct of horrendous violence against women. So on what basis should we permit their destruction?" —Tony Snow

MULTIPLE CHOICE

Who said the following:

"America does not have to choose between being a welcoming society and being a lawful society. We can be both at the same time."

A) George W. Bush

B) John Cornyn

C) Tom Tancredo

D) Hillary Clinton

Scroll down for the answer (no cheating!!)

A) George W. Bush

Have a great day!

American Socialists Declare War

2006-03-01T07:45:00.000-08:00

Brendan Miniter has a great article on how Wal-Mart has come under attack by the Left:

http://www.opinionjournal.com/columnists/bminiter/?id=110008023

Always High Taxes

The war on Wal-Mart is really about expanding government.

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BY BRENDAN MINITER

Tuesday, February 28, 2006 12:01 a.m.

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With the war on Wal-Mart now heating up in nearly three dozen state legislatures, I put a call in to someone who was in on the ground floor in pushing to force the retailer to spend more on health care for its employees. What Maryland's Delegate James Hubbard, a Democrat from Prince George's County, had to say was revealing of both why he backed his state's "Wal-Mart bill" and what this fight is really about: expanding Medicaid and other taxpayer-funded health-care entitlements.

Let's first understand that the drive to enact anti-Wal-Mart legislation has very little to do with the retail giant except in two respects: dipping into its very deep pockets, and using the controversy surrounding the company to mask the larger agenda of expanding already-bankrupt entitlement programs. Of course, in this war legislators have a ready made ally in the AFL-CIO, which has its own reasons for going after the nonunionized company.

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With that, let's turn to Mr. Hubbard. He began our conversation by pointing out that the Wal-Mart bill--which forces companies with more than 10,000 employees to spend at least 8% of their payroll on health care or pay the state the difference--was always intended to be just the first step. Four years ago, he made his intentions clear by introducing legislation to increase cigarette taxes and to use the tax code to compel employers to provide health insurance. Under his legislation the revenue from these taxes would be dumped into a new state fund that would then be used to expand Medicaid eligibility to families with incomes up to 300% of the poverty line (up from 200% now). But even in a legislature with large Democratic majorities, his bill stalled.

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So Mr. Hubbard and others settled on a new approach--pushing through smaller, bite-sized pieces. The first piece was the Wal-Mart bill. It passed last year and was enacted last month, when the Legislature overrode Gov. Robert Ehrlich's veto. Two weeks ago Mr. Hubbard was at it again, this time introducing a new bill to mandate that companies with at least 1,000 employees spend 4.5% of their payroll on health care or pay the state the difference. Once this piece is in place, Mr. Hubbard told me, the next step will be to create a similar mandate--perhaps 2% or 3%--for companies with fewer than 1,000 employees. Each year, Mr. Hubbard hopes to expand the mandate to include ever smaller companies with the ultimate goal of "health coverage for all Marylanders."

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Mr. Hubbard noted how effective splitting the difference can be in moving legislation toward a larger goal. "If you give up 80% of what you want to get 20%," he said, "after five years you will have nothing left to give up." Mr. Hubbard also noted a quirk in the system that made raising taxes and expanding the Medicaid rolls attractive. With the federal government paying half or more of every dollar spent on Medicaid, states were essentially leaving federal dollars on the table by not expanding the program.

It is within this context that we should view the National Governors Association's meeting in Washington this week. Like all interest groups, the states' chief executives are determined not to leave town empty-handed; and every year a top agenda item for them is getting more federal dollars to cover the ever-expanding cost of Medicaid. And who could blame them? After all, the federal government created Medicaid as a tiny program in the 1960s.

Today it eats up, on average, about a quarter of each state's budget and grows every year at a rate that outstrips inflation and threatens to gobble up dollars needed for education and other priorities. Yet Mr. Hubbard isn't the only state lawmaker who has figured out that he can leverage the federal Treasury to his advantage by expanding Medicaid eligibility. New York is well ahead on this learning curve. According to a recent study published by State Policy Reports, the Empire State receives more federal dollars per capita than any other state and more than twice the national average.

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What's now dawning on Wal-Mart CEO Lee Scott is that his company is a middleman in this exchange. So on Sunday he spoke directly to the governors and said there was "too much politics" in state bills taking aim at his company. Of course, that's exactly why more states will target Wal-Mart and other employers in order to raise revenue to expand Medicaid, unless someone in Washington puts a stop to it.
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So then Wal-Mart, and eventually all employers, will not be in the retail business, but in the health-care business.

I'll permit Mr. Limbaugh to do my light-work this time:

"Wal-Mart is doing more for low-income people than politicians can. That makes the politicians mad, and it threatens them. The Democratic Party, the American left ought to be embracing Wal-Mart. If the Democratic Party really meant what it says about compassion for the less fortunate, for the poor, the hungry, the thirsty, and the whoever, then it ought to be riding Wal-Mart to the bank, they ought to be praising it, trying to make Wal-Mart their friends.

"Wal-Mart is a big illustration to low-income people that capitalism will accommodate their needs.

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"They are using the power of the state to try to force this private company to support Democrats and Democrat special interests. Universal health care is a Democrat objective. And they are going about it piece meal, bit by bit, small chunks at a time."

Did You Hear What They Said?

2006-02-26T18:10:00.000-08:00

That's right, True-Believers!

It's your favorite series that reminds us all what people have actually said.

Remember, it's not a port deal. . . .they really said it!

IRAN

"It is striking. Four years ago we were talking about Iraq, saying they may have been trying to seek nuclear weapons, we thought they were sponsoring terrorism, so we went to war. Here's a country that's saying right to our face they are going forward with a nuclear program, we've proven that they've sponsored terrorism, and they have a president who says he wants to wipe one of our key allies off the map. And we're treating them differently, aren't we?"--Matt Lauer
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"Our enemies may be irrational, even outright insane, driven by nationalism, religion, ethnicity or ideology. They do not fear the United States for its diplomatic skills or the number of automobiles and software programs it produces. They respect only the firepower of our tanks, planes and helicopter gunships." —Ronald Reagan

NATIONAL SECURITY

"The circumstances that endanger the safety of nations are infinite, and for this reason no constitutional shackles can wisely be imposed on the power to which the care of it is committed." —Alexander Hamilton, Federalist No. 23

DANISH CARTOON FLAP

"Muslims think they can issue decrees about what images can appear in newspaper cartoons. Who do they think they are, liberals?"--Ann Coulter
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"Christians, Jews, Buddhists, [and] Mormons...don't lash out in violence when their religious sensibilities are offended. They certainly don't expect their beliefs to be immune from criticism, mockery, or dissent. But radical Muslims do." —Jeff Jacoby

MEDIA

"Why don't you just report the news instead of what might be the news?" —Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld

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"The mighty American media doesn't want to think itself spineless. So they close their eyes, rationalize their fear and call it the responsible thing to do." —Tony Blankley

FROM THE "DEMOCRATIC" PARTY

"Some Democrats are furious that their party doesn't have its own ideas. Others say they do have ideas; they're just keeping them secret for now. That sounds a lot like the high school geek who insists that his girlfriend is really hot but lives in an undisclosed location in Canada." —Jonah Goldberg

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"It is frankly shocking that there is anyone in Washington who would politicize the Patriot Act. It is an insult to those who died to tell the American people that the organization posing the greatest threat to their liberty is not al-Qa'ida but the FBI. Hearing any member of Congress actually crow about 'killing' or 'playing chicken' with this critical legislation is as disturbing today as it would have been when Ground Zero was still smoldering." —Debra Burlingame

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"I take a back seat to nobody when it comes to fighting terrorism and standing up for national homeland security. Our port security is too important to place in the hands of foreign governments. I will be working to introduce legislation that will prohibit the sale of ports to foreign governments." —Sen. Hillary Clinton

Memo to Hill: First, there is no transfer of security responsibility. Second, no ports are being sold. Third, if you feel so strongly about the UAE threat, then perhaps Bill should return the $600,000 he received from the UAE for speaking engagements in the last two years.
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"Hillary said that she finds the administration's refusal to level with the American people "troubling." She also finds it somewhat nostalgic."--Jay Leno

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"Al Gore announced he is finishing up a new book about global warming and the environment. Yeah, the first chapter talks about how you shouldn't chop down trees to make a book that no one will read." —Conan O'Brien
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FOOD FOR THOUGHT

"For the public, there may be some psychological solace in the assertion that preventing DPW from managing port terminals is tantamount to securing our destiny—but it is a false sense of security."--Mark Alexander

PASS THE PEYOTE, PLEASE

"Now you pick up the paper and there's a Watergate every day. I don't think anyone's connecting the dots and saying to the public, "Wake up, folks, because you could end up in a totalitarian nightmare, wondering what happened to your country." --Robert Redford

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"Try not to laugh when someone says these are the world's greatest athletes, despite a paucity of Blacks that makes the Winter Games look like a GOP convention."--Bryant Gumbel

MULTIPLE CHOICE

Who said the following?

"Private initiative is the only answer to black poverty and to rebuilding New Orleans."

A) Jesse Jackson

B) J.C. Watts

C) Star Parker

D) Al Sharpton

Scroll down for the answer (no cheating!)

C) Star Parker

HAVE A GREAT DAY!

Where's the Exit Strategy?

2006-02-20T06:34:00.000-08:00

This article by Myron Magnet (link) was written last February, but it still resonates, especially will the failures of liberalism laid bare in the wake of Hurricane Katrina.

He gets a little wordy here, but the bottom line is undeniable:

Government handouts will never solve poverty.

What ever happened to compassionate conservatism? Despite the Bush administration's focus on the war against terror, the idea didn't disappear. But as White House thinking developed, it got incorporated into a larger, more profound domestic theory. Yes, we need a safety net, the current view seems to go; but we don't need a Europe-style welfare state.

What's called for is the traditional American "opportunity society," as much a boon to the poor as to everyone else.

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Implicit in compassionate conservatism was the epochal paradigm shift that is now all but explicit. Taken together, compassionate conservatism's elements added up to a sweeping rejection of liberal orthodoxy about how to help the poor, which a half century's worth of experience had discredited.
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If you want to help the poor, compassionate conservatives argued, liberate them from dependency through welfare reform; free their communities from criminal anarchy through activist policing; give them the education they need to succeed in a modern economy by holding their schools accountable; and let them enjoy the rewards of work by taxing their modest wages lightly--or not at all.
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For the worst-off--those hampered by addiction or alcohol or faulty socialization--let the government pay private organizations, especially religious ones, to help. Such people need a change of heart to solve their problems, the president himself deeply believed; and while a clergyman or a therapist might help them, a bureaucrat couldn't.
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In fact a welfare-department worker might do harm even beyond providing money to fuel self-destructive behavior. Rather than understand that an inner transformation is what such a person needs, the welfare worker might well try to persuade him that his plight stems from an unjust economy, which provides him insufficient opportunity, or even purposely keeps a fraction of the population unemployed, so as to hold down the wages of those who are working.
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His problem thus is the result of vast, impersonal forces, of which he is the victim (and doubly the victim if he is black in racist America). In other words, capitalism is inherently defective and unjust, and therefore we need a welfare state to mitigate its harshness.
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President Bush entered the White House with no patience for such a view. What he understood was that the War on Poverty--an array of LBJ-era legislation that boosted welfare benefits and established other programs for the poor, including Medicaid--created its own form of depression, as women long dependent on welfare became so convinced of their own inferiority that they could hardly present themselves without trembling at a job interview.
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And, as a far worse psychological consequence, the sense of victimization and of entitlement to government support that the War on Poverty fostered created a corrosive self-pity and resentment among the children of its beneficiaries, and their children's children. The self-pity led to drink and drugs; the resentment to crime and violence; and both together to a perpetuation of irresponsibility, dysfunction, and failure over the generations. The first-line antidote, in Mr. Bush's view, would be the intervention of a counselor, preferably faith-based.
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But if there was a permanent class of poor, the cause was not a failure of capitalism but of the War on Poverty, which reinforced such self-defeating attitudes. Clearly, as the administration understood, American capitalism was a dynamo of job creation and opportunity. President Bush's generation, after all, had seen the astonishing restructuring of U.S. industry in the 1980s, when, in response to foreign competition, companies slimmed down, boosted productivity and quality, and kept their markets and prosperity; while their laid-off workers didn't permanently succumb to paralyzing depression but instead found--or created--new jobs.
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Moreover, as a Texan, Mr. Bush had seen waves of Mexican immigrants flooding in to take jobs no one previously knew existed--still more evidence that there was no crisis of opportunity--while in the cities, a new wave of immigrant-run greengroceries, nail salons, construction firms, even commercial fish farms in Bronx basements, gave the lie to the failure-of-capitalism theory.
And, on top of all that, the overwhelming success of the 1996 Welfare Reform Act, which became ever clearer during President Bush's first term, utterly exploded the idea that the hard-core poor were not working because of a lack of jobs.
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Welfare mothers crowded into the work force; the rolls dropped by roughly half. Not only were their children not freezing to death on the streets by the thousands, as even so wise an observer as the late Sen. Patrick Moynihan had predicted they would, but in fact child poverty reached its lowest point ever three years after welfare reform. Lack of opportunity? Hardly.
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The War on Poverty rests on a false premise: that capitalism creates a permanent class of poor. And War on Poverty attitudes have a deeply harmful effect on those entrammeled in America's current welfare state. So the second Bush term is bringing the War on Poverty--demonstrably a cataclysmic mistake--to an end.
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A glance at the administration's recent budget shows the ongoing dismantling of antipoverty programs: a sharp reduction in the Community Development Block Grant, the main conduit for funneling federal money to cities; the reduction in HUD money for Section 8 subsidized housing vouchers, which abets the formation of dysfunctional single-parent families and destabilizes respectable working-class neighborhoods; and the shrinkage of ever-expanding Medicaid.
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Welfare is now temporary assistance in adversity, not a permanent way of life; and we can expect welfare reform's conditions to become even stricter when the 1996 Act finally gets reauthorized.
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Supporters of the old paradigm are naturally apoplectic over such a transformation; and their outrage reveals just how sweeping a welfare state they really champion. As Georgetown law professor Peter Edelman, who resigned from the Clinton administration to protest the president's signing of the 1996 welfare reform, told columnist William Raspberry: "For virtually all of my adulthood, America has had a bipartisan agreement that we ought to provide some basic framework of programs and policies that provide a safety net, not just for the poor but for a large portion of the American people who need help to manage."
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How large a portion? Well, figures Mr. Raspberry, "the lower third of the economy." Think about that: nearly 100 million Americans as clients of the federal government. This is not temporary assistance but a European-style "social-democratic" (that is, socialist) welfare state. It is the political culture of America's old cities, with their hordes of government-supported clients, employees, and retirees--a culture that has produced slow or negative job and population growth. And this is exactly what the Bush administration does not want.
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The failure of the European model, explicitly based on the belief that free-market capitalism is dangerous and needs to be tied down with a thousand trammels, like Gulliver, is one of the signal facts of our era, along with the failure of communism.
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In Europe, the idea that capitalism creates a permanently jobless class has become a self-fulfilling prophecy, as strict regulation and the high taxes needed to pay lavish welfare and unemployment benefits have resulted in half the U.S. rate of job creation, twice the rate of unemployment, and thus little opportunity.
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Meanwhile retirees, often young and vigorous, go off for government-funded visits to health spas at taxpayer expense. Even if this were morally sustainable, it is not economically so, as even Gerhard Schroeder has learned. But with so many voters on the dole, or employed by the government to administer the vast welfare-state apparatus, who knows whether reform or collapse will occur first?
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It's in this context that we should understand President Bush's campaign for Social Security reform. It is part of the large and coherent world view that has evolved out of compassionate conservatism. What has always made America exceptional is limitless opportunity for everyone, at all levels--the ability to find a job, to advance up the ladder as you prove yourself, and to prosper.
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The poor especially have flocked to these shores for just this chance, and have proved the promise true. A giant welfare state--whether its clients are the poor, the "lower third of the economy," or a cohort of government-pensioned retirees who almost outnumber the taxpaying workers who support them--hampers the job creation that makes all this opportunity possible.
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President Bush is determined to keep the dynamism vibrant, and to encourage and empower the poor to take part in it, rather than to suggest they are unequal to the task.

Ann's On Target......Again

2006-02-12T06:17:00.000-08:00

One of the frequent contributors to "Did You Hear What They Said?" is Ann Coulter.
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Only on a few occasions do we post her articles here at The Perspective, and, well, this is one of those occasions.
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With the recent dust-up over Danish political cartoons, we thought Ann's take on the issue was most precient.

CALVIN AND HOBBES — AND MUHAMMAD

February 8, 2006

As my regular readers know, I've long been skeptical of the "Religion of Peace" moniker for Muslims — for at least 3,000 reasons right off the top of my head. I think the evidence is going my way this week. The culture editor of a newspaper in Denmark suspected writers and cartoonists were engaging in self-censorship when it came to the Religion of Peace.

It was subtle things, like a Danish comedian's statement, paraphrased by The New York Times, "that he had no problem urinating on the Bible but that he would not dare do the same to the Quran." So, after verifying that his life insurance premiums were paid up, the editor expressly requested cartoons of Muhammad from every cartoonist with a Danish cartoon syndicate.

Out of 40 cartoonists, only 10 accepted the invitation, most of them submitting utterly neutral drawings with no political content whatsoever.

But three cartoons made political points.

One showed Muhammad turning away suicide bombers from the gates of heaven, saying "Stop, stop — we ran out of virgins!" — which I believe was a commentary on Muslims' predilection for violence.

Another was a cartoon of Muhammad with horns, which I believe was a commentary on Muslims' predilection for violence.

The third showed Muhammad with a turban in the shape of a bomb, which I believe was an expression of post-industrial ennui in a secular — oops, no, wait: It was more of a commentary on Muslims' predilection for violence.

In order to express their displeasure with the idea that Muslims are violent, thousands of Muslims around the world engaged in rioting, arson, mob savagery, flag-burning, murder and mayhem, among other peaceful acts of nonviolence.

Muslims are the only people who make feminists seem laid-back.

The little darlings brandish placards with typical Religion of Peace slogans, such as: "Behead Those Who Insult Islam," "Europe, you will pay, extermination is on the way" and "Butcher those who mock Islam." They warn Europe of their own impending 9/11 with signs that say: "Europe: Your 9/11 will come" — which is ironic, because they almost had me convinced the Jews were behind the 9/11 attack.

The rioting Muslims claim they are upset because Islam prohibits any depictions of Muhammad — though the text is ambiguous on beheadings, suicide bombings and flying planes into skyscrapers. The belief that Islam forbids portrayals of Muhammad is recently acquired.

Back when Muslims created things, rather than blowing them up, they made paintings, frescoes, miniatures and prints of Muhammad. But apparently the Quran is like the Constitution: It's a "living document," capable of sprouting all-new provisions at will.

Muslims ought to start claiming the Quran also prohibits indoor plumbing, to explain their lack of it.

Other interpretations of the Quran forbid images of humans or animals, which makes even a child's coloring book blasphemous. That's why the Taliban blew up those priceless Buddhist statues, bless their innocent, peace-loving little hearts..

Largely unnoticed in this spectacle is the blinding fact that one nation is missing from the long list of Muslim countries (by which I mean France and England) with hundreds of crazy Muslims experiencing bipolar rage over some cartoons: Iraq. Hey — maybe this democracy thing does work!

The barbaric behavior of Europe's Muslims suggests that the European welfare state may not be attracting your top-notch Muslims. Making the rash assumption for purposes of discussion that Islam is a religion and not a car-burning cult, even a real religion can't go bossing around other people like this.

Catholics aren't short on rules, but they couldn't care less if non-Catholics use birth control. Conservative Jews have no interest in forbidding other people from mixing meat and dairy. Protestants don't make a peep about other people eating food off one another's plates. (Just stay away from our plates — that's disgusting.)

But Muslims think they can issue decrees about what images can appear in newspaper cartoons. Who do they think they are, liberals?

Did You Hear What They Said?

2006-02-04T06:16:00.000-08:00

Hello True-Believers!

As we settle in for another 6 weeks of Punxsutawney Phil-induced winter, here's another edition of The Perspective's signature series to keep the fires burning.

Remember, it's not a Danish cartoon. . .they actually said it!!!

A TIMELY REMINDER

"The more profoundly we study [the Bible], and the more closely we observe its divine precepts, the better citizens we will become and the higher will be our destiny as a nation."—President William McKinley

LIBERALISM IN DECLINE

"Those who see their lives as spoiled and wasted crave equality and fraternity more than they do freedom. If they clamor for freedom, it is but freedom to establish equality and uniformity. The passion for equality is partly a passion for anonymity: to be one thread of the many which make up a tunic; one thread not distinguishable from the others. No one can then point us out, measure us against others and expose our inferiority." —Eric Hoffer

"As Hillary explained, the House 'has been run in a way so that nobody with a contrary view has had a chance to present legislation, to make an argument, to be heard.' Yes, that's what was really missing on plantations during the slavery era: the opportunity to present a contrary view. Gosh, if only the slaves had been allowed to call for cloture votes. What a difference that would have made!"--Ann Coulter

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"I admire him for his resolve against my government and its meddling,"--Cindy Sheehan, on Venezuela's leftist President Hugo Chavez

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"I don't support our troops. This is a particularly difficult opinion to have, especially if you are the kind of person who likes to put bumper stickers on his car." —Los Angeles Times columnist Joel Stein

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"When Democrats began celebrating wildly the fact that they have done nothing to rescue Social Security, they handed Bush an opportunity to step away from the text and point out the partisan cynicism of celebrating failure. My comment would have been "Remember that applause 13 years from now when Social Security goes broke."--Michael Graham

ABORTION

"Every 38 seconds in America a woman lays her body down, feeling forced to choose abortion out of a lack of practical resources and emotional support. Abortion is a reflection that society has failed women. There is a better way."--Patricia Heaton, Feminists for Life celebrity spokesman

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"When we consider that women are treated as property, it is degrading to women that we should treat our children as property to be disposed of as we see fit." —Elizabeth Cady Stanton

SO TRUE. . .

"The Founding Fathers did not foresee a permanent political class, out of touch with the people and in touch only with their careers and self-interests." —Cal Thomas

"The government is still analyzing Osama bin Laden's latest tape. On his most recent release he called Bush a liar and said that he was just after oil. It's the usual stuff we have heard before. Like at the Golden Globes."--Jay Leno

"Hindsight alone is not wisdom, and second-guessing is not a strategy."--President George W. Bush

VALERIE PLAME BLAME GAME

"We have neither sought, much less obtained, 'all documents, regardless of when created, relating to whether Valerie Wilson's status as a CIA employee, or any aspect of that status, was classified at any time between May 6, 2003 and July 14, 2003."--Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald

And now for our MULTIPLE CHOICE question:

Who said the following?

"The framers of our Constitution believed that the judicial branch should be removed from politics and that its only goal should be the fair and impartial administration of justice. But in the last few months, the confirmation of a judicial nominee has become a spectacle of misrepresentation and single-issue politics. To allow this unprecedented practice to become the rule would jeopardize the integrity and independence of the American system of justice."

A) George W. Bush

B) Joseph Biden

C) Ronald Reagan

D) Pat Roberts

Scroll down for the answer (no cheating!)

C) Ronald Reagan

Have a great day!!

Pass It, Get Over It, and Get Back to Work

2006-01-30T19:28:00.000-08:00

On the Hill, the House and Senate are having a tough time reconciling the future of the Patriot Act.

Having been in limbo since December, key elements of America's domestic protections in the campaign against our enemies are in danger of expiring if agreement can't be reached in the conference committee.

Items in question are the heightened powers that allow federal agents to tap phones, obtain library records, view bank accounts and search homes of terrorist suspects.

Any law that puts more power into the hands of the government for any reason must be closely scrutinized and revisited on a regular basis.

However, in this instance, it appears that partisanship is a greater danger than individual rights—unless someone on the Left can point us to a single instance of a citizen's rights being violated AS A DIRECT RESULT OF the Patriot Act since it became law more than four years ago.

I wonder what this person's family thinks is more important: protecting "civil liberties" or actually capturing the persons responsible for their loved one's death. . . . . . .

CAUGHT RED-HANDED!!!

2006-01-26T08:26:00.000-08:00

In another shocking development from scandal-ridden Washington, a new picture has been released by the Democratic National Committee.

After unearthing a photo of President Bush with indicted lobbyist Jack Abramhoff, the DNC has scored what will probably be the coup-de-grace in their bid to impeach the President.

Shown here below is a picture of President Bush with a KNOWN SEX OFFENDER:

(Editor's note: I hate it when I can't find the "sarcasm off" button!)

Did You Hear What They Said?

2006-01-23T09:32:00.000-08:00

That's right, True Believers! It's time for another edition of:

Remember, it's not a partisan attack. . . . . .they actually said it.

A WORD FROM OUR FOUNDERS

"We should never despair, our Situation before has been unpromising and has changed for the better, so I trust, it will again. If new difficulties arise, we must only put forth new Exertions and proportion our Efforts to the exigency of the times." —George Washington

"The moral principles and precepts contained in the Scriptures ought to form the basis of all our civil constitutions and laws."--Noah Webster

ECONOMY

"The robust American economy is the great under appreciated story of 2005. Like the purloined letter in Edgar Allan Poe's story, our superb economy is hidden in plain view, mostly ignored by a media that prefer to accentuate the negative and a Democrat Party that, for understandable partisan reasons, is loath to admit that anything could possibly be right in George Bush's America." —Rich Lowry

"There are two reasons that cutting taxes makes sense. The first reason is because you and I are over taxed... The second is that tax cuts help create jobs. Like Ronald Reagan, I believe the federal government's problem is not that it taxes too little, but that it spends too much." —Rep. Sam Graves

THE SO-CALLED SPY SCANDAL

"President Bush's post-Sept. 11, 2001, authorization to the National Security Agency to carry out electronic surveillance into private phone calls and e-mails is consistent with court decisions and with the positions of the Justice Department under prior presidents."--Former Clinton associate Attorney General John Schmidt

"As we enter another year of extreme international danger, the one threat that solely is within America's power to reduce or eliminate is our lack of national unity... As the President and other national politicians have failed to make that case, it is time for convinced members of the public (including prominent figures) to organize at a much higher level than exists a broad-based, well-financed operation to try to move the better part of the American public to a unity of purpose in the face of the present danger. Any takers?" —Tony Blankley

"The Democrat Party has decided to express indignation at the idea that an American citizen who happens to be a member of al-Qa'ida is not allowed to have a private conversation with Osama bin Laden. If they run on that in 2008, it could be the first time in history a Republican president takes even the District of Columbia." —Ann Coulter

IRAQ

"We are not where we should be at the start of yet another year of war in Iraq and Afghanistan. Our troops and the American people would be better served if the President understood this and put forth a real plan for success." —House Demo Leader Nancy Pelosi

(We'd be better served if she could provide proof that we're losing....)

"Iraq isn't Vietnam, but it would be if we left. Mass death, tyranny, death to imperfect democracy and a grievous blow to American interests. The first three, however unfortunate, are the price the isolationist Left is always willing to pay, especially if the corpse of the '60s is reanimated, complete with Joan Baez soundtracks... Besides, if al-Zarqawi takes over and slaughters his foes and imposes al-Qa'ida control over oil-rich Iraq, it's not like we're powerless. We can always march and call him names." —James Lileks

"I worry about a slow withdrawal from Iraq which makes it look like there's a victory..." —Rep. John Murtha

(Contrast that with the following quote)

"The things that will destroy America are prosperity-at-any-price, peace-at-any-price, safety-first instead of duty-first, the love of soft living, and the get-rich-quick theory of life." —Theodore Roosevelt

POLITCAL MYOPIA

"Senator Kennedy gets a six-year contract renewed every six years by the people of Massachusetts. They have passed on his integrity for 42 years, and it is beyond question." —Paul Begala

"Yes, I'm a liberal, and I'm sick of it being a bad word. I don't know at what time in history liberals have stood on the wrong side of social issues." —actor George Clooney

(Welcome to 2006, George.)

CONGRESS

"So many of the talking heads seem to miss the point: the current scandal is less about lobbyists than it is about members of Congress and other people in high government positions. If members all refused to take bribes, there would be no bribery." —Lynn Woolley

"Congress is hardly a weak institution. It is composed of the only legitimate federal lawmakers in our system of government, 535 accomplished men and women who also happen to be the most skilled camera-hogging gasbags this side of professional wrestling." —Mac Johnson

HAVE A GREAT DAY!!

SOCIALIST SPLAT!!!

2006-01-11T09:30:00.000-08:00

Talk show host and commentator Mark Levin nailed it with the following entry at National Review Online :

First there was John Roberts. Now there's Sam Alito. The left-wing battle plan honed since 1987 during Bob Bork's confirmation hearings is flopping badly. And there are several reasons for this.

Today Americans have a much more sophisticated understanding of the proper role of judges. First and foremost, the judiciary has so exceeded the bounds of its legitimate authority that the public has taken notice of, and interest in, its egregious abuses of power.

From upholding the seizure of homes and barring a display of the Ten Commandments in a courthouse, to conferring rights on terrorists and benefits on illegal immigrants, the accumulation of these policy decisions are troubling not just to conservative intellectuals, but wide swaths of American society which are affected directly by these rulings.

Conservatives have also done a superior job in explaining their case against judicial activism by way of the new media. Long before these hearings, Rush and Sean, among others, have been educating millions about the framers' intended limits on the judiciary, and have exposed the underlying hostility for representative government motivating the judicial supremacists.

The Left is now forced to defend the idea that the dictates of nine lawyers in black robes should set national policy, while conservatives are defending popular sovereignty and the founding principles. The liberal senators on the Senate Judiciary Committee look frustrated and sound incoherent because, well, they are.

Their problem is that when you don't have fidelity to the written Constitution, your judicial philosophy, such as it is, consists of nothing more than strained and often contradictory arguments made for the purpose of advancing a political and policy agenda. Hence, we hear Dianne Feinstein demand from Alito adherence to judicial precedent respecting Roe v. Wade (Arlen Specter refers to is as super-precedent), and in the next breath acceptance of something called a living and breathing Constitution.

As for Borking — the smearing of conservative Supreme Court nominees through blatant dissembling about their character and thinking — it falls flat today because the American people have become largely immune to the strategy. It has been unleashed with such frequency and fury during the last 20 years that even a casual observer understands that every conservative nominee cannot possibly be a racist, sexist, and unethical pervert.

And the left-wing groups that serve this poison, such as Hollywood's People for the (Un)American Way and the radical Alliance for (In)Justice, have lost what little credibility they once may have had with the public. Sam Alito will be confirmed. The only question is how much more damage the Democrats will inflict on themselves during the course of these hearings.

Then there's the Socialist Spin on this from Buzzflash.com:

"As BuzzFlash Predicted, the Dems in the Senate are Once Again Getting Rolled Because They Lacked the Courage to Take on Alito Before "The Big Show." NYT Headline: "Judge Alito Proves a Powerful Match for Senate Questioners." Our Constitution and Democracy are at Stake and the Dems Think a Staged Performance Means Something."

It links to a NY Times article detailing the pimp-slapping that Judge Alito dished out during the Judiciary Hearings.

Too funny.

Did You Hear What They Said? New Year's Edition

2006-01-04T06:48:00.000-08:00

Happy New Year, True Believers!

Yes, I know 2006 has already begun, but around here, it gets BUSY right after Christmas!

Life Happens.

Now that things have momentarily settled down, let's ring in the New Year right with another edition of:

Remember, it's not a hit-piece. . .they ACTUALLY SAID IT!!!

AMERICAN CULTURE

"Any man who says he is an American, but something else also, isn't an American at all. We have room for but one flag, the American flag... [W]e have room for but one language here, and that is the English language...and we have room for but one sole loyalty and that is a loyalty to the American people." —Theodore Roosevelt

"America is, essentially, a conservative nation on most issues. Liberalism is an attempt to change the nation's culture more than an attempt to accurately represent it." —Mac Johnson

"Congress can no more repeal the law of supply and demand than physicists can repeal the law of gravity. If you restrict the profits you can make for something, you'll get less of that something. If you restrict prices, you'll get less conservation." —Jerry Taylor

"The States can best govern our home concerns and the generalgovernment our foreign ones. I wish, therefore...never to seeall offices transferred to Washington, where, further withdrawnfrom the eyes of the people, they may more secretly be bought and sold at market."
-- Thomas Jefferson (letter to Judge William Johnson, 12 June 1823)

"The American people will never knowingly adopt socialism, but under the name of liberalism they will adopt every fragment of the socialist program until one day America will be a socialist nation without ever knowing how it happened." -- Norman Thomas, six-time Socialist Party presidential candidate and one of the founders of the ACLU

IRAQ

"In recent weeks most Democrats seem to have concluded that the war effort is a sinking ship, the American people have already jumped overboard, and if Democrat politicians follow them off the side, the people will reward them by putting them in charge of the life rafts." —James Taranto

"American leftists want 'peace,' without realizing that peace is a byproduct of defeating evil. The left also wants to use the war for partisan political gain and will seek to deprive President Bush of any credit for victory because it could benefit him politically. How sick is that?" —Cal Thomas

"We cannot win this militarily. Our tactics themselves keep us from winning,"--Rep. John Murtha

"It's time for Democrats who distrust President Bush to acknowledge he'll be commander-in-chief for three more years. We undermine the president's credibility at our nation's peril."--Sen. Joe Lieberman

"Those who expect to reap the blessings of freedom, must, like men, undergo the fatigues of supporting it." —Thomas Paine

"Nancy Pelosi said Democrats will produce an issue agenda for the 2006 elections but it will not include a position on Iraq…"--The Washington Post (12/16/05)

HOWARD DEAN

''The idea that the United States is going to win the war in Iraq is just plain wrong,"--Howard Dean

"Dean's take on Iraq makes even less sense than the scream in Iowa: Both are uninformed and unhelpful."--Rep. Jim Marshall (D-GA)

"I think Howard Dean...represents himself when he speaks. He does not represent me."--Rep.Ellen Tauscher (D-CA)

ABORTION

"I do think abortion is murder—of a very special and necessary sort. What else would one call the deliberate stilling of a life? And no physician involved with the procedure ever kids himself about that...legalistic distinctions among 'homicide,' 'justified homicide,' 'self-defense,' and 'murder' appear to me a semantic game. What difference does it make what we call it? Those who do it and those who witness its doing know that abortion is the stilling of a life."-- Dr. Magda Denes, abortion advocate, clinical psychologist and psychoanalyst, "Performing Abortions," Commentary Magazine 10/1976

ECONOMY

"The prosperity of commerce is now perceived and acknowledged byall enlightened statesmen to be the most useful as well as themost productive source of national wealth, and has accordinglybecome a primary object of its political cares."
-- Alexander Hamilton (Federalist No. 12, 27 November 1787)

"Economic ignorance, misconceptions and superstition drive us toward totalitarianism because they make us more willing to hand over greater control of our lives to politicians."--Walter Williams

"For tax reform to galvanize the voters and to overcome the special interests, the plan needs to be pure, simple and revolutionary." —Dick Armey

And now for our MULTIPLE CHOICE Question:

This is from Thursday, March 20, 2003

Who issued the following statement in response to the commencement of military strikes in Iraq:

“It appears that with the deadline for exile come and gone, Saddam Hussein has chosen to make military force the ultimate weapons inspections enforcement mechanism. If so, the only exit strategy is victory, this is our common mission and the world’s cause. We're in this together."

A) George W. Bush
B) Tony Blair
C) John Kerry
D) Hillary Clinton

Scroll down for the answer (no cheating!!)
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C) John Kerry (source http://kerry.senate.gov/high/record.cfm?id=191582 )

Have a great day!!!

Merry Christmas!!!

2005-12-25T05:43:00.000-08:00

We have several items for your enjoyment as you sip your hot chocolate or coffee this morning:

The Origin of "Silent Night"

The origin of the Christmas carol we know as Silent Night was a poem that was written in 1816 by an Austrian priest called Joseph Mohr.

On Christmas Eve in 1818 in the small alpine village called Oberndorf it is reputed that the organ at St. Nicholas Church had broken.

Joseph Mohr gave the poem of Silent Night (Stille Nacht) to his friend Franz Xavier Gruber and the melody for Silent Night was composed with this in mind.

The music to Silent Night was therefore intended for a guitar and the simple score was finished in time for Midnight Mass.

Silent night, holy nightAll is calm, all is bright
Round yon Virgin Mother and Child
Holy Infant so tender and mild
Sleep in heavenly peace
Sleep in heavenly peace

Silent night, holy night!
Shepherds quake at the sight
Glories stream from heaven afar
Heavenly hosts sing Alleluia!
Christ, the Saviour is born
Christ, the Saviour is born

Silent night, holy night
Son of God, love's pure light
Radiant beams from Thy holy face
With the dawn of redeeming grace
Jesus, Lord, at Thy birth
Jesus, Lord, at Thy birth "

To share with us about the true meaning of Christmas, it is our pleasure to welcome our special guest, Linus Van Pelt:

Luke 2:1-20
1And it came to pass in those days, that there went out a decree from Caesar Augustus that all the world should be taxed.
2(And this taxing was first made when Cyrenius was governor of Syria.)
3And all went to be taxed, every one into his own city.
4And Joseph also went up from Galilee, out of the city of Nazareth, into Judaea, unto the city of David, which is called Bethlehem; (because he was of the house and lineage of David:)
5To be taxed with Mary his espoused wife, being great with child.
6And so it was, that, while they were there, the days were accomplished that she should be delivered.
7And she brought forth her firstborn son, and wrapped him in swaddling clothes, and laid him in a manger; because there was no room for them in the inn.
8And there were in the same country shepherds abiding in the field, keeping watch over their flock by night.
9And, lo, the angel of the Lord came upon them, and the glory of the Lord shone round about them: and they were sore afraid.
10And the angel said unto them, Fear not: for, behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy, which shall be to all people.
11For unto you is born this day in the city of David a Saviour, which is Christ the Lord.
12And this shall be a sign unto you; Ye shall find the babe wrapped in swaddling clothes, lying in a manger.
13And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host praising God, and saying,
14Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will toward men.
15And it came to pass, as the angels were gone away from them into heaven, the shepherds said one to another, Let us now go even unto Bethlehem, and see this thing which is come to pass, which the Lord hath made known unto us.
16And they came with haste, and found Mary, and Joseph, and the babe lying in a manger.

17And when they had seen it, they made known abroad the saying which was told them concerning this child.
18And all they that heard it wondered at those things which were told them by the shepherds.
19But Mary kept all these things, and pondered them in her heart.
20And the shepherds returned, glorifying and praising God for all the things that they had heard and seen, as it was told unto them.
21And when eight days were accomplished for the circumcising of the child, his name was called JESUS, which was so named of the angel before he was conceived in the womb.

Merry Christmas to all from The Perspective!!

Did You Hear What They Said...About Christmas?

2005-12-24T04:52:00.000-08:00

On this Day before Christmas, I thought it would be a good change-of-pace to offer a holiday version of The Perspective's Signature Series:

Christmas waves a magic wand over this world, and behold, everything is softer and more beautiful. ~Norman Vincent Peale

Christmas is a time when you get homesick - even when you're home.
~Carol Nelson

He who has not Christmas in his heart will never find it under a tree.
~Roy L. Smith

Christmas, children, is not a date. It is a state of mind. ~Mary Ellen Chase

The best of all gifts around any Christmas tree: the presence of a happy family all wrapped up in each other. ~Burton Hillis

There has been only one Christmas - the rest are anniversaries.
~W.J. Cameron

Instead of being a time of unusual behavior, Christmas is perhaps the only time in the year when people can obey their natural impulses and express their true sentiments without feeling self-conscious and, perhaps, foolish. Christmas, in short, is about the only chance a man has to be himself. ~Francis C. Farley

Christmas is a time when kids tell Santa what they want and adults pay for it. Deficits are when adults tell the government what they want and their kids pay for it. ~Richard Lamm

The Supreme Court has ruled that they cannot have a nativity scene in Washington, D.C. This wasn't for any religious reasons. They couldn't find three wise men and a virgin. ~Jay Leno

Be sure to stop by tomorrow when Linus Van Pelt once again shares with us about the true meaning of Christmas.

On the 12th Day of Christmas...

2005-12-23T05:50:00.000-08:00

My true love gave to me:

Twelve Drummers Drumming (link)

Eleven Pipers Piping (link)

Ten Lords a'Leaping (link)

Nine Ladies Dancing (link)

Eight Maids a'Milking (link)

Seven Swans a Swimming (link)

Six Geese a'Laying (link)

Five Golden Rings (link)

Four Calling Birds (link)

Three French Hens (link)

Two Turtle Doves (link)

And Liberal in a Pear Tree (link)

On the 11th Day of Christmas...

2005-12-22T06:11:00.000-08:00

My true love gave to me:

Eleven Pipers Piping (link)

Ten Lords a'Leaping (link)

Nine Ladies Dancing (link)

Eight Maids a'Milking (link)

Seven Swans a Swimming (link)

Six Geese a'Laying (link)

Five Golden Rings (link)

Four Calling Birds (link)

Three French Hens (link)

Two Turtle Doves (link)

And Liberal in a Pear Tree (link)

On the Tenth Day of Christmas...

2005-12-21T04:07:00.000-08:00

My true love gave to me:

Ten Lords a'Leaping (link)

Nine Ladies Dancing (link)

Eight Maids a'Milking (link)

Seven Swans a Swimming (link)

Six Geese a'Laying (link)

Five Golden Rings (link)

Four Calling Birds (link)

Three French Hens (link)

Two Turtle Doves (link)

And Liberal in a Pear Tree (link)

On the Ninth Day of Christmas...

2005-12-20T05:27:00.000-08:00

My true love gave to me:

Nine Ladies Dancing (link)

Eight Maids a'Milking (link)

Seven Swans a Swimming (link)

Six Geese a'Laying (link)

Five Golden Rings (link)

Four Calling Birds (link)

Three French Hens (link)

Two Turtle Doves (link)

And Liberal in a Pear Tree (link)

On the 8th Day of Christmas...

2005-12-19T15:16:00.000-08:00

My true love gave to me:

WAIT A MINUTE!!!!

Before continuing, let's permit the fine folks at FreeRepublic.com to caption this photo:

"My milkmaid is so udderly fugly, I yank 'em mahself - moo-oo-oo-oo-oo"

"The Nightmare before Christmas... Trick or Teat!"

"That's Udderly Ridiculous! "

"The Treason Twins."

"Now wait a minute. I thought you guys said that the democratic party was milking Cindy Sheeman. Now I'm just confused."

Thanks, everyone!

Eight Maids a'Milking (link)

Seven Swans a Swimming (link)

Six Geese a'Laying (link)

Five Golden Rings (link)

Four Calling Birds (link)

Three French Hens (link)

Two Turtle Doves (link)

And Liberal in a Pear Tree (link)

On the Seventh Day of Christmas...

2005-12-18T06:15:00.000-08:00

My true love gave to me:

http://worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=47532

Six Geese a'Laying (link)

Five Golden Rings (link)

Four Calling Birds (link)

Three French Hens (link)

Two Turtle Doves (link)

And Liberal in a Pear Tree (link)

On the Sixth Day of Christmas...

2005-12-17T04:42:00.000-08:00

My true love gave to me:

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-rumors27sep27,0,5492806,full.story?coll=la-home-headlines

Five Golden Rings (link)

Four Calling Birds (link)

Three French Hens (link)

Two Turtle Doves (link)

And Liberal in a Pear Tree (link)

On the Fifth Day of Christmas...

2005-12-16T07:33:00.000-08:00

Five Golden Rings (link)

Four Calling Birds (link)

Three French Hens (link)

Two Turtle Doves (link)

And Liberal in a Pear Tree (link)

On the Fourth Day of Christmas...

2005-12-15T05:29:00.000-08:00

http://www.azcentral.com/news/election/articles/sidebyside-military.html

Three French Hens (link)

Two Turtle Doves (link)

And Liberal in a Pear Tree (link)

Let Freedom Ring, The Sequel

2005-12-14T19:35:00.000-08:00

The Editorial staff of The Perspective salutes the brave citizens of Iraq as they show the world, once again, that Liberty and Democracy triumph over tyranny and oppression.

The road ahead will be tough, and the challenges will seem insurmountable.

As long as the fire of Freedom burns in your soul, you will NEVER be defeated.

On the Third Day of Christmas...

2005-12-14T05:14:00.000-08:00

My true love gave to me:

Three French Hens (link)

Two Turtle Doves (link)

And a Liberal in a Pear Tree! (link)

On the Second Day of Christmas...

2005-12-13T07:09:00.000-08:00

My true love gave to me:

And a liberal in a pear tree.

On the First Day of Christmas...

2005-12-12T06:11:00.000-08:00

My true love gave to me:

Here's the link and some excerpts:

http://www.insidebayarea.com/trivalleyherald/localnews/ci_3297424

MELVILLE, N.Y. — When the Rev. Nick Zientarski uttered the name of Jesus Christ during his traditional blessing of the official Christmas tree lighting in Manhasset last week, he had no idea he had signed on as a soldier in the Christmas wars.

Even as he spoke, the Roman Catholic priest said, he could hear North Hempstead Supervisor Jon Kaiman angrily objecting behind him, "this is inappropriate."

Then, Kaiman got up and told the crowd, "I just want to make it clear that this is no way a religious ceremony."

A collective gasp was heard from the 200 adults and children gathered around the gazebo across from Town Hall.

----

"Manhasset is a predominantly Christian town, and it's a conservative town," said John Kiggins, owner of Manhasset Sporting Goods and a parishioner at St. Mary's, where Zientarski is a priest. "There's a certain number of us who believe that if we're celebrating Christmas, then call it Christmas and recognize that we're celebrating the birth of Christ. "

Did You Hear What They Said?

2005-12-02T07:37:00.000-08:00

Welcome back, True Believers!

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

Remember, it's not a smear tactic.....they actually said it!

LIBERTY
"Guard with jealous attention the public liberty. Suspect every one who approaches that jewel. Unfortunately, nothing will preserve it but downright force. Whenever you give up that force, you are inevitably ruined."
—Patrick Henry

"A free people claim their rights as derived from the laws of
nature, and not as the gift of their chief magistrate."

-- Thomas Jefferson (Rights of British America, 1774)

IRAQ
"Aren't the Democrats, though, trying to have it both ways? They voted for the war—Hillary Clinton, John Kerry, John Edwards—and now, it's not going well. So they're saying, well, the president misled us. They had access to the National Intelligence Estimate, and in that National Intelligence Estimate, there were
caveats from the State Department particularly, about the quality of the intelligence. But they still voted for the war." —Tim Russert

"I say that the fight against Americans began with Abu Ghraib. It began with the invasion of Iraq. That's when terrorism started."--Rep. John Murtha (D) Pennsylvania

(And what was 9/11??)

"I wonder whether the Senate chamber itself should not be renamed the Abu Musab al-Zarqawi United States Senate. With increasingly rare exceptions, just about everything that emerges from the chamber tends to support
the Zarqawi view of Iraq -- that this is a psychological war in which the Great Satan is an effete wimp who can be worn down and chased back to his La-Z-Boy recliner in Florida."-Mark Steyn

"Democrats like to make antiwar noises for their moonbat base, but were unwilling to cast a vote that could hurt them with swing voters. They were too cowardly to be forthright cowards."--Jack Kelly

"President Clinton kept us out of war and recognized that one cannot attack a foreign dictator simply because the West's intelligence agencies say he has weapons of mass destruction. What if he does not? What if his thwarting of United Nations resolutions and his tauntings are simply empty macho boasts? Mr. Clinton's policy was to wait and see what the French do." —Emmett Tyrrell

POLITICS

"If you think that Uncle Sam feeds you while Big Business is trying to milk you dry, you're a Democrat. If you think that God feeds you, with a little help from a job through Big Business, while Uncle Sam is milking you dry, you're a Republican." —Jay Homnick

FAITH IN GOD

"It is the duty of all men in society, publicly, and at stated
seasons, to worship the SUPREME BEING, the great Creator
and Preserver of the universe. And no subject shall be hurt,
molested, or restrained, in his person, liberty, or estate, for
worshipping GOD in the manner most agreeable to the dictates of
his own conscience; or for his religious profession or sentiments;
provided he doth not disturb the public peace, or obstruct others
in their religious worship."

-- John Adams (Thoughts on Government, 1776)

"It is the duty of all Nations to acknowledge the providence of
Almighty God, to obey his will, to be grateful for his benefits,
and humbly to implore his protection and favors."

-- George Washington (Thanksgiving Proclamation, 3 October 1789)

Reference: George Washington: A Collection, W.B. Allen, ed. (543)

"Before any man can be considered as a member of Civil Society, he must be considered as a subject of the Governor of the Universe."

-- James Madison (A Memorial and Remonstrance, 1785)

SOCIETY
"Work, not welfare, is the key to social integration. Making excuses for violence begets more violence." —Jack Kelly

"Government subsidization and protection of irresponsible behavior has gotten blacks into the social black hole in which they now find themselves. Black kids are not suffering because they need more rights. They are suffering because they are not learning, from an early age, about responsibilities and consequences." —Star Parker

"A consortium of colleges is suing the federal government right now because they object only to the requirement that military recruiters be admitted to their campuses as a condition of receiving federal aid. Already these colleges are abiding thousands of pages of regulation. They object to this specific one. Perhaps they have forgotten that Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution—which enumerates the powers of Congress—mentions defense eight times. Education is not mentioned at all." —Larry Arnn

"The law must hold at least some people responsible for their decisions—otherwise, how can fast-food or tobacco companies be blamed for selling their products? Why is a big corporation responsible for its decisions but an individual not responsible for his?"--John Stossel

"France always thought it had one last resort, one ready strategy for fending off the rage of its Arab street: beyond avoidance lay appeasement. No country in the West has done more to cultivate world Arab opinion, to appease Arab terrorists, to ostentatiously oppose American Middle East policy (Iraq above all), to champion the signal Arab cause of Palestine. It was no accident that Yasser Arafat chose Paris as his place to die—Paris, after Jerusalem, his second holiest city. Paris burns anyway. As the French seem to learn every 70 years, appeasement does not work. It merely whets the appetite."
—Charles Krauthammer

"Liberals stoutly maintain that a woman has a privacy right to kill her unborn child, that pornographers have a right to broadcast the most nauseating filth, that scummy traitors have a right to spit on the flag, that adults have a right to have sex with adolescents, and that two men or two women have a right
to marry—but two individuals who gave a child life, who fed, clothed, sheltered and nurtured that child, have no right (constitutional or historical, explicit or implied) to control when, where and in what way they will be exposed to sex. And they wonder why, for normal people, 'liberalism' has become a dirty word."
—Don Feder

MULTIPLE CHOICE

Who said the following?

"We do not need more intellectual power, we need more moral power. We do not need more knowledge, we need more character. We do not need more government, we need more culture. We do not need more law, we need more religion. We do not need more of the things that are seen, we need more of the things that are unseen. If the foundation be firm, the foundation will stand." —

A) John Kennedy
B) Calvin Coolidge
C) Jesse Helms
D) Ronald Reagan

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B) Calvin Coolidge

Have a great day!

A Response to the Left

2005-12-01T07:49:00.000-08:00

Due to the overwhelming responses to the November 26 posting:

http://therobb7.blogspot.com/2005/11/but-can-you-prove-it.html

I decided that since the subject matter was quite important, and since the volume of information that I have in my reply is considerable, it would be better to create a new post to continue the discussion.

The reader would be well-served to read the "comments" at the above link first before continuing here.

A reader named "s9" commented "We always knew the Army were a bunch of pansies who like to dress up in kinky boots and tight pants"

My response was "I wonder if s9 has ever called a current Army soldier a "pansy" to his face....."

It was a legitimate query to see if s9 had ever actually done something so bold. I'd be willing to pay good money to see the out come.

In fact, my nephew (Army) should be stateside around the first of next year. I could arrange a meeting ......

The next response by s9 puzzled me, however:

"Let's just say I'm a firm believer in the practical value of allowing gays and lesbians to serve openly in the military."

How did THAT enter the conversation?
Anyway, I digress.

When I asked for "irrefutable evidence, the kind of evidence that would stand up in a court of law, that pre-war intel was manipulated" was that too much to ask for????

The response from s9 was quite telling:

"While you're at it, why not ask Santa Claus for a pony?"

Apparently, no such evidence exists.

However, to their credit, s9 stated that any hard evidence "will require an investigation."

OK, fine.....but atleast wait unitl you have the actual evidence IN HAND before making accusations.

Now let us move on to what appears to be the larger bone of contention with s9.
On November 26, 2005 I made the following statement:

"I don't mind dissent, but something must be made clear:

Dissent that is used as propaganda by the enemy is sedition in the hands of the enemy."

The aforementioned reader, s9, took that to mean that I was calling " for the summary field execution of a decorated veteran and sitting member of Congress for treason."

s9 went on to say the following:

"You're the one who called the military ineffectual when you called out a decorated veteran and sitting member of Congress for sedition— or was it treason?— and left hanging in the wind whether the U.S. Armed Forces should now be preparing to perform a battlefield execution of an openly declared domestic enemy of the Constitution. "

First of all, let's dial down the rhetoric here.

I am NOT advocating a battlefield execution of a sitting member of Congress.

Critical speech, political organizing, or suspicious association between individuals may be considered as "sedition."

Though such behaviours may be common in a free society, in societies where sedition laws exist the acts and behaviours which qualify as sedition are highly subjective.

By "subjective" I mean that it is my opinion that Rep. Murtha's comments do not need to be aired publicly, but rather privately, in closed-door meetings with those who make the decisions (the President, Joint Chiefs, SecDef, etc.)

Let's consider my original statement in it's proper context.

Speech that endangers American lives can be restricted in wartime, censorship in wartime is standard for all countries, including all democracies, and speech has led to trials – and convictions – for treason, Tokyo Rose and Axis Sally being two obvious examples.

The subversive left and its liberal allies are far stronger and more dangerous to our security now than they were in the 1960's.

I do not think the Bush Administration could politically enforce censorship now. This means we are that much more vulnerable to our enemies both at home and abroad.

The WWII era slogan “Loose Lips Sink Ships” was designed to encourage American civilians to be discreet, that is to censor themselves lest they endanger the brave men and women defending them on the field of battle.

In other words, even if the government does not have the political strength to impose wartime censorship, citizens should exercise reasonable restraint in the way they conduct their criticisms of war policy.

Those who denounce their own democracy as a “fascist” and “terrorist” and maliciously “lying” and an “outlaw state,” are inviting others to hate us and attack us, and they must accept responsibility for their acts.

This confusion is more than dangerous. It is undermining the morale of our troops and encouraging our terrorist enemies to think that they can win this war if they kill enough Americans and Iraqis in the Middle East.

If Rep. Murtha and the left are successful in their seditious effort to force an American surrender to the terrorists in Iraq, we will be forced to fight them in our own country.

In that case tens of thousands of Americans may die, and the Cut-and-Run Caucus will be in serious need of soap and water.

I have no problem with critics of the war.

My complaint is with those in elected leaders squabling in public, where their comments can be used as propaganda by the enemy.

Bottom line: Our elected leaders need to show a united front in public, and save the disagreements for the boardroom...away from the cameras.

(EDITOR'S NOTE: For those of you that are late to the party, this post has been edited to clarify my OPINION.)

It is in the crucible of debate that ideas are forged that can stand the test of time.

I do not and have not ever claimed that my opinions are superior to anyone else's.

If I have conveyed that impression to any visitor, I honestly apologize.

I welcome comments to The Perspective because debating the issues keeps me sharp.

...But Can You PROVE It?

2005-11-26T07:02:00.000-08:00

Here are a few thoughts gleaned from the following article:

http://www.washtimes.com/national/20051122-121630-5114r.htm

"The Republican leadership did a masterful job of manipulating and distorting Representative Murtha's vote, somewhat similar to what we saw with the administration's manipulation of intelligence with the case they used to justify the war," said Jim Manley, a spokesman for Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, Nevada Democrat.

..and the evidence you have to support that accusation would be....??

"Everyone agrees what the president is doing is not working and we need to change direction in Iraq," said Brendan Daly, a spokesman for House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, California Democrat

Since I disagre with you, your statement is therefore false.

"The American people have lost confidence in President Bush's ability as commander in chief, and his flawed policies have failed to bring stability and security to Iraq." --Rep. Robert Wexler, Florida Democrat

Since Mr. Wexler missed the memo, here is the four-point plan of Operation Iraqi Freedom:

1. Kill Terrorists
2. Teach the Iraqis to kill terrorists
3. Help Iraqis rebuild their infrastructure
4. Leave behind the only democracy of its kind in the Middle East

I don't mind dissent, but something must be made clear:

Dissent that is used as propaganda by the enemy is sedition in the hands of the enemy.

Choose Your Fate or It Will Be Chosen For You

2005-11-18T08:32:00.000-08:00

The ridiculous camera-vamping by Representative John P. Murtha of Pennsylvania just crossed a line that has inspired many Americans to say "ENOUGH!!"

To wit:

"Representative John P. Murtha of Pennsylvania, a Vietnam combat veteran who voted for the Iraq war, said the 153,000 American troops in Iraq should be pulled out within six months."--New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/18/politics/18military.html?hp&ex=1132290000&en=2f4f176ef0c3f15b&ei=5094&partner=homepage

MEMO TO AL QEADA: Osama Bin Laden was right. Just hold out a little longer and America will cut and run.

Apparently Rep. Murtha thinks Americans are too stupid to remember that he voted IN FAVOR OF RE-INSTATING THE MILITARY DRAFT!!

The proof: http://clerk.house.gov/evs/2004/roll494.xml

Murtha's pandering comes on the heels of Nevada Senator Harry Reid's public impugning of Vice President Dick Cheney:

"The manipulation of intelligence to sell a war in Iraq, Vice President Cheney's involved in that."

MEMO TO SENATOR REID: If you don't have HARD FACTS and INDISPUTABLE EVIDENCE that pre-war intelligence of distorted then SIT DOWN, SHUT UP and GIVE OUR TROOPS THE SUPPORT THEY NEED!

May I suggest to all Americans that they fax the following to their Senator's office:

A Bill: Resolution of Censure of Senator Harry Reid

Whereas on November 8, 2005 Senator Harry Reid of Nevada wilfully and publicly impugned the integrity of the Vice President of the United States by saying "The manipulation of intelligence to sell a war in Iraq, Vice President Cheney's involved in that."

And whereas Senator Reid continued his public attack by stating "The White House energy policy that puts big oil ahead of the American consumer, Vice President Cheney is behind that."

And whereas Senator Ried also said "Leaking classified information to discredit White House critics, the vice president is behind that."

And whereas these types of public personal attacks, WITHOUT OFFERING ANY EVIDENCE, demonstrate action contrary to senatorial ethics and tend to bring the Senate into dishonor and disrepute, that obstruct the constitutional processes of the Senate, and to impair its dignity; such conduct by a member of the United States Senate is hereby condemned.

RESOLVED: That the Senator from Nevada, Harry Reid, failed to maintain proper public ethical standards by impugning the ethics of a sitting Vice President of the United States. His behavior on November 8, 2005
betrays the necessary good conduct as a Senator and has affected the honor of the Senate.

His abuse of Senate rules has prevented his fellow members from carrying out their assigned duties, thereby obstructing the constitutional processes of the Senate, and that this conduct of the Senator from Nevada, Mr. Reid, is contrary to senatorial traditions and is hereby condemned.

While we're at it, why not one for Sen. Jay Rockefeller:

A Bill: Resolution of Censure of Jay Rockefeller

WHEREAS on Nov. 13, 2005 during a nationally televised interview, Senator Jay Rockefeller of West Virginia admitted to taking it upon himself to visit the countries of Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Syria in January of 2002 whereupon he "told each of the heads of state that it was my view that George Bush had already made up his mind to go to war against Iraq."

AND WHEREAS Senator Jay Rockefeller also told those heads of state "that was a predetermined set course which had taken shape shortly after 9/11."

AND WHEREAS Senator Jay Rockefeller, along with Senators Dick Durbin and Ron Wyden leaked details about a secret "black ops" CIA satellite program in December of 2004 in a move that may have seriously compromised national security.

RESOLVED: That the Senator from West Virginia, Jay Rockefeller, failed to maintain proper public ethical standards by impugning the ethics of a sitting President of the United States.

His behavior on Nov. 13, 2005, in which he made allegations against the President WITHOUT GIVING ANY EVIDENCE, has betrayed the necessary good conduct as a Senator and has affected the honor of the Senate.
That divulging of sensitive, top-secret information by the Senator from West Virginia, Mr. Rockefeller, constitutes a direct national security breach and should result in the absolute and forthwith revocation of his security clearances.
BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED that the conduct of the Senator from West Virginia, Mr. Rockefeller, is to be deemed by the United States Senate as contrary to senatorial traditions and is hereby condemned.

Did You Hear What They Said?

2005-11-16T09:56:00.000-08:00

Remember, it's not hate speech. . . the actually said it!!

A WORD FROM OUR FOUNDERS

"We have abundant reason to rejoice that in this Land the lightof truth and reason has triumphed over the power of bigotry andsuperstition, and that every person may here worship God according to the dictates of his own heart. In this enlightened Age and inthis Land of equal liberty it is our boast, that a man's religioustenets will not forfeit the protection of the Laws, nor deprivehim of the right of attaining and holding the highest Offices that are known in the United States."
-- George Washington (letter to the Members of the New Church inBaltimore, 27 January 1793)

WITHDRAWING HARRIET MIERS

"The unelected power-brokers of the far right have forced the withdrawal of President Bush's own Supreme Court nominee, before a confirmation hearing has even been held."--President Ralph Neas, People for the American Way

(Nine un-elected SCOTUS Justices overturned the 5th Amendment. Where was Ralph Neas when America needed him?)

"More Democrats should have complained that Miers was unqualified. But they didn't, apparently fearing an alternative nominee, and their silence speaks volumes about the timidity and intellectual cowardice of their party's current leadership." —Los Angeles Times editorial

"Conservatives are never stronger than when we are advancing our principles"--Rush Limbaugh

NOMINATING JUDGE ALITO FOR SCOTUS

"This is a debate the president, who needs a victory, should relish. Will it, as Democrats mournfully say, "divide" the country? Yes. Debates about serious subjects do that. The real reason those Democrats are mournful is that they correctly suspect they are on the losing side of the divide."--George Will

“I’m hopeful the Senate will honor the results of the last election and give this well-qualified nominee a full and vigorous hearing followed by a fair up-or-down vote on the Senate floor. To do any less would result in long-term damage to the Presidency and the Senate.”--Senator Lindsey Graham (R-South Carolina)

"Any nominee who so worries the radical left is worthy of serious consideration. Based on what is now known about Judge Alito, we applaud the president for this outstanding nomination."--Dr. James Dobson

"By selecting Alito, the president shows that he has learned that this is not a time to run from a fight. It’s time to challenge everyone and their principles."--Tony Snow

"By choosing Judge Alito and kowtowing to the conservative right, President Bush, led by a tainted Karl Rove, has made a calculated Machiavellian decision to tear the nation apart in order to placate a minority radical Republican base."--Congressman Robert Wexler (D-FL)
(This from a man who wants to raise taxes to fix Social Security: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/7847922/ )

"Judge Alito is a constitutionalist who has weathered one of the more liberal federal circuit courts in the country,"--Manuel Miranda, chair of the Third Branch Conference

"All nominees deserve a fair process and an up-or-down vote. No nominee should be used as a political pawn."--Sen. John Cornyn, (R) Texas

"Now the gauntlet has been, I think, thrown down. It was humiliating, it was degrading and it's a profound and distributing view of Judge Alito that he would uphold spousal notification as he did in the Pennsylvania case, and it raises concerns about his views of women." —Kate Michelman, former president of NARAL

ALGORE

"They say Saddam is delusional. He still thinks he's president and gives speeches standing next to his bed at night. No, wait, that's Al Gore."--Jay Leno

WAR

"Setting up liberal democracies and spreading freedom is what America has always fought for, and I trust always will fight for. If America ever ceases to fight for these things, she will have lost herself, and the world will have lost the shining city on a hill that America ever strives to be."--Jonathan D. Strong

" The Dems' inability to craft any policy to defeat terrorism is startling. It's more than four years after 9/11, and they still don't have anything to recommend except retreat and surrender. If the President speaks against them, by name—clearly and directly to the American people—he can not only re-establish support for the war, he can lay the groundwork for another conservative to take up the fight in 2008." —Jed Babbin

"Democrats are making the contention that they were told lies prior to the Iraq war, and believed them, central to their party's identity. Gullibility is not a leadership trait."--Rich Lowry

"The stakes in the global war on terror are too high and the national interest is too important for politicians to throw out false charges."--President George W. Bush

MEDIA ANTI-WAR BIAS

"In Wednesday's Los Angeles Times (10-26-05) there are three stories about U.S. deaths in Iraq covering 4,228 words. They are accompanied by a total of nine color photos.

"Meanwhile, the Times takes the major historical event, "Iraq Charter Ratified by Big Margin in Final Tally" ... and puts it on page A6. And for this, they give readers 1,056 words with one black-and-white photo and a map of Iraq."-- Dave Pierre

"The U.S. Marine Corps has done more for global freedom and social justice in two years than has every U.N. peacekeeping mission since the inception of that now-corrupt organization."--Victor Davis Hanson

CIA LEAK (AKA "THE VALERIE PLAME BLAME GAME")

"The indictment will not seek to prove that the war was justified or unjustified."--Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald on the indictment of Lewis Libby

"Too often the authorization of an investigation is essentially a fishing license to enable the prosecutor to find something to prosecute, whether or not he can get evidence to prosecute the crime he was supposed to be investigating."--Thomas Sowell

TAXES

"It is a singular advantage of taxes on articles of consumptionthat they contain in their own nature a security against excess.They prescribe their own limit, which cannot be exceeded withoutdefeating the end purposed - that is, an extension of the revenue."
-- Alexander Hamilton (Federalist No. 21)

GOVERNMENT

"The history of liberty is the history of the limitation of government, not the increase of it." —Woodrow Wilson

HILLARY CLINTON

"Anyone that stood up... was smashed down and belittled,very personally. Not only would she sort of humiliate you in front of your colleagues or whoever happened to be around, Hillary tended to kind of campaign against people behind their back, and that was certainly my experience."
--former Clinton press secretary Dee Dee MyersPBS Frontline, 16 Jan 2001The Clinton Years

OPINION POLLS

"The polls do not reflect reality, If all polls were right, John Kerry would be president now. Thank goodness he is not."--Tammy Bruce

And now for our MULTIPLE CHOICE QUESTION:

Who said the following?

"Just as it would be madness to settle on medical treatment for the body of a person by taking an opinion poll of the neighbors, so it is irrational to prescribe for the body politic by polling the opinions of the people at large."

A) Karl Rove
B) Cisero
C) Plato
D) Hillary Clinton

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C) Plato

Have a great day!!

Did You Hear What They Said?

2005-10-26T05:12:00.000-07:00

Welcome back, True Believers!

It's time for another edition of:

Remember, it's not hate-speech...THEY ACTUALLY SAID IT!

THE LEFT

"If you want to understand the Left, the best place to start is with an understanding of hysteria. Leading leftists either use hysteria as a political tactic or are actually hysterics. Take almost any subject the Left discusses and you will find hysteria... America neglects its poor, beats up its gays, oppresses its women, fouls its environment, ignores its children's educations, denies blacks their votes, and invades other countries for corporate profits: These are common accusations of the Left. No event is free of leftist hysteria. On the third day after Katrina, civil rights activist Randall Robinson reported that blacks in New Orleans were resorting to cannibalism. Indeed, most of the news media coverage bordered on the hysterical. Not to mention the hysterical predictions of 10,000-plus dead in New Orleans... [T]he irony in all of this is that the Left sees itself as the side that thinks intellectually and non-emotionally. And that is hysterical." —Dennis Prager

"Given the abysmal failure of state and local officials in Louisiana to plan adequately for or respond to the effects of Hurricane Katrina on the city of New Orleans, and given the long history of public corruption in Louisiana, I hope the House will refrain from directly appropriating any funds from the public treasury to either the state of Louisiana or the city of New Orleans. The head of the FBI in New Orleans just this past year described the state's public corruption as 'epidemic, endemic and entrenched.' Over the last 30 years, a long list of Louisiana politicians have been convicted of crimes; the list includes a governor, an attorney general, an elections commissioner, an agriculture commissioner, three successive insurance commissioners, a congressman, a federal judge, a State Senate president, six other state legislators, and a host of appointed officials, local sheriffs, city councilmen and parish police jurors. I am not confident that Louisiana officials can be trusted to administer federal relief aid." —Rep. Tom Tancredo

"There [is] no point-person for the Democrats who can help Democratic supporters easily understand their agenda. Part of that is there is no point-person. Another part of that is there is no agenda. Until the Democrats can clearly define an alternative future under their control, the only future they will continue to face is: Republicans in power." —Rich Galen

"The solution to poverty...doesn't lie in a collective movement. It lies in the will and discipline of individual people who dedicate themselves to living moral lives, striving to improve their circumstances, and providing greater opportunities for their children." —Mark Goldblatt

"Poor blacks do not need to be 'mobilized' to turn even more responsibility for their lives over to others. They need to go to school and take care of their families."--Star Parker

"Study after study shows that alterations in norms and values are at the heart of economic and behavioral troubles. That's why so much research boils down to the old rule: If you want to avoid poverty, finish high school, don't have kids in your teens, and get married." —John Leo

"When government tries to be all things to all people, it fails at the essentials." —Former House Budget Committee Chairman John Kasich

CONGRESSMAN TOM DELAY

"It is well to remember that an indictment is not a conviction. An indictment is a tool the government and its representatives too often use to intimidate and persecute citizens against whom it may have a grudge." —Lyn Nofziger

"It's interesting to think that many of those who are gleeful over the unproven charges against DeLay have spent the past few years arguing strenuously that it would be better if Saddam Hussein were still in power." —James Taranto

SUPREME COURT

"It is my belief that there are 'absolutes' in our Bill of Rights, and that they were put there on purpose by men who knew what the words meant and meant their prohibitions to be 'absolutes'." —Justice Hugo L. Black

"And it proves, in the last place, that liberty can have nothingto fear from the judiciary alone, but would have everything tofear from its union with either of the other departments."
-- Alexander Hamilton (Federalist No. 78, 1788)

"Some 41 of 107 Justices and nine of 17 Chief Justices never previously sat on a court and some of them, like Chief Justices John Marshall, Robert Brooke Taney (for most of his decisions), Salmon P. Chase, Charles Evans Hughes and William H. Rehnquist, have been topnotch. Thus, a lack of judicial experience is not automatically a disqualifier."--E. Ralph Hostetter

"We may be tossed upon an ocean where we can see no land—nor, perhaps, the sun or stars. But there is a chart and a compass for us to study, to consult, and to obey. That chart is the Constitution." —Daniel Webster

"Any philosophy that does not confine judges to the original understanding inevitably makes the Constitution the plaything of willful judges." —Robert Bork

"The basis of our political systems is the right of the people to make and to alter their Constitutions of Government. But the Constitution,which at any time exists, 'till changed by an explicit and authentic act of the whole People is sacredly obligatory upon all." --George Washington

TAXES

"Would it not be better to simplify the system of taxation ratherthan to spread it over such a variety of subjects and pass throughso many new hands."
-- Thomas Jefferson (letter to James Madison, 1784)

"The income tax is not an example of a good idea gone bad. It was bad from the beginning, and it just keeps getting worse." —Chris Edwards

DEMOCRACY

"[T]he flames kindled on the 4 of July 1776, have spread overtoo much of the globe to be extinguished by the feeble enginesof despotism; on the contrary, they will consume these enginesand all who work them."
-- Thomas Jefferson (letter to John Adams, 12 September 1821)

"Allowing Americans to vote has never led to créches being torn down across America. It's never led to prayer being purged from every public school in the nation. It's never led to gay marriage. It's never led to returning slaves who had escaped to free states to their slavemasters. And it's never led to 30 million dead babies. We've gone from a representative democracy to a monarchy, and the most appalling thing is—even conservatives just hope like the dickens the next king is a good one." —Ann Coulter

PRESIDENT BUSH

"But Bush, for good or ill, believes in himself as the real Third Way deal: It's a remarkable achievement to get damned day in and day out as the new Hitler when 90 percent of the time you're Tony Blair with a ranch."--MARK STEYN

IRAQ

"Iraq is a great American success story. You know, free Iraq... it's done. Free Afghanistan... it's done. Democrats have been driving around with free Tibet stickers for fifty years, and it's no nearer than it was when they stuck them on their 1962 Volvos."—Mark Steyn

FAITH

"No where in the scripture has God ever assured anyone, baptized or not, of a carefree, no conflict existence... When (not if) the trials come, we can be certain that they will reveal our courage, call, commitment and convictions... Regardless of how disheartening the difficulties can be, they should not send us into a tailspin. Rather, they should bring out the best in the believer. They can, if played correctly, bring us back to the biblical basics of faith, hope and love." —Doug Giles

HILLARY CLINTON AND HER HUSBAND

"With Jamie Gorelick working from the 'inside' and Sandy Berger on the 'outside,' the 9-11 commission was capably prevented from identifying the culpability of the Clinton White House in leaving America vulnerable to attack. More than four years after leaving office, the Clinton political machine continues to seriously endanger the interests of the nation. Yet Nancy Pelosi and the Democrats remain steadfastly unaware of any 'culture of corruption' here. And America has only begun to pay the price." —Christopher Adamo

"We're going to take things away from you on behalf of the common good." - Hillary Clinton 6/28/04

And finally, our MULTIPLE CHOICE QUESTION:

Who said the following about Hillary Clinton?

"I think she is a political animal who believes she has to be a war hawk to keep up with the big boys."

A) Rush Limbaugh
B) Tom DeLay
C) Cindy Sheehan
D) Helen Thomas

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C) Cindy Sheehan

Have a Great Day!

Did You Hear What They Said?

2005-10-03T17:00:00.000-07:00

That's right, True Believers! It's time for another rollicking edition of:

Remember, it's not a "hit piece"....it's a DIRECT QUOTE!

GOVERNMENT

"Like so many other things in Washington, the word 'hearing' in the U.S. Senate has absolutely nothing to do with the act of listening. It has everything to do with talking." —Rich Galen

"The worst failures of the past two weeks have been big government failures. The biggest successes, by contrast, have come out of this country's incredibly vibrant, amazingly diverse and fantastically generous civil society. Sooner or later, it will be impossible not to draw political lessons from that paradox." —Washington Post columnist Anne Applebaum

"A republican form of government presupposes self-government—the capacity of citizens to govern themselves according to reason—and does not, if it intends to survive, champion them as 'victims' when they don't."--George Neumayr

"the Democrats are hoping to boost their party's sagging power and are threatening a filibuster if things don't go their way. Once again, they are prepared to make their case at the expense of what is right for the country."-- Mark Alexander

"A government big enough to give you everything you want is big enough to take away everything you have." —President Gerald Ford

"We may not imagine how our lives could be more frustrating and complex—but Congress can." —Cullen Hightower

"As we hear calls for a 'compassionate' response to the victims of this [hurricane] tragedy, it is important to remember that you can't be compassionate with other people's money. This difference is as simple as the difference between my reaching into my pocket for money to help someone in need and my reaching into your pocket for the same purpose. The former is charity—the latter is not." —Michael Tanner

"The friendliness and charity of our countrymen can always be relied upon to relieve their fellow citizens in misfortune. This has been repeatedly and quite lately demonstrated. Federal aid in such cases encourages the expectation of paternal care on the part of the Government and weakens the sturdiness of our national character, while it prevents the indulgence among our people of that kindly sentiment and conduct which strengthens the bonds of a common brotherhood." —President Grover Cleveland

CINDY SHEEHAN

"Speaking in front of more than 500 supporters in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, Ms. Sheehan, speaking of Senator Clinton, said, "She knows that the war is a lie but she is waiting for the right time to say it."

Then, as the crowd cheered, she issued a challenge to Senator Clinton, saying, "You say it or you are losing your job."-- http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/19/politics/19sheehan.html

"Cindy Sheehan, originally a sympathetic figure, is now merely a pathetic one, and we're inclined to ignore her totally, except that we keep remembering all those Angry Left types who, a few short weeks ago, were declaring that she had 'absolute moral authority' and was going to transform American politics. If thinking about that doesn't give you a good, deep, soul-cleansing laugh, nothing will." —James Taranto

DEMOCRATS

"When the Democrats say something is "un-American," they usually mean something very American that they don't want in America anymore. Repeatedly during the presidential campaign the Democrats declared their independence from America -- and then were surprised when ordinary Americans went to the polls to give it to them."--George Neumayr

"There's such a broad ignorance or contempt for constitutional principles among the American people that any politician who bore truth faith and allegiance to the Constitution would commit political suicide." —Walter Williams

INSIGHT

"Great is the road I climb, but the garland offered by an easier effort is not worth the gathering." —Sextus Propertius

"Today's out-of-wedlock black births and single-parent households are triple what they were in the '40s and '50s. The collapse of the black family took off when big government programs, particularly welfare, were launched, compliments of black and white liberals, after the civil-rights movement." —Star Parker

AND FINALLY....OUR MULTIPLE CHOICE QUESTION:

Who said the following:

''The meaning of peace is the absence of opposition to socialism.''

a) Winston Churchill
b) Karl Marx
c) Golda Meir
d) David Horowitz

Scroll down for the answer (no cheating!!)
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b) Karl Marx

Have great day!

You Mean It WASN'T Bush's Fault???

2005-10-01T05:40:00.000-07:00

I came across this article on MSNBC.com about design flaws in the levees surrounding New Orleans dating back to the 1990's......BEFORE George W. Bush was President.

Here's the link: http://msnbc.msn.com/id/9532037/

Here's the story:

New Orleans levee reported weak in 1990s Records: Construction firm alerted engineers, but no action was taken

By Lisa Myers & the NBC Investigative Unit

NBC News
Updated: 11:40 a.m. ET Sept. 30, 2005

WASHINGTON - The thin gray line of concrete floodwalls erected along drainage canals was supposed to protect New Orleans. But when Katrina hit, portions of the walls came tumbling down, flooding the city.

Experts are just now beginning to probe why those floodwalls failed. They want to determine whether the storm surge from Katrina poured over them, or whether the walls collapsed because of a possible flaw.

“This is fairly typical of some of the failures we've seen,” says Professor Ivor van Heerden, a hurricane expert at Louisiana State University who has examined the wreckage. “These walls underwent catastrophic structural failure.”

But why?

NBC News has obtained what may be a key clue, hidden in long forgotten legal documents. They reveal that when the floodwall on the 17th Street Canal was built a decade ago, there were major construction problems — problems brought to the attention of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.

A 1998 ruling, by an administrative judge for the Corps' Board of Contract Appeals, shows that the contractor, Pittman Construction, told the Corps that the soil and the foundation for the walls were “not of sufficient strength, rigidity and stability” to build on.

“That's incredibly damning evidence,” says van Heerden, “I mean, really, incredibly damning.”

Pittman won the contract in 1993. There already was an earthen levee made of soil. Embedded in that was a thin metal wall called sheet piling. The contractor was hired to pour concrete on top of all that to form the flood wall.

But the 1998 documents — filed as part of a legal dispute over costs — indicate the contractor complained about “weakness” of the soil and “the lack of structural integrity of the existing sheet pile around which the concrete was poured.” The ruling also referenced the “flimsiness” of the sheet piling.

NBC showed the findings to engineering experts.

“That type of issue about the strength of the soils, of course, bears directly on the performance of a floodwall,” says retired LSU oceonography and engineering professor Joe Suhayda.

“I think it is very significant,” adds Robert G. Bea, a former Corps engineer and professor at the University of California, Berkeley, who is part of a National Science Foundation inquiry into the failure of flood controls. “It begins to explain some things that I couldn't explain based on the information that I've had.”

The construction company said as a result of these problems the walls were shifting and “out of tolerance,” meaning they did not meet some design specifications. Nevertheless, the Army Corps of Engineers accepted the work.

“It seems to me that the authorities really should have questioned whether these walls were safe,” says van Heerden.

The judge, in her ruling, blamed the contractor for the construction errors and turned down Pittman's request for more funds.

Pittman Construction is now out of business. (A firm called CR Pittman Construction, also based in New Orleans, is a separate company.)

In a statement, the Corps of Engineers tells NBC:

"The records on the Pittman contract appeal will undoubtedly be part of any thorough investigation to determine the cause of the levee breaches in New Orleans. The Corps is preserving evidence that could be used in the investigation. The exact composition and structure of the team responsible for a potential investigation has not been determined at this time."

So if this was going on before President Bush took office, the blame would then be on...........

Happy Anniversary!

2005-09-17T05:02:00.000-07:00

Happy Anniversary!!!!

That's right, it was one year ago that I began my foray into the world of the blogosphere.

To celebrate, let's have another rousing edition of :

DID YOU HEAR WHAT THEY SAID??

THE POLITICS OF HURRICANE KATRINA

"No tragedy is so horrific, no calamity so sad, that somebody can't reduce it to politics. Hurricane Katrina was a tragedy for most of us, but a gift of the gods to the kingdom of the left, where everyone gets up every morning eager to count the ways to despise George W. Bush." —Wesley Pruden

"Back in the real world, America's enemies will draw many useful lessons from the events of this last week. Will America?" —Mark Steyn

"Those who called early on for shooting looters on sight should have been listened to—not because property is more valuable than human life, but because when property isn't safe from marauders, human life isn't, either." —Jeff Jacoby
" Mayor Nagin and most mayors in this country have a hard time getting their people to work on a sunny day, let alone getting them out of the city in front of a hurricane."--Senator Mary Landrieu, (D) La.

Percentage of New Orleans population Black or African American 67.25% --http://neworleans.areaconnect.com/statistics.htm

"We are now reaping the benefits of a welfare state. For more years than most can remember, we have been told by those holding office that they will take care of us. We have provided food, clothing and shelter to the extent that the recipients became entirely dependent on government resources to live.

They have reached the point that no longer do they have the knowledge to take care of themselves. They will sit there and drown or go hungry, and curse the fact that the government has not gotten them out of this mess.

When it is all said and done, there is but one person who is responsible for me, and that is me. The responsibility falls to me to take care of my family, not the government. Society, not government, has an obligation to provide care and sustenance to those who, because of age or physical impairment cannot take care of themselves, but able-bodied people who stand around and complain that no one is doing anything for them deserve whatever the fates cast in their direction.

Life is hard, and you either get tougher or you get washed away—it is as simple as that. Politicians will never, ever take care of you—they only want one thing from you, and that is to stay in power as long as they can. In a situation like Katrina, they will stand in front of the cameras and microphones and denigrate everyone above them in government to take the eye off of their pathetic efforts. This is a situation that they have created, and now the good citizens of the area will have to step in and clean up the mess that has been created by the politicians.

It won't happen overnight, but it will happen—there are too many good people who live in that area for it not to happen. I love the people of New Orleans and the surrounding parishes, but I despise the politicians... I just hope that when the area is rebuilt, they stay away from the massive welfare system they had before—absolutely no good comes from welfare.

It depletes available resources, making it ever more difficult for what passes as government to respond to the true needs of the community."—Robert Johnson, retired NOPD captain

"Whatever the shortcomings of the federal response to Katrina—and there were many—the fact is that the plight of the abandoned poor in New Orleans says far more about that city and the state of Louisiana than about America generally.

The city had evacuation plans it failed to follow even as local leaders warned that their worst fears were coming true. They did not ask for help in a timely fashion, and then they immediately blamed the feds when they didn't get the immediate help they didn't immediately ask for."—Jonah Goldberg

"Ours is a federal system. The President is sworn to uphold and support the Constitution. He is not a dictator. And not to be blamed for failing to act like one. The problem was not the Constitution or the President, but Louisiana's officials." —Michael Gaynor

JUDICIAL

"The wall of separation between church and state is a metaphor based upon bad history [and] should be frankly and explicitly abandoned." Justice Rehniquist

" It's not judicial activism to strike down laws because they violate the Constitution."--Ann Coulter

"We must use a judicial, rather than a political, standard to evaluate Judge Roberts' fitness for the Supreme Court. That standard must be based on the fundamental principle that judges interpret and apply but do not make law." —Senator Orrin Hatch

" I had someone ask me in this process, I don't remember who it was, but somebody asked me, you know, "Are you going to be on the side of the little guy," and you obviously want to give an immediate answer, but as you reflect on it, if the Constitution says that the little guy should win, the little guy is going to win in court before me. But if the Constitution says that the big guy should win, well, then the big guy is going to win because my obligation is to the Constitution. That's the oath. The oath that a judge takes is not that I'll look out for particular interests; I'll be on the side of particular interests. The oath is to uphold the Constitution and laws of the United States, and that's what I would do."--Judge John Roberts

WAR

"every war strategist knows that the best-laid plans often go in the trash soon after the first shot is fired. In other words, circumstances change so quickly that response has to be fluid—because stubbornly sticking to a plan can get you killed."--Mark Alexander

"How could a readiness for war in time of peace be safelyprohibited, unless we could could prohibit, in like manner,the preparations and establishments of every hostile nation?"
-- James Madison (Federalist No. 41, 1788)

"There is a certain enthusiasm in liberty, that makes human naturerise above itself, in acts of bravery and heroism."
-- Alexander Hamilton (The Farmer Refuted, 23 February 1775)

POLITICS

" We don't think of political freedom as the right to have our preferred candidates always win elections, only that they have a right to compete in any election. It simply can't be that I am unfree if my candidate doesn't win, or if my policies are not enacted. Losing an election does not make me unfree."—Jennifer Roback Morse

"Artificial gas price caps will work no better now than they did in the 1970s. They won't get petroleum refined faster. They won't reduce motorists' demand for gasoline. All they will create is shortages—the one thing price controls always bring in their wake." —Jeff Jacoby

Thanks again and have a great day!!!!

FEMA Response.....A Little Perspective

2005-09-15T08:22:00.000-07:00

With all of the Media caterwauling about FEMA's "slow" response to Hurricane Katrina (three days), I thought I'd put the media's bias in proper perspective.

Imagine turning to CNN an seeing the following:

NEWS ANCHOR: We now go live to Israel where our own Christine Ammonpour is standing by with a report. Christine?

AMMONPOUR: Yes, I'm standing just outside of Jerusalem at a place called Golgotha. I'm here with Jesus bar Joseph, a preacher from Nazareth who just this past Sunday rose from the dead. This was after a brutal murder just three days earlier. Mr. Jesus, how do you feel?

JESUS: Great.

AMMONPOUR: There are many scholars who say that your resurrection is a key factor in the Christian faith. In fact, most have said that without it, mankind would still be drowning in the flood of its own sin. Now, since there were so many lives hanging in the balance, why did it take you three days to respond to such an urgent need?

'Nuff said.

Pictures Worth 1,000 Words; We Will NEVER Forget

2005-09-11T08:44:00.000-07:00

For all those who lost loved ones on September 11, 2001, our prayers are with you.

And now, four years later, it's time to check your politics at the door, we've got a job to do.

2005-09-09T18:31:00.000-07:00

Hello True-Believers! It's time again for "Did You Hear What They Said?", the regular series where we quote people in the public eye IN CONTEXT.

Remember, it's not hate-speech, THEY ACTUALLY SAID IT!!

And now, on with the show:

THE AMERICAN SPIRIT

"We should never despair, our Situation before has been unpromisingand has changed for the better, so I trust, it will again. Ifnew difficulties arise, we must only put forth new Exertions andproportion our Efforts to the exigency of the times."
-- George Washington (letter to Philip Schuyler, 7/15/1777)

"The politics of lamentation is not likely to appeal to Americans with a taste for the sunny side of the street." —Wesley Pruden

"Work as if you were to live 100 Years, Pray as if you were to die To-morrow."
-- Benjamin Franklin

"I have sworn upon the altar of God, eternal hostility againstevery form of tyranny over the mind of man."
-- Thomas Jefferson (letter to Benjamin Rush, 23 September 1800)

WAR

" it took from 1776 until 1790 for the United States to go from declaring its independence from England to final adoption of the document under which it would operate for the next 215 years. Based upon that, the Iraqis could take until 2016 to get this all done and still beat the U.S. timetable by a full year." --Rich Galen

"By all rights, Iraq should be in civil war, with the majority Kurds and Shiites slaughtering the Sunnis—which is exactly what the Jihadis are trying to instigate. Instead, the three groups continue talking, squabbling and trying to reach political compromise. It's nothing short of miraculous."--Mark Alexander

"They're not children in Iraq; they're grown-ups who made their own decision to join the military. That seems to be difficult for the left to grasp. Ever since America's all-adult, all-volunteer army went into Iraq, the anti-war crowd have made a sustained effort to characterize them as 'children'." —Mark Steyn

"Unless Democrats demonstrate the political courage and resolution to win a war, rather than just criticize it, they will remain a minority party no matter what the polls show."--Peter Charles Choharis, executive director of the 2004 Democratic Platform Committee

"Even if you could prove that the war was a mistake in every way, to say that it never should have happened is not a good argument for abandoning the project. If a man is stabbed in the chest, you don't cure him by simply yanking the knife out."--Jonah Goldberg

(The following is from a caller to the Rush Limbaugh Show)
RUSH: Paul in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, welcome, nice to have you on the program.

CALLER: Thank you, sir, I appreciate it. Yeah, I just wanted to say, especially after that one caller, I mean I didn't volunteer because the president's daughters were doing something or some senator's son was joining or anything like that, and I didn't join because I was coming from the ghetto and I wanted to get out.

You know, I joined because it was a career choice, and I wanted to do it, and I really feel that if her son was here today -- and I understand her grief. I mean, I'm a father as well, but I served in Iraq. I've served in Afghanistan.

I've been over there many times, and, you know, I've had friends lost right next to me in battle, and I can understand the grief, but, you know what? At the same time they're doing what they wanted to do.

So many of these people are stuck back in the Vietnam days, and the days of the draft, that I used to get e-mail saying, "Boy, I'm sorry that you're over there." I would e-mail back and say, "What do you mean, you're sorry? I put myself here on purpose. This is what I want to do." August 15, 2005

DEMOCRAT HYPOCRISY

"War against Serbia is unwarranted on strategic, legal and moral grounds. If air strikes take place, Serbia will be the fourth country Bill Clinton has bombed in the past seven months. That record is one of a trigger-happy administration that is creating an image of America as the planetary bully. Decent Americans need to make a stand when it has reached the point of a full-scale war of aggression against a country that has done us no harm."--Ted Galen Carpenter, March 23, 1999 (http://www.cato.org/dailys/03-23-99.html)

In 1996, former Sierra Club President David Brower wrote, "President Clinton has done more to harm the environment and to weaken environmental regulations in three years than presidents Bush and Reagan did in 12 years."--(http://www.earthisland.org/eijournal/new_articles.cfm?articleID=555&journalID=57)

CINDY SHEEHAN (or "Michael Moore told me this would work!")

"We do not agree with the political motivations and publicity tactics of Cindy Sheehan. She now appears to be promoting her own personal agenda and notoriety at the expense of her son's good name and reputation. The rest of the Sheehan Family supports the troops, our country and our President, silently, with prayer and respect."--Casey Sheehan's relatives

CINDY SHEEHAN, RIGHT AFTER MEETING WITH PRESIDENT BUSH
"I have a new respect for him because he was sincere and he didn't have to take the time to meet with us. I now know he's sincere about wanting freedom for the Iraqis. I know he's sorry and feels some pain for our loss, and I know he's a man of faith."

CINDY SHEEHAN, RIGHT AFTER GETTING IN FRONT OF A CAMERA
"We are not waging a war on terror in this country, we're waging a war of terror. The biggest terrorist in the world is George W. Bush!"

"I've been with the President of the United States when he has met with the families of those brave young men and women who have sacrificed all. I have seen his compassion, I have seen his love, I have seen his concern. So any charge of insensitivity or uncaring on the part of this president is absolutely false... I'm sure he wouldn't like to hear me say this, but I saw him afterwards. He was very, very grieved."--Senator John McCain

Army Cpl. Forest Jostes, 22, who served with Casey Sheehan in the 1st Battalion, 82nd Field Artillery Regiment, 1st Cavalry. On 4 April 2004, Forest died beside Casey in the same battle with Jihadis.

Last week, Forest's parents, Von and Diane Ibbotson, had this to say about his death: "We were at a crossroads, but we decided from the day he died that we were going to honor him, his sacrifice. We support the President, and we have made a conscious effort to not make this political."

Of Ms. Sheehan's behavior, Forest's parents said, "We both lost sons in the same battle, but the similarities pretty much end there. Cindy Sheehan has a right to protest, wave signs, march or whatever, a right she wouldn't have had it not been for men like our sons.

"My son gave his life for the freedom we enjoy in this country; I hope that the Iraqi people have that someday. We feel sympathy for Mrs. Sheehan, but we're angry because she presumes to speak for so many. I resent the fact that she says she 'speaks for the millions' and is the face of the Gold Star families. That is not so."

Sheehan spoke at an April San Francisco State University rally in support of Lynne Stewart, who was convicted in February of providing material aid to terrorists. Here's an excerpt:

"I was raised in a country by a public school system that taught us that America was good, that America was just. America has been killing people . . . since we first stepped on this continent, we have been responsible for death and destruction.
I passed on that bull***t to my son and my son enlisted. I'm going all over the country telling moms: "This country is not worth dying for."

"If we're attacked, we would all go out. We'd all take whatever we had. I'd take my rolling pin and I'd beat the attackers over the head with it. But we were not attacked by Iraq. We might not even have been attacked by Osama bin Laden if 9/11 was their Pearl Harbor to get their neo-con agenda through and, if I would have known that before my son was killed, I would have taken him to Canada. I would never have let him go and try and defend this morally repugnant system we have."

(Note to Ms. Sheehan: If America is so "repugnant" to you, you are welcome TO LEAVE.)

MEDIA

"That's my job. I'm a newsman. That's what I try to do, is make news." —CNN's Wolf Blitzer

HILLARY

“She is perceived to be too far to the left.”--Larry Gates, chairman of the Kansas Democratic Party

“I think she’s potentially toxic for the Democrats every place except for the Democratic stronghold states,”--Bruce Buchanan, a University of Texas political scholar

AND FINALLY

"The sacred rights of mankind are not to be rummaged for, among oldparchments, or musty records. They are written, as with a sun beam,in the whole volume of human nature, by the hand of the divinityitself; and can never be erased or obscured by mortal power."
-- Alexander Hamilton (The Farmer Refuted, 23 February 1775)

Take care and have a great day!

The Time is NOW

2005-09-05T11:26:00.000-07:00

"The value of liberty was thus enhanced in our estimation bythe difficulty of its attainment, and the worth of charactersappreciated by the trial of adversity." --George Washington

There have been several people, from politicians to pundits, that have opined about how to--or whether to--rebuild the city of New Orleans.

Right here and now, I will take a stand:

REBUILD THE CITY.

In the wake of a natural disaster of epic proportions, we also now have an opportunity of epic proportions.

Not since the era of the Great Depression have we had an opportunity to reshape the landscape of the American Future.

In much the same way that the New Deal changed American society, President Bush has the opportunity to changethe face of America and establish a true Ownership Society.

Now is not the time for caterwauling, arguing, hate speech, race baiting, or class envy.

Now is the time for action.

Now is the time for the Best and the Brightest of America's private sector to step forward with new ideasto meet and overcome the new challenges that are before us.

One of the lessons we have learned in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina is that the way that the city of New Orleanswas planned, laid-out and build was a prescription and invitation to disaster.

There are organizations in America RIGHT NOW that are capable of banding together plan, re-designand commit resources to rebuilding one of America's best cities.(http://www.greatrivereng.com/) (http://www.asce.org/)

History shows us the power of great minds backed by great efforts that can even change the courseof rivers (www.chipublib.org/004chicago/timeline/riverflow.html).

If the American Spirit was strong enough to reverse the flow of the Chicago River A CENTURY AGO, just imaginewhat that same Spirit could do today with the resources at our disposal.

Re-designing and implementing a plan to rebuild New Orleans will put multiple thousands of people back to work.

Highway projects across the coutry can now be fully staffed, putting even more displaced New Orleanians to work.(http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=highway+construction)

The time has come to stop playing political football with America's energy future.

Beginning the road to America's energy independence is imperative.

The Alaska National Wildlife Refuge must be opened to provide America with not just a fresh supply of oil,but also jobs that will continue to boost our economy and bolster America's pre-eminence among the nations.

(link to President Bush's comments: http://www.anwr.com/archives/senate_supports_drilling_in_alaskan_refuge.html)

Even the housing industry can contribute to our immediate future by providing housing and jobs for Katrina survivors (www.nahb.org/) (http://katrinahousing.org/).

America, YOU CAN DO THIS!

THIS IS THE AMERICAN CENTURY.

STAND UP, BE COUNTED, AND PROVE TO THE WORLD WHO WE REALLY ARE.

You got some 'Splaining to Do....

2005-09-03T08:37:00.000-07:00

I found an interesting article from the LA Times (http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/wire/sns-ap-katrina-response,1,3041667.story?coll=sns-ap-nation-headlines)

In it I found an interesting excerpt:
"After Hurricane Georges barely missed New Orleans in 1998, there was talk of using city buses to evacuate New Orleans residents without cars. But apparently, that proposal never developed into an executable plan. "

New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin ia quoted as saying"I need reinforcements, I need troops, man. I need 500 buses, man.... This is a national disaster."

Then I came across this photo from the AP newswire:

An aerial view of flooded school buses in a lot, Thursday, Sept. 1, 2005, in New Orleans, LA. The flood is a result of Hurricane Katrina that passed through the area last Monday.(AP Photo/Phil Coale) http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/050901/480/flpc21109012015

Mayor Nagin, you had the buses for evacuation. You got some 'splaining to do.

American Heroes, Part II

2005-09-02T19:21:00.000-07:00

The American Spirit lives on .

In our giving, in our prayers, and in our deeds we stand with you.

Hypocrisy.Org--Hurricane Edition

2005-09-02T05:50:00.000-07:00

The American Left is already beginning to propagate something that needs to be nipped in the bud right now:

The injecting of racism and class warfare into the Hurricane Katrina aftermath.

Hoping to inflict his twisted world-view upon the Major Media, Jack Shafer writes an article at Slate.com entitled "Lost in the Flood--Why no mention of race or class in TV's Katrina coverage?"

You can't make this stuff up.

If you wish to imbibe the whole bottle of blather, here's the link: http://slate.msn.com/id/2124688/

The excerpt that induced nausea for me was this:

"To be sure, some reporters sidled up to the race and class issue. I heard them ask the storm's New Orleans victims why they hadn't left town when the evacuation call came. Many said they were broke—"I live from paycheck to paycheck," explained one woman. Others said they didn't own a car with which to escape and that they hadn't understood the importance of evacuation.

"But I don't recall any reporter exploring the class issue directly by getting a paycheck-to-paycheck victim to explain that he couldn't risk leaving because if he lost his furniture and appliances, his pots and pans, his bedding and clothes, to Katrina or looters, he'd have no way to replace them. No insurance, no stable, large extended family that could lend him cash to get back on his feet, no middle-class job to return to after the storm."

What difference does race and class make in the wake of what could be the greatest natural disaster to hit this nation?

The color of a person's skin does not change their status as a victim of this storm.

If you are a resident of the city of New Orleans (or the Mississippi Gulf Coast, etc) or a tourist there, you are a hurricane victim.

If Liberals want to be critical in the area of race, then they need to go peddle their onions someplace else.

After 9/11 there was a national debate over the use of "hyphenated" American labels. Terms such as "African-American" or "Italian-American" were beginning to be seen as divisive. By and large, we were starting to drop the prefixes and just simply call ourselves "Americans", and rightly so.

The American Left is now blaming the media for not mentioning race in their reporting, which is an attempt to get them to begin spreading the lie that this is an unfairly damaging circumstance to people of color.

Isn't it funny how Liberals were more than happy to use their cars, vans and buses to bring blacks to the polls to vote for their candidates, but when it came to saving those voters' lives in the DAYS...yes, DAYS before the hurricane struck, those cars, vans and buses were nowhere to be found???

American Heroes, Part I

2005-09-01T09:49:00.000-07:00

"When you turn on your television and you look at the people rebuilding New Orleans and Gulfport and Biloxi, Mississippi, those are not going to be environmentalists.

"You won't see the Robert F. Kennedy, Jrs., or any of these others from these well heeled nonprofit groups rebuilding New Orleans in Gulfport and Biloxi. Do you know who it's going to be?

"It's going to be the military. It will be construction companies and their employees. It will be hotels and restaurants and grocery stores and the like.

"It will be the very capitalists that make this country work; it will be the very people that make this country work. It will not be the environmentalists who detest these people." --Rush Limbaugh

Info on How to Help Hurricane Katrina Victims

2005-08-30T09:48:00.000-07:00

Here is a listing of organizations that you can send donations to help our fellow Americans who have suffered the effects of Hurricane Katrina.

They also could use your prayer support. First, last and always.

www.redcross.org or 1-800 HELP NOW

http://www.redshield.org/crisis/ or 1-800-SAL-ARMY

Operation Blessing: (800) 436-6348.

America's Second Harvest: (800) 344-8070.

Adventist Community Services: (800) 381-7171.

Catholic Charities USA: (800) 919-9338, or www.catholiccharitiesusa.org.

Christian Reformed World Relief Committee: (800) 848-5818.

Church World Service: (800) 297-1516 or online at www.churchworldservice. org.

Convoy of Hope: (417) 823-8998 or www.convoyofhope.org.

Lutheran Disaster Response: (800) 638-3522.

Mennonite Disaster Service: (717) 859-2210.

Nazarene Disaster Response: (888) 256-5886.

Presbyterian Disaster Assistance: (800) 872-3283.

United Methodist Committee on Relief: (800) 554-8583.

In addition, Wal-Mart Stores Inc. is accepting donations at its 3,800 stores and Web site, www.walmart.com.

Let's step it up, America. Let's show our brethren that the American Spirit still lives on.

If You Don't Vote, You can't Complain

2005-08-28T22:29:00.000-07:00

I know several people that choose not to excerise their right to vote.

They still hold to the disproven notion "With so many millions of people voting, my vote isn't going to matter."

These are the same people that later on complain when things go badly.

I remind them that by not voting, they forfeit their right to complain.

By choosing to not vote, you are essentially removing yourself from the democratic process. Hence, you have relegated yourself to the role of spectator.

Which brings me this article at the Washington Post:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/08/26/AR2005082601323_pf.html

The part that caught my eye was this:

The draft constitution, as it stood early Sunday, allowed for the next National Assembly to approve creation of a new federal region by a simple majority, authorities said. Shiites make up an estimated 60 percent of Iraq's population and would almost certainly hold a majority in the next assembly.

Sunni Arabs, who made up Iraq's ruling elite for decades but fell from dominance with the toppling of Saddam Hussein in 2003, largely stayed out of this past January's National Assembly elections in response to insurgent threats and boycott calls from Sunni leaders. The move left them with comparatively little political leverage in the constitutional negotiations."

When the election was held, the Sunnis stayed home. They didn't vote.

Meanwhile, an overwhelming majority of the Iraqi population snubbed their noses against "insurgent threats", showed up at the polls and voted.

So now we have the people, and their leaders, WHO STAYED HOME wanting to have a say in the Constitutional process????

My question to the Sunnis and their leaders is this:

WHERE WERE YOU BACK IN JANUARY?

WHILE YOUR COUNTRYMEN WHERE RISKING THEIR LIVES TO VOTE, WHERE WERE YOU???

I hate having to repeat myself but:

By choosing to not vote, you are essentially removing yourself from the democratic process. Hence, you have relegated yourself to the role of spectator.

Boot To The Head!!

2005-08-24T07:13:00.000-07:00

Doug Patton, writing for GOPUSA.com delivers what can best be described as a well-placed boot to the head of the liberals running the show at the DNC.

WARNING: If you're a liberal, don't get anywhere near this article. The truth always leaves a mark.

As always, the link: http://www.gopusa.com/commentary/dpatton/2005/dp_08221.shtml

It's Official: The Dems Are Losing
By Doug Patton
August 22, 2005

Despite my ongoing grumbling about GOP inaction on certain key issues important to the future of the Republic, a recent article from The St. Louis Post-Dispatch reminded me once again why I remain a Republican.

I couldn't help but smile as I read about the latest official report from something called "The Democracy Corps." According to the Post-Dispatch, the report warns Democratic candidates that their party has "made little progress presenting themselves in a way that would capture rural voters or make inroads into other Republican turf."

Tapping into a brain trust consisting of such Democrat hotshots as Stan Greenberg, Bob Shrum and James Carville, this organization has managed to do what Democrats always do so well: spend lots of money to produce a study that states the obvious, only to create flawed strategies drawn from inaccurate conclusions. Their brilliant hypothesis this time: Democrats are losing elections. The reason: red state voters are failing to understand the moral values of the Democrat Party.

It is hard to imagine why their agenda is not resonating with the American people. After all, Democrats stand for so many things Americans hold dear, things like:
*purging all references to God from the public square;

*coddling violent criminals while banning the ownership of handguns by law-abiding citizens;

*the redistribution of wealth from those who have earned it to those who have not;

*capitulation to our terrorist enemies abroad;

*the surrender of American sovereignty to a corrupt world body (the U.N.);

*homosexual marriage;

*abortion on demand right up to the moment of birth; and

*the seizing of private property for commercial use if it produces more tax revenue for their precious government coffers.

What civic-minded American wouldn't support a sensible agenda like that?

Don't believe me? I offer as Exhibit "A" the national platform of the Democratic Party. It is one of the most socialist documents since Karl Marx wrote, "I have an idea for a manifesto" to his friend Frederick Engels. In fact, the Democrats' platform was written by radicals from organizations like MoveOn.org and the nation's teachers unions, who want nothing to do with traditional American values. These are the people who comprise the "grassroots" of the Democrat Party.

Exhibit "B" is its national chairman, Howard Dean, one of the shrillest liberals in the country. The only two more out-of-the-mainstream people the Dems could have chosen to lead their party are Michael Moore and George Soros. (Unofficially, at least, these two seem to be running the party, anyway.)

Then there is the Democrats' anointed 2008 presidential candidate, Hillary ("Where did I leave those Rose law firm billing records") Clinton. This is a woman with such contempt for the free enterprise system she tried to affect a government takeover of one seventh of the American economy in 1994. You will recall that her draconian health care proposal was so extreme her husband couldn't even get it through a Democrat Congress.

Finally, there is the United States Supreme Court. Democrats will tell you it is a "conservative, Republican court." Uh-huh. And John Kerry was a supply-sider. The left-wing decisions coming from our federal courts are so far away from the thinking of both the Founders of yesterday and the American people of today that the only question remaining is whether the Republic can be saved from judicial revue.

Democrat strategists like Carville, Shrum, Greenberg, et al, are in the business of winning elections. However, they will continue to lose as long as they think their party's "values" are the values of the American people. Their only hope lies in masquerading as something they are not. Voters didn't fall for that one in 2004. Let us hope they don't in 2006 or 2008.

------------
Doug Patton is a freelance columnist who has served as a political speechwriter and policy advisor for federal, state and local candidates, elected officials and public policy organizations. His weekly column can be read in newspapers across the country and on selected Internet web sites, including www.GOPUSA.com, where he also serves as the Nebraska editor. Write him at dpatton@neonramp.com.

True Social Security

2005-08-21T08:00:00.000-07:00

Grow Accounts for Social Security
Ending the Raid on the Trust Fund with Personal Retirement Accounts

By: Max Pappas, FreedomWorks Policy Director

The movement to allow workers to put a portion of their payroll tax dollars in an account they own and could pass on has taken on new vigor in Washington, DC. A large group of prominent Senators and Representatives, all with their own bills and visions for improving Social Security through Personal Retirement Accounts have put aside their differences to support an idea that has overwhelming popularity across the country: ending the raid on
the Social Security surplus.

As many Americans now know, Social Security currently runs a surplus, but will begin to run a deficit by about 2017. What many have been surprised to find out is that the surplus Social Security is currently bringing in is given to Congress to spend on whatever they want—whether it is the $3,000,000 the federal government gave to the Cal Ripken, Sr. Foundation or the $1,700,000 it paid for the International Fertilizer Development Center. In exchange for these surplus dollars—about $150 billion—Social Security gets IOUs to be
cashed in in the future.

As voters across the country have learned about this, they have almost without exception called for it to end—whether or not they think personal retirement accounts are a good idea.

The Congressmen have listened, and are trying to ending the raid on the trust fund the only way they can—buy putting it in the savings device that Al Gore made famous, a lockbox. But this time, the lockboxes will be individual lockboxes. They’re calling them GROW Accounts, an acronym for the Growing Real Ownership for Workers Accounts Act. Under the GROW Accounts proposal, instead of Congress getting to spend the surplus Social Security
money on whatever they’d like, workers will have the option of putting their share in their own account—their own lockbox.

The Ways and Means Committee’s Subcommittee on Social Security lays out the following details on the GROW Accounts legislation:

1. It’s based on the following principles:

• Social Security taxes should only be used for Social Security.

• The Social Security surplus should not be used to fund other government programs.

• The surplus should not be used to mask the true size of the national deficit.

2. The bill does the following:

• Protects the Social Security surplus.

• GROW Accounts will be created for workers under the age of 55, unless they choose not to participate.

• The Social Security surplus will be dedicated to GROW Accounts, where it will be invested in no-risk, marketable Treasury securities - real assets that workers own.

• Upon retirement, account balances will be used to help pay the worker's Social
Security benefit.

• Account balances are inheritable.

• An independent Board will manage and administer GROW Accounts. In January 2009, the Board will submit a plan to Congress that would allow individuals to diversify into other prudent investment options. Workers can always choose to keep their assets invested in Treasury bonds.

• The bill does not impose investment risk on workers and does not harm the Social Security Trust Funds. It does put us on the path to protecting the integrity of the Social Security program by ensuring that Social Security taxes are only used for Social Security.

Congressmen Jim McCrery (4th Dist.-La.), Clay Shaw (22nd Dist.-Fl.), Sam Johnson (3rd Dist.-Texas), and Paul Ryan (1st Dist.-Wis.), along with Sens. Jim DeMint (R-SC) and John Sununu (R-NH), should all be applauded for taking this important first step toward meaningful reform. It’s time to pass real personal accounts that workers can own and control and pass on to their loved ones.

It would be even better if the proposal allowed workers to put even more payroll tax dollars into these accounts, but this bill is sound in that it contains two key ingredients that must be a part of any good reform proposal. First, it allows individual ownership of Social Security tax dollars and second, it allows the inheritability of the accounts created with these dollars.

The current system lacks these important features. Under the current system, someone can work from age 16 to age 65, paying tens of thousands of dollars into Social Security along the way, and have nothing to pass on if he or she dies at 65. A system with ownership and inheritability of contributions, like the GROW accounts, ends this unacceptable pitfall.

Individual ownership of the surplus Social Security dollars is also the only way to create a real claim on these dollars. Any politician who ever supported the idea of a lockbox should be a strong supporter of this new plan, which creates individual lockboxes.

GROW Accounts also put opponents of Social Security reform in an interesting position: do they really want to be on the record for voting against ending the raid on the Social Security trust fund? That would make for an interesting campaign ad next fall.

For more information visit http://www.freedomworks.org

A Teenager Who Gets It

2005-08-21T07:43:00.000-07:00

http://acuf.org/issues/issue41/commentscensor.asp

Censoring Conservatives
by Tyler Whitney

America's culture war is fought everyday and the country's most vulnerable soldiers --conservative high school students–are on the front line. Conservative students are ridiculed everyday as we fight to save America from the ongoing leftist assault. Unfortunately, spreading conservative ideas is difficult when administrators muzzle conservative speech and indoctrinate students with liberal propaganda.

Repression is alive and well at East Lansing High School.

On Tuesday March 19th, several conservative students distributed “The Right Way” -- a conservative paper independently organized and published. Instead of receiving accolades for extracurricular involvement, we were reprimanded for distributing our publication before the school approved it.

Frustrated yet cooperative, I visited the board office where Superintendent Dave Chapin banned our paper. Although his reasoning is unclear, he did mention that the John Birch Society is too extreme for East Lansing High School. Apparently, Dr. Chapin felt his superintendent status granted him authority to rate the extremity of content.

That night I immediately fired off press releases to every major media outlet. I wanted to make the world aware that East Lansing High School was taking unconstitutional actions. Thankfully, I wasn't the only person who believed that ELHS was in the wrong. East Lansing High School received numerous phone calls from angry conservatives nationwide about the censorship of our paper.
Due to the awkward nature of the situation, I managed to completely avoid speaking to administrators while media coverage continued to pile up.

Eventually, Principal Paula Steele granted our paper the status of a Non School Organization, meaning we had the same rights as groups that meet in the building after school.

Despite that, I was later informed that any content that can be traced to East Lansing High School must be removed. Principal Steele wanted me to remove an ad for my Teenage Republicans club as well as several other insignificant things.

Feeling rebellious, I distributed my paper with the banned content. As expected, I was reprimanded. Unfortunately, my punishment was quite severe. Not only was I suspended but more than 200 copies of “The Right Way” were trashed by school authorities.

After weeks of fighting, I have decided to give in to East Lansing High School's Stalinist policies. I can't call my battle completely pointless because I've created awareness about the cultural bolshevism prevalent in America's high schools.

As a dedicated conservative activist, I will continue to publish more issues and inform our nation about America's biggest threat: Liberal indoctrinators who try to create unthinking minions with their biased multicultural education and its anti-male slant. If conservatives rise up, we can create a cultural backlash against the tide of liberalism corrupting America's youth.

Did You Hear What They Said?

2005-08-15T09:57:00.000-07:00

Hello True Believers!

Once again, it's time for another edition of "Did You Hear What They Said?"

This is where we quote public figures, people in-the-know, and various media figures IN CONTEXT on a variety of today's issues.

Just remember, folks, it's not a hit-piece..... it's direct quote!

And now, ON WITH THE SHOW!!!

FILIBUSTERING PRESIDENTIAL NOMINEES

Remember how Democrats recently defended filibustering President Bush's nominees ? Let's take a look at their position on the matter when THEIR man was in the Oval Office:

Sen. Joseph Biden (D-Delaware) March 19, 1997: “But I also respectfully suggest that everyone who is nominated is entitled to have a shot, to have a hearing and to have a shot to be heard on the floor and have a vote on the floor.”

Sen. Richard Durbin (D-Illinois)September 28, 1998: “We should meet our responsibility. I think that responsibility requires us to act in a timely fashion on nominees sent before us. ... Vote the person up or down.”

Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-California) September 11, 1997: “Let’s bring their nominations up, debate them if necessary, and vote them up or down.”

Sen. Edward Kennedy (D-Massachusetts)February 3, 1998: “We owe it to Americans across the country to give these nominees a vote. If our Republican colleagues don’t like them, vote against them. But give them a vote.”

Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vermont) May 10, 2000: “The Founding Fathers certainly intended that the Senate advise as to judicial nominations, i.e., consider, debate, and vote up or down. They surely did not intend that the Senate, for partisan or factional reasons, would remain silent and simply refuse to give any advice or consider and vote at all.”

Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-CA) 5/14/97 : “It is not the role of the Senate to obstruct the process and prevent numbers of highly qualified nominees from even being given the opportunity for a vote on the Senate floor.”

Sen. Tom Daschle (D-SD): “I find it simply baffling that a Senator would vote against even voting on a judicial nomination.” (Congressional Record, 10/5/99)

(Yes, my friends, he really DID say that!)

Sen. Tom Daschle (D-SD): “Hispanic or non-Hispanic, African American or non-African American, woman or man, it is wrong not to have a vote on the Senate floor.” (Congressional Record, 10/28/99)

Sen. Byron Dorgan (D-ND): “My expectation is that we’re not going to hold up judicial nominations. …You will not see us do what was done to us in recent years in the Senate with judicial nominations.” (Fox News’ “Special Report With Brit Hume,” 6/4/01)

Richard Durbin (D-IL) "If, after 150 days languishing on the Executive Calendar that name has not been called for a vote, it should be. Vote the person up or down." (Cong. Rec., 9/28/98, S11021)

Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA): “Let’s bring their nominations up, debate them if necessary, and vote them up or down.” (Congressional Record, 9/11/97)

Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA): “It is our job to confirm these judges. If we don’t like them, we can vote against them.” (Congressional Record, 9/16/99)

Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA): “Our institutional integrity requires an up-or-down vote.” (Congressional Record, 10/4/99)

Sen. Tom Harkin (D-IA): “[The filibuster process] is used … as blackmail for one Senator to get his or her way on something that they could not rightfully win through the normal processes.” (Congressional Record, 1/4/95)

Tom Harkin (D-IA) "Have the guts to come out and vote up or down….And once and for all, put behind us this filibuster procedure on nominations." (Cong. Rec., 6/22/95, S8861)

Sen. Tom Harkin (D-IA): “I urge the Republican leadership to take the steps necessary to allow the full Senate to vote up or down on these important nominations.” (Congressional Record, 9/11/00)

Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-MA): “It is true that some Senators have voiced concerns about these nominations. But that should not prevent a roll call vote which gives every Senator the opportunity to vote ‘yes’ or ‘no.’ ... Parties with cases, waiting to be heard by the federal courts deserve a decision by the Senate.” (Congressional Record, 9/21/99)

Sen. Herb Kohl (D-WI): “These nominees, who have to put their lives on hold waiting for us to act, deserve an ‘up or down’ vote.” (Congressional Record, 9/21/99)

Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-VT): “I hope we … will accept our responsibility and vote people up or vote them down. … If we want to vote against them, vote against them.” (Congressional Record, 10/22/97)

Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-VT): “Now, every Senator can vote against any nominee. … But it is the responsibility of the U.S. Senate to at least bring them to a vote.” (Congressional Record, 10/22/97)

Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-VT): “ "I have stated over and over again … that I would object and fight against any filibuster on a judge, whether it is somebody I opposed or supported …” (Congressional Record, 6/18/98)

Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-VT): “[E]arlier this year … I noted how improper it would be to filibuster a judicial nomination.” (Congressional Record, 10/14/98)

Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-VT): “[I]f the person is otherwise qualified, he or she gets the vote. … Vote them up, vote them down.” (Congressional Record, 9/21/99)

Sen. Harry Reid (D-NV): “[W]e should have up-or-down votes in the committee and on the floor.” (CNN’s “Evans, Novak, Hunt & Shields,” 6/9/01)

Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY): “[W]e are charged with voting on the nominees. The Constitution does not say if the Congress is controlled by a different party than the President there shall be no judges chosen.” (Congressional Record, 3/7/00)

(Uh, Chucky....you...are....BUSTED!!!)

Carl Levin (D-MI) "If a bipartisan majority of the U.S. Senate is prepared to vote to confirm the President's appointment, that vote should occur." (Cong. Rec., 6/21/95, S8806)

(Are we having fun yet?)

AMBASSADOR JOHN BOLTON

"No one should make prejudgments on reputation. One must do it on the merit of the facts. We'll do that when we see what happens here."--Chile's UN ambassador Heraldo Munoz

"He's a colleague like any other. He will be received as such."-- Denmark's UN ambassador Ellen Margrethe Loj

"No American ambassador arrives at any appointment anywhere with a cloud hanging over his head; the representative of the president of the United States makes his own weather."--Wesley Pruden

JUDICIAL

"On every question of construction [of the Constitution] let us carry ourselves back to the time when the Constitution was adopted, recollect the spirit manifested in the debates, and instead of trying what meaning may be squeezed out of the text, or invented against it, conform to the probable one in which it was passed." --Thomas Jefferson, letter to William Johnson, June 12, 1823

"Fidelity to the original intent of the Constitution must be the sole ideological criterion used to evaluate any nominee. Everything else is noise. Originalism alone produces a body of law evincing the will of America's citizenry." --Steven Geoffrey Gieseler

"A resumè is no substitute for answering questions about whether the nominee respects the basic rights and freedoms on which the nation was founded." --Ted Kennedy "
At Thurgood Marshall's 1967 Supreme Court confirmation hearing, a young Sen. Edward Kennedy lectured his colleagues on the Judiciary Committee, saying it was not their responsibility to question a nominee's judicial philosophy, only to ascertain his legal credentials and qualifications." --Jill Zuckman, Chicago Tribune.

"Senator Boxer, the Constitution says 'Advice and Consent,' not nag and meddle. If you want to be involved in the nominating process, run for president." --Duane Patterson

"I hope Judge Roberts, understanding how important this nomination is, particularly when replacing a swing vote on the court will decide to answer questions about his views. Now that he is nominated for a position where he can overturn precedent and make law, it's even more important that he fully answers a broad range of questions."--Sen. Charles Schumer, July 19, 2005

(Uh, Senator...judges don't MAKE LAW, they INTERPRET it.)

"Judge John Roberts cannot be given the opportunity to make law for what may well be the next 30 years." --spokesman for "Gay Men's Heath Crisis"

(Apparently, they don't get it, either.)

"A judge's personal policy preferences are not supposed to matter when it comes to doing their job from the bench."--Rush Limbaugh

"The only way a Supreme Court nominee could win the approval of NARAL and Planned Parenthood would be to actually perform an abortion during his confirmation hearing, live, on camera, and preferably a partial-birth one."--Ann Coulter

"I know no safe depository of the ultimate powers of the society but the people themselves; and if we think them not enlightened enough to exercise their control with a wholesome discretion,the remedy is not to take it from them, but to inform their discretion by education. This is the true corrective of abuses of constitutional power."
-- Thomas Jefferson (letter to William Charles Jarvis, 28September 1820)

"The truth of the matter is that no matter who the President nominates, Harry Reid and his merry band of obstructionists will do everything in their power to delay the nomination, smear the nominee, make outrageous demands and whine every step of the way." --Kay Daly, president of the Coalition for a Fair Judiciary

"Pretty soon, Supreme Court nominees will be asked to supply the Senate with their high-school papers in an effort to determine their future votes on key issues like abortion and the Ten Commandments." --Dan Thomasson

"John Roberts is a Roman Catholic. How important to him is his religion? Do you think it might affect him as a Supreme Court Justice?" --ABC's Barbara Walters

(It didn't seem to bother John F. Kennedy.)

SOCIAL SECURITY

"Do you know where your Social Security taxes are? Some of them went to pay for the National Cowgirl Hall of Fame and Museum in Fort Worth, Texas. The same monies helped the State Historical Society of Iowa in Des Moines pay for the development of exhibits for the World Food Prize. And we should all be happy that some of our Social Security surplus funded a study of mariachi music for the Clark County (Nevada) School District. As we know by now, Social Security is facing many problems that will require long-term, comprehensive reform. But before a doctor operates on a patient, the first step is to stop the bleeding. And the first step toward Social Security reform should be to stop Congress from spending Social Security money on anything except workers' retirement." --Michael Tanner

"Liberals, Democrats and others on the Left frequently state that they 'support the troops.' For most of them, whether they realize it or not, this is not true. They feel they must say this because the majority of Americans would find any other position unacceptable. Indeed, for most liberals, the thought that they really do not support the troops is unacceptable even to them. ... Many on the Left express far more contempt than support for the troops. ... Supporting people who wish to fight entails supporting their fight; and if that fight is opposed, those waging it are also opposed. Many on the Left angrily accuse the Right of disparaging their patriotism. That charge, too, is false. I have never heard a mainstream conservative impugn the patriotism of liberals. But as regards their attitude toward our troops, the patriotism of those on the Left is not the issue. The issue is their honesty." --Dennis Prager

What are the odds that a state as miniscule as Vermont could have so many braying jackasses representing them? Ranked 48th in population and 43rd in land area, Vermont has a public image dominated by some of the most quaint and curious specimens known to mankind.

A crypto- socialist like Patrick Leahy;

a political transvestite like Jim Jeffords;

a hate-monger of like Howard Dean;

and a couple of closet Marxists exploiting the capitalistic market like Ben & Jerry, Vermont's ratio of flakes to normal folks appears to be way out of kilter. Glad I don't have to take responsibility for that bunch!" --A Patriot in Manns Harbor, North Carolina

WAR

"The next time someone demands a timetable for the war in Iraq, ask them to name just one war -- anywhere -- that had such a thing." --Thomas Sowell

"Not much has changed since the mid-1980s. Substitute 'insurgent' for 'Sandinista,' 'Iraq' for 'Soviet Union,' 'Bush' for 'Reagan' and 'war on terror' for 'Cold War,' and the stories need little editing. The U.S. is 'bad,' our enemies 'understandable' if not downright 'good.' ... When's the last time you read a story about the progress being made on the power grid [in Iraq]? Or the new desalination plant that just came on-line, or the school that just opened, or the Iraqi policeman who died doing something heroic? No, to judge by the dispatches, all the Iraqis do is stand outside markets and government buildings waiting to be blown up. ... And reporters wonder why they're despised." --Mark Yost, St. Paul, Minnesota Pioneer Press

"There are those who believe that men in uniform are somehow associated with starting wars. That's like saying policemen cause crime. ... Keeping the peace is the most important problem we face. And I believe that because young men...are willing to put on the uniform and endure the rigors of military life, peace is more secure." --Ronald Reagan

"Clearly, a civilisation that feels guilty for everything it is and does will lack the energy and conviction to defend itself."--Jean-Francois Revel

"[I]n this battle against fundamentalist Islam, I am hardly preoccupied with political correctness, or who may or may not be offended. Indeed, al-Qa'ida cares little if the Western world is 'offended' by televised images of hostages beheaded in Iraq, subway bombings in London, train attacks in Madrid, or Americans jumping to their death from the Twin Towers as they collapsed. ... As long as this war goes on, being 'offended' should be the least of anyone's worries." --Rep. Tom Tancredo

"Buried in all the mainstream media coverage this week over new terrorist bombings in London, space shuttles that didn't launch, the trashing of Karl Rove and the nomination of a new Supreme Court justice was a little-noted item about reenlistments in the U.S. armed forces exceeding expectations. USA Today offered some prominence to the story, but it was widely ignored by most of the Fourth Estate. Perhaps that's because it's a 'good news story.'" --Oliver North

"Present suffering is not enjoyable, but life would be worth little without it. The difference between iron and steel is fire, but steel is worth all it costs. Iron ore may think itself senselessly tortured in the furnace, but when the watch-spring looks back, it knows better." -Maltbie Davenport Babcock

"While it's true that hundreds of millions of Muslims live in miserable circumstances, who's actually responsible for that oppression? Fifty nations boast Muslim majorities and not one of them boasts economic prosperity and a functioning democracy. ... The true oppressor of Muslims is Islam itself, with teachings that destroy any chance of progress, peace or freedom." --Michael Medved

MEDIA

" It is a pretty sorry situation in the media when you can trick them by telling them the truth."--Rush Limbaugh

"I'll never talk to a reporter again! We were just talking -- I was ranting -- and he wrote about it. That isn't right. We all say stuff we don't want printed." --Helen Thomas after Albert Eisele, editor of The Hill, published her suicidal threat if VP Dick Cheney were to run for president

"If a million people say a foolish thing, it is still a foolish thing." --Anatole France

ETHICS

"As eugenics passes through each of its stages -- from sterilizing the enfeebled at the beginning of the 20th century to aborting the disabled at the end of it and the beginning of the 21st -- man is indeed playing God but without any of His providence or care." --George Neumayr

"There's nothing so absurd that if you repeat it often enough, people will believe it." -- William James

"Of all the dispositions and habits which least to political prosperity, Religion and morality are indespensable supports. In vain would that man claim the tribute of Patriotism who should labor to subvert these great Pilliars of human happiness."
-- George Washington (Farewell Address, 19 September 1796)

LABOR

"Union leaders seem genuinely to believe that their glory days will return if only they can defeat President Bush, or oust Tom DeLay as House Majority Leader. But their real obstacle is the reality of the modern global economy. Until they offer workers something more than class warfare, circa 1955, they will continue to decline." --The Wall Street Journal

FREEDOM

"No one more sincerely wishes the spread of information among mankind than I do, and none has greater confidence in its effect towards supporting free and good government."
-- Thomas Jefferson (letter to Trustees for the Lottery of EastTennessee College, 6 May 1810)

GAS PRICES
“As bad as prices are now, the surprising fact is that gasoline is still cheaper than in 1981, at least adjusted for inflation.”--NBC reporter Andrea Mitchell
(A barrel of oil will need to top $90 to set an actual record high price.)

And now for our multiple choice question: Who said the following?

"You vote yourselves salaries out of the public funds and care only for your own personal interests; hence the state limps along."

A) Victor Hanson
B) Aristophanes
C) Plato
D) Barry Goldwater

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B) Aristophanes

Have a great day and thanks for visting The Perspective!!!

Here's A Good One

2005-08-14T20:14:00.000-07:00

Sorry for being away for so long.....life happens!

My youngest just started Kindergarten, so things have been busy.

To get back in the groove, here's a thought-provoking article from Alan Nathan from the Washington Times.

COMING SOON: "Did You Hear What They Said?"

http://www.washingtontimes.com/op-ed/20050810-092827-7470r.htm

LEFT IS STUCK ON NEGATIVES OF WAR IN IRAQ
By Alan Nathan
-----------------------------------------------------------

The Left's hunger for genuinely progressive principles is rivaled only by Paris Hilton's craving for privacy; both are appetites less than ravenous. They reveal this by demonstrating a double-standard tolerance for the intolerance of Islamic extremists and their apologist governments in the Middle East.

The congressional record shows that in the aggregate, Democrats have voiced greater outrage over American abuse of prisoners than they have over Muslimsupport for atrocities. This became manifestly salient when Illinois Sen. Dick Durbin likened American soldiers at Guantanamo Bay to those who had served under Hitler, Pol Pot and Joseph Stalin.

They use their free-speech rights to support the very timetable withdrawal that would further enable dictatorial forces in the region to continue depriving their own citizenry of those same rights to free speech. These are regimes that, if given their druthers, would divest from the Left their own current entitlements of expression so as to pre-empt eventual dissent. It seems so counterintuitive.

Sens. Ted Kennedy of Massachusetts and Barbara Boxer of California are also emblematic of this syndrome. Mr. Kennedy harps monthly about Iraq as a"quagmire" or "the new Vietnam," and Mrs. Boxer recently mimicked the European Left's sentiment to the Commonwealth Club of California arguing that, "Terrorismis a result of this war." Where is the causation given that Osama bin Ladenkilled 3,000 on our soil a year-and-a-half before the war began?

Whether abroad or here, supposed progressives seem not to realize that thetenants of liberalism are unable to thrive unless they exist within the environs of a country possessing a representative government whose leaders rule by theconsent of the governed; such as the one we're helping to create in Iraq.

The mainstream media has also shown complicity in this endeavor. Its reporting of the war in Iraq has focused on setbacks at the exclusion of equally verifiable triumphs. Our successful kills of the enemy consistently receive less news prominence. The Sunni political leadership now participating in the drafting of their country's new constitution garners little attention, though its earlier absence was once at the heart of liberal and press ridicule.

Additionally, infrastructural advances have minimal reporting, though the examples are many. One of the most dramatic was a mission involving a 700-ton,260-megawatt combustion turbine generator secretly hauled over 640 miles throughthe insurgency dominated Anbar province.

Thanks to coalition forces, the citizens of Kirkuk will soon have power for their families. But you'll not hear Mr. Durbin speak of miracles like this. He's more outraged by terrorist prisoners not receiving their rightful servings of chateaubriand chased down by magnums of Cristal.

This practice narrows the journalistic picture of Iraq instead of expanding it, and consequently marginalizes our nation's collective grasp of the advancements in that burgeoning democracy. Pundits who recognize this tendency for not reporting progress alongside setbacks in Iraq will rationalize it by arguing that good news is rarely covered. Paul Begala, former CNN host and White House counsel for Bill Clinton,once said on my show "Alan, please, you never cover planes that land on time and safely." It's a reasoning that's beyond bizarre.

What drives the legitimacy of a news story isn't whether it's good or bad. What drives it is whether or not it's eventful. We report good news all the time i.e., stock markets rising, housing starts increasing, unemployment dropping and teenage pregnancy declining. The reason we're not covering planes that land on time and safely isn't because it's good news; it's simply not eventful.

A vexing truth about the Left is their insistence to block some of the more effective methods of stopping these Muslim terrorists whose perfect universe is one in which all the Left's professed ideals (like equality for women and the right to choose or reject a religious path) would be quashed immediately. One strategy they repudiate on every level is that of racial profiling even if it's only applied to monitoring.

Just as it made sense to look at Southern white males when tracking suspected members of the KKK in the '60's and '70s, doesn't it make equal sense to look at Middle Easterners when tracking members of al Qaeda? While the vast majority of Southern white males didn't belong to the KKK, most cross-burners in the KKK were Southern white males. Conversely, while the vast majority of Middle Easterners don't belong to al Qaeda, almost all terrorists in al Qaeda are of Middle Eastern descent.

Don't these numeric realities dictate that demographic origins have atleast some relevance to our system of profiling?

Hypocrisy.Org....The Saga Continues

2005-07-31T16:42:00.000-07:00

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

2005-07-21T20:24:00.000-07:00

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!"

2005-07-18T09:51:00.000-07:00

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?

2005-07-13T18:39:00.000-07:00

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!

2005-07-11T09:44:00.000-07:00

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

2005-07-07T09:22:00.000-07:00

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

2005-07-04T18:52:00.000-07:00

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!

2005-07-03T14:22:00.000-07:00

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?

2005-06-30T06:55:00.000-07:00

Dearly Beloved,

We have gathered here today to pay our last respects to the latest attempt of the Sore Losers to smear our President, George W. Bush.

If you recall, just days before the November 2004 election, Dan Rather and his minions at the C-BS network tried to foist upon the American public "fake but accurate" documents about the Presidents service in the Air National Guard. The documents were proven to be forgeries and the attempt to take down a sitting President backfired.

Recently the so-called "Downing Street Memos" have surfaced, purporting that the President "fixed" the facts to support the Iraq war effort.

It has been a main contention of the President's enemies that he lied about Iraq having weapons of mass destruction(WMD's) to get us into a war.

However, what has been conveniently forgotten is that the belief that Saddam Hussien had WMD's was widely held BEFORE PRESIDENT BUSH TOOK OFFICE IN JANUARY 2001.

A brief look at news articles from CNN.com provide sufficient proof:

"We must stop Saddam from ever again jeopardizing the stability and security of his neighbors with weapons of mass destruction."- Madeline Albright, Feb 1, 1998
http://www.cnn.com/WORLD/9802/01/iraq/

"If Saddam rejects peace and we have to use force, our purpose is clear. We want to seriously diminish the threat posed by Iraq's weapons of mass destruction program." - President Bill Clinton, Feb. 17, 1998 http://www.cnn.com/ALLPOLITICS/1998/02/18/iraq.political.analysis/

"One way or the other, we are determined to deny Iraq the capacity to develop weapons of mass destruction and the missiles to deliver them. That is our bottom line." - President Clinton, Feb. 4, 1998 http://www.cnn.com/US/9802/04/us.un.iraq/

So you see, my dear friends, since the belief that Saddam had WMD's goes all the way back to the Clinton Administration, President Bush did not lie, "fix" or fabricate the WMD issue.

So as we say good bye to another dear fabricaton of the Left, let us now with strong resolve push forward to the bright future that is before us, proving to the world the true liberating power of democracy.

Feel free to stop by the casket on your way out.

Still Anti-War....and STILL Wrong!

2005-06-28T18:16:00.000-07:00

Mark R. Levin wrote an interesting piece at this link:
http://www.nationalreview.com/levin/levin200406011433.asp

It demonstrates the Old Media has always been against ANY type of war. If you compare news stories from the WWII era and compare them to today's anti-Iraq war stories, you'll find a lot of parallels.

A Familiar Place
It got ugly in postwar Germany, too.

With all the nay saying about our presence in Iraq, it's worth noting that none of these difficulties are particularly new. No postwar occupation has been without serious challenges, including the occupation of Germany after World War II.

The New York Times ran a series of news stories in late 1945 reporting, in part, the following:

"Germans Reveal Hate of Americans,"
October 31, 1945
The German attitude toward the American occupation forces has swung from apathy and surface friendliness to active dislike. According to a military government official, this is finding expression in the organization of numerous local anti-American organizations throughout the zone and in a rapid increase in the number of attacks on American soldiers. There were more such attacks in the first week of October than in the preceding five months of the occupation, this source declared.
This official views the situation as so serious that he and others are protesting the withdrawal of 1,600 experienced military-government officers form the German governments on township, county and regional levels between Nov. 1 and Dec. 15. "We have been talking since the summer about the trouble that we expect this winter," the source said. "That trouble has now begun and we meet it with a plan to withdraw officers from communities where trouble is already being encountered.

"Loss of Victory in Germany Through U.S. Policy Feared,"
November 18, 1945
Grave concern was expressed today by informed officials that the United States might soon lose the fruits of victory in Germany through the failure to prepare adequately for carrying out its long-term commitments under the Potsdam Declaration. Government failures were attributed in part to public apathy. The predictions of a coming crisis are predicated upon three points:

1) The failure to start training a civilian corps of administrators to take over when the Army's Military Government pulls out of Germany by June 1.

2) The failure of the Government to set up an expert advisory group, such as that which existed in the Foreign Economic Administration's Enemy Branch to back up the American administrators of Germany with informed advice and provide a focal point in Washington for policy-making on the German question.

3) The failure of the Allies to decide together, or the United States for itself, the crucial economic question raised by the Potsdam Declaration; namely what level of German economic activity is desired over the long term?

"Germans Declare Americans Hated,"
December 3, 1945
An exhaustive compilation of opinions of Germans in all walks of life on their reaction to the United States occupation of their country was released this afternoon from the confidential status under which it was submitted to officials of the United States Forces in the European Theatre recently.

Bitter resentment and deep disappointment was voiced over the Americans' first six months of occupation, though there was some praise for the improvements in transportation, health conditions, book publishing and entertainment.

"German Election Set In Towns of U.S. Zone,"
December 19, 1945
United States Seventh Army headquarters announced today that plans had been completed for initial German elections in January at Gemuende. A statement said that a vast majority of Germans remained passive in attitude toward politics and displayed no disposition to take over civic responsibilities.
I think we can agree that the postwar occupation of Germany, and the rest of Europe, worked out quite well, despite numerous difficulties and the best efforts of the New York Times to highlight them — as it does today in postwar Iraq.

The Straight Stick

2005-06-24T19:22:00.000-07:00

I recall one of my teachers in Bible college telling me about how to discern truth from error:

"The quickest way to tell if a stick is crooked," he said in his South Texas drawl, "is to lay a straight one down next to it."

Such is what presidential adviser Karl Rove did when he told a gathering of the New York Conservative Party that "Liberals saw the savagery of the 9/11 attacks and wanted to prepare indictments and offer therapy and understanding for our attackers." Conservatives, he said, "saw the savagery of 9/11 and the attacks and prepared for war."

(The AP story can be found at http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20050624/ap_on_go_pr_wh/rove_speech;_ylt=AqAit15SiaFzf32g8TQVRxayFz4D;_ylu=X3oDMTBiMW04NW9mBHNlYwMlJVRPUCUl )

By JIM ABRAMS, Associated Press Writer
Fri Jun 24, 5:06 PM ET

WASHINGTON - A White House official said Friday the administration finds it "somewhat puzzling" that Democrats are demanding presidential adviser Karl Rove's apology or resignation for implying that liberals are soft on terrorism.

"I think Karl was very specific, very accurate, in who he was pointing out," communications director Dan Bartlett said, contending the comments weren't aimed at all Democrats. "It's touched a chord with these Democrats. I'm not sure why."

I wish that I could have seen Bartlett's face when he said that. There HAD to be a sarcastic grin going on.

When I saw that comment, it reminded me of the teacher I mentioned above. The point being that if you want to see who's who on the ideological spectrum, run some truth up the flagpole and see who salutes.

Notice that Rove never used the words "Republican" or "Democrat".

He didn't have to. Once the meat was tossed into the yard, only the ravenous ones showed themselves.

Back to the article:

"It's somewhat puzzling why all these Democrats ... who responded forcefully after 9/11, who voted to support President Bush's pursuit of the war on terror, are now rallying to the defense of MoveOn.org, this liberal organization who put out a petition in the days after 9/11 and said that we ought not use military force in responding to 9/11," Bartlett said on NBC's "Today" show. "That is who Karl Rove cited in that speech ... There is no need to apologize."

But Eli Pariser, executive director of the MoveOn political action committee, said the online group didn't oppose U.S. military action in Afghanistan in response to the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks.

LIAR!!!

From this link: http://www.newsmax.com/archives/articles/2005/6/23/202013.shtml

we find a litany of sources from MoveOn.Org opposing an armed response to the 9/11 attacks:

Immediately After 9/11, MoveOn.Org Petition Urged "Moderation And Restraint" And Use Of "International Judicial Institutions."
"We, The Undersigned, Citizens And Residents Of The United States Of America ... Appeal To The President Of The United States, George W. Bush ... And To All Leaders Internationally To Use Moderation And Restraint In Responding To The Recent Terrorist Attacks Against The United States." (MoveOn.Org Website, "MoveOn Peace,"

"We Implore The Powers That Be To Use, Wherever Possible, International Judicial Institutions And International Human Rights Law To Bring To Justice Those Responsible For The Attacks, Rather Than The Instruments Of War, Violence Or Destruction." (MoveOn.Org Website, "MoveOn Peace,"

"(W)e Demand That There Be No Recourse To Nuclear, Chemical Or Biological Weapons, Or Any Weapons Of Indiscriminate Destruction, And Feel That It Is Our Inalienable Human Right To Live In A World Free Of Such Arms." (MoveOn.Org Website, "MoveOn Peace.")

The article also contains quotes from various LIBERAL DEMOCRATS who did exactly what Karl Rove said that they did. You'll find quotes from John Kerry, Joe Biden, Al Sharpton, Barbara Lee, Neil Abercrombie and others.

What's also insulting is that they think we have such a short memory.

New York Governor George Pataki read Sen. Hillary Clinton the riot act on Thursday after she demanded that he condemn comments by White House political advisor Karl Rove.

In an article found at http://www.newsmax.com/archives/ic/2005/6/23/235044.shtml

Pataki said this:
"I think it's a little hypocritical for Sen. Clinton to call on me to repudiate a political figure's comment, when she never asked Sen. Durbin to repudiate his comments,"

"She never responded to Howard Dean's insult to every single Republican, saying that they never earned an honest day's living.

"She never responded to Sen. Reid's unfair criticism of the president - he called the president a loser and a liar. He's never apologized - she never requested that."

"She never called for an apology or clarification when Moveon.org called for moderation and restraint in response to the terrorist attacks."

"So, when she does that, I'll be glad to listen to her call for me to ask someone to apologize."

And the AP story we started with ends with a pot-calls-kettle-black paragraph:

Democrats said Rove, and his Republican allies, were now trying to change the subject when Democrats, and many Americans, are becoming increasingly critical of the course of the war in Iraq. For Rove "to try to exploit 9/11 for political purposes once again just shows you how desperate they are," said House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi of California, who in recent days has been the target of Republican attacks for saying that the Iraq war was a "grotesque mistake."

Thank you Karl for laying down a Straight Stick.

7 Months Later....

2005-06-23T18:33:00.000-07:00

Finally, after SEVEN MONTHS of accusations, verbal attacks, and hate speech we can do what failed Presidential candidate John Kerry urged us to do:

We can bring the nation together.

Yes, after SEVEN MONTHS of hearing "BUSH STOLE THE ELECTION" and "HEIL BUSH", Democrat party leaders have finally laid down their guns and admitted that there was NO FRAUD in the 2004 Election.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/06/22/AR2005062202273.html?sub=AR

Now, you have to be careful when you read this, because the writer starts off with listing how the system in Ohio broke down.

Were there mistakes in Ohio? Yes.

Was there fraud in Ohio? No.

Buried in the next-to-last paragraph is this interesting fact that debunks all the charges of racism by the Republicans in Ohio:

"census data showed that African American turnout reached record levels last year, increasing by 84,000 from 2000."

So even Democrats agree: BUSH DIDN'T STEAL THE ELECTION.

We now return you to your regularly schedule life.......................

Down for the Count: Downing St. Memo

2005-06-19T20:27:00.000-07:00

On two previous occasions (Monday, June 06, 2005 and Monday, May 30, 2005) I posted articles, with links, that put the lie to the spurious "Downing Street Memos".

My left-wing co-workers have been in a state of euphoria, stating that the memos are "gonna bring down Bush" etc.

(As a brief aside, didn't the pro-death liberals depcit Terry Schiavo's experience as a "state of euphoria" after her feeding tube was removed?)

And now, with a healthy assist from one of the Blogosphere's heavyweights, The Captain's Quarters, here is a posting (again with links) that puts the Downing Street Memo in the grave:

First, a link to the Captain's site: http://www.captainsquartersblog.com/mt/archives/004746.php

Now the story:

The media and the Leftists have had a field day with the Downing Street memos that they claim imply that the Bush administration lied about the intelligence on WMD in order to justify the attack on Iraq. Despite the fact that none of the memos actually say that, none of them quote any officials or any documents, and that the text of the memos show that the British government worried about the deployment of WMD by Saddam against Coalition troops, Kuwait and/or Israel, the memo continues to survive.

Until tonight, however, no one questioned the authenticity of the documents provided by the Times of London. That has now changed, as Times reporter Michael Smith admitted that the memos he used are not originals, but retyped copies (via LGF and CQ reader Sapper):

The eight memos — all labeled "secret" or "confidential" — were first obtained by British reporter Michael Smith, who has written about them in The Daily Telegraph and The Sunday Times.

Smith told AP he protected the identity of the source he had obtained the documents from by typing copies of them on plain paper and destroying the originals.

The AP obtained copies of six of the memos (the other two have circulated widely). A senior British official who reviewed the copies said their content appeared authentic. He spoke on condition of anonymity because of the secret nature of the material.

Readers of this site should recall this set of circumstances from last year. The Killian memos at the center of CBS' 60 Minutes Wednesday report on George Bush' National Guard service supposedly went through the same laundry service as the Downing Street Memos.

Bill Burkett, once he'd been outed as the source of the now-disgraced Killian memos, claimed that a woman named Lucy Ramirez provided them to him -- but that he made copies and burned the originals to protect her identity or that of her source.

Why would a reporter do such a thing? While reporters need to protect their sources, at some point stories based on official documents will require authentication -- and as we have seen with the Killian memos, copies make that impossible. The AP gets a "senior British official" to assert that the content "appeared authentic", which only means that the content seems to match what he thinks he knows.

This, in fact, could very well be another case of "fake but accurate", where documents get created after the fact to support preconceived notions about what happened in the past. One fact certainly stands out -- Michael Smith cannot authenticate the copies. And absent that authentication, they lose their value as evidence of anything.

Besides, as the AP report makes clear, the two governments sincerely worried about the deployment of WMD despite the allegations of those who fixate on one sentence of one memo. The latest issue coming from the memos, according to its proponents, is the alleged statement by Blair that WMD programs had not progressed. However, it also points out why 9/11 made all the difference in the approach to Iraq:

The documents confirm Blair was genuinely concerned about Saddam's alleged weapons of mass destruction, but also indicate he was determined to go to war as America's top ally, even though his government thought a pre-emptive attack may be illegal under international law.

"The truth is that what has changed is not the pace of Saddam Hussein's WMD programs, but our tolerance of them post-11 September," said a typed copy of a March 22, 2002 memo obtained Thursday by The Associated Press and written to Foreign Secretary Jack Straw.

"But even the best survey of Iraq's WMD programs will not show much advance in recent years on the nuclear, missile or CW/BW (chemical or biological weapons) fronts: the programs are extremely worrying but have not, as far as we know, been stepped up."

All of the Western nations had intelligence that matched with the Bush/Blair determination that Saddam had not disposed of his WMD stocks. Prior to 9/11, the Western approach of waiting Saddam out appeared adequate. After 9/11, the existence of those WMD stocks clearly was intolerable, given Saddam's involvement with terrorist groups in the past -- including hosting an al-Qaeda convention, of sorts, in 1999.

Even if these memos could be authenticated, they're still meaningless. They could only excite the kind of idiots that would hold mock impeachment hearings with four witnesses and no authority whatsoever.

This story gets nuttier and nuttier.

UPDATE III: Despite what Truck says in the comments, a lack of protest from Downing Street after being asked to authenticate retyped copies of alleged minutes of secret meetings does NOT constitute verification. The same exact argument came up with the Killian memos in Rathergate and the Newsweek Qu'ran-flushing report last month.

In both cases, the documents or sources turned out to be fakes. It's the reporters' job to provide verification, not simply a demurral by officials to opine on their authenticity. If that isn't obvious, then centuries of evidentiary procedure in American and English common law have gone for naught, as well as traditions of journalistic responsibility and professionalism.

After all, this argument just means that reporters can type out anything they like and the burden of proof shifts from the accuser to the accused in proving them false -- hardly the process endorsed in libel and slander cases in the US, at least.

UPDATE IV: The port side of the blogosphere seems a bit unhappy to hear that the DSM are fakes, but I'm not making this up. The reporter himself says that he retyped the memos on an old-style manual typewriter and destroyed either the originals (AP) or working copies from which he worked (Rawstory). In effect, he created mock-ups -- and that means the memos provided by the Times in PDF format are fakes.

John at Power Line says that the memos would make more ridiculous claims if they were fakes. However, there's a difference between fakes and frauds. Giving Smith the full benefit of the doubt and assuming the originals really exist and that he transcribed them perfectly, they're fakes but the information could, indeed, be accurate.

The problem is that we can't authenticate them, and a series of demurrals from Tony Blair and other British officials don't amount to authentication, either. It doesn't help that Smith went to such weird lengths -- such as the manual typewriter and artificially aging the appearance through multiple copying -- to produce the information.

The Killian memos were both fakes and frauds, as even CBS's expert stated in their final report, although laughingly Kevin's commentors continue to argue that they're neither. We know for certain the DSMs are fakes -- and because of that, we can't help but assume the DSMs are fraudulent absent positive authentication.
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In the AP story mentioned above, this part was buried down in the 10th paragraph:

"Smith told AP he protected the identity of the source he had obtained the documents from by typing copies of them on plain paper and destroying the originals."

Doing these things against President Bush didn't work before the election, and it's obviously not going to work after it either.

Couldn"t Have Said it Better

2005-06-16T21:26:00.000-07:00

Ralph Peters of the NY Sun wrote an excellent piece on the nonsense that has become "GitmoGate".

The article is so outstanding, I'll post it here and I'll also give you the link.

http://www.nypost.com/postopinion/opedcolumnists/25151.htm

THE demands to shut down our Guantanamo lock-up for terrorists have nothing to do with human rights. They're about punishing America for our power and success.

From our ailing domestic left to overseas America haters, no one really cares about the fate of Mustapha the Murderer or Ahmed the Assassin. The lies told about Gitmo are meant to undercut U.S. foreign policy and embarrass America.

The Gitmo controversy is about many things, from jealousy of the United States and outrage that we refuse to fail, to residual anger that we won the Cold War and exploded the left's great fantasy of a dictatorship of the intellectuals. But the one thing the protests aren't about is human rights.
Except, of course, as a means to slam the United States.

Torture? Who and when? Koran abuse? I'd rather be a Koran in Gitmo than a Bible in Saudi Arabia. Illegal detentions? Suggest a better way to handle hardcore terrorists. Maltreatment? Spare me. The food the prisoners receive is better than what I had to eat in the Army.

Another thing: Would it be more humane to incarcerate the declared enemies of civilization in northern Alaska, rather than on a Caribbean beach?

Has the Bush administration made mistakes regarding Guantanamo? You bet. The biggest one was attempting to placate the critics. By launching a new investigation every time a terrorist had a toothache, our government played into the hands of its enemies.

The truth is that the terrorists and their defenders have something in common. It's not courage, which is one quality violent fanatics don't lack. It's that neither can be appeased.

Any concession only increases their appetites. The Clinton administration's reluctance to respond to terrorist strikes encouraged al Qaeda. If the Bush administration closed the Guantanamo facility, any alternative holding center would be attacked just as rabidly and dishonestly.

If we put our captives up at the Four Seasons, we'd be condemned because somebody smelled bacon at breakfast.

You can't negotiate with terrorists. And you cannot reason with ideologues — whether they're Islamist fanatics or pathetic old lefties fishing for a cause to give meaning to squandered lives. Terrorists, French and German neo-Stalinists, and our own democracy-hating intelligentsia aren't interested in facts. It's all about the comfort of belief.

Let's get this straight: Nothing we could do would appease those who feel a need for our country to fail. We must stop trying to satisfy them.

There's a military maxim that applies to all the nonsense about Gitmo: Don't let the entire battalion get bogged down by a sniper. By attempting to respond to the wild charges leveled by those who offer no solutions themselves — who have no interest in solutions — we've allowed anti-American basket cases from Harvard Yard to the German parliament to create an issue from nothing.

Oh, and thanks to the "mainstream" media for assuming that our country's always wrong.

There is a culture of torture in the world. Blessedly, America isn't part of it. When a few of our troops make mistakes, they're punished. Given the magnitude of our task and the unprecedented conditions we face, it's remarkable our errors have been so few.

What should enrage every decent citizen is that the real torturers — from Zimbabwe to China, from Syria to North Korea — get a pass from the political left. If terrorists behead defenseless captives on videotape, it's simply an expression of their culture. But if a handful of U.S. troops play an ugly round of Candid Camera, that's a new gulag.

As someone who takes human rights seriously, I'm appalled by the lack of sympathy the left feels toward the victims of any regime other than the Bush administration. Let's shout it to prisoners everywhere: If you're not harmed by an American, your suffering doesn't count.

The left's hypocrisy is immeasurable. The grandchildren of those who defended Stalin are mortified that Saddam Hussein will stand trial. By taking such irresponsible voices seriously, we grant our critics a strength they otherwise lack and simply help them keep their lies alive.

No matter what our country does, we will never please a global intelligentsia outraged that all their theories came to nothing. We can't satisfy al Qaeda, and we can't please those discontented souls who need to blame the United States for their personal inadequacies. It's time we stopped trying.

What should our nation's leaders say about Guantanamo and our treatment of captured terrorists? A lot less.

When comments are unavoidable, try this: "We're human. We make mistakes. We fix those mistakes. And we move on. Nothing will divert us from our mission of defeating terror and keeping our country safe."

Ralph Peters' next book, "New Glory, Expanding America's Global Supremacy," is due out in August.

Did You Hear What They Said?

2005-06-15T21:16:00.000-07:00

Hello, True Believers!

That's right, it's time for another edition of "Did You Hear What They Said"? Where we actually quote people in the news and show the world who they really are!

And now, without further ado, let's.......get.....busy:

The Framers

"I am well aware of the toil and blood and treasure that it will cost to maintain this Declaration, and support and defend these States. Yet through all the gloom I can see the rays of ravishing light and glory. I can see that the end is worth more than all the means...." --John Adams

Homosexual Agenda

"In the supposed state of nature, all men are equally bound by thelaws of nature, or to speak more properly, the laws of the Creator."--Samuel Adams

"When homosexuality takes on all the aspects of a political movement, it,too, becomes a war, the kind of war in which the first casualty is truth, and the spoils turn out to be our own children. ... In a Washington March for Gay Pride, they chanted, 'We're here. We're queer. And we're coming after your children.' What more do we need to know?" --Charles Socarides,M.D., clinical professor of psychiatry, Albert Einstein College of Medicine

War

"Abuse at Abu Ghraib prison -- where no one was killed or even hurt -- was given massive attention; Saddam's mass graves precious little. The news media's double standard is clear." --Jack Kelly

"Let's understand what mishandling means. Under the rules the Pentagon later instituted at Guantanamo, proper handling of the Koran means using two hands and wearing gloves when touching it. Which means that if any guard held the Koran with one hand or had neglected to put on gloves, this would be considered mishandling. On the scale of human crimes, where, say, 10 is the killing of 2,973 innocent people in one day and 0 is jaywalking, this ranks as perhaps a 0.01." --Charles Krauthammer

"We feed them now their Islamic food. We give them honey and dates when they break fast at Ramadan. We give them prayer beads, prayer oil, all paid for -- in fact if you did that for American GIs and you did a call to prayer five times a day the ACLU would sue on the basis that we broke into separation between church and state. So my question is -- we even have footprints that are painted at the prison where guards are not to step during prayer time because they will squeak, will make noise and bother the prisoners. How could you possibly improve that treatment for the guys that are Osama bin Laden's bodyguards and the guy who was on his way to kill 5,000 Americans no matter where you put them?"--Congressman Duncan Hunter

"You can't fix in six months what it took 35 years to destroy." --Ibrahim al-Jaafari, Iraq Prime Minister

"If American troops kill a hundred terrorists in battle and lose ten of their own men doing it, the only headline will be: 'Ten More Americans Killed in Iraq Today.' Those in the media who have carped at the military for years, and have repeatedly opposed military spending, are now claiming to be 'honoring' our military by making a big production out of publishing the names of all those killed in Iraq. Will future generations see through this hypocrisy -- and wonder why we did not?" --Thomas Sowell

"This is an enemy that refuses to observe any conventions, treaties or rules of warfare. They lie, cheat and violate agreements. They slice off heads like raw meat. They murder women and children. They fly airplanes into buildings. But we're the bad guys?" --Oliver North

"To be prepared for war, is one of the most effectual means of preserving peace." --George Washington

Religion

"When people stop believing in God, they don't believe in nothing -- they believe in anything." --G. K. Chesterton

Did any Muslim clerics apologize for the terrorists who desecrated the Church of the Nativity? Do any of them protest against the persecution of Christians and Jews that goes on every day in many Islamic states? Has Turkey apologized for its genocidal jihad against the Armenian Christians? Do we ever hear Muslim clerics — talking when Westerners aren't around, that is — express the same respect and tolerance for Christianity and Judaism that they demand for Islam? --Bruce Thornton

"No one proposes teaching the Bible as a sacred text or to promote religious faith in public schools. With three kinds of Jews, a dozen varieties of Methodists and countless flavors of Baptists, just for starters, we could never agree on what, exactly, should be taught as doctrine even if that's what we set out to do. But in a less-than-perfect world there can be no harm, and a lot of good, in well-informed surveys of the Bible as literature, showing how the Bible has shaped history, philosophy, the law, art and other subjects, inspiring our earliest settlers, Founding Fathers and presidents unto the modern day." --Suzanne Fields

At this link: http://www.anti-naturals.org/15cst/no19/p1.htm you will find an essay containing the following quotes:

"On a personal level, religiosity is merely annoying—like bad taste. This immaturity represents a significant social problem, however, because religious adherents fail to recognize their limitations. So, in the name of their faith, these moral retards are running around pointing fingers and doing real harm to others. One only has to read the newspaper to see the results of their handiwork. They discriminate, exclude and belittle. They make a virtue of closed-mindedness and virulent ignorance. They are an ugly, violent lot."

"Those who believe that they are acting out the divine plan are the most dangerous sort in the contemporary world. Make no mistake."

"Can there be any doubt that humanity would be better off without religion? Everyone who appreciates the good, the true and the beautiful has a duty to challenge this social poison at every opportunity. It is not enough to be irreligious; we must use our critique to expose religion for what it is: sanctimonious nonsense. --Timothy Shortell

He sounds like this guy:
"Christianity is an invention of sick brains. ... The best thing is to let Christianity die a natural death. ... We commence hostilities against the so-called Ten Commandments; the tablets from Sinai are no longer in force." --Adolf Hitler

"If we ever forget that we're one nation under God, then we will be a nation gone under." --Ronald Reagan

Dr. Howard Dean (aka Dr. No)

"Republicans are not very friendly to different kinds of people. ... They all behave the same. They all look the same. It's pretty much a white Christian party." --DNC Chairman Dr. Howard Dean, former governor of Vermont, which, as you may recall, is 96.8 percent white.

"'Democrat National Chairman Howard Dean further burnished his shoot-from-the-lip reputation Thursday' by suggesting that President Bush won re-election because Republicans are lazy, the Chicago Sun-Times reports. ... It's a strange complaint coming from the head of a party whose most recent presidential nominee was a man who married another man's fortune." --James Taranto

"Last week's scandal was Deep Throat. This week's scandal was Dean's throat, and apparently Dean likes the taste of his own foot."--House Speaker Dennis Hastert

"Dean's inflammatory rhetoric makes it clear that Democrats have no vision and would rather pander to the maniacal fringe than talk about the important issues facing our country," --Tracey Schmitt

"'All you need to know about the Democrat Party is we will defend abortion to the death, and the Republicans are mean, nasty people that want to starve old people and poison kids.' That pretty much sums it up. All I can say is the country will continue to be a better place to live if Howard Dean keeps calling us stupid, white, Christian morons who've never held an honest job. It will only ensure that the closest that Democrats get to seats of power is through the Capitol tours." --Duane Patterson

"I was hoping that Governor Dean could make it tonight, but sadly, he's too busy to make it. He's too busy helping us expand the Republican majority."--Senator Bill Frist

The Party of Dr. No

"If the Democrat Party is supposedly so diverse, why is the Democrat Party leadership apparently homogenously white? I mean the Democrat Party looks like an antebellum plantation from 150 years ago. You got the big, white owner and the white family in the big house, and thousands of black workers in the fields. Where's the Democrats' answer to a figure like Condoleezza Rice?" --Mark Steyn

"The great challenge for Democrats is not to be put into a cultural box. ... We live in a fairly conservative country, and progressives have to adjust the way they present their case." --Marshall Wittmann of the centrist Democrat Leadership Conference, admitting it's the Left that's out of the political mainstream

"The Deep Throat incident was about the Watergate break in, when the Republicans broke into the Watergate hotel to see what the Democrats were up to. You see, back in those days the Democrats actually had ideas worth stealing"--Jay Leno

"For Kerry, Gore, and Clinton, even a few conservative outlets are too many. They grew up in the era before cable TV, talk radio, and the Internet -- the age when liberal dominance was unquestioned. Now Democrats have to compete in the marketplace of ideas, and voters don't seem to be buying what they're selling. Is it any wonder so many are grumpy?" --Jeff Jacoby

"When the federal assault-weapons ban expired last September, its fans claimed that gun crimes and police killings would surge. Sarah Brady, one of the nation's leading gun-control advocates, warned, 'Our streets are going to be filled with AK-47s and Uzis.' Well, over eight months have gone by, and the only casualty has been gun-controllers' credibility. Letting the law expire only showed its uselessness." --John Lott, Jr.

"Democrats consistently rely on judges to impose legislation that they can't get through the normal democratic process because majorities don't want it. As a result, our politics and our courts have been deformed. A contempt for majorities keeps growing on the left, and contempt for the courts keeps rising on the right." --John Leo

"The Framers' carefully considered requirement was that each state's senators would be "chosen by the legislature thereof" rather than by direct popular election. Do Democrats, in the purity of their newfound reverence for the Framers, now favor repealing the 17th Amendment?"--George Will

"Political parties that choose the path of obstruction will not gain the trust of the American people. If leaders of the other party have innovative ideas, let's hear them. But if they have no ideas or policies except obstruction, they should step aside and let others lead."--President George W. Bush

"As Republicans, we will always point out where the other party is misguided and mistaken, but we will never embrace their hateful rhetoric. [Democrat leaders hope] their loud talk and angry rhetoric will hide the fact that they have nothing to say and nothing to offer." --RNC Chairman Ken Mehlman

And finally, our multiple choice question, Who said the following:

"So we're going after them, we have to destroy their brand."

A) Stephen Heyer, president and chief operating officer of Coca-Cola
B) Nancy Pelosi, House Minority Leader
C) Tim Penner President of Proctor & Gamble, Canada
D) Don Westfall, Vice President, Promar International

Scroll down for the answer (no Cheating!)
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B) Nancy Pelosi, House Minority Leader

Have a great day!

Ahnold Gets It Right

2005-06-14T08:03:00.000-07:00

California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger is trading on his populist appeal to bypass the State Legislature for initiatives he believes are crucial to reshape California government.

http://www.KESQ.com/Global/story.asp?s=3469429

"The governor wants voters to consider ballot measures that would impose a cap on state spending, redraw legislative districts and increase the time it takes teachers to gain tenure."

Surely this is democracy in its purest form. LETTING THE VOTERS DECIDE.

I mean, there's nothing wrong with that, is there?

That's what America is all about, right?

Nobody in their right mind would opposed letting the voters decide issues, would they?

Uh........well.......back to the article:

"Schwarzenegger's move will likely lead to a showdown with teachers, unions and Democrats in a campaign that is expected to be costly and bitter."

So there you have it. The people who are AGAINST LETTING THE VOTERS DECIDE ISSUES are:

Teachers
Unions
Democrats

Here's where it gets funny:

If you listen to today's prominent Democrats, you would think that Republicans, like Governor AHnold, are the enemies of democracy.

Hillary Clinton, for example has publicly stated the following about Republicans:

"They are turning back the clock; they are tearing down the building blocks of democracy"

(Note to Hillary: Uh, no. Letting the voters decide issues IS THE BUILDING BLOCK OF DEMOCRACY)

And then she actually uttered this gem:

"Too many communities, too many people of color, too many college students are effectively denied an equal right to cast their vote."

(Note to Hillary: The Guv is actually GIVING THE VOTERS A CHANCE TO CAST THEIR VOTE.)

(You can find her quotes at http://www.nydailynews.com/news/ideas_opinions/story/318072p-272071c.html )

The Real Equivalent

2005-06-13T22:32:00.000-07:00

Here is a link to a fascinating article about what historical conflict is closer to resembling the Iraq war.

http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/05163/519867.stm

Some excerpts:

"Journalists constantly compare the war in Iraq to the Vietnam War. This may be because Vietnam is the only war with which they are familiar, the study of military history not being foremost on the agenda of most scribes. More likely it's because it suits their ideological purposes to compare Iraq to the only war America has ever lost."

This can be verified by a member of that media, ABC News reporter Terry Moran.

On Hugh Hewitt's radio show, Moran said "There is, Hugh, I agree with you, a deep anti-military bias in the media. One that begins from the premise that the military must be lying, and that American projection of power around the world must be wrong. I think that that is a hangover from Vietnam, and I think it's very dangerous,"
Link: www.HughHewitt.com

Another excerpt fro the Post-Gazette article:

"Those who have studied military history think a more apt historical parallel is with the battle of Okinawa, which concluded 60 years ago this month."

That popping sound you just heard was thousands of liberals sticking their fingers in their ears......

It Was a "Cease-Fire"?????

2005-06-13T22:11:00.000-07:00

At the following link you will find an interesting tid-bit of info:
http://archives.cnn.com/2002/US/11/08/iraq.resolution

It mentions that Iraq was believed to be in violation of "the cease-fire treaty it signed when Baghdad lost the 1991 Persian Gulf War. "

CEASE-FIRE?

You mean that war never came to an end?

Does that also mean that (gasp) when Iraq violated that treaty and the UN Resolutions that followed that (gasp) we were actually justified for going back in there??????????????????????????

Selcetive Memory Syndrome

2005-06-13T22:02:00.000-07:00

After enjoying a jolly-good laugh at the Left-wing extremists and their tendancy toward political suicide, I came across an article from Time magazine that was published during the run-up to the Iraq war.

Here's the link: http://www.time.com/time/archive/preview/0,10987,1002894,00.html

Note the Headline:

Decoding the Headlines About Iraq
Bush's team isn't preparing for war but fighting over whether and how to fight

So, did Time magazine also lie, given what what is in the "Downing Street Memo"?

Or maybe we are seeing another indication of Liberals suffering from Selective Memory Syndrome???

Good News...In Spades!

2005-06-13T21:37:00.000-07:00

Here is a link to a story detailing all the GOOD news going on in Iraq:

http://opinionjournal.com/extra/?id=110006812

The article is much to long to post here, but even if you just scroll down the page, you will be amazed at all the good things going on over there.

And that's just in the LAST THREE WEEKS!!!

"Glenn Beck on Ice"

2005-06-08T04:47:00.000-07:00

Last night at the Orpheum Theatre (Memphis, TN) my wife and I attended the GlennBeck on Ice program.

If you listen to Beck on the radio, you know that he and his staff are trying to come up with a way to describe the show to people in other cities on the tour.

We were part of the meet-and-greet after the show and Glenn asked us to call in Wednesday to tell listeners how they felt about the show.

If you live in one of the cities on the tour, read my lips: GO SEE THE SHOW!

There are several ways I could describe the show, but the best way would be to use Glenn's own introduction we hear on his radio show, "the fusion of entertainment and enlightenment".

First the show entertains us by allowing us to laugh at ourselves by reminding us to not take ourselves so seriously. (The part about the "fruit cellar" is priceless.)

Second, the show enlightens us by reminding us of the things that we NEED to take seriously. Things such as family and faith. The impression I got at the end of the show was that perhaps one of the best things we can do for our children is to create memories. Memories of doing things together. Memories that help to form our lives. Things that, when added together, show us what is good about the American spirit. The Real America.

Thanks, Glenn.

"Downing St. Memo" Goes Down...Again

2005-06-06T22:24:00.000-07:00

The following article by James Robbins finally puts the "Downing St. Memo" to bed.

It's a reminder that we should examine the nature of the evidence, instead of harping on the seriousness of the charges.

http://www.nationalreview.com/robbins/robbins200506060801.asp

June 06, 2005, 8:01 a.m.
Causing a Commotion
“Downing Street Memo” is old news.

It is July 2002. A British report notes that Prime Minister Tony Blair had “decided Britain must back any US assault and had ordered defence planners to begin the preparations for a new war in the Gulf.”

The report claims “President Bush has already made up his mind. This is going to happen. It is a given … What we are waiting for is to be told the details of how and when and where.”

A shocking secret document recently leaked from Whitehall? No, it is the London Observer, in an article published July 21, 2002, p. 2. Two days later nearly identical language would be recorded in the so-called "Downing Street Memo," the minutes of a British cabinet meeting recorded by foreign-policy aide Matthew Rycroft and published “gotcha!” style days before the recent parliamentary election.

The memo raises three issues dear to the hearts of President Bush's critics — the timing of the decision to go to war with Saddam, the WMD rationale, and the use (read: abuse) of intelligence to create the casus belli. One paragraph in the memo conveniently contains all three:

Richard Dearlove, Head of MI-6 reported on his recent talks in Washington. There was a perceptible shift in attitude. Military action was now seen as inevitable. Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy.

This and other excerpts have caused a furor on the American Left. Ralph Nader is calling for impeachment (again), and John Kerry has vowed to bring the matter to the Senate floor.

Of course, the memo simply contains the impressions of an aide
of the impressions of British-cabinet officials
of the impressions of unnamed people they spoke to in the United States about what they thought the president was thinking.

It is sad when hearsay thrice-removed raises this kind of ruckus, especially since a version had been reported three years ago. As smoking guns go, it is not high caliber.

Was the president committed to go to war with Iraq in July 2002?In the summer of 2002 the policy of the United States was that Saddam Hussein should be removed from power. However, that does not mean that the decision to go to war had already been made.

Contingency planning for military operations against Iraq had begun as early as November 2001. This is no secret; the full timeline along with a wealth of details can be found in General Tommy Franks’s memoir American Solider. The plan that became known as OPLAN 1003V began to be put together in earnest in January 2002. The existence of war planning does not in itself prove that the use of force was inevitable. The purpose was to provide the president with the full range of credible alternatives for pursuing U.S. policy vis-à-vis Saddam Hussein’s regime.

Regime change had been U.S. policy since October 31, 1998, when President Clinton signed the Iraq Liberation Act. It was not a state secret. On February 12, 2002, Colin Powell stated that "With respect to Iraq, it has long been, for several years now, a policy of the United States government that regime change would be in the best interests of the region, the best interests of the Iraqi people. And we are looking at a variety of options that would bring that about."

The policy had bipartisan support; in June 2002 Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle said, "There is broad support for a regime change in Iraq. The question is how do we do it and when do we do it." It was also an international objective.

On April 6, 2002, during a summit in Crawford, Texas, Prime Minister Blair said that regime change in Iraq was the policy of Great Britain, and that failure to act against Saddam was “not an option.” Blair pledged to support military action against Iraq, should that become necessary.

But had the president made up his mind that regime change would necessitate war? British journalist Trevor McDonald sparred with the president at the summit to try to get him to say so, but Bush stuck to his position. "I made up my mind that Saddam needs to go,” he said. "That's about all I'm willing to share with you."

What the president would not share was that other means were already being employed. The Downing Street Memo mentions “spikes of activity,” which probably refers to the program of covert operations begun against Iraq in the spring of 2002. This program was revealed the following June.

Covert action against Iraq was hardly controversial. On June 16, 2002, on ABC’s This Week, House Democratic leader Richard Gephardt said that congressional leaders had been briefed on the secret directive by the White House, and stated that “It is an appropriate action to take. I hope it succeeds in its quest." Senator Joseph Biden, then chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said on Face the Nation, "If the covert action doesn't work, we better be prepared to move forward with another action, an overt action, and it seems to me that we can't afford to miss."

By the time the Downing Street Memo was written overt action against Iraq was being widely discussed, spurred in part by the July 5, 2002, publication of some of the war plans in the New York Times. (A previous version had been leaked in May by the Los Angeles Times.)

The July 5 article led to rampant speculation about the inevitability of war, especially in Britain, and whomever Dearlove and Foreign Secretary Jack Straw were talking to then may well have been reflecting this mood. Moreover, either Dearlove or Straw, or one of their staff, may well have been the “Whitehall source” for the Observer piece two days before the cabinet meeting in question. Either that or they read it in the paper and repeated it at the meeting.

My question: Had they ever spoken to the president to get his views first-person?

Why use WMDs as a rationale for war?

In the July 25, 2002, memo, Foreign Secretary Straw is said to have said,
We should work up a plan for an ultimatum to Saddam to allow back in the UN weapons inspectors. This would also help with the legal justification for the use of force. The Attorney-General [Lord Goldsmith] said that the desire for regime change was not a legal base for military action.

There were three possible legal bases: self-defence, humanitarian intervention, or UNSC authorisation. The first and second could not be the base in this case. Relying on UNSCR 1205 of three years ago would be difficult. The situation might of course change. The Prime Minister said that it would make a big difference politically and legally if Saddam refused to allow in the UN inspectors. Regime change and WMD were linked in the sense that it was the regime that was producing the WMD.

The WMDs justification for regime change was of course not new. On November 26, 2001, President Bush was asked what would happen if Saddam Hussein did not allow U.N. weapons inspectors back into Iraq. “He’ll find out,” he replied.

The president had grown concerned with a scenario that came to be known in policy circles as the “nexus,” a potential relationship between rogue states, nuclear weapons, and terrorists acting as delivery systems. The president was referring to this in his January 29, 2002, State of the Union address when he said, “The United States of America will not permit the world's most dangerous regimes to threaten us with the world's most destructive weapons.”

That the WMD issue was viewed as diplomatically useful, i.e., the easiest way to invoke international law, is not a surprise. Former Deputy Defense Secretary Wolfowitz stated as much in his May 9-10, 2003, interview with Sam Tannenhaus of Vanity Fair (see also NRO analysis here).

The WMD approach worked exactly as intended. The Downing Street Memo is a very good analytical piece, and demonstrates a sound understanding of Saddam’s emotional state and probable future moves. The cabinet discusses presenting Saddam with an ultimatum to let the U.N. inspectors back in, knowing that this would either settle the question, or lead to recalcitrance and defiance on Saddam’s part, creating circumstances justifying intervention. As a strategic analysis, it is spot on, and it formed the road map for the eventual lead-up to war.

Of course Saddam could have simply cooperated with the U.N. and denied the Coalition any pretext for intervening; was it the Coalition’s fault that he reverted to type and disregarded the U.N. resolution?

Unfortunately, so much emphasis was placed on the WMD rationale that the failure to turn up the expected weapons brought the entire regime-change effort into question. However, there were other ways the U.N. might have been engaged. The mismanagement and barefaced corruption of the “Oil for Food” program could have been leveraged for this same purpose.

Was the WMD Intelligence Faked?

Dearlove’s comments include the intriguing passage noted above, “Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy.” To the president’s critics, the meaning is clear — the WMD intelligence was being faked to support the rationale for intervention.

This passage needs some clarification. Maybe Rycroft or Dearlove could elaborate; by “fixed around” did they mean that intelligence was being falsified or that intelligence and information were being gathered to support the policy? There is nothing wrong with the latter — it is the purpose of the intelligence community to provide the information decision-makers need, and the marshal their resources accordingly.

But if Dearlove meant the former, he should be called upon to substantiate his charge. It can be weighed against the exhaustive investigation by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence on prewar intelligence assessments in Iraq. The committee examined this very question, whether the White House had pressured the intelligence community to reach predetermined conclusions supporting the case for war.

The investigation found no evidence that “administration officials attempted to coerce, influence or pressure analysts to change their judgments related to Iraq's weapons of mass destruction capabilities” or that “the Vice President's visits to the Central Intelligence Agency were attempts to pressure analysts, were perceived as intended to pressure analysts by those who participated in the briefings on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction programs, or did pressure analysts to change their assessments.”

One would think that the Senate investigation would have somewhat more weight than the secondhand impressions of a foreign intelligence officer, but if Mr. Dearlove is able to elaborate, one hopes he will.

The memo itself notes that the British assumed that Saddam had limited WMD capabilities — and the September 24, 2002, British white paper on the topic spelled out exactly what Whitehall believed to be the facts. Surely, this was not the result of pressure from the vice president or any other American officials.

I think the fact that the Downing Street Memo had once been classified has a lot to do with its current notoriety. People might suppose that a “secret” document must ipso facto be important. But not always, and not in equal measure. The section of the memo dealing with strategic planning, yes, that was worth keeping close hold on. But the speculations about the inner workings of the American government?

Sounds like the same things one could have heard on any newscast. Looking at the document in context it is hard to see what the commotion is about. Most of what might be thought sensational has already been written about elsewhere, to little fanfare.

The charge of intelligence fraud (if it is such a charge) has already been investigated and found baseless. And the allegations that the president had already decided to go to war and was thus deceiving the American people are personal opinions based on unsubstantiated impressions from unnamed sources.

You want a smoking gun? Check out the real thing. Makes the Downing Street Memo look rather anemic.