For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places. ---Ephesians 6:12


"The age of casual Catholicism is over; the age of heroic Catholicism has begun. We can no longer be Catholics by accident, but instead must be Catholics by CONVICTION." ---Fr. Terrence Henry TOR, Franciscan University of Steubenville

Sunday, June 29, 2008

Irena Sendler VS Al Gore


I overlooked this last month. Better late than never.

Isn't it odd how the Nobel prizes have become so mired in politics that a huckster of junk science could beat out someone like Irena Sendler? But then they probably asked themselves, so what has Irena done lately?

Or have things gotten so shallow in our world that Princess Diana would have beaten Mother Teresa for the Peace Prize (if they were both nominated for it today)? It is a fair question considering that when they died only days apart, Diana received overwhelming press coverage while Mother Teresa's death was treated as an after-thought. That was another revealing moment for the world.

The truth is that Mother Teresa beat Jimmy Carter for the prize in 1979, back when the prize meant something. But I believe it was soiled beyond repair when Arafat shared it in 1994, which was proven again when they caved in to Carter in 2002.

Where Have I Been?

My friend Paul sent me a link to this ad narrated by Senator Fred Thompson in support of Senator John McCain. Nice theme.

Been off-line for a bit due to technical difficulties with my AT&T Wireless Data Connect account and my USB connector. Whenever I can get tech support on the phone (I am a working man with little time to wait on hold), I will probably still have to wait for the warranty people to send me a new Sierra Wireless Data Connector. In the meantime I will try to find free WIFI on the road somewhere that actually works...like this morning.

Saturday, June 21, 2008

More Than A Little Pretentious, Obama


Hmmm. If this is really Barack Hussein Obama's new campaign logo then add PRETENTIOUS to his list of lovable traits.

The Latin vero possumus loosely translates into "yes we can," but most of his supporters, not knowing much Latin (as hardly do I) might think it means "a possum in every pot!"--a very catchy slogan indeed. This could actually work to Obama's advantage when courting voters from the southern states where possum is not only a delicacy, but is also thought to have therapeutic properties, via possum snout.

The emblem in the middle is supposed to be a sunrise, right? Obviously it's an attempt to copy or plagiarize Ronald Reagan's Morning in America. But what it looks like to me and perhaps most conservatives, (those of us who are so fearful of an Obamanation that we will wholeheartedly campaign for McCain) is a SUNSET suggesting the twilight of America's greatness should we elect B.H.O.. (campaign logo borrowed from LGF)

Wednesday, June 18, 2008

Senator John McCain For President....*sigh*




For weeks now I have been searching my soul for a reason to endorse Senator John McCain for President, but I've had a hard time putting it into words. The fact that McCain often takes positions that make what little hair I have on my head fall down the sink doesn't help any.

But to my rescue has come Thomas Sowell and his column which appeared in Townhall.com last week that my brother emailed to me recently. I've heard many criticise Obama and attempt to prop up McCain, but Mr. Sowell makes the point look like such an obvious one that I had to post the entire column (and because Townhall columns have a tendency to become detached from their links after a couple of days). Here it is:


[Obama and McCain

By Thomas Sowell

Now that the two parties have finally selected their presidential candidates, it is time for a sober-- if not grim-- assessment of where we are.

Not since 1972 have we been presented with two such painfully inadequate candidates. When election day came that year, I could not bring myself to vote for either George McGovern or Richard Nixon. I stayed home.

This year, none of us has that luxury. While all sorts of gushing is going on in the media, and posturing is going on in politics, the biggest national sponsor of terrorism in the world-- Iran-- is moving step by step toward building a nuclear bomb.

The point when they get that bomb will be the point of no return. Iran's nuclear bomb will be the terrorists' nuclear bomb-- and they can make 9/11 look like child's play.

All the options that are on the table right now will be swept off the table forever. Our choices will be to give in to whatever the terrorists demand-- however outrageous those demands might be-- or to risk seeing American cities start disappearing in radioactive mushroom clouds.

All the things we are preoccupied with today, from the price of gasoline to health care to global warming, will suddenly no longer matter.

Just as the Nazis did not find it enough to simply kill people in their concentration camps, but had to humiliate and dehumanize them first, so we can expect terrorists with nuclear weapons to both humiliate us and force us to humiliate ourselves, before they finally start killing us.

They have already telegraphed their punches with their sadistic beheadings of innocent civilians, and with the popularity of videotapes of those beheadings in the Middle East.

They have already telegraphed their intention to dictate to us with such things as Osama bin Laden's threats to target those places in America that did not vote the way he prescribed in the 2004 elections. He could not back up those threats then but he may be able to in a very few years.

The terrorists have given us as clear a picture of what they are all about as Adolf Hitler and the Nazis did during the 1930s-- and our "leaders" and intelligentsia have ignored the warning signs as resolutely as the "leaders" and intelligentsia of the 1930s downplayed the dangers of Hitler.

We are much like people drifting down the Niagara River, oblivious to the waterfalls up ahead. Once we go over those falls, we cannot come back up again.

What does this have to do with today's presidential candidates? It has everything to do with them.

One of these candidates will determine what we are going to do to stop Iran from going nuclear-- or whether we are going to do anything other than talk, as Western leaders talked in the 1930s.

There is one big difference between now and the 1930s. Although the West's lack of military preparedness and its political irresolution led to three solid years of devastating losses to Nazi Germany and imperial Japan, nevertheless when all the West's industrial and military forces were finally mobilized, the democracies were able to turn the tide and win decisively.

But you cannot lose a nuclear war for three years and then come back. You cannot even sustain the will to resist for three years when you are first broken down morally by threats and then devastated by nuclear bombs.

Our one window of opportunity to prevent this will occur within the term of whoever becomes President of the United States next January.

At a time like this, we do not have the luxury of waiting for our ideal candidate or of indulging our emotions by voting for some third party candidate to show our displeasure-- at the cost of putting someone in the White House who is not up to the job.

Senator John McCain has been criticized in this column many times. But, when all is said and done, Senator McCain has not spent decades aiding and abetting people who hate America.

On the contrary, he has paid a huge price for resisting our enemies, even when they held him prisoner and tortured him. The choice between him and Barack Obama should be a no-brainer.]


And this is why I've decided to belatedly and somewhat grudgingly announce my endorsement of Senator John McCain for President of the United States. He wasn't my first choice...or my second, third, or fourth. He was, in fact, my second to last choice just ahead of Ron Paul. But to think of what could happen to our nation if a McGovern-Carter idealist with little or no mental stamina (more on the stamina thing another day) who falls flat when away from a teleprompter, who was elected (or selected) by those possessing a Peter Pan teenage mentality and emotional instability (IMHO) who vote according to gender and race (identity politics), the choice is painfully clear. John McCain in '08.

Make no mistake..., anytime McCain enrages me I will jump on him. But I cannot imagine voting for anyone else at this point....



Saturday, June 14, 2008

Congressman Kanjorski Admits Dems Lied To Win In 2006

What a dangerously revealing age we live in where video cameras can pop up anywhere and catch people weaving a tangled web of deceit... And like little children, Democrat politicians cannot keep it secret for long.

Remember the interview with Congressman James Clyburn on Washington Post Online in which he admitted that a positive report from General Petraeus would be bad for Democrats? That is almost as good as this Kanjorski ambush (and a well deserved ambush at that). Three cheers for the interviewer! Small consolation for losing the majority in both Houses, though.

Friday, June 13, 2008

Green And Nasty McCain Girl

Can you blame me?

This from Mover Mike.

Fred Thompson's Opinion On Latest SCOTUS Decision


Fred Thompson weighs in from his Townhall.com blog about the recent SCOTUS (Supreme Court Of The United States) decision regarding enemy combatants (though Fred and I agree it was decided more with Gitmo detainees primarily in mind). My links to Townhall posts and columns usually only last a day before the link points to a non-page, so I am posting the entire bit:

[A Supreme Mistake

Upon reading the opinion in Boumediene v Bush, one must conclude that the majority knew where they wanted to go and simply had to figure out how to get there. The trip was not a pretty one. How could it be when the justices seemingly wrote a map based on ideas cherry picked from over 400 years of established law and backfilled with justifications to create a new right for alien combatants that Americans themselves do not enjoy?

They could have saved us all a lot of time if they’d told us what was clearly on their minds.

They don’t trust military tribunals to deal with those accused of being enemy combatants, even if the tribunals are following guidelines established by Congress.

That the government has probably detained some prisoners at Guantanamo for longer than they should have.

And that Guantanamo should just be closed.

Though they are willing to give it lip service, they don’t really believe we are at war … at least not a “real” war.

Therefore, they should create a new right for our nation’s enemies commiserate with the displeasure that they and the rest of the “enlightened” people have with this “war,” Guantanamo and the Bush Administration.

At least this approach would have been an honest one and based upon about as much legal justification as the approach they took.

But, instead – as Justice Scalia pointed out in his dissent – they for the first time in our nation’s history, conferred a Constitutional right of habeas corpus on alien enemies detained abroad by our military forces in the course of an ongoing war – a broader right than has been given to our own citizens. The court majority did so acknowledging that they could find no precedent to confer such a right to alien enemies not within sovereign U.S. territory

The majority had simply decided that prior courts had denied such rulings based on “practical considerations.” In other words in prior cases and prior wars it had just been too inconvenient to bestow the right of habeas corpus upon non-citizens in foreign jurisdictions. So, by focusing on what they saw as “practical” instead of those pesky court precedents based upon the issues of citizenship and foreign territory … and the Constitution … the majority reached the conclusion they wanted to, since what is practical is subjective. One can only ponder the state of our nation directed by the subjective instead of the Constitution.

As Chief Justice Roberts pointed out in his dissent, the court strikes down as inadequate the most generous set of protections ever afforded aliens detained by this country as enemy combatants.

Among the problems the majority saw was the prisoner’s limited access to classified information, even though his personal representative is allowed access to it and can summarize it for the accused. Exactly what procedures would pass muster with the majority? Well, this has to be figured out by the habeas court later – and most certainly be challenged in endless rounds of further litigation.

At this stage, no one can really tell the extent to which this decision is going to add to judicial confusion, additional administrative difficulty, time and attention of military personnel or how many more prisoners will be mistakenly released to join the at least 30 who were released from Guantanamo only to return to fight the United States.

In reading the majority opinion I am struck by the utter waste that is involved here. No, not the waste of military resources and human life, although such a result is tragically obvious. I refer to the waste of all those years these justices spent in law school studying how adherence to legal precedent is the bedrock of the rule of law, when it turns out, all they really needed was a Pew poll, a subscription to the New York Times, and the latest edition of “How to Make War for Dummies.”

It is truly stunning that this court has seen fit to arrogate unto itself a role in the most important issue facing any country, self-defense, in a case in which Congress has in fact repeatedly acted. This was not a case where Congress did not set the rules; it did. But the court still decided – in the face of overwhelming precedent to the contrary – to intervene. This decision, or course, will allow for "President Bush Is Rebuffed” headlines, the implication being that the Administration was caught red-handed violating clearly established Constitutional rights when in fact the Administration, and the Congress for that matter, followed guidelines established by the Supreme Court itself in prior cases.

People can disagree over whether Congress got it right, but at least members have to face the voters. What remedy do people have now if they don’t like the court’s decision? None. If that thought is not enough to cause concerned citizens to turn out on Election Day to elect a new president, then I don’t know what will be.

I also find it just a tad ironic that in a case involving habeas corpus, which literally means that one must produce a body (or person) before a court to explain the basis on which that person is being detained, the decision of this court may mean more fallen bodies in the defense of a Constitution some of these justices ignored.]


I still prefer this man to John McCain!




Tim Russert Dies Of Heart Attack



Tim Russert, host of Meet The Press, died today of a sudden and massive heart attack after returning to work following a vacation in Italy. His family was returning from the vacation when they were notified of the news.

NBC News has lost its only fair commentator and round table host, who held everyone's feet to the fire with equal firmness. And our nation has lost a great family man and man of faith. He will be sorely missed and seldom equaled by his peers in the business.

Laura Ingraham To Return To The Radio...Soon

Uh..."don't believe what you read on blogs"...????

The only blogs I've seen dealing with Laura's absence are the ones supporting her return to the radio. She must be referring to some other blogs saying she's gone for good. Well, I for one am glad she's returning soon to the airwaves. And per the good people at Talk Radio Network, that return of hers will be June 30th, if not sooner. I'm hoping for sooner. Not that Monica Crowley is all that bad,...but I am growing weary of all those Monty Python references she uses.

In the meantime you can see Laura Ingraham on the Fox News Channel at 5pm as one of several rotating hosts on Just In.


(Hat tip: Conservative Cat)

Tuesday, June 10, 2008

STAND UP For Laura Ingraham!


Laura Ingraham has a new post on her site linking to THIS PAGE with disturbing news about the possible future of her radio program. Here is a portion:

[People: Laura Ingraham deserves your support.

At her website (www.lauraingraham.com), this message is posted:

NOTE TO LAURA LISTENERS

Due to contractual obligations, for the present time I am unable to reveal why I am not currently hosting The Laura Ingraham Show. Rest assured, this absence is not of my choosing, nor is it health or family related. I am ready, willing and eager to continue the conversation we started seven years ago about politics and the culture. (Heck, if cancer couldn't keep me off the airwaves for long, nothing will.) Keep checking the site for a schedule of my appearances on the Fox News Channel. All queries regarding my on-air status should be directed to Talk Radio Network's management at 541 474 2297 or send an email. Thanks for sticking with me, and...Power to the People!

Laura is the lady who went from appearing on a 1995 cover of The New York Times Magazine in a friend's leopardskin miniskirt for an article about rising young conservatives to leading the counterattack on what she calls (rightly) "the pornification of America" as the most listened-to woman in America, The Laura Ingraham Show, a nationally syndicated radio show)…..

If the Democrats control both the White House and Congress in 2009, talk radio superstars like Laura are expected to come under attack.

We'll deal with that later.

NOW:

(1) Let's tell Talk Radio Network's management that we want Laura back on the air NOW;

(2) Let's tell the local stations that carry Laura's show to let Talk Radio Network's management know that there is no substitute for Laura; and

(3)Let Talk Radio Network's Mark Masters himself know that we Laura fans consider keeping Laura off the air is utterly ridiculous and unfair.

Talk Radio Network's Contact information

P.O. Box 3755 Central Point, Oregon 97502

Phone:
541-664-8827

Fax:
541-664-6250

Email info@talkradionetwork.com ] (Actually you will need to go HERE to contact them.)


I have "met" Laura Ingraham three times, though they were more like encounters since we were never properly introduced. All three encounters were disasters starting with a shouting match over a barking Dr. Troy. This happened 10 years ago in Central Park in NYC before either of us turned our lives to Christ, while the other two encounters occurred four years after the first, but just before our respective "Jesus moments,"--hers in '02 (I think) and mine in '03. In spite of these memorable moments with Laura I have become a huge fan of her's and her show and consider myself a member of her "extended family" of listeners addicted to her program.

I have already left a scathing message on the voice mail of one of the radio executives taking those calls. If you love her show go to the trouble of standing up for Laura. They are taking calls and are likely basing their future response upon our reactions to this news. Now get off your butts and do it!

Laura Ingraham Reminds Us To Be Vigilant

While Laura Ingraham is on vacation(????) she’s sending out E-Blasts. The following excerpt is the reason why I haven’t officially endorsed John McCain and put a banner supporting him on my blog. I can barely handle his green policy only because I have faith that a Republican minority will stand against the worst of it, but it will be hard to hold back the tide of amnesty.

From Laura:

[MCCAIN'S IMMIGRATION "LESSON": If you thought John McCain had learned from his initial amnesty push with Ted Kennedy, you're wrong. We took note back in January when, appearing on Meet the Press, he reflected on the immigration reform implosion, saying: "The lesson is they want the borders secured first." (Note the odious use of "they," rather than, say, "Americans.")

So, lesson learned? Keep dreaming. National Review's Jim Geraghty reports that in a weekend conference call with reporters, campaign manager Rick Davis downplayed concerns that this fanfare for amnesty is politically damaging, claiming it was actually a positive that "may suit to fit him in a general election."

Really. Either Team McCain thinks the leadership of La Raza is a representative sample of the American populace, or he hasn't learned a damn thing about why his amnesty-for-all bill nearly toppled his political career. Sad to say, I'm not sure which it is.]

Sunday, June 8, 2008

Islamic Women Extremists Demand Equal Martyrdom


From the Daily Mail comes a story about Islamic women extremists wanting their equal rights, not for education, employment, equal pay, or laws ensuring equal treatment, but rather for joining al Qaeda as suicide bombers to advance the cause of their own oppression. It is forbidden for women to join and blow themselves up for Allah according to Zawahiri. For the men of that culture, while being perfectly comfortable with beating, oppressing, sexually mutilating, and treating their women as chattel, the thought of women exploding for the cause makes the men feel a bit squeamish.

Instead, claims Zawahiri, women should make themselves “ready for any service” their men require. Better for the women to be ignorant servants to their crazy husbands while staying at home and raising their children to go out and blow themselves up for Allah, than to be allowed any equal footing in their society by sharing the burden (or glory) of dying for their God. And it sort of makes sense when you think about it. What the heck are female martyrs going to do with all those vestal virgins, anyway? (Please leave an amusing response in the comments section, thanks!)


(hat tip Culture Wire)

Friday, June 6, 2008

F(r)iends

This video from The Nose On Your Face. Enjoy!

Sorry haven't posted in a bit. Just got back from vacation and there are lots of loads to do. Seriously, business seems to have picked up considerably, and that is a good thing.